Blowback and forth

Oral vaccine, Balochistan. Via Express Tribune Pakistan, 2011.

So in southwestern Balochistan last Wednesday, just outside the provincial capital of Quetta, a van carrying eight women and a boy working in Pakistan's polio vaccination program was attacked by a couple of men on a motorcycle, with guns, who just started shooting. They killed three of the women and a bystander and then sped away. The women screamed for help but there were no police around; there was a "security gap", according to Masood Khan Jogezai, Balochistan representative for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

Egypt: The next India or the next Israel?

Thomas P. Friedman, aka Thomas L. Friedman, the Erzschnurrbart of the Zeitgeist, has learned to his amazement and delight that India is a multiethnic and multireligious country in which members of non-majority groups frequently ascend to high political office, though only when the Congress Party is in power:

India’s prime minister and its army chief of staff today are both Sikhs, and India’s foreign minister and chief justice of the Supreme Court are both Muslims. It would be like Egypt appointing a Coptic Christian to be its army chief of staff.

“Preposterous,” you say.

I'd say it's more like Dublin having a Jewish mayor ("Only in America!" my dad liked to say), not all that preposterous, whereas Egypt having a Christian army chief would be pretty interesting. Still, why not? Iraq had a Christian deputy prime minister under the Baath party leadership, and my country, in which about 13% of the population is black, just re-elected its first black president.

Would it be preposterous for Egypt to have a Christian army chief?

Well, yes, that’s true today. But if it is still true in a decade or two, then we’ll know that democracy in Egypt failed. We will know that Egypt went the route of Pakistan and not India. That is, rather than becoming a democratic country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became a Muslim country where the military and the Muslim Brotherhood fed off each other so both could remain in power indefinitely and “the people” were again spectators. Whether Egypt turns out more like Pakistan or India will impact the future of democracy in the whole Arab world.

I have no idea what makes Friedman bring up Pakistan in this context. No doubt it has become somewhat less comfortable for Christians than it was in the glory days of the 1960s, when A.R. Cornelius presided over the Supreme Court, but still. I expect it was a bizarre slip of the fingers when he meant Israel, where no Christian has ever served in the government, the little token minority positions in governments of the "left" being reserved for Muslims and Druze—and where Christians and Muslims alike are passed up for national service, under the assumption that they are naturally traitors.

Yes, of course that's it. Rather than becoming a democratic country where its citizens could realize their full potential, instead it became a Jewish state where the military and the Orthodox clergy fed off each other so both could remain in power indefinitely until somebody still more cynical came by and ate their lunch. And if Israel has a Christian foreign minister or a Druze running Mossad or maybe one Reconstructionist rabbi conducting weddings ten years from now, maybe democracy will be a success there too!

Theatrical release poster, 1928. From Wikipedia.

P.S. I should have taken a screen shot but now it's too late: the original version of Friedman's column referred to Amartya Sen as a "Noble Prize-winning economist".

Cheap shots and chasers 6/8

Shorter David Brooks: Endorsing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in Tuesday's recall election:

Walker is an obnoxious, hyperpartisan brute who exemplifies everything in movement conservatives I've been complaining about for years now, but you should vote for him because he thinks exactly the way I do.

 That's only part of the column; for the rest, Dean Baker offers an enjoyably acid takedown.

Walker himself won, of course, but not everybody believes it's because Wisconsin agrees with him, as Roy Edroso translated it into our language,

that the problem with our economy is that garbagemen and schoolteachers make too much money.

 Zandar at Balloon Juice and assorted colleagues argue persuasively from exit polls that Wisconsin just doesn't like recalls. Then again it seems that this recall has given control of the state senate to Democrats, so Walker will not be able to railroad any more of his ghastly program through it.

To Walker, naturally,

Tonight, we tell Wisconsin, we tell our country and we tell people all across the globe that voters really do want leaders who stand up and make the tough decisions.

Edible dried zombie skin, From Crosstalknet.

That "tough decisions" phrase has to be one of the most abused in the zombie rhetoric repertoire, by the way. It sounds like a brave decision made by a politician without regard to cheap popularity, a "profiles in courage" choice. But it is invariably used to describe a decision that is self-evidently bad—a bogus solution to a problem that may not even exist presented as the only alternative, like trying to jail all the undocumented immigrants in Arizona—to conform with some kind of pharisaically pinched, narrow-minded notion of moral hazard: cutting off somebody else's nose to spite your own face, and ensure the votes of the nastiest people in your constituency.

Another piece of zombie rhetoric was used this week by secretary of defense Leon Panetta:

“We have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America is going to defend ourselves against those who attack us,” Mr. Panetta said. “This is not just about protecting the United States. It’s also about protecting Pakistan. And we have made it very clear that we are going to continue to defend ourselves.”

 Panetta is here answering, or refusing to answer, the question of  whether drone strikes in Pakistan violate that country's sovereignty. The usage, as a rhetorical trick, comes from Israel: every time the Israeli government is caught committing some abuse against somebody in the neighborhood they cry, "Israel has a right to defend itself."

The implication is always that this is a plea: justifiable crime, because it's self-defense. But they never actually argue it, because it isn't arguable—self-defense doesn't justify everything. If the United States is violating Pakistani sovereignty by dropping bombs there maybe it is truly somebody's idea of self-defense, but it's still violating Pakistani sovereignty nevertheless, and no amount of zombie rhetoric can change it.

Truth terrorists: China

Wu Xiaoqing, the vice minister for environmental protection, demanded that foreign governments stop releasing data on China’s air.

In a criticism clearly aimed at the United States, Mr. Wu said at a news conference that the public release of air-quality data by foreign governments’ consulates “not only doesn’t abide by the spirits of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, but also violates relevant provisions of environmental protection.” (New York Times, June 6, 2012)

What's supposedly wrong with the data is that it's not "representative"—I guess in the sense that instead of building its consulates in a very large random sample of locations, the US puts them only in major cities, the very places most likely to suffer from pollution; you get no idea of the bracing atmosphere in Inner Mongolia or at the North Korean border, or the sultry breeze in semitropical Hainan.

Cycling Hainan. From Mountainbikingasia.com.

What's really wrong is that it's data the Chinese government didn't get a chance to edit—those consulates are nothing but a bunch of truth terrorists. Anyway Wu's statement shouldn't be interpreted as some kind of threat; the vice minister simply wanted to clear the air, heh-heh.

Jennifer Rubin writes;

Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party.

No, you do not wreck havoc. Unless the meaning is, "You had some perfectly good havoc in the Democratic Party, and he went and wrecked it." Which would be a pretty odd thing—talk about concern trolling!

One wreaks havoc (past tense and participle wreaked) or occasionally works it (past tense and participle wrought). Not knowing this is illiterate, and illiteracy is a disqualification for writing a column in a national newspaper. See Zandar, again, for demonstration that the content of this column is even worse than the English usage.

 

A little intelligence

As we know, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has backed down a little from his claim a year ago that there had been no civilian deaths in drone strikes since 2010:

Brennan was asked about his claim last June that for almost a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

On Sunday, he appeared to qualify his statement. "Well, what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being killed," he said. (Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2012)

Now we've learned from the New York Times how they manage to avoid the information: [jump]

Water-ordeal. From Wikipedia.

Is America really Pakistan?

While our president was going around last May making nice about all those Arab revolutionaries bringing their governments down, guess what the Pentagon was up to? According to closely reasoned and evidenced reporting from Nick Turse at TomDispatch,

[a]s state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there.  During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings...

Now, what exactly is up with that? Should we be applying our standard left-paranoid analysis to this? I.e., (1) the interests of our ruling class, the 1% if you like, are aligned with those of the familiar dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak and so on; (2) the U.S. government, as the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" or agency for carrying out ruling class interests, inevitably opposes the democratic revolutions; and (3) Obama does his job of expressing the natural pro-revolutionary sentiments of the 99% to distract us from what is really happening.

But I'd like to sketch out an alternative way of looking at it that might be a little less boring and a little smarter, and still "of the left"--and indeed the seeds of a whole bigfat theory of democracy and power.

Benevolent dictator Wotan figures it out: God can't give people free will, they have to take it. But won't that make trouble for the government? Hey, kid, why do you think they call it Götterdämmerung?