Jul. 14th, 2008

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Lib/Dem Political Ineptitude--A Prelude (The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem, Pt 3a, by: Paul Rosenberg


In my Part Two of this series, Why Conservatives Can't Govern, I argued that (a) the world is simply too complex for the Level 3 conservative mind [in Kegan's typology] to handle and (b) movement conservative political discourse often doesn't even rise to Level 2. This raises the obvious question: if they're so stupid, and we're so smart, then how come they're running everything? The simple answer is: wealth and power. But a secondary answer is that they're not all stupid (besides which, cognitive complexity and intelligence are two different things).. In this diary, I'm going to lay some groundwork, and then begin discussing how the lens of cognitive complexity can illuminate why conservatives have been so much better at politicking, when they suck soooo bad at governing.



The Problem Restated It's a well-known fact that college tends to have a liberalizing effect on people. The exposure to different points of view does that to people. But it's equally well-known that a lot of college graduates are still Republicans, even conservatives. Furthermore, the impact of college on promoting cognitive development has also been widely noted-well, at least within the field of cognitive development. From all this comes an interesting question: What are these people thinking?


Equally puzzling-and quite related-is the question of why liberals and Democrats have been so consistently politically inept for so long, given that they're much more sophisticated, as a whole, when it comes to policy analysis. This diary offers my answer to these questions: Level Four Republicans focus their attention and higher level cognitive skills on getting what they want, rather than trying to understand the world in a broadly objective manner. This is a rather straightforward consequence of their interests and values, which are not substantially changed by growing more conscious.


The notion that conscious evolution inherently equates to a similar growth in moral and ethical responsibility is just one of those liberal myths that comes from hanging around with people whose parents raised them right. Not everyone is like that.


Development vs. Interest
One of the main points of Kegan's approach to cognitive development is that he stresses a common structure of consciousness that applies across the full range of cognition. There is clinical evidence for this, but it does not mean that people actually use the same level of cognition at all times. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that specialized knowledge does not translate into other contexts-and, indeed, does not necessarily get assimilated by those directly and repeatedly exposed to it.


For example, even college biology students, who learn in detail about evolution can retain the mistaken, but commonplace folk impression that evolution is essentially progressive, as if higher intelligence were the whole point of it, despite the fact that there are so staggeringly many more insects than there are higher mammals. Thus, an important part of education is not simply the inculcation of new knowledge, but the much more difficult elimination of old, false knowledge. In short, capacity to think at any level is no guarantee that one will think at that level, as opposed to simply relying on what one already thinks one knows. (emphasis mine}



Above all, one must be interested in something in order to pay attention to it, and think about it, and one must be very interested indeed to pay so much attention that one will willingly discard what one thinks one already knows. This is difficult enough on an individual basis, but when one is part of a social group, it is all the more difficult.


Someone at Level Five may be much more capable of sophisticated moral reasoning than someone at Level Three. But if the person at Level Five dislikes struggling with human problems (as, for example, many physical scientists do) while the person at Level Three has spent their life wrestling with moral dilemmas (counseling troubled youth, for example), then the Level Three person will have a much firmer grounding, a much surer instinct, and a much stronger motivation to address, understand and solve problems.


And this, then, is the fundamental key to all that follows: conservatives are much more interested in power, control and running things. Indeed, it is their most central concern. Liberals are much more interested in understanding things, making things work, sharing the fruits of these endeavors and furthering the unfolding of human potential-all of which amounts to an incredible dissipation of attention, since it leads to limitless different forms of endeavor, while power-seeking focuses on just one.




The Big Picture

This is my favourite part of this installment:

The classic conservative narrative is the narrative of The Fall from Grace in a past Golden Age. If only we can return to some past Golden Age, all will be well and good, conservatives tell us. The classic liberal/progressive narrative is the opposite-the narrative of progress. But conservatives in recent decades have excelled at co-opting liberal narratives, and casting past narratives of progress as proof that we have already achieved everything worthwhile-and somehow lost it again. Thus, the immigrant experience of past generations is not a lesson we can carry forward in our own lives, or a source of compassion for those living that experience today. Instead it is a source of entitlement-"My ancestors came here legally, and they struggled hard to give me a better life, and those people are just trying to steal what my family had to work hard for."

While liberals and progressives have by far the greater number of storytellers, conservatives have gained an incredible strategic advantage by harnessing the storytellers the do have, and widely disseminating their stories. They have also inculcated storytelling into the activities of activists at all levels, and in all manner of different roles. Above all, conservative media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, are predominantly story-tellers. They routinely tell outrageous lies precisely because that is the purpose and their function: they are mythmakers. And liberals have an incredibly hard time dealing with this, in part because they do not understand that myths are absolutely vital for us as human beings-and that some myths can be absolutely true.

This is one of the great disconnects in liberal politics today. We have the majority of storytellers. And the majority of real-life stories, too. And yet our political establishment disdains these strengths. Hollywood's money is fine. Their creative input is not simply not wanted-it is despised. We're going to take a closer look at this--and other disconnects--in our next installment.
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Free Lunch Conservatism

All the above explains motivations-and, broadly stated, means as well. But it does not really explain how old-fashioned monopolistic capitalism made such a striking comeback, producing a rapid rise in economic polarization, which virtually halted a centuries-long history of each generation of Americans doing better economically than the generation before. These political developments were so transparently opposed to the common good, and yet were so readily normalized that they require special explanation in their own right-as well as being crucial to understand if we wish to reverse them, as it seems inarguable that a progressive politics must do.



For this, we require an explanation that brings us back to the main thrust of this diary series. The mechanism I propose was two-fold: First, traditional conservatism had utterly failed, and try as it might to re-present itself, people might buy it in the abstract, but when it came down to brass tacks, they were down with the New Deal, and broad government spending. A conservative ideology that was halfway reality-based could not appeal to people whose everyday experience told them that government had an important role to play, even if they longed for the freedom of the Wild West and wished it were not so. Still worse was a conservatism of austerity that promised people lots of hard work, with nothing much to show for it. For conservatism to succeed, it had to totally cut its reality-based ties, and remake itself in the image of liberalism, promising good times for all, a better tomorrow, morning in America.


This was the beauty of supply-side economics, as sketched out in the earlier diary "The Big Lie And The Rightwing's Neo-Feudal Vision (A Supplement To The Political Duality Series)": it promised something for nothing: tax cuts would make tax revenues grow. Instead of the traditional conservative message of sacrifice and hard work, this free lunch conservatism leap-frogged over the most utopian promises that mainstream liberalism had ever made. Its promises were so excessive that they could only be compared to Communism.



It's worth noting some other aspects of reality-denial that surfaced at this time. Racism suddenly vanished overnight, along with any sense that the conservatives who had fiercely defended it were in any sense morally lacking. (Indeed, the fact that black people remained poor even after racism had vanished seemed to indicate that conservatives had been right all along-there was something morally wrong with the great mass of black people, and liberals were doing them no favors by pretending otherwise.)


Furthermore, by discovering the cause of fighting abortion, conservatives staked a claim to the new Civil Rights Movement. Vietnam was not tragic betrayal of ideals, a genocidal war of domination, marked by countless atrocities, fought for no good reason, and built on an elaborate foundation of lies. It was a noble crusade, one that we had actually won, in fact, before the treasonous liberals in the media and the Democratic Congress stole it from us. And as for the environment, trees were a leading cause of pollution.



In all these ways and more, by cutting its reality-based ties, rightwing movement conservatism positioned itself for a dynamic of magical thinking, much like the rightwing movements of early 20th Century Europe. Such a dynamic holds tremendous advantages over reality-based politics, simply because it is able to promise so much more-miracles both economic and spiritual. The arguments for such a magical politics cannot be made in the same mundane reality-based way that one argues for realist politics. One cannot discuss the Pentagon Papers, for example. One must talk about Rambo instead, with his poignant question, "This time, will they let us win?" One cannot study the sociology and economics of poverty. One must tell stories of non-existent "welfare queens." Nor can one realistically face the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship, and preparing to "win" a nuclear war. Instead, one must tell fairy tales about a Star Wars missile shield, like a giant Superdome protecting the entire country.


All these problems that conservatism could not face and solve were to some degree insoluble because the world is simply too complicated for its Level 3 solutions. It could neither grasp nor abide the Level 4 solutions of liberalism, but it could step in aggressively when liberalism faltered, either because a changing Level 4 world always throws up set-backs from time to time, or because the world was becoming even more complex-a post-modern Level 5 world. And when it stepped in because liberalism faltered, it stepped in with simplistic stories, about turning back to the good old days, and moving forward at the same time.


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Even More Good Analysis and History Combined

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Reality Be Damned! Why Media Narratives Don't Change by: Paul Rosenberg





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Journalism Ethics As Problematic

But the workings of truth suppression revealed by Parry's account are only part of the picture. A deeper part goes to the very nature of how journalism as a whole defines its roles and purposes. This is the subject of a unique book of media criticism, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest. In it, Iggers argues that the core problem with journalism is not that journalists sometimes violate their code of ethics, the problem is the code of ethics itself.


Instead of being a disinterested code, divorced from the everyday pressures of realworld journalism, Iggers shows how codes of journalism ethics are deeply interested documents, reflecting the over-arching material concerns. Conflicts of interest, for example, are held to be a very serious concern for individual journalists. Yet, dependence on advertising creates much more powerful economic incentives at the corporate level, which are routinely ignored. At the same time, it's clear that journalists and their sources both benefit from dealing regularly with one another, and yet the journalist-source relationship is regarded as a pillar of journalism, not a source of ethical problems. This is but one aspect of his critique, which demonstrates a complete lack of level 4 reflection on the practice of journalism from outside the system of relationships that practical journalism is embedded in.


Iggers also provides a compact history of how journalims ethics has changed over the years, particularly around the notion of truth-telling, as various different proxies for quasi-scientific "truth" have been tried and found wanting. In the end, we have arrived at a state in which "balance" has come to substitute for any concern with "truth"-we're much too sophistatced to believe in that anymore. This helps to explain why the media can get things so thoroughly and deeply wrong-as they have done continuously with Iraq, and as Glenn shows, with the 2006 mid-terms-and yet not be bothered at all: they have done their jobs according to the book.


Journalism Ethos As Problematic
Finally, one can consider the matter of journalistic culture and ethos. There are ways of promoting or validating some stories, just as there are ways of dismissing others. The Downing Street Memo provides a classic example. Here was smoking gun evidence that the President of United States had lied about invading Iraq, had planned for it roughly a year in advance, and worked to construct a plausible rationale. It was, by any sensible measure, a blockbuster story. And yet, it has been regularly and routinely ignored by the Versailles media.


When I interviewed a USA Today reporter who had co-written an excellent, high-profile article on the first anniversay of 9/11 which told a similar story, but without the evidence of the Downing Street Memo, she showed no interest in following up on it, and did so using a coule tropes I've heard before-it was an "old story" that was "up to the historians now." Of course, it went directly to the issue of impeachable offenses and the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, and many more Iraqi civilians. What's more an even "older story"-the Whitewater land deal, in which no one died-was kept alive ad nauseum by the press, despite copious evidence that the Clintons had lost money on the deal and done nothing wrong whatsoever.


But this only goes to show that such explanations are not to be taken seriously at face value. They are semi-ritualized behavior, by which certain unwanted stories are gotten rid of, while others are embraced-nothing more, nothing less. They are part and parcel of how level 3 life is lived, and as such they cannot be seriously questioned by a level 3 consciousness. Only someone who stands outside, someone at level 4 or above who regards such rituals and the purposes they serve as objects can properly question or challenge them. And any attempt to do so will be severely attacked. Just look at how Versailles screams bloody murder about the blogosphere, almost every day now.


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The notion of an independent truth to be served--an 18th Century Enlightenment notion that fanned the flames of the press that helped win our freedom as a nation--is virtually nowhere to be found. Global warming, evolution, George Bush's numerous impeachable offenses, none of these are, or possibly could be matters of simple, straightforward truth, because such truth no longer exists in the lowly precincts of Versailles.

They owe their allegience to another 18th Century tradition, from which they take their name--an opulent, excessive, out-of-touch culture of gossip, terminal triviality and utter incompetence. That is their reality. It is all they know, and it has total dominance over mere facts, which are completely powerless to change the stories it tells.... just like it was in the old Versailles until the guillotine came.




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What am I doing here? by Paul Rosenberg

Obama Is Absolutely Right Obama is absolutely right that we stand at a time of historic possibility for fundamental change-if anything, he under-estimates how much this is so.

He is also absolutely right that he is the perfect figure to lead us in a new direction. He doesn't have a lot baggage, he is someone that young people can identify with, he is not deeply embedded in a Washington culture that is far removed from the real pulse of the country. But...

Obama Is Absolutely Wrong
Obama is absolutely wrong in his fundamental political analysis. The problem in America today is not a polarized political system in which Democrats and liberals are as equally to blame as Republicans and conservatives. The problem is a political system that's dominated by this sort of brain-dead political narrative. And the longer that Obama promulgates such brain-dead political narratives, the more he squanders his enormous potential.

This sort of brain-dead political narrative dominates our political system because it's highly beneficial to the right wing, which has positioned itself to have veto power over such things. It's not the ideal narrative for them. "Democrats are the source of all evil, and should be hunted down like dogs" is the ideal narrative for them.

But they will happily settle for a dominant narrative that says it is equally reasonable-and equally divisive-to say "Democrats are the source of all evil, and should be hunted down like dogs" or to say "no, we're not, we're just sorta stupid, is all."

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Will The Real Culture War Please Stand Up???
by: Paul Rosenberg


It's the grand premise of the Obama campaign that he can bring us together, slay the dragon of partisan divisiveness and end the culture wars which he lays at the feet of the Baby Boom generation. It's a nice, appealing narrative, in a way, it all turns on the question of what you mean by "culture war." The commonsense meaning of "culture war" over the past few decades is a war over social mores between hierarchical "traditional values" and the post-1950s emergence of egalitarian values, especially with respect to race and gender, more closely aligned with the traditional values at the core of our Constitution.


But there's a deeper meaning, which is clearly understood by rightwing culture warriors, and virtually unknown to everyone else. This meaning comes, ironically, from a leading Marxist theorist, the highly independent Italian leader, Antonio Gramsci, who described culture war as a struggle for ideological control of the broad range of institutions in society. And in this deeper sense, Obama's analysis is completely upside-down--the problem is not that both sides are equally to blame, but that only the right is actually fighting a coordinated culture war as Gramsci defined it. It's not a case of bringing a knife to a gunfight, it's a case of brining a plastic yogurt spoon to a nuclear war.


Gramsci was grappling with the question of why Marxist predictions had not come to pass, why the rise of working class power had not lead to a communist revolution, or even the dominance of socialist political parties. The reason, he believed, was that workers aspired to become their class enemy--they wanted to join the bourgeoisie, not destroy it, and the reason for that was the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, expressed through a whole range of political institutions.




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I intend to follow it up with some diaries that look at how the right has moved in on various different cultural institutions-possible examples include think tanks, the media, K-12 and higher education, churches, state governments, the courts and civil society institutions such as the Boy Scouts. I have one about the intrusion of "homeland security" on academia that's ready to go. I plan to do one or two others this weekend or next. Two other forms of follow-up are planned-first, more scrutiny of Barack Obama in light of this analysis and his failure to grasp what's going on, and second, a step back to discuss what the two sides are all about. Broadly conceived, I will characterize them as hierarchy, authority and coercion on the right, versus equality, autonomy, and voluntary cooperation on the left. These encompass a wide range of specific forms and culture expressions on both sides that have their differences with one another, but that all express similar fundamentals.


So what the hell is ACTUALLY going on?

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Repress U-A Gramscian Case Study In A War of Position: The "Homeland Security" Attack On Academia by: Paul Rosenberg


Higher education has been highly contested terrain in culture wars as far back as ancient Greece, if not farther. But a recently-published article in The Nation magazine gives a fascinating snapshot of the efforts undertaken since 9/11 to bring academia into line with George Bush's highly-partisan "homeland security" agenda.

As such, it illustrates a particularly broad front in the struggle for hegemony-subsuming the entirety of an inherently troublesome institutional sector to the most rigorous forms of hierarchical control-those associated not simply with the military, but with military intelligence. The article, "Repress U", by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, is organized perfectly for illustrating how a well-coordinated war of position can be carried out. Discussion begins on the flip.

The article begins:
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.
From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
No doubt many of you read something about these incidents. Or about campus "free speech zones," which Gould-Wartofsky also mentions in this section. But few probably thought about it in terms of what it might it portend operationally. What was the purpose being served? Obviously, chilling dissent is one purpose. But chilling dissent is not the end of it, this article shows. It's just one piece of the puzzle.

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames. Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."
And so, slowly but surely, people become acclimatized to living in a garrison state. It makes them feel "secure," by simultaneously making them feel insecure. It changes their everyday experience, expectations, and assumptions about what is normal, taken-for-granted.

Want to get even MORE scared?



A Gramscian Take on The Times And McCain
by: Paul Rosenberg Sat Feb 23, 2008


The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher. (A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.

(B) Gramsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.

(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.



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So, again, Straight Talk? Not so much....
Which leads me into one of my recurrent topics--the politics of cognitive developmental levels--and how it helps illuminate the strange workings of the "Straight Talk" meme, a meme that's been prominently applied to Ross Perot, George W. Bush and Ron Paul, as well as John McCain. The implications of "straight talk" are quite clear--in ordinary parlance, a straight talker is someone who tells the truth, without all manner of qualifications and embellishments.

But the "Straight Talk" meme is something quite different--it takes the superficial lack of qualifications and embellishments as proof that what is said is true, even if what is being talked about happens to be rather complicated, and very much in need of qualifications and embellishments. One could understand the "Straight Talk" meme simply in terms of American anti-intellectualism, ala vintage Richard Hofstadter. But I prefer Robert Kegan. In the table below, "Straight Talk" is an example of the underlying structure of Level 2--a "durable category":



Click through and scroll down for chart


The first thing to understand is that we are talking about mere appearances here. While the real deal is an "Enduring Disposition"--the psychological manifestation of a durable category--the "Straight Talk" meme refers simply to the appearance described above.

The second thing to understand is that normal conservatism operates on Level 3. It corresponds to adult consciousness in a traditional society. The self is defined in terms of the matrix of social roles and relationships of the surrounding society.
At that level, we are those roles and relationships, and any criticism of them is a criticism of ourselves. "America, love it or leave it," indeed.
Except that--Third Thing--America was founded as a Level 4 institution. Our very Constitution is the very embodiment of a "Relationship-Regulating Form." And it is the conservative, Level 3 mind's complete incapacity to deal with Level 4 that leads to falling back on Level 2 pseudo-certainties.

You see, each level is more complicated than the one before. Each level involves taking what was subject, the foundation of thought and being, and making it object, turning taken-for-granted context into clearly manipulable content. For those who remain embedded in the taken-for-granted context, this is not merely a frightening possibility, it is, quite literally, inconceivable, because they lack the context needed to conceive it.

Traditional, Level 3 societies change only very slowly over time. This is where the "narrative of 'personal virtue' as the foundational concern of politics" described at the beginning of this post fits in. So long as society is basically unchanging, the person who exemplifies living by the rules has a very strong claim to encompass the very essence of what politics is all about.


But modernism developed out of the quickening pace of change that first hit Europe a good seven centuries ago, in the fast-paced trade-oriented city-states of Northern Italy. They called it "The Renaissance," but it was actually much, much more than the rebirth of ancient knowledge, because that ancient knowledge feed into a newly dynamic form of life, from which a wholly new future would spring--the future in which we now live. This future requires, among other things, the active engagement in reshaping the rules by which we live. Change is simply too rapid, and too all-pervasive for us to remain unchanged and still fit with the world around us.


But the Level 3 mind sees such change as its very destruction. To note things that need changing in America is to be anti-American in this view. Ironically, this view is quintessentially un-American. People come here to reinvent themselves. That is the whole point of America. If reinvention is not your thing, then you just don't belong here. Of course, no Level 3 mind can grasp such a basic Level 4 fact, which constitutes an existential threat to its very existence. And a common response to such overwhelming threats is one form or another of ego defense mechanism, such as regression, which is defined as :returning to a previous stage of development."


Much more

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1. Look. I do realise that long and challenging pieces of writing are a bit intimidating, due to the pull on time, and the fact that we have all been accustomed to much shorter (and in my opinion, rather less substance-filled) writings and opinions for a time. Lord knows that I myself don't read long pieces all in one go. But I do believe that there are some ideas that cannot be synthesized into 300-500 word pieces, with snark threaded throughout to make the intellectual medicine go down easier. Sometimes, in order to fully undersatnd your position and the steps that need to be taken, the marrow of the issues need to be extracted. And that leads to long essays. Sorry people, but citizenship is not easy. Never was. So buck up, break up the essays into chunks, exorcise that ridiculous expression "tl;dr" from your vocabularly, and exercise your brain a bit. Actually, exercise it a lot. Last I heard, we only use 10% of our brains anyway. That leaves 90% that need to be taken out into the sun.

2. Oy idiot! WTH do you mean you are not interested in the history and lets just focus on today? The history is how we got into our current predicament, dummy! If you don't know how this shit happened to you, how the hell do you think that you can craft an effective strategy for getting your ass OUT of the mess?! Besides, dumpling, ever heard of the saying "Those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it"? Sit your ass down and use your head, dammit!
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EDIT:
I'd like to thank Anonymous in the comments for pointing to refutation of this article.

spinsanity, PR Watch and Alternet refute the story. The excerpt below is from Alternet:


According to commentators of all ideological stripes -- from the Nation's Christopher Hitchens on the left to the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg in the center to the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly on the right -- the US gave $43 million to Afghanistan's Taliban government as a reward for its efforts to stamp out opium-poppy cultivation. That would have been a shockingly inappropriate gift to a government that had been sanctioned by the United Nations for its refusal to hand over international terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Would have been, that is, if it had really happened. It didn't.

The truth is contained in the transcript of a briefing given by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who on May 17 announced the $43 million grant; it was aimed at alleviating a famine that threatened the lives of four million Afghans. Far from handing the money over to the Taliban, Powell went out of his way to criticize them, and to explain the steps the United States was taking to keep the money out of their hands.

"We distribute our assistance in Afghanistan through international agencies of the United Nations and non-governmental organizations," Powell said. "We provide our relief to the people of Afghanistan, not to Afghanistan's ruling factions. Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it."


Powell did say one favorable thing about the Taliban: "We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance for Afghans, including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome." The bottom line, though, was -- or should have been -- easy enough to comprehend: humanitarian aid for Afghans, yes; money for the Taliban, no.


Since the story is wrong and it is teh major linchpin of teh diary, I've decided to de-reccomend it. Sorry for misleading everyone!



Via Daily Kos

As Barack Obama begins the effort of turning America’s attention toward the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan--and as American soldiers die at the hands of Taliban militants in numbers never before seen--it’s worth drawing everyone’s attention to a piece in The Nationdug up this afternoon. It was originally published May 15, 2001--less four months before 9/11.

that VetVoice’s Chris LeJeune
Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush Administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously.
That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that "rogue regime" for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this administration's attention.
Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.
Sadly, the Bush Administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at US insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden.


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WTF? WTF? WTF? WHAT. TEH . FUCK?
How the fuck did this happen,and not be headline news for the next 3 mths? How come it was NOT used against the fucktard to win the next Presidential election, exactly? What the FUCK???
 
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via: Open Left



Redefining Progress: The Nature of Economics


How We Measure Progress
The GPI starts with the same personal consumption data that the GDP is based on, but then makes some crucial distinctions. It adjusts for factors such as income distribution, adds factors such as the value of household and volunteer work, and subtracts factors such as the costs of crime and pollution. Because the GDP and the GPI are both measured in monetary terms, they can be compared on the same scale. Measurements that make up the GPI include:
Income Distribution


Both economic theory and common sense tell us that the poor benefit more from a given increase in their income than do the rich. Accordingly, the GPI rises when the poor receive a larger percentage of national income, and falls when their share decreases.

Housework, Volunteering, and Higher Education
Much of the most important work in society is done in household and community settings: childcare, home repairs, volunteer work, and so on. The GDP ignores these contributions because no money changes hands. The GPI includes the value of this work figured at the approximate cost of hiring someone to do it. The GPI also takes into account the non-market benefits associated with a more educated population.

Crime
Crime imposes large economic costs on individuals and society in the form of legal fees, medical expenses, damage to property, and the like. The GDP treats such expenses as additions to well-being. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs arising from crime.

Resource Depletion
If today's economic activity depletes the physical resource base available for tomorrow, then it is not creating well-being; rather, it is borrowing it from future generations. The GDP counts such borrowing as current income. The GPI, by contrast, counts the depletion or degradation of wetlands, forests, farmland, and nonrenewable minerals (including oil) as a current cost.

Pollution
The GDP often counts pollution as a double gain: Once when it is created, and then again when it is cleaned up. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs of air and water pollution as measured by actual damage to human health and the environment.

Long-Term Environmental Damage
Climate change, ozone depletion, and nuclear waste management are long-term costs arising from the use of fossil fuels, chlorofluorocarbons, and atomic energy, respectively. These costs are unaccounted for in ordinary economic indicators. The GPI treats as costs the consumption of certain forms of energy and of ozone-depleting chemicals. It also assigns a cost to carbon emissions to account for the catastrophic economic, environmental, and social effects of global warming.

Changes in Leisure Time


As a nation becomes wealthier, people should have more latitude to choose between work and free time for family or other activities. In recent years, however, the opposite has occurred. The GDP ignores this loss of free time, but the GPI treats leisure as most Americans do-as something of value. When leisure
time increases, the GPI goes up; when Americans have less of it, the GPI goes down.

Defensive Expenditures
The GDP counts as additions to well-being the money people spend to prevent erosion in their quality of life or to compensate for misfortunes of various kinds. Examples are the medical and repair bills from automobile accidents, commuting costs, and household expenditures on pollution control devices such
as water filters. The GPI counts such "defensive" expenditures as most Americans do: as costs rather than as benefits.

Lifespan of Consumer Durables & Public Infrastructure
The GDP confuses the value provided by major consumer purchases (e.g., home appliances) with the amount Americans spend to buy them. This hides the loss in well-being that results when products wear out quickly. The GPI treats the money spent on capital items as a cost, and the value of the service they provide year after year as a benefit. This applies both to private capital items and to public infrastructure, such as highways.

Dependence on Foreign Assets
If a nation allows its capital stock to decline, or if it finances consumption out of borrowed capital, it is living beyond its means. The GPI counts net additions to the capital stock as contributions to well-being, and treats money borrowed from abroad as reductions. If the borrowed money is used for investment, the negative effects are canceled out. But if the borrowed money is used to finance consumption, the GPI declines.

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Global Warming And Hegemony--Further Thoughts On A Rockridge Institute Diary




I now want to turn my attention to global warming, by way of revisitng a recent, diary from Joe Brewer, of the Rockridge Institute, Why We Are Losing the Global Warming Battle. In it, Joe argues:
Right now, things don't look very promising. It isn't just that we've reached the tipping point, as James Hansen suggests. (warning - large PDF file) It isn't just that the first-ever climate bill is about to arrive DOA on the Senate floor--maybe not such a bad thing since Lieberman-Warner is built on the wrong ideas. The real problem is in the way we think about the problem and, therefore, the solutions.
There are two problems with "the way we think"-the actual lack of a well-developed framework of ideas, and the lack of an institutional framework for propagating the ideas we do have. These are, ever and always, the two sides of what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described as a "culture war" or "war of position"-a struggle to control the institutions that shape our culture, including not just the ideas we think, but the ideas we can think. In this case, I would argue that the later-the institutional framework- is much more of a problem than the framework ideas itself is.
For example, Joe goes on to say:
Consider this sampling of Big Ideas conservatives have pushed into public discourse:

* Nature is a resource to be exploited.
* Wealth is measured simply by money.
* The economy and environment are distinct and inevitably in conflict with one another.
* Polluting is a right, so companies should be compensated for the cost of clean-up.
* Markets are natural and naturally good.
* Government is distinct from markets and intrudes upon them.

These ideas are at the heart of the climate debate.
It is not hard to think of ideas counter to those. What is hard is to envision powerful organizations engaged in systematically refuting them with a vigour equal to that of conservatives pushing them.


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