So again, I ask: Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?He then goes on to make the Flashman case (institutional incompetence, not hypercompetence, is the rule) and then to explain that the fallout from killing such a public figure would be too severe to manage.
It's a serious question.
That's fine. And it's the law. I don't expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him. As of now, the plan seems to be to do nothing at all.Now there's a much better post buried in there, which is a variant of the "if we're living in such a fascist state why aren't you in a gulag?" argument I make to people like Glenn Greenwald and my more hysterical friends.
With all the million-dollar salaries being thrown around journalism circles these days, you'd hardly know we were in the depths of a media downturn.Well, isn't that special...on one hand, you could argue it's the power law effect in place; on the other it could be that the last survivors in journalism leadership - like in music - are more concerned with feathering their nests before the deluge than in figuring out how to build boats.
While much of the journalism profession is idled, redundant, bought-out and collecting unemployment, a slim layer is suddenly pocketing supersalaries as the media landscape remakes itself around rags -- and riches.
Do you agree with some who have said that leaving the names of Afghan informants in some of the raw reports has put them in danger? Is this irresponsible?res ipsa loquitur, as they say.
The answer is "so what?" in part. Unless you're a supporter of the war. If you're trying to undermine the war then I don't think it's a catastrophic event.
But I think as a human being you don't want to do things that can lead to other people suffering. Even I would say that WikiLeaks should have been more careful in concealing the names of people who could face violent retribution as a result of this. But let's also remember that these are people who are collaborating with a foreign occupier that's oppressing their fellow countrymen. In every situation like that - Algeria, Iraq - collaborators often suffer. Obviously, if the occupying country wants to preserve its collaborators, it has to take pains to protect their identities. The media and whatever you call WikiLeaks aren't under the same obligation.
The argument that it's revealing American information that could harm tactical strategies, that may be true, but WikiLeaks isn't an American organization and they're not beholden to American national security interests. Again, as somebody who thinks that war is wrong, and this war in particular - it doesn't serve American interests, it doesn't serve my interests - I think undermining that war in any way possible is a good thing.
"...is evidence that he's a poor President, but not that he's..."Whatever comes before the "is" may be accurate, and thus people may make normative judgements on their basis, but bogus, strained conclusions (in this case: "the antecedent confirms he's a Muslim! Lets everyone go around saying Obama is a Muslim!") say a lot more about the critic than their target. It ends up being an act of self-nullification of any substantive critique they might have offered.
Here at Winds, one of the original purposes of this blog, and a reason I liked it, is to note and condemn things that poison the debate regardless of whether it's done by "our side" or against it. The knowledge by the fine and wise people who founded this blog, and gave me the opportunity to post here too, that meretricious arguments such as those not only inflame the debate but are self-defeating. Improper arguments may warm the hearts of some of the readers (in the "red meat" sense), but they also discredit those who make them in the eyes of fair observers. Or should. One of the reasons why I dislike the modern Left is that they are allowed to get away with this sort of behavior, since they still have the preponderant control of the "opinion-leading" institutions. Of course, one of the reasons that control may ebb is precisely because, in allowing many to get away with such things and even make careers out of it, they're undermining their own credibility, though at a more glacial pace than many think.
But that's no reason for the other side to become just the flip side of the same coin, because the same fair observers will see them as no different rather than a real alternative.
As for me, and connecting this to the other posts in the series: I don't know what Obama's heart is. I don't know what his real faith is (I highly, *highly* *HIGHLY* doubt it's Islam, however). Perhaps he's a sincerely devout Christian. He says he's a Christian. As Dave Kopel points out, no one doubts Carter is a sincere Christian. People who oppose President Obama's policies and behavior, I highly doubt they do so because they think he's a Muslim but would support those same policies and behavior if they became convinced he was a devout Christian ("Well, if he was, then his policies and behavior would be different!" is a non-argument, as there are many devout Christians who have the same political beliefs and behavior as he. You may think they're politically and even theologically misguided, and I might agree - after all, everyone's a heretic). No, as with the Blogchair Psychoanalysis, they first oppose his policies, and then latch on to something ("he's a bad President by reason of crazy!" or "he's a bad President by reason of Islam!") that claims to explain it, but really doesn't.
To me, the Alinskyist Argument makes more sense, because it's definitely connected to everything Obama has said and done. But even there, so what: A lot of people on the Right these days, while simoultaneously condemning Alinskyism, in the next breath proudly proclaim they are using Alinskyist tactics against Progressives, turning the tables on them. Huzzah!
Well, I'm all for the turning of tables, and holding people (especially the governing class) to the same standards they hold others to. But it's rather ironic for people to say "OMG, this Administration is full of Alinskyists, and Alinskyism is bad! Have you read Rules? You should!" (you really should) "I have! It's evil! And here's what I've learned from it, and this is the Alinskyist tactic I'm using today!"
That's the common thread in this series of posts: that the tactics the Right despises in the Left, some elements of the Right are gleefully adopting themselves, even while still deploring the tactics. Now, this can be done to some degree and in certain ways, but done in the way these have, it's as I said: poisonous and self-destructive.
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But while 76% of Mainstream voters think the United States should continue to build the fence, 67% of the Political Class are opposed to it.We need a constant stream of polls showing "N% of the general electorate has this view, X% of the political class believes the opposite."
Not because the majority is always right, but because it's absolutely critical to repeatedly demonstrate on a range of issues how detached the governing class is from the people they govern, how alienated they are from the society they rule.
Which is also why, alas, such breakdowns are unlikely to get widespread mention in the Official Press.
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You want to hasten the end of your industry? Then by all means, keep doing what you're doing: consider yourself unaccountable and scoff at the blogosphere. Yes, I understand bloggers are changing the newspaper industry in fundamental ways. (Ezra Klein, to use one example, does not blog with the same tradition of objectivity in which the Washington Post's print journalists report. How that changes the culture of the newsroom, then, is interesting.) But if you think you don't need to answer to bloggers, some of whom have spent years doing field research or working in Central Asia and now blog as a hobby, the invisible hand of the market is going to find you out. And before you know it, you'll have taken a buy-out from the New York Times and be teaching creative writing in Maryland. And, let's face it, probably blogging on the side.-
You simply couldn't make this up. I give you Helen Thomas, acknowledged Dean of the White House press corps, at a White House Jewish Heritage Celebration:
And the thing is, it's not really surprising. Just someone who chose to say out loud the logical endpoint of Islamo-leftist opinion about Israel, and the way many on the left feel.
Back to Poland and Germany. Just let that sink in for a second.
Of course, Helen Thomas issued a statement later:
The attention to detail at a base like Restropo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences.From "War" by Sebastian Junger. I just finished it and will try and do a review before I travel this weekend. Let's just say it's good enough that I need a day or so to process before writing about it.
...
In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out - can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose importance of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don't even make the connection; at Restropo, that connection was impossible to ignore.
The Tea Party movement has been compared (by David Brooks of TheNew York Times, among others) to the student protest movement of the 1960s. Even though one came from the left and the other from the right, both are/were, or at least styled themselves as, a mass challenge to an oppressive establishment. That's a similarity, to be sure. But the differences seem more illuminating.
First, the 1960s (shorthand for all of the political and social developments we associate with that period) were by, for, and about young people. The Tea Party movement is by, for, and about middle-aged and old people (undoubtedly including more than a few who were part of the earlier movement too). If young people discover a cause and become a bit overwrought or monomaniacal, that's easily forgiven as part of the charm of youth. When adults of middle age and older throw tantrums and hold their breath until they turn blue, it's less charming.
