Ann Coulter's dream come true

Previously:

Ann Coulter has a new book out: Guilty: Jewish "Victims" and Their Assault on Germany oops! I mean: Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America.

While out promoting this book she advocated "strong Republican men" punch non-violent (though disruptive) 99 pound female anti-war protesters in the face when they get the chance.

Now

As far-right ophthalmologist Rand Paul (R) arrived for the candidates' final debate, Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org tried to give him a satirical "employee of the month award" from Republicorp, a pseudo-entity created by MoveOn to draw attention to the merger of the GOP and corporate interests.

But before Valle could reach the candidate, Paul supporters grabbed her, forced her to the ground, and at one point, literally stomped on her head as she lay helpless on the curb.

But remember - only shrill, leftwing partisans see any connection between violence directed at "liberals" and the obsessive, totalistic and categorical demonization of "liberals" as evil enemies of America by leading mainstream figures within the conservative movement.

For example, one should not notice that those defending several men grabbing a woman with a sign, forcing her to the ground, then stomping at her head are doing so on the premise that she's an "unhinged leftist" who is, thus, dangerous; and that Michelle Malkin wrote a dishonest book - Unhinged - which demonized "liberals" as being dangerous and unhinged left-wing extremists.

Four years ago, I wondered

How long might it be before we see the results of the seed of hate that is being planted by the people who "joke" about the elimination of liberals?

It appears we already are - and have.

Today, Neal Boortz decided to plant a new seed.

Wanted: A Rand Paul supporter with a bad back to stand on a Media Matters staffer's head for a while

Quote of the day

"There are three things to which man is born—labor, and sorrow, and joy. Each of these three things has its baseness and its nobleness. There is base labor, and noble labor. There is base sorrow, and noble sorrow. There is base joy, and noble joy. But you must not think to avoid the corruption of these things by doing without the things themselves. Nor can any life be right that has not all three. Labor without joy is base. Labor without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labor is base. Joy without labor is base." - John Ruskin,Time and Tide (Letter V)

Baleful quote of the day

"[W]hen someone who has got genocide on the mind thinks that you’re too extreme, you’re really kind of far out there." - Jeff Sharlet

Sharlet is speaking about David Bahati, a leading proponent of a Ugandan effort to criminalize homosexuality and make it punishable by death, dismissing the conspiracy theory of Scott Lively, who argues that the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide are the result of homosexuality.

Witness your utopian Tea Party future

Thanks to Sarah Palin, we know that Tea Partiers are firm believers in the First Amendment rights of candidates to run for office and not be criticized by the press. Which is why its so understandable that the Glenn Beck watching, Alex Jones conspiracy promoting, survivalist ex and active duty crew cut white military guys working as security for Palin endorsed Tea Party candidate Joe Miller felt the need to "arrest" a reporter at a "private event" (aka a town hall for Miller open to the public held at a public school). Miller is a self-proclaimed lover of the Constitution and his guards were obviously just fulfilling their oath to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and liberal; they had to handcuff and detain him and threaten other reporters with the same because they were protecting Miller's First Amendment right to not be questioned by journalists about his past public service.

Thank god the Tea Party is here to save the Constitution.

Speaking of oath keeping, Digby notes that bikers from a biker gang at another "private event" (aka a rally in a public park open to the public) for Palin endorsed Tea Party candidate (and veteran discharged for torture) Allen West physically threatened a worker for West's opponent who showed up at the rally with a camera. Again, they must have been protecting West's First Amendment rights from a domestic enemy.

Thank god we have military veterans, using physical violence to give America a phoenix like rebirth from the stab in the back at the hand of liberal enemies within, in the Tea Party to save the Constitution from the fascism of the top marginal tax rate cut of 3 percentage points being allowed to expire.

Parody in the age of Beck

I recall reading recently Stephen Colbert saying something to the effect that it has become increasingly difficult to parody Glenn Beck since he is already so cartoonish and over the top. While this is certainly true, Simon Malloy has demonstrated that it is still possible to generate some brilliant parody of Beck, as he has done with his "Glenn's Beck timeline of American history"

I love this part

6,000 BC: God creates entire planet just for America.

27 BC: Caesar Augustus becomes first person to employ the Obama Doctrine.

1 AD: First Founding Father born.

and

1981: Ronald Reagan cuts taxes 23 percent, revenues increase 4 billion percent.

1983: Federal spending as percentage of GDP hits unsustainable 23 percent. No historical record exists of who was president at the time.

On a more serious note, historian Sean Wilentz has written a lengthy article about how Beck's psuedo-historicism is mainstreaming 50 year old extremist conspircy theory. The difference being that Beck has a megaphone in Fox News that his predecessors could only dream of and exists in a vacuum of public intellectual leadership.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I will merely highlight one of the examples of the distorted view of history that Beck gives to his audience

Beck’s readings of Progressive-era politics are nearly as bizarre. Whatever can be said about Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a crypto-radical. It was Roosevelt who coined the term “lunatic fringe” to describe the extreme leftists of his day, and his concept of New Nationalism—in which an activist government built a vibrant capitalism, partly by regulating big business—looked back to Alexander Hamilton, not Karl Marx. Nor was Wilson a Bolshevik; in fact, in 1917 he sent American troops to Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik White Army. At home, his reforms sought to break up monopolies in order to restore competition among small companies. “If America is not to have free enterprise,” Wilson declared, “then she can have no freedom of any sort whatever.”

Quote of the day

"The operation of the mind - conscious and unconscious, free and unfree, in perception, action, and thought, in feeling, emotions, reflection, and memory, and in all its other features - is not so much an aspect of our lives, but in a sense, it is our life." - John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction

Today's discount book purchase

Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (hc) by Arianna Huffington for one dollar.

President Obama should not have the power of judge, jury, and executioner

Via Scott Horton

It seems increasingly that the Obama White House is using the al-Awlaki case to establish a new principle: the president’s power to order extrajudicial executions of American citizens.

As with Glenn Greenwald, I find it remarkable that there is a need to argue that the president should not be able order a citizen (or for that matter - any person) to be killed outside of any legal process and far from any battlefield at his fiat.

I'm not even sure how to respond: have we as a society had the value of human rights erode so much that we don't recognize tyranny when we hear it? Are we like the frogs in the old Aesop fable, finding the law too boring, wishing instead to be ruled by a predator that we may later find will turn its appetite on us? As Paul Woodruff put it:

In our frustration with law, we forget too easily that law is all we have between us and tyranny. Aesop has a fable to illustrate the point. Long ago, the frogs lived without any form of government. Feeling the need for some sort of authority, they prayed to Zeus and asked for a king. He sent them a piece of wood. To understand the story, you need to know that ancient Greek laws were written on wooden tablets, set up for all to see. The frogs were illiterate, of course, and missed the point:

The frogs were unhappy with the anarchy in which they lived, so they sent representatives to Zeus asking him to provide them with a king. He saw how simple they were and set up a piece of wood in their pond. At first the frogs were frightened by the noise Zeus had made, and they hid themselves in the depths of the pond; but later, since the wood did not move, they came up and were so contemptous of it that they climbed up on it and sat there. Feeling that they did not deserve such a king, they went to Zeus a second time and insisted that he give them a different ruler, as the first one was too lazy. This made Zeus angry, and he sent them a water-snake who caught and ate them up.

And so it was - and still is - when people are frustrated with the law's stupidities or delays or inconveniences. If they wish for a ruler who will rise above the law, they are offering themselves to be devoured.

Since we seem so keen on a return to Nixon era corruption, often in the name of "liberty," perhaps this might be helpful to remember.

In the two decades that followed, the conflict [between Richard Nixon and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson] became so ferocious, Feldstein says, that Nixon ordered CIA surveillance of Anderson and his family — and White House operatives seriously considered assassinating the journalist.

"They actually conducted surveillance. They followed him from his work to his house," Feldstein says. "They staked out his house. They looked at it for vulnerabilities ... [and discussed] how they could plant poison in his aspirin bottle. They talked about how they could spike his drink and they talked about smearing LSD on his steering wheel so that he would absorb it through his skin and die in a hallucination-crazed auto crash."

The plot was ultimately called off, Feldstein says, because Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, the two men who were supposed to assassinate Anderson, were instead tapped to break into Watergate.

Changing backwards

From the New York Times

In this year’s midterm elections, there is no talk of satchels of cash from donors. Nor is there any hint of illegal actions reaching Watergate-like proportions. But the fund-raising practices that earned people convictions in Watergate — giving direct corporate money to a campaign and doing so secretly — are back in a different form in 2010.

This time around, the corporations are still giving secretly, but legally. In 1907, direct corporate donations to candidates were legally barred in a campaign finance reform push by President Theodore Roosevelt. But that law and others — the foundation for many Watergate convictions — are all but obsolete. This is why many supporters of strict campaign finance laws are wringing their hands.

Quote of the day

"The word 'proof' should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences. In this strict sense of the word, scientific hypotheses can rarely, if ever, be proved true by the data." - Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction

The rationalization of evil

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side" - George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism"

From The New York Times

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

American tax dollars, through theNational Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.

If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics.

“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M. Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paperthat prompted American health officials to investigate.

A doctor quoted in the article notes the irony that this occurred at the same time that the United States was prosecuting Nazi medical experimenters for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.

This is a point that Professor Reverby addressed in her Democracy Now discussion of these revelations

So, when bioethicists talk about why we have regulations in place now, part of it is, of course, there’s these revelations of these kinds of what we now think of as illegal, but horrific studies, that when you think about it, go back for a second and think about it, with all of the revelations of what the Japanese were doing during the war, and particularly what Mengele was doing, you get the Nuremberg Code right after the war, which says doing this kind of research on people who cannot give informed consent is immoral and a crime against humanity. The problem is that Americans treated those crimes by the Nazis and the lesser-known ones by the Japanese as something done, as the bioethicist Jay Katz so brilliantly put it, as a code for barbarians. So if you think that they were Nazi doctors, you don’t think that you, a good researcher here, could possibly do anything like that.

The last sentence touches upon an essential point (and the reason that the Orwell quote prefaces this post.) The sort of cognitive dissonance resolving rationalizations that Tavris and Aronson wrote about in Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) can lead one down a pyramid of choice (with each successive rationalization building upon the last) to such inhumane and evil actions.*

During the discussion, Amy Goodman played a clip of a documentary in which one of the experimenters from the infamous Tuskegee experiments was asked if the fact that his experiments violated the Nuremberg Code of informed consent, which had been formulated in response to the Nazis, gave him pause. His response was to be wounded at the comparison, as "They were Nazis."

Reverby responded

I think the most chilling, actually, in the clip that you just played, is Jim Jones, the historian's retelling of what Rod Heller said to him, which is it’s just—when Heller said to him, "But they were Nazis." So I think that’s the point I was making earlier, that it’s just too easy to assume that it’s only monsters.

This sort of rationalization, where actions are viewed as right or wrong depending on who does them, has been the central justification - as Orwell noted - for just about any type of wrong that can be imagined. It is the same underlying thought process that was employed to rationalize the Bush administration's torture regime and it is the same as the rationalizations that are being put forth by apologists for the Obama administration's claim to possess the tyrannical power to assassinate citizens by fiat in secret with no due process.

And this is why the sort of "patriotism" championed by Ronald Reagan - in which one's patriotism is defined as a function of one's inability to recognize any wrong on the part of one's nation - is so pernicious (and infuriating.) There is nothing patriotic about turning a blind eye to wrongs committed by one's nation. Real patriotism comes from facing uncomfortable facts. It is the patriotism of Sen. Carl Shurz: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

*The discussions that Tavris has had with D.J. Grothe on both For Good Reason and Point of Inquiry are highly informative regarding the subject of how cognitive dissonance can lead to self-deception.

Best anti-Beck propaganda featuring Donald Duck ever

Created here

This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed from dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.

Will Donald’s feelings of disenfranchisement lead him to be persuaded by his radio’s increasingly paranoid and xenophobic rhetoric? Or will our favorite Disney duck decide that this voice is not actually on his side after all? Watch and find out!

Three dollars and fifty cents worth of science

Here is what I picked up at the library book sale today:

The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (hc) by Leonard Susskind - $1.oo

Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space (hc) by Henning Genz - $1.00

Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History (hc) by Peter Ward - $1.00

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (pb) by Carl Sagan - $0.50

2009 Book of the Year

This is a severely late edition of The Daily Doubter Book of the Year post, but I figured better late than never. Let's get right to it. My pick for best Doubter related book read during the previous year is:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

I must say that after reading The Ghost Map, I was truly disappointed that I managed to complete my primary education without ever hearing about John Snow's victory for public health during the London cholera outbreak of 1854 - the focus of the book - as it is a remarkable demonstration of the scientific process in action.

Here is an extremely short-hand synopsis of the book: it is the tale of how two men, employing critical thinking, were able to solve the riddle of one of the deadliest epidemics in London's history. The doubter related aspect of the book would be the political and medical establishments who instead employed a form of pseudo-doubt, conducting research to arrive at a predetermined conclusion to resist what they considered Snow's wrong-headed ideas about cholera; in contrast, the Rev. Whitehead, who ended up identifying the epidemics zero case, had started out with the intention of disproving Snow but ended up collaborating with him after being confronted with the evidence.

There is also a fascinating analogue to the discovery of evolution. Darwin found strong enough evidence to demonstrate the existence of evolution but was unaware of a mechanism of heredity despite Gregory Mendel being a contemporary. Likewise, Snow was able to infer that cholera was being transmitted in contaminated water but did not know the mechanism of transmission, yet Filippo Pacini in 1854 discovered the cholera bacterium. Unfortunately, Pacini's work was ignored for much the same reason as Snow's.

It really is tragic that so many people died at the hands of a disease that could have been cured by drinking more (clean) water.

Previous Doubter Books of the Year:
2008

2007
2006
2005

Witches don't exist

I may have overestimated people's response to Christine O'Donnell's claim that she once "dabbled in witchcraft" when I noted that "they are criticizing her for an obviously bullshit story about Satanic witches that only exist in the imagination of (some) Christian fundamentalists," as I've seen numerous individuals ridiculing the claim but not so much the notion's veracity.

Slacktivist has more

The oddest thing to me about Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's "I Was A Teenage Witch" claims is that so much of the reaction has accepted her claim that such a thing might be possible.

It is not. Her claims of "dabbling" in what she called "witchcraft" are not true. The supposed witchcraft she describes is not something that exists. Such stories of bloody altars and Satanic covens are common and they are false. All of them. That is a matter of established fact.

The supposed witchery O'Donnell describes is simply the stuff of Satanic panic urban legends. Her descriptions come straight out of the fabrications of proven liar and con-man Mike Warnke. He made this stuff up. Her claims are about as credible as if she had said that she once conjured Bloody Mary by repeating her name three times in the bathroom mirror.

The rest is worth reading.

And so too is Will Bunch's take on the larger significance of the politics of corporate sponsored cult of anti-elitism.

Mr. Russell goes to Russia

I recently finished reading The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell, a book written after Russell visited Russia in 1920 to examine for himself the effects of the Bolshevik revolution. In it, Russell gives his general impressions of the state of the economy , the populace, the culture, and the Bolsheviks themselves.

Although Russell agreed in general with the aims of a communist revolution and the need to reform the evils of capitalist society (see Russell's views on political ideals) he was critical of Bolshevik methods which conflicted with his democratic and humanist sentiments. As Russell put it: "Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures."

Russell later in the text goes further:

I cannot share the hopes of the Bolsheviks any more than those of our Egyptian anchorites; I regard both as tragic delusions, destined to bring upon the world centuries of darkness and futile violence. The principles of the Sermon on the Mount are admirable, but their effect upon average human nature was very different from what was intended.

Those who followed Christ did not learn to love their enemies or to turn the other cheek. They learned instead to use the Inquisition and the stake, to subject the human intellect to the yoke of an ignorant priesthood, to degrade art and extinguish science for a thousand years. These were the inevitable results, not of the teaching, but of fanatical belief in the teaching. The hopes which inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically, and are likely to do much harm.

He goes on to explain his definition of a religion and why Bolshevism fits it:

By a religion I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual. By this definition, Bolshevism is a religion: that its dogmas go beyond or contrary to evidence, I shall try to prove in what follows. those who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and commit intellectual suicide. Even if all the doctrines of Bolshevism were true, this would still be the case, since no unbiased examination of them is tolerated. One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.

It is impressive that Russell was able to realize this well before many other liberal and progressive thinkers (like, say, Albert Einstein.) There is also here a demonstrated nuance that is absent from much of what now passes for political discourse; simple minds might easily dismiss Russell as a "Communist," but Russell is both a critic of capitalism and of communism as he saw them practiced.

If Bolshevism remains the only vigorous and effective competitor of capitalism, I believe that no form of Socialism will be realized, but only chaos and destruction. This belief, for which I shall give reasons later, is one of the grounds upon which I oppose Bolshevism.

Or

I believe that while some forms of Socialism are immeasurably better than capitalism, others are even worse. Among those that are worse I reckon the form which is being achieved in Russia, not only in itself, but as a more insuperable barrier to further progress.

Russell makes a prediction which reminds one of the conclusion of Animal Farm, where the pigs had monopolized power and reestablished Manor Farm, based on George Orwell's own observations of practiced communism twenty plus years later.

This is what I believe to be likely to happen in Russia: the establishment of a bureaucratic aristocracy, concentrating authority in its own hands, and creating a regime just as oppressive and cruel as that of capitalism.

Here are a few more quotable gems from Russell:

• Good relations between individuals, freedom from hatred and violence and oppression, general diffusion of education, leisure rationally employed, the progress of art and science - these seem to me among the most important ends that a political theory ought to have in view.
• This teaching of Communism, however necessary it may appear for the building of the Communist state of the future, does seem to me to be an evil in that it is done emotionally and fanatically, with an appeal to hate and militant ardour rather than to constructive reason. It binds the free intellect and destroys initiative.
• Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.
• Perhaps a love of liberty is incompatible with whole-hearted belief in a panacea for all human ills.
• I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.
• A society which is to allow much freedom to the individual must be strong enough to be not anxious about home defense, moderate enough to refrain from difficult external conquests, and rich enough to value leisure and a civilized existence more than an increase in consumable commodities.

For a concise (and very good) review of The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, see this archived New York Times article.

No one told me

Although I was aware that DJ Grothe was leaving Point of Inquiry, after four years of hosting the excellent humanist podcast, to go work with JREF, I somehow managed to remain oblivious to Grothe's having become the host of a new (and also excellent podcast) - For Good Reason - which is now up to 19 episodes.

The new hosts at Point of Inquiry have done a good job, but the show just hasn't been the same without Grothe's superb interviewing skills. Which is why I'll look forward to being able to listen to some of the top humanist figures talk with him for For Good Reason.

A book for the literary curmudgeon

I have never been able to understand the appeal of books of popular fiction. Having spent my formative reading years diving right into the great classics of western literature, I find the sort of books that dominate sales lists to be unpalatable. These books seem to me so bland, flat, derivative, formulaic and intellectually tasteless that I wonder how anyone that reads them can find any enjoyment it it. These books are to literature what frozen fishsticks are to food.

Back when Dan Brown was at the peak of his popularity I read both Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code after friends raved about how fantastic they were. I was in disbelief that my friends could have been serious. Dan Brown's books are horrible.

Which is why I was pleased to come across S.T. Joshi's Junk Fiction: America's Obsession with Bestsellers, a book that examines the phenomenon of the bestseller:

Bestsellers have been with us for more than a century, ever since the first bestseller list appeared in 1895. But they have received surprisingly little attention from critics. What kind of books become bestsellers? Why do people read them? Do they have literary value or are they merely the literary equivalent of crossword puzzles?

S. T. Joshi, a leading critic of horror, fantasy, and mystery fiction, devotes his attention to these and other issues, showing that bestsellers emerged only with the advent of near-universal literacy and the increased leisure time among the masses. Joshi is also aware that most bestsellers fall into the categories of genre fiction: romance (Danielle Steel, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Nora Roberts); mystery (Mary Higgins Clark, Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell); suspense (James Patterson, Nelson DeMille); espionage (Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler); horror (Stephen King, Dean Koontz); and so forth.

Joshi provides detailed examinations of books by these authors, as well as of such recent bestsellers as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and such bygone titles as Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, in a wide-ranging discussion of both the virtues and the failings of popular literature. Joshi’s study, written in a witty, accessible style, is must-reading for anyone interested in the literary and cultural phenomenon of the bestseller.

I have just begun reading this and Joshi has pretty much the same impression of these authors that I have.

Wittgenstein's biography in tweets

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and regarded by some as the most important since Immanuel Kant. His early work was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer and, especially, by his teacher Bertrand Russell and by Gottlob Frege, who became something of a friend. This work culminated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book that Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. It claimed to solve all the major problems of philosophy and was held in especially high esteem by the anti-metaphysical logical positivists. The Tractatus is based on the idea that philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of the logic of language, and it tries to show what this logic is. Wittgenstein’s later work, principally his Philosophical Investigations, shares this concern with logic and language, but takes a different, less technical, approach to philosophical problems. This book helped to inspire so-called ordinary language philosophy. This style of doing philosophy has fallen somewhat out of favor, but Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following and private language is still considered important, and his later philosophy is influential in a growing number of fields outside philosophy.

Thanks to my recently developed twitter habit, I came across a website that had a pretty neat idea for a twitter account.

The aim of Wittgenstein Tweets is to introduce the entire life of Ludwig Wittgenstein in around 500 tweets over 6 months. Yes, a silly project, and one which Wittgenstein himself would have almost certainly loathed.I am doing it purely because I find Ray Monk’s biography (1990) of Wittgenstein so captivating and hilarious that I want more people to get to know him. No love for or knowledge of Wittgenstein is necessary.

Wittgenstein Tweets is a fun and easy way to digest the life of one of the 20th century's most influential philosophers. Today's tweets about Wittgenstein wanting to build an airplaine (but settling for a kite) have already reminded me that I've got Wittgenstein Flies a Kite waiting for me in a stack of yet unread books.

Blogging will be back ...

I've got my home computer set up and am trying to get the hang of an unfamiliar operating system. I'll be back to blogging regularly as soon as I get the hang of this ...

Quote of the day

"Fanatacism is, in reference to superstition, what delirium is to fever, or rage to anger." - Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

On economic denialism

David Cay Johnston, on GOP supply-side economics

This is economic madness. It is policy divorced from empirical evidence. It is insanity because the policies are illusory and delusional. The evidence is in, and it shows beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts failed to achieve the promised goals.

So why in the world is anyone giving any credence to the insistence by Republican leaders that tax cuts, more tax cuts, and deeper tax cuts are the remedy to our economic woes? Why are they not laughingstocks? It is one thing for Fox News to treat these policies as successful, but what of the rest of what Sarah Palin calls with some justification the "lamestream media," who treat these policies as worthy ideas?

The Republican leadership is like the doctors who believed bleeding cured the sick. When physicians bled George Washington, he got worse, so they increased the treatment until they bled him to death. Our government, the basis of our freedoms, is spewing red ink, and the Republican solution is to spill ever more.

Those who ignore evidence and pledge blind faith in policy based on ideological fantasy are little different from the clerics who made Galileo Galilei confess that the sun revolves around the earth. The Capitol Hill and media Republicans differ only in not threatening death to those who deny their dogma.

Awesome. More media Johnstons, please.

Been busy on twitter

I haven't gotten around to setting up my home computer yet - and am currently burned out from blogging via iPad - but have been busy tweeting on twitter, which I'm starting to find addictive. Somehow, typing how annoying I find Meghan McCain's celebrity or mocking Christine O'Donnell's willful stupidity in 140 characters or less makes me want to bash my head into a wall because of Idiot America slightly less.

Regular blogging to resume in a couple of days.

Baleful quote of the day

'No [torture] techniques were used on Ms. Nearne [by the Gestapo] that were not also applied with authority of the Bush Administration to prisoners in the “War on Terror.' - Scott Horton

I created a Twitter account

I'm going to experiment with twitter for a while to see if I find any utility in it. If I do find it beneficial, I'll end up adding a widget to the blog that features my latest tweets.

Hooray!

I am extremely happy to say that I now have access to C-Span2, which means I get to watch Book TV again.

Better news: I now have a home net connection and will be able to blog more often and with less difficulty (starting in a few days when I have my new computer up and running.)

Baleful quote of the day

'[C]raziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.' - Paul Krugman

Michelle Malkin is still intellectually bankrupt

I used to read Michelle Malkin's blog on a regular basis, but quit doing so mainly for the fact that I'd assumed I'd already seen Malkin hit the bottom in terms of pathetic intellectual argument.

And checking her website today, I see that she is still there. In defense of the Republican Tea Party senate candidate who just won the Republican primary in Delaware and who derives multiple anti-reality positions from her belief in the superstitions of pre-scientific people living thousands of years ago having said that she can speak authoritatively about witchcraft because she dated a Satan worshipping witch, Malkin writes

At 1:03 in the video, one of the panelists on the show criticizes O’Donnell for criticizing Halloween — “Wait a minute, I love this, you’re a witch, you go ‘Halloween is bad,’ I’m not the witch, I mean wait a minute.” She responds by explaining that she opposes witchcraft because she has had first-hand experience with what they do.

So, she tried it. She rejected it. And she learned from it.

What Malkin's ignorant little mind is unable to grasp is that people who intellectually inhabit this century are not criticizing O'Donnell for a youthful indiscretion from which she learned a valuable life lesson, they are criticizing her for an obviously bullshit story about Satanic witches that only exist in the imagination of (some) Christian fundamentalists.

In the same post, Malkin repeats the idiot smear that O'Donnell's opponent is a Marxist.

Isn't it lovely, what a land of opportunity America is, where someone dumber than a bag of rocks can rise to political stardom or star pundit status, provided that they are ideologically qualified (i.e. say sufficiently hateful/defamatory things about "liberals" or deny reality to the correct ends, e.g. Creationism is true) for the welfare system created by the right-wing's parallel media institutions.

Fear and loathing in America

Book Review: The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama by Will Bunch

Before the 2008 election I wrote:

If a Democrat becomes president expect to have our public discourse overtaken and overwhelmed with the most extreme, insane, and rotten attacks and smears from the conservative movement that you can possibly imagine.

...

If either Obama or Clinton becomes president look for a resurgence in the patriot movement, with these folks going off into the woods, stockpiling weapons, and preparing to wage war with the anti-Christ.

But excluding some sort of national catastrophe, the real threat is not going to be them. (Although the families of those killed by Timothy McVeigh might beg to differ.) The bigger threat is the one Hofstadter recognized, that this kind of endless mindless drivel that comes from the Drudge-Hannity-Limbaugh axis of misinformation will create a political climate in which rational pursuit of our well-being and safety is impossible.

The Backlash presents author Will Bunch's first hand experience of that very rage and paranoia that was unleashed by the election of a Democrat, with the author traveling the country attempting to understand the fury of a right-wing populism which has pretty much made such predictions a reality. The book covers many of the same incidents that have been covered here on this blog, but with Bunch actually tracking down the involved parties and speaking with them. While Bunch provides humanizing portraits of such individuals, he also manages to provide sharp criticism of the predators who have preyed upon economic insecurity and cultural fears to fan the flames of hysteria for profit (both political and economic).

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with how often I have cited the work of Richard Hofstadter to explain movement conservatism and may recall my recent disclosure of how much I have been influenced by Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Hofstadter and Postman are also strong influences on Bunch; with the book basically examining the way that the "paranoid style" that was fringe in Hofstadter's day has become mainstream thanks to the culture being amused to death by a vapid media that substitutes entertainment for information.

Working off of the central themes of the aforementioned authors, Bunch posits that what has fueled much of the backlash of right-wing populism in a time of economic insecurity has been conservative white fears of a changing American demographic in which whites will no longer be the majority. Conservatives of the backlash, as Hofstadter put it, feel they are "manning the barricades of civilization." (Bill O'Reilly has previously given explicit expression to this fear.)

This translates into a fear of "The Other" which turned generally powerless minorities into scapegoats. In this atmosphere, electing the first African-American president with a foreign sounding name made it almost an inevitability that the authoritarian base of the Republican party would not recognize the president's legitimacy (and implicit prejudice helped, too.). Bunch found this most on display in the state of Arizona, a state that not only took harsh anti-immigrant measures but introduced a "birther bill" designed to question President Obama's citizenship. As Bunch put it:

Republicans were asking the forty-fourth president of the United States the same question they were asking Mexicans with a busted taillight: "Your papers, please."

What's more

To modern conservatives, the elevation of a Democrat who was black and a product of the nation's most elite law school at Harvard was not just a political event; it represented the destruction of their elaborate if cheaply constructed conservative temple of belief. The only answer that made any sense to the true believers was total denial.

And here I pause the review to take a moment and note my own previous musing on the backlash, reality denial, and the paranoid style as I cannot resist the urge to add my own two cents:

It's difficult to understand how just 6 months into the presidency of Barack Obama, so many self-described "conservatives" have managed to work themselves into an hysterical furor and fear about living under an oppressive, American Nazi regime of Obama. But as I've said many times now on this blog, if you understand the core of these individuals and pundits as being authoritarians with a black/white Manichean world view, it becomes easier to make sense of their behavior.

When they lose an election, that means that Evil has come to power. Satan is in control (Figuratively for some, literally for the Christian nationalists.) It is Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia ... 1984 come to life. This is why the movement's parallel reality seems to lag behind conservative ideology. Once the Other is in power, it is only a matter of time for the leaders of the movement to construct such a reality that fits to their preconceived notions of the evil characteristics of their eternal Enemy. (E.g. President Obama isn't even a citizen! says the Manichean minded psuedo-conservative.)

What is so destructive about this sort of mentality - and especially those who fuel the epistemic fire with non-stop paranoid propaganda - is that it is difficult for democracy to function if you have a core constituency of one of the two viable political parties in your nation which has the belief that either they win an election or it is time to wage a revolutionary war to win back their freedom. This is brand of "democracy" in which the only legitimate outcome is theirs; all of the rest of electorate cease to be Americans and fall into the category of the Other. This is why Glenn Beck can say in all sincerity (after pretending to be President Obama and then setting the American public on fire in effigy) that President Obama is not delivering the change that he and his 9/12 movement voted for, managing not to notice that there are millions of Americans who voted Obama and other Democrats into office precisely because they do want some public form of healthcare. The normal democratic process of election and policy making thus turn into the very definition of tyranny, and mobs of right-wing populist protesters, organized by conservative elites, show up to shut down the democractic process at town hall meetings. Borrowing the Adorno quote that Hofstadter used in his famous essay on the psuedo-conservative revolt, "The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Bunch notes that paranoid, conspiratorial beliefs and smears (e.g. that Obama is not a citizen, that Obama is going to confiscate guns, that FEMA concentration camps are being built, that Obama is a socialist, etc.) that once would have been obscure, fringe crank literature distributed locally as pamphlets now circulates widely on the internet, through the airwaves of talk radio and into the mainstream discourse almost effortlessly and instantly. (See here for an example of this idiot process in action.)

Traveling along with Bunch as he encounters right-wing hysteria given political expression in various forms you will notice one unifying thread: Glenn Beck. Beck looms throughout the book, sometimes in the background, or in sections devoted specifically to him, promoting fear and paranoia. This is not surprising; Beck has been busy for the last year and a half attempting to frighten his audience that white, fundamentalist Christian conservatives will soon be the victim of radical black socialist thugs and minorities who want to take their money as reparations and then maybe start killing them in a new Holocaust or turn them into second class citizens.

Bunch also leans on the work of Alexander Zaitchik, noting that Beck in addition to being the backlash's Fearmonger-in-Chief is also its Huckster-in-Chief, promoting not merely himself but a number of dubious to bogus products which make him richer and his audience poorer. Bunch devotes several chapters to exposing the hucksters up and down the movement who profit off of fear and paranoia with junk products and schemes. (Survival seeds, anyone?) Bunch writes of Beck:

Fear.

It was almost as if Beck was the bizarro-world version of Franklin Roosevelt, who in an earlier economic meltdown in 1933 had not only railed against "fear itself" but spoke of "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." But in 2010, Glenn Beck Incorporated thrived on "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror," regardless of whether it helped to drive the body politic in the opposite direction of where FDR guided the "Greatest Generation" ... Beck was constantly straining to find the outer limits, exploring both the inner terrors of his audience and their hopes for restoration and a common purpose. And then he was brazen in taking hold of his public and using it to sell them things, with little care over the side effects.

Bunch's reporting took him across the country, from Delaware where he tracked down the "I want my country back!" Youtube birther sensation to Knob Creek where he witnessed first hand the bizarre phenomenon of people convinced that President Obama was going to confiscate their weapons and abridge their Second Amendment rights despite the reality that the president had relaxed gun restrictions with the trend across the nation towards making it easier to carry arms; from talks with devoted fans of Beck to a founder of the ultra-paranoid Oak Keepers; from rural Georgia where Congressman Paul Broun was able to rise from obscurity via extremist anti-Obama rhetoric to Pittburgh where Richard Poplawski, acting out on the conspiratorial, extremist rhetoric that has been normalized by the likes of Broun and Beck and others, killed three police officers out of fear that they were coming to take away his guns.

Although Bunch notes that the backlash and our politics-as-entertainment driven media has provided an atmosphere conducive to inspiring violence such as that of Poplawski, Jim Adkisson, Scott Roeder, or the Hutaree militia, the book is really a chronicle of the way that right-wing populism has severely inhibited the capacity for democracy in America to function. Perhaps expressed most concisely in this passage:

These [Repubican] representatives of 37 percent of teh country wielded unprecedented powers because of something the likes of which this nation had never seen before: their ability to stick together on every single issue with the sole purpose of obstructing Barack Obama and his Democratic allies. It was an "I Hope He Fails" strategy hatched in the ratings-driven studios of talk radio, but now rigid legislative fealty to the on-air musings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck had ground Washington to a total halt.

I must confess that my one disappointment with The Backlash is that Bunch did not manage to work the following Richard Hofstadter quote in, as it seems to describe the Tea Party, 9/12 Beck/Limbaugh backlash so perfectly.

"[I]n a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible." - Richard Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt"

Bunch's book is a chronicle of Hofstader's hypothetical possibility becoming a realized phrophesy.

Disclosure: I was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of this book from Harper and had hoped to have a review possible by the time of its launch two weeks ago, but time (and the difficulty associated with composing such a post on an iPad) got the best of me. Better late than never, I hope.

Quote of the day

"I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear." - Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R - ME), "Declaration of Conscience" (June 1, 1950)

She was talking about McCarthyism.

Book review coming

I'm in the process of finishing up a book review for a recently released book that I should be ready to post either Wednesday or Thursday. This will be the first full-on review that I've done in a good while.

In the meantime, I've just discovered another book that looks like a must read - and it has a great title!

Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

From the press release:

In Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (Viking, Sept.), New York University’s Charles Seife shows how numbers can be a powerful rhetorical weapon, but warns that “in skillful hands, phony data, bogus statistics, and bad mathematics can make the most fanciful idea, the most outrageous falsehood seem true.”

Seife, a professor in NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, defines “proofiness” as the art of using pure mathematics for impure ends.

“Phony numbers have the appearance of absolute truth, of pure objective fact, so we can use them as a justification to cling to our prejudices,” he writes. “Proofiness is the raw material that arms partisans to fight off the assault of knowledge, to clothe irrationality in the garb of the rational and the scientific.”

From Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claims of exact numbers of communists who had infiltrated the State Department to the misuse of census data to skew the formation of congressional districts to the application of a mathematical formula to falsely accuse the Soviet Union of violating the Threshold Test Ban Treaty in the 1980s, proofiness continues to erode democracy, Seife posits.

“Proofiness is toxic to a democracy, because numbers have a hold on us,” Seife maintains. “They are powerful—almost mystical. Because we think that numbers represent truth, it’s hard for us to imagine that a number can be made to lie. But proofiness is not merely a tool for propaganda as it was for McCarthy—it is much more dangerous than that. Democracy is a system of government based upon numbers, and rotten numbers are eroding the entire edifice from within.”

Cool site of the day

Big Think

Big Think is a global forum connecting people and ideas.

It may be a cliché to say that knowledge is power, but that doesn’t make the statement any less true. We know that there are just 24 hours in a day, that you are bombarded with information, and that the bombardment will only escalate.

We believe that not all information is equal. We believe that expertise is invaluable and should be shared. If you had a heart problem and could afford the counsel of the world’s leading cardiologists, you would seek their advice. If you owned a business and wanted to expand into China or Russia, you’d want to hear from people who had already done that. If you planned to write a novel or a screenplay, you’d want to get pointers from the world’s leading writers. At Big Think, we put you in contact with the ideas of very smart people.

Book sale bonanza

Here is what I purchased at the library book sale, yesterday, for the grand total of eight dollars (hard covers for a dollar; paperbacks fifty cents):

The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 2) (hc) by Arthur Schlesinger

Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (hc) by Amy Goodman and David Goodman

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (hc) edited by Michael Lewis

The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World (1788 - 1800) (hc) by Jay Winik

The Informant (pb) by Kurt Eichenwald

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pb) by Douglas Hofstadter

Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (hc) by Michael Isikoff and David Corn

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (hc) by Chalmers Johnson

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (hc) by Charles Pierce

The only one of these books that I have previously read is Nemesis. Of the remaining books, I'm probably most excited to read Idiot America, although there is no telling when I'll get to it.

Godel, Escher, and Bach is a 1980 edition that was donated and looks like someone has had it on their book shelf for thirty years without ever reading it. And The Coming of the New Deal is a '59 edition and is in remarkable condition considering its age.

Obama administration makes a mockery of human rights

Scott Horton observes

Diplomacy, according to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, is the “patriotic art of lying for one’s country.” A fine example of this comes from the U.S. Department of State’s Report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Conjunction with the Universal Periodic Review (PDF), submitted at the end of August:

Thus, the United States prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons in the custody or control of the U.S. Government, regardless of their nationality or physical location. It takes vigilant action to prevent such conduct and to hold those who commit acts of official cruelty accountable for their wrongful acts. The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture, and U.S. law prohibits torture at both the federal and state levels. On June 26, 2010, on the anniversary of adoption of the Convention Against Torture, President Obama issued a statement unequivocally reaffirming U.S. support for its principles, and committing the United States to continue to cooperate in international efforts to eradicate torture.

Horton goes on to note that contrary to what the United States officially asserts, it in fact does torture when the president feels like authorizing it and it does not hold those who torture accountable.

The "vigilant action" apparently includes arguing in court and winning expansive executive power to shield criminal conduct from legal scrutiny. It also includes "Looking forward, not backward" which allows the authors of a torture and kidnapping regime to walk around freely, making television appearances bragging about how proud they are of the torture that they had committed.

This is the sort of thing that should generate national outrage and dominate a news cycle. Perhaps we would have less such moral outrages if we had a media class that had a functioning moral compass in the first place. As it is, many of those in a position to hold the Obama administration's feet to the fire for its campaign promise shattering continuation of human rights violations are too busy having fun water gun fights with White House officials at the Court of Versailles Vice President's mansion.

Update: I agree with Brayton's sentiment, although I disagree that lying and winning an appeal are in themselves impeachable, no matter how despicable or destructive to the rule of law.

Obama lied, plain and simple. And now it is no exaggeration to say that we are on the cusp of the end of the very notion of constitutional checks and balances. Think for a moment about what Obama's victory in this appeal means. It means that the government can torture people at will -- entirely innocent people -- and the victims of that torture have no ability to seek justice in court. The moment the government says this is a state secret, the case has to be dismissed -- do not pass go, do not even think about demanding due process or justice.

The plaintiffs plan to appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court upholds it, the rule of law is a dead letter in this country. It really is that simple. There is no more important issue facing this country. If the executive branch is allowed to violate the constitution, the law and our treaty obligations at will and there is no judicial oversight allowed for those actions, we do not have a president we have a dictator -- and the fact that we are allowed to change dictators every four years does not change that reality one bit.

Not a dictator, so much as a para-dictator. We still have the institutions of democracy, the hypothetical seperation of powers and such, the laws on paper ... they all just happen to be useless when it comes to doing anything about the monarchical national security state war president. The Obama administration has just helped to transform, further, the Rule of Law, into a vestigial organ of the American political body.

And here's another recent example of the "vigilant action" that has been taken to hold those who commit torture to account: rehiring a torturer as a contractor.

As Andrew Sullivan puts it

The cloak of secrecy [Obama] is invoking is not protecting national security but protecting war crimes. And this is now inescapably his cloak. He is therefore a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more. This won't happen in my lifetime, barring a miracle. Because Obama was a test case. If an outsider like him, if a constitutional scholar like him, at a pivotal moment for accountability like the last two years, cannot hold American torturers to account, there is simply no accountability for American torture. When the CIA actually rehires as a contractor someone who held a power-drill against the skull of a prisoner, you know that change from within this system is impossible. The system is too powerful. It protects itself. It makes a mockery of the rule of law. It doesn't only allow torture; it rewards it.

The case yesterday is particularly egregious because it forbade a day in court for torture victims even if only non-classified evidence was used. Think of that for a minute. It shreds any argument that national security is in any way at stake here. It's definitionally not protection of any state secret if all that is relied upon is evidence that is not secret. And so this doctrine has been invoked by Obama not to protect national security but to protect war criminals from the law.

Pathology of a political response

From Germs, Genes, and Civilization: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today by David Clark

When a new problem arises in society, especially a novel health issue, the response of the political establishment is pretty much as follows:

1. The problem does not exist.
2. The problem is extremely rare and, in any case, is declining. There are more important things to worry about.
3. The problem has been highly exaggerated by irresponsible activists and popular journalists.
4. There is a serious problem, and we have been doing everything possible to deal with it from the very begginning.

Both the American response to the AIDS crisis and the British response to mad cow disease followed these stages.

A quote for Labor Day

"A good labour union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as its the best way of fighting unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers' association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish Log who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to." - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Still the finest satire of manufactured market values that I know of.

Quote of the day

"One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap. A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living. Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless. And now, the very people responsible for the vulernable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living: Social Security." - Glenn Greenwald

Rabbi on Glenn Beck show echoes Nazi rhetoric

Just look at how delighted Beck was to hear Rabbi Lapin tell his audience that "atheists are parasites" benefiting from the good society and culture that religion has built for them. I love how he prefaced his bigoted statement with the old bigot tactic of claiming to know some good atheists, kinda like how Henry Ford would say he knew some good Jews to demonstrate he wasn't prejudiced when he denounced "Jewish parasites."

I expect that there might be some who would be so inclined to believe that I'm being unfair with my post title. For such individuals, I suggest you read this.

A quintessential example of why I despise Nancy Grace and CNN HLN so very, very much

I randomly turned to CNN HLN twice today. The first time I was informed by this "news" network something or another about Kat Von D (a reality show tatoo artist) hanging out with Jesse James (a reality show mechanic) ... I'm not sure exactly what important information the network had about the two as I tried to turn the channel as quickly as possible to avoid mental contamination.

The second time I flipped by the network I was confronted by an angry, scowling Nancy Grace (this is apparently her default facial posture for television) in her most serious and grave, indignant and outraged demeanor, covering the "BREAKING NEWS" that a nanny was caught on tape physically abusing an infant. The child's parents fired the nanny and turned the tape over to police, so what exactly is the news significance of this tragedy to a national audience?

On the other hand, I also flipped once randomly to NPR, and this is what I heard

Melissa Block speaks with Miel Hendrickson, regional coordinator for International Medical Corps in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hendrickson's team has treated more than 200 women who were raped in rebel attacks a month ago. The area is known for its gold and mineral deposits, and attacks on villages in the area is frequent.

While CNN HLN and Nancy Grace are trading on celebrity gossip and individual personal tragedy for profit, there actually is relevant news with important significance out there that goes generally unnoticed.

One can google the topic for more information about the systematic raping of women (and abuse of children) that is occurring in the Congo, but here is one that kind of puts in perspective the fraud that is CNN HLN

Cassiterite, wolframite, coltan: they might be the spoiled offspring of celebrity parents, or characters from an unfamiliar fairytale. The truth is much more prosaic. They are the minerals on which laptops and mobiles and even the tin of tomatoes in the cupboard depend. Cassiterite is the main component of tin oxide. Wolframite is a source of tungsten, used in many electrical applications. Coltan makes mobile phones work.

There are two reasons why it is necessary to know about these otherwise apparently esoteric minerals. First, the rich world has a capacious appetite for them, and second, it is fuelling conflict in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rape of more than 150 [Note - now confirmed at 240] women and children earlier this month in Luvungi, North Kivu, in the DRC's mineral heartland is probably (it is not yet proven) directly connected with the exploitation of the mines from which these minerals come.

Despite the enormity of the crime – and even though it apparently took place over several nights – news of the rapes travelled only slowly into the western media. Even the UN's Monusco stabilisation force, based less than 20kms from the village, claims to have heard nothing. The force, due to leave in a year, has long been accused of spending too long in barracks, failing to patrol on foot, and making too little attempt to listen to the concerns of the people it is supposed to be there to protect. Partly because of its failings, Kivu, geographically and politically remote from Kinshasa, has become the killing field in what is being called Africa's world war. Proportionally, it is a conflict that dwarfs any British war: it has already claimed 5 million lives and cruelly disrupted millions more. Yesterday, a leaked report from the UN accused neighbouring Rwanda of a genocidal spree as its Tutsi-controlled army hunted down Hutu refugees in the late 1990s. Then soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army, pushed out of Uganda, launched a series of deadly raids.

Oh, and this, too.

3 September 2010 – More than two dozen children were among the hundreds of civilians recently raped by members of armed groups active in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the United Nations reported today.

...

The UN said today that 27 minors, including one boy, were among those assaulted, with one attempted rape reported as well.

You see, this is actually breaking news. It's been breaking for more than a god damned decade.

Here's a bit from the latest report on the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the International Rescue Committee:

"It was not uncommon to hear accounts of armed groups seizing young women from farms or water points and enslaving them and raping them for one to three months," says [IRC D. R. Congo Gender Based Violence team coordinator Sarah] Mosely. "Now women in North Kivu talk to me more about gunmen breaking into their homes and brutally raping them in front of their families."

She says the attacks have become so frequent that families in the north cross into Uganda at night to sleep in the forest. It's safer than staying at home.

That was written in 2007.

I'll close my little rant with the same question the above author asked 3 years ago: "Wonder when Nancy Grace will get around to those women."

Better "communists," please

McClatchy reports

Democrats in Congress are poised to play a leading role this month in thwarting their party's effort to raise income tax rates on the wealthy.

So, let's see, the Bush tax cuts for the rich will stay while Democrats are considering reductions in Social Security benefits. Remembering that taxes on the middle class were raised in the 80s under the pretense of funding Social Security but in reality to finance Reagan tax cuts for the wealthy, it does make a kind of nice symmetry to the whole affair to see Social Security being put on the chopping block in order to further subsidize the transferance of wealth upwards.

Gee whiz, I sure can see why everyone is so worked into a hysteria about how radical socialists in Congress are persecuting the wealthy. I mean, with Leninists like the ones Greenwald mentions, it's a wonder that the Obama administration hasn't carved Stalin's face into Mt. Rushmore yet.

Following Robert Gibbs' announcement that liberal Obama critics should be drug tested, and before that, Rahm Emanuel's declaration that the same group is "fucking retarded," a new book by former Obama "car czar" Steven Rattner describes how Emanuel worked to thwart union interests and declared, in the midst of the auto bailouts:  "Fuck the UAW."

Ten top psychology myths

The authors of 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology have an article in eSkeptic listing the top ten myths. Take a look.

I'm pleased to see my own pet peeve of pop psychology mythology - the lie detector - made the list.

Living through World War II with Orwell

In case you quit checking the blog since you found the number of eggs that George Orwell had for breakfast that day to be not all that interesting, I thought I'd point out that the daily unfolding of Orwell's diary at Orwell Diaries has now gotten to where he is commenting on living through World War II on a daily basis (with each entry correlating to this day seventy years ago).

Given that Orwell wrote probably the most influential anti-totalitarian novel of all time, and that his experiences living through World War II no doubt played a significant part in shaping his thoughts about such matters, I find the diaries to be a fascinating window into his mind and how Orwell experienced the war.

Here is yesterday's entry:

Air-raid warnings, of which there are now half a dozen or thereabouts every 24 hours, becoming a great bore. Opinion spreading rapidly that one ought simply to disregard the raids except when they are known to be big-scale ones and in one’s own area. Of the people strolling in Regent’s Park, I should say at least half pay no attention to a raid-warning . . . . . Last night just as we were going to bed, a pretty heavy explosion. Later in the night woken up by a tremendous crash, said to be caused by a bomb in Maida Vale[1]. E. and I merely remarked on the loudness and fell asleep again. Falling asleep, with a vague impression of anti-aircraft guns firing, found myself mentally back in the Spanish war, on one of those nights when you had a good straw to sleep on, dry feet, several hours rest ahead of you, and the sound of distant gunfire, which acts as a soporific provided it is distant.

Brief, belated book reviews

Between the difficulties of blogging off of an iPad, lacking a home wifi connection, and a career change, I've fallen far behind on a number of posts that I've been meaning to write (some for over a year now.) The two books I'm about to plug fall into that category of post ... hopefully, I'll start catching up. So here goes:

- The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.

Two of the books that have most influenced my blogging, especially as it relates to media/cultural criticism, are Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neal Postman (I've listened to it three times on my iPod) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter.These, to me, are superb works, exemplarary of public intellectualism, with Postman focusing on how the transformation of America from a print to a tv society has led to our transformation from an information culture to an entertainment culture and Hofstadter arguing America's long history of anti-intellectualism being a by-product of democracy.*

In The Age of American Unreason, Jacoby has continued in the tradition of both of these authors, coming down hard on the dumbth of American society, finding much blame in tv, fundamentalism, and in anti-intellectual demagogues (some of whom are themselves right-wing intellectuals) who equate intelligence with liberal elitism. Although Jacoby comes across as a curmudgeon with some of her criticism of technology (I use my iPod as an educational resource, listening to science/philosophy/skeptic podcasts and such) much else of the book provides acute analysis of the dumbing down of American culture and the absence of serious, thoughtful discourse.

To get a better feel for book's subject matter, see this discussion between Moyers and Jacoby.

- Logicomix: An Epic Search for the Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

I would have never imagined that a biography of Bertrand Russell focusing on his search for a rigorous, formal grounding for mathematics would make for a good comic book story, but Logicomix is exactly that. I imagine that this is likely the most accessible and entertaining introduction to the early to mid 20th century philosophical efforts to establish a formal foundation of logical certainty for mathematics that one is going to encounter.

Although Russell failed in his quest (thank you, Kurt Godel) the graphic novel does an excellent job of showing how the process and search itself helped spawn the computer age.

For more on the comic, see this review in The Philosohphers' Magazine.

*The Assault on Reason by Al Gore is another book that follows in this tradition.