Jon wondered why I hadn’t commented on the new Wikileaks “cablegate” affair. A fair question, especially given the last Wikileaks thing turned this blog into a genuine internet sensation (for about 3 seconds) (and not due to any editorial effort on my part, I literally just cut and pasted from their twitter feed, go figure).
Answer is: I don’t know what to make of it. This is clearly a more complex action than previous Wikileaks releases. My instinctive feeling is that this is a good thing as a one-off targeted at a country that rationalises itself as a global policeman, but in general this is a dangerous precedent. Diplomacy needs to function out of public view, and losing that assurance of discretion is certain to have a limiting effect on positive as well as negative efforts.
But I find it hard to feel bad about this if it puts the UK govt’s handling of Iraq in the pooh. My fury over that whole affair remains undimmed, seven years on.
So ultimately – I don’t know what to say. I’ll wait to see how things shake out. Assange is clearly a tosser, and yes he may be a sex criminal too but that doesn’t mean he’s not doing good work.
Glenn Greenwald has been getting a lot of attention for this firebreathing attack on the US media coverage of Wikileaks and what it says about the state of the fourth estate in the USA.
But the most interesting thing I’ve read yet is this article that looks at Assange/Wikileaks’ motives. Short version: Assange’s stated view is that authoritarianism must inevitably rely on a conspiratorial approach. The contradictions between authoritarianism and conspiracy provide a vulnerability that can be exploited by wikileaks. So the point of the cablegate affair is not the cables themselves, but the response they force in the US government.
All these articles give me some interesting starting points but I don’t feel I’m anywhere near understanding the depth of what this affair means. Too complex, too soon, too something. I dunno. Opinions & interpretations welcome.
Train reading over the last little while (when not listening to the Mayo/Kermode podcast) has been Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America From The Right (2007, this edition paperback with new foreword from 2009).
The book is essentially a history of “how we (the U.S.) got into this mess”, combined with an emphatic reminder “yes, this is a mess”. It tracks through the last century-plus, where the Long Gilded Age of massive inequality was succeeded by the New Deal which introduced a welfare state and (with the help of some wartime measures) brought about what Krugman calls “the great compression”, where the extremes of inequality shrunk massively and the U.S. became a middle-class nation.
Then it tracks the rise of movement conservatism through its capture of the Republican party, and shows how the political shifts from Reagan onwards pushed inequality back towards Gilded Age levels. And it does all of this from an explicitly liberal, progressive viewpoint (Krugman discusses the use of both terms) that gives a prescription for pulling back from inequality and, crucially, completing the New Deal by developing health care for all.
It’s a great and readable book, putting a framework around a lot of things I only knew in bits and pieces. It’s a refreshingly candid argument, too, with an appeal to the fundamental morality of political liberalism and a reminder that it is liberals who are always on the side of democracy:
When liberals and conservatives clash over voter rights in America today, liberals are always trying to enfranchise citizens, while conservatives are always trying to block some citizens from voting. When they clash over government prerogatives, liberals are always the defenders of due process, while conservatives insist that those in power have the right to do as they please. After 9/11 the Bush administration tried to foster a deeply un-American political climate in which any criticism of the president was considered unpatriotic – and with few exceptions, American conversatives cheered. (p267)
Implicit in Krugman’s argument, but mostly unexplored in favour of other lines of discussion, is the power of social identity in shaping politics. Krugman gives convincing evidence that America is in fact a liberal country – that when you poll Americans on policy initiatives they would support, liberal policies are highly favoured. However, many of these same people identify as Conservatives. This is partly thanks to movement conservative’s skill at putting values issues to the forefront, a trick learned from Nixon; partly it’s a legacy of endemic racism in the US. In fact, if there’s anything in Krugman’s book that shocked me, it was his matter-of-fact conclusion that racism in the U.S. – specifically, the race relations problems that are the legacy of the slave trade – is the point of differentiation that explains why the US is so different to its neighbours and contemporaries. Since Reagan’s “welfare queens” comment, the hidden element of economic discussions in the US is that supporting poor people means supporting black people, and that is not a vote-winner.
Krugman gives a good account of the rise of movement conservatism. This was a small set of intellectuals in favour of minimal government and unregulated economic activity, and who saw the welfare state as anathema. They developed over time into a complex system of media channels, think tanks, and political operations that co-operate and, crucially, protect their own by circling them around through the system while ejecting those who stand against them (e.g. by shifting towards a more Eisenhower-Republican stance). However, he doesn’t have much to say about why people become movement conservatives – about the appeal of the ideology, in its purist form as well as its popularized (tea party) form. (The tea party movement hadn’t happened at the time Krugman wrote, of course, but the elements of it could be seen in the Joe-the-Plumber/Sarah Palin crowds.) To be fair, that’s well out of Krugman’s area, but I would have appreciated some comment from him on this. Movement conservatism, it seems clear from Krugman’s account, is not fundamentally concerned with social dividers like race and homosexuality. Movement conversatism is about the relationship between wealth and government, which are not identity issues in the normal sense; and yet the ideology seems to resonate as powerfully as any identity politics might.
This post hasn’t been a very good review or description of the book, more some random musings that it has prompted in me, but there you go. As usual, reading about the U.S. political scene is an exercise in wonder and frustration for me as a non-U.S.ian, but the influence of the U.S.A., and of movement conservatism, is clearly felt over here in countless ways so this kind of understanding is very handy. Book now available for borrowing, Wgtn/Hutt folks!
Although the Obama administration has put the blame squarely on BP, polls show Americans are losing faith in the government’s ability to mitigate the disaster.
In his second visit to the Gulf in the 40-day crisis on Friday, Obama faced criticism that he responded too slowly. He told people in Louisiana that they “will not be left behind” and that the “buck stops” with him.
There is not much Obama can do other than apply pressure to BP to get it right and put his best scientists in the room. The government has no deep-sea oil technology of its own.
I, personally, don’t understand why Obama hasn’t swum down to the leak and used his super-breath to blow all that oil down into the centre of the earth, then used his heat-vision to weld the top of the pipe shut, then flown over the surface of the ocean at super-speed and scooped up the oil inside a gigantic satellite dish, then poured it gently into a gigantic tank for later use. I think it’s because he doesn’t love America/because he is a corporate tool. Curse you Obama!
[The scale and the depressing inevitability of the oil disaster make me furious, but not as much as the fact that BP’s gonna emerge from this with little more than scuffs.]
Just over a week ago, a post I made about Wikileaks (lifted directly from Dylan Horrocks’ twitter feed) went ballistic and garnered nearly 100,000 sets of eyeballs in a day. The events in question mentioned an upcoming video release about murder in Iraq and a Pentagon cover-up.
The video has now been released. It’s circulating all over the place, and Scoop has a good overview, with the short-form (17-minute) video embedded.
Basic story: a U.S. military helicopter identifies a group of men in a street as targets, and shoots them down. When others arrive to evacuate the wounded, they too are shot down. I don’t recommend watching the video lightly – it’s intense and emotional, and the video-game chatter of the U.S. soldiers is hard to listen to. But I do think it’s important, and if you intend to form an opinion on this, you should try to get through it. Warning: children are injured in the attack.
There’s lots of discussion happening all over the ‘net about what the video shows, and whether the U.S. military personnel involved were right or wrong to designate the men as targets and shoot them, and whether they were right or wrong to do the same thing when more people arrived to help the wounded. A lot of this discussion concerns the rules of engagement in play at the time, and whether the men in question were reasonably seen as carrying weapons.
The weapons are, to me, of greatest interest. You can hear in the spotter’s (gunner’s?) commentary as he sees the men and sees guns that he believes this is a legitimate military target. Look again at how exactly this happens:
At 3 mins into the video, the leaked footage begins as the spotters identify a group of people standing together.
At 3 mins 20 seconds, Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen is in the centre of the frame, hoisting his camera. The spotter says “That’s a weapon.” (With those words, Namir and companions were condemned to death.)
At 3’37, the spotter reports: “Have individuals with weapons.” Note the plural – one weapon has become several, without obvious cause.
At 3’40, two other men come into frame, and they both are carrying weapons, AK-47s apparently. (These are, again, legal to carry here.) Spotter, on seeing the first of this pair: “He’s got a weapon too.” Then, after seeing the other: “Have five to six individuals with AK-47s.” Three identified weapons (one erroneously) have become five to six. They’ve seen enough. At 3’50, permission to fire is sought, and soon after is received.
At 4’10, a long camera piece is identified as an RPG. Note, permission to fire has already been received at this point.
There’s a well-known perceptual/cognitive phenomenon called confirmation bias. This says that we interpret what we are seeing in terms of what we expect to see. This video captures confirmation bias in action. A camera became a gun, then two others with guns became proof of an attack squad, then the camera again became an immediate threat. The pattern is clear: there is no way for the spotters in the helicopter to step out of this chain of perceptions.
This is not a trivial matter. I’m not trying to diminish these events by pointing at a cognitive bias as an excuse or rationale. No, to me this is exactly where the scandal is. Fire orders are being made on interpretations that do not correct for this extremely common and well-understood bias. Lives are being taken and the system that authorizes this fails to account for decades-old research (and anecdotal understanding that goes back hundreds of years.) Instead, the whole apparatus operates in precisely the opposite direction; once the action is taken, it must be justified. The evidence is massaged and re-interpreted to support the initial confirmation bias. A perceptual error becomes truth.
Now, the target identification issue isn’t the only troubling thing here, and it isn’t the focus of Wikileaks’ interest. The assault on unarmed men (and children!) attempting to evacuate the wounded is horrific. The Pentagon’s stonewalling of Reuters trying to get this tape is appalling. The disengaged chatter of the U.S. military is disturbing, if completely understandable.
Regardless of those issues, the confirmation bias explanation for what happens is all I can think about right now. I probably won’t come back to the rest. I don’t think I want to watch that video ever again.
Happy April Fools Holy Thursday linky. I was all keen to do an April Fools Pantheon of Plastic entry, following DavidR’s suggestion, but after far too long clicking through action figure custom galleries and flipping the pages of Tomart’s Encyclopedia & Price Guide to Action Figure Collectibles, I still hadn’t found any photos that felt like they could play. No doubt I’ll have a great idea as soon as I post this, but oh well.
Flatlander pointed at this interview and response with a young right-wing politico on the subject of Earth hour. It is hilarious, and we should all seize the rhetorical flourishes on display for future use. Everyone likes “I think my argument is so powerful that it’s not necessary to talk about it” but I am fond of “it fails on three fun-loving levels”, which must be an actual talking point for him because he repeats it in both interviews. Outstanding.
The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t destroyed the universe yet, but it did give us a Tweet that will be remembered long after Twitter has faded away.
Elyssa a.k.a. The Moon Whispers, late of Wgtn and now home in Italy, has released a bunch of free music, including a new track Tutto Intorno e Ombra. (You have to subscribe to her email list to get the download link.) From the site: “Elyssa writes enchanting dark ballads with evocative vocals and a storytelling slant. ”
From Rodger: Polka Face! Wunnerful.
Seen the Scarface School Play yet? As a hoax it was never gonna last more than five minutes, but as a piece of wacko guerilla pop-art, it’s something amazing.
Weird, the Weird Al biopic. Am I the only one who genuinely would love to see a Weird Al biopic? A doco would beeven better.
And a round-up of linky about Dylan, interviews at BoingBoing, newsarama and more. Tomorrow I’ll be going to the NZ Comics Weekend opening, and hopefully on Saturday too to see the Wgtn launch of the first NZ edition of Dylan’s classic work, Hicksville. Bookman Beattie writes about Hicksville here. Dylan is a lovely chap and a great creator, and is currently serializing new work free on his blog: hicksvillecomics.com
Sitting next to my computer for the last few months has been an issue of Cerebus, the long-running nearly indescribably series by Dave Sim. I picked up a stack of them in a ten-cent sale a decade ago and have finally been working through them. Sim was a champion of the comics form and provided a showcase for plenty of up-and-coming creators, and a back-up in this issue (#177) is by a woman named Nina Paley. She, I remembered instantly, had written and drawn some great funny strips for Dark Horse Presents back in the 90s (and indeed, Sim’s intro mentions Diana Schutz, editor at Dark Horse). What, I wondered, had become of her? Well, it turns out she made a movie: a full-length animated feature called Sita Sings the Blues. Roger Ebert gives it an extensive and glowing review here. Ebert:
“By this point, I’m hooked. I can’t stop now. I put on the DVD and start watching. I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens.”
It’s back in the circuit because it’s just been made available, free, under a Copyleft license. An interview with Paley at CBR tells the fascinating story. And you can watch the film here. I haven’t, yet, but I will, because it looks AMAZING. And now I can put that Cerebus issue away!
I was talking to Dale yesterday about this and we shared our confusion at this whole situation. As Dale said, how can they not see this as a big vote-loser? Where are the gains to balance that out? Claire expresses similar feelings down in the comments, with the post title above being one of her explanations for the behaviour on display. I am no wiser. I’ve heard some conspiracy theories that it’s about controlling the media while other changes get pushed through, or about putting this or that MP over, and the govt will pull back and say “sorry folks we listen love us!” but I don’t have any faith in the present govt’s ability to run that kind of disciplined strategy, and Brownlee has totally nailed his credibility to this endeavour so I don’t think an elegant backdown is possible any more.
What with Spider-Man and Wolverine and Iron Man being some of the biggest movies of the last ten years, everyone’s a comic-book superhero fan now. Or so I thought, until the huge controversy over an issue of Captain America erupted a month or so back.
SHAKOOOOOOM!
Story goes like this: in this comic, this dude Captain America and his long-time buddy the Falcon go investigating an anti-government group of villains called the Watchdogs. (None of these characters are new. Cap came along at the start of the 40s, Falcon in the 70s and the Watchdogs in the 80s.) Cap and Falcon carry out surveillance on an anti-tax rally in a middle-American town.
Big group of people holding signs like “America 4 Sale” and “Stop the socialists!” and “Tea bag the libs before they tea bag YOU!” Says Falcon, who is black, about the prospect of infiltration: “I don’t exactly see a black man from Harlem fitting in with a bunch of angry white folks.” So they come up with a plan: Falcon pretends to be an IRS man turning up in a bar threatening an audit, while Cap pretends to be a roving trucker who punches out the IRS man and wins over the locals.
So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just “hate the government,” they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government.
Bet you didn’t know that when you were indulging your right as a citizen to protest your government that you were a dangerous white supremacist that wants to destroy the country, did you? Bet you didn’t realize that your reverence for the U.S. Constitution was a subversive thing to do, did you? And I’ll also bet that you never imagined that you’d scare the little blue panties off of Captain America!
GANOOSH!
Soon the entire rightosphere was raging with animus and fury, overcome by a frightful and all-consuming hunger for vengeance! Rich Johnston has the overview. Even Glenn Beck, crying, screaming superstar of the political rightiest, devoted some airtime to the comic. Fox News grabbed the story and made much hay out of story writer Brubaker’s left-leaning Twitter-expressed politics. Faced with this uproar, Marvel hastily damage controlled to say “it’s part one of the story, give us a chance to show you the whole picture” and “we didn’t mean for it to specifically be a tea party rally”.
And now the whole storm is gone and forgotten, except not by me because I found a copy of Cap 602 and of course I bought it. Because I had to see for myself what the fuss was all about. And here’s the thing: there isn’t much to get fussed about, here. To the extent there is, it’s in the plan to get in with the anti-government extremists by punching out a black civil servant. Even in the shorthand and broad-strokes storytelling of comics, that’s kinda weak.
What I like about this whole saga is how perfectly it encapsulates the way popular politics works in the U.S. right now. (Similar patterns are apparent elsewhere, but in the U.S. this process is very well-established.) The network of conservative blogs, always voracious for content, grab on to anything that emerges in their network and start howling enthusiastically. When enough of them do this, it works its way through to the radio hosts, and if it gets play there it finally surfaces into the Fox News circuit. If it still has legs, it will go on to all those mouthpiece shows Fox has clogging its broadcast schedule. The fundamental narrative is always one of conservative victimization.
It’s an amazing system with a slick and efficient beauty. To use the jargon, the Republicans have figured out how to crowdsource their propaganda machine. I have to admire it. But it is horrible, too, because it’s all sound and fury with no real thought or analysis. Everyone grabbed on and started whacking without much care to check the validity of the initial complaint. Indeed, the bit of the original post that had some merit (the supposed subtext of racism to the IRS agent scene) fell by the wayside immediately. The story just became about that one picture of the tea party rally, evaluated solely in the context of frothing blog posts. Such is the nature of this machine – it generates noise and anger and emails and phone calls, but it doesn’t generate anything remotely like understanding.
Which has been to the amusement of those who’ve followed the Captain America character, whose writers have an unsurprising history of making none-too-subtle political points with their work. In his first ever appearance, he was punching out Hitler on the cover of his new comic – which was remarkable because the U.S.A. wasn’t even in the war at that stage.
