Missile Defense?

Seriously? That's the supposed reason to stop the latest START treaty? Krauthammer, did somebody put your columns in a time capsule from August of 2000 or something?

Never mind that he calls the tax bill "bipartisan", when it was a big Republican victory. That's why they were willing to hand over DADT, which threatens the wealthy 0.1% that Dubya aptly called "his base" not one whit. They traded away the TheoCon's interests to serve the moneymen's interests, just as they have before and will again. It barely matters; Krauthammer is only bringing it up as "punch a hippy" fodder, a paen to the "bipartisanship" that he wouldn't give a shit about if Barry had an "R" beside his name.

But missile defense? You've gotta be kidding. Even if North Korea is a bit more unstable than it used to be, it's been made patently clear that America's conventional war advantage ain't what it used to be either. Maybe if this WERE 2002 or so, it might make sense, but American predominance has kind of had a difficult run since then.

Let's be honest. If Russia wanted to ruin America, they wouldn't need nukes for it. All they'd need to do is completely economically align with China and start really tightening their grasp on Eastern Europe, and there's a whole host of economic consequences that would make the White House sweat.

Why on earth would they need to, though? Putin has to see what's going on. Cold-blooded or no, he's possibly the most clear-sighted state leader the world has right now. There's no way that he's missed that America's wealthiest and their various mouthpieces (like Krauthammer!) are tearing down everything else in their quest to extract whatever cash can be produced by the other 99.9% of Americans. There's no way he's missed just how disastrous Obama's Administration has been so far, DADT or no DADT.

He, and everybody else that may (or may not) wish America harm, can just sit tight and let all the work be done for them. The danger isn't nukes. It's people like Krauthammer himself.

A Short Pop-Culture Aside

Tron: Legacy is billed as a sequel to Tron. It doesn't do a bad job in that respect. But considering just how much attention is paid to the astonishing soundtrack that Daft Punk created for it, and how closely the action seems to be connected to that soundtrack...

...could it be that the movie is, in its own way, as much a sequel to Interstella 5555?

Screwing Consumers: It's the Telecom Way!

Once again, the old rule that I figured out ages ago remains true: if a conservative starts babbling about the Internet and "innovation", it's really justifying yet another way to screw consumers.

For years, proponents of so-called "net neutrality" have been calling for strong regulation of broadband "on-ramps" to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.

Nothing is broken that needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure.

Analysts and broadband companies of all sizes have told the FCC that new rules are likely to have the perverse effect of inhibiting capital investment, deterring innovation, raising operating costs, and ultimately increasing consumer prices. Others maintain that the new rules will kill jobs. By moving forward with Internet rules anyway, the FCC is not living up to its promise of being "data driven" in its pursuit of mandates—i.e., listening to the needs of the market.

This is all nonsense. Consumers DON'T have choice. The Internet CAN'T route around telecoms' dominance of the Last Mile. And in a situation of oligopoly or monopoly, "innovation" is only going to happen in ways that allow the monopolist to squeeze more cash out of their captive "customers". We're already seeing North American telecoms systematically underinvesting in capacity now, since there's more money to be made in promising "unlimited" internet and then using your deliberately-cripped networks as an excuse for extracting big data transfer fees. THAT is what will "increase consumer prices", not neutrality!

But, as is usually the case, the only thing this guy cares about is ensuring that the wealthy stockholders of these companies can drain that much more money out of already-beleaguered middle class. Sure, that's what the Republicans and the Wall Street Journal's opinion page is all about. But you'd think they'd be a bit more subtle about it.

(Oh, and if anybody tries to start their own network, they get crushed. Witness what's happened to most of the municipal WiFi initiatives. They work quite well, until the telecoms lean on state governments to get them shut down in the name of, yes, "competition" and "innovation". It's enough to make you puke.)

This sort of thing is exactly the reason why North American internet access is becoming a tragic joke, to the point where it hurts competitiveness and productivity. And it's only going to get worse, not better, since the FCC has pretty much punted on the issue with a loophole-ridden "law" that will probably get torn to shreds by the telecoms' lawyers and various pet mouthpieces. Certainly the Obama Administration has shown that they could give a rat's ass.

Hope you enjoyed the free Internet. Because, folks, unless something changes real soon, it's goin' bye-bye.

David Gergen, You Idiot

The Tax Bill and START weren't "bipartisan victories". The Republicans won a big victory in cramming huge upper-class tax cuts down America's throats, and they were almost certainly never terribly opposed to START to begin with. It was just about ensuring that the Dems didn't get a "win" over them.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell is History

Yep, I'm as surprised as you are. Kudos to the President and to the Congress for finally sacking up and getting rid of a ridiculous law. And, yes, kudos to ol' Joe Lieberman for pushing so hard on it. He still doesn't deserve nomination next year, but this is something that he will be able to honestly look back upon with pride.

And, hey, Susan Collin, Olympia Snowe, and a few other Republicans actually stood up for the rights of people who aren't white, male, conservative and rich for a change. That's almost shocking. 

Observations About Language Drift

Two things really strike me about this story about how words change over time.

First, the google books archive is really going to be a useful resource for broad-scale research.

Second, that anybody who seriously attempts to use the word "culturomics" deserves a smack upside the head. Good GOD, guys. Just because you're studying the use of words doesn't mean you're allowed to muck 'em up for the rest of us.

Kelly McParland is "Unejjicated"

There's a saying going around that "left" populism is about wealth, whereas "right" populism is about education. I don't know how I feel about that, but the spectacle of someone like Kelly McParland writing something like "Some smart insider type with a university degree in high finance is going to have to explain to us poor unejjicated peons how this is a good idea"  proves at least the latter bit. Wingnuts clearly get really, really shirty about education for some reason.

It's a bit bizarre, really. Almost anybody can get a post-secondary education, assuming that  they can afford it. Surely someone making as much money as McParland can. Takes four years at most to become "ejjicated". Yet almost nobody will EVER make enough money to benefit from, say, the estate tax cuts. A vanishingly small minority will get billions of dollars, while everybody else doesn't see a thin dime. But it's somehow school that's the problem here?

Of course, it could just be an act. Perhaps he's just trying to win over a particular anti-education, anti-intellectual audience. But that's the truly strange part. He writes for the NATIONAL POST. Why on earth would such a group of people be reading it in the first place?

(He could also simply be a tendentious twit, like that guy who linked to my earlier post on WikiLeaks. But I suspect that that goes without saying.)

A General Note About WikiLeaks

I honestly haven't seen an attack on the concept yet that didn't boil down to "all you proles should shut the hell up and go back to work". That's what all that "sometimes there needs to be secrecy" stuff generally boils down to.

Sure, diplomacy must have a secret component. Sources and methods should be protected, for example. But it's transparently (heh) obvious that there is far more secrecy than there needs to be. The reason is equally transparent: because in a democracy, the very last thing you want is for the voters to know what they're actually voting for. Keep the reality of the situation secret, lie to them with every breath, and hope that the lies are consistent and attractive enough that they'll go along with it.

See, if they knew what they were voting on, then they'd know what they can't vote on. All those bits of government that keep on rolling no matter who won the election? The ones that usually have something to do with blowing up random bits of the planet for "America's interests"? HELL no, you folks ain't going to be voting on that stuff. Democracy isn't supposed to go THAT far...Americans might disagree with what "America's interests" are, and then where would we be?

But just telling them "no, screw you, that stuff isn't up for debate" doesn't work. People can get annoyed when Their Betters make these sorts of decisions for them. So you keep them in the dark. Don't let them know that the decisions even exist, let alone how they've been made. That keeps them under wraps.

The sad thing is that the same people who defend this nonsense are the ones who rail against utterly open processes like the development of scientific consensus, or equally open government programs like food and drug safety. If you want to know how you're protected from horrible food poisoning, the information is out there. If you want to know why global warming is a threat, the information is out there. And if you want to know why those guys in the white suits came and removed the asbestos from your office, the information is out there too. And, hey, if you REALLY think it's bullshit? You can vote on it.

But not defense and foreign relations. Never that. Defense against food poisoning is one thing. Defense against, say, terrorism or instability is quite another. That's all supposed to be done FOR you, at great expense, while they snow you with a steady drumbeat of jingoistic nonsense and misplaced patriotism.

Certainly that's the press's reaction as well. THEY are allowed to know the truth. They are (or obey) Very Serious People. They ask The Right Questions, get The Right Answers, and tell all you idiots The Right Way To Think. And when The Right Way To Think turns out to be wrong, as is inevitably the case these days? Well, there are new Right Questions, new Right Answers, and new Right Ways To Think.

So you get assholes like Paul Carr, who say things like this:

I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name when, in fact, we elect people to act in our best interests on a global stage without necessarily giving us a heads up every time they want to have an off-the-record chat with a dictator.

 This is Right Thinking in spades. This guy is a tech columnist, one who clearly hasn't the faintest clue whether or not he's elected someone who will "act in our best interests". Certainly, if he either in Britain or America, the overwhelming tide of evidence suggests that they are NOT "acting in our best interests", never have, and arguably never will unless something seriously changes.  Like it or lump it, that's what WikiLeaks represents: a serious change.

How anybody, even someone this clueless, could even BEGIN to make this argument after the Iraq war is beyond me. I suppose he was too busy exulting in the the glory of having Steve Jobs dictate how he uses his computer, and thought that the same should apply to governance as well. Well, that, and trying to be some kind of Ellis-like cranky British scribe. Except without the talent. Or sense of humor.

Then again, maybe that's the issue, isn't it? The people who are crafting and repeating Right Thinking never live up to the responsibility. You're frankly doing a crap job. So why not let the rest of us decide?

Edit: Good bit on this was put up in, all of all places, The New Republic. Yeah, Peretz's rag. No, I don't get it either. But here's David Rieff, breaking it down in the midst of a weird Clay-Shirkyesque piece that somehow doesn't mention Clay Shirky:

In reality, there was only one group that was not privy to this information released by Wikileaks: the general public. And we can’t have them properly informed, now can we? Father (or, in the case of Secretary Clinton, “mother,” I suppose) knows best. I do not often agree with Noam Chomsky, but it seems to me that he was exactly right when he said that “one of the main reasons for state secrets is so that the state can defend itself from its citizens.” But, regardless of Washington’s motives, stopping Julian Assange (which, in any case, is not the same thing as stopping Wikileaks, as we are all starting to discover) will not be a victory over terrorism, as Senator Mitch McConnell has suggested so preposterously, for the simple reason that the one group we can be sure had the information in the cables before the Wikileaks are the terrorists.

In contrast, powerful people hate being shown up as much if not more than they hate failure, and people with insider information that gives them special status hate losing their intellectual monopoly, since they know that, if they do, loss of status will not be far behind. In this sense, the back-story of Wikileaks is not that American diplomacy is threatened or that Al Qaeda has been strengthened but that American diplomats have lost face, and American policy intellectuals have been confronted by an existential threat to their priestly monopoly on inside information. Oh, the pity of it!

That's something I've been banging on for a while. All these statements that "we elect our leaders to make these decisions for us!" miss the point that the people with the greatest say are not elected at all. The "priestly intellectuals" that set the ground and decide what the options are have never been elected by anybody but their colleagues and/or co-conspirators. They aren't even bureaucrats; at least bureaucrats are accountable to somebody. These jokers aren't really accountable to the people at all.

Which is probably why they keep showing up despite being wrong damned near 100% of the time.

"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of President Obama."

...and WHY is Dana Milbank proud of Obama?

Because he punched a hippie.

The extent to which the Republicans have taken ownership of the Washington press corps is almost comical. If it weren't one of the biggest reasons why America is in freefall, that is.

Time Magazine's Cowardly Choice

Time's readers make the obvious choice for person of the year: Julian Assange. Time, instead, selects the Facebook guy. Who would have been a notable choice for 2009, mind you, when Facebook really hit its stride, but is only notable this year for having been the subject of a movie that he despises and believes is inaccurate.

But look at the symbolism of this. Time is utterly conventional, and absolutely dependent on government leaks. (Just like every other news source these days.) Everybody with any sense knows that Assange should have got the nod. Like him or hate him, he was a HUGE newsmaker over the past year. But the Time editors know that the government would absolutely lose their shit if Assange got the nod. They don't want him to be painted as a villain, they just want him and his organization to go the hell away. They want him tossed down the memory hole as soon as possible.

So, instead, we get Zuckerberg and his scary privacy-demolishing machine. One that, according to persistant rumors, has ties to American intelligence organizations. I don't know whether that's true or not—though certainly the stories about the hard-right early funding sources for Facebook are creepy—but it's undoubtedly true that Facebook collects a LOT of information about you and the sorts of things you like, and I have no doubt that the U.S. government would find that a useful resource, if they have access to it.

Certainly, this bit in their user agreement is creepy as hell:

We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.

 But no matter what the truth of that is, the fact remains that Facebook is just about the opposite thing to a challenge to the established order. If anything, by being a single privacy-hating corporation that is trying to supplant the rest of the Internet and dictate what you can and cannot do on the Internet, it's big business and big government's wet dream.

So Time makes the safe, cowardly, government-friendly choice. The one that emphasizes taking secrets from the people, instead of sharing secrets with the people. Rather a bizarre position for journalists to take. Assuming that they're still really journalists in the first place. A hard assumption to make in 2010, and it's just getting harder.

Edit: Or, as a brilliant Twitter put it:

Mark Zuckerberg wants it utterly closed. Julian Assange wants it utterly open. #time chose Zuckerberg man of the year, its readers Assange.

Not That TNR Is Much Better Than Obama

I quoted Noam Schreiber in that last piece, but that doesn't change the fact that TNR is still a website that publishes people like Todd Gitlin who calls people on the internet "a wild street mob":

or indeed, where there is a state, there is diplomacy. Where there is diplomacy, some of it must take place out of the spotlight. The diplomats may well be better judges of which part that should be than the bureaucratic squads who stamp classifications on government documents. Surely, overall, the diplomats are better judges than the wild street mobs of the Internet.

This points to what's at the heart of the Wikileaks phenomenon: the complete inability of people like Gitlin to understand that elite opinion is the problem right now, not the solution. That's what the Tea Partiers are tapping into right now, though the Republicans and their think-tank allies are working hard to rechannel the sentiment in ridiculous, counterproductive directions.
Why the hell should Americans trust that diplomats are good judges of what should remain secret? Why the hell should ANYBODY? Sure, they're experts, but they're also an interested party, and the last two years are littered with stories about how interested experts got things wrong over, and over, and over again. Matt Taibbi has practically built his reputation on it, and the things he ferrets out are worse every day. What's the difference between a secret communique and, say, a rocket docket? Both are kept secret.  Both are the province of experts. And both raise one hell of a lot of questions about these experts' and elites' judgement and objectivity when brought to light.

The reason why Wikileaks is being castigated is the same reason why Taibbi got kicked out of one of those secret courts: because they expose just how jury-rigged and questionable these peoples' solutions are.

Obama Lashes Out At "Purists"

One day, Mr. President, you'll learn that it doesn't work. You'll understand that pissing off your own base by calling them names is bad politics. You'll figure out that the Republicans will still lacerate you and block your every move, the press will applaud you but promptly forget during the next news cycle, and the "independents" you chase will still vote you out because they care about jobs, not talking points. You'll understand that demoralizing those who believed in you is counterproductive at best.

You'll learn that bargaining does not mean compromising before negotiations have even begun, since you'll just end up losing even more when the real process begins.

But, sadly, it would appear that today is not going to be that day.

edit: Noam Shreiber brings us the fight from the inside.

Within the administration, the split over whether to mount a tax-cut offensive broke down largely along wonk-operative lines. The wonks spent the last year mystified that the White House was ducking the fight when the substantive merits were so one-sided. The operatives brooded that the politics could abruptly turn against them, despite polling showing little public appetite for the upper-income cuts. “They view it through the class warfare stuff—Kerry in 2004, Gore in 2000,” says one administration official. “They worry that they’ll get painted as lefties, tax-raisers.”

One day, those "operatives" (who failed spectacularly this past year, didn't they?) will learn that you're going to get painted as a lefty tax raiser no matter what you do. They'll learn (or remember?) that there's already a class war going on, and it's being waged by the ultra-rich and their Republican apologists against everybody else.
But, again, today is not that day. And as for their treatment of progressives, well...

Team Obama may also be insufficiently attentive to the left, which has erupted over the tax-cut deal. The Friday after the midterms, a senior administration official convened a meeting with representatives of several dozen prominent progressive organizations. When the meeting began at 9 a.m., the official announced the discussion would have to be quick as the White House needed the room by ten o’clock. “The White House is having a meeting with all its important allies, and the initial message is, ‘We couldn’t get a room for more than an hour,’ ” says one participant. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

This isn't policy. This isn't even compromise. This, Barry, is just an out-and-out DICK MOVE. And you should be goddamned ashamed.

The Hidden Story About Dixie Blue Dems

Politico's going through a whole song and dance about how Dixie Dems are extinct. Maybe it's true, maybe it isn't. I've heard that sort of thing before.

But I wanted to highlight a somewhat buried point here.

Most people in north Alabama cannot identify with Nancy Pelosi” is how incoming Alabama House Speaker and state GOP Chairman Mike Hubbard put it.

But it also has to do with the narrative Republicans have ceaselessly driven.

“Democrats are the party of entitlement and of more government intrusion,” said Hubbard, calling health care reform “socialistic.”

And while Southern Democrats once could’ve avoided being painted with that brush thanks to personal relationships and influential newspapers in their region, the explosion of new media has made it more difficult for them to differentiate themselves from the national brand. How people get news about politics, and much else, has fundamentally changed.

Melancon, a Blue Dog Democrat, recalled how people would approach him in the final weeks of his Senate campaign to ask why he voted for health care reform. He hadn’t.

“I’d ask folks, ‘Where did you hear that?’ and they’d say, ‘I don’t know,’” he recalled.

Often, they would cite a forwarded e-mail.

“I have to tell my own friends to not forward me that gobbledygook unless they’ve fact-checked it,” Melancon lamented. “If you’re going to forward it without taking the time to figure out if it’s true, then you’re as bad as the person who sent it.”

I'm sure you noticed the key point there: it doesn't matter how you voted. Melancon voted against the Health Care Reform bill, and guess what? People blamed him for it anyway. They were convinced that he voted for it, because his party voted for it. The "D" beside his name meant "health care" no matter what he did. His actual vote didn't make a lick of difference.

ConservaDems and supporters of ConservaDems should pay very, very close attention to that. Taking a stand against a bill that your state or district won't like won't make a bit of difference.  You're going to get blamed regardless. The only hope you have is that the bill in question gets out-and-out killed, and even then you might get punished for your party having proposed it in the first place. You can't win by opposing.

So what CAN you do? Something that may be almost bizarre: you can try to make the best legislation you know how. ObamaCare is so controversial not because people think it went too far, but because of the concessions made to to try and get votes from recalcitrant conservative Senators. Those concessions were what made it such a pretzel of industry handouts and half-hearted regulation; without them, it would have almost certainly been a cleaner, more focused, more effective piece of legislation. With a public option, no less. If everybody involved had been focused on the quality of the legislation, instead of optics of "conservative" v. "liberal", they would have produced a reform bill that would stand up all on its own. Sure, the Republicans and the conservative movement would have taken shots at it, but what would have mattered would be how it improved people's lives.

Yes, this isn't necessarily going to help House ConservaDems that much, since the problem is primarily in the Senate, not the House. Senators will have to learn this lesson as well. But at least said CDs will realize that they can't run against their party like they used to. Dems, like the Founders, need to  "hang together, or hang separately". Useful lesson, that.

Australia: "WikiLeaks Is Just As Bad As Child Porn" (Edit: Not So Much?)

Yep, Australia has just added Wikileaks to its list of banned websites. Anybody who links to WikiLeaks can now get fined up to 11 grand a day.

THAT will stop Australians from reading it, I'm sure.

Edit: Doesn't this do enormous harm to the list in general? Sure, you can justify a list that blocks kiddie porn and fining people who link to it. Not a great justification, but you can.

But WikiLeaks? What's next, banning people from linking to the Government of New Zealand the next time a trade dispute comes up? Banning people from linking to Chinese websites because China said something mean about the Australian Prime Minister? Banning links to adult porn sites because it encourages "deviant sexuality"?

So the government is entitled to omnipotent surveillance, and the people aren't allowed to read SFA. Well done. You might as well put up a big banner that says "Welcome to Australia: we just proved why Assange may have a point!"

Edit: And, just as fast, it would appear that it has been removed.  But this is more interesting: Apparently the Australian government is willing to go along with any American prosecution of Assange. Assange is an Australian national, so he may be more vulnerable here.

Then again, he may just as well renounce Australian citizenship. I'm not sure how that would affect things, but if he goes to Iceland—which has basically become a WikiLeaks haven—then he might well be secure.

Either way, I don't think this will stem the tide. If WikiLeaks falls, someone else will take up the slack.

Could Saying Nice Things About WikiLeaks Get You Arrested?

Hot on the heels of that last post, I find this: WikiLeaks should be designated a 'foreign terrorist organization,' Rep. Pete King fumes.

Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to designate WikiLeaks a "foreign terrorist organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," and to prosecute founder Julian Assange for espionage.

Again: Not an American.

But aside from that, this is deeply disturbing. As NPR points out, the laws against supporting supposed foreign terrorist organizations are incredibly extensive. It's not just material support: even talking to them could get you arrested and indicted, if not shipped off to one of the foreign covert prisons that we're not supposed to know about.

So is that how this is going to play out? Are Americans supposed to pretend that the site doesn't exist, for fear of getting arrested? Or are Americans only allowed to pretend it exists if they engage in the sort of kabuki dance of overt condemnation that you normally only see in salacious sixties films about the dangers of drugs and promiscuity? It won't keep any of this information out of American hands, since the Internet is global. The best that the Government could do is redirect DNS requests, as they've tried to do with BitTorrent sites. But that didn't work, and wouldn't work. It's not worth it.

As Susan Delacourt says, this is really just another revolt against "elites". America clearly no longer trusts the people that are supposed to be running it. Either they're spitting angry against a government that doesn't care that they're out of work, or simply distrustful of a state that seems to be governed BY Wall St. bond traders, FOR Wall St. bond traders.

In a country where Matt Taibbi seems to uncover fresh horrors on a daily basis, where security theatre has TSA goons laughing at your genitals when they aren't smacking them with the backs of their hands, and when Congress collectively decides that protecting mortgage fraudsters is more important than ensuring that people don't die of starvation during the Christmas season...why the hell should anybody care about whether some diplomats get some egg on their faces?

I don't know about you, but I'm drawing a blank.

"US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis"

Well, how could it not? Pretty much everything marked "noforn" is going to be utterly embarrassing for all involved. That's kind of the point.

The best part about the WikiLeaks controversy, so far, are all the right-wingers asking "why aren't they being prosecuted"? No matter how many times somebody says "you can't prosecute them, they aren't Americans", it never gets through. You can't even pass a law against it, either, or else every other nation in the world would be breaking U.S. law for engaging in their own espionage.  And the U.S. would be breaking theirs.

(The U.S. probably shouldn't bring that sort of thing up, anyway, considering they have been trying to collect passwords, encryption keys, and biometric data from U.N. diplomats. Whoops.)

Edit: I think the right-wingers know that prosecution is impossible. Their protestations aside, what they really want is for Obama to kill Julian Assange. Obama wouldn't do it because it's stupid, it would bring down universal condemnation, and wouldn't help stem the flow, since WikiLeaks is bigger than Assange.

But, hey, if the American right had realized that "beheading" attacks do not work in situations like this, they wouldn't have botched Afghanistan and Iraq so badly, would they?

Chalmers Johnson Passed Away Last Week

I had missed posting about this while I was working on redoing the site.

Dammit. He was one of the greats. His "blowback" series was incredibly insightful and blistering at the same time, and his work on Japan helped define how people thought of that country's economy and political structure. He was also, by all accounts, a genuinely decent human being.

He received a moving eulogy on TomDispatch that I'd encourage you to read, and another by Steve Clemens at the Washington Note, which also highlights his unbelievably important work fighting against the movement by "rational choice" political scientists to import all of neoliberal economics' various pathologies.

(Thanks to Avedon for the links.)

The WikiLeaks Cables Are Out

Haven't delved into the so-called "Cablegate" too much yet. Checked out the Israel stuff, since that's likely to be the most immediately explosive, but most of them seemed to primarily focus on how Israel is convinced that Iran is its greatest potential threat. (Which isn't exactly news.)

To be fair, they aren't all out. In fact, supposedly a relatively small number are out. It seems like WikiLeaks is serious about scrubbing information that's dangerous, instead of merely embarrassing. I have no doubt that there is still going to be dangerous information released,
 mind you, since there are supposedly over 250,000 cables in total. But since none exceed Secret classification, and since WikiLeaks is being more careful. I think that the potential threat that they pose may be limited. I certainly hope so.

I'm of two minds about this. These things are supposed to be secret for a reason. As an advocate of pseudonymity and anonymity in debate and communication, I can't deny that in good conscience. Privacy in comunication is vital, and too many people forget that in their rush to build their public social presence online.

But these aren't individuals, these are governments. Yes, diplomats need to be able to conduct their business privately. Governments do too. But many (if not all) of the governments in question here cannot and will not acknowledge that they should respect privacy too. The American government wiretaps the hell out of its own citizens; the Europeans and Canadians are worse, and the rest of the world is even worse than THAT. Governments, as a rule, have not recognized that there is a single line of personal privacy that they can't cross for even the most ridiculous, prosaic rules. They're tearing apart personal privacy to protect COPYRIGHTS, for God's sake—ripping up any protection that citizens may have expected just to allow private holders of government-granted monopolies to sue the bejeezus out of some dumb college kid.

In that sort of environment, in that sort of world, how can I unconditionally condemn WikiLeaks? Sure, they don't respect governments' interests. But the one thing that comes across in all of their leaks is that governments don't respect our interests either. They can get away with that principally because of the secrecy that these sorts of institutions enjoy. We don't realize what they do to us. But they work for us, so we damned well should.

If the only way to change things is through this sort of extreme response, then it may be as necessary as it is disquieting.

Edit:  Good piece by Colin Koopman about how this presages widescale information transparency. I don't know if I fully agree, since WikiLeaks itself is a product of a dizzying level of secrecy and privacy-consciousness. Assange is only the front man: the organization itself is mostly anonymous, and as far as I can tell, takes pseudonymity and anonymity VERY seriously. I've read comments pointing out that they don't even know each other's names.


Still, I agree that we've been moving to a world where,  Colin said, "transparency trumps secrecy". We were already becoming more and more transparent to our governments. Now they're discovering that they could be just as transparent to us. They were NOT expecting that it goes both ways, and that's why they're collectively losing their shit over this.

Taibbi on Friedman Last Year

I'd missed Matt Taibbi's piece in the New York Press taking down Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded last year. More the fool I. As an enormous fan of his legendary demolishing of Friedman's earlier The World is Flat, I should have expected that Taibbi would return.

And why wouldn't he? Apparently Friedman is an environmentalist now. Then again, according to Taibbi, he'd almost have to be. He has nothing left:

To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.

So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be? All the other ideas he spent the last ten years humping have been blown to hell. Color me unimpressed that he scrounged one more thing to sell out of the smoldering, discredited wreck that should be his career; that he had the good sense to quickly reinvent himself before angry Gods remembered to dash his brains out with a lightning bolt. But better late than never, I suppose. Or as Friedman might say, “Better two cell phones than a fish in your zipper."

Little surprise that he came up as #3 in Salon's list of the top fifty hacks in journalism. And, like a lot of the hacks in question, the biggest problem is that he retains his position despite being constantly wrong. You'd think that that would be a problem. But Friedman, like his fellow Salon "hacks" Richard Cohen, David Broder, and Mark Halperin, acts like a sort of reverse Cassandra: his predictions are inevitably wrong, but everybody in Washington believes him regardless.

But why wouldn't they? He's defending the status quo. He's advocating the popular. Friedman's only challenging insofar as you have to decipher what the hell he's on about. Nobody ever got broke aiding the rich and powerful, and in Friedman's case, it made him wealthy as hell.

Maybe his real skill is being able to look himself in the mirror every morning. In his position, I doubt I could.

Canadian Liberal Conflict

It'll be very interesting to see how the conflict within the Liberal Party of Canada over the extension of their commitment to Afghanistan is going to play out. Apparently there will be a vote, and it's anybody's guess as to whether or not Ignatieff can get his caucus to play ball. He's not the most popular man in the country. Or even among his party:

Just about two in three Canadians (64 per cent) believe the Liberals definitely or probably should change leaders. Naturally, that number includes a lot of people who weren't going to vote Liberal anyway, but the stunning finding under the surface of this poll is that fully 59 per cent of those who say they are inclined to vote Liberal think a new leader would be a good idea.

This represents a huge "enthusiasm gap" for the Liberal Party. Its the kind of factor that could depress their voter turnout, and turn marginal victories into marginal losses. To put these numbers in context, Stephen Harper is not one of the country's most loved political figures ever, but only 50 per cent think the Conservatives should replace him. And the vast majority of Conservative voters (74 per cent) are happy with him.

Bruce Anderson, the commentator I just quoted, thinks that it's not because of a "visceral dislike" but more due to "disinterest". He isn't alienating people, but he isn't really attracting them, either. Perhaps. But we all should remember that this is the man that the Liberals dumped Stephane Dion for, who was supposed to be their Kennedy or Trudeau. Nothing of the sort has taken place. He isn't even inspiring the loathing he once did when he was espousing the now-laughable value of "American Empire".

Progressive and liberal leaders aren't inspiring much support these days. Certainly neither Nick Clegg nor Barack Obama have been very attractive progressive party leaders lately. But they're in government, and are making the tradeoffs inherent to governance. Ignatieff doesn't even have that. He's that most unfortunate of creatures: a bland, uninspiring opposition leader. If he's to have any hope at all, he needs to break out of that. He needs to give people a reason to give a damn about him.

(And while I'm discussing Canada, I'll ask again: what did the Liberals do to the Eugene Forsey Liberal? Edit: He's back now. Still, the question remains.)