cheese it, the cops!

drone wars

obviously, one should greet the military's assertion that the lost drone was flying in afghanistan and went offcourse into iran - which, typically, cnn is reporting as a fact - with skepticism.

quench me

folks say i'm bloodthirsty because i've argued that despots like assad or gaddafi should be visited by cruise missiles. but there's bloodthirsty and then there's bloodthirsty.

one-state solution

whatever they say, it is obvious that the u.s. government is opposed to palestinian statehood

world loses gaddafi

despots are people too. but it's good when they've matured into dead people.

a thousand to one

trading a thousand of your prisoners for one of ours, i think, does kind of hint that each among our people is worth a thousand of yours. and the media coverage is likewise a thousand to one: shalit utterly individuated, palestinians treated en masse.

sacha baron cohen's new role

as mutassim gaddafi. i can hardly wait for the film: watch the people of sirte freak out as he struts around talking smack in a ridiculous accent, threatening to drop them into mass graves. har har!

casus belli

puzzled that iran would try to kill the saudi ambassador (well, if they did)? there are many continual flashpoints of difficulty between the two. but one word that might come up is 'bahrain.'

unhealing

all over the mideast, dictators have tried to prevent demonstrators from getting medical care, and repressed in various ways the doctors and nurses who gave such care. an appropriate response by the medical community would be for the rulers' own physicians to treat them with extreme aggressiveness for conditions they do not in fact display. you know: a thorough irradiation, forty-times the normal dose of chemo, multiple transplants, emergency amputations, michaelesque doses of propofol, pro-psychotic medications, etc. this might seem to violate their hippocratic oaths, but i don't think they can make their patients any worse than they already are.

do the same to assad

hacking syria

anonymous rocks.

few downsides

obama, susan rice etc all say that a un recognition of a palestinian state won't actually achieve a palestinian state. of course, but that's definitely not the only possible effect they'd be hoping for. as i say, it already gives more leverage. even a vote would make the situation clearer. and the whole thing is placing immense international pressure on israel, already. i say: keep right on.

pa rocks the un

however much hillary or susan rice might whine, and however much perry and bachmann - with their intensely bizarre fundamentalist support for israel (fundamentalist among other things in being unquestioning) - might snipe, the palestinian approach of applying for recognition as a state in the un has been quite the little stroke of genius. it gives a huge dose of publicity to their situation. it gives them actual negotiating leverage, and you'd have to think that obama is up there today making offers. and it shows the basic non-existence of us support of palestinian statehood: we're good with it as long as it remains a vague hope for the distant future. all in all, a tactical coup.

bachmania, contd.

it takes a bold presidential candidate to come out foursquare against the arab spring. we've got to back up our very own autocrats, for god's sake. i'm looking for a president who only asks, with regard to hundreds of millions of people in a gigantic region: how does this affect israel? because she's going to convert the jews and rapture them up.

gov

let me try to clarify my feelings about the us gov, obama etc, since folks seem to think i love it/him above all things. first, like all governments, it is in my view not morally legitimate. i take myself not only to assert that, but actually to have proven it, insofar as political claims can be proven. the us government shares that with the assad regime. i also think that it is entwined with a global capitalism that i find repugnant, and that is one of the major oppressive forces in the world, and also that our military - the spending, adventures, weaponry - is fearsomely dangerous: it threatens everybody's life every day.

however, all things being equal, i'd rather have even a distorted democratic system (distorted by corporate money, e.g.) than a straight-up entirely unaccountable totalitarian system. i would rather live in this system than the chinese system, or the soviet system, or the idi amin system, or the pinochet system, etc, and i say there are real differences. admittedly, the responsiveness or responsibility to the people of the american government is a matter of tradition and cultural values rather than any actual safety we have if obama or someone decided to go totalitarian and the military acquiesced. we've had our scrapes: you might consult cheney's memoir. we need constant vigilance.

in the last decade, the us government has done many many bad things. the iraq invasion/occupation killed many people for no immediate reason (certainly not for the reasons the bush admin gave), though it also deposed a classic despot. we have tortured people, and i'd say we don't know the full extent of what has happened and what is happening. that is why free speech and press rights are so incredibly important. that's why, for example, i regard bradley manning as a hero and a political prisoner, and decry his mistreatment. i do not regard it as equivalent to khamis gaddafi stacking political prisoners in a warehouse, then throwing in grenades and firebombs, then setting up a crossfire on those who emerge, and then heaping their bodies in maggot-infested holes.

but we do have an incredibly wide-ranging free press, though it is also distorted by corporate domination. but it is less corporate-dominated than it was thirty years ago: many more outlets, and anyone can blog anything or tweat etc. even the wikileaks stuff got published, is available, even if the cia is also hacking it.

obviously, there are worse and better applications of coercive force. that the police have sometimes raped people is no argument that it is wrong given the actual immediate circumstances for that particular policeman to prevent that particular rape. indeed, anyone who is in a position to prevent a rape is morally required to do so. i don't think there is any way to make our engagement with the arab spring into a simple act of oppression, and indeed we acted sluggishly because of the many connections of our military and our corporations to middle eastern despots, kleptocrats, and torturers. that was disgusting. but if we condemn that, we ought to congratulate the us state when it finally turns on them. i actually do think that nato ordered airstrikes to save the people of benghazi, and that nato helped the people of libya remove a monster of oppression. 

for that matter, i'm very not down with religious fanatics flying jetliners into buildings or suicide bombers on the bus, and few people have ever deserved death more clearly than osama and his cohorts.

anyone who opposes torturing people, robbing people, raping people, shutting them up and shutting them in, ought to want the same for assad. or if you're not feeling bloodthirsty, then an immediate comfortable retirement in a place he can do no more harm.

i think obama is better than bush, and that he's actually trying to wind down our wars. now that's not to say i love him and day to day my politics might be closer to the tea party than the obama admin, at least on sizeofgov or deficit-spending-type issues. so anyway, let me be me, and try not to operate on a worldview with no room for any nuance, or that basically responds to an a priori position that anything the us gov does is bad. rather, try as best you can to gather up the most reliable info you can on any given situation (which is difficult, i know, and all media outlets need to be approached critically) and analyze it on its own.

call me

when obama refuses to relinquish power (a refusal backed up by the total resources of american armed forces), puts malia and sasha in charge of death squads and the oil industry (respectively), nationalizes all television stations and imposes a regime of total censorship, and then deposits half u.s. gdp into his offshore accounts and the bodies of tea partiers, graffiti artists, and random fifth-graders into his mass graves.

hope he survives long enough to produce the documents

here is the courageous attorney general of hama, resigning, and enumerating the crimes of the regime in that city. 

 

the syrian regime's explanation: he's being forced to do this at gunpoint by terrorists and germs (their favored description of protestors). meanwhile whenever gaddafi wants to issue another mind-numbing hallucinatory rant, he puts it on syrian state television.

strictly relevant

bashar al-assad's regime tortures children to death. now before you reply that barack obama is a war criminal, you might want to ponder whether that's strictly relevant.

stay human

look. you may be unhappy with the u.s. record of international intervention. you ought to be. maybe things will now descend into more disasters in libya: a new civil war, even. but right or left, black or white, straight or gay, capitalist or communist, you've strayed too far from your basic human responses and your basic opposition to oppression - if any - if you do not feel exhilarated as you watch the people of tripoli celebrate the end of their dictatorship. there were nato airstrikes. fundamentally, though, this was something that the people did themselves, as they did in tunis and cairo, as they will do in damascus and sanaa. that's one reason this isn't vietnam or iraq. the u.s. government has a rich record of pretending that people want us there, that we are liberators, etc., while engaging in massive (though usually completely incompetent) disinformation in the service of such claims. now, does anyone believe that the situation in libya is like that? then i want some evidence, and some explanation of what we're actually seeing.

the infinite process of becoming a bastard

assad's legitimacy continues to leak away asymptotically, imperceptibly, at the rate of an electron-per-corpse.

almost out of legitimacy

this is getting ridiculous.

suicide is painful

no doubt this sort of thing is why the people of libya love their leader.

can't lose what you ain't never had

clinton says assad has lost his legitimacy. not of course because he keeps shooting and interning and torturing his own citizens, but because he sent some tomoato-throwers to the us embassy. outrageous!

alice walker on gaza

if it's any comfort to you, i agree with most everything that alice walker says here about israel and gaza. and i admire the guts of the people who have run the blockade, especially after that absurd commando raid. thanks, lisa!

harshly criticizing israel?

i must say that i find jackson diehl's column today just kind of bizarre. even though i think the response to syria has been far too mild, the criticism of israel is extremely restrained. he's not calling for the ouster of the government, or nailing the brutality of israeli policies toward the palestinians, or talking about apartheid etc. but you get the same response among republican presidential candidates, appealing to this bizarre endtimes-christian/israel connection: any qualification of total support, any hint of criticism of israeli policies no matter how vague or mild, is completely unacceptable. surely no government anywhere, much less one as engaged in...problematic activities as israel, can be this immune from scrutiny.

tactical rape

an extremely disturbing story from cnn on gaddafi's use of rape as a tactic of war, which has long been reported, but becomes ever-more vivid.

guts

imagine how much courage it takes to protest on the streets of syria today. the demonstrators are demonstrably ready to die for what they believe in.

cnn in syria

the amazing arwa damon dipped into syria today, hearing more "horror stories."

Jisr al-Shughour

the guardian has excellent first-hand accounts of the nightmare.

strange legitimacy

gates again today condemned the slaughter in syria in clear terms. then he came up again with the official formulation: 'whether the syrian regime has the necessary legitimacy to continue to govern is a question.' the un position is the same. without proposing an intervention (though i'll say again, anyone with a clear shot should take it), i just want to say that this stance is incomprehensible. again i'll ask: what considerations are actually in play? what in the world would it take for all these people to just to say clearly: the assad regime is murdering its own people by the hundreds, and we want it gone?

now admittedly i wouldn't formulate the thing in terms of legitimacy, because i hold that there are no legitimate governments. and one way to take these remarks is as a pretty good confirmation of that, or demonstration of it: to say that the actions of the syrian regime have engaged in puts its legitimacy in question pre-supposes that the assad regime had legitimacy before - possibly based on bashar's father's stabilizing slaughter in hama - and that engaging in massive murder and torture of peaceful dissidents doesn't necessarily compromise a regime's legitimacy. in other words, the threshold of legitimacy applied by bodies such as the un and the government of the united states is...minimalist. but however one formulates the problem, the situation is intolerable.

bashar al-assad vs paul ryan: who is the monster?

bashar al-assad has had bad moments (such as this very moment, as the people of jisr-al-shughour, where he's shot his own soldiers for refusing to fire on demonstrators, empties into turkey, knowing that they'll all be slaughtered otherwise). but he has many good qualities! he wasn't created by the cia, but rather by the totally awesome kgb. he hasn't endorsed the nato assault on gaddafi. he didn't assassinate that freedom fighter, osama. he hasn't really gotten on glenn greenwald's shitlist. he didn't get paul revere wrong. he hasn't called for vouchercare. as far as i know, he isn't a birther or a skeptic about climate change. so i say: enjoy the spectacle.

if you're wondering what the hell i'm doing: i'm asking: what actually does arouse your outrage, and why? i realize no one is endorsing assad. but i'm asking: how can you shrug this off, or get through it with a disclaimer, while pounding on what are comparative moral trivialities all day every day? how can sarah palin yapyaping get you worked up into a tizzy, while assad shooting demonstrators or torturing children makes you go: that's too bad. if we did take assad out, or try to, would that tick you off? then maybe some of that tickedoffedness is appropriate right now aimed at assad himself. if you have any commitment to - i don't know - opposing inequality or oppression, assad would be a good place to start. put that shit on your list.