just what does “anti-american” mean anyway? i see it get thrown around a lot, usually intiated in the context of us foreign policy criticism(s). william blum has a good retort when being slagged. anyway, the 101 quiz seems to not even acknowledge state terrorism, far more prevalent than retail terrorism. cribbing from tariq ali, the well-trained house slave thinks only of the costs to the house for which he works…

Posted by: b real | Dec 2 2004 23:23 utc | 3

jérôme
some times my friend – as in this case of cuba – the demonisation just comes a little too easily. it is a flawed society but wouldn’t you be if you were attacked since inception.
what have the cubans to be proud of – the best education in latin america – an education that i imagine is better than that given in america – cuban medical schools recently opened their doors to north americans who wanted to study medicine & could not afford it in us. their health system is unparalleled & it rest comfortably with comparison with advanced capitalist countries
ô i am very serious jérôme even in ill health i would in my humble way physically defend cuba if the u s laid a hand on her beautiful head
how do you expect soiceties to function when they are paralysed from birth. but even with that paralysis – there is no question where it was safer to be as a citizen in latin america – & that rests true to this day
societies do not fall from the heavens – they are created jérôme with human hands & human desires – was not cuba’d desire not to be treated as america’s whorehouse & gambling casino not a just demand
& i’m not naïve – i know what happened to the ochoas – i know what happened to some of cubas sons & daughters but in the end i am with gabriel garcia marquez in saying that this experiment is above all, noble
maybe i’m an old fashioned person but nobility matters to me. decency too. i live in france as you do – & we are a rich country – yet there are conditions here that woulod not seem out of place in 1935
i know what it means to rise from the mud & what that means to a human being & to a society – the man is flawed & so is the society but theone thing cuba is not is corrupt. she is almost angelic in her efforts to keep true to her ideals & she has suffered disproprtionaltely for her dream
& what of the dream of the chilean people – was than not their soverieign right. was not the real support of the sandinistas in nicaragua to be respected – or its it simply the ideas that third world people possess are worth so much less than our own. i do not think so. i never shall
i have a soft spot for fidel & on a level of tyranny – he is much less so than our own charles pasqua or even raymond barre
as i have just noted in the previous post – the enormous concentration of incarceration in america – many many being the most beautiful but bent flowers of african american manhood that has been condemned to that existence. whyè do we not speak of them
& while we are at it why do we not speak of leonard peltier, why do we not speak of mumia abu jamal, why do we not speak of the railroading of geronimo pratt etc etc etc
no its too easy to attack the beautiful island of cuba & i will not pariticipate in that. to be critical of practices can be done without sliding into anti communist hysteria
communism & the struggles of the oppressed have shown me that human being can be giants & that they sing more beautiful songs – if the right can offer just one, one great man or woman or even one song i would not be ashamed to sing then perhaps i would feel like being apologetic. but i do not. not at all
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 2 2004 23:50 utc | 5

“so long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the atlantic, i will hold up america to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. in doing this, i shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.”
frederick douglass 1845

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 3 2004 1:50 utc | 7

rgiap
I think you’re right about one point of the terror of u.s. imperialism. U.s. hegemony is now impelled more than ever by violence. I do not agree there is much about this fact that can be blamed on americanism per se. Rather, the peculiar historic development of production has culminated in the desperation of the u.s. to defend to the end the abstraction of ‘our way of life.’ Post-war American economic and industrial policy has been a disaster in many ways: the deskilling of labor, reduction of collective bargaining, decline in manufacture and decline in competitiveness, floating exchange rates and the lack of political will to reduce the deficits and debt, etc. These mistakes now give American desperation its own patina of horrors.
This is all to say, while America’s experiments in capitalism are not reducible to ‘the logic of capital,’ there are no immutable iron laws of american conduct. We (man oh man, ‘we’) are doing now whatever it is that a second rate economic power with a firstrate military does when it can no longer afford a ‘way of life.’

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 3 2004 3:10 utc | 9

But…I would and will defend the view that a more general ‘logic of capital’ urges the utterly inhumane exploitation of labor. The great capital accumulator that is China is just so motivated; as well: “beloved France” and so forth.
Maybe europe and asia will forge some third-way and lead the world to a better future through some more smiley-faced capitalism. Much has been written, including, off the top of my head Michael Piore and Charles Sabel: Second Industrial Divide.
I don’t know, but I doubt it.

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 3 2004 3:20 utc | 11

@ Jérôme and b real
Thanks for two nicely “dialectical” links. Terrorism
101 is totally reasonable within its framework, the
Blum link suggests that the frame may be excluding
a lot of relevant data. That many Moslems are quite
rightly indignant about U.S. foreign policy is clear,
but just who Bin Laden is (or was?), who is really
funding him and “producing” his media appearances, and who is occultly maneuvering Al Quaeda remain, to me at least, very much open questions (although I do harbor
some “paranoid” or “flat-earth” suspicions). Most of those who contribute (including this poster) to Moon share a leftist “conventional wisdom” that could be almost as wrong-headed as that of the benighted red state rednecks. We claim, and try, to be reality based but
history and political science do not permit experimental verification. Historical facts like those so lucidly placed in evidence by Chomsky, Finkelstein, r’giap and others still don’t help to decide if the evil done was part of a consciously cynical program of imperial domination, or rather merely examples of incredible stupidity and callous
inability to imagine oneself in the victims’ place.
Strangely enough, it is rather more coherent for a conservative to see “evil” in these actions: the left
tends to view man as “intrinsically good” (in the absence of “false consciousness”) rather than as a
post-lapsarian creature capable of real evil. Under
normal circumstances these vague musings have no urgency, but the daily violence resulting from the American occupation of Iraq make them a sharp pang of impotent anguish. In the end decenct men and women must recognize evil, call it by its name, and take a stand against it, whether that evil be the result of calculation and deliberation or merely of superficiality and ignorance. Yet as Terrorism 101
points out, in this way we risk assuming the very absolutist connotations that we abhor in our adversaries.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 3 2004 10:05 utc | 13

Ah, Hannah, the nature of man. This site is going to go to hell for this, isn’t it?
A realistic view of our nature should be, of course, at the basis of how a sensible person would organise the world. All the conventional ones seem wrong: man is not basically good, nor is he basically self-serving. We are complex productions of nature, nurture and chance, and any dispassionate attempt to assess what we are truly challenges our most basic assumptions. So much of philosophy and economics is justification of the authors prejudices, or that of their masters.
I don’t know if science can provide a basis for answering the question. but it seems to have a better chance than anything else.
Here, for what it is worth, is what I see:
* We are animals. I can no longer see any human capability that is different in kind to those found in the other animals. Different in degree, yes, kind no. We are primate wolves, social, omnivorous, making up for our poor armament with other skills and traits. Without any weapons, humans are capable of running down prey in the same way that wolves run them down, exhausting them and closing for the kill with whatever is to hand.
* We are both co-operative and competitive. We don’t need a philosophical explanation of altruism: it’s built in. Our sense of good and evil is built in, like our skill for language. Both are shaped by circumstances and vary from person to person, but they’re both there to start with.
* We are pack animals. We have a sense of who is in our pack, and we all want the best for our pack. The difference between liberal and conservative is who we think is in our pack. Liberals tend to extend membership to everyone, conservatives restrict it.
* Evil is what offends our sense of good and evil. If you don’t consider Arabs to be members of your pack, you don’t see that killing 100,000 of them is evil.
* Our societies and cultures are layered on top of these basic facts, shaping us in detail, but unable to change the basic nature except superficially.
Any political or economic ideology which does not take these basic facts into account, which plays on differences between us and the animals, which justifies itself on the basis of a religious book, which takes a single human trait is dangerous nonsense. In fact, any economic ideology is dangerous nonsense: decide what your economic aim is and work out how to get there.
Now, I’m not arguing for any particular ideology: quite the opposite. Adoption of an ideology, be it Marxism, socialism, capitalism limits your choices. A rational society decides what its goals are and then trys to achieve them. So if a society’s goal is to concentrate all the wealth and power in the hands of a small number of monopolists, it follows a strong free market approach. If it wants a massively inefficient system with almost everyone equally poor and all the power in the hands of a small number of oligarchs it adopts communism. If it wants a reasonable distribution of wealth while still remaining moderately efficient it muddles along with some sort of mixed economy trying to avoid the excesses of either system and changing policies when policies no longer work. If a country wants a world of terrorism and death it engages in imperialistic warfare and economic oppression. If it wants peace and quiet prosperity it avoids warfare and attempts to deal with problems by negotiation and by leading by example, accepting the world isn’t perfect and trying to improve it little by little.
[You know, I was in a bad mood before writing this. Much better now. It’s probably off topic, and probably all nonsense, but that never stopped the objectivists, did it?]

Posted by: Colman | Dec 3 2004 10:59 utc | 15

skd, that would be a danger. Where does the should come from?
My argument is that we need to make a best guess as to how people work and organise things to get what from where we are to where we want to be taking that into account and revising our methods when we see how things are going.
I don’t care if you act morally or not. I’m not even sure what that means.

Posted by: Colman | Dec 3 2004 11:57 utc | 17

Breaking – The Ukrainian Supreme court has declared the election invalid.

Posted by: Jérôme | Dec 3 2004 16:20 utc | 19

The euro seems likely to finish today at $1.34, thus neatly falsifying my prediction of a short term downward
move. Similarly Kerry’s defeat falsified my electoral
prediction about “responsible conservatives” being fed up with Bushism (or at least so it seems until real evidence of fraud emerges). This must be why I like conspiracy theories so much: when properly formulated they can almost never be falsified (or verified). Case in point: does anyone besides Jérôme see a link between the Yukos case and the
Ukrainian election? If it’s true that Rothschild
money was behind Yukos what is the (Schweikian) deeper meaning here?

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 3 2004 16:57 utc | 21

If pipelines from the Caspian ran through the Ukraine, who would own, build and maintain them?

Posted by: alabama | Dec 3 2004 17:29 utc | 23

@Colman not much argument here, though I would suggest that “morality” of some kind is actually a feature we share with other primates: recent experiments suggest that chimps have a sense of fairness and get angry when “unfairness” happens. I find this encouraging, myself — on the gut-level sense of fairness, which is accessible to any child or chimpanzee, a whole Kantian superstructure can be built that justifies decent behaviour.
I don’t think there is anything quite so convenient as “a society” “wanting” something. The elite of a society may want one thing and the proles quite another. And it’s interesting to note that as soon as humans have enough tangible, storable surplus wealth, the division into elites and proles happens pretty fast. The only truly egalitarian cultures I can think of, off top of head, are gatherer-hunters who don’t “own” anything much but their hand tools and a few scraps of adornment — the !Kung come to mind immediately, a peaceable people with the loosest hierarchies of anyone I’ve ever read about.
I’d also suggest that a great deal of how we behave and organise revolves around the source of our food. Agrarians behave differently from gatherer/hunters, who behave differently from coastal/marsh fisherfolk, who behave differently from nomadic herders. A lot of our history is written in the conflicts between these lifestyles. I’m reading about Ibn Battuta right now, so an example that comes to mind is Battuta’s shock and disapproval when he meets a royal Mongol family and finds that the Mongol princesses walk freely and unveiled, and participate actively in the ruling of the country, on a footing almost equal with the princes. A fast moving, herding, horse-based, warrior culture could not afford to seclude and disable half its population — the cost in reduced mobility and lost labour for herding and horse-handling when the men were in the vanguard fighting, would have been insupportable.
Several writers have suggested that the Colonial Era (still going on) represents the desperate expansion of the Wheat Growing People, whose dietary habits (wheat and meat) require vast acreage under plough and grazing to maintain. People with different dietary requirements might use less land, and thus be less hungry (literally) for Lebensraum…
Another stray thought is the issue of inclusion and exclusion (who is “us” and who is “not us” and therefore expendable/alien/enemy). Was it Buber who posited the notion of “moral distance,” suggesting that we care in radii, with our caring diminishing as the distance between us (be it geographical or cultural or genetic) and the suffering person increases? If we accept that metaphor then the “liberal/progressive” effort is to increase that radius, to care about non-family almost as much as we care about family, to care about people even if they are on the far side of the world and speak a different language. Whereas the “conservative/rightist” approach is to define that radius precisely — perhaps to write reams of legalese carefully defining who is and is not officially White or who can and cannot claim social benefits — and to expend a fair amount of effort preventing those Outside from getting any of the goodies coveted by Us and Ours.
One thing that makes the confessing faiths so incredibly radical (and Communism as well, though it came along *after* the universalist ideal had already been articulated in the European language family) is that they suggest the abolition of that radius entirely. To “love thy neighbour as thyself” or “to see that of God in everyone” is perhaps the most challenging diktat ever issued — and it’s been issued by every one of the confessing faiths (in which I count Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism). Communism comes along late but consistent with “to each according to his needs” and the concept of the International, transcending the radius of national identity.
Chimps, by the way, and most of the other primates have a fairly well-defined moral radius. It doesn’t seem to extend to monkeys — I seem to recall that chimps will eat small monkeys alive, ignoring their struggles and screams, even though to a human viewer the small monkey looks not that different from a chimp baby. The chimps’ perception of “unfairness” doesn’t extend to a prey species even if the prey species looks like their own young. And this perhaps explains why some people are only outraged and grieved by the thought of US troops with their legs blown off, and remain unmoved by an image of Iraqi children with their legs blown off. Their sense of fairness is functioning somewhere below chimp-level — they can perceive other members of their own species as if they were not conspecifics, but prey.
Nature, nurture, nature, nurture, do be do be do… I find myself agreeing with those who say that our politics come down to a vision, perhaps never clearly articulatedm of how we wish we could live — “what kind of society do you want to live in and what are you prepared to do to get there.” Some Americans, I am convinced, literally want to live in a world where everything is suburban White Christian America — where all other religions, races, cultures, lifeways have been eradicated and there is one big happy monoculture — where, as Kissinger suggested, Asia has been “depopulated” and all the world’s resources are at the disposal of the Superior Us who dwell in N Am.
To me, such a “utopia” would be a living hell, a nightmare from which I’d run screaming. But for some people I suspect it is their unexpressed, subconscious Paradise. Such people are fundamentalists — the nub of fundamentalism, be it xtian or Communist, is the refusal to admit that any person can believe or think or be differently from oneself without being Damned. The nub of progressivism, it seems to me, is tolerance. And this explains why “the worst are full of passion and the best lack all conviction” — real conviction, passionate maniacal zeal, is the province of the fundamentalist who can brook no disagreement. It’s the dialectic contradiction of liberalism that liberal principles force us to respect the freedom of speech of the White Power Party, and to write a Constitution that defends their right to hold a rally and march. The opposition has no such principles, as recent developments (Patriot 1 and 2, the senator from Alabama, Ann Coulter and her ilk) clearly show.
I’m blue skying here (ah, the human condition)… and will welcome disagreement and further illumination…

Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 3 2004 18:18 utc | 25

Skd: oh, sure, the whole idea of natural = good drives me completely mad. Either we are part of nature and everything we do is by definition natural, or there is no human being on this planet whose life isn’t so unnatural to make the whole concept irrelevant. Drives me batty that does.
DeAnander: Yes, the moral senses of the other primates are fascinating. I was thinking of adding a few references to those things to the book list thread at le Speakeasy when I get a chance. Actually I have lot’s more to respond to in your post, but if I don’t get some dinner inside me soon bad things will happen!

Posted by: Colman | Dec 3 2004 18:29 utc | 27

BTW, speaking of the politics of inclusion and exclusion
Networks refuse to run Christian inclusionary ad
Major networks ABC, CBS, NBC refuse to run paid ad by UCC (a church group) which satirises rigid exclusion (by class, race, sexual preference) as antiChristian and extends a message of welcome to all. Networks claim ad is “too controversial.”
In other words we are seeing played out in real life the very political theory we have just been discussing — that tolerance itself is the nub of a progressive politics. Seems like the rightwing corporate media machine is now confident enough in its own power and the backing of a rightwing regime, that it can afford to ban tolerance itself from the airwaves, in other words, refuse to tolerate tolerance.

Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 3 2004 18:38 utc | 29

@DeA
And to connect my above to you’re above:
The UCC ad can’t be shown, must not be shown, because if it were shown, people might get the idea, that some people are being excluded. So we have to exclude them from the very fact that people are being excluded, or they might come to the realization, that maybe if others can be excluded, then maybe, they themselves might be excluded, and whoo daddy, we got to exclude them from seeing that.
Cultural exclusion rubs both ways necessarily, and we’re getting far enough down that road, to not see from which we came from.

Posted by: anna missed | Dec 3 2004 20:21 utc | 31

alabama – reposting something I wrote about a week ago on the same topic (over at Kos):
I really don’t think that Ukraine is about oil in any significant way. It is an oil importer and one of several oil export routes for Russia (and as one of the least reliable – Odessa is one of the worst Mafia-infested oil export terminals), the transit issues are much less significant than for natural gas.
The only remotely oil-related issue [with Ukraine] that I can see is the Odessa Brody pipeline which has been recently put in service. Odessa is on the black Sea, and Brody is North of that, on the main East-West pipeline going from Russia to Hungary and further West. The Europeans were hoping that this pipe could be used South-North to export Caspian Oil from the other side of the black Sea (mostly Supsa in Georgia) towards Europe – without going through Russia at any point. Instead, the Russians have convinced the Ukrainians to take their oil north-to-south from their pipe to Odessa. The Turks are especially unhappy because it means more tanker transit through the Bosphorus (Istanbul) which is the route from Odessa to the Mediterranean. However, I doubt that this is even remotely linked to the current crisis.
My take is that the opposition won fair and square and are facing a power that does not want to give up. But I am optimistic.
Remember that Ukraine already experienced a peaceful transition in 1994, when Kravtchuk (the candidate of the Westest part of Ukraine) was beaten by Kuchma and left peacefully, and it seems that they will teach us a lesson again in how to demonstrate peacefully for political goals.
What we also see is Putin abandoning all pretense of a warm relationship with the West (“cold” does not necessarily preclude “good”, but it certainly means that we should forget illusions about grand cooperation. Ironically, oil is probably the one area where Russia and the US could maintain a working partnership within an overall icy relationship – they are on the same side there, both sides want to increase supply, not reduce demand)

Posted by: Jérôme | Dec 3 2004 20:26 utc | 33

As if to prove every word we write about them:

Al Kamen writes in his Washington Post column: “President Bush announced yesterday he’ll be awarding the presidential Medal of Freedom to the Tres Amigos of Iraq: former CIA chief George J. “Slam Dunk” Tenet, who gave him bad information; retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who didn’t have enough troops for the postwar occupation; and former Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer, who complained about the troop levels too late.”

WaPo

Posted by: Colman | Dec 3 2004 20:38 utc | 35

Anna, I don’t even know what those people consider failure anymore.

Posted by: Colman | Dec 3 2004 20:44 utc | 37

Or possibly they’re going to claim that the build-up of pressure it causes is a WMD.

Posted by: Colman | Dec 3 2004 20:56 utc | 39

i’m glad to see george galloway won his libel action against british newspaper & do not wonder why bbc&co do not try to also clear the name they so effortlessly besmirched
reminds me of the scandalous libel against the heroic miners leader arthur scargill – that was also found to be untrue ten years too late

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 3 2004 22:41 utc | 41

and while we are on News of the Weird
this would be hella funnier if I didn’t feel like the US was heading towards the same (or a similar) psychotic endstate. Bums and Drums indeed.

Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 4 2004 0:51 utc | 43

Falluja residents face choice – retina scan and take ID card….or die

Posted by: Anonymous | Dec 4 2004 1:24 utc | 45

@DeAnander – do you have more from your agroeconomist friends on Cuban agriculture? I’ve heard some fascinating stories about their new agriculture system.
Why NKoreans starving & Cubans not? Both were dependent on their Soviet Patron for energy. When S.U. brought down/fell, both had problem since they used Industrial Agriculture that US uses. It’s as inefficient & unscientific as agriculture can get, requiring 10kcal of energy inputs for each kcal energy output. Castro decided that Organic Agriculture, that until then had been confined to universities, should be taught to farmers. Hence, Cubans have higher caloric input now than during Soviet Sponsorship, but NKoreans, who didn’t take that road-for whatever reasons- are starving.
Do you know anymore about this?
@RGiap’s 11:31 PM Post:
“stanley hoffmann sd fascism was simply the corruption of the state being only able in its decay to function in a totalitarian manner”
Anyone know who said Stanley Hoffman is?

Posted by: jj | Dec 4 2004 4:20 utc | 47

Carlos Fuentes “A Victim of Pinochet”
Ariel Dorfman “If Pinochet Dies Abroad
and
“On Memory and Truth”

Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 4 2004 4:51 utc | 49

Homeland Security ‘Chief’ Bernard Kerik. Apparently suffers some deep psychotrauma (mother-whore shot by pimp). Bush sychophant, sure. Whatever it takes.
Oh: former undercover cop.
What a gem.

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 4 2004 6:20 utc | 51

More bar snacks.
Kenneth Torp says “The staggering irony here is that the most bellicose administration in recent history on issues of international cooperation is likely to bring about the sharpest curtailment of foreign policy sovereignty by handing veto power to the very same international players it so routinely snubs.” i.e. by ruining the US economy, BushCo will hand sovereignty over to the IMF/WB, foreign investors and the like, who will exert their muscle to force the US to behave. “In other words, the ability of the United States to defend itself against the next (real) threat is severely circumscribed by the Bush administration’s ideological commitment to tax cuts and its refusal to exercise even a modicum of fiscal discipline.” An interesting way to put it — I’d say the Bush regime was the real threat. But anyway…
Carolyn Baker says that Americans are “addicted to happiness” and had better learn to face harsh realities: “Recently, a foreign-born friend of mine asked why the American people believe that they have the right to expand, exploit, rape, pillage, murder and conquer every area of the planet. I could only answer by explaining the history of the United States—an epic saga of what my friend had just verbalized. Indeed, the bills are coming due, and unfortunately, it is now time for us to pay.” It’s a dark essay, echoing much of what various Cassandras have said here at MoA and elsewhere: party’s over, time to sober up and face the hangover. “Our children are unlikely to demand an end to a perpetual war on terrorism until they hold draft cards in their wallets which have been sucked dry by that war’s astronomical debt. We may never cherish our communities until we and our neighbors have to depend on each other for food and basic necessities of life. The preciousness of our resources will not be fully appreciated until they disappear or become very difficult to acquire.”
Harsh words indeed. Worth discussing?
And in the meantime, just to prove that I don’t spend all my time with a bottle of vodka and a loaded revolver on the desk, spinning the cylinder thoughtfully, but do crack a smile now and again 🙂 — here’s the inimitable Ben Tripp advising us on shopping strategies for the Resistance: “Lists of companies that gave 90% of their campaign contributions to the Republican cause (90% of companies) are circulating around the Internet like swarms of enraged mayflies. The only real way to avoid spending money on these corporations is to live under a large, flat rock, subsisting on lizards. Here are my strategies for ‘buying blue’ in a time when the Red Tide no longer means godless communism, but rather the thimble-witted sociopaths out to turn the clock back to 1630 –­ all 100 million of them.”
From under my large flat rock, picking lizard bones out from between my teeth, I wish y’all a good evening. As HKOL says, people are dying in Iraq while we chat here — and this has been true for my entire life, that somewhere in the world the machinery of US militarism and capitalism was killing someone while I did whatever I was doing that day. Often other machineries were killing people as well, separately or in cahoots or in competition: the machineries of tribal vendetta, of Soviet and Chinese and Indian expansionism, of French nuclear testing, S African Apartheid, US and Australian domestic racism [and I’m just picking randomly out of the barrel here, plenty of rotten apples left unmentioned!] — of independent Third World sweatshoppery and slumlording and Enclosure, of starvation and soil destruction patriarchal misogyny and gaybashing and flood and epidemic and domestic battery and Chernobyl and carcinogenic pollutants and medical incompetence and ordinary murder… By incompetence and by design, for profit or for bigotry or vengeance or sheer stupid petty piqued ego, or in some cases just for fun, people were killing one another all the time I’ve been alive, and they still are, and I’m so sick of it that the vodka and the revolver sometimes look good, in a metaphorical sort of way.
Bad primate — no planet.
How we live with this world and our own species I don’t know, and how we stop the wicked from having their way I don’t know… how what we laughingly call “civilisation” (good music, good food, good literature, good company, good humour, civic life, family, decency, theatre, craftsmanship) manages to float on the surface of this cesspit of violence and cruelty, I don’t know that either. What I like about this drinking establishment is that all of the regulars seem as bothered as I am by not knowing…

Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 4 2004 7:27 utc | 53

@ Jérôme
Deanander was probably thinking of the Rainbow Warrior caper, or perhaps the effects of fallout from
Saharan tests way back when. Agreed, of course,
on orders of magnitude of lethality, a calculus which I nevertheless abhor.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 4 2004 8:10 utc | 55

@ Jérôme

This field is so big and so complex, with so many actors, that you will probably be able to follow the global geopolitics of oil just by understanding this one project. I’ll try to put up a post on the topic later if you’re interested (and if I can find the time)

Hey, yes, this is a fascinating tidbit!
I agree completely that Berlusca is intimately
linked to the Mafia.
I would also be interested in a Parisian’s comments
on the recent evacuation by the ITALIAN military
of Israeli citizens (mercenaries, diplomats, agents?) from
Ivory Coast? This happened almost immediately after the Israelis were accused of aiding
in an attack on French troops there. Nothing more than meets the eye, or
are U.S. allies engaging in “pay-back” to the difficult French?

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 4 2004 8:24 utc | 57

@ Jérôme I have no problems with actuarial calculations, and indeed I’m sure there are some
nice mathematical aspects to be explored in the
underlying statistics, but, as I’m sure you agree,
military talk of “megadeaths” “acceptable casualties”,
“wars of attrition” and “collateral damage” all seem
to pervert the attempt to exercise rational judgment
on decisions. That’s a whole “other can of worms”:
should we support “military research” that aims to
produce greater efficiency, not in the production of weapons but in the mere logistics of running a large organization. As you know operations research and linear programming came out of military research in WWII. As taxpayers do we want an expensive inefficient military or a cheaper more efficient one
that “optimizes” the deployment of its assets? Because of “negative externalities” I’ve never been
able to really decide that question to my own satisfaction.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 4 2004 8:49 utc | 59

Jérôme @ 3:11 am, I’ve been avoiding my North Caspian oil field homework for a while now. A short course, at your leisure, would be very welcome. For that matter, few reliable leads (or links) would be welcome too….And Hannah @ 3:24 am, how did Berlusconi spring those hostages from Iraq? It can’t have been money alone. Could he have promised them something down the road–like a pull-out after 30 January…. ?

Posted by: alabama | Dec 4 2004 15:00 utc | 61

Jerome
Onereport of 46 Israeli advisors in Cote D’Ivoire.

Posted by: mdm | Dec 4 2004 17:05 utc | 63

Kind of a info-thin article on the tumbling dollar, but puts the crisis in the context of asian-euro interests.
Couldn’t help but laugh about the rather pitiful irony that Chinese production expansion is yoked so ineluctably to u.s. finance capital. Ah, when will the turmoil end?
Fernand Braudel noted how such accumulation crises are a prelude to a massive transition in economic power. Rather sad the u.s. has chosen to disaccommodate the shift in power with the military destruction of ME.
What an exciting time, these times!

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 4 2004 17:36 utc | 65

DeA, Satire of exclusion not allowed .. difference itself soon taboo:
College Board Asks Group Not to Post Test Analysis
By D. Schemo, Dec. 4, 2004
The College Board, which owns the SAT college entrance exam, is demanding that a nonprofit group critical of standardized tests remove from its Web site data that breaks down scores by race, income and sex.
The demand, in a letter to The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, also known as FairTest, accuses the group of infringing on the College Board’s copyright.
“Unfortunately, your misuse overtly bypasses our ownership and significantly impacts the perceptions of students, parents and educators regarding the services we provide,” the letter said. …
NYT
At this moment, I can still download these numbers (see: 2004 College Bound Seniors, PDF documents.)
FairTest

Posted by: Blackie | Dec 4 2004 17:41 utc | 67

@Jerome I mixed a lot of scales, kind of deliberately, in my list of malefactions — “after the first death there is no other”… the number of women murdered by male partners/husbands in the US each year is far smaller than the number of people killed by medical error or incompetence. the number of pedestrians killed by drivers is about the same as the number of murdered women, only about half the number who die from skin cancer. the number killed by nicotine addiction in the form of cigs dwarfs all the rest — 400K per annum per CDC. the number killed in the WTC is conventionally recited at 3K, about half the annual pedestrian death toll. and I didn’t even mention the millions of Africans who have died and are dying of AIDS partly due to the profiteering (and racism) of the First World.
what I was trying to get at is not so much that we need to scream louder about what distresses us, or that our screaming will make any of it go away — it won’t — but that sometimes the world seems like one big Scream — millions of people every day being cheated, beaten, robbed, raped, shot, tortured, exiled, bullied, humiliated, insulted, coldly planned out of existence — and once we open our ears and hearts to the sound and reality of other people’s suffering it is a continuous background roar, a screaming that never stops, and it can leave us paralyzed and staring at the revolver and the whiskey bottle. I think they call it “compassion fatigue” in NGO-land.
your native optimism [and possibly a relatively sheltered background? I say cautiously, since it is dangerous to make assumptions, and some optimists are those who have survived the worst and learned to dance on the edge of the abyss] perhaps protects you from these moments of despair. the despair springs, I believe, from feeling utterly futile and helpless, and thus feeling incriminated as a passive bystander who witnesses all this criminality and suffering and yet “does nothing.” or perhaps we all know that we could do more than we are doing, that if we really all (or large numbers of us) kissed off the EstablishedMen and put our life’s work into something more constructive than keeping a rotten system stumbling along, perhaps the world would be transformed. it’s the “perhaps”, and the depressing counterexamples of history (revolutions gone stale and mean spirited, bold plans foundering on human frailty) that keeps me, for one, from being the hot headed wide eyed enthusiast for revolution that I was in my youth…
gotta go do something fun outdoors and shake off this grim mood… more anon…

Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 4 2004 17:43 utc | 69

thanks back to you, slothrop. I hoped I wasn’t just taking up bandwidth.
I had a “boyfriend” –that sounds so funny to me now– who was from Chile. He lived there, but as a kid, during the whole era and his family was obviously not poor.
He and I watched the movie, Missing. He told me that none of the stuff in the film happened…that he was there and he never saw anything like that ever happen, and, therefore, it didn’t. I argued with him that maybe things had happened, but he just didn’t know about them.
But he was adamant that the story, the murder of Horman, the disappeared, never took place. That wasn’t his country that was depicted.
Because of that moment, I starting looking into the issue myself. That moment was also the beginning of my real education. It made me believe that truth is the one thing that can neutralize and eventually destroy the unjustly powerful…even if it takes decades.
(and I dumped the b.f.)

Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 4 2004 19:30 utc | 71

playing with fire
Congress should investigate NED and any organization that used clandestine cash or agents to fix the Ukrainian election, as the U.S. media appear to have gone into the tank for global democracy, as they did for war in Iraq.
Pat Buchanan summarizes some of these issues. Interesting. Following this has been overload for me (so I have avoided it thus far).

Posted by: DM | Dec 6 2004 7:32 utc | 73