Inconceivable …

This exchange caught my eye, from 4&20 Blackbirds. It’s in the comments after a post by Lizard regarding a Montana candidate for Denny Rehberg’s House seat, Franke Wilmer. Wilmer had claimed, as is so easy to do without evidence, that the number one threat to our national security are terrorist attacks.

Turner: I’m not sure what your quibble with Wilmer is. Is there a greater threat to national security (if we understand this to mean an action leading to the deaths of large numbers of Americans) is terrorist attacks?

What would that threat be? What is Franke missing?

lizard19 terrorism is a tactic, that’s my first quibble. it’s used both by foreigners and by US citizens, so it’s a threat that shouldn’t be relegated solely to the area of foreign policy, where terrorism is used to justify projecting US imperial ambitions. in terms of actual deaths caused, not having access to affordable health care is a bigger threat than terrorist attacks.

and I thought I was pretty clear in voicing my concern over Franke’s endorsement of Obama’s military doctrine. obviously my opinions are perceived as pretty radical to some when it comes to criticizing Obama and the whole left’s obsession with humanitarian interventions, but if terrorism is such a concern, then actions taken by this administration to actually STRENGTHEN the boogemen [sic] in al-Qaeda should be examined just a bit more closely, don’t ya think?
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Corporations are indeed people – psychopaths

In their fine documentary “The Corporation, Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan have taken modern law at its word and ask, “If the corporation were a person, what sort of person would it be?” …The American Psychiatric Association classifies psychopaths and sociopaths under the general diagnosis of “antisocial personality disorder,” and to be diagnosed with the disorder, the patient needs to meet three of out these seven criteria:


  1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
  2. Deceitfulness, as initiated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
  3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
  4. Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
  5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
  6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
  7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

The filmmakers find that corporations do indeed behave in these ways, breaking the laws if they can, dissembling and hiding their behavior, sacrificing long-term welfare for short-term profit, being aggressively litigious, flouting health and safety codes, welching on payments to suppliers and workers and never once feeling a pang of remorse. (Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing, Page 41)

Raj Patel
I might add that the qualities above are pathological – that is – no matter who is at the helm of a corporation, that person cannot change these behaviors and so is not even aware that these behaviors even exist. For instance, oil, gas and pipeline companies that contribute to global warming have run a propaganda campaign, a highly successful one, to convince Americans that it is not a problem. The CEO’s of these corporations surely know better, and yet cannot change their behavior because they know that if they acknowledge the problem, the group that sponsors the position that the CEO’s occupy will expel them.

It is group pathology, and so cannot remedy itself. For that reason, corporations need to be heavily regulated and subordinated in law to the status of servant of the public, and not a legal person.

The nature of stupidity

From John Cleese

I think the problem with people like this [he was asked about Christine O’Donnell, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck] is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. You see, if you’re very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are. There’s a wonderful bit of research by a guy named Dunning at Cornell, (who’s a friend of mine, I’m proud to say), who has pointed out that in order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means, and this is terribly funny, that if you are absolutely no good at something at all, that you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it. And this explains not just Hollywood, but almost the entirety of Fox News.

I might add that the people he refers to are baseline stupid, barely sentient, but that there are higher degrees in this knightly order that are cloaked in better jargon.

There is no “I” in “Group Psychology”

I wish to point out something painfully apparent, something swirling all about us but to which all seem oblivious. It is this: Campaign rhetoric does not translate into public policy. During election cycles politicians hire public relations and advertising firms, and these are the ones who craft the talking points. They poll, research attitudes, use focus groups and psychology. But none of this is done with any notion that the result might be a new law or citizen initiative. As soon as the election is over, it all vaporizes.

Advertising, to be cost-effective, cannot dwell on individual traits. Rather, it must focus on groups. Let’s go back to Edward Bernays and his book on advertising, “Propaganda” (about advertising, and not what we now call propaganda, an offshoot. The word “propaganda in his time was not tainted as it is now.):

The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible manipulation of motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter* and Le Bon**, who approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas***, Walter Lippmann****, and others who continued with searching study of the group mind, established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we understood the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?[Footnotes are mine.]

It’s the group, baby. Just the group. That’s all that matters – move groups into voting blocs.
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The meaning(lessness) of our elections

An exchange with Polish Wolf over at Intelligent Discontent brought to mind a truth that is not so much inconvenient as unpleasant. I keep it submerged and don’t often let it surface. 

It is widely shared wisdom that everyone should vote, no matter intelligence or education. We should all have a voice. That sounds really good. We should all genuflect now. 

The  universal franchise created a new environment,  new problems for leaders last century. The biggest one was most people are clueless about international and national affairs, so that consulting them should only be done for show. There are two spins to put on this:

Bertrand Russell agreed that the average citizen was indeed clueless, but that the process was useful anyway. It routinely forces changes in leadership, a good in itself even if that is an unintended outcome for voters. It reins in aristocracy.

In the US  his reasoning does not apply, as our elections are privately financed, and this has led to two, and only two parties. The two parties and their financiers are our aristocracy. Democracy is a sham here. 

In the twentieth century American intellectuals addressed the problem of the universal franchise coupled with the ignorant voter. Their conclusion was that people had to be allowed to believe that they were in  charge, and so be given their sham elections and never let in on the secret. 

That’s pretty much how we do it now, and if we had enlightened leadership it would be a workable system. But we do not have that, so that the true effect of manufactured consent is an elite and detached leadership class fronting for silent power, or what we now call the “1%” (but which is in truth more like the “1/10th of 1%”). There is no effective way to hold them accountable, as our elections have no substance and do not affect policy. 

So contrary and illogical as it seems, our democracy was killed by too much democracy.

My solution? Rewrite or throw out the constitution. It’s dysfunctional anyway. Eliminate private money from politics, and minimize high elective offices, instead having very small districts elect representatives in gymnasiums, each required to make the case for election by means of deliberation. The resulting body, a parliament of sorts, would by ballot appoint the top tier of leaders and hold them accountable, removing them from office when they misbehave. Sound familiar?

The advantage of this system is that disinterested people would not show up, nor would they be encouraged to do so. People would not be encouraged to vote for the sake of voting, nor would they be influenced by stupid TV ads and other manipulations used to win elections. However, if conflicts arise that spring into action various constituencies, they have a means to power.

There is no system that satisfies ideal democracy, but my goodness, the one we have here is a not even a good joke. It is a hoax. My suggestion does not eliminate the problem of parties, but without money, influence, there would be more than just two.

Thank you very much, Andy

We watched Man on the Moon again last night, and I remembered what a talented man Andy Kaufman was. What a tragedy that he died so young – he neither smoked nor drank, did not use any kind of substance, and died of lung cancer at the age of 35 in 1984.

Sorry if they run an annoying pre-roll ad. Whatever it is they are advertising, do not buy it.

Slaughter and brutality hidden in Libya; Media lying and distortion in Syria; Attack on Iran set to go – business as usual for the progressives of the Obama adminstration

In the map above, the blue area in the middle is not sea or ocean, but rather Iran. It is surrounded by hostile forces, Each star representing a US military base (I count 41), and this does not take into account the US Fifth Fleet, comprised of 25,000 personnel and twenty vessels. There are also reports that a US nuclear submarine and destroyer are on their way to the Gulf. Iran gets testy, now and then, as we all know they are warlike and irrational, right? One might say that Iran presents a serious threat to all of those hostile bases, troops, weapons and naval forces aligned against it.

From Alex Cockburn (Olivia Wilde’s uncle) at Counterpunch (“Or your lying eyes”):

Meanwhile, on another front, the networks are ready. A CounterPunch informant reports:

“I was visiting ABCNews the other day to see a friend who works on graphics. When I went to his room, he showed me all the graphics he was making in anticipation of the Israeli attack on Iran; not just maps, but flight patterns, trajectories, and 3-d models of U.S. aircraft carrier fleets.

Huh?
“But what was most disturbing – was that ABC, and presumably other networks, have been rehearsing these scenarios for over 2 weeks, with newscasters and retired generals in front of maps talking about missiles and delivery systems, and at their newsdesks – the screens are emblazoned with “This is a Drill” to assure they don’t go out on air – (like War of the Worlds).

“Then reports of counter-attacks by Hezballah in Lebanon with rockets on Israeli cities – it was mind-numbing. Very disturbing – when pre-visualization becomes real.”

Another CounterPuncher emails us:

“Just a quick possible scoop for the news room – I have a neighbor who bounces for a Seattle bar, and he had some very rowdy US service men in the bar the other night. When he asked them what was up, they told him they were being deployed to the mid-east as a front-running group for an operation in Iran.”

The whole piece is disturbing, as Cockburn describes the utter chaos and brutality going on in Libya; the efforts to arm and undermine the regime in Syria (please, if anyone counters by saying the the Syrians are oppressive and that the US cares about that, the door is right to your right); and the virtual certainty that the US has given Israel the green light to attack Iran.

I have to say that I am feeling fear right now for the millions of people the US is about to kill in cold blood, and revulsion in the delight that so many Americans will take in it. This will include Democrats, as it is Obama who will be overseeing this slaughter.

We don’t think, therefore we are

The advertising industry learned decades ago that there is no money to be made by appealing to our outer selves. All advertising is subliminal. The surface message, the croaking frog, merely conceals the underlying appeal to some primal motive.

It is no different with the political parties. We only have two, and they are not ideological camps. They are merely brands. I clipped this yesterday from Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the state of mind of liberals in supporting Obama as he has morphed before our eyes into the new Bush. GG cites Tom Paine from The Age of Reason:

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

We are not honest in ourselves. We profess to believe things we do not believe, and do not examine our own motives. Consequently, as I stand off with (mostly) Democrats who profess to know that their party is ideologically superior to the other, I marvel at the impenetrable shield they have built. It’s a fortress against reason, a means of validation, and a tribute to the innate irrationality of our species.

But there are 7 billion of us, so it works. If we really thought for ourselves, as we all profess to do, we’d probably not be here to do that thinking.

Missoula adopts Cuban surveillance techniques

There is no Drug War – I don’t know why people cannot see that. In foreign policy, the War merely another name for counterinsurgency, as used in Colombia. That’s known as “murder” for the people of Colombia, as this country uses the Drug War as a cover for operations designed to murder rebels down there. Since all of that started before 9/11, it’s still considered part of the Drug War. Had it started after that date, it would be called part of the “War on Terror,” equally phony. (The Colombia operation is all nicely summed up in a book by Doug Stokes, “America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia”.)

Domestically, the Drug War serves other purposes, such as invasion of privacy and control of minorities. For instance, even though we know that marijuana is not harmful and is widely used, marijuana laws are still vigorously enforced … against certain groups. The popular HBO TV series The Wire highlighted this very well – use of drug laws to target blacks for surveillance and imprisonment, never beginning to stem the flow of drugs, but allowing police to keep a wire on their activities. This is a byproduct of the Civil Rights era, when law enforcement wanted to curtail protests. Imprisonment of black leaders was a good tool. (Suppose that drug enforcers were concerned about cocaine use … would they have wires all over Wall Street? Not likely. That is not a targeted group.)
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