Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Progressives have the tendency to revile the United States as the center of Homeland Security authoritarianism, and to look to Europe for a more liberal-minded alternative. They’re correct to fear the America’s growing security state, but quite wrong to imagine that Europe will offer a refuge of enlightened liberalism.

News came out today in a new European Union report indicating that the governments of Britain, Poland, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus all knew about the program of secret, illegal CIA prisons where people were held and tortured without legal authority and without criminal charge.

The Europeans knew about it, and went along with it.

Is there no refuge in the world where liberty is still valued?

No, probably not.

I’ve been out working as a grassroots organizer for the Republican get out the vote effort, and so I haven’t come back to my regular email account to resume my political writing until after this ungodly election. Well, let me tell you what I found on my return: Anal sex spam!

Oh, it’s not just any kind of marketing campaign. No, no. I believe in the free market, but there has to be limits to free speech, and that limit comes when I am sent a message, without my permission, detailing the smutty thrills of “her first double anal”.

What is the message in this email, I wonder? How are we to interpret this?

Well, for one thing, I see that this is just her first double anal! The liberals who send out this spam to attack me and my political work clearly intend all people who come here to pick up the message that having two throbbing cocks shoved up the rectum isn’t something that a woman will do just once in her life. Oh, no! It’s something to do over and over again. Sodomy is thus normalized! Shame.

Don’t doubt for a second that it’s the hollywood liberal Barbra Streisand fans who are sending me all this nasty spam. How do I know? The number of sex spam in my email box this morning was 1776.

Oh, how these nasty liberals mock America!

Here’s a link for the Southern readers of Irregular Times: Atlanta Progressive News. I know, it sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. The truth is that Atlanta is a mix of Northerners and Southerners, plus people from elsewhere in the country, and so there is, finally, a real local struggle to establish a genuinely progressive presence.

Atlanta Progressive News doesn’t always go as far as progressives outside Georgia might expect it to go, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. Georgia still isn’t Vermont, but some people are trying to move the culture ahead, at long last.

Does anyone else have some local progressive links to suggest?

Over at the Associated Press, reporters Holly Ramer and Mike Glover have just produced an article which beautifully exhibits the unreflective worship of political insiders that dominates the mainstream news approach to covering presidential campaigns. They write about how very important it is for Democratic presidential candidates to court Democratic Party
insiders.

But who do they bring up as their prime example? Jim Demers, a Democratic insider in New Hampshire. The support of Mr. Demers is described as critical to the success of a Democratic presidential candidate in the New Hampshire primary. If a candidate doesn’t have the help of Demers, Ramer and Glover say, that candidate is in trouble. Insiders like Demers rule the political system, after all, and voters’ political preferences are secondary to their influence, right?

Well, maybe not. Consider who Jim Demers supported in the 2004 presidential primary in New Hampshire: Dick Gephardt. Think back now, and you’ll remember that Dick Gephardt ran so poorly in the New Hampshire primary that he was not a major contender even in Iowa, where Gephardt was supposed to be king… again, because of his contacts with political insiders. If political insider power was so important, how come Jim Demers couldn’t get a victory for the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives?

I suggest that Holly Ramer and Mike Glover look at the evidence again sitting in front of them again. Insider politics just doesn’t have the extraordinary power that reporters like Ramer and Glover say it does. It’s just easier for reporters to cover the relatively small number of self-important political insiders than to try to report on what voters themselves are up to, and what genuine grassroots organizers are doing independently.

Today is Buy Nothing Day, a day which will be thoroughly ignored by everybody. Why should we have a day on which we buy nothing? Come to the light of reason, my dear misguided friends. If nobody buys anything, nobody will eat. Should you really not eat? Oh, you say, just don’t buy your cabbage today, buy it tomorrow! But that is the same thing. The only way to have an effect is never to buy a particular thing. So why not have a Don’t Buy One Thing, Ever Campaign? That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? No, it’s just ever so much better to have a day where people can postpone their trip to the mall, and feel really good about themselves, and then buy the latest glossy issue of Adbusters. But not this Friday. You can buy the magazine and feel smug on Thursday or Saturday.

For ten years, the Mars Global Surveyor has been mapping the surface of the planet Mars, watching for signs of life on the planet. Now, suddenly this month, the Mars Global Surveyor has disappeared!

The scientists who have been working with the satellite circling Mars say that they don’t know what happened to the Surveyor, and they can’t find a sign of it. Now, think, please, about what that means.

A satellite watching Mars for signs of life disappears. Why? Did the Mars Global Surveyor find what it was looking for?

Ask yourself: Who didn’t want the Mars Global Surveyor to find life on Mars? Who was in the position to destroy the Mars Global Surveyor by “accidentally” missing a decimal point in a standard course correction, thus sending all evidence of an advanced alien civilization burning up upon descent into the Martian atmosphere?

I think it’s pretty clear we’re talking about the Trilateral Commission, here. Of course, I could be wrong. It could be the Bilderberg Group. What is certain is that someone wants to keep you in the dark about Mars. Why?

I heard on the radio that Fox News was going to put a comedy show on its lineup. And this is news exactly how? Fox News is a 24-hour comedy channel already. Oh, maybe they are going to try some literal comedy on us, not the satirical farce that they currently are engaged in. I say No! Don’t go out of character, Fox News; that will only destroy the integrity of your black-is-white, up-is-down, Kafkaesque romp.

If the Senate Republicans were to read tea leaves for the American voters, they’d probably come out with an interpretation such as, “You are sleepy alll the time, because you refuse to drink hot caffeinated beverages.”

It’s this kind of backwards thinking that leads the Republicans in the United States Senate to return Trent Lott to a high position of power as Minority Whip. The Republicans see that they’ve lost many seats to the Democrats in the Senate, so what conclusion do they make? Do they conclude that they’ve been too extreme in their ideology, and give a relative moderate, like Olympia Snowe, the Minority Whip position? No, no. They decide to put another Southern right winger, one who has mourned the loss of forced racial segregation, into that office.

I wonder what will happen if they lose another seat to the Democrats in 2008. Will they start a special Minority Senate Office for the Prevention of Miscegenation?

Yesterday, I wrote here on the Irregular Times Diaries about how the Iraq War has raised epistemological questions, such as, How can we know the difference between a police commando and a gunman dressed as a police commando?

You see, there were reports yesterday morning that “gunmen dressed as police commandos” had kidnapped people from an Iraqi scientific research facility. That curious phrase caught my attention, because it implied a distinction between someone dressed as a police commando and an actual police commando. Given the chaos and corruption throughout Iraq, I didn’t think that distinction held merit.

Now, this morning, my suspicions are confirmed. Six policemen from the area around the research facility have been arrested for their involvement in the kidnapping – including the local police chief.

So, when the police chief sends in commandos with guns, dressed up like police commandos, to kidnap people, how are those involved not police commandos? Why were they called “gunmen dressed as police commandos” and “gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms”.

There’s an ontological question at the root of this, and a tragic one at that: When the police that we trained are now recruiting people who had been in government-supporting militias to take part in actions dressed as police, how are they not police? Who are the police, if they are running illegal operations? Who is standing up, and who is standing down? Who are we there in Iraq, who are our allies, who are our enemies? Is there really any difference now between these different identities?

The war in Iraq is a philosopher’s mirror, presenting all the quandries of classic philosophy in the media of blood and bombs.

Take, for example, the epistemological question presented by this morning’s news that 150 Iraqi educators and researchers have been kidnapped by what the Associated Press refers to as “gunmen dressed as police commandos”: What is the difference between a police commando and a gunman dressed as a police commando?

Police commandos have guns, right? Iraqi police have been observed taking people off the streets to hold in secret prisons, right?

So, how come the news media is referring to these people as “gunmen dressed as police commandos” and not just police commandos? How was that decision made?