When I read the Detroit Free Press referring to bankrupt General Motors as a “juggernaut” this morning, I rolled my eyes. I thought that the newspaper was describing GM as a company with unstoppable strength.

It turns out, however, that there are two main definitions of the word “juggernaut”. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, they are:

1. Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed. 2. An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path

To be honest, I have to say that I’ve never run across that first definition in general usage before. When it comes to General Motors, however, I think that definition is certainly apt.

Hat tip to My First Dictionary.

soft tyranny, noun: Anything the government does that irritates Republicans.

Yesterday afternoon, we received a comment over on an article about AIG that seemed to have the generally vague language of comment spam:

“thanks for the blog, very interesting prespective, i still think b is a soft tyranny tho”

The phrase soft tyranny gave a link to a specific page in the Obama White House’s web site. Not too long after that, another comment came in from someone using a different name, but with the same IP address, offering another vague comment and another link to that same White House page using the phrase soft tyranny.

My thoughts immediately went to another phrase: Google bomb. A Google bomb is a silly form of Internet activism in which a group of people try to manipulate the way search engines work to get a particular page to show up at the top of the search for a particular phrase. When a phrase is used to link to a web page, search engines like Google note that and elevate that page’s ranking when that phrase is searched for. If there are a large number of sites that link to a page using the phrase “dirty black crows”, for example, that page is likely to be near the top when people search for “dirty black crows”. Google bombs are collective efforts to artificially engineer this kind of result.

That appears to be what’s going on with the phrase soft tyranny. Looking around on social network sites and other blogs, I see that comments including the same “soft tyranny” link are being left all over the web.

Somebody is trying to create a Google association between Barack Obama and the concept of soft tyranny. The thing is that they aren’t succeeding. Search Google for soft tyranny, and you don’t see that White House web page among the top rankings.

The reason is that the soft tyranny Google bombers appear to have a remarkably unsophisticated understanding of how the software of the Internet works. Most sites that allow comments use comment software that automatically inserts a rel=”nofollow” tag into any links in the comments that people make. We have that here at Irregular Times, as a way to discourage comment spam. The nofollow tag is an instruction to Google, and other search engines, to disregard the link in any calculations of search engine rankings. It’s a hidden message that essentially indicates to Google that the link is worthless. People can still follow the link, but search engine bots will not.

That means that almost all of the comments linking to the Obama White House with the phrase soft tyranny are failing to accomplish what the Google bomber seeks to accomplish. The soft tyranny Google bomb campaign appears to be orchestrated by idiots.

Who are these Google bombers, though, and what is soft tyranny, anyway?

The IP address of the commenter fails to provide a specific location, only informing us that the Google bomber who visited Irregular Times was using a Roadrunner service to access the Internet. However, I can say that the Google bombers are likely to be Republicans.

That’s because “soft tyranny” appears to be a particularly right wing catch phrase. Search around and you’ll find that the phrase “soft tyranny” is used almost exclusively as part of incoherent right wing ramblings that complain about liberals and government. For example, there’s the following babbling complaint by professor Alan Charles Kors about the continuing influence of people who were educated in the 1960s on college campuses today:

“From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case–the professoriate and the curriculum–it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification.”

Oy. Who has a self-inflated sense of mission of demystification there, Professor Kors?

Many sources attribute the idea of soft tyranny to Alexis de Tocqueville. They claim that the phrase comes from de Tocqueville’s work, Democracy in America. An article entitled The Soft Tyranny of the NOBama Regime, for example, cites a claim that “Modern Liberalism promotes what French Historian Alexis de Tocqueville called soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, partially leading to hard tyranny”.

Actually, I can’t find any evidence that Alexis de Tocqueville ever used the phrase “soft tyranny”. I searched through Democracy in America, but couldn’t find the phrase once. It seems to be the interpreters of Alexis de Tocqueville, and not de Tocqueville himself, who really invented the phrase and developed the idea.

What I did find in my search through Democracy in America was a poorly defined idea that government regulations and social expectations can combine to create a drag on individual achievement. It’s this kind of idea that de Tocqueville’s fans seem to be getting at when they use the phrase soft tyranny. It’s a kind of libertarian concept: Government regulations may attempt to serve the common good, but in doing so, they thwart exceptional individuals.

The people who complain about soft tyranny appear to believe that they’re just the sort of exceptional individuals who would flourish, if only it wasn’t for the burden of the do-gooder government and its regulations. I wonder, though, how long all of these opponents of soft tyranny would survive in competition with each other, the exceptional individuals that they are.

This version of soft tyranny is rather, well, soft. It reflects an attempt to inflate mere inconvenience to the level of oppression. It asks us to accept the idea that paperwork and government licenses are equivalent to the abusive reigns of people like Adolph Hitler and Vlad the Impaler. They were tyrants. The people behind the desk at the Department of Motor Vehicles are not.

The idea of soft tyranny gets even softer, though, as it leaks out into the Republican culture beyond the sphere of people who have actually read Democracy in America. Republicans seem to have taken up the phrase soft tyranny to mean pretty much anything that they don’t like.

For example, Armand Vaquer, a right wing blogger and contributing writer to Godzilla fan magazines, recently wrote in an article entitled We’re Becoming Frogs in Obama’s Soft Tyranny that:

“Obama is implementing soft tyranny through executive orders without bothering to wait for congressional action. What we have now is a government that believes that it is the sole decider on what’s in the best interest of citizens, as opposed to the people themselves.”

Vaquer’s complaint isn’t against government regulation per se, but merely in opposition to Barack Obama using executive orders rather than allowing Congress to take all control of the operations of the Executive Branch. There isn’t really anything of the pseudoTocquevillian concept of soft tyranny in his accusations. Vaquer merely accuses Obama of tyranny which seems to be soft. That’s the mumbling weakness the general use of the phrase soft tyranny, complaining about little uses of authority that don’t really amount to much.

There are serious reasons to worry that President Obama could be facilitating the machinery of tyranny in the American government. Barack Obama is continuing George W. Bush’s massive programs of electronic surveillance against the American people, for example. Obama is also supporting Bush’s legal arguments that the President has the ability to place himself above the law, declaring state secrets in order to prevent people who accuse the government of gross violations of constitutional rights, such as arbitrary imprisonment and torture, from having the opportunity to pursue justice in a court of law.

If we’re going to bother as citizens to oppose acts of tyranny in the Obama Administration, let’s focus on acts of hard tyranny such as these, rather than the supposed soft tyranny of using government funds to promote the general welfare, as the Constitution suggests. Soft tyranny, after all, appears not to really be tyranny at all, but mere inconvenience for an elite few.

Why do we have nuclear submarines?

Nuclear submarines are nuclear in two senses: First, they have nuclear engines. Second, they have nuclear weapons aboard. In both senses, they’re damned dangerous.

They’re damned expensive too, often costing several billion dollars each.

So why do we have these nuclear submarines? To hear the popular press tell the tale, there are two reasons: One is that the submarines are part of our “deterrent”.

A deterrent is a threat: Do what we want you to do, or we’ll use the deterrent against you. In the case of the nuclear submarines, the specific deterrent comes in the form of nuclear weapons. The idea is that foreign governments will only do what the United States wants them to do if we threaten them with nuclear annihilation.

Put another way, these nuclear submarines are a form of terrorism.

Think I’m being extreme in my designation of nuclear submarines as a form of terrorism? Well then, you’ll have to accuse the Columbia Encyclopedia of terrorism. The Columbia Encyclopedia defines terrorism as “The threat or use of violence, often against the civilian population, to achieve political or social ends, to intimidate opponents, or to publicize grievances.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines terrorism as “The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”

Are you going to quibble that nuclear weapons aren’t illegal, and aren’t a form of terrorism… because the U.S. government says that they aren’t illegal? If you were to make that argument, you’d have to agree that no attack can be designated as terrorist just so long as a government somewhere says that its legal. In that case, you would have to regard the U.S. government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism as an oxymoron. Any defense of the legal and moral acceptability of nuclear weapons roaming the world on military submarines has to be based upon a claim of American exceptionalism, that the United States of America is somehow subject to a different standard than every other nation on Earth.

The other argument in favor of spending billions of dollars on nuclear submarines is that they’re needed… to counter other nations’ nuclear submarines. The unspoken presumption in this argument is that nuclear submarines are actually capable of countering other nuclear submarines.

That argument is supported by works of fiction of the sort written by Tom Clancy, but it’s undermined by cold reality of the sort seen yesterday, when a British nuclear submarine and a French nuclear submarine smashed into each other. The British military explained that the accident happened because submarines “can’t see each other in the water”.

If modern-day nuclear submarines are really so blind that they can run right into each other without detecting each other’s presence, then they’re not really very good at countering each other. The billions upon billions of dollars that we spend on nuclear submarines then, is really only used for one thing: Our own nation’s state-sponsored terrorism.

I suggest that’s a morally unacceptable use of our taxes. Those people who are calling upon the government to cut spending ought to take aim at our military’s nuclear submarines, which present a threat to the entire world, even if they never fire a shot.

Unequivocal

1) adjective, English: Admitting no doubt or misunderstanding; clear and unambiguous (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

2) adjective, Obamanglish: Completely the opposite of one’s true intentions (Pragmatic Dictionary of Political Science, First Edition)

alternative form: unequivocally (adverb)

For both definitions, see:

“Giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies is simply wrong. Thankfully, the most recent effort to pass this legislation at the end of the legislative year failed. I unequivocally oppose this grant of immunity and support the filibuster of it. I have cosponsored Senator Dodd’s proposal that would remove it from the current FISA bill and continue to follow this debate closely. In order to prevail, the proponents of retroactive immunity still have to convince 60 or more senators to vote to end a filibuster of this bill. I will not be one of them.”

- campaign email from Barack Obama, 2008

Per Se: A phrase used by politicians to signal to supporters that they’re about to break a promise.

Example: “The issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security of the American people.” - Barack Obama, June 2008

If Barack Obama doesn’t announce his opposition to the FISA Amendments Act tomorrow, I will not vote for him in November per se.

Neither will Barack Obama be getting the support per se from the supporter in Indianapolis in swing state Indiana who writes, “I was the first in the neighborhood to place your yard sign firmly in the yard. I proudly wore the logo t-shirt to cast a vote in the Primary. In 2004, I asked everyone if they had seen the Convention speech, and found audio for those who had not to listen, that this man would be different from the leadership we have. So, why do I feel like removing my battered yard sign now?”

Barack Obama’s middle name is not Hussein. It’s Per Se. Barack Per Se Obama.

Not too long ago, scientists at the International Astronomical Union, getting uptight about revelations that there are many more objects close to the size of the planet Pluto in the Solar System than they had once thought, decided to end their emotional agitation by changing the definition of planet so that Pluto would no longer be a planet. This was the equivalent of a kid who doesn’t carrots deciding to redefine the meaning of vegetable so that he could tell his mother that he didn’t have to eat carrots because carrots are not vegetables.

The question remained: If Pluto is not a planet, then what is it?

The astronomers were stumped, and put the determination of an answer off to a later date. Now, finally, this question has been answered. Pluto is a plutoid.

What is a plutoid? A plutoid is an astronomical body that is, um, like Pluto. So, Pluto is now redefined as a thing that is like Pluto.

Isn’t that a bit circular, and unimaginative? The astronomers had this chance to set things right after throwing a big hissy about Pluto not, not, not being a planet. They could have done Pluto the honor of having, after its rejection from the pantheon of the Solar System, having a nice new definition to reside in.

But oh, no. The astronomers decided that they would define Pluto as a plutoid, which is a thing that is like Pluto.

If the astronomers were going to just make up a new name for the category of rejected planets, they could have at least been more imaginative and dramatic. They could have come up with a new name to make people stand up and take notice.

They could have declared that Pluto is a zipthwat. I hereby nominate zipthwat.

At least the name zipthwat is not circular. You could say, “Hey, they discovered a new zipthwat today!” Your friend would respond, “What’s a zipthwat?” You could respond with “A zipthwat is that group of big objects in the solar system like Pluto that are no longer classified as planets.” Your friend would not respond to that with, “Yeah, but what are they?” Your friend would say, “Oh, cool. Zipthwats.” He would then go call the woman he wanted to date and ask her if she wanted to come over so they could talk about zipthwats.

But no, they had to go can call Pluto a plutoid. Sigh.

The people at the International Astronomical Union are plutoids. Hmm. Maybe this “plutoid” word might be useful after all.

Plutoid - noun. A thing of diminished importance.

Our Green Man pointed out something yesterday that you won’t find written about in many other articles on the subject: When Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that he had been finally forced to give protection to polar bears under the Endangered Species Act (because polar bears are actually, you know, endangered), that didn’t mean that polar bears would actually be receiving any protection. Kempthorne announced:

“While the legal standards under the ESA compel me to list the polar bear as threatened, I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting. Any real solution requires action by all major economies for it to be effective. That is why I am taking administrative and regulatory action to make certain the ESA isn’t abused to make global warming policies.”

Polar bears are threatened by global warming, you see, and the Endangered Species Act requires the government to remove threats to endangered species whenever possible. Yet, Secretary Kempthorne says that nothing will be done about global warming, even though the Bush Administration has now grudgingly acknowledged that global warming exists, and admits with this listing that global warming is severe enough that it is likely to cause polar bears to go extinct in the wild if there is no intervention.

All that was noted by the Green Man. What I want to point out this morning is something in the tone of Dirk Kempthorne’s remarks. It’s his use of the word abuse.

“I am taking administrative and regulatory action to make certain the ESA isn’t abused to make global warming policies,” said Kempthorne. There are two meanings of the word abuse that Dirk Kempthorne might have intended with that statement:

1. That creating global warming policy under the authority of the Endangered Species Act might actually injure someone
2. That the act of creating global warming policy under the authority of the Endangered Species Act is a misuse of the Endangered Species Act that is contrary to the intended function of the Endangered Species Act

The first possibility is absurd. When a human-produced disaster is of such proportions that even powerful animals in areas far from human habitation could be wiped out by it, a policy to bring the disaster under control is not abusive. The policies that created the disaster are the abuse. Given that human habitat is as much under threat as polar bear habitat, it’s mind-boggling to consider that Republicans in the Bush Administration still consider taking action to deal with global warming would be abusive against human beings. Republicans have been saying that for over 20 years now. Do they still believe that they were right to fail to act in time to avert the tragic effects we are now suffering?

The second possibility is equally absurd. It is the intended purpose of the Endangered Species Act to trigger the creation of government policies that remove environmental threats that contribute to species extinction. Given that it’s global warming that threatens the extinction of polar bears, the creation of global warming policy is exactly what the listing of polar bears under the Endangered Species Act ought to result in.

That’s not abuse. It’s the law, and it’s in the interest of everyone involved - except for, perhaps, big oil and gas corporations. Under the Endangered Species Act, those corporate interests must give way to the interests of the actual human beings, and the animals, involved.

A homonaught is a word that is not itself naughty, but sounds like it really somehow ought to be naughty. This might have to do with the etymology of the word, or the sound of the word, or some other je ne sais quoi that stays right on the tip of the brain.

I don’t have an all-time-favorite homonaught, but tonight my favorite homonaught is the word ‘robotics’.

What’s your favorite homonaught?

I’ve long found that traditional definitions of religion are culturally biased and lacking in descriptive power. So, this afternoon, I thought I’d come up with a new definition of religion that got closer to the mark. Here’s what I came up with:

Religion is the collection of a culture’s idiosyncrasies, put into writing, with buildings.

Agree? Disagree?

Talk amongst yourselves.

It is Earth Day, a holiday that is being celebrated by increasing numbers every year. I might observe that the American Family Association is observing a war on Earth Day, given their description of Earth Day as an “imitation” that “mocks God’s truth and honors the world’s spiritual alternatives… which happens to be Lenin’s birthday.”

I might observe that, but it would be silly, as silly as imagining a conspiracy amongst philosophers, novelists, pinup girls, actors and politicians behind Earth Day. After all, April 22, happens to be the birthday of Immanuel Kant, Vladimir Nabokov, Bettie Page, Jack Nicholson and Congressman James Langevin.

Let’s take Earth Day as an opportunity to respond to the outrageous attempts of groups like the American Family Association to define environmentalism as “a Harry Potter-like faith in earthy magic and benevolent occultism.” Let’s work on our own definitions of environmentalism.

I’ll start out with this definition of my own: Environmentalism is the crazy idea that we ought to clean up after ourselves.

How about you? How do you define environmentalism?

Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf has a plan for how Hillary Clinton can win the Democratic presidential nomination for the 2008 election. “She can say, like all the others can say, that she was fooled by the president,” he suggests.

Yes, Hillary Clinton voted to help Bush start the Iraq War, Sheinkopf says, but Democrats won’t mind that, so long as Senator Clinton says that she was duped, just a poor helpless United States Senator who couldn’t tell that anything fishy was going on. Never mind that the majority of citizens in New York State begged her not to vote in favor of the war. Never mind the millions of Americans who protested against starting the war. How was Senator Clinton to know invading and occupying Iraq would be a bad idea? After all, George W. Bush told her everything would be okay.

Yes, Sheinkopf’s strategy is to bet that America will accept as its next President to be someone so stupid as to be fooled by George W. Bush. Sorry, Mr. Hanky, but you can’t count me in on that bet.

I’d really like to see Hillary Clinton run for President with this Sheinkopf strategy, though. It would be very entertaining. I can imagine the slogan now: Clinton 2008 - Outsmarted By Bush.

Jump The Shark is a web site that chronicles the embarassing moments that chronicle the point at which once-popular television shows begin to descend into oblivion. The name of the web site comes from the episode, in Happy Days, when The Fonz jumped over a shark while water skiing.

The Jump The Shark idea caught on a number of years ago, and the phrase “jump the shark” has since entered American English as a phrase used by people who have never even been to the site. Not just television shows, but fads, cultural movements, and popular ideas can now be said to jump the shark. For something to jump the shark is for it to begin to become ridiculous after being, for a while, culturally popular and relevant.

Let me be the first to announce that the phrase “swift boat attacks” has now jumped the shark, with its use by Congressman John Murtha to defend himself against accusations that he has a long history as one of the most corrupt members of Congress. Murtha said, of Democrats who are criticizing his history of ethical challenges, “I thought we were above this type of swift-boating attack… This is not how we restore integrity and civility to the United States Congress.”

Is Congressman Murtha really being swift-boated with these criticisms? The question is important, given that a vote in which House Democrats choose either Murtha or Congressman Steny Hoyer as Majority Leader will come either today or tomorrow.

Fortunately, the answer is simple. The criticisms of John Murtha are not swift boat attacks, because they’re accurate. The idea of a swift boat attack came out of the 2004 presidential election, when a Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, a group organized by Republicans promoting the re-election of George W. Bush, came out with untrue accusations against candidate John Kerry. So, a swift boat attack is defined as an untrue and unfair set of accusations.

The accusations against John Murtha don’t consist a true swift boat attack because they are neither untrue nor unfair. Congressman Murtha’s documented history of corruption goes back to the early 1980s, with the ABSCAM investigation into bribery in Congress. Murtha was videotaped giving an undercover agent possible places in his congressional district where money could be laundered, and then talked to the agent about how, while he was not prepared to accept a bribe at present, if the two did more business in the future, Murtha might take a bribe later. A transcript of part of the conversation reads,

“Undercover FBI Agent: “I got, I went out and I got the $50,000, okay? From what you’re telling me, okay, you’re telling me that that’s not what you, you know, that’s not what you…”

Murtha: “I’m not interested.”

FBI Agent: “Okay.”

Murtha: “At this point.”

FBI Agent: “Okay.”

Murtha: “You know, we do business for a while, maybe I’ll be interested and maybe I won’t, you know.”

John Murtha’s history of corruption doesn’t stop with ABSCAM. More recently, Congressman Murtha has been caught using his influence to direct over 20 million dollars of federal money to companies that Murtha’s brother Kit represented as a registered lobbyist. What qualified Kit Murtha to be a lobbyist? Why, having John Murtha as a brother.

John Murtha’s history of unethical behavior has been brought up by supporters of Steny Hoyer, but they didn’t concoct any untruths. The fact that Congressman Murtha calls the accusations “swift boating attacks” illustrates how the meaning of the phrase swift boat attacks has quickly devolved into a label for criticisms that a politician does not like.

I’m not among those who support Steny Hoyer for Majority Leader. I find the politics of both John Murtha and Steny Hoyer to be too far to the right. Both Hoyer and Murtha vote with the Republicans often enough to cause doubt in their ability to lead a Democratic House of Representatives in a way that will provide a genuine check against the power of the White House. Both Hoyer and Murtha voted in favor of starting the Iraq War back in 2002, and Hoyer still supports the war.

Neither Hoyer nor Murtha deserve to be Majority Leader. It’s not a swift boat attack to note that, time and time again, both Hoyer and Murtha have betrayed Democratic voters in favor of a right wing agenda and for the sake of their personal power.

Irregular Dictionary: Emergency

Emergency n (Homelandian; early 21st century): The possibility that someone might do something, some time within the next year, that might cause trouble.

Usage example 1: There’s a fire emergency at the high school! In the chemistry room, there’s a box of matches in the teacher’s desk, and a student could take those matches, release a natural gas valve in the lab, and blow up the whole school!
Usage example 2: Los Angeles declared a state of emergency yesterday, because the city is close to the San Andreas fault, and a massive earthquake could take place at any moment.

—————

President George W. Bush employed this meaning of the term emergency yesterday when he issued an official notice to the Federal Registrar and to Congress that he is extending, yet again, the state of national emergency for another year. In this notice, Bush wrote,

“Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the measures adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2006. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency I declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.”

With this notice, the national state of emergency is being extended until September 14, 2007.

This isn’t just a matter of language. It’s a matter of law. The Constitution enables the President of the United States to engage in certain kinds of activities that would otherwise be illegal when there is a state of emergency. So, when George W. Bush declares an ongoing, perpetually renewed state of emergency, he is in effect telling the American people that he intends to keep on violating the law and the ordinary system of constitutional protections that are in place to keep us free. With this statement, and the others that keep the state of emergency going, George W. Bush is creating a legal justification for himself to rule over the United States of America as if there were no Constitution or rule of law at all.

A child can see what’s wrong with the President’s ongoing claim to exemption from the Constitution and American law. There is no emergency.

If we really expand the meaning of the word emergency to include a six year-long period of time during which the supposed threat results in no deaths, no injuries, and no property damage on American soil, then it becomes possible to say that we will be in a state of emergency forever, because it is always possible that someone, somewhere, might be planning a spectacular attack.

There is always a threat of terrorism. George W. Bush says that means there is always a state of emergency, and that, therefore, the law never applies to him.

Will you agree with President Bush’s definition of an emergency?