Psychopolitik 2.0

Yet another Bin Laden tape:

Osama bin Laden issued ominous new threats in an audiotape broadcast Sunday, purportedly saying the West was at war with Islam and calling on his followers to go to Sudan to fight a proposed U.N. force.

In his first new message in three months, bin Laden said the West

 

Tom Knapp’s post on the LP’s 2008 prez candidates to George Phillies’ campaign page. While I’ve personally been soured on voting at all, I just couldn’t let this slide by unnoted. A few things stuck out about his website that strike me as….counterproductive:

1) The last lines on the opening page about immigration — “Americans who quote the Statue of Liberty’s message ‘Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ should remember that it was written when France, Germany and Russia were autocratic monarchies. The huddled masses of Europe now breathe free” — could be worded better. I personally got his overall point right away, but some people might misinterpret that last part as a racial comment.

2) the color scheme is a bit….odd. Yell at me all you want for saying this, but the pink & the rainbow banner are sending signals that make the words said seem less serious. It’s “striking” but not in a good way.

3) someone in Knapp’s comments mentioned it & I agree with it: that picture on the front page ain’t cuttin it. Looks like a DMV photo.

4) the wording of the “Important issues” partial on the main page & those same bullet points on the actual “Important Issues” page is identical. You want to drive your point home even further on the inner pages, the introduction was already done on the front.

Yeah, they’re superficial. If I were in the voting mood I wouldn’t be using any of this as reason not to support him, it’s irrelevant to his actual positions. Problem is, there are people out there for who image actually matters.

Hey, how else do you explain who ends up winning our goofy-ass elections?

tags: Libertarian+Party, 2008+U.S.+election, George+Phillies]]>

everyone considers this a dumb move:

An Iraqi actor who plays a hijacker in a new film about the September 11 attacks on the United States has been denied entry into the country for the movie’s premiere, he told a newspaper on Friday.

Lewis Alsamari, who has lived in Britain since 1995, stars in “United 93″, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York next week. […] Alsamari, 30, said he may have been denied entry by the U.S. embassy in London because he served in the Iraqi army in the early 1990s. “I think this was because I am still an Iraqi citizen and fought in the army — but that was only because I was forced to,” he told London’s Evening Standard newspaper.

Seriously, am I reading The Onion? Wouldn’t it be kind of, um, difficult for someone to commit terrorist acts after they’ve played a f**king terrorist in a movie?!?!?. Everyone would know who he was, any suspicious moves would be amplified, what reason do they have to deny this guy entry?

Oh yeah, I forgot: he’s an arab, & for us arabs are equivalent to the Boogeyman, that’s why…

tags: 9/11]]>

California must’ve misinterpreted that:

Public Government schools can prohibit students from displaying messages that attack gays or other persecuted minorities, a divided federal appeals court ruled Thursday in the case of a Southern California youth whose T-shirt proclaimed that “homosexuality is shameful.”

In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a high school sophomore in San Diego County was unlikely to be able to show at trial that his rights were violated when school officials ordered him to remove the shirt in April 2004, the day after an event at the school promoting gay-straight tolerance.

“Public Government school students who may be injured by verbal assaults on the basis of a core identifying characteristic such as race, religion or sexual orientation have a right to be free from such attacks while on school campuses,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the majority opinion.

First of all, the student in question is clearly a moron. His religion saying that homosexuality is “shameful” is irrelevant, since not everyone follows the same religion, or even if they do they don’t follow his specific interpretation of it. The statement itself is ridiculous, as is his assumption that a government school — let alone one in Southern California — would allow it.

That said, I actually agree with the dissenting judge on this:

Judge Alex Kozinski dissented, saying the majority was relying on pop psychology to create a new right for certain groups of students to be protected from offensive speech.

“I have considerable difficult with giving school authorities the power to decide that only one side of a controversial topic may be discussed in the school environment because the opposing point of view is too extreme or demeaning,” Kozinski said.

As any freedom-loving person knows, the best weapon against bone-headed and hateful speech is even more speech. It was gay-straight tolerance day, here’s someone who disagrees, why not start up an arguement? It’d expose the circular reasoning of the student in question & actually strengthen the point that was being made by the event. Instead, they add fuel to the whole “christian persecution” garbage & set a double standard.

I strongly doubt that some jackass with a religious T-shirt is really so painful for gay students to endure. Hell, I’ve known gay dudes that could seriously stomp the shit outta somebody if confronted, if this guy crossed the line he’d find out pretty quick.

On a more personal note: I remember when I was in high school there were students like this, kids apparently put in government schools as “youth missionaries” in hopes of finding converts. They tended to be the most annoying people in the entire school, even some of the teachers would engage in counter-hassling of the God Squad. One day I needled one of ‘em so bad he actually broke out of Charlie Church mode & cussed me out. To this day I still consider that an accomplishment…

tags: California, US+Court, Court+of+appeals, Alex+Kozinski, homosexuality, Gay-Straight+Alliance]]>

this:

Chinese news reports made no mention Friday of the protester who interrupted President Hu Jintao’s visit with President Bush or a White House announcer flubbing China’s official name. But ordinary Chinese commenting on Web sites accused President Bush of insulting Hu.

“You can see from Bush’s lack of respect for foreign leaders just how lacking he is in class,” said a posting on a bulletin board run by the People’s Daily, the main Communist Party newspaper.

How convenient. The ones that find access to forbidden material just end up getting their pseudo-patriot on, rather than ask why the protestor was such a big deal. If this reflects on the general population there, those filters the chinese government spent so much money on amount to a security blanket.

Wait, it gets worse…

On washeng.net, a Chinese-language Web site hosted overseas, postings accused the White House of intentionally allowing in the protester.

“This was absolutely planned and directed by America. Given America’s anxiety over the war on terror, that person should have been shot otherwise,” said an unsigned comment.

Wow! Invoking the “War on Terror” in calling for action that ignores human rights? That wouldn’t look out of place at all in a Ann Coulter column…

tags: China, Hu+Jintao, Bush]]>

record oil prices“…

Prices at the pump have already pierced the $3 a gallon mark in several major cities. And with oil prices setting another record at $71 a barrel, the $3 gallon price tag is likely to spread. (emphasis mine)

Hmm. 71 dollars a barrel. Sounds pretty high, doesn’t it?

*glances at chart of Inflation-adjusted oil prices over the past 60 years*

Waitaminute….how can $71 be a “record” if the inflation-adjusted peak was $97.50? That’s right, it can’t.

Oversights like this would explain why so many of us are ignorant about these kind of things. When the media screams that current prices are the highest they’ve ever been, the average person takes their word for it, figuring that they wouldn’t screw up such an easy story. It’d be bad enough by itself, but the way things are now the price of oil influences how people think about everything else.

tags: Oil, inflation, economics, US+media, US+politics]]>

a “progressive” case against government transparency & individual privacy. They wasted the web space for garbage like this:

“The 4th Amendment pretty much just benefits the rich”

The poor tend to live in apartments rather than detached houses, spend more of their lives in public spaces than in private ones (because their homes and workplaces tend to be small and unpleasant), and travel more by bus or subway than by car. By contrast, the lives of the wealthy are lived in spacious houses, offices, and cars. Like a tax code that charges the highest rates to those who make the least money, Fourth Amendment law protects houses more than apartments, private spaces more than public ones, and passengers in cars more than those who ride buses and subways.

“If it weren’t for that pesky Constitution, then drug law enforcement would be fair”

For violent felonies and thefts, the decision [of where to place officers] is easy: Go where the crimes are. Drug crimes are different–there are no immediate victims, no 911 calls. The police must decide where to look for them. And, since drugs are omnipresent, where the police look determines whom they catch. […] Inner-city drug policing is often violent and nearly always humiliating to the targets of police attention, the vast majority of whom are innocent. (The nypd arrests only one of every nine suspects its officers stop and frisk.) But the harms are not chiefly to privacy. So they don’t count. We seem to have created the perfect system for policing the police–if the system’s goals are to maximize protection for rich white kids from the suburbs and maximize police authority over poor black kids from central cities.

“people who oppose easy domestic surveillance are just encouraging much worse. Oh, and blahblahterrorismblah”

…remember that different forms of evidence-gathering are substitutes for one another. Anything that raises the cost of one lowers the cost of all others. The harder it is to tap our phones, the more government officials will seek out alternative means of getting information: greater use of informants and spies, or perhaps more Jose Padilla-style military detentions with long-term interrogation about which no court ever hears, or possibly some CIA “black ops,” with suspected terrorists grabbed from their homes and handed over to the intelligence services of countries with fewer qualms about abusive questioning. In an age of terrorism, privacy rules are not simply unaffordable. They are perverse. (emphasis mine)

“policy would be sooo much better if the public knew squat”

Transparency makes politics a running argument about decision-making, not about decisions. A few years back, Washington spent more time discussing which lobbyists were in the room when Dick Cheney crafted energy policy than actually debating energy policy.

Notice a common thread here? Each situation where Stuntz blames political failure on “over-skepticism” of government the scenario itself proves the skepticism justified.

-You do not stop being an individual every time you leave your home. If 4th Amendment law has become that narrow then rather than yelling about the amendment — which is rather clear — it’s time to start questioning the interpretation that led to this.

-He admits himself that with drugs there is no victim involved — then what’s the point of the laws against them? That we have cops flying off the handle over what can best be described as a personal choice is the central issue, that they do this most often in the ghetto & not the suburbs is a mere symptom, they shouldn’t be doing it at all.

-He wants it to be easier for our phones to be tapped. Well geez, we’ve only had that warrantless domestic surveillance program for the past few years, who have we caught with that? Oh, that’s right, nobody. As long as we’re making comparisons between tactics, how about this one: the wider you stretch the definition of reasonable suspicion, the less likely you are to actually find who you’re looking for. By his logic, the best pool of suspects would be the entire population.

-That he blames the energy policy mess on a lack of secrecy is amazing in its audacity. It’s not like this is new behavior, as if politicians one day took note of the change in environment & said “just for that, we’re going to cut side deals with our friends!”. The only real difference is that nowadays we hear about these things while they’re happening or shortly after, instead of when the culprits are long dead & in the history books. Some conservatives — and Stuntz would probably agree — would argue that these arrangements should be accepted because these people are “experts” in their field, but that blows apart the whole point. Citing an example of politicians knowing zilch yet being involved anyway practically indicts itself.

This is way more than such tripe deserves, so I’ll stop now.

tags: US+politics, US+Constitution, domestic+surveillance, energy+policy, corruption, government+secrecy, privacy, William+Stuntz, The+New+Republic]]>

On that note, the following exchange from a tax Q&A on MSNBC says a lot:

Each year, we send in W-2’s and 1099’s along with our 1040’s. I know the information on the 1099’s is already reported, and I believe the same is true of the W-2’s by the companies that issued them to us. Why doesn’t the IRS just enter what they already have in a mainframe and send us out a bill or refund like any business would?
– Matt R., Jefferson City, Mo.

In short, because the tax laws are made by the U.S. Congress, which doesn

 

death penalty trial:

Asked why he hates America, Moussaoui paused, then said his answer would be long. He went on to describe his resentment of U.S. support for Israel. “For me, the Jewish state of Palestine is a missing star on the flag of America,” he said. “You are the head of the snake for me. If I want to destroy the Jewish state of Palestine, I have to destroy you.”

[sarcasm]Yeah, sure dude. You just hate our freedoms. You’ve been driven mad by the thought of people in the US enjoying porn, liquor & BBQ pork, that’s it, it’s nothing our politicians did.[/sarcasm]

tags: 9/11, US+court, Zacarias+Moussaoui, US+foreign+policy, Israel]]>

When we said to dissolve the State, this isn’t what we meant“:

I don’t normally object to the dissolution of nation-states. They are bloodthirsty and oppressive, and government, to the extent it must exist at all, is better when it is small and decentralized. But the bigger picture here includes NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, the United Nations. The trend may be the eventual disappearance of nation-state power, but only because it is transferred upward to global elites, not downward to the people. (emphasis mine)

Do read the whole thing, wouldja? What he describes is a prime example of why it matters how you take down state power. Encouraging people to accept 2nd class status defeats the purpose of all else we work towards.

Essentially, erasing the border is, for the purpose of the anti-State movement, the political equivalent of the last one out of a room turning off the lights.

tags: immigration, illegal+immigration, NAFTA, globalization, libertarianism]]>