The Reproof Valiant.
You realize, of course, that “the art of the possible” isn’t the art of doing what’s possible. It’s the art of making things possible.
The all-too-common tragedy of the foreseeable unforeseen.
As a Republican state senator in Montana and as a human being, I am offended by Senator Craig’s existence. Why oh why are most of the perverts that get caught Republicans? Are there more of them or are they just stupid? The thought of a US Senator chasing love in all the wrong places makes me think longingly of the Ayotollahs in Iran. They would just kill the turkey.
And James, Dave Lewis, a very honorable man, did not recommend “death for queers” (your phraseology).
His statement was obviously exaggerated, but I am sure he meant only to display his rage at Craig’s betrayal of his word and the trust placed in him.
Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people—people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is—he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.
This is a direct consequence of the war—the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.
Those who survive, flee. Through a network of safe houses and incredibly brave people and escape routes to the West.
The British home office is disinclined to regard the likelihood of being murdered by a variety of non-state agents as persecution, because it is not the government that is doing it. The leaders of the diaspora queer community are under death threats—again from Sistani—and live under police protection of a moderately minimal kind.
When troops leave, as leave they will in the runup to the British and American elections, there will be no change, except possibly for the worse.
One of the diaspora spoke to us at Translondon this evening.
He said something amazingly moving to the effect that this is not a movement of Resistance so much as a movement of Existence. Because when everyone wants to kill you, staying alive is the most radical form of resistance possible.
We the motherfucking people.
The Edwards campaign will send our forgetful Attorney General a copy of the constitution for every signature they receive on this petition. (Then again, maybe some of those copies could go elsewhere…)
I’m hurting cultchah!
Confidential to Keen in Silicon Valley: dude, I know, he made a lot of money, but you start citing George Lucas as some sort of, Christ, I’m not sure what, a compeer of David Hockney or something, some sort of authority on art, well, you’ve pretty much gone and shot your argument in the face. (via; via)
What do you think of Internet video? Lucas says there are two forms of entertainment: circus and art. Circus is random, he says: “feeding Christians to the lions”—or, he says, as the term in Hollywood goes—”throw a puppy on the highway. … You don’t have to write anything or really do anything. It’s voyeuristic.” In short, he says, it’s YouTube. Art is not random, Lucas says. “It’s storytelling. It’s insightful. It’s amusing.”
Wait a minute—
“I say, old chap, could you explain something to me?”
“I suppose.”
“You see, well, it’s just—this wall we’re building. Of raw meat. The flensed cow-carcasses and such. It’s not I’m complaining, no, of course not, far from it, but it’s such an odd thing to be doing.”
“You want to know why we’re building this wall of raw meat.”
“Bingo! Hit it in one.”
“Well, the tigers, of course.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. The tigers.”
“It’s to keep us safe from the tigers.”
“You know, now the you mention it, I believe I’d heard something to that effect. All part of the initiative, right? Like the duct tape and the surveillance and the torture and that ridiculous television program. Of course. The wall of raw meat. Capital.”
“Well, do you see any tigers around hereabouts?”
“Do you know, I think I have? Why, one carried off poor Maybelline just yesterday. Stacking some butchered pigs on the south side, and it just swooped out of the jungle and with one gulp— Terrible thing. And one does hear them prowling about out there, roaring now and again, much more than one ever used to! Doesn’t one?”
“Precisely! So hadn’t you better keep building this bloody damn wall?”
We only sing about it once in every twenty years.
Everybody’s linking up the “4th of July,” but the only X song for me today is “See How We Are.” And the best post for seeing just that today is Rick Perlstein’s.
What’s the argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity—and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity—“selling out”—the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty. The canary in the coal mine is the death of young people’s “freedom to live adult lives typified by choice rather than economic compulsion.”
I think I made a decision at some point in the past few days of McCloud Madness; I think I’ll be the better for having done so, soon enough. We’ll see. —Further bulletins as events warrant.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph.
“The attitude among the Democrats and the media now seems to be that, hmm, maybe if we keep our fingers crossed we won’t need a government for anything until 2009, and if we just wait until then, the next president can get everything running again just in the nick of time.” —Phil Nugent
Cui bono?
“‘A group of boys I know were thinking of going to the Lloyd Center on the max to see 28 Weeks Later on Friday night,’ said TJ Browning—a long-time Forum member, this morning. ‘But one of the boys said, “Wait a minute, that curfew thing is going on,” so they chose not to go on Friday night.’ —Browning was, in fact, touting this as a sign of the policy’s success, but to what end?” —Matt Davis
That’s the difference between God and me.
You’ve seen Steve Benen’s timeline, and calimac’s use of Dunsany is impeccable, and Phil Nugent’s perspective is as close to a last word as any of us will need, but I ended up smiling the most at this. —It’s the little things, y’know?
It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is—along with “truth,” “Bush,” “administration,” “extraordinary,” “scandal,” “free,” “single,” “instance,” “corruption,” “unearthed,” “the,” “that,” and “of.”
Those brave truth-eaters are at it again:
The truth is that the Bush administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free. Not a single instance of corruption has been unearthed. Only one significant member of the executive branch, Scooter Libby, has been convicted of anything. Whether the jury’s verdict was right or wrong, that case was an individual tragedy unrelated to any underlying wrongdoing by Libby or anyone else.
That’s one of the boys at Minnesota’s most popular blog, Power Line, written yesterday, Saturday, April 28th, 2007. —David Kurtz wants to know when the piper’s gonna get paid:
If you’re a hard-core conservative reading Powerline, does this sort of nonsense make you feel better about yourself or about your beliefs? For the uninformed, maybe it offers the assurance that things are okay. For the semi-informed, maybe it comforts them that things aren’t as bad as they may seem. At what point does the internal dissonance of those who read and write such garbage exact a personal toll—morally, emotionally, spiritually?
Kurtz is looking at it the wrong way. The piper’s already been paid and done packed up and left the building; that post at Power Line isn’t so much a strategy or a tactic as it is a symptom. —“I realize,” said John Holbo (some time ago), “it is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back.” Yup; once again, yup.
“Apparently,” then, but: are they really not coming back? Is it possible to reach someone who’s so far around the bend? So removed from the world as it indisputably is? —I’d like to think I’m as open to dialogue as Detritus, who’d rather try teaching a young Hitler English than just shooting the little fuck; I’d like to think I could have a civil conversation with John Hinderaker, should I bump into him between planes at O’Hare, say, and not just punch him in the nose. But he has accused you and me and everyone we know of betraying America. And I’m only human.
But forget the punching, and leave aside for a moment the rather large question of whether such a conversation civil or otherwise could even begin to reach someone so far around the bend. What we’re talking about here isn’t a conversation. It’s a blog post, yes, and so it looks like it’s part of our great political multilogue, our give and take of political argument and debate, but it’s a truth-eating post. It’s no more an argument than David Broder’s columns are political journalism, or the Attorney General’s appearance before Congress was testimony. —This is cargo-cult stuff, hieratic gestures that mimic argument and journalism and testimony, incantations no more meaningful than a magic spell, attempts not to engage the world as it is but take it and through sheer force of will bend it to what it damn well ought to be.
Put it that way, and I think our responsibility is clear: engage them in conversation, yes; try to reach around that bend when you can, when reaching is possible. But don’t return those gestures. Don’t respond to the call of their spells. (We were supposed to be outraged when Giuliani promised another 9/11 if he weren’t elected president. Better instead to point and laugh. —Perhaps it seems unfair to sweep an entire wing of our national discourse beyond the pale? Very well, it is unfair. But all our arms are too short to box with a whole damn world of straw. Why should we bother?) —When they put on their robes and gin up another solemn ritual to mimic the fillips of civil discourse, do what you can to minimize the infection by discrediting their authority. Point and laugh. Point and laugh.
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.
No controlling authority.
Ladies and gentlemen, your Attorney General and mine:
During those conversations, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.
And it’s not that the guy who’s, y’know, in charge of the Department of Justice thinks he just dodged the bullet of a bad decision by saying, hey, look, I didn’t make the bad decision. It’s that he can’t even weasel without weaseling. “To my knowledge”? How on earth do you not know that you might have just made a decision? How can you be in doubt as to whether a decision had been made by you? —No, seriously. How?
All it takes is one bad apple.
Remember how mega-agribusiness Dole had a little problem with E. coli-infested bags of factory-farmed spinach last summer, so that all over the country restaurants and supermarkets went through a spinach dry-spell? How on earth will we protect Oregonians from ever-increasing outbreaks of food contamination? —By slapping draconian regulations on small farmers, of course, driving local farmers’ markets out of business.
Goose and gander?
I’m not so sure about the wisdom of the sauce prescribed, and far be it from me to jump in a bigblog pie-fight, and it’s not like I even have the knowledge to say for myself whether this is the stupidest thing Markos Moulitsas has ever written, but I hope to God it is, because it’s staggeringly, mind-bogglingly stupid. —Lisa Spangenberg rounded up some links to actual, intelligent grappling with the vital topics squirming under the hateful things that were done to Kathy Sierra, and follows up by unpacking a joint statement from Sierra and someone who might could help Kos realize how smart it would be to own up, publicly, to the implications of his admitted ignorance of what happened, and stop playing stupid.
Defending the republic from the likes of Kimberly Prude.
On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County—I’m going to mispronounce the name—but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.
I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.
“There were no voting locations in the county in 2000,” he explains. “It was all strictly by mail. This was the first election after vote-by-mail passed, and everything was mailed in. People could go into the county elections office to pick up their ballot if they didn’t receive one, but there weren’t other locations to drop them off.”
As for the bizarre library card claim, “I have no idea what he’s talking about. A library card has nothing to do with people being able to vote.”
—Scott Moore, quoting Multnomah County Elections Director John Kauffman
It bears repeating: Republicans depend on preventing as many people as possible from voting. —The New York Times details some of the collateral damage in this foul, anti-American quest for permanent hegemony: folks deported and rotting in jail for filling out the wrong form at the wrong time. Josh Marshall puts the damage in perspective.
“This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth.”
Yeah, I know, Douglas Feith, but in looking for a hook for the previous I stumbled over this toxic gem of weapons-grade stupidity from Daniel Pipes and just had to share:
Karl Marx famously did much of his research in the 1850s into socialism—work that would culminate in the creation of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other political monstrosities challenging the United Kingdom to its core—in the reading room of the British Library, the elegant public space of the country’s vast national library.
And now, we learn, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence in a US maximum security prison for (among other charges) conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, spent time plotting the downfall of the West in the 1990s also in the British Library. Newly released court papers from Moussaoui’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia, includes photographs of his five-year British Library reading pass, which he received 1994 after enrolling in a master’s degree course in international business at South Bank University.
Comment: Both these men were immigrants. The British don’t seem to learn. (August 6, 2006)
Two great hostile camps,
or, The increasing us and the decreasing them.
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism.”
The British Ministry of Defense is prognosticating, trying to part the mists of time for a glimpse of the year 2035: criminal flashmobs, city-killing EMPs, ethnic cleansing with neutron bombs, and still that dam’ specter haunts Europe. —Momus has a good question:
Isn’t “the world’s middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?
