Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

IAN WELSH, quite reasonably, has this to say today:

The government should not (I won’t say “does not” because they do it anyway) have the right to punish anyone without a timely trial before their peers, the right to see the evidence against them and the right to face their accusers. [Welsh]

Never one to miss the pertinent point, and focus on something barely related, I tripped over the phrase “have the right.” Because, what’s a right?

Jack Crow:

[A] right has a whole lot less to do with a quality you possess (as in, nothing), and a whole hell of a lot more (as in, everything) to do with how much power you have and hold, how many people you can force or persuade to agree with you, and how much loot you can pool in order to defend the list of things you want to do, as well as stave off the efforts of those who want to stop you. [Crow]

It’s certainly not that Welsh misses this conception of “rights,” for he’s said this very thing, “I won’t say ‘does not’ [have the right] because they do it anyway[.]“

That said, of course. The government is not justified in punishing anyone. Period. Much less without the customary judicial accouterments, those stalwart facades of justice: a timely trial before their peers, allowing the accused to see the evidence against them, to face their accusers, and so on. But they do it anyway.

[Hat tip: Charles Davis]

APPARENTLY PRESIDENT OBAMA takes something of an originalist view of the constitution and the fourth amendment. Through the arguments of his people in the federal prosecutors office this interpretation becomes clear.

[Emphasis added.] The legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read. [Wired]

The founding fathers didn’t say anything about electronic mail, suckas! Papers and effects, LOL. Was this interpretation of the fourth amendment the impetus behind all those “paperless society” campaigns?

Download your email and delete it off the server every 179ZERO! days, kids. So much for the convenience of “cloud computing.”

Question Everything

• Pay attention in class… unless you’ve already mastered the material.
• Don’t distract others… unless you are creating a diversion.
• Don’t make fun of people… unless they are an asshole.
• Don’t do anything to hurt others… unless they are trying to hurt you.
• Be respectful to your teacher… unless they’re full of shit.
• Take your turn in class or play… unless you don’t want to.

[Via: this isn't happiness.]

PLEASE TURN TO PAGE 246 in your songbook, to Saint Steven’s hymn, Shoplifters of the World Unite.

Man Bites God

Father Jones, 42, was discussing Mary and the birth of Jesus when he went on to the subject of how poor and vulnerable people cope in the run-up to Christmas.

‘My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,’ he told his stunned congregation at St Lawrence and St Hilda in York.

‘I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

‘I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

‘I would ask them not to take any more than they need. I offer the advice with a heavy heart. Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift. [Daily Mail]

Concerned, friendly atheist, Hemant Mehta, zooms past the myriad moral issues that result in modern-day people finding themselves poor, vulnerable, struggling to make ends meet and running out of options. He zeroes in instead on the hairsplitting he groks the priest is engaging in:

Because burglary is very different from shoplifting? [Mehta]

Well, when you really look at it, yes. Yes it is.

Burglary is personal. The victim feels that their home, their personal space has been violated. If the victim is also struggling to get along in lean times, they are harmed in their need for the stolen effects.

Shoplifting from a large national business, as the priest specifies, is not personal because a large national business is not a person. What’s more, being large, it is more able to absorb petty losses to shoplifting.

This priest, religious context aside, offers sound, pragmatic advice for people who find themselves languishing toward the left end of our graphical diagram of human nature, that is, people that could be said to be ethically justified in the use of force for self preservation.

“I would ask them not to take any more than they need,” is sound, pragmatic advice for everyone, in a general sense. Especially for those who approach life in society with deference to subsistence.

Books that Changed Me: A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz

HERE IS A FANTASTIC PIECE of literature. It’s been featured previously in this space. The novel manages to hit upon all of the recurring themes rattling around inside Your Montag’s head, and clinging tenuously to the pages of this blog.

Question Everything:

“People always complain about having no shoes until they see a man with no feet, then they complain about not having an electric wheelchair. Why? What makes them automatically transfer themselves from one dull system to another, and why is free will utilized only on details and not on the broad outlines–not ‘Should I work?’ but ‘Where should I work?’ and not ‘Should I start a family?’ but ‘When should I start a family?’ Why is it that we don’t suddenly swap countries so that everyone in France moves to Ethiopia and everyone in Ethiopia moves to Britain and everyone in Britain moves to the Caribbean and so on until we have finally shared the earth like we were supposed to and shed ourselves of our shameful, selfish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical loyalty to dirt? Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?” [290-291]

What if you had the wherewithal, the freedom and the means, to choose a life outside of the spectacle? How might such a life change you?

(more…)

REMEMBER this post? (One of our self-proclaimed greatest hits!) Even in our criticism, we bought into the larger lie.

Well, as it turns out, we’ve now got information — new shit has come to light. Or one might say, new questions have been raised, and the (Obama!) administration is doing everything it can to prevent new shit from coming to light.

How do you like Obama now?

Books that Changed Me: The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord.

Voices From The Grave! Guy Debord changed my life. Well, he at least provided a framework and language to think about certain truths I’d had some nagging sense of, yet until now, would have struggled to express. Though the edition pictured above is the book I read, for cutting and pasting purposes, the excerpts in the article below come from a different translation that I found online.

WHAT IS the spectacle? Debord puts forth the proposition that we people of the modern age do not directly live, but rather experience a representation of life through an endless succession of spectacles.

In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. [Debord, #6]

That sense of dissonance we experience, in quiet moments of clarity, between the world we plainly perceive, and the world as it is presented to us, is born of our alienation from an unreal version of ourselves which is a construct of our all-too-real societal (spectacular) institutions.

Spectacular society is uncompromisingly divided into a small elite ruling class and everybody else, whose value stems from their productivity. The spectacle’s greatest strength is in it’s ability to create and perpetuate an image, an alternate version, representing the “truth” of these opposing classes.

Wait, when the fuck did all of this happen?

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class. [Debord, #100]

This representation of the working class is still at work today. It could be witnessed recently, when we saw the vilification of autoworkers as they made efforts to ensure the pensions and retirement health benefits owed them as a term of their employment would continue to be honored, even as the auto companies were facing bankruptcy. It can be seen in the vilification of migrant workers, even as they harvest our food! It cannot be said that that work isn’t valuable to society, but these are some of the most hated people in this country.

This sort of domination through false representation and alienation isn’t limited to workers. The portrayal of women, minorities, young people, the handicapped, in no way reflects the true nature of particular individuals or their aspirations. The spectacle thrives by creating these groups and categorizing people by association, and then championing or dispatching whatever group’s concerns as determined by political utility.

The spectacle is a potent servant of power.

Debord’s chapter 6, Spectacular Time is one that really sings. Especially to one experiencing the constant sense of loss brought on by an obsessive preoccupation with the inexorable passage of time. (more…)

THE SUPREME COURT IS HEARING the case of two men who were wrongly convicted and spent 25 years in the slammer before being exonerated.

The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.

The prosecutors counter that there is “no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed.” Stephen Sanders, the lawyer for the prosecutors, will tell the Supreme Court on Wednesday that there is no way to separate evidence gathered before trial from the trial itself. Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says Sanders, “that’s an absolutely immunized activity.” [Morning Edition]

That’s an astounding amount of power and impunity being proposed right there! Though as IOZ points out:

Immunizing prosecutors from lawsuits is a far more drastic and interventionary step than simply heading off most suits of this type by offering modest restitution and recompense for time served after an illegitimate conviction. [IOZ]

Commenter David drives home the point about the impunity with which police and prosecutors like these prefer to operate:

There’s a special arrogance in a group of guys … claiming that no action they take at work should be ever be held against them, as not being able to break the law without consequence would really fuck up the flow of their day.

Really, even getting an innocent convicted without using fake evidence should bother them, as in any sensible world, it would be a mark of incompetence. [David]

Of course, another way to head off such suits would be to protect suspects from frame-ups in the first place. It is possible to imagine a better system, or better yet, remember one you read about once. Like, say, one put forth by Bertrand Russell in Power: A New Social Analysis (1938)

[Emphasis added.] In every democracy, individuals and organizations which are intended to have only certain well defined executive functions are likely, if unchecked, to acquire a very undesirable independent power. This is especially true of the police. The evils resulting from an insufficiently supervised police force are very forcibly set forth, as regards the United States, in Our Lawless Police, by Ernest Jerome Hopkins. The gist of the matter is that a policeman is promoted for action leading to the conviction of a criminal … and that, in consequence, it is to the interest of individual officers… [to do whatever it takes to elicit a confession (or build their case).] … For the taming of the power of the police, one essential is that a confession shall never, in any circumstances, be accepted as evidence.

This reform, however, though necessary, is by no means sufficient. The police system of all countries is based upon the assumption that the collection of evidence against a suspected criminal is a matter of public interest, but that the collection of evidence in his favor is his private concern. It is often said to be more important that the innocent should be acquitted than that the guilty should be condemned, but everywhere it is the duty of the police to seek evidence of guilt, not of innocence. Suppose you are unjustly accused of murder, and there is a good prima facie case against you. The whole of the resources of the State are set in motion to seek out possible witnesses against you, and the ablest lawyers are employed by the State to create prejudice against you in the minds of the jury. You, meanwhile, must spend your private fortune collecting evidence of your innocence, with no public organization to help you. If you plead poverty, you will be allotted Counsel, but probably not so able a man as the public prosecutor. If you succeed in securing an acquittal, you can only escape bankruptcy by means of the cinema and the Sunday Press. But it is only too likely that you will be unjustly convicted.

If law-abiding citizens are to be protected against unjust persecution by the police, there must be two police forces and two Scotland Yards, one designed, as at present, to prove guilt, the other to prove innocence; and in addition to the public prosecutor there must be a public defender, of equal legal eminence. This is obvious as soon as it is admitted that the acquittal of the innocent is no less a public interest than the condemnation of the guilty. The defending police force should, moreover, become the prosecuting police force where one class of crimes is concerned, namely crimes committed by the prosecuting police in the execution of their “duty.” By this means, but by no other (so far as I can see), the present oppressive power of the police could be mitigated. [Russell, pp 295-297]

Surely there are myriad reasons such a system hasn’t occurred to US.

Even direct democracy proves unjust. Shame on Maine!

THERE WAS A REPORT on National Public Radio this morning about elections that are supposed to happen in Iraq soon. As NPR seems to often do, they make a couple of points in passing, without seeming to notice that they have implications worth exploring.

Without a deal by this weekend, Iraq will run out of time to organize an election before the government’s term expires. [NPR]

The report mentions this, and also reports the following:

1. The government’s term expires January first.
2. The Iraqi organization in charge of running elections says they need 90 days to organize a legitimate poll.

What NPR does not point out is that it is already October 29th.

Apparently, US diplomats are taking a hands-off approach, and letting the Iraqis run their own affairs. Although, as the NPR report mentions:

A long delay might even trip up the pace of American troop withdrawal. [NPR]

What NPR does not point out is that the US doesn’t always shy away from getting involved in foreign elections. No discussion of how US interests are served by a policy of either getting involved, or not getting involved, in a particular election. Other than the passing mention of delayed troop withdrawals.

[WSJ via J.R. Boyd]

[Prologue edited for clarity.] Years ago, before my ideas went out of fashion, I went around calling myself a Liberal. I also frequently submitted posts for the Carnival of the Liberals, and still do occasionally. Sometimes I manage to sneak one in there. The Carnival was the driving force behind my beginning a series of long form posts (one and two) in which I began to sketch out my political thoughts in an attempt to figure out what it all meant. Enough time has passed since the second of those posts, that I feel rather radically removed from the younger me that wrote them. This post serves as a continuation of that project, yet picks up not where that different me left off, but instead from where I find myself now.

I AM NOT A LIBERAL. Certainly not in the postmodern United States where words have no meaning beyond their commercial utility, where “Liberal” means “Progressive” means centrist corporate imperialism with a friendly face, and the “center” is nowhere near the middle of the full range of political possibilities.

I’m a Recovering Progressive

Classical Liberalism, if that term can still be used meaningfully, may be onto something in emphasizing individual liberty, but loses the thread in its devotion to free market, laissez-faire economics. A condition which may very well work on a much smaller scale, yet does not obtain in a society such as ours, large enough to necessitate the establishment of a ruling class, which in turn manipulates market conditions to enrich a powerful elite, and then globalizes that influence through military force.

My Liberal/Progressive friends acknowledge this on some level. They are concerned that the system is broken and they want to fix it. But it’s worse than broken: it works perfectly; in accordance with the demands of the powerful. The People have been rendered utterly powerless. It cannot be stated in any plainer or more direct terms. We. Have. No. Power. In directing the governing forces of our political-social-economic system.

Add to this competition over the dwindling, soon to be scarce resources necessary for human subsistence, and the problem comes into clear resolution. Our current situation is untenable. This fucker is too big. Not “too big to fail,” but “so big it must fail.”

One cannot rely on Big Coercion* to insure (sic) healthcare for all. (Or low oil prices, or safety, or whathaveyou.) It is worth examining whether it is right to even request such provisions, when by doing so one legitimizes an institution that directly expends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on military supremacy and conquest. The American Way of Life had a a good run there, but really, to quote myself, “Is it even right to ask for a bigger slice of the pie, when the pie is imperial plunder, taken through violence and exploitation?”

* It is appropriate to call it Big Coercion, when “big” has come to mean “evil” in the parlance of the postmodern commercial utility of vocabulary. Think “Big Oil,” “Big Insurance,” “Big Government,” and so on.

(more…)

Image: crossesandchristmas.com

CULTURE IS SORT OF a dead institution, isn’t it? At least the kind of culture Catholic League President Bill Donohue writes about in America’s secular saboteurs in the Washington Post:

[Emphasis added.] Yesterday’s radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today’s radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them.

If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it. [Donohue]

Societal destruction would be great and all, but us “nihilists” don’t have to bother with attacking religion or culture. To hear Guy Debord tell it, that shit’ll burn itself down. Debord says* “[The] whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition.”

Donohue is making a bit much of the alleged persecution of Catholicism. Religion and culture are targets only insomuch as they are entrenched in the political and economic structure. The system appropriates culture and bends it to its own ends, while the cultural elite, Donohue et al, in turn embrace the power they are granted in reward for their service to the system. The result is a culture alienated from the very people that culture is supposed to regulate. In this alienation, culture becomes obsolete.

The culture warriors won’t go quietly though. Donohue’s parting shot:

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels. [Donohue]

Good thing about cultural self-negation! It was always to be expected that this, along with the provision of cannon fodder for the system, (a la the quid pro quo mentioned above,) was the impetus behind the pro-life movement.

Screw that! Annihilate American culture!

* 180. Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived experiences within historical societies divided into classes. It is a generalizing power which itself exists as a separate entity, as division of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division. Culture detached itself from the unity of myth-based society “when human life lost its unifying power and when opposites lost their living connections and interactions and became autonomous” (The Difference Between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling). In thus gaining its independence, culture embarked on an imperialistic career of self-enrichment that ultimately led to the decline of that independence. The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of culture, and to the ideological illusions regarding that autonomy, is also expressed as the history of culture. And this whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition. Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost unity. In the course of this quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself. [Debord]

DEVINDER SHARMA: …there is no shortage of food in the world. You know, we have about 6.7 billion people on the earth, and we produce food for 11.5 billion people. There’s no shortage. It’s only that one part of the world is eating more, and one part of the world is starving. And I think that’s a distribution problem, the critical problem that we need to address. — [Trigger warning!] The concept of redistribution is uncongenial to The American Dream. —

THIS DUDE is mad as hell:

Dr. Paul Hochfeld: This is a government giveaway to the insurance industry, with or without the public plan option.

This public plan option, at least as it’s written in HR 3200, is a lame, failed, designed-to-fail public plan option. It’s not available until 2013. When it’s available, it’s not available to people who get insurance from their employers. Those are healthy people. It’s not available to people who are upper middle class or wealthier. Those are healthy people. So the public plan option is designed to attract the sickest, most expensive people. And when it fails in 2017 or 2018, by design, the insurance industry is going to point at it and say, “See, the government can’t do healthcare.” And it’ll be the wrong lesson. And I just–this whole thing is being manipulated by the industry with our legislators being complicit in this process. [Democracy Now!]

He goes on to say that health care is a right. I’m not so sure. But aside from that, good stuff, Dr. Hochfeld.

While health care probably isn’t a right, it is, however, a moral imperative. Especially in a society that places the utmost importance on individuals’ right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, (assuming we still do.) “Life” depending on “survival” as much as it does, and “happiness” being as affected by “good health” as it is.

One way to persuade someone on this point would be to ask them, “If someone in your church were ill, and unable to afford treatment, and you could afford to do so, would you feel obligated to contribute to a fund to help pay their expenses?”

And, “Furthermore, knowing that your church provided this kind of help, would you feel that such a contribution was a wise investment if you knew the same would be done for you in a time of need?”

This is just an example, replace “church” with just about anything: neighborhood, family, union, club, circle of friends, motorcycle gang, maybe even town. It seems more likely that people would answer the two questions in the affirmative when conceptualizing about an affinity group they belong to. Puts the issue on a scale where it becomes tangible, where folks start thinking about it in terms of the people they see in their daily lives.

For some reason, or some combination of reasons, this feeling of solidarity toward an affinity group doesn’t translate to the nation as a whole. A Mainer might bristle at the idea of their money going to pay for some fast-driving flatlander’s or, worse, some Yankees fan’s medical bill. The rich man wonders why the fruits of his entrepreneurial expertise should benefit the health of some grunt can’t rub two quarters together. The worker doesn’t see why the cubicle denizens should get healthy off the labor of their strong back. Regional differences, religious beliefs, race, economic disparities, the urban/rural divide: all of these divisions play their part.

Living in a culture that obsesses over such divisions, there will always be a loud subset of Americans who can be relied upon to angrily resist solidarity on health care at the national level, and the media can always be counted on to amplify that dissent.

This is how politicians are able to say socialized health care, or single payer insurance, or price controls on medical services just aren’t ‘politically feasible,’ and instead reel off legislation that amounts to a bonanza for health insurance companies.

While the ideal solution I would conjure up in the anarchist utopia in my brain isn’t the single payer insurance this guy advocates, his defeatist approach toward the current health insurance legislation, with or without a so-called public option, is admirable:

Kevin Zeese: My preference would be to see this bill defeated. It does more harm than good. It empowers these corrupt corporations in ways that we don’t need. So let’s see this bill defeated and start over and make the next election about a national healthcare plan. [Democracy Now!]

Faith in the electoral system notwithstanding.

(more…)

HERE WE GO again:

…the [Obama!] administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. [New York Times]

But why can’t we bring them to trial?

[Emphasis added.] The legal interpretation applies to detainees whom the government concludes should be held because they are a continuing danger to national security but who cannot be brought to trial for various reasons, like evidence tainted by harsh interrogations. [NYT]

Hard evidence is not “tainted” by what goes on in the interrogation room. Evidence can be corroborated, clarified, knitted together, by a good interrogator, but the physical evidence itself is not changed.

What is being alluded to here is that the information itself, obtained through harsh interrogations, is tainted. Let me reiterate what was said in this space just the other day: Our harsh interrogation torture methods are not designed to elicit reliable information. It is not right to call what comes from these interrogations “evidence,” tainted or otherwise.

To rephrase: The Obama! administration will continue to hold detainees who have been tortured, without bringing them to trial, because the evidence against them was gathered by torturing them.

Impeach Obama.

Via: IOZ