"Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]"
Some Time journalists have expressed concern that the company's decision could have a chilling effect on their relations with sources and could hinder their newsgathering efforts.
"We're very much worried about what kind of signal this sends," Ms. Tumulty said. In Washington, she added, "confidentiality is the lubricant of journalism."
In re the summer’s mini-Rove scandal: LI has been searching for historical parallels to write about Matt Cooper’s revealing email, as published by Newsweek. It throws a nice light on the mores of the press corps. This is how the sausage is packaged (incidentally, last night we saw Alain Tanner’s excellent film, La Salamandre (1971). So we have seen how sausage is really packaged). We all knew that most stories in the media peddle a pro-government, pro-corporationist agenda; but the question is, what do the puppets, ie the journalists, think they are doing? How does a corps that exudes such arriviste arrogance negotiate its own perpetual surrender? It takes a major event – for instance, being led into a war desired by a lobby in D.C. – to show us that the techniques that sell tickets to and toy spinoffs of The War of the Worlds are now routinely used to sell every war and policy lurch. It is a world of press releases, with the voice of the third person narrator in your average news story turning out to belong to somebody from the dread State or the dread Corporation or other of the infinite band of dimwits working the American hypno-zone. They have simple desires. They want to steal your money, kill your brothers and sisters, and erect a large tombstone over your every opportunity for joy. The journalist has the complicated but rewarding task to make this seem inevitable – as inevitable as seeing the latest movie or watching the latest tv show. Press criticism has become a lazy blogger past-time. The point of it, though, is to pluck out those moments of ersatz necessity and lay them bare in all their essential ridiculousness. Though it is true that murder and the destinies of nations are at stake, it is also true that fate, here, is operating in the comic mode.
Incidentally, a story about Rove in the NYT this morning ends in this appropriately lubricated manner: “A former official who has worked for Mr. Bush said: "This president is Mr. Alamo. He sees the hordes coming over the hill and he heads for the barricades. And not to raise a white flag."
Wow. Former official risks all to deliver world class flattery to former boss. Punishment: a three hundred per job on K Street. No wonder the NYT scribe guaranteed him anonymity. Just think – if there were more Cooper like surrenders of anonymous sources, we wouldn’t have such choice bits to thicken the stew of sycophancy and propaganda. Our very freedoms would be threatened.
PS -- Press auto-fellation watch:
This, from David Carr's review of In Cold Blood in today's NYT:
"Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives."
PPS -- LI sometimes worries that our p.o.v. is so from Mars that we are separated, forever, from our fellow mooing herds of Americans. We too, wait in the slaughterhouse stockyard. But somehow, we don't have our little bovine head on straight. In any case, the views given above are reflected in this article in the NYObs by Christopher Lehman.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Monday, July 11, 2005
chiral up!
Lately, LI has been enjoying Chris McManus’ book Left Hand, Right Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures. We love an omnium gatherum, of which this is a superior instance. Also, handedness is naturally of interest to the philosophically minded. It comes as no surprise (although, actually, it did come as a surprise) that one of the great pioneers in the study of the problem of handedness was Immanuel Kant. Kant thought that the dispute over absolute or relative space – the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz – could be resolved by considering right and left. Kant was, as always, right (a word etymologically connected, as all handedness researchers assure us, to the superstitious reverence accorded to the right hand, just as superstition accords ill luck to the left – the left is “cack-handed”), although as always, he was also wrong.
In 1768, Kant wrote a little essay entitled Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum (usually translated as On the basis of differences between regions in space) about absolute and relative space. You will remember that Leibniz’ argument against absolute space capitalized on the anxiety caused by the loss of discernability – L.’s idea being that one region of absolute space would be absolutely identical to another. This would mess up the cosmic bookkeeping of God himself. Kant’s first theory about space (he changed his mind later, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason) sought to find the answer in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz in considering incongruent counterparts: the left hand and the right hand are the most “at hand” examples. The metaphysical dimension of the problem would be on the way to logical solution if we could find some fundamentally right handed spatial object – something asymmetrical to which all parties could refer.
Now, as McManus notes, the problem of transforming a one dimensional shape on a plane facing one way into its incongruent counterpart facing the other way has been solved by the trick of assuming another dimension, in which the first object can be flipped. What is the medium of that third dimension?
Remember, the argument is ultimately about discernability. Here’s how McManus puts it:
“If space could be described adequately in terms solely of the relationships between objects, as Leibniz…argued, then objects that are different could be distinguished by different interrelationships of their components. [in other words, the differences would be expressed by internal configuration -- LI]. … That, though, is not the case with my own right and left hand. All of the angles and lengths are the same in my two hands, yet still the hands are indisputably different. I cannot put my right glove on my left hand or my right shoe on my left foot [although I can try, as I discovered a few days ago, trying to put a right sandal on the left foot of the squirming two year old son of a friend of mine. The child, being an inveterate Kantian, baulked-LI]… For Kant, the conclusion is inescapable: there must be something against which right and left can be compared – and that could only be space itself: “Our considerations … make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies: these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space.’ Even empty space must have some absolute structure against which it can be said that our right hand is not the same as our left.”
Kant’s paper has created a sub-industry. Pooley’s paper, here, defends the Leibniz-ian view, modified by contemporary physics, against Kant.
“I will side with most—although admittedly not all—philosophers in defending an account of incongruent counterparts according to which they are intrinsically identical.3 Moreover, I will defend a relational account of handedness according to which the difference between incongruent counterparts is grounded in their relations to each other and to other material objects. Kant thought that there were reasons to reject such an account. Initially he concluded that the difference between left and right hands did indeed come down to a difference in their relational attributes, but that these involved relations to “universal space as a unity” (Kant,
1992 [1768]: 365). Not long after reaching this conclusion, he also rejected this substantivalist account of handedness. Instead he now believed that the difference between incongruent counterparts was fundamentally incomprehensible: that it could only be grasped in perception, through a “pure intuition,” and not by any “characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” (Kant, 1992 [1770]: 396).”
We will return to handedness in another post But we should include, here, the most wonderful bit of Kant’s essay. Like Condorcet and Locke, Kant liked the Enlightenment notion of an imaginary problem (which has become, as philosophers have grown into thinking of themselves as scientists without portfolio, into “thought experiments’). This is Kant’s
“ . . imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That human
hand would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause producing the counterpart.”
Has Borges somewhere taken up this absurdly beautiful idea? LI, at least, finds it ravishing, and would like to worship that unknown God that created, as his first magic trick in the as yet uncreated universe, a human hand.
Of course, this might actually have been God's first trick in all earnest -- given the handedness of the electrons.
In 1768, Kant wrote a little essay entitled Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum (usually translated as On the basis of differences between regions in space) about absolute and relative space. You will remember that Leibniz’ argument against absolute space capitalized on the anxiety caused by the loss of discernability – L.’s idea being that one region of absolute space would be absolutely identical to another. This would mess up the cosmic bookkeeping of God himself. Kant’s first theory about space (he changed his mind later, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason) sought to find the answer in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz in considering incongruent counterparts: the left hand and the right hand are the most “at hand” examples. The metaphysical dimension of the problem would be on the way to logical solution if we could find some fundamentally right handed spatial object – something asymmetrical to which all parties could refer.
Now, as McManus notes, the problem of transforming a one dimensional shape on a plane facing one way into its incongruent counterpart facing the other way has been solved by the trick of assuming another dimension, in which the first object can be flipped. What is the medium of that third dimension?
Remember, the argument is ultimately about discernability. Here’s how McManus puts it:
“If space could be described adequately in terms solely of the relationships between objects, as Leibniz…argued, then objects that are different could be distinguished by different interrelationships of their components. [in other words, the differences would be expressed by internal configuration -- LI]. … That, though, is not the case with my own right and left hand. All of the angles and lengths are the same in my two hands, yet still the hands are indisputably different. I cannot put my right glove on my left hand or my right shoe on my left foot [although I can try, as I discovered a few days ago, trying to put a right sandal on the left foot of the squirming two year old son of a friend of mine. The child, being an inveterate Kantian, baulked-LI]… For Kant, the conclusion is inescapable: there must be something against which right and left can be compared – and that could only be space itself: “Our considerations … make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies: these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space.’ Even empty space must have some absolute structure against which it can be said that our right hand is not the same as our left.”
Kant’s paper has created a sub-industry. Pooley’s paper, here, defends the Leibniz-ian view, modified by contemporary physics, against Kant.
“I will side with most—although admittedly not all—philosophers in defending an account of incongruent counterparts according to which they are intrinsically identical.3 Moreover, I will defend a relational account of handedness according to which the difference between incongruent counterparts is grounded in their relations to each other and to other material objects. Kant thought that there were reasons to reject such an account. Initially he concluded that the difference between left and right hands did indeed come down to a difference in their relational attributes, but that these involved relations to “universal space as a unity” (Kant,
1992 [1768]: 365). Not long after reaching this conclusion, he also rejected this substantivalist account of handedness. Instead he now believed that the difference between incongruent counterparts was fundamentally incomprehensible: that it could only be grasped in perception, through a “pure intuition,” and not by any “characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” (Kant, 1992 [1770]: 396).”
We will return to handedness in another post But we should include, here, the most wonderful bit of Kant’s essay. Like Condorcet and Locke, Kant liked the Enlightenment notion of an imaginary problem (which has become, as philosophers have grown into thinking of themselves as scientists without portfolio, into “thought experiments’). This is Kant’s
“ . . imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That human
hand would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause producing the counterpart.”
Has Borges somewhere taken up this absurdly beautiful idea? LI, at least, finds it ravishing, and would like to worship that unknown God that created, as his first magic trick in the as yet uncreated universe, a human hand.
Of course, this might actually have been God's first trick in all earnest -- given the handedness of the electrons.
dissociative politics
The Plame affair is a curious cultural relic. It revolves around an utterly revolting law that prevents the names of covert CIA operatives from being leaked. This unnecessary constraint on our civil liberties was passed in 1994, meaning that we somehow managed to trundle through the Cold War without it. The Alice in Wonderland aspect of the case begins with the law, which has suddenly become a sacred thing, next to the flag and motherhood, in the liberal ‘sphere. Taking down America’s imperial ambitions, or at least making them transparent, is never going to occur if the transparency is blocked by a trumpery law. Novak is an utterly ridiculous figure, in LI’s view, but we are glad he revealed the inner workings of this particular action. Far from being a traitor, actions like Novak’s are necessary if we are ever going to rein them in.
Laws like the non-disclosure law are not, however, ever about treason, but about court society. The exist in order to create vectors of blackmail and blackguardism. The second Alice in Wonderland aspect of the Plame case is that it shows us how American foreign policy – a thing of D.C. cabals – is enacted. Joseph Wilson might well have been the right man to send to Niger to check on the bogus yellow cake story, but it is nevertheless of high interest that his wife put in a word for him. Who does put in words for people in that place? Who puts in the word for Chalabi? Who put in the original word for Pearle? At least the investigation has opened up that mechanism a little, so that we can see springs operating against springs. There is a distressing American habit of respecting the governing class. The governing class in D.C. is no more respectable than it was in Byzantine courts – indeed, a lot less respectable. It consists of circus performers, praetorian guards, satyrs and whores. Unlike the Byzantine court, there is a lot less learning among them.
The third Alice in Wonderland thing is how journalism works through the blackmail vectors. Obviously, journalists are used as the knights for complicated in-fighting, whispering a little info here, spreading a little gossip there. Basically, journalism operates to weed out any bit of talent or dissent that appears to threaten the cabal form. Judy Miller’s role is particularly interesting, since she was basically an operative in Operation Lie mounted by the belligerents in 2002-2003. Diffusing information that the white house wanted diffused allowed her to play the game of then bouncing the information off the white house or the collection of neo-con eggheads and sycophants with White House connections.
Bringing us to the fourth Alice in Wonderland thing, the use of jail. LI has always wondered at the American addiction to jail. In our opinion, jail is properly the place for the few truly dangerous criminals – rapists, murderers – plus the occasional incorrigible robber. Mostly the people in jail should be under house arrest. There is, of course, no incentive for the purging of the jails, and every incentive to build more of them. We would support with all our Mighty Mouse powers a politician who proposed creating anti-jail incentives – for instance, tying one hundred fold increases in social welfare to increases in the jail population. But to jail everybody must go, it seems…
In Antonio D’amascio’s Goodbye Descartes, there is a story about a nineteenth century railroad worker who suffered a horrible accident that made neurological history. An iron rod, accidentally propelled by a mistimed explosion, entered his skull at such speed that it entirely left the head, exiting out of the top of the skull, and taking with it some frontal brain matter. The worker survived, but his personality was utterly changed. He became unable to understand goal oriented action. Or rather, he understood it intellectually, but he couldn’t incorporate himself into any larger plan. As D’Amasio puts it, he was dissociated, with his intellect disconnected from his pragmatic life.
Dissociation is a very good term for D.C. politics. Politics on this level is not about ideology – ideology is secondary. It is about the dissociation of power as its own goal. Judith Miller, Christopher Hitchens, CNN, Fox – they are all products of the dissociative form of governance we suffer under.
…
Since we are talking about jail, we must talk about another issue, however heavily it weighs on our heart. Yes, LI is terribly sad that Li’l Kim’s going to the slammer. Not that we are surprised. In the slammer’s terms, this was a slam dunk. But listen to Shut up bitch for the Queen Bee's response to her critics. Like the Elizabethan wits, Li'l Kim has taken the opportunity to make a little artistic use of an unfortunate predicament. But hasn't she always? Ah, women like Li'l Kim have wrought complete disaster on my heart forever. Why is it I treasure every tantrum and twist of mood? I don't know. And I don't care.
Kimberly, if you are out there, listen: Kit Marlowe was killed moving in similar circles to those of Ms. Bella Mafia, and he got 'a great reckoning in a small room", as Shakespeare said. It happened like this:
...it so hapned, that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickely perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed."
Ingram? As you would expect, look for the man with dubious connections to the cops, down to a fake weapon laydown, rumors, and a skewed inquest. Then another Elizabethan, Ben Jonson, killed an actor with whom he'd previously been in prison, guy named Gabriel Spensor. You will appreciate that Spensor was murdered because he claimed that the Chamberlain's Men were better actors than the company Jonson preferred, the Admiral's Men. Shades of a certain incident for which you are playing the patsy.
So Kimberly -- if you need a prison correspondent, and this message in a blog bottle reaches you, write me at rgathman@netzero.net. We won’t rat you out, take that as a solid fact. And since we have piss poor aim, our firearm skills aren’t gonna get you in trouble either. We will always be there for ya…
Ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough
(shut up, bitch)
Laws like the non-disclosure law are not, however, ever about treason, but about court society. The exist in order to create vectors of blackmail and blackguardism. The second Alice in Wonderland aspect of the Plame case is that it shows us how American foreign policy – a thing of D.C. cabals – is enacted. Joseph Wilson might well have been the right man to send to Niger to check on the bogus yellow cake story, but it is nevertheless of high interest that his wife put in a word for him. Who does put in words for people in that place? Who puts in the word for Chalabi? Who put in the original word for Pearle? At least the investigation has opened up that mechanism a little, so that we can see springs operating against springs. There is a distressing American habit of respecting the governing class. The governing class in D.C. is no more respectable than it was in Byzantine courts – indeed, a lot less respectable. It consists of circus performers, praetorian guards, satyrs and whores. Unlike the Byzantine court, there is a lot less learning among them.
The third Alice in Wonderland thing is how journalism works through the blackmail vectors. Obviously, journalists are used as the knights for complicated in-fighting, whispering a little info here, spreading a little gossip there. Basically, journalism operates to weed out any bit of talent or dissent that appears to threaten the cabal form. Judy Miller’s role is particularly interesting, since she was basically an operative in Operation Lie mounted by the belligerents in 2002-2003. Diffusing information that the white house wanted diffused allowed her to play the game of then bouncing the information off the white house or the collection of neo-con eggheads and sycophants with White House connections.
Bringing us to the fourth Alice in Wonderland thing, the use of jail. LI has always wondered at the American addiction to jail. In our opinion, jail is properly the place for the few truly dangerous criminals – rapists, murderers – plus the occasional incorrigible robber. Mostly the people in jail should be under house arrest. There is, of course, no incentive for the purging of the jails, and every incentive to build more of them. We would support with all our Mighty Mouse powers a politician who proposed creating anti-jail incentives – for instance, tying one hundred fold increases in social welfare to increases in the jail population. But to jail everybody must go, it seems…
In Antonio D’amascio’s Goodbye Descartes, there is a story about a nineteenth century railroad worker who suffered a horrible accident that made neurological history. An iron rod, accidentally propelled by a mistimed explosion, entered his skull at such speed that it entirely left the head, exiting out of the top of the skull, and taking with it some frontal brain matter. The worker survived, but his personality was utterly changed. He became unable to understand goal oriented action. Or rather, he understood it intellectually, but he couldn’t incorporate himself into any larger plan. As D’Amasio puts it, he was dissociated, with his intellect disconnected from his pragmatic life.
Dissociation is a very good term for D.C. politics. Politics on this level is not about ideology – ideology is secondary. It is about the dissociation of power as its own goal. Judith Miller, Christopher Hitchens, CNN, Fox – they are all products of the dissociative form of governance we suffer under.
…
Since we are talking about jail, we must talk about another issue, however heavily it weighs on our heart. Yes, LI is terribly sad that Li’l Kim’s going to the slammer. Not that we are surprised. In the slammer’s terms, this was a slam dunk. But listen to Shut up bitch for the Queen Bee's response to her critics. Like the Elizabethan wits, Li'l Kim has taken the opportunity to make a little artistic use of an unfortunate predicament. But hasn't she always? Ah, women like Li'l Kim have wrought complete disaster on my heart forever. Why is it I treasure every tantrum and twist of mood? I don't know. And I don't care.
Kimberly, if you are out there, listen: Kit Marlowe was killed moving in similar circles to those of Ms. Bella Mafia, and he got 'a great reckoning in a small room", as Shakespeare said. It happened like this:
...it so hapned, that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickely perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed."
Ingram? As you would expect, look for the man with dubious connections to the cops, down to a fake weapon laydown, rumors, and a skewed inquest. Then another Elizabethan, Ben Jonson, killed an actor with whom he'd previously been in prison, guy named Gabriel Spensor. You will appreciate that Spensor was murdered because he claimed that the Chamberlain's Men were better actors than the company Jonson preferred, the Admiral's Men. Shades of a certain incident for which you are playing the patsy.
So Kimberly -- if you need a prison correspondent, and this message in a blog bottle reaches you, write me at rgathman@netzero.net. We won’t rat you out, take that as a solid fact. And since we have piss poor aim, our firearm skills aren’t gonna get you in trouble either. We will always be there for ya…
Ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough
(shut up, bitch)
Friday, July 08, 2005
more froth for your buck
To sum it up: Tony Blair took a non-threat to the U.K., Saddam Hussein, implanted a continuing British presence in the Middle East, and for the return on the British investment got 50 some deaths, 700 some casualties, and the disruption of all of London.
Steven Coll, whose Ghost Wars is the best book I’ve read about the Reagan era financed adventure in creating the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, has a good article in the WP. Here are two grafs:
“Yet al Qaeda's chief ideologues -- bin Laden, his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri and, more recently, the Internet-fluent Abu Musab Zarqawi -- have been able to communicate freely to their followers, even while in hiding. In the past 18 months, they have persuaded dozens of like-minded young men, operating independently of the core al Qaeda leadership, to assemble and deliver suicide or conventional bombs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Egypt and now apparently London.
As in the Madrid bombings, these looser adherents sometimes copy al Qaeda's signature method of simultaneous explosions against symbolic or economic targets, an approach repeatedly advocated by bin Laden in his recent recorded speeches.
"No more 9/11, but lots of 3/11, especially in Europe," declared the final slide in a PowerPoint presentation about al Qaeda's evolution presented at numerous U.S. government forums this year by terrorism specialist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, a clinical psychologist who has recently studied al Qaeda's European cells.”
Terrorism on tap – it is evolving nicely in the direction of a constant structure. The war on terrorism, enacted with the incompetence at which the governing class is especially good, to create a continually mobilizable base of support; the occasional real explosions, to instantiate a strong psychological restraint on dissent; and the filtering of all discussion through an endlessly growing network of anti-terrorism experts, whose ideas, a junk shop of reactionary ideological clichés that would have bored a John Bircher meeting in the 60s, will be presented with suitable worshipfulness every time an incident happens. It is rather like interviewing the head of the Nuclear Energy lobby every time there is a Chernobyl.
The end of the Coll story is a nice example of this blindsided mindset:
“Even the relatively unsophisticated nature of the attacks in London has generated soul-searching about whether effective countermeasures exist against an Islamic extremist movement that appears able to "self-generate" new terrorists, as a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official put it. "The impact of it is significant. It shows they have been able to overcome a well-developed security architecture in London," the former official said. "It shows that al Qaeda and associated groups and fellow travelers still have the ability to conduct an effective operation."
A number of themes come out in this graf.
a. The self exculpation of the experts. Since the main fact, here, is that the U.S. spectacularly blew it both by encouraging Al Qaeda at the outset and renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden, the main goal is to disguise this fact. Soul searching indeed. The job is just so complicated, it is just so intricate, it just requires so many brain cells, that we might need whole offices and bureaucracies to do it, and certainly many, many terrorism experts. It isn’t as simple as: removing the structure and removing the cause – taking down bin Laden and ceasing to occupy significant parts of the Middle East and blowing up Moslems every day on the tv in the name of … well, something. The job couldn’t have to do with exploiting the torture facilities of our ally states in the Middle East while loudly proclaiming our commitment to compassion. No, that is way too simple. The discontent of those young Moslems are because they hate us. They have hate in their hearts. We have compassion.
b. Then, of course, there is the absence, in that soul searching, of a pretty simple solution for the U.K. – withdraw from Iraq. Hey, it worked for Spain. And perhaps, oh just perhaps, a war that is opposed by the majority of the population shouldn’t be pursued by an isolated, arrogant elite – perhaps that was one of the reasons, in the eighteenth century, that the aristocratic/monarchic form of governance was either overthrown or reformed away.
c. Which is why we need a cover story. The “self-generation” one is nice. We know, to a t the kind of landscape that ‘self-generates’ terrorism, since we gleefully exploited that landscape in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And we’ve faithfully copied that landscape in Iraq, with the U.S. this time starring as the U.S.S.R., and with co-stars the Badr Brigade and Sciri imposing shari’a law in those areas ‘democratized’ by the British occupation, such as Basra, while our opponents, yesteryear’s freedom fighters, are showing what good pupils the CIA had back in the golden days.
Of course, LI’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East shouldn’t overlook the good things we’ve done. For instance, we are cleverly bedeviling the ghost of Khomenei with irony. The man, from all accounts, did not take to irony. But what is his ghost to make of the fact that the U.S. has succeeded, where he failed, in spreading his revolution? This graf from the NYT is a juicy one, buried at the bottom of an Iraq story:
“While the United States has pressed hard for friendly Arab nations to upgrade their ties here, it has been wary of the new government's ties with another neighbor, Iran, and American diplomats and military commanders said on Thursday that they were still weighing an announcement that Iraq and Iran had reached agreement in Tehran on a military cooperation pact that will include Iranian training for Iraqi military units.
Iraq's defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as having told reporters after the signing ceremony, "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries."”
PS – we’ve been very displeased, lately, to see one meme among liberal bloggers: that of getting young Republicans to sign up to go to Iraq. This is another example of rhetoric surmounting common sense. If you want the US to withdraw from Iraq, or set a timetable, don’t encourage, even as a sport, giving the War department more toys to play with. The principle of the strike is pretty simple. Discourage recruitment. Discourage enlistment. I was happy to hear, from my brother, that in Atlanta, the quakers have been active in some of the high schools, passing out anti-recruitment literature. The joke of encouraging Young Republicans to sign up is ultimately on the recruits that are over there right now, and on the Iraqis. It is a sick and sorry joke.
Steven Coll, whose Ghost Wars is the best book I’ve read about the Reagan era financed adventure in creating the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, has a good article in the WP. Here are two grafs:
“Yet al Qaeda's chief ideologues -- bin Laden, his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri and, more recently, the Internet-fluent Abu Musab Zarqawi -- have been able to communicate freely to their followers, even while in hiding. In the past 18 months, they have persuaded dozens of like-minded young men, operating independently of the core al Qaeda leadership, to assemble and deliver suicide or conventional bombs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Egypt and now apparently London.
As in the Madrid bombings, these looser adherents sometimes copy al Qaeda's signature method of simultaneous explosions against symbolic or economic targets, an approach repeatedly advocated by bin Laden in his recent recorded speeches.
"No more 9/11, but lots of 3/11, especially in Europe," declared the final slide in a PowerPoint presentation about al Qaeda's evolution presented at numerous U.S. government forums this year by terrorism specialist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, a clinical psychologist who has recently studied al Qaeda's European cells.”
Terrorism on tap – it is evolving nicely in the direction of a constant structure. The war on terrorism, enacted with the incompetence at which the governing class is especially good, to create a continually mobilizable base of support; the occasional real explosions, to instantiate a strong psychological restraint on dissent; and the filtering of all discussion through an endlessly growing network of anti-terrorism experts, whose ideas, a junk shop of reactionary ideological clichés that would have bored a John Bircher meeting in the 60s, will be presented with suitable worshipfulness every time an incident happens. It is rather like interviewing the head of the Nuclear Energy lobby every time there is a Chernobyl.
The end of the Coll story is a nice example of this blindsided mindset:
“Even the relatively unsophisticated nature of the attacks in London has generated soul-searching about whether effective countermeasures exist against an Islamic extremist movement that appears able to "self-generate" new terrorists, as a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official put it. "The impact of it is significant. It shows they have been able to overcome a well-developed security architecture in London," the former official said. "It shows that al Qaeda and associated groups and fellow travelers still have the ability to conduct an effective operation."
A number of themes come out in this graf.
a. The self exculpation of the experts. Since the main fact, here, is that the U.S. spectacularly blew it both by encouraging Al Qaeda at the outset and renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden, the main goal is to disguise this fact. Soul searching indeed. The job is just so complicated, it is just so intricate, it just requires so many brain cells, that we might need whole offices and bureaucracies to do it, and certainly many, many terrorism experts. It isn’t as simple as: removing the structure and removing the cause – taking down bin Laden and ceasing to occupy significant parts of the Middle East and blowing up Moslems every day on the tv in the name of … well, something. The job couldn’t have to do with exploiting the torture facilities of our ally states in the Middle East while loudly proclaiming our commitment to compassion. No, that is way too simple. The discontent of those young Moslems are because they hate us. They have hate in their hearts. We have compassion.
b. Then, of course, there is the absence, in that soul searching, of a pretty simple solution for the U.K. – withdraw from Iraq. Hey, it worked for Spain. And perhaps, oh just perhaps, a war that is opposed by the majority of the population shouldn’t be pursued by an isolated, arrogant elite – perhaps that was one of the reasons, in the eighteenth century, that the aristocratic/monarchic form of governance was either overthrown or reformed away.
c. Which is why we need a cover story. The “self-generation” one is nice. We know, to a t the kind of landscape that ‘self-generates’ terrorism, since we gleefully exploited that landscape in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And we’ve faithfully copied that landscape in Iraq, with the U.S. this time starring as the U.S.S.R., and with co-stars the Badr Brigade and Sciri imposing shari’a law in those areas ‘democratized’ by the British occupation, such as Basra, while our opponents, yesteryear’s freedom fighters, are showing what good pupils the CIA had back in the golden days.
Of course, LI’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East shouldn’t overlook the good things we’ve done. For instance, we are cleverly bedeviling the ghost of Khomenei with irony. The man, from all accounts, did not take to irony. But what is his ghost to make of the fact that the U.S. has succeeded, where he failed, in spreading his revolution? This graf from the NYT is a juicy one, buried at the bottom of an Iraq story:
“While the United States has pressed hard for friendly Arab nations to upgrade their ties here, it has been wary of the new government's ties with another neighbor, Iran, and American diplomats and military commanders said on Thursday that they were still weighing an announcement that Iraq and Iran had reached agreement in Tehran on a military cooperation pact that will include Iranian training for Iraqi military units.
Iraq's defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as having told reporters after the signing ceremony, "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries."”
PS – we’ve been very displeased, lately, to see one meme among liberal bloggers: that of getting young Republicans to sign up to go to Iraq. This is another example of rhetoric surmounting common sense. If you want the US to withdraw from Iraq, or set a timetable, don’t encourage, even as a sport, giving the War department more toys to play with. The principle of the strike is pretty simple. Discourage recruitment. Discourage enlistment. I was happy to hear, from my brother, that in Atlanta, the quakers have been active in some of the high schools, passing out anti-recruitment literature. The joke of encouraging Young Republicans to sign up is ultimately on the recruits that are over there right now, and on the Iraqis. It is a sick and sorry joke.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
the csa and terror
The rituals begin. The comments sections are flooded with “our prayers and thoughts are with you.” The leaders condemn the attack. They are against terrorist attacks. The Pope, too, is against terrorist attacks. Not a single leader thinks that London commuters should be blown to bits by a network winding back to a very alive and not very dead and certain not captured Osama Bin Laden.
These are the grooves we are stuck in. LI has an idea that the model for the half-security state – the state that leaves obvious gaps in its defenses while it goes about putting people’s library book checkout records under the magnifying glass – is Russia. Yeltsin, with Western encouragement, made himself briefly popular by playing the terrorist card and invading Chechnya. Putin has infinitely refined on the Yeltsin prototype. That the Bush culture is at once as tough as testosterone and as supine as a newly born lamb when it comes to demanding the taking down of the paramilitary networks from their supposedly tough leaders is a peculiar psychological complex that often accompanies junta politics. I especially love the rightwing meme that you can’t use “police” methods against terrorists. In point of fact, that is all you can use – the method of hunting down and destroying dispersed cellular groups that are armed and exist on a black money dole is the only method for destroying them. Because the perpetual war economy is about an elaborate welfare system for defense department engineers, it is understandable that this element thinks that terrorism is an excuse to get more of the gravy. If Boeing and Halliburtan don't make a profit on it, it can't be security. Cold war days are happy days. In the meantime, of course, there is also the solution of throwing bureaucracies and money at the security problem and making immigrants go through purposeless knots as though this was really sorting out the good, the bad and the ugly, instead of bottlenecking the good. However, one has to admire the emergence of a rich Homeland security welfare system that puts money into bungholes in Wyoming and Mississippi and takes money out of NYC, in the time honored, free riding fashion of Red State politics. Sweet.
In the week after Bush was re-elected, LI rethought a lot of what we used to assume about politics. The ascendancy of the Confederacy means, we think, that progressives must create enclaves and networks outside of D.C. – hence, they must invert their reflex support of centralizing power in the national government and work for the serious devolution of that power. But there is a fly even in this ointment: there is no alternative to endowing the central government with military power. This is a real problem: the D.C. Pentagon crowd, and their international clientele, are simply clueless. The evolution has been to the dumbest, which is why this is the Rumsfeld era in the ministries of war, technosmart and logistics dumb, full of strategic visions and tactical collapse. They cannot protect us, but they can certainly lie to us -- as the Bush and Blair governments did systematically in the run up to the war. They were the Code Orange Bobsey twins of misleading statements.
Meanwhile, the basic, security-making feature of government, which is equivalent to a membrane for a cell, is in hands that have proven themselves utterly unable to cope from day one.
It is childish to think men with bombs can be absolutely stopped. In fact, the benefit of an open society overwhelms the risk of terror. But a international order led by men who unwittingly open up new venues for terror, who brag about fighting wars that train terrorists, who intentionally create situations in which constituencies for terrorism are born, is rather like a hospital managed by doctors and nurses who refuse to obey the simple rules of hygiene. They become deadly to the rest of us. Our leaders have become very good at condemning the barbarity of killing commuters, which is a good thing. Because every policy they have pursued and every opportunity they have punted increases the possibility that we will see much more of it.
These are the grooves we are stuck in. LI has an idea that the model for the half-security state – the state that leaves obvious gaps in its defenses while it goes about putting people’s library book checkout records under the magnifying glass – is Russia. Yeltsin, with Western encouragement, made himself briefly popular by playing the terrorist card and invading Chechnya. Putin has infinitely refined on the Yeltsin prototype. That the Bush culture is at once as tough as testosterone and as supine as a newly born lamb when it comes to demanding the taking down of the paramilitary networks from their supposedly tough leaders is a peculiar psychological complex that often accompanies junta politics. I especially love the rightwing meme that you can’t use “police” methods against terrorists. In point of fact, that is all you can use – the method of hunting down and destroying dispersed cellular groups that are armed and exist on a black money dole is the only method for destroying them. Because the perpetual war economy is about an elaborate welfare system for defense department engineers, it is understandable that this element thinks that terrorism is an excuse to get more of the gravy. If Boeing and Halliburtan don't make a profit on it, it can't be security. Cold war days are happy days. In the meantime, of course, there is also the solution of throwing bureaucracies and money at the security problem and making immigrants go through purposeless knots as though this was really sorting out the good, the bad and the ugly, instead of bottlenecking the good. However, one has to admire the emergence of a rich Homeland security welfare system that puts money into bungholes in Wyoming and Mississippi and takes money out of NYC, in the time honored, free riding fashion of Red State politics. Sweet.
In the week after Bush was re-elected, LI rethought a lot of what we used to assume about politics. The ascendancy of the Confederacy means, we think, that progressives must create enclaves and networks outside of D.C. – hence, they must invert their reflex support of centralizing power in the national government and work for the serious devolution of that power. But there is a fly even in this ointment: there is no alternative to endowing the central government with military power. This is a real problem: the D.C. Pentagon crowd, and their international clientele, are simply clueless. The evolution has been to the dumbest, which is why this is the Rumsfeld era in the ministries of war, technosmart and logistics dumb, full of strategic visions and tactical collapse. They cannot protect us, but they can certainly lie to us -- as the Bush and Blair governments did systematically in the run up to the war. They were the Code Orange Bobsey twins of misleading statements.
Meanwhile, the basic, security-making feature of government, which is equivalent to a membrane for a cell, is in hands that have proven themselves utterly unable to cope from day one.
It is childish to think men with bombs can be absolutely stopped. In fact, the benefit of an open society overwhelms the risk of terror. But a international order led by men who unwittingly open up new venues for terror, who brag about fighting wars that train terrorists, who intentionally create situations in which constituencies for terrorism are born, is rather like a hospital managed by doctors and nurses who refuse to obey the simple rules of hygiene. They become deadly to the rest of us. Our leaders have become very good at condemning the barbarity of killing commuters, which is a good thing. Because every policy they have pursued and every opportunity they have punted increases the possibility that we will see much more of it.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
science as culture
There is nothing some scientists hate more than to have their activities scrutinized by a certain kind of sociologist. Somebody, for instance, like Bruno Latour, who they suspect is saying, in obscure language, that science is a dream, a highly wrought bubble composed of countless work-arounds and displayed before the credulous, who haven’t the training to see through the trick, as a seamless miracle. That is not, really, what Latour is saying, although he does, at critical points, suspend the question of the truth of what a particular scientist or a collection of scientists is maintaining in order to aim at what the scientists are doing. For the scientists, their motivations come from the nature of things; for Latour, their motivations come from the nature of scientists.
To do this kind of work, one must be extremely clever. But often, one isn’t. Which brings me to the Spring 2004 issue of Science as Culture magazine. Jon Turney has written just the kind of article that would seem to back up the scientists’ suspicions: “THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as Information Waiting to be Rewritten.” Turney turns his gaze on the genre of the popular science book. A little hurray for that – we are great devourers of popular science books ourselves. The poetics of the genre has been much neglected. Turney, however, isn’t interested in being extensive. Rather, he uses only one popular science book, Adrian Woolfson’s Life Without Genes. He does, it is true, make an allusion to one of Carl Sagan’s. But that is it. This is typical of Turney’s m.o. – generalization with too few examples. The article is an amalgam: Turney borrows Burke’s notion of the sublime to categorize the aesthetic appeal of popular science book, thus applying literary theory to science (of a type). The idea is good, but the follow through is lousy. His explanation of Burke is canned – he throws in some remarks about how people in the Middle Ages feared mountains and people in the eighteenth century started to revere them, which is such a stale insight, has been repeated so often as a cultural fact marking the borderline between the medieval and the early modern, that we are beginning to think it must be untrue. We look forward to some brave soul resurrecting a whole lost culture of medieval mountain climbers.
Turney likes Burke saying:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Surely Turney is right that some feeling that mingles terror and beauty is the expected response that shapes certain passages in certain popular science books. But he really should have gone to Kant for further information. Kant’s idea that sublimity is about the overcoming of some natural disproportion through the intellect is much closer to the modern sublime. The modern sublime is engineering and special effects. To understand the aesthetic impulse, as it relates to popular science books, you have to see its relation to curiosity – which, as problem-solving, has become the basis of our idea of intelligence. I say “our” – not LI’s idea of intelligence, I should add.
Fortified with his idea of sublimity, Turney then takes a crack at biology. Here things get much worse.
By any measure, biology is an incomplete science. Any sampling of the literature on biodiversity, for example, quickly shows that we have little idea how many different kinds of organisms currently exist on Earth, let alone how many may have existed in the past. Electronic databases contain records of a few complete genomes, but there are many more to analyse. And there are many aspects of intracellular or neuronal interaction which are poorly understood, to say the least.
Yet from one point of view, it is possible to imagine a biology which takes complete inventory of all these things. If you begin with the conviction that, in principle, all that is known can be represented as information, then what is not yet known is simply extra information. Conceptually it is equivalent to more of the same. One can then move imaginatively from, say, a DNA database containing the decoded genomes of a few species whose hereditary information has been processed through mass sequencing to a complete database of all species, or even all existing individual organisms. Expand to
include all the organisms that ever have existed and you are still nearer completion. All that remains is to include all the organisms which ever could exist.”
This is biology as Linneaus imagined it – infinite taxonomy. Turney’s unlikely idea that biology is data base making takes him to his even more unlikely idea that biology has now embraced, across the discipline, information as a sort of father son and holy ghost:
There is more to the state of any living organism than its genes, Woolfson acknowledges, but all the other features of its development, organization and experience can nevertheless be considered as simply additional information. In fact at this level of abstraction, the universe of all possible organisms is simply an awfully large subset of the set of all possible states of anything at all. The awesome extent of the Information Sea stems from the fact that ‘all possible bits of information are housed within an information
space … which accommodates every element of an infinitely detailed description of the state of the world at any moment in the past, present or future’ (p. 77).
Indeed, it contains all possible histories—for, again, The Information Sea is [thus] the space of all possible mathematical spaces, a hypothetical information space which contains the complete collection of all the infinite libraries of description that document every possible state of the universe to the highest degree of resolution.
Turney is very impressed by this. LI is less so. What makes information valuable isn’t captured, here, at all – for all possible histories includes false ones. The information that I leaped off the roof and flew for several miles is only separated from the information that I didn’t by the fact that one is a true statement and the other isn’t – not something information can specify. Although, to be sure, in specifying, I am providing information. As for the particular dynamism that provides us with our information about organisms – descent with modification – well, that sort of sinks to the bottom, here, doesn’t it? Turney’s paper has just that aggressive tendency to exaggeration that should make the science-as-culture people cringe. This isn’t, after all, the English department. So that I doubt very much Turney’s point:
As I have stressed, this may seem an unexpected space to explore in a book about the potential and limits of biology. But it is a logical product of the development of biological thinking in the last halfcentury, and of the ascendancy of computational and cybernetic metaphors. As Lily Kay and others have documented in detail, the
development of the idea of the genetic code indicated that biology was becoming an information science.”
In fact, biology is a vast array of different sub-disciplines. Molecular biology certainly uses the information archetypes – which, in turn, are parasitic on 19th century thermodynamics. But the key to biology is that it explains histories – organic development – and the information archetype is always oriented to this explanation. As Turney should have known from reading, well, popular science books, genes are not blueprints. If you skip survival in your tour of biology, you skip, well, biology itself.
To do this kind of work, one must be extremely clever. But often, one isn’t. Which brings me to the Spring 2004 issue of Science as Culture magazine. Jon Turney has written just the kind of article that would seem to back up the scientists’ suspicions: “THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as Information Waiting to be Rewritten.” Turney turns his gaze on the genre of the popular science book. A little hurray for that – we are great devourers of popular science books ourselves. The poetics of the genre has been much neglected. Turney, however, isn’t interested in being extensive. Rather, he uses only one popular science book, Adrian Woolfson’s Life Without Genes. He does, it is true, make an allusion to one of Carl Sagan’s. But that is it. This is typical of Turney’s m.o. – generalization with too few examples. The article is an amalgam: Turney borrows Burke’s notion of the sublime to categorize the aesthetic appeal of popular science book, thus applying literary theory to science (of a type). The idea is good, but the follow through is lousy. His explanation of Burke is canned – he throws in some remarks about how people in the Middle Ages feared mountains and people in the eighteenth century started to revere them, which is such a stale insight, has been repeated so often as a cultural fact marking the borderline between the medieval and the early modern, that we are beginning to think it must be untrue. We look forward to some brave soul resurrecting a whole lost culture of medieval mountain climbers.
Turney likes Burke saying:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Surely Turney is right that some feeling that mingles terror and beauty is the expected response that shapes certain passages in certain popular science books. But he really should have gone to Kant for further information. Kant’s idea that sublimity is about the overcoming of some natural disproportion through the intellect is much closer to the modern sublime. The modern sublime is engineering and special effects. To understand the aesthetic impulse, as it relates to popular science books, you have to see its relation to curiosity – which, as problem-solving, has become the basis of our idea of intelligence. I say “our” – not LI’s idea of intelligence, I should add.
Fortified with his idea of sublimity, Turney then takes a crack at biology. Here things get much worse.
By any measure, biology is an incomplete science. Any sampling of the literature on biodiversity, for example, quickly shows that we have little idea how many different kinds of organisms currently exist on Earth, let alone how many may have existed in the past. Electronic databases contain records of a few complete genomes, but there are many more to analyse. And there are many aspects of intracellular or neuronal interaction which are poorly understood, to say the least.
Yet from one point of view, it is possible to imagine a biology which takes complete inventory of all these things. If you begin with the conviction that, in principle, all that is known can be represented as information, then what is not yet known is simply extra information. Conceptually it is equivalent to more of the same. One can then move imaginatively from, say, a DNA database containing the decoded genomes of a few species whose hereditary information has been processed through mass sequencing to a complete database of all species, or even all existing individual organisms. Expand to
include all the organisms that ever have existed and you are still nearer completion. All that remains is to include all the organisms which ever could exist.”
This is biology as Linneaus imagined it – infinite taxonomy. Turney’s unlikely idea that biology is data base making takes him to his even more unlikely idea that biology has now embraced, across the discipline, information as a sort of father son and holy ghost:
There is more to the state of any living organism than its genes, Woolfson acknowledges, but all the other features of its development, organization and experience can nevertheless be considered as simply additional information. In fact at this level of abstraction, the universe of all possible organisms is simply an awfully large subset of the set of all possible states of anything at all. The awesome extent of the Information Sea stems from the fact that ‘all possible bits of information are housed within an information
space … which accommodates every element of an infinitely detailed description of the state of the world at any moment in the past, present or future’ (p. 77).
Indeed, it contains all possible histories—for, again, The Information Sea is [thus] the space of all possible mathematical spaces, a hypothetical information space which contains the complete collection of all the infinite libraries of description that document every possible state of the universe to the highest degree of resolution.
Turney is very impressed by this. LI is less so. What makes information valuable isn’t captured, here, at all – for all possible histories includes false ones. The information that I leaped off the roof and flew for several miles is only separated from the information that I didn’t by the fact that one is a true statement and the other isn’t – not something information can specify. Although, to be sure, in specifying, I am providing information. As for the particular dynamism that provides us with our information about organisms – descent with modification – well, that sort of sinks to the bottom, here, doesn’t it? Turney’s paper has just that aggressive tendency to exaggeration that should make the science-as-culture people cringe. This isn’t, after all, the English department. So that I doubt very much Turney’s point:
As I have stressed, this may seem an unexpected space to explore in a book about the potential and limits of biology. But it is a logical product of the development of biological thinking in the last halfcentury, and of the ascendancy of computational and cybernetic metaphors. As Lily Kay and others have documented in detail, the
development of the idea of the genetic code indicated that biology was becoming an information science.”
In fact, biology is a vast array of different sub-disciplines. Molecular biology certainly uses the information archetypes – which, in turn, are parasitic on 19th century thermodynamics. But the key to biology is that it explains histories – organic development – and the information archetype is always oriented to this explanation. As Turney should have known from reading, well, popular science books, genes are not blueprints. If you skip survival in your tour of biology, you skip, well, biology itself.
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