Posts tagged "politics"

And one that has nothing to do with whether Greenwald is wrong or right about PRISM (he’s wrong, by the way) and why that matters. Ultimately, in a debate like this, the best thing a politically engaged intellectual can do is write in a way that does not short-circuit thought. And my, oh, my, does Greenwald’s style of political discourse short-circuit thought—with a fierceness.

Rick Perlstein, “On Glenn Greenwald and His Fans,” The Nation, June 18, 2013

And:

The bottom line is that there’s an attitude out there that anything bad anyone says about the NSA must be a priori true, and that anything bad anyone says about the NSA must have already been said by Glenn Greenwald, and that anyone who questions Greenwald about anything must be questioning Greenwald about everything, and thus thinks the NSA (and its boss Barack Obama) is swell.

This is why I find Glenn Greenwald tiresome, even though he has done and will continue to do valuable work. I don’t doubt his honesty, but I do question his judgment. As a thinker he’s suspect. His mindset is of a man forever readying for total war.

2
media america politics
Jun 18

The “honor code” that Brooks claims was violated is perhaps nothing more than condescension mitigated by social obligation.

Amy Davidson, “David Brooks and the mind of Edward Snowden,” The New Yorker, June 11, 2013

But “condescension mitigated by social obligation” is basically David Brooks’s entire schtick right?

EDIT: “Brooks, as I’ve written before, seems to have a greater horror of impoliteness than of injustice.”

1
america media politics
Jun 12

Here, by the way, is one of the many reasons why I don’t buy the idea that “conservative civil libertarians” — or libertarianism in general — are a meaningful political force. Once a politician reaches a certain point of liberalism, she’s going to be suspicious of the surveillance state. In the realm of conservatism, opposition to government intrusion on civil liberties occasionally exists, but it’s mostly just an accident. 

Here, by the way, is one of the many reasons why I don’t buy the idea that “conservative civil libertarians” — or libertarianism in general — are a meaningful political force. Once a politician reaches a certain point of liberalism, she’s going to be suspicious of the surveillance state. In the realm of conservatism, opposition to government intrusion on civil liberties occasionally exists, but it’s mostly just an accident. 

5
politics america
Jun 11

[White House Press Secretary Jay] Carney — who off camera retains a reporter’s curiosity and charm…

Glenn Thrush & R.J . Epstein, “Jay Carney press briefing blues,” Politico, May 21, 2013

The two reporters reporting this story don’t mention whether Carney also retains a reporter’s sexiness, intelligence, or impeccably agreeable odor.

2
politics america media
May 24

This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party,” a powerbroker told ABC TV’s Chris Uhlmann. “Now that his only faction — Newspoll — has deserted him, he is gone.

Erik Jensen, “Kevin Rudd’s Unrelenting Campaign to Regain Power,” The Monthly, May 2013

If you ever wanted to see the problem with the Australian Labor Party — and Australian politics in general — encapsulated in a single quote, here it is. For our parties, the voters’ will (for that is precisely what Newspoll measures) is an afterthought: one mere faction among many.

In his authorial voice, Jensen seems to agree with the politicians’ consensus:

On 27 February 2012, the party rejected Rudd 71–31. The message was emphatic: caucus loathed Rudd for what he had done and was doing to the party. But there were some in the press who still couldn’t let go of Rudd. As Peter Hartcher wrote: “Labor has overwhelmingly endorsed the candidate of the unions and the party machine over the candidate of the people.”

Hartcher’s point about Rudd’s popularity amongst the public is, in Jensen’s conception, a trivial media fixation: Hartcher can’t “let go.” And Jensen goes on to adopt the dismissal of public opinion as the “Newspoll faction”: 

Gillard’s circle suspected Rudd of timing media opportunities to coincide with Newspoll’s fortnightly phone surveys. The polls were, after all, his only faction.

And continued public dissatisfaction with Julia Gillard, for Jensen, cannot be legitimate, but the product of press magnate string-pulling:

Although the press gallery wrote off Rudd for good in the wake of the uncontested challenge, and the country’s economic indicators could hardly be better, leadership speculation will be back on the agenda when Murdoch’s editors want it to be — that is, when their pollsters resume asking the question: who is your preferred choice for PM, Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard?

Indeed, for Jensen, public approval of Rudd has not only been meaningless; it has illegitimate: 

When Rudd seized the leadership from Kim Beazley in December 2006, already the public liked him a lot more than his party did. (Back in Queensland, as premier Wayne Goss’s right-hand man, his nickname had been Dr Death.) Voters bought his faux folksiness.

“Bought”? It’s impossible, apparently, that voters like him. They had to have been duped.

I’m not writing this to defend Rudd — though my thoughts on him are here, if you want to know where I’m coming from. And certainly I would not like to suggest there isn’t a problem with the ceaseless scrutiny of new polling figures as a dynamic force in Australian politics — and the responsibility the media bears for the problem. But Gillard’s unpopularity isn’t the invention of meddlesome survey-takers, and nor is the public per se wrong to come to a different conclusion about Rudd from that of the people who work with him.

For a long time I thought that it didn’t matter if the people around Rudd in Canberra didn’t like working with him — as a voter, it’s not my job to care if staffers and MPs feel nice about any one politician. But I have become persuaded that part of the job of being prime minister is to manage your relationships effectively so that you do the job effectively. Rudd clearly failed on that count. But the idea that, in politics, public will is a mere afterthought, something to be managed while one undertakes the real game of aligning factional power to one’s best interest, is the underpinning of the deep malaise in both parties in Australian politics now. 

8
australia politics media
May 06

We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

Bruce Schneier, on why we must keep calm and carry on after the Boston Marathon bombing. (via theatlantic)

One of the best things I’ve read in a very, very long time.

(via naysayersspeak)

different-exotic-fishes

Actually I can think of a few more things you can do to combat this terrorism thing: stop being cunts to most other people in the world, remove US forces from Saudi Arabia, go back in time and un-invade Iraq, learn from history and realise that nobody ever wins in Afghanistan and then go back in time and un-invade them too.

No idea what is behind this Boston thing, obviously, but Americans acting like they’re targeted, all the time, by people because they’re just so good at living free is insane.

File under: Self-righteous Australians who conveniently forget Australia also invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

373
australia america politics
Apr 16

It’s difficult to believe that a hundred years from now historians are going to say, ‘America had a terrible curse of gun violence. It also had entertainments of all kinds, which depended on the use and glorification and a fetishization of guns, but these two things had no connection. They ran on completely different cultural circuits.’ They will say, surely, something closer to the truth: Americans were obsessed with violence; they fetishized it and glorified it, loved to watch it; and that American culture of spectacular violence took many turns. Often, it was a symbolic turn, occasionally a sublime turn—expressed in many extraordinary works of art—and inevitably that conception of violence as high style, serious style, of nihilism as a test of meaning, infected the rest of their lives.

Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker (via thesmithian)

This is staggeringly idiotic. Shouldn’t something like this follow?

“…and then they exported it to countries all over the world, many of which did not have anywhere near the number of gun deaths or murders the US did.”

We have Bruce Willis movies in Australia, too. We don’t kill each other like Americans do. If you look at the US, with its lax gun legislation, its history of oppression that squeezes opportunity and hope from communities and squeezes them into underserviced pockets of poverty, and conclude that the problem is even remotely connected to Halo, you’re suffering from a shocking failure of imagination.

And, see, Gopnik even affirms the weakness of his argument:

The correlation between observed violence and actual violence is very poorly established—and, here again, common sense confirms social science: the Japanese play seemingly insane amounts of violent video games, but have very little gun violence in their culture and country.

He offers no rebuttal to this point, except to call people who make it “pious.” Gopnik just feels violent entertainment must be harmful.

I’m not saying that American culture and history doesn’t contribute to the nation’s gun violence; it does. But culture is not the same as cultural output, and pretending like you’re undoing centuries of shared understanding of large and complicated concepts like justice and liberty by tut-tutting about Call of Duty is not addressing culture in the slightest. (And it ignores that US gun culture is changing: gun ownership over the past few decades has been shrinking, and gun owners are increasingly older and whiter members of the population.)

This plaint that violent entertainment must be magically, uniquely hurting Americans is American narcissism at its most banal. It proceeds as if human experience outside American borders is something that not only doesn’t matter, it’s something that doesn’t even exist.

94
america politics
Apr 11

On Thatcher

If you hated her yesterday, nothing will have changed today; for those people, surely her death is no relief. Margaret Thatcher hadn’t existed as a political figure in years (not since she palled around with Augusto Pinochet in the late ’90s perhaps?) and if dementia was not vengeance enough for her detractors, what could death really offer? Thatcher’s opponents never had the satisfaction of seeing her deposed electorally, as we in Australia did with John Howard — surely the happiest revenge anyone could hope to take against a politician in a democratic country.

So Thatcher is worth considering (and dismissing) today because her ideas and influence are being newly discussed. On that count, I like Jessica Irvine:

Thatcher inherited an inflation-riddled, union dominated, heavily nationalised economy. Her early policy reforms were aimed solely at bringing inflation down from eye wateringly high levels above 25 per cent a year in the 1970s to around 4 to 5 per cent. By the mid 1980s, she had succeeded. Inspired by the ideas of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, she began slashing government spending in a way that would make the modern European troika proud.

But her austerity regime came at a price. That price was the jobs of three million Britons who suffered the indignity of unemployment during her rein. The British jobless rate stayed above 10 per cent for most of the 1980s, even as prices growth sank to a moderate 4-5 per cent. A world recession in the early 1980s didn’t help the jobless situation. But neither did pro-cyclical big cuts to government spending.

[…]

She deregulated financial markets – an event remembered today as “the Big Bang” – leading to an explosion of private equity firms and hedge funds in The City. Indeed, the seeds of the 2008 financial crisis were sown in her decision to abolish regulations on borrowing.

And Krugman:

Well, there’s a bit of a problem: Thatcher came to power in 1979, and imposed a radical change in policy almost immediately. But the big improvement in British performance doesn’t really show in the data until the mid-1990s. Does she get credit for a reward so long delayed?

This is, by the way, somewhat like a similar issue in America: right-wingers were eager to give Ronald Reagan credit for the productivity boom of the Clinton years, which also didn’t start until around 1995; if Reagan could get credit for events that were 14 years or more after his 1981 tax cut, shouldn’t Richard Nixon be given credit for anything good that happened in the Reagan years?

Anyway, I guess there is a case that the Thatcher changes in taxes, labor regulation, etc. created a more flexible economy, which made the good years under Blair possible. But it’s an awfully long lag. And there’s another possibility. For what happened in the 90s that arguably redounded very much to Britain’s benefit? Why, the rise of fancy finance — which was a huge boon to the country that contains the City.

And, why not, Germaine Greer (h/t Soto):

Thatcher’s strength derived directly from her limitations. If she had been better read, if she had been afflicted with imagination, if she had had a sense of humour, if she had had anywhere near as much insight into the lives of ordinary people as she claimed to have, she would have been unable to pursue her headlong career, riding roughshod over the consensus towards the property-owning debtor economy in which we now struggle. If socialism had been in better shape, she would not have been able to turn it into a dirty word or confuse it with totalitarianism and state monopoly capitalism. If the trade unions had not betrayed their own class, if they had understood the importance of organising all workers, including women, including those in the service sector, if they had not institutionalised inequality, the people might have defended the cause of labour.

Thatcher had her successes — and not just the symbolic, feminist success that was her election. There were markets that needed to be deregulated and industries that should not have been owned by the public. But even these commend her poorly. She deregulated and privatized with the zeal of an ideologue driven not by desire for good governance but by the venom her enemies, in turn, returned to her. “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul,” she wrote once, the sloganeering of a right-wing social engineer. Tasked with the duty of economic modernization, but unburdened by her fanaticism, Australia’s Paul Keating and Bob Hawke delivered the same successes as Thatcher — greater ones, in fact — without the misery, the nostalgia for empire, the disgusting tolerance of apartheid, or the class warfare. Don’t credit Thatcher’s toryhood for her successes; blame it for her failures.

24
politics england
Apr 09

It’s the “nobody promised you anything” philosophy that is all too absent in contemporary, consumer-driven culture.

Jennifer Rubin, “Margaret Thatcher’s political lessons for Republicans,” The Washington Post, April 8, 2013

This is confusing; the WaPo’s conservative blogger is complaining about “consumer-driven culture”? I understand market-suspicious lefties complaining about consumer culture, even though I think such complaints are vapid, but how can you exalt the market’s influence economically yet bemoan its influence culturally?

Or, if that is what you want to do, how can you not acknowledge the contradiction?

(There are market-suspicious conservatives, but unlike their lefty counterparts, they’d never admit to their skepticism.)

2
politics
Apr 08

The question for someone considering whether or not to support Clinton in 2016 is, will a Clinton 2016 campaign pass the Mark Penn Test? The Mark Penn Test, which I just invented, determines whether or not a person should be trusted with the presidency, based solely on one criterion: Whether or not they pay Mark Penn to do anything for their campaign. Paying Mark Penn means you’ve failed the Mark Penn Test.

Mark Penn is a pollster and political strategist and amoral P.R. creature who is generally wrong about everything. To find out how incompetent Mark Penn is at campaign strategy and how personally toxic he is in a campaign working environment go to your local library and check out literally any book about the 2008 presidential race. For the basics, check here and here. In short, he had no clue how the primaries actually worked and constantly pushed for the campaign to go as nasty and negative as possible, and everyone hated him and he was bad at his job and eventually he was fired.

Alex Pareene, “One thing we don’t know about Hillary,” Salon, April 4, 2013

I’d also like to nominate Terry McAuliffe for inclusion in this test.

EDIT: I read on; Pareene does include McAuliffe, as well as Howard Wolfson and Harold Ickes.

4
america politics
Apr 03


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