Psychopolitik 2.0

Just saw a commercial making fun of those stupid “Head-On” commercials…done by “Head-On”.

I’m still laughing.

At the intersection of imperialism & cronyism lies a familiar little place:

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade. (emphasis mine)

It’s as if he thought in between pretzels “y’know, this situation just ain’t dumb enough yet…”.

Brad Spangler did some thinking out loud the other day, & touched on some things I’ve wanted to clarify myself on for awhile.  Consider this a laying down of cards…

Apparently what first triggered Brad’s post was him having a beef with the Wiki entry on market anarchism, specifically the differentiation between mutualists & (what are currently called) anarcho-capitalists on the basis of the Labor Theory of Value.  Having read that, I have an issue with it too, though not Brad’s:

IMO, it is not a “theory”, it’s fact.

Yes, you read that right.  Not only do I believe that all value comes from labor, I personally don’t get what the big fuss is about saying so, it strikes me as shit-obvious.  I remember once in an arguement on a message board w/ a self-identified Marxist I conceded a point he’d made about it (he used this hypothetical about people stranded on an island, w/ one person hoarding coconuts so they could make the other survivors work for them to get any).  He seemed shocked for some reason or other.

I’d think that it would actually be very difficult to come up with another view of what value comes from that actually meant anything.  Sure, you could say that everything is worth nothing until we think it is, but that’s veering away from discussion of property and into psychology.  Ever since the first man to walk the earth we have had to do SOME form of work to survive, that is well known.  The reason that people get it confused now is because the definition of “labor” has been warped over time into something more complex than it actually is.  For example, imagine a vulture — yes, those birds that eat dead stuff.  Even that is “labor” if you think about it: they have to find it first…

That said, I personally don’t have a problem with profit, despite feeling so strongly about LTV being a fact, so in that way I completely contradict the Wiki article on what holding to LTV means.  More specifically, profit at its root — getting back from labor more than subsistence — is not incompatible with a market order in a just, post-state society.   It would look very different though, since in such a society it would be impossible to shift costs onto others by force.  Profit as a thought would have to detach itself from profit as its current action, essentially being reborn minus even the implication of corporate-state collusion — in English, that’s “worker-owned and/or local scale yes, Wal-Mart no”.  No surprise there, but the implications are deafening.  Hey, that’s what you get when a natural market order gets usurped and you take forever to rectify it, you can’t just chip off a single piece & declare the statue to be done.
The reason I view the world the way I do is moral: using force for personal enrichment, IMO, is unquestionably wrong.  Some that may point in the same general direction (though maybe not as far along) of opposition to statism have other reasons, and on those I pretty much agree with how Brad put it:

The state and its allies are understood [by Rothbardians] to be a criminal gang — an ongoing system of theft, oppression, slavery and murder. The thought of the Friedmanites, by contrast, is a mere intellectual discourse upon what would maximise total prosperity in a society. Utilitarianism is an academic exercise suitable for economics textbooks. Such studies are to be welcomed to the extent that they make justice (i.e. anarchy) more appealing to the amoral and boost our own confidence in the workability — but to substitute utilitarianism for natural rights theory within anarcho-capitalism is to quite literally sell out ethical principle for a mess of pottage.  (emphasis mine)

Couldn’t have put it any better.  As you may have noticed, with a couple of exceptions (SCOTUS Blog, which focuses entirely on US judicial issues, & Washington Monthly, which I just like to read for my own reasons even though I staunchly oppose their general views — kinda “know your enemy” in a way) my blogroll is inhabited by people who in some way or another generally point to the end result I’d seek.  Whether it’s disgruntled “conservatives” or “liberals” just now coming around to the moral bankruptcy of politics and confused by what they see, political activists spreading skepticism of the State at the least, or full-blown capital-A Anarchists, each could be said to be on a journey where the final stop is to seek the death of politics.  It’s only a matter of whether they keep going or not.  I may not agree with some of what is said right now, but I’m not going to run them off the road for it.

Action: The other day some whacko shot up a college in Montreal.

Reaction: Canadian parliament already discussing more “gun control“.  Meanwhile, US media insinuates that anyone who is a firearms enthusiast, a “goth”, or has an adversarial attitude to authority figures should be suspected of plotting murder.

Oh well, at least they won’t be able to blame this one on rap music — dude said on his own website he doesn’t like it.

Unsurprisingly, I like looking at stuff on YouTube. Also unsurprisingly, that does NOT include stuff like this:

The wildly popular video-sharing Web site YouTube.com has dozens of videos purporting to show individual American soldiers being killed in Iraq, in what amounts to snuff films, overlaid with music and insurgent slogans.

Some of the videos, including ones of American soldiers purportedly being picked off by snipers or being blown up by improvised explosive devices, have been viewed tens of thousands of times each in the past few months. Some are posted in YouTube’s “news and blogs” category, but others are listed under “entertainment” and even “comedy.”

Their presence on YouTube shows that insurgent propaganda — including genuine footage — already available on more obscure Web sites has seeped in the mainstream of American popular culture, said Eben Kaplan, assistant editor of CFR.org, the Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank headquartered in New York.

Sick, yes. No shock though. Propaganda is worthless unless it reaches the masses, and the US media rigorously sanitizes all war coverage. So, knowing that many people use 3rd parties for entertainment purposes, they stick those videos onto one and falsely categorize it, & unsuspecting people end up watching out of curiousity. It’s the Train Wreck theory of spectatorship, except deliberate.
That said, look what we do:

The site also holds numerous equally violent videos that claim to show U.S. soldiers killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The statement doesn’t say whether they mean they’re pro-US-military videos of insurgents or foreign fighters being killed or video of civilians being murdered, but I’ve seen some of the former. Personally, in that case I don’t see the real moral difference. Before anyone starts with angry letters, I am NOT — NOT!!! — saying that it is somehow good or morally equivalent in and of itself for US soldiers to be killed! I am saying only that, whether intentionally or not, our videos serve the same purpose as theirs, as internal support & outward intimidation. You can believe that without becoming Fred Phelps, people…

This is all beside the point though. People that cheer while people are being killed, regardless of reason, are fucking sick. As for the videos being on YouTube, blame the mainstream media. Perhaps if it were more common to see the horrors of war then people would take it more seriously, eh?

Shorter Bush: “War on Terror?  Culture War? Same thing…”

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a “Third Awakening” of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation’s struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as “a confrontation between good and evil.”

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. […]

“There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50s and the ’60s — boom — and I think there’s change happening here,” he added. “It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.”

The First Great Awakening refers to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760, while the Second Great Awakening is generally believed to have occurred from 1800 to 1830. (emphasis mine)

Some people understandably take solace in religion (among other things) in difficult times, and he takes it as some sort of repudiation of the last 50 years.   Wonderful…

This would be one of those cases where who you say something to matters as much as — if not more than — what you actually say.  Telling a bunch of right-wingers that you see a “third awakening” serves as a promise of favors to come, whereas saying it at, say, an official press conference just scares people.  They call it “message discipline”, no?

In his comments yesterday, aides said Bush was not casting the war as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war.

“He’s drawing a parallel in terms of a resurgence, in dangerous times, of people going back to their religion,” said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was not open to other journalists. “This is not ‘God is on our side’ or anything like that.”

Ah, the other part of message discipline.  Saying something ridiculous & then have your aides spin the hell out of it.  If he were simply making a comparison, then there’d be no point to him saying it, it’d be a “no shit” statement.  Therefore, not only is “god is on our side” the true meaning, but also “btw: by ‘our side’, I mean christianity, not the US as a whole”.

Don’t see it?  Then next press conference ask him: “do you think god is on our side?”.  He won’t be able to answer, because “yes” would confirm his nuttery to others & “no” would piss off his base.

As in “five years is a long time for someone to get away with mass murder”.

Unfortunately, as Brad reminds us, “our” government has robbed us of full grounds to bark:

There is a point which is still, five years later, lacking its deserved prominence in our public discourse.

That point is this…

Imperialistic U.S. foreign policy made something like 9/11 inevitable. While most people are cowed by aggression, some won’t be. Pigeons will come home to roost. The Power Elite didn’t have to carry out 9/11 in order to benefit from it. They undoubtedly, in general terms, saw it coming. Their critics certainly did. The attacks were, while thoroughly evil, a natural reaction to the bloodthirsty policies we have been letting the politicians in this country get away with. (emphasis mine)

I remember from my childhood my mother telling me when someone hit me to hit them back.  That’s a fairly common view, and it stuck with me.  It’s a small thing, but it serves as a bit of interesting background when the portrayal of this as a clash of civilizations (rather than blowback from imperialism, amplified by religion) gets blasted all over the media.

Curious how the rubes at home view the upcoming congressional elections, CNN did a poll over it.  The main conclusion, mentioned in the headline, was a yawner — most respondents thought a Democratic congress would encourage gridlock.

Huh, I wasted time on that?  Gimmie that 10 seconds of my life back, you bastards!

Keep reading though, it gets…interesting:

Fifty-seven percent of the respondents said they think it would be good for the country “if the Democrats in Congress were able to conduct official investigations into what the Bush administration has done in the past six years.” Forty-one percent said such probes would be bad for the country. Half of the sample was asked this question, also.

Grain of salt an’ all, but 57% is not only a majority, but high enough to reasonably assume that this reaches across the aisle.  So if representative, accusations that anyone who wants investigations is a bitter partisan hack are already null & void.  Onward…

At the same time, 69 percent said Bush should not be impeached or removed from office, with 30 percent saying he should be impeached or removed from office. (emphasis mine)

This isn’t a majority, but c’mon, they didn’t even include censure in the poll.  Also, some people may have impeachment fatigue from having gone through that with the last president, not to mention that the question was phrased differently in the poll itself than it is in the article about the results.  The question said “impeached AND removed”, the article changed the “and” to an “or” for some reason, it is entirely feasible that some people think he should be impeached but not removed.
The anger isn’t at my own level — sadly, most folks approach questions of civil liberties like they’re written in sanskrit — but it’s there, an’ the fallout oughta be fun.  Way I see it, since the political process is pointless for anything meaningful, might as well just use it for entertainment purposes.

Ah, another entry in the “examples of why Bush needs to fire his speechwriter” department…

All emphasis mine:

US President George W. Bush branded Iran’s president a tyrant and compared leaders in Tehran to Al-Qaeda terrorists who cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. “America will not bow down to tyrants,” he said in the second of a series of election-year speeches defending his handling of the war on terrorism and Iraq.

No, we won’t bow down to tyrants. But we will give them money…

“The world’s free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Yeah, only free nations can have nukes! Free nations like Pakistan and China! Oh, wait a minute…

“Like Al-Qaeda and the Sunni extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims. They want to drive America out of the region, to destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle East,” said the US president.

Considering we overthrew their neighboring enemy, that’s no surprise. Hell, I’d think some people in the Iranian government were having a hearty laugh the day that the invasion started. Once we finally leave Iraq, you might as well erase the line between them on the map.

But, he said, Shiite extremists have done something Al-Qaeda only dreams of by taking over Iran in 1979, “subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny and using that nation’s resources to fund the spread of terror and to pursue their radical agenda.”

Yup, I was right. He forgot Afghanistan…

I’ve a suggestion: when we have relations with, and give aid to, the leaders of nations that aren’t free, the rhetoric used to defend our foreign policy should not be “up with freedom”. You just end up looking like a lying imbecile.

I’ll admit it: before reading this article I didn’t know there was an indian reservation (their term, not mine, don’t shoot me) in southern california.  Figured there wasn’t enough space.  Eh, anyway, here’s what’s going on there:

Once steeped in poverty, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians has become one of the nation’s wealthiest tribes thanks to casino gambling.

Now the Southern California tribe is using its riches to fund a potentially precedent-setting legal fight contending that tribes are exempt from federal labor laws because they are sovereign governments.

A ruling against San Manuel could open the door for unions to organize an estimated 250,000 workers — dealers, servers, cooks — at the nation’s 400-plus tribal casinos. Except for a handful in California, tribal casinos are generally not unionized; unions say it’s difficult to make inroads without the protection of federal organizing rules.

Note the assumption here, that for workers to organize they MUST have the federal government behind them.  This type of creeping dependance on politics is what has largely crippled organized labor, turning many away from it and transforming the leftover shell into little more than a cog in the status quo. Despite that, they want to foist it on these people, who it’s safe to say have been through enough already.

Backed by many of the country’s leading tribal organizations, San Manuel is fighting a 2004 opinion by the National Labor Relations Board that asserted the board’s jurisdiction over tribal businesses.

Under the decision, tribes would be covered for the first time by the National Labor Relations Act that bars unfair labor practices and gives workers the rights to organize and bargain with employers. (emphasis mine)

“Gives” rights?  Gee, I must be stoned out of my mind, because I could’ve sworn more rights were taken away by the Taft-Hartley Act than were “give[n]” by NLRA.

Union activity has basically become a joke, a buereacratic mess.  Why?  Because through politics it was forced to organize in an alien and inefficient manner.  Rights CANNOT be “given”, they exist by virtue of humanity itself, by buying into this idea that we merely do what we’re allowed to we end up in a position akin to a slave asking his master “please may I take a break?”.

The laborers of these reservations should learn from our mistakes, and say to those who want to file their interests into neat little boxes to be marginalized “no, we can do better without you”.  You want to unionize?  Then just gather together and declare yourselves a freakin union.  If the casino owners don’t like it, tough, there are more of you than there are of them.