cheese it, the cops!

war in its springtime

watching the news last night had a certain cinematic quality; like the flashback that shows what they were watching just before the apocalypse. but i still think we might be getting a relatively slow but consistent rollout of ww3. the way europe is now embroiled is suddenly transformed; hollande says france is "at war" and is promising a hideous vengeance. well, that means throwing the french into the battlefield where already the russians, assad, iran, hezbollah, the kurds, turkey, the us, and the saudis are all active. i don't see the russian involvement as doing anything but escalating in the face of the plane. the knife attacks etc in israel should be connected up, and with more can pull israel into less covert involvement. egypt may well get into civil-war mode now, and since the plane bombing must themselves be planning an armed response to isis. i wonder how turkey is responding to the kurds taking sinjar, for a kurdish state is blooming along the border with turkey on one side and the islamic state on the other. this and the opposition to assad aligns the interests of turkey with the islamic state. 

the islamic state really is a state now, with territory, borders, and so on. they have money, materiel, all sorts of resources, and i think can achieve spectacular terrorist attacks all over the world as well as defend themselves effectively. it's one thing to have a 'terrorist safe haven' in the caves of afghhanistan or rural somalia or mali or pakistan, quite another to have islamism as a belligerent nation in the middle of the middle east. i'm going to bet that they have intelligence services, an it department, document and munitions production, etc.

you are really going to see the rise of ultra-nationalist and anti-immigrant parties in europe now, and it could happen here too. you are going to see a rise in anti-immigrant or white suprematist etc violence. the relation of the french republic to its own muslim population just got even more dire and it's just as bad elsewhere. but these societies with millions of muslims could themselves get into low-level civil wars; the stance of france right now registers that. all of that might also give a goose to putin; if he had annexed eastern ukraine this morning no one would have noticed, and he can make common cause with parts of the electorate across europe, which is going to want a kick-the-terrorists' ass strongman. remember when i incinerated chechnya with thermobaric weapons?

there's no way of knowing where this is all going, but calming down any time soon is not one of the realistic scenarios. on the other hand, there are a good dozen scenarios where this thing just blazes from pakistan and xinjiang to libya to kiev to hungary to amsterdam with an ever-greater intensity. nor will we be sitting this one out.

clash of the abstractions

john kerry on isis, or islamism: "we face a medieval and modern fascism, both at once." feel clearer now? man, it is amazing how people try to think about history, or time, or ideology. i'm trying to picture what is happening in kerry's head as he stirs up a formulation like that, or what process of thought something like that is a trace of. it's like trying to imagine what it would be like to be a bat. no, on the contrary, what we face now is a sci-fi falangism from the seventh millennium and a stone-age marxism, both at once.

well, let's retrace the steps. the first thing is that on the informal metaphysics of your average mediocre yalie, peoples and persons, all of whom exist contemporaneously, are to be understood as each located at different times: you've got stone-age people in the amazon jungle, natives lingering in africa, medieval talibans up in the hills, quaint brits from early in the twentieth century, white trash left over from the depression, and then super-progressive people from the future, like the extremely dead steve jobs. guess what? this conceptuality of time is insane, and invariably self-serving, and just a metaphysical colonialism, even or especially in its 'progressive' forms. perhaps the mediocre yalie has given up thinking that yalies are the peak of human evolution; now he just thinks he is the furthest along on a progressive timeline, that he's won the race to the future, though all the while time is grinding on all of us at just the same rate. there's nothing there but preening and incoherence. i heard tom ridge and several others this morning "the barbarians are at the gates. the barbarians are inside."

ok, so, anyway, people like kerry have been calling islamists medieval for decades now, and feeling like that explained something. it's only an insult. but then: they're all over social media! they have a shitload of c4! thus the 'modern and medieval both at once.' as to 'fascist'; oh man, that is just slapping an irrelevant insulting ideological label on someone. i do think that this degree of incomprehension leads to bad policy, as well as being a farrago of obvious jive. it cannot but represent a total and self-serving incomprehension of what you are dealing with; you understand them by fitting them into your a priori structure, and become insensible to actual information. and then the a priori structure is utterly confused, and you make terrible mistakes. the structure of thought is like a super-half-assed hegelianism or something. and yet teasing someone like kerry out of it would require erasing his brain and starting again.

war blooming like a flower

it looks more or less like russia will fully engage in the ground war in syria, with troops, etc. no doubt they can quickly transform the balance on the ground.

i've been listening to lindsey graham on cnn. his view is that russians are assembling a regional force - assad's alawites, iran, hezbollah - and launching a ground war to prop up assad. in short, "russians and shiites". then he gives this: the russians are sort of doing what i thought we should do: form a regional force (in this case saudi arabia, jordan, kurds, turkey). he said the russians will destroy everything we've tried to do, rip up various cia programs. (that appears to be accurate).

so this raises the specter of shiite/sunni regional war (already well underway) now driven by one non-local, christiany superpower on each side, or images of world war 3 blossoming out of the middle east. 

our policy has been insane, actually. we have fueled the sunni/shiite religious war by forcing a shiite/iranian regime on iraq, and we are de facto allied with the shiites of iran. and then we're trying to assemble a sunni force to take out isis, even as sunni regimes implicitly support and covertly fund isis. saudi arabia is running a savage bombing campaign in yemen with our materiel against iranian-backed rebels, etc. whatever obama says, we've essentially let assad proceed, hoping he'll take out isis; we've been 'coordinating' with assad, and with iran. and saudi arabia. and we have soaked the whole region in weaponry thoroughly and for a long time.

we even, i think, implicitly approved a russian intervention, until it started to become evident what shape it would take. we're arming and funding both or all sides, just as though we hope for maximum chaos and are intent on taking practical measures to achieve it.

i think this situation is something we fundamentally created or at a minimum made possible and set off, with policies of mind-boggling idiocy starting with the iraq invasion. the only hopeful thing i can think of is that we are too, um, chickenshit actually to commit ground troops, or actually to confront russia (on ukraine/crimea, all we did was yap, e.g.).

on the other hand we are very likely to have a republican president, and if it's anyone but paul, that pres is liable to be belligerent and intent on restoring american pride, superduperpower status, and so on. e.g. kasich in the last debate squarely portrayed a worldwide struggle between islam and 'jewish and christian values.' we're still not all that good at distinguishing between muslims. well, they might not be too swift at distinguishing among non-muslims.

you really could get a pretty direct spread into europe and europe is already engulfed by refugees and russian expansion. it is embroiled, and could easily become much more embroiled.

then there's israel. it wouldn't be shocking if they more or less approved of the conflict, or are taking measures to keep it going (we're doing the same, but our motives are not sensible; theirs would be watching their enemies destroy each other). i don't think we have a clear picture of what they're doing in syria. but i do know this: if there's a republican pres (again, other than rand paul), s/he will do whatever israel tells himmer to do. this is another way you might get a explosive expansion of an already explosive situation. why are republicans the servants of israel? wackily enough, because of a protestant christian interpretation of the apocalypse. plenty of islamists are throwing down the apocalypse too, oh and probably some jews are too. this may appear demented, and yet expecting armageddon seems a little less fantastic every day. a key factor in putin's regime is the revival of the russian orthodox church.  quite the complex little religious situation.

then again, perhaps israel is lending substantial support to assad and the russian incursion. astonishingly, their interests align somewhat with iran's. then again, maybe they are also helping sisi and the saudi royal family against their islamists. the israelis would be trying to keep the armed conflict or isis from washing up right on their border. it's close. what happens if it gets closer?

and the situation is even more complex than that, because you have intra-religious conflicts, christian on christian (usa v russia), and intra-sunni civil wars in afghanistan, egypt, and libya.

republicans love to say that iran is the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism, but it's really sunnis who are reaching into the west with a constant dripdrip of terrorism. this is a way various countries including the usa, can get sucked in, or how the front comes to calgary and marseilles and adelaide and xinjiang and both birminghams. we've already pretended that we've been in a 'war on terror' for 14 years, and a spectacular attack (perhaps a couple of assassinations) would be one way we get sucked in fully to a real war.

so, if there's a world religious war, how does that comport with everyone's idea of what the shape of history looks like? remember last week, when it was obvious that we were all engaged together in a progress toward secularization, freedom, and so on? univocal, progressive, or teleological conceptions of history are simplistic, self-congratulatory, and false.

unstrategic communications

i do not understand what everyone from kerry to the military mouthpieces think they're accomplishing by pretending all day every day that everything is going fine against isis, even as they get their ass kicked again and again. truly, perhaps they are deluding themselves in order to enhance their self-esteem? or perhaps they have taken on board the profound postmodern insight that appearance is everything, that confidence wins the battle, and that the world outside their fluffy little heads is a story that they can win through re-narration. isis prefers munitions. or perhaps they think that acting like they live in a hallucination will win them public support. no, on the contrary, they ought to be painting a dire picture instead of waving off massive defeats as little setbacks. that really might martial some public support if they intend to continue at all. meanwhile, they are degrading and defeating themselves, as well as talking jive all day.

the strategy is entirely incomprehensible: they are sending in iran with air support to re-take ramadi. it's quite as though they are trying to touch off a sunni/shia war to engulf the whole region, which is what is actually happening. i would like to hear what the government of saudi arabia is saying about this, and it would hardly be surprising if the saudis are more or less supporting isis in various ways. they have to read this as part of iranian expansion through the whole region and they have to be working on stopping it. one would think that the saudis are pleased if aqap controls large swathes of yemen, e.g. meanwhile the us is blowing up iran with "war rhetoric" as they also try to negotiate a deal on nukes with them and use their "militias" as the shia ground force to conquer the sunni bits of iraq. there is nothing - really, nothing - in this scenario that could count as a victory. they are fucking themselves from all angles at once (sorry, i've been watching veep), and their strategy is to act like they're enjoying it.

now i realize that it is a difficult situation, presenting no obvious solution. but this is just insane. the goal appears to be total defeat by definition and maximizing total corpses. seriously, what counts as winning? iran de facto taking anbar and killing everyone? their actual strategy is only to yap in a positive mode. but even these people with their pollsters and communications experts are going to be broken, thoroughly and deservedly, by reality.

oy, the torture

the american psychological association loves torture. the good thing about this is that they could not possibly have helped. i am aware that i might be slightly hyperbolic when i say these things: psychology hasn't come up with an interesting or original or plausible idea in 50 years. psychologists are the herdiest of intellectuals, opposed in principle to reflection, sensitive only to fashions and fads. their 'treatments' are ineffective, possibly because their diagnoses are half-assed nonsense. in principle, psychologists could be useful in controlling populations or normalizing the deviant or selling stuff: the yapyap has changed, but those are still the purposes. but really i wouldn't worry about that, because they are psychologists.

oops

in iraq, the us is aligned with iran; it's all about arming up shia militias, which one could be forgiven for thinking was the purpose of the invasion, since that was its tangible and predictable and intentional result. on the other hand, in yemen, we're aligned with the saudis. i daresay the saudi strategy on the ground in yemen is to arm up al qaeda in the arabian peninsula and give them air support. that is, we are supporting both the iranian mullahs and al qaeda here and there while opposing them elsewhere as we mechanically condemn them both. (then there's assad v isis; we support each against the other. israel and egypt both need ever-more extreme weapons. we support and hate every side in libya, etc.) so i'd say this to the state department or the pentagon: if you can't come up with a strategy that isn't just arming your declared enemies ("the terrorists"), you should quit. obviously there's no way to win if you're on all sides at once, or if you strongly support everything you condemn, and so on. we're a very yappy nation, but not the thinkiest. if you described our strategy as trying to make sure that the whole region is consumed by the maximum possible total war as soon as possible, that would at least make our decisions 'rational'.

 

i always knew

it would come to this: terrorist drag queens. they hate our way of life. this is how the world ends: in an unholy alliance of diana ross and lana del rey.

we will never know

i can't believe anyone for a moment pretends to be puzzled about who killed boris nemstov. a former us ambassador to ukraine this morning on cnn: 'we will never know' what happened. then he makes it completely obvious that he has no doubt whatever that it was vlad the impaler. like what is the strategy there? what percentage is there in saying you've got no idea and then making it obvious that you are completely certain? well, whatever mealy-mouthed diplomats might think they're accomplishing, there is just no other even vaguely plausible scenario.

hs bs

i'm having trouble resonating to the tizzy about shutting down the department of homeland security, any more than i was upset when ferdinand marcos died. but anyway, it's the meaninglessness of today's politics: nothing but yapyap. let me ask you this: how did you survive the last couple of government shutdowns? make it through ok or are you still huddled under the table in your whining room? there was a time, a time last week, when there was no department of homeland security. but anyway, if you think those fuckers are going to actually shut it down and stop the surveillance or internments or whatever, you're out of your mind. if they actually shut that shit down, i will blow jeh johnson on the bill o'reilly show. really, if necessary the department of homeland security could just live off the land, be self-supporting through domestic raiding.

another reason to panic

one thing about a national-security/surveillance state that is obsessed with terrorism: anyone could shut the sucker down at any moment. (notice that i am describing, not advocating this. i don't see what constructive purpose would be served and it's wrong to cause people hassles unless you've got a good reason.) here are two  examples. (honestly, growing up as a baby revlutionary in dc, it did occur to me to wonder whether you could fly a model plane onto the white house grounds.) but really, anybody with a twitter handle can scramble the airforce or disrupt air traffic all over the country or world. a few backpacks would be enough to shut down a major city. there is a panicky, pussy-like, hysterical quality to our anti-terror efforts that is itself a vulnerabilty. procedures like this require a lot less expertise than hacking the power grid or something. any teenager is aware that he can shut down his school with a phone call if the need arises - the thing is fairly routine in any given county - and it generalizes to any situation where you have a lot of people and prickly, testicularly challenged authorities who watch them all day. right now, not to put too fine a point on it, you could stop paris without committing a crime, using only a parked rental truck, a funky outfit, and an ambiguous phrase. (i say that in my capacity as a security consultant, to help governments identify emerging threats.) everybody's focused on not making the fatal mistake, which is a fatal mistake.

malcolm and martin: the eternal yin yang

a bit more selma. as you may know, i have been reading about and writing about malcolm x for many years, for example, long chapters of act like you know and extreme virtue. reading the autobiography in 7th grade was a real revelation to me, as i went to a mostly-black school in chocolate city; it transformed my understanding of the racial situation in the world and in my life, and it set me on a road to political radicalism. in my own view, it taught me something important about trying to speak the truth as i experienced it, as he did: the truth about the world, about oppression and liberation, about my own life. now, in selma, it's pointed out that malcolm called martin an 'uncle tom' (his favorite, though, was 'house negro'). i would say even in selma, king is doing stuff that might make someone construe him sort of like that (i am not asserting that these were ultimately fair characterizations at all). but the relationship with johnson is what works in this sort of direction. many people, including maureen dowd today are for giving johnson much more credit for the whole thing, and joe califano has asserted that selma was johnson's idea. (i can only say that that appears ridiculous to me.) 

but at any rate, johnson is pictured as using king to try to prevent people like malcolm x or later militants from leading the civil rights movement. king is in and out of johnson's office, maybe also conjuring the spectre of malcolm x (the, um, 'field negro' on his own account, who wants to see massa's big white house burn). now this, even in the movie a bit (king does more or less stand there and take johnson's patronizing attitude), but surely, surely in the accounts of califano, dowd, etc, really would tend to substantiate malcolm's basic reading, and it would tend - in my opinion, at any rate - to discredit king. if califano's account is right, then i'm actually pretty comfortable with malcolm's characterizations of king, though for a white person like me to call any black person, much less king, an uncle tom, would be excruciating or insane. but if you are intent on hagiography - and everyone is, where king is concerned - i would suggest not playing this up too much. at least the movie portrays king as using johnson in a way, bringing ever-greater and finally irresistible pressure. i think this makes king much more admirable than the alternative (that johnson was using king, or telling him what to do), and i also think it is a more plausible account overall, though i have not listened to all the relevant johnson tapes or something, and though of course if we are doing history we ought to say whatever's true. 

j. edgar hoover was surveilling king in order to destroy him. bobby kennedy authorized that, but it would surprise me if johnson opposed this approach, and it would surprise me if he didn't try to make use of it to run king. but i don't think that he was running king, and i think that's obvious from what king was doing, including in selma. i think he decided to go on despite the blackmail, which is how the film portrays it. but surely this whole thing makes the portrait of johnson as king's champion or whatever implausible. i guess the claim is that hoover was running johnson; i don't necessarily buy that, and any sort of decent pres would have shut that shit down with extreme prejudice, especially if, as these folks are claiming, he was on king's side. in my view johnson was attacking king's life and family, and trying to put him under his thumb. and in my opinion that did not succeed. johnson was capable of almost any strategem to get what he wanted, and i think blackmail was central to his amazing effectiveness as a senate leader.

and though johnson, whatever his reasons, did do a lot for civil rights, it is worth recalling his monstrousness in other dimensions: he was killing hundreds of thousands of vietnamese people for reasons that were simply incomprehensible, in a war that was unwinnable, and he invented the incident that led to the congressional authorization for extreme 'escalation'. he lied about vietnam all day every day, and he got everyone else in the american state lying about it too. i remember lyndon baines johnson, baby, and i felt the emanation of murderous evil and soul- and democracy-destroying lies, lies, lies.

i did think that the most human, and maybe the most (and even only) surprising moment in selma was the moment martin accused coretta of being 'enamored' with malcolm. but perhaps my response reflects my fascination - a little difficult for me fully to explain, maybe - with the profound contrast and connection between malcolm and martin. in my head, they embody two ways to resist vicious power, and even two ways of being in the world. for whatever reason, it seemed and seems like an existential choice to me, and i still just feel malcolm in the way a lot of people feel king: i was a little white boy who wanted to be malcolm x, and now i'm a 55-year-old white man who, left to me own immediate emotional responses, still feels that way. i think if one took the approach of attacking my right to make any judgments on this, or even to feel these connections in any authentic way, one would have a point. on the other hand it runs deep, and i can't really stop, and i guess i think that even if i am horribly wrong to be this way, i am not doing a great deal of harm to anyone. 

 

an ahistory of aniconism

here's a pretty good example of the pc approach to history, where whatever would serve your argument or have (according to you) positive social results is asserted as true, no matter how obviously false it may be. the piece asserts that images of muhammad were not banned until 2001, when the taliban banned them. then it describes various islamic regions and moments in which the prophet was depicted. but then he really does have to deal with the fact that there are few if any known images from the arabian peninsula, certainly the origin and center of the islamic world. his explanation is that they had the arabic language. now i think actually you have to grapple with the whole history of restrictions and prohibitions on images in the monotheistic religions: start with the golden calf story in hebrew bible. the general association of images of divine or saintly figures with idolatry runs very strongly - though of course not uniformly - through judaism, islam, and protestant christianity. really it sounds like there has been no or little censorship or destruction of images in the history of islam. um. and the language thing is the worst argument i ever heard: just the sort of thing you try not to examine because if true it would help your case. let's see: americans and french people and chinese people and hindu people and ancient greek people have had both extremely rich languages and a non-stop barrage of images. often these work in concert, and so on. 

back at it

history is not a narrative of progress. really i think very many people believe that it is: 'progressives', in short, still working on that 19th-century hegelian-type model. anyway, think about what a believer in progress - setting out the alleged direction of history in 1850, or 1900, or 1950 - would make of a sort of worldwide religious war, unfolding in the 2000s. islam is as much an issue now as in the 13th century. but this is not the 13th century, and occasionally people express their outrage by saying that islamists or whatever it may be want to take us back to some earlier period. all of that is complete confusion, for there is no going forward or backward, for history is not progressive.

it is true that the current outbreak of islamist terrorism and militarism is not exclusivly due to religious factors. it is bound up with world economic structures, the still-unspooling history of colonialism, immigration patterns, and so on. but i take seriously the account of the people performing the murders of journalists or schoolchildren, their own statements about their motivations. i try to do that with everyone, really: take them seriously as giving an account of their own experience. they believe themselves to be doing what their religion demands. 

before people even say anything else, they say that only a small aberrant minority of muslims take the truly depraved approach that we are seeing right now in many parts of the world - oh, setting off girlbombs, e.g. ok. right. and yet it is not just a few dozen people in al qaeda cells, is it? there is territorial expansion: syria and iraq, of course, but similar and possibly-allied forces control significant geographical areas in libya, yemen, and nigeria. some groups sport air forces, oil fields, ministries of information, banking systems. sooooo, we might want to worry a little less about the narrative and how people's sensitivities are being affected and a little more about the actual situations on the ground, which really can unfold or are unfolding from spree killings into genocides.

as to any very simple answer to the question of whether islam endorses violence: it is too simple by far. right now the fad is to point out that the koran imposes no penalty for blashpemy, or even for prophet-mocking cartoons. but a religion isn't just a single text or scripture, is it? it's a history of teachings, institutions, actions. if you wanted to describe 'the teachings of the christian religion', you'd have to talk about scripture, but also, say, augustine, aquinas, luther, calvin, etc: christianity here and there as interpreted in that or that cultural context, this or that theological tendency; this strand or that strand and so on. so, it is and it is not a violent religion. certainly, its history is not absolutely pacifist in all cases. what is the history of censorship and prohibition on images and its enforcement in islam, for example? i'm sorry, but a verse from the koran is only a start; there is such a history.

send in the clowns

i very much like the idea of sovereign nations at war with entertainment conglomerates. but, if i were kim jong-un - which, for all i know, i may well be - and i was interpreting comedies as acts of war, i would be worried. in fact, i'm surprised deterrence didn't work. alright you messed with our seth rogen/james franco movie? guess what, de-hack immediately or we will send in will farrell. dude we will come at you in waves of comedy annihilation. we'll assemble a unit under cedric the entertainer or tina fey. seriously, are you going to mess with tina fey? your nation will die laughing, son. this will make nuclear warheads look like kittens. when we're done, you'll wish we had opted for mere regime change.

cybernonterrorism

i don't think an act is terrorism if no one gets physically damaged. plus i think screaming terrorism is the whole world's hobby right now. i'd like to move from stopping the terrorists to stopping the phrase 'the terrorists'. but anyway: no, leaking a pre-release of your next film is not terrorism. even leaking your most embarrassing email moment is not terrorism. you could start killing people and blowing shit up this way, possibly, but until you do, you ain't no terrorist.

i have a funny feeling we may actually be in for regime change in north korea. you just prodded power where it lives: in the $. certainly, there is every justification for a massive cyber-attack on north korea, and i'm betting a lot of governments here and there are dying to try out their new weapons. the insane brutality and demented totalitarianism of the regime wasn't enough to get people going; this might be, though.

just when you need jean baudrillard

it really is too bad that jean baudrillard croaked before world war 17, pitting north korea against sony entertainment. a comedy assassination is taken as an 'act of war' and leads to an overwhelming virtual response. also, it's about time a government went to war with a corporation, or i also think that the us government is now at cyber war with north korea on behalf of the japanese corporate sector. pundits are debating whether the hacking is 'terrorism'. really the virtual and the actual have flowed or flown into one another, at least in all the rhetoric; the distinctions have broken down...in the media! there does seem to me to be an important difference between actual and virtual murder and war and terror, though, even though cgi is getting better and better. i think the whole thing is entertaining indeed. if i was sony or kim, i'd be figuring out how to monetize this bad boy in terms of an ongoing podcast or an unfolding assassination contest or nuclear holocaust conducted on buzzfeed. 

So if Zombie Ayn Rand eats the brains of vampiric Ted Cruz...

For Crispin and Co....Merry Baby Jesus Birthday and stuff....

Speaking of which, here is the offical Crusader AXE position on CIA torture and such abominations. While I think it's a pretty good piece as these things go, as often happens with VetsToday, the comments are the best part. When a column gets that response, I feel like Sheldon Cooper, doomed to spend my life teaching evolution to fundamentalists in east Texas. On the other hand, they're pretty funny, if you don't mind feeling amazed at the stupidity of a hunk of the American population. Here's a personal favorite --

Since the massive Rhine meadows slaughter of 1.8 million Germans after WWII by your Rat Bastard leader Eisenhower torture has been a part of the US military efforts ever since! You rat bastard Yanks are far worse than the NAZIS ever were they were using these techniques for maybe ten to twelve years You Yankee Rat Bastards have been at it for 200 plus years and you Rat Bastards are proud of it! How long will you Rat Bastards remain in the sewers and latrine pits of humanity? 

Enjoy! good luck! and all that stuff...

 

 

against mason

for such an unprepossessing person, michael hayden's resume is really something, as is his testimony. four-star general and director of military intelligence. nsa director as the program of universal surveillance was established and of cia as, let's speculate, most of the records of the bush-era programs were cleaned up in anticipation of the transition. lord knows how he's contracted into the security state through the chertoff group, while like all such careers today, his makes it clear that the corporate boardroom, the surveillance state, and the torture chamber are located in the same compound. he is the primary spokesman for the pro-torture cabal currently invading the media in a years-in-the-making attempt to avoid trial for crimes against humanity.

what an academic might find disconcerting, though, is that he is also a distinguished professor at george mason university. this is the sort of problem i pointed to with regard to the gruber scandal. so perhaps your tendency there was to think there's nothing so wrong about the same professor helping write obamacare and being hired to sell it and also providing mit-stamped objective research showing that it would have good effects. but, if so, you might also be the sort of person who'd be disconcerted by a pattern of contributions to a university coupled with appointements that do not have even a vague academic justification. at many academic institutions, you are a distinguished professor just merely in virtue of raw power you wield, and also you have next to no academic duties. what a miserable excuse for a university george mason is, an object-lesson in academic boot-licking, like the philosophy department at moscow u under yuri andopov or something. but at any rate, in setting out the whole squishy totalitarian thang, i should have included the professoriate along with the corporation and the state. all forms of prestige and wealth gather around power, wait in line to shower it with accolades and cash.

intelligence coup, contd.

i do think it sort of eyeballs like john brennan is at the center: he is the fact that the torturers are still in charge. how in the name of god did he survive after it was revealed that the cia was hacking feinstein's committee to delete files etc? there has never been a clearer occasion on which someone should have been fired instantaneously, outright. if one really took the cia in that event to have been acting qua part of the executive, it is impeachable. and yet it faded in everyone's mind but feinstein's. she surely demanded brennan's resignation months ago and got nothing, so she's also pissed at obama, and may well have issued her report despite his attempts, at brennan's behest, to redact it in its entirety. but anyway, i don't think brennan could possibly have survived that if he actually served at the pleasure of the president, because a president is going to respond to the utterly justified outrage of a major figure in his own party. obviously, every day all day, you have to understand that john brennan has access to the last fifteen years of barack obama's communications. 

brennan is part of the group that mobilized immediately, that was already poised, to respond to the report. it is all one voice in many bodies: cheney, alberto gonzales (who you bring in only when you're down to your very last lawyer), hayden, jack rizzo, porter goss, mike rogers, and a swarm of staffers; brennan and all of them are saying the very same sentences. the republicans on the committee and the cia itself released complementary replies to the report instantaneously. now, does all that strike you as odd, when brennan serves at the pleasure of a president whose first act was to end the program and who calls it torture plainly, even as all these people still deny or evade even that? it's almost like brennan is part of another government, one consisting of supposedly former intelligence and homeland security and anti-terrorism officials now lodged here and there, maybe working for homeland security or whatever as consultants or in state-in-waiting thingtanks, and also the republican intelligence establishment in congress. it might not be entirely clear whether that group or the white house actually controls the intelligence services of the united states. and info is power, baby.

one thing that, for me, distinguishes american torture programs since 9.11 from any old torture by anyone here or there, is that i helped pay for them. that rather annoys me, i must say, though i draw some comfort from the fact that they obtained this money from me under coercion. i do appreciate that part of it.

giving it up for dianne

i have rarely seen a more formidable or angry or focused senator than dianne feinstein over the last two days. and i will say this: a straight-up totalitarian system could never have released that information. but the difference between sheer totalitarianism and something not that - under conditions of universal continual survellance, militarized police power, intelligence services as the basic centers of abusive power, and so on - is just the principled anger of someone like feinstein, who actually does have some power. also it depends, as i argued a few months ago, on such people being clean, on their having no skeletons whatsoever. if feinstein had a drug habit or had engaged in a series of affairs, john brennan would control her without effort.

it's been a pleasure

a wide-ranging debate has opened up about whether we gained actionable intelligence from torture. but that's only one way to defend torture, and if enthusiasts for other people's pain such as john brennan and charles krauthammer lose the argument on that ground, they should shift to this: torture isn't justified by its outcome; it is intrinsically satisfying. forced rectal feeding, for dick cheney or john brennan or mike rogers, needs no external justification: it is its own reward. all of these men are part of an oppressed and stigmatized sexual minority. what they were doing at black sites the world over was expressing their sexual identity, and that exonerates them because we are born with our sexual identities. god doesn't make junk, though he provides victims in abundance. the release of this report is a chance for all of us to confront our own sadophobia. the good part of 9/11 is that it opened up new dimensions of pleasure for michael hayden and george w. bush, pleasure that may well have outweighed the pain they were inflicting, leaving the world with a net increase in happiness. another good part is that it revealed who these people really are, and has been revealing it ever since. 

all decent americans must hope that the report - devastating though it is - doesn't lead to any actual changes in policy, for then it would become slightly more difficult to dangle michael hayden, alberto gonzales, john yoo, porter goss, and scooter libby from a pipe in the official us dungeon they themselves built in thailand, and use them as pinatas. admittedly, they're full of shit rather than candy. but sometimes the most amazing erotic experience for a top is to get flipped, and i would not want to deny various pundits and politicians and so on that opportunity. fortunately, according to justice department legal guidance - on which i always rely to enhance my own actions - no approval is needed to whisk these guys off and drop them off naked at isis hq with little bows on their heads. 'merry xmas, or whatever it is y'all celebrate over there. hope you enjoy these, because they aren't returnable. do send back video, though. cheers, the american people.'

bombing yourself

mike rogers - the nonstop apologist for war and domestic oppression - argues that releasing the torture report will lead to violence and death. of course what might be irritating to rogers is that such violence would be a response to learning the truth about something, namely the values and identity of people such as rogers. what really gets under rogers' skin isn't any old violence; it's violence that he himself helped make completely justifiable by facts. it's like his office got bombed by the reality of who mike rogers himself is. it's like the terrorist blowing himself up in mike rogers' office with a suicide vest is mike rogers' double, from a universe in which each of us has double, but where our doubles speak the truth. that kind of violence is peculiarly irritating to mike rogers.

it would be foolish to assume uncritically that luke somers was killed by his captors, as every msm outlet is doing. you'd think after getting burned twenty times you'd wise up and just keep formulating this line as the assertion of hagel or whomever it may be rather than the actual story. i don't know what happened, but this is a very usual sort of account making the whole thing compatible with american heroism, and often five years later it finally emerges it was friendly fire and the cascade of mistakes is revealed, just at the moment when almost no one cares any more.

an infinite stack of subordinations

 

 chris hayes and francisco goldman talking about the situation in mexico

goldman argues that the government and the drug cartels have merged, fully, and are dumping children's corpses into rivers. it is funny watching statists suddenly completely bewildered by the howling contradictions, infinite regresses, and so on that have always obviously been inherent at the essence of their position. oh my god! says hayes, if the government is the drug cartels, what can be done? there must be a force sufficient to hold the government to account, says hayes, as he looks completely flummoxed: the only thing this smart person can envisage is creating a new, more powerful state to control the old corrupt state. so then when all those segments in turn merge, you will be facing an even more impossible-to-constrain force. and then who will constrain it? you really do need god. after that, you're gonna need mega-god. this may well be the origin of monotheism, which never helped anything.

 

the usually extremely thoughtful goldman, too, is completely at a loss as to what even conceptually could possibly be done: someone, something, must impose the rule of law! he asserts, in answer to the question of what practically might improve the situation: he seems literally to be invoking athena, or deciding to believe in some force or other by a sheer kierkegaardian leap of faith. something, someone, somewhere help me. this, intellectually and practically, is where your own commitments led you: you have advocated the force that creates this monstrous oppression; suddenly you realize you can't even face the rudimentary entailments of your position: you started on this road by constituting a power capable of controlling the powers that existed already. that was the most general solution, and yet it entails an infinite repress. 

the conceptual and the practical problem, remakably, are exactly the same in this case. you wouldn't think someone could miss both simultaneously, but there it is.

the merging of a government and a drug cartel is a pretty typical scenario, and is just one version of squishy totalitarianism. you are not going to keep economic and political power apart, you dorks! it's quite as though the us government were not distinguishable from the oil companies, or j.p. morgan/chase, or blackwater. fortunatley, those aren't vicious or violent, unlike a drug cartel. they'd never kill you to preserve their territory or market share, or just because, would they?

seriously, a state-leftist solution - the only one envisionable in that structure of thought - would be to nationalize the drug cartels or make them public utilities: just straight-up to endorse the merger you find intolerable and are trying to solve. it is already a socialist system on the ground: that is, a merger of state and economy. that is supposed to be an egalitarian formula.

words are weapons

we have a clearly defined mission: to degrade isis.

consider this a bid for the contract. alright...we're pitching the defense dept: shall we say 100k per insult? dude i am very talented. i'll submit sheafs of devastating book and record reviews and stirring testimonials from my ex-wives. i'm bonded, and i certify this: every insult will be profoundly degrading yet sickly hilarious, devastating yet poetic, concise yet with broad ramifications. this will be no mere persiflage, no good-natured badinage or idle chaffing. each element in my campaign of ridicule will be wholly or at least sort of original, and can be precision-targeted at the leadership of the so-called islamic state, its fighters, their mommas, their equipment, non-combatants, your co-workers, or whomsoever you may designate.  

ima ass-ass-inate ya

i've heard of some useless terrorist operations, but the idea of assassinating queen elizabeth is about as valueless a concept as one could readily generate. i feel that terrorists lack the vision thing. i do think that anarchists owe a debt to islamists, though. terrorism used to be our thing, and we were deleting kings, presidents, and prime ministers all about, and throwing bombs semi-randomly here and there. this discredited the whole position, which i can quite understand, and now we're all peaceful and shit. well, this might be a lesson for you. for one thing, you are working incredibly hard to discredit your own religion. you've been extremely effective there, anyeway.

ours is a cynical time...

the secret service fence-jumper scandal is the only thing they want to talk about on cnn and msnbc. war in the middle east has dwindled to irrelevance. amazingly, this is in a situation in which nothing really bad actually happened. whatever. chill and re-think your security.

meanwhile, morning joe among others is bemoaning the fact that one 'pillar' after another - all the institutions that the american people apparently trusted - the secret service, the nsa, the irs, congress, etc - has lost all credibility. thank god we still trust the military, seemed to be the consensus. so why would trusting the government be a desirable state, and when were the american people ever doltish or submissive enough to trust the irs or congress? i don't even think that is is physically, morally, or intellectually possible.

i hope they are being sarcastic about the military. trust the military? have you lost your fucking mind or been asleep for the last half century? also, what the hell, the military is precisely what gave us american hero omar gonzalez.

people who trust those who seize and hold power over them, or trust the institutions in which they are embedded, by which they are surveilled etc, are likely to be raped and executed, and, honestly, it's fundamentally their own doing: evidently what they want and deserve. right now people are just visibly yearning to submit, and are so upset and alienated that watching the news makes that harder. but a situation in which it is glaringly obvious that only a masochistic cretin would trust the authorities is better than a situation wherein everyone or indeed anyone trusts the authorities. that can only be based on secrecy and lies, because the fucking authorities are no better than you or me, to put it mildly.

innovate and die

one thing that the khorasan group has allegedly been working on is exploding clothes. now, i feel that this is a marketable concept, a future fad. i love your outfit! i'm hoping to see a lot of exploding clothes on the red carpet at awards shows. at any rate, i just want to reach out to khorasan in case they need help with the ipo.