“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Friday, December 11, 2015
why trump is going to be a problem for the GOP even if he loses
I don't think the GOP will nominate Trump. But in a sense, that doesn't matter. Trump on the sidelines is not going to be like other GOP losers, who gracefully make way for the winner and fall in line. Trump represents ideas - genuinely idiotic ideas. And whoever wins will either have to gingerly embrace them while denying them or simply deny them. In that case, Trump will be drumming for his ideas right there on the sidelines. So this man is a genuine problem for the GOP whether he wins or doesn't.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
bogus numbers in the press: swallow your propaganda like a good liberal, children!
Trump has been commendably criticized for citing bogus
figures on everything from Moslem terrorists to the number of crimes committed
by african americans. This criticism has
been performed by the press, which takes great bride in shooting down certain false
figures.
But there are other false figures, or dubious ones, that the
liberal press revel in. One that I have seen reported a lot, as though it
settled the case, is the figure, coming, vaguely, from the “non-partisan” Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, that Assad’s regime is responsible for an amazing
95 percent of civilian Syrian deaths. We
have it on the word of Glen Newby, for instance, writing for London Review of
Books, who is an otherwise sensible man:
“After meeting Hollande, Sarkozy, with
an eye on returning to the Elysée in 2017, called for a tilt (‘une inflexion’)
in French foreign policy towards Syria and Russia in order to smash Isis, even
though Assad has caused around 95 per cent of civilian deaths in the civil war. Putin has run rings round occidental
policy-makers in Syria, but a bilateral French tilt to Damascus is never going
to fly, not least because French foreign policy needs to keep on the right side
of the US and Turkey.”
The obvious reply is that Daech has
been responsible for 100 percent of French casualties. Which of course might be
of concern to the president of France. But the idea that Assad’s forces, in a
civil war involving multiple paramilitaries, including an outfit of Al Qaeda and
Daech, are responsible for 95 percent of civilian deaths, should be subjected
to a smell test. Because it seems incompatible with everything we know about
the war.
Now, the first thing that is of importance is the link that
Newby uses to support his figures. It is to a supposedly “non-partisan” outfit, the SNHR, led by a man
named Fahdi Abdul Ghani. How non-partisan is Ghani? Well, in 2013, he was
calling for the US to bomb Assad. This seems like less than non-partisan
behavior. He also seemed less than worried about the civilian casualties that
would result from bombing Damascus.
In fact, the SNHR regularly sends out notices that are, let
us say, a bit fantastic. For instance,
they have noted that 65 some churches have been attacked in Syria, attributing
64 of those attacks to the regime, and one to al Nusra. So we are meant to
believe that the secularist regime of Assad, whose supporters are alawi and
christians, went on a church attack rampage, while the paramilitary jihadists
ignored the churches entirely in the spirit of ecumenism. Counter evidence is
easy to find. Apparently, for instance, the Christians of Idlib have no idea
that Assad is a big enemy of Christianity – in fact, some are “praying” for
Assad to liberate them from al-Nusra. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/culture/2015/04/syria-idlib-christians-jabhat-alnusra-.html.
In Tel Nasri, Daech blew up the Assyrian Church. http://www.albawaba.com/news/daesh-bombs-assyrian-church-northeastern-syria-678594.
I could casualy google and find other instances, but I won’t. The point is that
announcements like this one about who is damaging churches are evidently
conceived in the spirit of propaganda.
However, the main reason one has to question the figure that
95 percent of the civilian casualties in Syria are caused by Assad’s forces is
to look at the casualty rate that the Syrian groups, including the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, attribute to Assad’s forces. The estimated
figure, in spring of this year, was 78, 186. If the SNHR are to be believed, in
a war that is basically an insurgency, in fighting that is taking place in
various towns and cities, these soldiers are struck down with barely any
collateral civilian casualties, whereas every battle in which Assad’s soldiers
are involved creates vast collateral casualties. If the figure of 39,848
casualties on the rebel side, which is claimed by the Observatory, is true, and
only 5 percent of the civilian casualties can be blamed on the rebels, that
would mean that of the 104,629 civilian casualties, 99397 can be
attributed to the side which has taken twice the casualties. If this is true, it would make Syria a
remarkable exception to what we know about civil war, or war in general.
I think it isn’t true.
Assad is a secular tyrant who is up to his neck in blood. But
undoubtedly, the most basic civil liberties of different ethnic and religious
groups, and women, are better secured by Assad than by any plausible successor
among the Saudi led rebel groups. It is for this reason that Kurdish groups in
the North have made their peace with Assad and have rolled back Daech – the only
regional militias to do so. Newby’s endorsement of a fairy tale of numbers is a bad sign, since
if the LRB, which prides itself on going outside of the mainstream media
narrative, can produce such nonsense, we can only expect worse from the media
in the mainstream. Those who continue to maintain a fragile memory capability –
memory is the last resistor – will recall the propaganda about Saddam Hussein
leading into the first Gulf war. That propaganda was successful in that it too,
with Gulf funding, set up “non-partisan” groups to rubberstamp its figures. In
a more sceptical atmosphere, the 95 percent figure would be a step too far –
but anything is now believed once we have identified this year’s Hitler.
Wednesday, December 09, 2015
on unlikeable heroes in novels and their social meaning
How are we to explain the eeriness of the novel, or its
social function within novel cultures? Or, to put this in a narrower way, to
speak of a certain species of novel that emerged in the 19th century
– from an ancestry in the criminal picaresque: why would anybody want to read
about the actions, thoughts and words of a hero one dislikes? Why would you
do this for fun?
The line in lit crit, which was cemented in mid twentieth
century, was that the modernists invented the novel in which the anti-hero is
the dark eminence, and true prince of our sensibilities. This, however, really
isn’t the case. Greek myths, the Grimm’s fairytales, Daoist anecdotes are all
seeded with mildly or strikingly dislikeable personages. Aristotle, in a sense,
is asking a similar question in the Poetics about tragedy. We can admire
Antigone, we can even admire Achilles, but we don’t – we are intended to –
befriend them. For Aristotle, plausibility is a sort of meta-rule of narrative
production. Plausibility is not reality, but rather, reality as seen by a
certain credentialed set. It inscribes class into the very heart of aesthetics.
Plausibility is not just continuity and logistics, but it gives us our sense of
what typifies a character – what they would do in character. This is not a
neutral judgment about norms – it is an imposition of a certain class’s norms
upon narrative. And, always, the artist has squirmed under that imposition. The
slave’s impulse – irony –counters the demands of plausibility even in fairy
tales. When La Fontaine portrays the ant and the grasshopper, for instance, we
know, from the point of view of plausibility, that the ant is right Mention,
say, welfare at a dinner party in the suburbs and you will hear a chorus of
ants. But La Fontaine surely makes the reader uncomfortable with this judgment.
We see the cruelty of ants, and the beauty of the grasshoppers.
Plausibility and likeability get us to reflect on what these
narratives do in the culture. And I think that this is what really happened
with the novel in the 19th century in a Europe that was still largely
peasant and ancient regime: the novel was a tool for encountering the Other.
The Other outside the bourgeois norms, as orphan or ax murderer, as adulteress
or unhappy wife. This is where the
anti-hero collects within his unlikeability the collective unconsciousness, and
opens up the dreamlike possibility that the plausibility-ruled reader is,
perhaps, Other. The novel hymns what Foucault calls the experience-limit – the
limit in which you test to see whether you are a human or a monster. How much of
a monster can you be? And so far, in the sweep of the imperialist eras, the
genocide, the famines, the wars, we find that often, dizzyingly, the likeable
is the monstrous, systematically liquidating the dislikeable, which it has
previously created in its anti-image. Its negative, that appallingly chilling
word for the photographic process by which the original film shows the reverse
of the colors or tones of the final photograph – black or darker for white or
lighter, and so on. John Herschel, who
coined the terms in a paper in 1840, wrote about them within the framework of
an assumed theory of the original and the real: “To avoid much circumlocution,
it may be allowed me to employ the terms positive and negative to express
respectively pictures in which the lights and shades are as in nature, or as in
the original model, and in which they are the opposite, i.e. light representing
shade and shade light.” Nature and its substitute, the original model, produce,
of course, a system of representation. In the novel, the original model is not
only reversed in the negative character, but retrospectively shaken out of its
originality. As in photography itself, the negative precedes, in time, the
representation of the original model, the positive. Upon this complex of
reverses, our canonical novel – and play, and movie, and ballad -rests.
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Why the West won't defeat Daech, or the next Daech, or the next one after that...
When the aging Karl Kraus, the spring of whose mockery was
the endlessly mocked up world presented by the press, confronted the horror of
Hitler, he wrote that, on this topic, “nothing occurred to him”. It is not
often enough noted, by those interested in Kraus, that this gesture reproduces
the aggressive-passive silence which he maintained at the outbreak of World War
1 for some time. World War I and Hitler were symptoms of the larger dissolution
of the European order, cheered on by everything Kraus loathed – the patriotic
poets, the xenophobic or liberally patriotic press, the amazingly incompetent
political establishment, and the façade of humanism (now called “Western values”
by our contemporary belligeranti) which was poured in abundant, syrop like
dollops over the real, blood jelloes created on the Western and the Eastern
front.
Le Pen is no Adolph Hitler, but the Kraus reference is still
a good place to start. Le Pen is a standard issue fascist politician, a species
that has infested France since Louis Napoleon invented the type. Just as World
War I and Naziism represented, in their different ways, the deep corruption of
the liberal order, so, too, Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the US
represent the deep corruption at the heart of the post-liberal order, or, as I
prefer to call it, the fucked-up order. They emerge in a political context in
which large swathes of the population of developed countries have, literally, no
reason to vote for anybody. This era, in
which the government privatizes services that should, by any theory of the role
of monopoly in capitalism, remain nationalized;
which stints on welfare for the neediest and opens its purse, for trillions of
dollars, to support the greediest, seems intent on demonstrating what happens
when capitalism confronts no resistance. There are many ways for the capitalist
system to collapse – apparently, we are chosing the one where capitalism
succeeds absolutely, invades every space, and undermines the non-capitalist
ethos on which it unconsciously depends.
I am tired of autopsies of the left. Let the dead bury their
own dead is my current position. But nevertheless, there are ironies to note.
When the head of France’s socialist party calls for an alliance of the
Socialists and the Left, there is, as some twittering commentor noted, an
enormous unspoken confession resting on the shoulders of that “and” – it is an
ideologically overdetermined copula, a conjunction/disjunction, that sums up
the politics we’ve swallowed for the last twenty years.
So instead of thinking about Le Pen, I’ve been thinking
about perhaps the last rational European politician, Jeremy Corbyn. Recently,
to the hossanahs of the press, the Commons voted to support Cameron’s proposal
to bomb Syria. Corbyn was widely derided for questioning this piece of bold
policy. The pacifist! Unworthy to lick the shoes of Winston Churchill! and so
on.
Of course, here is what the press doesn’t say. Bombing Daech
in Syria will lead to Daech striking back in the UK. As Daech has shown, just
because it doesn’t possess drones and planes doesn’t mean it is powerless to
attack the bombers. Cameron has increased to a large degree the possibility
that some mass murder event, between San Bernadino size and Paris size, will
occur.
This being the case, one should ask, as Corbyn has, why
Cameron is proposing to put the UK on the frontline. To what end? What interest
is served by the policies being pursued by the US and its allies in Syria?
It isn’t that the allies are the friends of liberty and
humanity. Quite the contrary. The totalitarian Gulf states which have both put
down democratic demonstrations and shown a startling willingness to behead “witches”,
the starvation and strafing of Yemen,
the authoritarian government in Egypt, are all phenomena abetted, at the very
least, by the West. Nor is the battle being fought to bring peace to Syria or
Iraq: there is no non-laughable scenario by which Assad is replaced in Syria by
a multi-cultural, democratic government. The militias the West supports are
very clear about massively expelling or killing Alawites and other
non-believers. No, the bottom line is that Syria and Iraq will continue to be
blood puddings.
Finally, and most damningly, though, is the fact that the
war against Daech is a phony war. We’ve had a lot of time to see this show, and
it is a bust. Phony wars not only spawn massive casualties that we are
indifferent to – Syrian and Iraqi civilians, for instance – but they produce
ever more blowback casualties.
The Western leaders all concluded, at the end of the
Yugoslavian wars, that they had a magic technology that would enable a country
to wage war and never wake up its own people. But the Yugoslavian wars, it is
now clear, were an exception, not the rule. Yes, you can help topple a Saddam Hussein
or a Qaddafi, but you can’t control the vacuum that results. The vacuum in
Libya, which has brought about massive flights of refugees to Europe,
amplifying the presence and power of rightwing movements, should have taught
the ‘liberal’ intervenors something. It didn’t. Instead, we’ve seen them double
down on the incompetence of liberal intervention, producing wonderful moral
harangues about the duty to accept refugees while never mentioning at any point
their own complicity in creating the horrific conditions from which those
refugees are fleeing.
If, indeed, this cycle is going to end, then the luxury of
phony war will have to end. You can’t fight a world war as a hobby. If any
Western leader really wants to stop Daech, the answer is simple. First, it will
require more troops than can be maintained from a voluntary system. World Wars
are expensive. They require compulsory service.
Second, the “allies” of the West – Turkey and the Gulf states – will have
to be confronted. And thirdly, occupation in force for a long period of time
will most likely be necessary.
The phony warriors with their tough talk are, actually,
paper mache warriors. Below their monster act, they are not going to
reintroduce elements into the social whole that will lead to the massive
questioning of our current establishment’s governance. They will continue to advocate what Obama has
labeled “stupid stuff.” It will, of course, continue not to work.
The phony warriors will turn to drones instead, and to
bombing, and to expressions of shock when Daech inspired or trained terrorists
kill a trainload of people here, an office meeting there. Meanwhile, the wars
will go on, and on. We don’t lose wars anymore, because that would be too
embarrassing for everyone: instead, they just continue for decades. Look at
Afghanistan. The Taliban, which has been supported by our ally Pakistan for
years, is not only still in the hills –they are coming down into the cities as
the troops are withdrawn. When Afghanistan was first invaded, lo these many
many years ago, those who alluded to the Soviet experience were laughed at
heartily in the press. What losers! We swept in their and won the whole game by
2002. Except somehow the war kept going in 2002, and 3, and 4, and 5, and 6,
and 7, and 8, and 9, and 10, and 11, and 12, and 13, and 14, and 15. Here’s
some recent news reported by the Australian, in a story that we are really much
too indifferent to care about:
“Demoralised Afghan
forces were on the verge of collapse across swathes of the key southern
province of Helmand in recent weeks, and only the return of foreign troops and
air strikes prevented a Taliban rout.
A year after the last
British soldiers left Helmand, handing over security for the province to Afghan
forces, many of the areas they fought for are back in the hands of the
insurgents, with local units barely able to defend themselves, let alone
recapture lost territory.”
The war is endless
because the people waging it from the technologically superior end aren’t even
tough enough to admit to themselves that they fucked it up, that they don’t
know what they are doing, that all the brilliant technology is not worth a piss
if you don’t have massive manpower to back it up. As it was in the beginning –
a fuck up – so it shall be at the ending – another fuck up.
But the phony
warriors learn nothing. It still amazes me that the Western response to Daech,
after Daech forces, last year, decisively defeated 100,000 Iraqi soldiers who’d
been trained at great expense and equipped with billions of dollars in military
equipment, is to propose shipping millions of dollars of weapons to a bunch of
ill assorted Syrian militias and a supply of books entitled, How To Win Against
Shock Troops for Dummies. Even Pavlov’s
dogs, after a course of electric shocks, learned something. Or maybe I’m not getting the establishment’s strength,
here: it consists of firmly shutting their collective eyes to reality. They
firmly shut their eyes to the spike in unsustainable private debt in the 00s.
They firmly shut their eyes to the malign effects of austerity, which not only
increases unemployment but explodes public debt. And now they are firmly shutting their eyes to the fact that they are exposing
their civilian populations to terrorist attack while doing nothing, really,
that is going to impede Daech.
And thus I begin my
58th year. I hope that I can flip the channel and shut my eyes, too.
It would be nice.
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