Briefer futility

If you've noticed a slight reduction in the posting frequency here it's not your imagination; I'm no longer spending multiple hours on carefully researched essays doomed to have zero effect on the world, and can't imagine I'll change my mind on that anytime soon (though I may use this space to capture longer thoughts on various topics).

However, I do still occasionally spend multiple seconds on 140 character squibs doomed to have zero effect on the world, which you can see at https://twitter.com/DistantOcean (or @DistantOcean, as those kids who won't get off of my lawn would say).

Many thanks to everyone who spent time reading and commenting here over the years; to the extent that it felt worthwhile, y'all made it so.

Someone should tell Muslims they weren’t raging

Newsweek prompted a wave of indignation and mockery from the left a few months back when it published a cover with the caption MUSLIM RAGE in the wake of riots over the YouTube-posted trailer for "The Innocence of Muslims".  The responses I saw offered no specifics, apparently considering the offensive absurdity of the notion of "Muslim rage" so self-evident that it required no explanation, but as far as I could tell the core of the complaint was that not every Muslim on the planet was outraged—so this overly-generalized caption was clear evidence of Newsweek's anti-Muslim bias* (just as the use of the blanket phrase "Los Angeles Riots" back in 1992, despite the relative peace in areas like Echo Park and Brentwood, established once and for all the media's anti-Angelenoism).

In any case, someone really needs to get the word out to the Egyptian court that just handed down this ruling:

An Egyptian court ordered YouTube to be blocked for a month after the website disseminated video footage deemed offensive to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, the state-run Middle East News Agency reported, citing Administrative Court Judge Hassouna Tawfik. […] YouTube, “did not respect the belief of the millions in Egypt and it overlooked the state of rage that prevailed amongst Muslims,” it said, citing court documents.

Maybe a bad translation?

YouTube had "insisted on broadcasting the film insulting Islam and the Prophet, disrespecting the beliefs of millions of Egyptians and disregarding the anger of all Muslims" the court said, according to MENA.

Huh.  Well, once the Egyptian judiciary is informed about how ridiculous this whole "Muslim rage" notion is I'm sure they'll not only retract their offensively Islamaphobic sentiments, but will also overturn the death sentences they've imposed on seven Egyptians involved in the production of the film.  One of the capital crimes for which those people were convicted, by the way: "Using religion to promote extremist ideas."

ADDING: The Egyptian court also transgressed against the permissible narrative when it suggested any meaningful connection between the film trailer and the so-called "rage"; the mere suggestion that these outbursts of violence and anger are caused by seemingly obvious triggers like Koran-burning or crappy-film-trailer-distributing provokes scorn from many on the left, who blithely ignore statements like the one(s) above, Muslims who say outright that "We cannot accept any insult to our prophet…it's a red line" or "We did the protest to show to the infidels that we are unhappy about their action in burning our holy Koran in America," etc.  In ideology as in theology, reality is rarely an impediment to belief.

—

* Newsweek wasn't alone in this ugly bias, though; the well-known Muslim bashers at the Daily Times of Pakistan ran a story titled "New blasphemous caricatures fuel Muslim anger."

Before and after

Last night I was stunned to see an article on the New York Times web site titled "Israeli Airstrike Kills Three Generations of a Palestinian Family", which led off with this text:

An Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here Sunday afternoon, killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single family, in the deadliest single strike since the cross-border conflict between Israel and the militant faction Hamas escalated on Wednesday.

The airstrike, along with several others that killed civilians across this coastal territory and hit two media offices here — one of them used by Western TV networks — further indicated that Israel was striking a wider range of targets.

This was a shock because it's almost unheard of to see a story in any mainstream U.S. press, and particularly the Times, that gives a relatively unbiased view of the kind of vicious violence the Israelis are visiting on Palestinians.  Though the story did make a few nods to Israeli-centric "balance" later on, the headline and the first two paragraphs made it enough of an outlier that I wondered how it even saw the light of day.

I also doubted it would continue to see the light of day, though.  You may have noticed that the link I provided points to a current-at-the-time copy of the story rather than the actual story itself.  Why?  Because this morning, the story at the original link has been re-titled "Hamas Leader Dares Israel to Invade Amid Gaza Airstrikes", and the text I cited above a) is now buried deep in the article and b) has been changed to the following, which I invite you to compare to the original version:

An Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here on Sunday, killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single family, in the deadliest single strike since the latest conflict began. Members of the family were buried Monday in a rite that turned into a gesture of defiance and became a rally supporting Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.

A militant leader said Tel Aviv, in the Israeli heartland, would be hit "over and over" and warned Israelis that their leaders were misleading them and would "take them to hell."

Now, it's true that the Times and other outlets sometimes maintain stories for current events that are updated regularly as circumstances continue to change.  Nonetheless, I can't help but suspect that the original story was produced on a Sunday night when the regular staff of the Times was off for the evening, and when that regular staff came in on Monday morning they quickly corrected the unpalatably accurate, insufficiently Israeli-friendly version of events their night crew had published.

Whatever the case, it's reassuring to see once again that our systems of disinformation are self-correcting.

Droning on

And I was so looking forward to war being wrong again for four years.

I’ll punch your teeth in if you don’t stop claiming I’m violent

Given that I've written about the crack team of thought police over at CommonDreams on several occasions, I couldn't possibly pass up this gem from founder and chief control freak Craig Brown:

Commenters who react to the infrequent spam filter glitches by screaming "Censorship!" and spreading conspiracy theories about mass "censorship" will also be banned from commenting on the site.

Almost too perfect, isn't it?

WITH APOLOGIES TO BEAVERS: The 2007 article where I discovered that Brown and his goons had banned me from the site had at least 133 comments at one point, but they'd whittled it down to 127 by deleting both my comments and all responses to my comments by other people (you can see this for yourself in that first posting I cited above).  Looking at that same article again today, five years later, it's down to just 120 comments—so the busy beavers at CommonDreams eventually achieved a 10% comment censorship rate on that one article.  Impressive, but no surprise given that their scorched earth methods of erasing people involve removing not just a) the comment that crossed their invisible line but b) every comment the person has ever made on the site, c) responses to those comments by other people, and even d) comments by other people that merely mention the disappeared commenter's username.  (They ban their victims by IP address as well, though that's outside the scope of our little analysis.)

Has CommonDreams maintained this impressive 10% rate of censorship?  Does a 10% deletion rate make them the most aggressively censoring news and opinion site on the Internet?  And do the little Napoleons there ever feel even a twinge of conscience as they go about their shabby work?  So many uninteresting questions we'll never have answers for.

Apotheosis of insignficance

Who will win tonight's debate: black Romney or white Romney?  Unwitting kabuki fans everywhere are feverish with anticipation.

Birds of a feather

I can't tell you how tired I am of bringing up my news page in the morning only to be greeted by the stare of yet another remorseless mass murderer: Anders Breivik, Jared Loughner, Barack Obama, Wade Michael Page, etc.

Four more years

George Monbiot's latest has this keeper:

Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires.

It's funny 'cause it's true!  Oh wait, it's not funny.  Still true though.  And then there's this:

You have only to see the way the United States has savaged the Earth summit's draft declaration to grasp the scale of this problem. The word "equitable", the US insists, must be cleansed from the text. So must any mention of the right to food, water, health, the rule of law, gender equality and women's empowerment. So must a clear target of preventing two degrees of global warming. So must a commitment to change "unsustainable consumption and production patterns", and to decouple economic growth from the use of natural resources.

Most significantly, the US delegation demands the removal of many of the foundations agreed by a Republican president in Rio in 1992. In particular, it has set out to purge all mention of the core principle of that Earth summit: common but differentiated responsibilities.

You really should click through on that link he provides, which shows the actual changes made by the US and its co-conspirators to the draft.  In fact you should so really click through on that link he provides that I'm going to make the rest of this paragraph one big clickable link so that if you even innocently click in this window to change the mouse focus and accidentally nick the side of this paragraph you'll end up following it.  Please don't hate me for helping you.

That's the first most important thing people are ignoring as they obsess over the minutiae of the most inconsequential election in living memory.  Here's the second and even more important thing, which is intimately related:

LORI WALLACH: The [Trans-Pacific Partnership] requires that every signatory country conform all of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures to what are 26 chapters of very comprehensive rules, only two of which have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters set a whole array of corporate new privileges and rights and handcuff governments, limit regulation. So the chapter that leaked—and it’s actually on the website of Citizens Trade Campaign, it’s a national coalition for fair trade—that chapter is the chapter that sets up new rights and privileges for foreign investors, including their right to privately enforce this public treaty by suing our government, raiding our Treasury, over costs of complying with the same policies that all U.S. companies have to comply with. […]

[E]ach of these agreements has gotten bolder, more expansive in its limits on government regulation and in its granting of corporate powers. This one could be the end, because what they intend to do is leave it open, once it’s done, for any other country to join. So, this is an agreement that ultimately could have the whole world in it as a set of binding corporate guarantees of new rights and privileges, enforced with cash sanctions and trade sanctions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the TPP threatens to become a regime of binding global governance, right at the time that the Occupy movement and movements around the world are demanding more power and control.

Which shows that even though underappreciated heroes like Wallach managed to kill the Multilateral Agreement on Investment over a decade ago, its worst provisions have shambled zombie-like through the sweaty dreams of neoliberals, waiting to find new life in yet another secretly negotiated corporate constitution with global ambitions.  (I've always found it bitterly amusing that while hyperventilating right wingers conjure up conspiracies to establish a UN-controlled one world government in nefarious plots like the attempt to increase bike ridership, corporations are taking actual, concrete and successful steps to render democratic self-governance—in the broadest sense of the phrase—all but meaningless.)

No matter which millionaire wins, the entrenchment of corporate control over every aspect of our lives and the destruction of the ecosystems in which human civilization developed will both continue without a pause.  "Four more years" isn't an aspiration—it's a threat.

Let’s get back to reality

Last year I uncharitably suggested that one of the liberal threats to Obama in 2012 boiled down to: "We'll think about running a primary challenge against you! Not that we will, of course, but don't you imagine for a second we won't think about it."  And here's what the editors of the SF Bay Guardian said in their endorsements for the June 5th primary:

Last fall, when a few of the most progressive Democrats began talking about the need to challenge Obama in a primary, we had the same quick emotional reaction as many San Franciscans: Time to hold the guy accountable. Some prominent left types have vowed not to give money to the Obama campaign.

But let's get back to reality. […] We're mad at Obama, too — but we're realists enough to know that there is a difference between moderate and terrible, and that's the choice we're facing today.

Here's another threat I suggested: "We'll vote for you again—but with slightly less enthusiasm!"  And here's Daily Kos himself:

"I’ll tell you what. If [Obama] shows that he’s going to fight for the things that I care about, I will fight twice as hard for him." And if he doesn’t? "Then I’ll vote for him," says Moulitsas.

As much as I'd like to say this proves I'm more prescient than Nostradamus, it's hard to make that claim when I was joined in these far-seeing predictions by the entire Democratic Party establishment.

FORGIVE OUR THOUGHTCRIME: But my favorite part of that Guardian endorsement:

No, this one's easy. Obama has no opposition in the Democratic Primary, but for all our concerns about his policies, we have to start supporting his re-election now.

Got that?  Even in this entirely meaningless exercise in which Barack Obama was literally the only candidate on the Democratic primary ballot, and despite the fact that he would have won a crushing victory in California even if he had faced token principled opposition, the Guardian editors felt that asserting the tiny measure of dissent of withholding their primary vote from him would have been going too far.  After all, if someone had looked at the vote total in San Francisco and noticed it was even one lower than expected, who knows what might have happened?

I imagine Obama's written down the Guardian's "concerns about his policies" on a roll of toilet paper, so he can give them all the attention they require.

Antidote

If you haven’t already, odds are good you’re going to have someone point you to this wretched bit of Obamaphilia in the next few months (I warn you that clicking through may cause nausea, vomiting or uncontrollable seizures).

The first time I saw that I thought that someone really needed to put together a corrected version—and happily, someone did (thanks, the Internet!).  Bookmark it now and you won’t have to track it down later when some Democratic hack coughs up that first link.