War and Democracy: Always Already Together Again

(((Alain Badiou on what results from democratic materialism's commitment to the proposition that there are only bodies and languages; what else, by the way, is there?)))

Alain Badiou in Radical Philosophy, 2005:

Today, natural belief can be summarized in a single statement:

There are only bodies and languages.

This statement is the axiom of our contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? Democratic materialism. The individual fashioned by the contemporary world recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone. [ . . . ]

Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. This is because the contemporary consensus, in recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. [ . . . ]

Having said that, democratic materialism acknowledges a global limit to its polymorphous and animalistic tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule over all bodies, will be termed dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of our ‘right to intervention’: legal, international and, if necessary, military intervention. Aggressive actions serve to rectify our universalistic claims, along with our linguistic sectarianism.

Bodies will be made to pay for their excesses of language. That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship – at any cost!) sustains the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the final analysis, war, and war alone, makes possible the alignment of languages.

War is the barely hidden materialist essence of democracy.

Democracy has always been at war with terrorism.

And always will be.

It's not Torture if You're not at Guantanamo

(((Those destroyed CIA videotapes of waterboarding; how they're not covered by the judge's order not to destroy evidence because the victims--yeah, I said it--weren't at Guantanamo Bay)))

According to CNN:

The Bush administration argued Friday that the CIA's destruction of videotapes that showed the interrogations of two al Qaeda suspects did not violate a court order because the suspects were not at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [ . . . ]

Joseph Hunt, an administration attorney, said the men in the videos were held at secret locations and did not fall under the category of those who were "now at" Guantanamo in Cuba.

"It is inconceivable that the destruction of the tapes could have violated the order," Hunt told the judge.

Okay, it's the judge's bad. They like to blame everything on those activist judges, don't they?

And yet . . . it is also a clear demonstration of bad faith on the part of the administration to even make this argument, never mind to have destroyed the evidence in the first place. Could it be any clearer that they will do precisely everything they think they can get away with?

Lenin Just Like Hitler and bin Laden

(((Historical Analysis by George W Bush, Heritage Foundation, Bloggers, Freedom, War on Terror, Ignoring Warnings (= Warning Signs?), Communist Revolution, Racist Nazi Rigged Elections, Terrible Cost in Lives and Treasure [sic])))

The world's foremost expert in the history of Communism and Nazism (I know that's redundant), President Bush gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, yesterday, warning us not to forget the warning signs Lenin and Hitler gave of the evil they were determined to perpetrate.

History teaches that underestimating [sic] the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia -- and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews -- and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Um. Treasure? WTF?

But more to the point, look at those two paragraphs. Never mind that Lenin (for all his flaws) was a strident anti-anti-semite. Lenin is accused of having "laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia," while Hitler "explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews" (nice use of the serial comma there, by the way). In which treatises, which Leninist version of Mein Kampf, did Lenin warn us that he wanted to rule a Jew-free world from the Pan-Slavic Fatherland Russia?

Or that he wanted the world to be subject to sharia?

And yet we have to let people get away with this kind of intellectual sloppiness because what really matters is that they all killed lots of people. Therefore, since all evil beings, all bad things, are essentially the same, Hitler and Lenin (and Osama bin Laden) must be essentially the same, which is to say, the opposite of us. The differences between them are subtleties. Nuances of no import.

How do we learn anything from this kind of propagandist pseudo-history?

How Not to Get It

This would make me think they'd been taking lessons from the Bush administration, if it weren't so characteristic of them, already. Indeed, so much so that the Iraq War looks like it models itself on an Israeli policy. Anyway, looks like the Gaza rockets have finally crossed a line. Or something.

Israeli cabinet ministers on Wednesday voted unanimously to declare the Gaza Strip an “enemy entity” in order to shut off fuel and power to the 1.4m Palestinians in the impoverished enclave if rocket attacks continue.

Since June the territory where 40 per cent of Palestinians live has been ruled exclusively by Hamas and its borders have been open only for humanitarian aid.

So we thought it would be a good idea to make sure the humanitarian workers had more to do, which is sure to stop those rockets, since we're seeing that choking harder has slowed them down so much. Oh, wait,

Timed with the arrival in Israel of Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, the move by Ehud Olmert’s administration shows exasperation with continued Palestinian militant rocket fire against the Negev.

Yep, clamping down is clearly working for Israel in the Occupied Territories, just like it always has. Not.

Three dozen young soldiers were wounded last week when rockets struck their base, sparking a public outcry for retaliatory action.

Oh, no! Not soldiers! Only terrorists would fire at soldiers!

Gradual sanctions, imposed by Israel in stages if the rockets do not stop, would allow in only enough fuel to power electrical generators at Gaza hospitals. The borders would be opened only for essential food and medical supplies. Water supplies would continue flowing at present levels, however.

Lawyers also advised the cabinet that any disruption in electricity should be restricted, to avoid violating international law by inflicting collective punishment on the civilian population. More than half the Gazan population is under 15 years old.

Ahhhh, I knew I saw the hand of Alberto Gonzales; at least he's found new work! If less than half the Gazan population were under 15, it would be acceptable to starve them. As it is, it is only possible legally to make them really, really hungry. Even if they did vote for terrorists.

Despite Israeli air strikes and Israeli Defence Forces forays to root out the rocket launchers, which have killed a dozen people in seven years and terrified thousands of citizens in Sderot, in northern Israel, homemade rockets rain down almost daily on Israeli soil.

Almost daily attacks that kill an average of two people a year? Hasn't anyone in Hamas figured out that those are pretty inefficient numbers? Maybe the strategy is to keep the pressure on without, in fact, killing lots of people, but I don't know that you can target those rockets accurately enough to reliably aim not to kill or hurt people.

Tzahi Hanegbi, defence committee chairman, told Israel’s Army Radio there was no need to “pamper” Gazans with fuel and electricity, and that a new incursion into the strip was inevitable.

Yes, fuel and electricity are examples of those modern American luxuries, like private jets. I mean, it's not like they won't have water.

What? You got a problem?

tags technorati : Israel, Palestine, Terrorism, Hamas, Gaza, Politics

Suicide Bombs

More news to embolden our enemies: Army suicide rates have skyrocketed.

There were 99 Army suicides last year -- nearly half of them soldiers who hadn't reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. [ . . . ] 69 were committed by troops who were not deployed in either war, though there were no figures immediately available on whether they had previously deployed.

Most striking is the youth of the suicides. There's a theory about that.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is ''failed intimate relationships, failed marriages.''

She said that although the military is worried about the stress caused by repeat deployments and tours of duty that have been stretched to 15 months, it has not found a direct relationship between suicides and combat or deployments.

''However, we do know that frequent deployments put a real strain on relationships, especially on marriages. So we believe that part of the increase is related to the increased stress in relationships,'' she said.

''Very often a young soldier gets a 'Dear John' or 'Dear Jane' e-mail and then takes his weapon and shoots himself,'' she said.

Notes an army chaplain, ''You're away from home, you have to put your life on hold. I know soldiers whose marriages have broken up or who couldn't pay their bills.''

Sounds to me like those army wives hate america. If they were real patriots, they would support our troops by staying in marriages that are impossible, emotionally and financially. By divorcing their husbands, breaking up with their boyfriends, or even just being too emotionally or financially demanding, they embolden the terrorists.

Why do army wives hate freedom?

License Plate of Fury

Speaking of special license plates, here's a good one from, of all places, Oklahoma.


Beause 9-11 is the Earth's Independence Day. Or something.

Is there a global war on poverty plate somewhere? Personally, I'd probably want a "global war on stupidity" plate.

tags technorati : War on Terror, License Plate

Doublespeak in Action

I think George Orwell himself wrote Bush's encomium to the new law that lets the NSA eavesdrop, without obtaining a warrant, on any communication involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States."

"When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," Bush said. "And when these same legal tools also protect the civil liberties of Americans, then we can have the confidence to know that we can preserve our freedoms while making America safer."

"Civil liberties" here apparently does not include the Fourth Amendment, or the First, as far as I can tell. But it gets better. Bush is threatening to further protect and extend our freedoms:

The new law updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it will expire in six months unless Congress renews it. Bush wants deeper, permanent changes. "We must remember that our work is not done," Bush prodded. "This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law.

The "clash of civilizations" is turning into the squabble among totalitarian family members.

tags technorati : FISA, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Politics, Civil Liberties

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Give Me Back My Star Chamber

Thank God for the new security bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. This legislation, approved by a razor-thin margin of 60-28, "would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas."

"Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said.

Excuses, excuses.

I'm writing an article on the Yankees. Every day I don't get to read all the major papers for free, I don't know what's going on with the Yankees. Of course I should have the New York papers, but is it too much to ask that I pay to read a bunch of irrelevant material?

On the other hand, the attitude also resembles that of our lazy-ass airport security, which can't be bothered to identify suspicious travel patterns, and so just makes everyone's lives miserable in a shotgun approach to security: if you take away everyone's everything, you're bound to take away the right guy's everything, too. This exemplifies the precision approach to fighting terrorism adopted by the Bush Administration.

Our senior friend at the White House continues:

"All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

Ahhhh, we need warrantless wiretap authority for the war in Iraq. I didn't even think of that one! I was thinking we could probably bust all those Islamist phone phreakers on pr0n charges, cause if they're rerouting calls all over God's green earth, you know they're anonymizing they're pr0n downloads, too. And Islamofascists love the child pr0n.

Anyway, all I'm saying is, it's a really good thing the Scientologists got penet.fi shut down. Otherwise, our lawyers would need warrantless wiretap authority so they could spend their precious time going after poor Julf.

Adding to the urgency for the administration is a secret ruling by a FISA judge earlier this year that declared surveillance of purely foreign communications that pass through a U.S. communications node illegal without a court-approved warrant -- a requirement that intelligence officials have described as unacceptably burdensome.

Right. So judges free of political pressure refuse to play along with Bush's bullshit "if you hate warrantless wiretapping, you hate America" approach to surveillance, so he gets into a political fight with Dems on the hill. This is a sick irony, that in the modern land of democratic freedoms it takes someone operating in secret to stand up for the Constitutional rights of Americans, rights the Declaration of Independence considers to be granted to us by our Creator (a creator Bush claims to believe in).

I don't believe in the creator, but I believe in the rights, and it runs right straight against my understanding of accountability that elected officials would be the ones to hand over those rights. It's the reverse of the Star Chamber. When the NSA comes to get me, I might actually request a secret trial.

tags technorati : Terrorism, Surveillance, National Security, Politics

What Does 'Moderate' Mean, Again?

US doing an arms deal with Saudi Arabia:

The officials said the arms deal aimed to bolster the militaries of the Sunni Arab states as part of a strategy to counter what it sees as a growing threat posed by Iran in the region.

"The role of the Sunni Arab neighbours is to send a positive, affirmative message to moderates in Iraq in government that the neighbours are with you," a senior State Department official told the New York Times on Friday.

Um, so "moderate" means "Sunni"? Am I the only one who sees a problem, here?

And here's the best part, we take the $20Bn we get selling weapons to the homeland of one of the most conservative versions of Islam in the world (Wahabbism), a country for whom the Qur'an and the Sunna comprise the constitution, and give it to Israel in the form of military aid.

Genius. More brilliant, even, than selling arms to Iran and funneling the proceeds to "freedom fighters" in central America, where running the sale through Israel was necessary as icing on the cake.

tags technorati : Saudi Arabia | Arms Sales | Arab Moderates

Standards Do, After All, Facilitate Communication

A spec for My Enemy's Enemy is my Friend (MEEF), via nettime.

Abstract MEEF, My Enemy's Enemy is my Friend uses the World Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework (RDF) to allow for automatic generation of ontology for networks based upon shared antipathies.

Status of this Document. This is the first draft proposal specification for MEEF. It provides a description of a basic vocabulary which can be used in generating MEEF applications. MEEF files can be added to documents and web resources as Unicode. Versions of MEEF will incorporate the FOAF vocabulary in order that friends of your enemies can also be readily identifiable.

Sample properties:

Property:tv
This property identifes the enemy's favourite tv programme.

Property:social
This property specifies social networking mechanisms used by the enemy. Where FOAF is not used, other tools must currently be used to identify their 'friends'.

Property:love
Enemies love some things. It is important to be able to identify them.

Property:rumour:URI
This property locates a URI where a rumour concerning the entity can be found. Rumours may be generated without including any of the identifying characteristics of the entity and assigned to multiple enemies. The re-use principle is important.

And let's do a declaration:

A sample MEEF declaration incorporating FOAF:

<meef:Entity>Bush</meef:Entity>
<Property:Antipathy:open/>
<foaf:person>
<foaf:name>George Bush</foaf:name>
<foaf:homepagerdf:resource=
http://www.whitehouse.gov/>
</foaf:person>
<meef:property:love>cocaine</meef:property:love>

tags technorati : TEOMEIMF, MEEF, Enemies, Politics, Blowback, Terrorism, War on Terror,Bush, Cocaine

 

Hamas Frees Abducted Journalist?

No, not yet. But they've captured an Army of Islam leader in Gaza. What will Israel and the US do when Hamas proves themselves capable of winning against an al-Qaida-related group in Palestine? I hope they're thinking about it, because it seems imminent, but they've not shown themselves especially capable of thinking ahead on this stuff.

tags technorati : Hamas, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Army of Islam

A Coup by an Elected Government

Say what you want about Fisk, he is spot on:

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ? [ . . . ]

It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other). [ . . . ]

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?

Technorati Tags: Palestine, Fisk, Israel, Middle East, Hamas

To Hell with Checks and Balances

The Constitution is over-rated, anyway.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. He also raps jurists who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences.”

The text of the speech, scheduled for delivery at the American Enterprise Institute, was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. It outlines, in part, what qualities the Bush administration looks for when selecting candidates for the federal bench.

“We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments,” Gonzales says in the prepared speech. “That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

Let me see if I've got this straight. The Attorney General wants to make sure that the President is looking for the right qualities in federal judges, by which he means, deference to the executive in matters of national security. The trick here, it seems to me, is that it is not the job of federal judges "to know what is in the national security interests of our country;" it is the job of federal judges to know what is and isn't consistent with the Constitution of the US. This is like saying that we won't hire political science faculty at a college who don't "know enough about biology" to know that the bio department should be running the school.

Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, has in the past warned about judges who inject their personal beliefs in cases. But his prepared remarks Wednesday mark his sharpest words over concerns about the federal judiciary — the third, and equal, branch of government.

Judges who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences, they actually reduce the credibility and authority of the judiciary,” Gonzales says. “In so doing, they undermine the rule of law that strengthens our democracy.”

Isn't it ironic? Apparently, public political attacks on federal judges do nothing to undermine the independence of the judiciary ("the third, and equal, branch of government"), and appointing judges based on their willingness to defer to an imperial presidency does not "undermine the rule of law that strengthens our democracy."

And war is peace, too, by the way. Viva Baghdad!

Lies, Damned Lies, and The Rule of Law

From the Rude Pundit:

When O'Reilly asked Bush about defining torture, Bush got all pissy once again: "We don't talk about techniques. And the reason we don't talk about techniques is because we don't want the enemy to be able to adjust. We're in a war...one thing is that you can rest assured we're not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don't want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield." Motherfucker sticks to a talking point like a barnacle sticks to a whale.

Yeah, torture is a "technique." Revealing to terrorists that you use it will change their tactics . . . to, um, avoiding torture. Or wait, avoiding capture. Or, killing more people. Or . . . organizing around the fact that you -- a modern liberal democracy -- have legalized torture. There it is.

But the really sick part is how the Geneva Conventions are, per Alberto Gonzales, not applicable to people we don't want them to apply to. It's really not about the principle that torture, inhuman(e) treatment, cruelty, are wrong, and, as our friend Joe Lieberman helpfully notes, unjust. No, fighting a just war justly includes, apparently, the legal, systematic, institutional(ized) use of torture. Thinking otherwise is, per Joe and Alberto, "quaint" at best, and unjust at worst. Just dead wrong.

And we haven't even mentioned habeas corpus. Thomas Jefferson is rolling in his grave. I hope.