He
was one of the greatest minds of modern time, a founding father of
computer science, and his legendary breaking of the Enigma Code may
have been a tipping point in the struggle against Nazism. Few men have
contributed so much to human learning or to his country's survival. But
Turing was persecuted into suicide by the homophobia of his time and
barred from entering the US because he was a homosexual (now America
reserves that distinction to homosexuals with HIV). Here is the story of his death:
In January 1952 Turing picked up the 19-year-old Arnold Murray
outside a cinema in Manchester. After a lunch date, Turing invited
Murray to spend the weekend with him at his house, an invitation which
Murray accepted although he did not show up. The pair met again in
Manchester the following Monday, when Murray agreed to accompany Turing
to the latter's house. A few weeks later Murray visited Turing's house
again, and apparently spent the night there.
After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing
reported the crime to the police. During the investigation Turing
acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.
Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonaltreatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injectionswhich lasted for a year. One of the known side effects of these hormone injections was the development of breasts, known as gynecomastia,
something which plagued Turing for the rest of his life. Turing's
conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him
from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ.
Every now and again, we should remember how brutal the persecution
of homosexuals was for so long, how counter-productive, how many lives
were ruined, and how a great man like Turing could be reduced to
suicide by the oppression he lived with on a daily basis. And so it is
a good thing that Britain has now offered a formal apology to Turing -
if fifty years too late. Here are prime minister Brown's words.
September 08, 2009
Heidi Silcox called my attention to this video. It's funny because I've just started rereading the Old Testament and my prime reaction is just how weird the early stuff Bowers is talking about is. I kind of interpret it along the lines of the philosophy professor in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, as the fallible record of people's attempts to make sense of a just and loving divinity. No sooner had they thought of a God who demands fairness and love than that they portray that God as telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. [Another really interesting take is Jack Miles' excellent God: A Biography. If you read the stuff in Hebrew in the Jewish ordering, God comes across as very fallible and somewhat pitiable. He just doesn't forsee much of the stuff that happens and often responds badly.]
Here's Leonard Cohen's take on the Abraham/Isaac thing. It's preferable to Kierkegaard's take I think, and has particular resonance in a country and age where the destruction of the New Deal social contract over the last thirty years just is the unconscionable theft our children's inheritance (environmental destruction, unsustainable debt, radical failure to invest in infrastructure, increasing income disparity, etc.).
In the refectory is read a message of the Pope, denouncing war, denouncing the bombing of civilians, reprisals on civilians, killing of hostages, torturing of prisoners. . .
Do the people of this country realize who the Pope is talking about? . . .
The monks seem to know. The voice of the reader trembles.
The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless
detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out,
torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their
children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down
their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their
shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they
vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and
leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating
them with the butt of a rifle -- all things that we have always
condemend as "torture" and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies
("torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that
another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical
pain or suffering . . .") -- reveals better than all the words in the
world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when
it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.
As an academic, I've known tons of people who have lived under both the United States health care system and either Canada or a Western European system. This includes Americans who have lived abroad and Europeans and Canadians who live here. Not one of them has preferred our system. And every single one of them has told me that the talking points funded by the lobbyists who own a substantial enough portion of Congress are simply not true.
I've stopped following the debates, though I did learn something interesting. A very good indication that a right wing pundit is about to lie is when they use the first name of the person they are talking too, i.e. "Well Joan. . ." If you're still have the fortitude to follow these things, watch for it; you'll see this over and over again.
This makes sense. When I was growing up in Alabama the politicians who always reformed education by making it about what they always called the "three R's" (reading, writing, and arithmetic) were in fact as stupid as you would infer if you didn't realize the phrase was a joke.
This kind of politician does not write well nor does he read books (beyond the twenty or so he had to to get his college degree), and with the exception of a few engineering types, has no knowledge of higher math. But I guess if you really thought the highest goal of education is to produce a cadre of self-satisfied, a-literate, ignorant people like yourself, it was a rational plan.
Professor Bousquet's blog How The University Works is an invaluable resource. The following is from a recent letter of his that is going around the American Association of University Professors listservs.
At the present rate of decline, the next two decades will see the percentage of tenured and tenure-track professors plunge into the single digits. As of fall 2007, the tenurable comprised just one-quarter of the faculty population, according to the American Federation of Teachers, down from one-third a decade earlier.
Sadly, the AFT analysis is probably conservative, relying chiefly on federaI IPEDS data containing reporting loopholes for instructional staff that the institution designates as“without faculty status,”* employees with another position on the campus, and some graduate employees.
Nor do these sobering statistics capture the full sense of the transformation. Tasks formerly performed by the professoriate haven't just been turned over to lecturers-- much of that work is now done by an army of nonfaculty staff, administrators, and even undergraduate students
In short, we already know what the future academic workplace will look like. It'll closely resemble many of today's for-profits and the community colleges with which they compete--operating without tenure or with tenure reserved for a small group of faculty administrators in charge of hiring, supervising, and setting curriculum for a part-time staff, typically without doctorates and earning only a few thousand dollars.
At institutions where some faculty currently engage in research, tenure is likely to survive among those populations bringing in external grants. But departments that traditionally rely on internal funding are likely to do steadily less research and more instruction. . .
Many of these departments may consolidate on the model of the community college--more and more “modern-language departments” and “humanities departments” featuring consolidations of philosophy, art, art history, classics, and the languages—not to mention departments of “social and behavioral sciences,” “intercultural studies,” and the like.
In many cases, the income-producing research activity will follow the trend of moving into non-departmental locations –institutes, centers, and programs—that can be closed with less fuss if the income dries up. This suggests an alternate to consolidating departments at institutions where faculty do research: by redefining the department chiefly as an instructional center and not the home of exciting interdisciplinary research, the researchers will visit departments only to irritably develop syllabi to be implemented by subordinated cadres of cheap teachers, and to reproduce themselves in steadily more pro forma votes, as the real decisions about hiring and retention are made in the revenue centers.
. . .for the majority of us, this ugly future has already happened. The only reason “we” don't realize it is because those of us with the loudest professional voices haven't allowed ourselves to understand.
What the one-quarter of us bemoaning the “future” demise of tenure are most unwilling to understand is this: those of us with tenure are not just a minority--we're experiencing a radical shift in our function with respect to everyone else.
With the nontenurable majority engaged primarily in teaching, and many of the tenured released to revenue production, the remaining fraction of a fraction performs most of the service for everyone else.
More and more committee work. Longer terms in administration. More advising of more complex requirements, and more assessment of more kinds of learning. More mentoring of graduate students. More oversight of student workers, including undergraduates, both paid and donating their services. (I swear I just received a request to serve as my unpaid “research assistant” this summer--from a high-school junior!) And a steady stream of more and more nakedly managerial responsibilities with respect to the nontenurable majority—hiring, evaluation, curricular development, professional development, and so on.
If you are tenured and feel this intensified service burden already, imagine what it will be like twenty years from now when the proportion of tenured and tenure track is 8%, not 25%.
Fortunately, there are countertrends. Most notably, the movement toward unionization of the nontenurable faculty is producing substantial new forms of job security and raising wages.
Some points-
(1) Bousquet's decline is not going to happen at the tiny minority of prestige universities (paradigmatically the top 25 rated Carnegie institutions and the best 10 or so Liberal Arts colleges), which will continue to have large departments with decently funded Ph.D programs across the panoply of the humanities.
(2) Since unionization is the only thing to stop any of this, so called right-to-work states are going to further lag behind the rest of the country.
[For people living in more civilized states and countries reading this, "right to work" means that unions are prohibited from signing exclusive employment contracts with employers, and so employers can always fire union members and hire non-union members. This is unconstitutional, as it abrogates employees' rights to organize into their own corporations that can make service contracts. These laws were touted by anti-union forces in the 60's and 70's as ways for mostly Southern states to radically improve their economies. But all they did (and this is not controversial) was vastly decrease the middle class, lowering median income, further returning such states to the share-cropper economic status that aspects of their cultures support. [Consider Louisiana, which is the 14th richest state in the country in terms of per capita wealth, but is reliably from 45th to 50th in terms of median income.] In addition, the laws economically hammer the states by contributing to the massive outmigration of skilled labor to other states where union protections guarantee a livable wage.
And please don't bring up the canard about automotive unions causing the Big Three to go under. First, watch this excellent performance.
Then note that American car companies would still be the envy of the world if auto executives had used a tiny fraction of their political power to push for socialized medicine and meaningful federal support for energy efficient vehicles. Instead they betrayed their shareholders, employees, and customers out of class loyalty, a truly misguided alliance with oil companies, and relying on SUVs that any rational person could have said would not be profitable as soon as the next oil crunch came along. American companies are obsolete because they have to compete with car companies in countries where the government provides health care and meaningful pensions. And everybody knows this.]
(3) States without prestige universities are increasingly being governed by a political elite that attended prestige universities in other states. As with unconstitutional "right to work" laws, this will further the trends of which Bousquet speaks.
All of the life experiences of these leaders support the thought that anyone smart enough to deserve a truly liberal education would go to an out of state prestige university. But then, for the majority of Americans not wealthy or preternaturally gifted enough to travel out of state to a prestige institution, education further devolves into narrow vocational training. That this is catastrophically short sighted in a world where the most important skill is being able to learn new skills is beside the point, just as the economic and human carnage of "right to work" laws is beside the point.
(4) I think it's important to realize that when one experiences the trends Bousquet chronicles that they are not the result of moral failings of the specific administrators at your university. It's really not very much fun to be an administrator. That's why they have to pay them so much.
More importantly, the administrators at your school didn't set up the system of economic incentives that are killing research in the traditional arts and humanities and also leading to a now decades long decline in real median wages in the United States. They just work here.
(5) Likewise, I think it's important to realize that these trends are happening at most American universities (again, with the exception of the prestige schools). The age of massive investment in infrastructure to improve the things for everyone, an age typified by setting up land grant colleges and songs like this
was unceremoniously deposed in the 1980s in the United States.
If the realization that these trends are catastrophically misguided as far as the direction of our Republic is depressing, there is still some consolation in realizing that they have nothing in particular to do with your school.
(6) Complete pessimism about the trends Bousquet measures is warranted in the short and medium term. Cultivate your own garden. Give up on the illusion of "faculty governance." The powerlessness of faculty senates in the face of these changes show them to almost always be glorified student councils. Actually not even that. In American High Schools student councils get to plan the prom, which is some power at least.
To the extent that they have any role in governance anyhow, these trends turn faculty senates into Lord of the Flies type scenarios. People from the "revenue generating" departments, and the one or two humanities or arts departments who for historic reasons still have decent PhD programs at the institutions in question, have zero interest in the service departments flourishing. And the "blame the victim" mentality that is sadly intrinsic to human nature leads those of the tenurable left in one of the service departments to get treated like a peasant or child. Be seen and not heard. The big people's table is not for you.
(6) It used to be considered part of academic freedom that there was a defeasible presupposition that tenured professors were doing a decent job and that people in the departments were the experts on what and how to teach (so long as this was consistent with university requirements). I've seen this presupposition waver to the point of collapse in my ten brief years as a professor (and time as a grad student before that). More and more, we are subject to the hegemony of time-consuming, soul destroying, jumping-through-hoops, assessment measures, where you have to write report after report to committees of people not in your field just for permission to continue doing what you've always done. Never is anything actually improved by these processes!
Any private business that wasted so much time on assessing rather than doing would go out of business. But in higher ed. more and more of the business just is this kind of infinitely recursive assessment, self assessment, assessment of assessment, etc.
It's like under Mao where you had to wear dunce caps and have kids hit you as you told everybody what a crap job you were doing for the revolution. No good ever came of that either.
The hegemony of "assessment" is a complete scam that exists solely to "prove" to accreditation agencies that schools with less and less credentialed teachers are still deserving of accreditation. It really is maddening the number of insultingly useless reports you have to write to overseers whose bureaucratic Stockholm Syndrome leads them to take these things seriously, even though nothing has ever been improved as a result of any of these assessments.
A few examples: a book-like "strategic plan" for your department, every five years another book for "external review," reports every year on writing skills of senior majors in every senior level class, reports on how learning outcomes are being accomplished in every General Education Requirement class, yearly reports from every department about how the number of majors is being increased (even though the school has a static number of students), reports on how grade inflation is being addressed, a slew of reports to two committees any time any aspect of departmental curriculum is changed, etc. etc. etc.
This has gotten so bad for smaller departments (in big departments the labor can be distributed better) that one chair that I have immense respect for broke down weeping in the secretary's office a few years ago. He had been spending over 40 hours a week writing Kafkaesque reports. He quit.
But in my heart I know everything will all work out. The awesome power of this song has been rearranging the spheres even as I've been writing this.
. . .the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry
right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine
populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way:
when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in
Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is
always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and
find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each
other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are
mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against
the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who f*****d them
over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The
Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get
‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were
identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the
same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been
trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of
course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other
way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals,
immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.
But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic
peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the
master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or
the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in
the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people
who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your s**t.
Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he
sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the
rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out
newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you
immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant
is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what
we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a
non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or
Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters!
After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there
was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class
Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to
millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I
imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.
It's maddening that obviously refuted beliefs can get spewed forth from the halls of our government by people who at some level do know they are lying, and then how these falsehoods are not corrected by the media, and then how when you are on the phone with a much beloved family member, you get the same falsehood repeated at you.
And there's nothing you can say. We don't just live in a country where people don't know very much (all countries are like that). We live in a country where people don't know very much, but also don't know that they don't know very much. And I do fear for the future of our Republic.
In any case, in an attempt to be part of a truth meme- I must note that falsehood of the hour isn't just false, it's also completely incoherent. The falsehood states that Roosevelt's New Deal actually hindered our recovery from the Great Depression, and that it was only World War II that got us out of it. This is so clearly inconsistent that it's hard for me to conceive how people can believe it. Why did World War II get us out of it? Because Roosevelt was able to nationalize production and boost employment related public spending in ways he was prevented from doing so by Republicans prior to the war. That is World War II was the New Deal not just on steroids, but with superpowers. [So if you think that WW II got us out of the Depression, then your argument should be that the Republicans were wrong to block so much of the initial New Deal, and hence that Republicans are wrong to gut Obama's legislative agenda.]
But the position isn't just incoherent. During the early years of the New Deal (before Roosevelt had to pull back because of Republican obstreperousness in 1937), unemployment declined from 25% to 10% and robust GDP growth returned. Here's a quote with statistics from Dean Baker
While the basic [Republican] argument has the form of a no evidence
counter-factual assertion (e.g. the good fairy of the market would have
set things right, if only Roosevelt didn't get in the way), the
discussion is contradicted by the known facts of the era. Roosevelt's
New Deal Agenda lowered the unemployment rate from 25 percent in 1933
to 10 percent in 1937. None of us would be happy with 10 percent
unemployment, but it is difficult to complain about policies that
reduced the unemployment rate by an average of almost 4 percentage
points a year. The annual growth rate over these four years averaged
13.0 percent. It is always possible that the magic of the market would
have done better, but there is no reason that we should believe so.
Schlaes is correct in pointing out that things turned bad again in
1937. The Blue Dogs of the Roosevelt era won sway and got Roosevelt to
cut spending and raise taxes. This threw the economy back into a
serious recession, just as any good Keynesian would have predicted. . . .
[For folks who think that the growth in federal spending under
Roosevelt and the recovery were just coincidence, here is the annual
growth in federal government spending, alongside the following year's
GDP growth:
This is annual data (obviously quarterly would be better) and
clearly monetary policy and other factors played a role, but it is
pretty hard to look at this data (available at www.bea.gov) and not see
a relationship between government spending and GDP growth.]
Also see this piece by Paul Krugman here, which among other things shows how the fact that WWII was an enormous public works project was the reason it was so successful at ending the Great Depression.
Other relevant statistics concern policy decisions by other countries during the Great Depression and how they fared. Nobody pushing the (manifestly implausible) counter-factual claim that we would have been better without the New Deal has done this minimal bit of relevant research! From the history I know, I would bet large sums that the Democratic case is considerably strengthened by such an analysis.
We are dirtied by these lies. Roosevelt and his New Deal very likely saved us from some form of nasty authoritarianism, it lead to the building of a successful war machine that defeated tyranny of our enemies and our allies (through Roosevelt and Truman's anti-colonial stances, which Eisenhower disastrously abandoned in Guatemala and Iran), and it was the blueprint for successful recovery from the war for all of the first world nations on this planent. He was the best in us, and we demean ourselves by lying about him and his monumental achievement. Finally, just note that the hole we are in now is because we turned over the reins of government to people who don't hold Roosevelt in proper reverence. And our media parrots the lies of these irreverant clowns.
My college acquaintance Phillip's band had a fantastic song called "Español Es La Lengua De La Rock-and-Roll." It's not on their myspace page though, which makes me very sad.
Pharyngala on a speech where Governor Palin simultaneously mocked the federal funding of fruit fly research and claimed we needed more research on developmental disabilities:
This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks
basic research and the international research community. You damn well
better believe that there is research going on in animal models — what
does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and
chop up baby brains for this work? — and countries like France and
Germany and England and Canada and China and India and others are all
respected participants in these efforts.
Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools
in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and
these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation.
Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key
molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals,
thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the
wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that we can use these other
organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core
processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the
phenomena Palin claims are so important.
This is where the Republican party has ended up: supporting an
ignorant buffoon who believes in the End Times and speaking in tongues
while deriding some of the best and most successful strategies for
scientific research. In this next election, we've got to choose between
the 21st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice.
I don't know how much the "make fun of fruit fly research" works. McCain surely thinks it does, with his repeated invocation of studies on grizzly bear DNA and the purchase of a planetarium projector. When i watched that I just assumed he was being a jerk, Of course we need to study the DNA of various animaIs and anyone who has ever enjoyed a trip to the Planetarium (and this is most American schoolchildren I assume) must realize that those projectors coud not possibly be cheap.
. . . .But the greater irony is that the “gospel” of Jesus translates to “good news,” not “be afraid.” The Book of Matthew
tells the story of the good news Jesus brings to the poor, the
grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek, the merciful, the pure
of heart, and the peacemakers. It is these, the scriptures say, who
will be blessed, comforted, satisfied, and who shall see God.
Not once does the Jesus of the New Testament express concern over
homosexuality as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God. Rather –
as is made clear in the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible critiquing
the love of money – it is being consumed with materialism and one’s own
well-being at the ignorance and expense of others.
In Matthew 25:42-45, Jesus says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me
no meat. I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger,
and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in
prison, and you did not visit me. Then shall they also answer him,
saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, or
naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto you? He
answered them, saying, I tell you the truth: inasmuch as you did it not
to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”
Imagine a letter from 2012 in which genuine Christian values – an
agenda for “the least of these” – were to prevail. Now that would be a
transformed world. In the meantime, Dobson and his supporters would do
well to heed the words of David in the Psalms: “The Lord is my
Shepherd, whom shall I fear?” Indeed, the most frequently expressed
command in the Bible is “be not afraid “ or “do not fear.” Focus on
the Family’s political agenda is thus neither Christian, nor right.
No one in the history of the planet has ever triumphed over the combined powers of Opie, Andy, and Fonzie. And McCain/Palin certainly won't be the first.
. . . .Now the mass exodus is underway. Anyone who is fiscally
conservative can't call himself a Republican anymore.
Anyone who is a
religious Christian can't honestly be part of this since Jesus preached
about caring for the sick and the poor--not about eliminating
reproductive choice or issues related to same-sex marriage. There's
nothing Christian about the agenda of the Religious Right--it's a
totally political movement focused on issues that Jesus never mentioned
and they ignore the issues about which Jesus preached constantly.
Anyone
who believes in honesty or competence in government wouldn't call
themselves a Republican after Bush. And now, no one who is not a
committed soldier in the Holy War against the Left is welcome either.
The
only ones left inside the tent are people who don't want to vote for a
Black person, those who mistakenly believe they have been better off
financially over the last eight years than they'd be under Obama, or
those who are driven by a complete and unwavering hatred of liberals,
Democrats, and the Left. It doesn't take a lot of room to accommodate
that crowd and who would want to be in that tent anyway?
I find
all this frustrating and it makes me sad. I liked being an independent.
More important--we need the old Republican party--the one that thought
the only thing worse than taxing and spending was borrowing and
spending which is what the Bush/DeLay crowd has done for years in the
name of Conservatism. . . .
It's one thing to have a president and servile elite so committed to torture, corruption, ruinous deficits, class warfare against the poor and middle classs, badly run, unjust wars, and all of the insulting pseudo-science, sophistry, and lies to convince a plurality to go along with it . . . . but when otherwise principled people refuse to condemn these things one's faith in human nature begins to further weaken. Though perhaps the Sullivans, Buckleys, and Powells of the right should make me optimistic. If I thought that the Republican Party could overcome its rot enough to listen to them, I would be.
A few years ago in Baton Rouge, our local newspaper interviewed the Iman of the local mosque and his words struck me as insulting. The Iman inconsistently asserted both that Islam was not extremist, and that the only reason people are not Muslims is because they don't understand Islam. But what could be more extreme than denying that one could rationally disagree with your view?
And this is what John McCain repeatedly implied during the debate (with his constant refrain that Obama was naive and that he does not understand this or that piece of conservative boilerplate), that it is impossible for a rational, informed person of good will to disagree with John McCain.
This should not be a surprise to anyone with knowledge of why most of his senatorial colleagues can't stand John McCain. Whenever someone disagrees with him he blows up and accuses them of either lacking honor or being stupid. Since McCain could not say on national television that Senator Obama is dishonorable (a risible claim, albeit one that McCain both believes and uses to justify the incessant dishonesty of his campaign), instead he says that Obama is naive and lacking understanding.
As a devotee of Lady Philosophy, anyone's rampant failure to follow the principle of charity in debate is particularly painful to me. This being said, I'm heartened to see that all extant polling shows that independents/undecideds think Obama wiped the floor up with McCain, and by a very large margin at that. So Senator Reads Books might actually beat Senator Grumpy Pants this time around, good news for the Republic I think.
Eltahaway's claim in the previous post is actually almost certainly false. The cybaritic, corrupt Saudi elite spend as much time as possible in other countries where women have equal rights, as do their wives. They are not pushing their morality down the throat of the country. Rather, like demagogues everywhere they are exploiting what is worst in human nature. That they can get away with this says nothing about the morality of the Saudi people either; the only reason the scam works is because of vast Western support (we put these jerks in charge, pay enormous sums of money to them, and fight their wars) combined with oil wealth.
Sexism in Saudi Arabia plays exactly the same role that racism did in South Africa and the American South. It allows a corrupt elite to buy off half the population by ensuring that they are relatively better off than the other half. Saudi men also get a horrible deal- no freedom of speech, no fair share of the incredible oil wealth, massively declining standards of living, work going to foreigners, no real representaiton, etc. . . But what holds it all together (as it does in all Apartheid regimes) is that Saudi men get the psychic joy of being superior to the other half of the population. Yes they are slaves to their royal family and religious elite, but at least they are not women.
The absolute worst aspect of Bush, Cheney, et. al. is their strong ties to Saudi Arabia and the way this has destroyed American foreign policy during the war on terror. After the Northern Alliance with our help defeated the Taliban (who were Sunni opponents of Iran), Iran offered to put everything on the table- stopping all funding of terrorist groups in Lebanon and Israel, recognizing Israel and working towards a two state solution for the Palestenians, halting their nuclear program, strong support for us in Iraq, etc. etc.
This made sense, we defeated their Sunni enemies in Afghanistan and were about to in Iraq. Iran is a representative Republic where women vote (yes they are theocratic, but so is Saudi Arabia, and the Iranian theocrats don't fund sexist, anti-American, wahabbi Islam all over the world, unlike our Saudi allies), one that has historically been a United States ally (albeit one we have historically treated shamefully, such as by Eisenhower having their democratically elected president assassinated), and one with a raucous freedom-loving people culturally similiar to Americans (yes, there is oppression, but there is also the strongest democracy movement on the planet, one that is actually moving the state towards more constitutional protections, and one that would be vastly more successful if we actually treated Iran decently).
But the Bush people vetoed Iran's attempt to ally themselves with us, and as a result we are gearing up for war with a country that by any rational measure (along with Israel and Turkey) should be our strongest ally in the region. And we continue to be servants to one of the worst regimes on the planet.
Whenever I hear pundits on television talk about "realism" versus "idealism" in foreign policy, identifying Bush's "pro-democracy agenda" view with idealism, it makes me sick. We are potentially going to go to war with a country that is vastly more democratic than our greatest ally in the region (and Saudi Arabia is our greatest ally in the region), an "ally" that does more than any country in the world to intentionally bring about the ideology and root conditions that cause terrorism, as well as terrorism itself.
It is neither naive nor conspiratorial to suspect that having an executive branch full of members in financial in thrall to the oil industry is partially responsible for this, what is already the greatest and most perverse foreign policy debacle of our lifetime (just like Northern Alliance support was the only way to take down the Taliban, Iranian support would have been the only way to take down the Baathists, who (unless we do ally with Iran) I predict will again have their boots on the Iraq's Shiite majority's neck within the next decade). It is not conspiratorial to suspect that oil money corruption is more than anything else responsible for the execrable fact that Saudi Arabia is not treated like the Apartheid state it is. Nor since September 11 is it even remotely McCarthyist to call the actions of Bush Republicans what they so manifestly are, treason.
I don't think academic psychologists have ever set great store by this test. But it is probably the only such test devised by one of the great philosophers from the previous century. The higher the score the more authoritarian. You can go here to take it.
I scored a 2.46666. . .
Adorno and Horkheimer were trying to explain why the working classes the world over were so initially excited about World War I, and then later why so many good Germans supported a transparently idiotic and evil regime (the vomit worthy Mein Kampf was a best seller prior to Hitler's election, people knew what they were getting; moreover it's not possible for a secret cabal to efficiently murder twelve million people, in fact it takes a lot more than Hilary Clinton's village to kill that many children).
Adorno and Horkheimer's basic insight is that people experience intense suffering from a sense of lack of control. Through Nietzschean sublimation this can in many cases this can spur great achievement (scientific, artistic, business, etc.). When such achievement has not yet been realized in the case of adolescents (especially those picked on and/or badly parented), or not likely to be realized in the case of some adults who feel like losers (and astute adolescents starting to sense the writing on the wall about their own likely lack of accomplishment), one psychological mechanism is to mentally identify oneself with ideas and figures that project some combination of domination and collective revenge. It's a suckers game, because the adolescent and non-functional adult end up having even less control, but Adorno and Horkheimer skillfully examined how suffers of the authoritarian personality paradoxically feel more in control for that identification. They also discovered empirical connections between the way these people are parented and the likelihood that they develop the personality.
The authoritarian personality is the psychology of the good German, the good Communist, the good fascist (found in great numbers in Spain, Italy, and Vichy France), the religious fundamentalist, the right wing couch potato bully that is now the soul of Bush Republicanism, people who idiotically and fallaciously identify themselves with a mythic version of their racial and cultural past (this is why, with the exception of Lynyrd Skynyrd, it's always adolescents and people who haven't come to grips with their own failures who waive the Confederate Flag today), and left wing blame-America-for-everything baby boomers that end up worshiping third world dictators (read Chomsky's never apologized for intensely evil writings on the Khmer Rouge or look at any of those kids wearing t-shirts with the Christlike visage of the incomparably awful Che Guevara).
Given the phenomena of the good communist and the baby boomer blame-America-for-everything lefty, recent labeling of the dysfunction as "Right Wing Authoritarianism" by some researchers is a misnomer. However, given the seeming unstoppable ascendancy of Bush Republicanism a few years ago in this country, it is perhaps an understandable one.
For legible version, either click on the comic or go here.
For graphic comparisons of relevant (that is, non cherry picked) levels of violence/dysfunction in Iraq between this year and last year go here and scroll down to the charts labeled "violence metrics" and "infrastructure metrics."
Consider the Gulf Coast housing crisis, one of the key issues that
has kept nearly half the population of New Orleans from returning to
the city since Katrina. More than 75 percent of the housing damage from
the storm was in Louisiana, but Mississippi has received 70 percent of
the funds through FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Of the $388
million available, FEMA gave a Mississippi program offering upgraded
trailers more than $275 million. Meanwhile, the agency awarded
Louisiana's "Katrina Cottage" program, which features more permanent
modular homes for storm victims, a mere $75 million.
It's not just housing. Mississippi is also slated to get 38 percent
of federal hospital recovery funds, even though it lost just 79 beds
compared to 2,600 lost in southern Louisiana, which will get 45 percent
of the funds. Mississippi and Louisiana both received $95 million to
offset losses in higher education, even though Louisiana was home to 75
percent of displaced students. The states also received $100 million
each for K-12 students affected by the storms, despite the fact that 69
percent resided in Louisiana.
The whole story puts to rest the idea that Mississippi got more money because they are putting it to better use.
Corruption, cronyism, and the resulting (completely predictable) massive incompetence/waste are George Bush's legacy at home and abroad. And that's the nicest thing I can say about him.
Eltahaway's claim in the previous post is actually almost certainly false. The cybaritic, corrupt Saudi elite spend as much time as possible in other countries where women have equal rights, as do their wives. They are not pushing their morality down the throat of the country. Rather, like demagogues everywhere they are exploiting what is worst in human nature. That they can get away with this says nothing about the morality of the Saudi people either; the only reason the scam works is because of vast Western support (we put these jerks in charge, pay enormous sums of money to them, and fight their wars) combined with oil wealth.
It is neither naive nor conspiratorial to suspect that having an executive branch full of members in financial in thrall to the oil industry is partially responsible for this, what is already the greatest and most perverse foreign policy debacle of our lifetime (just like Northern Alliance support was the only way to take down the Taliban, Iranian support would have been the only way to take down the Baathists, who (unless we do ally with Iran) I predict will again have their boots on the Iraq's Shiite majority's neck within the next decade). It is not conspiratorial to suspect that oil money corruption is more than anything else responsible for the execrable fact that Saudi Arabia is not treated like the Apartheid state it is. Nor since September 11 is it even remotely McCarthyist to call the actions of Bush Republicans what they so manifestly are, treason.
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