Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 618
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
WHAT TO DO IN CENTRAL AFRICA? Andrew Northrup has a quite long, and typically thoughtful, comment in the comments for the post directly beneath this one, asking the above question, in essence. You should go read it.
This question has, understandably, come up in many comments discussions on the various blogs paying attention to the Congo, such as Matthew Yglesias, Andrew, John Cole, and many others. Another understandable and frequent response goes along the lines of "this conflict is utterly messy, it would be very messy to help out, and it's just not sufficiently in our 'interest' to expend tax dollars on it."
Here's my non-sarcastic response to Andrew (I'll spare you the further sarcasm I dumped over at John Cole's Balloon Juice in response to the notion that there were no "good guys" being killed, and it's just a civil war that's too expensive to interfere in):
The short answer, Andrew, is that these are failed countries with essentially no viable government.
These are, of course, not nations that were "designed to take care of themselves." They were colonies designed to send wealth back to Europe. And they are in no shape to reform themselves, by themselves, at present, into anything remotely resembling viable states.
What's necessary, I think, is for the Big Powers of the planet to establish a UN mandate over, quite possibly, all of Congo, Rwanda, and possibly chunks of Uganda, supervise a Mandate government made up of some form of combination of locals, involvement from the Organization for African Unity, and the UN, with a massive international force of peacekeepers from many countries. Manpower from China and India might be very helpful, as well as Pakistan and the usual contributors, but with logistic and air support from the US and Europe.
Would it be extremely messy and difficult, and take years to sort out? Of course. Would it be quite imperfect? Of course.
But the US and Europe and much of the rest of world can, in fact, easily afford it as a tiny fraction of 1% of GDP, so far as I can estimate, and I can't, frankly, understand how simply letting the situation continue is conscionable.
I've never thought that the cliche of "Never Again" was supposed to, or should, apply only to Jews, or that Africans, or anyone else, should get an exemption.
It's just wrong to let people be slaughtered when you can stop it.
The French intervention on behalf of the UN in Congo will be short-lived and localised and will have a negligible impact on tribal conflict, according to a French military briefing paper obtained by the Guardian.
The document confirms military analysts' pessimism about the likely success of the mission, which began on Friday, to rein in the latest outburst of violence in the civil war which has killed an estimated 4.7 million people in four years.
France, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Norway have agreed in principle to send a bridging force of 1,400 to the north-eastern town of Bunia, in Ituri province. The advance unit comprises about 100 members of the French special forces.
The document says: "The operation in Bunia is politicaly [sic] and military [sic] high risk; very sensitive and complex. France has no specific interest in the area except solidarity with the international community." The end of the intervention, it says, has been "firmly established at Sept 1st 2003", by which time a contingent of Bangladeshi peacekeepers is expected in Bunia.
The Bangladeshis are to relieve 700 Uruguayan peacekeepers, who have been humiliated by their failure to prevent a string of massacres.
During a 10-day battle for control of the town last month they remained in their barracks, without the numbers or a mandate to stop the slaughter of hundreds of civilians.
Two unarmed UN military observers were murdered, and seven peacekeepers taken to hospital after having nervous breakdowns.
A European military planner who was issued a copy of the French document said: "This is the most cynical military briefing I've read in my entire life. Everybody is just laughing at it."
François Grignon of the International Crisis Group writes in a forthcoming report on Congo: "This intervention is, on the face of it, totally insufficient to meet the needs of Ituri's pacification."
A brief patrol by the French troops yesterday made the mission's modest ambitions apparent. Four jeeps packed with infantrymen drove 200 metres through the town centre, accompanied by as many western journalists. For 20 minutes groups of children sang for the cameras, then the troops rolled back to their airport base.
There was no patrol on Saturday during a gun battle in central Bunia. "We are here to secure the airport for the arrival of the international force. It is not our mandate to intervene in fighting between armed groups, only in direct attacks on civilians," the colonel in command said.
Words can't express how enraged and outraged I am at this cynical cover of genocide.
You can help stop it.
Write your Congressional representative; write your Senator; write your Minister; write your politician; demand military intervention to stop the genocide.
Write or call or do whatever it takes to stop the slaughter.
PROPORTION: I dropped by Mickey Kaus's blog, and almost had a seizure when I read that "Blair" had resigned, several times. Migod, Tony Blair was forced out?
No, it was that stupid little story about the New York Times metro reporter.
Sheesh. Mickey Kaus (who had the great graciousness to post his good wishes here when I was ill a month ago) seems focused on the Times and Howell Raines and Jayson Blair, etc., over the, y'know, world. Like, on this planet? Bigger than a newsroom?
The global thing? A few billion people?
It's great to focus on your specialty, but, gee, how many hundreds of thousands of people has anyone at the Times killed, compared to the militias in the Congo?
That would probably be a proportion of, in the last decade, a couple of million to.... oh, gee, has anyone at the Times committed genocide lately? Or even committed cannibalism on a single soul?
Can we have a sense of proportion about our outrage, people? Which is worse? A careless reporter, or several million slaughtered people?
MICHAEL WALZER, whom I respect the hell out of on just war, and everything in general, speaks on Israeli policy and many subjects. One:
"You have to defeat the settlers movement. The great mistake Rabin and Barak made was that on the same day they were elected, they should have found a way to challenge the settler movement. Maybe to evacuate a single settlement as a symbol."
"You have to start acting as if 'little Israel' is what you want, because only little Israel would have a stable Jewish majority. You have to decide that your country has a certain size, and even if, for security reasons, you can't withdraw to that boundary right now, you have to decide that this is the boundary of the country, in some future time."
Quite right.
Read The Rest Scale for other wise thoughts: 3 out of 5.
Just saying that I've now watched the Buffy last episode a few times, and it damn well still rocks.
Just saying.
(That was nifty.)
Okay, not with certain characters getting sliced deeply, and actually dying. Um, that was bad. Er, I hope everyone knows there is a difference between fictional characters, and actual murder and genocide, right?
And I have a very simple take. Perhaps it's too simplistic, but there it is.
Substitute the word "Jews" for "Lendu" or "Hema."
Then say, gee, gosh, it would cost a lot to save them.
Tough luck if millions die, because it's expensive, it's awkward, it's tough, to save them.
Bye, bye, Jews. Too bad. It's expensive to save them. It's expensive to save you black people, you Hema, you Lendu. It's tough to keep track of your names, even. Even your clan, your tribe, your people.
Bye-bye. Die in peace. Die by the thousands. Die by the tens of thousands. Die by the hundreds of thousands. Die by the millions. I have fast food. Bye-bye. I don't need to go to trouble. Bye-bye. Die well. Bye-bye. My conscience is untroubled. I could have saved you for a few days of work, but I don't want to be troubled. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Die well.
I can't be bothered to take a few minutes or hours to help stop it.
Bye-bye.
Die well.
Die.
ADDENDUM: I wanted to do an e-mail on this, but haven't been able to connect to my server for two days (plus). If anyone is listening, this would be a nice post to link to and pass on, I think. Anyone out there? Is this thing on?
BUNIA, Congo, June 10 -- Three days after gun battles between warring ethnic militias brought this town to a terrified standstill, the newly arrived commander of the multinational force dispatched by the United Nations pledged today "to reassure and to protect" its people. But he made clear he did not intend to disarm the fighters, many of them children.
Of course not.
Speaking to reporters on the airport tarmac here, the commander of the French-led force, Brig. Gen. Jean Paul Thonier, said he would not strip the militias of their guns, venture outside the city or get in the middle of a gun battle. "Separating the factions is not part of my mission," he said.
Of course it isn't; he doesn't have the firepower to, even if he wanted to.
His spokesman, Gerard DuBois, described the mission as threefold: to protect the population, help aid agencies carry out their work and provide security within Bunia city limits.
And they'll be very lucky if they can manage to do that.
And the rest of Congo? Go die.
At the moment, the Hema ethnic militia controls the town; its rivals, the Lendu militias, are positioned somewhere on the outskirts. Lendu civilians have deserted the city.
Aid groups, unable to deliver food and medical relief, except to those taking shelter in two heavily guarded United Nations compounds, have been pressing for the militias to be disarmed.
"We need a demilitarized city," said Nigel Pearson, the medical coordinator of Medair, a relief agency. He added that the planned deployment of 1,400 troops was nothing more than "gesture politics."
You don't say?
We've now seen response from a number of blogs on this.
Most ignore it.
Some have taken up my calling for massive armed intervention and peace-making.
A couple confusedly think the situation calls for "peace-keepers." (No.)
At least one manages, apparently, to put primary blame on George Bush for getting the world angry with America (see comments on my last entry on this topic).
A number agree it's a terrible thing, a terrible thing, but feel that either a) it's not our problem; or b) there's nothing we can do; or c) there's nothing we should do.
All I have to say to those last is that I remember the Shoah, the Holocaust, and I hear your answer being the same.
And that's my short answer to that.
And I, for your own soul's sake, ask that you might reconsider.
Where do we go from here? That's the question the Buffy ensemble asked in one of the finest episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the musical episode, a highlight of the much-disputed Season 6 -- or at least, much-disputed by the type of person who knows lyrics from an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which season they're from, and who sang them.
Because let's face it: there are fans, and there are fans. And for seven glorious seasons, Buffy has consistently attracted the second type: your scholarly theoryhead, your web geek uploading fan fiction, your cocktail party evangelist. Just because our show has been staked through the heart -- the series finale was shown a month ago, with all the requisite media mourning and top-10 lists -- doesn't mean that our fanhood has ended with it. At last, we can start living in the past.
All Along, Most Iraqi Relics Were 'Safe and Sound'
[...]
The museum was indeed heavily looted, but its Iraqi directors confirmed today that the losses at the institute did not number 170,000 artifacts as originally reported in news accounts.
Actually, about 33 priceless vases, statues and jewels were missing.
In the end: a complete non-story. But as many people will believe it as believe that Bill Clinton getting a haircut held up LAX airport, or that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, or that the Clintons engaged in a crime in "Whitewater," or believe that Paul Wolfowitz said the reason for going to war was to get Iraq's oil.
THE DARKER SIDE OF MILITARY TRAINING in Britain. I don't believe in the slightest this is unique to the UK.
It was 10.30pm, half an hour before 'lights out', and the barracks were quiet. Duncan Millington, a shy teenage recruit in the second month of his basic training at Bassingbourne army base in Hertfordshire, was doing sit-ups by his bed. A dozen other young trainees were preparing to sleep.
But Millington was to get little sleep that night. Over the next half an hour he was subjected to a frightening, humiliating ordeal, when one of his fellow squad members stripped to expose his genitals, sexually propositioned him, pushed him against a locker and finally squatted, stripped from the waist, above Millington's face.
The rest of his squad were present throughout, but no one intervened and the young recruit was left shaking and in tears, his former confidence in a career in the military utterly shaken. The harassment carried on for another month, culminating in a more serious assault.
[...]
But the news last weekend that a group of British soldiers may have humiliated Iraqi prisoners by forcing them into simulated sexual acts raised concerns that war had exposed a deep-seated culture of sexual harassment and violence in the Army in peacetime.
Eighteen-year-old Gary Bartlam, of the Royal Fusiliers, was arrested by military police last month after workers in a processing laboratory saw pictures of the alleged mistreatment of PoWs. One photograph apparently showed trouserless British soldiers with Iraqis who were captured during fighting in Basra kneeling in front of them. Senior MoD sources have told The Observer they are 'braced' for further allegations of torture.
An Observer investigation based on the analysis of records and transcripts of courts martial held over the last three years indicates that incidents such as those in Basra or Bassingbourne are far from isolated.
A quarter of all general courts martial so far this year have involved allegations of sexual offences. Last year the total was a fifth, itself a slightly higher proportion than in 2001. The offences include rape, indecent assault on both young children and adults, and a variety of bizarre and degrading sexually suggestive practices.
Page after page of court testimony reveals a barrack-room culture of homoerotic bullying, low-level sexual harassment of women, occasional serious assaults on both sexes, endemic use of and trading in illegal hardcore pornography and outbursts of violence, all of this exacerbated by a massive consumption of alcohol.
In one incident, similar to that involving both Millington and the Iraqi soldiers, a more senior soldier ordered colleagues to haul a recruit from his bed, tie him at the wrists and ankles, strip him and then drop their trousers and squat over his head. A knife was produced and a threat made to sever the recruit's genitals.
Cases heard by army judges over the past 18 months have included those of a young soldier who raped a young German girl in a car park, a sergeant who raped a female colleague at a base in Cyprus, a male sergeant instructor who seriously assaulted five young teenage male recruits while they slept, a corporal who took photographs of young soldiers in showers and offered others money for pictures of their genitals, a captain who indecently assaulted junior soldiers in a bar over a period of weeks, a military intelligence officer found guilty of distributing child pornography, and a drunken corporal who forced his penis into a junior female recruit's mouth.
If you're "trained" to do this with your mates, why not with POWs?
Japan detained two North Korean cargo ships in Japanese ports today, moves that North Korea denounced as sanctions and that Japan defended as safety inspections.
"We are ready to thoroughly inspect all North Korean vessels at ports across the country," Chikage Ogi, Japan's transport minister, said at a news conference, hours before her inspectors scoured the North Korean ships for violations.
[...]
After the inspections, Maizuru transport ministry officials ordered the detention of the Namsan 3, a 298-ton freighter, until its North Korean crew of 16 could fix three major safety violations: lack of charts of surrounding seas, a hole in its bulkhead, and a doorsill to the cabin that was too low to prevent water from flooding in.
Farther north, at Otaru port in Hokkaido, northern Japan, local transport officials ordered the detention for safety violations of the 178-ton Daehungrason 2, which was carrying a cargo of crabs.
[...]
"If this is part of `sanctions' against the D.P.R.K., we cannot but regard it as a very serious development," the official Korean Central News Agency said, using the initials of North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
For once, they're right. I don't know how far this is going to go, and I'm a bit afraid to find out.
IT IS?: Odd John Kerry quote buried in this profile of Howard Dean and John Kerry fund raising amongst young New Yorkers.
Kerry also took questions from the audience; the last came from a glamorous young woman wearing a low-cut white dress who wanted to know how he felt about the charge -- levelled by Dean, among others -- that he was too similar to Bush to lead the Democrats. "The Bush Administration agenda isn't conservative Republicanism, and it's not radical Republicanism -- it's extreme libertarianism," he replied. "We certainly don't need another Republican Party."
I wasn't aware that extreme libertarians support foreign intervention, huge subsidies to domestic agriculture and industry, laws restricting the private lives of Americans, laws increasing the ability of government to surveille the citizenry, and changing the tax laws to massively shift wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. Just for starters.
I suppose it's because I'm not an extreme libertarian -- or not more of one than I am a "liberal" -- that I missed the memo on this.
ANNE APPLEBAUM'S GULAG is rightfully getting attention. Here is some.
It is a story of almost limitless misery - of female inmates raped to death, of children torn from their mothers and neglected to the point of starvation, of men tortured until they "confessed" to anti-Stalinist "crimes", of a dehumanised and brutalised workforce upon whose hard labour the communist project was partially built. It is also a story almost wholly unknown here in the West, where, by grisly contrast, the names of Nazi concentration camps are household words.
[...]
It is still impossible to say how many people died in the camps of Soviet Russia - Applebaum's book quotes various estimates from 10 to 20 million. Yet, "in terms of numbers," she says, "the Soviet system certainly killed more people than did the Nazis, partly because it was there longer. The Nazi experience was a short, extremely brutal 12 years, and the Soviet experience lasted more or less throughout the 20th century.
"It's not a competition in atrocity, but I would say that the Nazi and the Soviet camps belong in the same context. These were two terrible people, Hitler and Stalin, who both did terrible things on the same continent at the same time. In some ways their camps had the same intellectual origins, and they should be compared."
The differences lay in the camps' function, she says, and in the kinds of people imprisoned. "There's no direct equivalent in the Soviet system of the six Nazi extermination camps. When you entered Auschwitz, you were pretty sure you were going to die; in the Soviet camps you could very well die, you could be worked to death, but your life was more flexible. You could also climb the camp hierarchy, you could wheel and deal and make friends with the guards. You could even become a guard."
That does not mean to say that life was "better" as a prisoner of the Russian regime - if one can classify relative levels of inhumanity - nor that entire camps did not die of starvation, say, simply because a prison commandant had not organised regular deliveries of food.
[...]
"World War Two is still remembered in Britain and America as a wholly just war," Applebaum says, "the one war in which we did nothing wrong. It's very difficult for people to understand that we fought a war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another genocidal dictator, and that we liberated the camps of Nazi Germany while allowing the camps of Stalin's Soviet Union to expand.
"World War Two is still remembered in Britain and America as a wholly just war," Applebaum says, "the one war in which we did nothing wrong. It's very difficult for people to understand that we fought a war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another genocidal dictator, and that we liberated the camps of Nazi Germany while allowing the camps of Stalin's Soviet Union to expand.
"That's something I learned while I was writing the book. They did expand after the war: we assumed that they didn't, but they did. Soviet tyranny expanded. To this day we have trouble thinking about the Second World War as a real failure, which on those terms it was."
The Cold War, on the other hand, was "one of the great achievements of the West," she says. "The Soviet system was a criminal system, and Stalin wanted to spread it around the world." It's her hope, therefore, that the experience of those imprisoned within the Gulag "will become part of our popular memory of the 20th century".
Here is what Foreign Affairs thought. Here is her own page on Gulag. Here is the excellent Sunday New York Times Book Review by Michael McFaul. Here is that of the Financial Times. David Remnick in The New Yorker is particularly essential.
The administration at Solovki put up a sign at the main camp, which captured perfectly the Leninist program. It read, "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness."
EYE ON THE BALL(S): In the face of the national crisis, the British House of Lords has, um, gripped the bull by its horns, and voted decisively to ban sex in lavatories (toilets, the loo, dearie).
MEAT IS US: Excellent review of neuropsychologist Simon Hattenstone's Into the Silent Land; Hattenstone is being compared to Oliver Sacks.
The book has no right to hang together, but somehow it does, quite beautifully, thanks to the narrator - a melancholic neuropsychologist tortured by the impossibility of understanding the brain.
[...]
In one story, a nightmare, he is taken in front of an ethics committee after admitting: "My area of supposed expertise, neuropsychology, is the subject about which I feel the most profound ignorance." There is something of the bewildered innocent in the narrator - a wide-eyed Gulliver travelling through the alien land of the mind.
[...]
How did he get into neuropsychology? Well, he says, he was always interested in it as a child - even though he didn't know the word for it. "Not so much how the brain works, but how absurd that we are these meat puppets and we go round with this level of consciousness. A lot of kids have these deep philosophical thoughts, and it gets smoothed out along the way." He looks down to his fingers and wiggles them. "I used to look at my hands and think, is that part of me? If I cut my finger off, is that still part of me? And how far d'you have to go before you aren't yourself any more?"
Again, he says it's amazing how we are just these chunks of meat, yet the whole universe exists within us.
About the book:
Well it's about how personal identity is fragile, and how at one level we're basically meat and at another level we're basically fiction - human beings are storytelling machines, and the self is a story, and we tell a story about ourselves, and we just pick up on the story." He stops, defeated. "I do find it very difficult when people ask what it's about. I haven't found a formula. Can you suggest one?"
TEXAS MANHUNT SCANDAL: Thomas Nephew continues to follow the case of what appears to have been illegal activities by Texas Republicans to illegally make use of Federal Homeland Security agencies (and, now, possibly the FBI as well) for purely partisan reasons.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.
Thomas also points to the BBC's online diary of activists protesting against Mugabe last week. Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.
THE SLOW QUARANTINING OF NORTH KOREA has begun. Also:
North Korea declared today for the first time that it was seeking to develop nuclear weapons so that it could reduce the size of a million-man army it can no longer afford.
The announcement came on the same day that several administration officials said the United States and its Asian allies were planning to track and inspect suspect sea shipments out of North Korea.
Administration officials said that those steps would stop short of a full embargo, but would amount to what one official called "selective interdiction." The effort is aimed at curbing the weapons exports of North Korea and cutting off its sources of cash, officials said. North Korea has shipped missiles to the Middle East, including Iran, and to Pakistan.
[...]
Japan began the process, sending 1,900 "safety inspectors" and policemen to meet a North Korean ferry suspected for years as being the link that allowed North Koreans living in Japan to transfer money home. When it became clear that the ferry would be inspected regularly, the North suspended the service.
American officials say those inspections are just a beginning. They are encouraging allies to stop ships and inspect them for drugs, as Australia did a month ago. Whether the United States itself will attempt to interdict shipments is unclear.
[...]
The effort "will be focused on those activities which require no additional laws, no new international treaties, no going to the United Nations Security Council," a senior official said. "Look at the Japanese, who can't stop transfers of money on North Korean ships, but suddenly discovered they can do `safety inspections.' " Other techniques like that are under consideration.
The idea here is, obviously, to increase the stranglehold on North Korea while attempting to avoid any acts or incidents that North Korea can capitalize upon as an excuse to launch a military attack on the South, or on Japan, the US, or anyone else.
The problem with this is that the underlying premise fails: the Leadership of the Dear Leader is so fundamentally irrational and unpredictable that the regime could declare war against the fascist puppet paper tiger of the US because, they would announce, of the way George Bush combed his hair that day, which obviously signals the intent of the US to commence all-out invasion.
They don't need any excuse for an attack, because the only people they need to persuade are their own people, most of whom are prepared to believe that Kim Jong II spends much of his time at his Lunar Base, since the Moon has always belonged to Korea, and helps Korea's juche (self-reliance). When you live in a land where the only media is a direct speaker in your home from the regime, to which you get up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and there is no off switch, it's no more implausible than to be told that Kim Jong Il is also now annexing Jupiter, because it is so pretty, and was originally created by a Korean, anyway.
In short: Korean situation will continue to be extremely worrisome, and our main angle of response needs to be to continue to try to woo China as an ally in dealing with North Korea.
Your Moralising Quotient of 0.04 compares to an average Moralising Quotient of 0.25. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are more permissive than average.
Your Interference Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Interference Factor of 0.19. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are less likely to recommend societal interference in matters of moral wrongdoing, in the form of prevention or punishment, than average.
Your Universalising Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Universalising Factor of 0.25. This means you are less likely than average to see moral wrongdoing in universal terms - that is, without regard to prevailing cultural norms and social conventions (at least as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned).
The ancient treasures of Nimrud, unaccounted for since Baghdad fell two months ago, have been located in good condition in the country's Central Bank -- in a secret vault-inside-a-vault submerged in sewage water, American officials said today.
They also said that fewer than 50 items from the Iraq Museum's main exhibition collection remain missing after the looting and destruction that followed the capture of Baghdad by United States forces.
[...]
An official with the American-led occupation force said at a news briefing that the number of artifacts looted or lost from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had been exaggerated. Of the 170,000 initially thought missing, about 3,000 objects remain unaccounted for. Of those, only 47 are main exhibition items, the official said.
So, there's the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks.
[...]
This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his "great bewilderment". "Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of [his] knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects," says Flynn. "Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting." To Flynn it is also odd that George didn't seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. "There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out," he suggests.
On Sunday night, in a remarkable programme on BBC2, the architectural historian Dan Cruikshank both sought and found. Cruikshank had been to the museum in Baghdad, had inspected the collection, the storerooms, the outbuildings, and had interviewed people who had been present around the time of the looting, including George and some US troops. And Cruikshank was present when, for the first time, US personnel along with Iraqi museum staff broke into the storerooms.
One, which had clearly been used as a sniper point by Ba'ath forces, had also been looted of its best items, although they had been stacked in a far corner. The room had been opened with a key. Another storeroom looked as though the looters had just departed with broken artefacts all over the floor. But this, Cruikshank learned, was the way it had been left by the museum staff. No wonder, he told the viewers - the staff hadn't wanted anyone inside this room. Overall, he concluded, most of the serious looting "was an inside job".
Cruikshank also tackled George directly on events leading up to the looting. The Americans had said that the museum was a substantial point of Iraqi resistance, and this explained their reticence in occupying it. Not true, said George, a few militia-men had fired from the grounds and that was all. This, as Cruikshank heavily implied, was a lie. Not only were there firing positions in the grounds, but at the back of the museum there was a room that seemed to have been used as a military command post. And it was hardly credible that senior staff at the museum would not have known that. Cruikshank's closing thought was to wonder whether the museum's senior staff - all Ba'ath party appointees - could safely be left in post.
Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that - these days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.
That last point is the key. Just as many on the right will believe and repeat anything bad about those on the left, so many on the left, both within the US and without, will hear anything bad about the Bush Administration and know that, of course, The Truth Has Been Uncovered, and will eagerly repeat it as far and wide and fast as they can, along with accompanying condemnation and then throwing it onto the infinitely tall Heap Of Evidence That Bush And His Minions Are Satan (or, to put it in more useful terms for the milieu: Worse Than Nixon And, Basically, Hitler).
Man, there's plenty to be against Bush for: horrific economic policies, rapacious energy and environmental policies, a foreign policy that has us hated around the world, incompetent and insufficient and stingy planning for the occupations and reformations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and so on, that one doesn't have to simply take every accusation that comes down the pike, and chortlingly throw it into your personal megaphone, unexamined and unsupported save by desire to believe.
They say the life unexamined isn't worth living. The information unexamined isn't worth passing on.
BATMAN: The Animated Series. I watched it for all these years, and only fully grokked and remembered tonight that Mark Hamill is the voice of the Joker.
Read The Rest Scale: if you're a nutcase Batman fan.
WORLD TRADE CENTER DUST: "Mindles H. Dreck" of Asymmetrical Information has the results of a particle analysis, as presented last week at the Museum of Natural History, of the debris dust floating around NYC for months after September 11th.
Microscopic analysis of WTC dust by Nicholas Petraco, BS, MS, DABC, FAAFS, FNYMS at The New York Microscopic Society lecture held at AMNH 28 May 2003
45.1% Fiberglass, rock wool (insulation, fireproofing) 31.8% Plaster (gypsum), concrete products (calcium sulfate, selenite, muscodite) 7.1% Charred wood and debris 2.1% Paper fibers 2.1% Mica flakes 2.0% Ceiling tiles (fiberglass component) 2.0% Synthetic fibers 1.4% Glass fragments 1.3% Human remains 1.4% Natural fibers
trace asbestos (it became illegal to use during the construction of the WTC)
Other trace elements: aluminum, paint pigments, blood, hair, glass wool with resin, and prescription drugs were found.
As a born and bred New Yorker who has lived the majority of his life in NYC (aside from eight years in Seattle, a year in Boston, a half year in East Lansing, Michigan, and some long temporary stays elsewhere, including a month in Britain), in every borough save for Staten Island, and who was living for a year and a half on Long Island in 2001, moving to Boulder in December, I knew that I was breathing in, among other things, a small quantity of human remains from September until mid-December.
Charming to know the likely percentage. Also noted:
Fiberglass particles are smaller than asbestos and lodge deeper into lungs creating more serious long-term health hazards than asbestos like white lung disease which will become more evident 5, 10, 20 years from 11 Sep 2001.
