Are vegetarianism/animal rights/animal liberation philosophically incoherent?

From a humanist (human-supremicist) standpoint, there are many strong reasons to reduce meat eating. The key one, I think, is that current livestock practices undermine the environmental sustainability needed for human life to flourish. But we should be clear - this argument doesn't require eliminating animal eating or animal exploitation, only reducing them.

I don't think humanism can stand up to the anti-speciesist argument. Separating humans from other life and calling for the right to life, freedom, and equality for humans is based on the arbitrarily-chosen "special properties" of humans. No argument is made for why protection from torture and murder should follow from the ability to use language or demonstrate self-consciousness. And frequently humanists still want to protect even those humans who don't possess such properties, like the severely retarded or comatose.

The question is whether an anti-humanist perspective is any more viable. Once you recognize that the arbitrarily-drawn categories that protect humans are invalid, I don't see how you can avoid accepting that all life, including plants and insects, is equally deserving of protection. Where does that leave us, living in an industrial society that necessarily kills millions upon millions of plants and insects?

At some point I think we have to accept that to live is to kill, that nothing short of the elimination of all humans (and all predators for that matter) is consistent with anti-humanist rights to life and freedom. It goes without saying that such a solution, which demands massive killing, is itself inconsistent with these commitments.

So where does that leave us? I think harm reduction is really the only appropriate way forward, unless you want to go straight for absolute nihilism. We have to reduce as far as possible the human impact on other living things. Some obvious measures include:

1) Stop eating most animals,
2) Promote sustainable agriculture,
3) Pursue population control,
4) Produce and consume less,
5) Research technologies that keep unwelcome animals out of human habitats without hurting them.

But these guidelines are less absolute than a lot of us are used to. I don't think there's any question we should stop eating mammals and birds, since raising them for food not only involves killing them but also killing all the plant feed they eat. However, it's less clear that eating wild fish and insects is a problem. We should certainly consume less, but what kinds of consumption are indispensable remains an open question. An impact reduction approach also fails to answer questions of how to balance the need to prevent suffering with the need to prevent killing, and where all this leaves the matter of animal exploitation.

Thoughts?

A war of each (plus parents) against all

This is a pretty interesting article about how parents in the USA are increasingly subsidizing their kids well into adulthood.

The Bank of Mom and Dad

There are some pretty surprising numbers here, including these: "Parents pay $2,323 a year to help support children 25 and 26 years old, said Dr. Schoeni, and $1,556 annually for offspring 33 and 34."

Disappointingly, the reporter does a half-assed job exploring what might be causing this trend. She gestures toward unfavorable economic conditions - "paychecks have stalled, housing costs have risen, education costs have skyrocketed and credit has become so available as to be dangerous" - but then settles on a different explanation. Namely, today's youth are more choosy, so "extended education, the exploration of career options and delayed marriage are the causes of the long transition to self-sufficiency".

My own suspicion is that this represents an adaptation to the realignment of capitalism that began 30 years ago. The postwar settlement that created equitable growth and secure if powerless jobs for the nation's workers has been steadily torn down and replaced with steep inequality and fierce competition. Those parents with the means to do so are trying to preserve a middle class life for kids who simply can't do it on their own, and trying to give them a competitive edge in the increasingly bitter struggle for the dwindling number of jobs that can financially support lives considered respectable and comfortable.

This brings up an issue that the reporter was curiously silent on - what happens to all those kids whose parents simply can't afford to give them the financial space they need to explore careers, attend business school, law school, med school, or grad school, or accumulate the low-wage experience on which they can build successful careers? This seems like far the more interesting story, where we can see the naked class struggle going on beneath the generosity of parental love.

Tofu eating revealed to be immoral

The front page article in The New York Times Magazine this week is a long and self-indulgent intellectualization of the killing and eating of animals, "The Modern Hunter-Gatherer". If you cut away all the fat, it comes down to this:

there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing the force of human will can somehow overcome it.

I have some sympathy for the moral imperative to be honest about reality. Yet I'm at an utter loss as to how a desire to change the systematic brutality of that reality can thereby be dismissed with the wave of a hand. Or as to how the author, after extensive and dramatically rehearsed expressions of disgust and shame at his killing of a wild pig, can resolve all this in a few lines of confused pseudo-philosophy.

Progressive reformers inside a colonial puppet state

This is a political fable from a book I'm reading called Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism by Louise Young (1998).

I didn't know much about Japanese imperialism in Manchuria before reading this book, so I was pretty surprised to learn that Japanese leftists were very supportive of 满洲国/Manzhouguo (usually rendered in English as Manchukuo - the puppet state created by the Japanese military in today's 东北/Dongbei, northeast China). Not only that, leftist intellectuals in droves actually took up jobs in the Manzhouguo colonial administration and, despite their deep skepticism of imperialism, enthusiastically took part in the Manzhouguo enterprise.

Young cites two main reasons for the bizarre alliance between Japan's most progressive intellectuals and its most right-wing force, the military. First, public intellectual space in Japan was rapidly closing down as the climate of repression and compulsory nationalism forced many leftist intellectuals out of their previous safe haven in the universities. At the same time, ideological space in Manzhouguo was suprisingly open as the military tolerated - until the early 1940s at least - liberal and leftist academics because it needed their cooperation in gathering key information to form policy and suppress opposition. Excluded and facing persecution at home, leftists surged into the many research, administration, and policymaking jobs in Manzhouguo.

Second, leftists genuinely believed that they could make a revolution in Manzhouguo. Disappointed by the failure of their dreams on the home islands, they turned to Japan's newest colony. Yet they came not in desperation or weariness, but with great optimism. The absolute power of the colonial state to crush local opposition to progressive reform - which had been frustrated time and again inside Japan by intransigent landowners and businessmen - made the leftists believe that their dreams could be achieved. This time, working from the inside would succeed.

How valid these hopes actually were is captured in this vignette:

Mantetsu's [the state-controlled enterprise that had a vast research arm responsible for supplying much of the information needed by the military puppet regime] researchers and Sinologists...tried to provide analyses that took account of the force of Chinese nationalism and advised that military aggression would just make the problems worse. The "Investigation of the Resistance Capacity of the Chinese"..., one of the enormous "integrated" research projects undertaken by Mantetsu at the close of the decade, aimed to convince the army of this point as forcefully as possible.... Under the general editorship of Japanese Communist Party operative Nakanishi Kō, the report submitted to the Kwantung Army [hanyu pinyin: Guandong Army, the Japanese military force running Manzhouguo] in 1940...asserted that Japan could not win the war with China militarily. But when Nakanishi presented the research team's findings with the recommendation that Japan end the war politically to general staff headquarters in Tokyo, he was greeted with silence and finally one question from a young staff officer: "So, then, what sites would it be best for us bomb?" (p. 280-281)

There's two lessons we can take away from this. First, the Chomskian analysis that judges all progressive rhetoric surrounding imperialism as nothing more than cynical manipulation is too simple. Many imperialists deeply believe that what they're doing will forge a more just, more equal world. Of course, the Chomskian skepticism of such claims is, at least in this case, borne out.

Second, "working from within" to accomplish change is a questionable proposition. I wouldn't say it's inappropriate under all circumstances. Yet it does take a nearly willful naïveté to think you can turn institutions in which ultimate power is held by fundamentally right-wing or reactionary forces toward progressive ends. A current example that springs immediately to mind is those progressives who championed the invasion of Iraq as an instance of humanitarian intervention despite the overwhelming evidence that the institutions actually planning the invasion had far different purposes in mind.

More broadly, it's worth questioning whether working from within the state or any corporation is more likely to promote reform or merely provide the information that the leaders of these organizations need to execute their assuredly anti-progressive policies. People are remarkably agile in the rationalizations they perform to justify taking secure or lucrative jobs, but I suspect that "working from within" is almost never useful except when those "working from the outside" are particularly strong.

letter to the editor, re: Iran and disarmament

To the editors:
Accepting a nuclear-armed Iran, which is acting primarily because sworn nuclear-armed enemies (the US and Israel) surround it, is certainly preferable to the current course (The New York Times, "Suppose We Just Let Iran Have the Bomb", 2006 March 19). But a better option is to discuss a different "unthinkable" - worldwide nuclear disarmament.

As the world's leading nuclear power, and the national security threat prompting both Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear arsenals, only the United States could lead such a campaign. Yet the US government instead pursues the rank hypocrisy of designating which countries are "responsible" and thus allowed to proliferate.

Iran's violations of the NPT have been the focus of much public discussion. Yet the US is also breaking its word on the NPT - it and the other nuclear-armed powers solemnly agreed to pursue disarmament. When will we Americans feel the same outrage against our own treaty violations as against those of others?

There are poor people in São Paulo?

I feel like it's a good idea to read articles in The New York Times travel section every now and then so we can renew our disgust against the moneyed classes. This Sunday's article on visiting São Paulo (The New São Paulo) proved especially effective. The author spent three days in São Paulo visiting expensive boutique stores, eating at expensive restaurants, and staying in expensive hotels. To give a taste of this:

My room at the Emiliano was soothing and sybaritic: white Egyptian cotton sheets and six pillows of different firmness; an Eames lounge chair upholstered in an oatmeal fabric; a wall of honey-colored wood that hid closets and two Sub-Zero drawer refrigerators stocked with drinks; and a large bathroom with a view of neighboring penthouses. As the guest services manager tried to teach me how to work all the lighting controls (which I never mastered), she told me she could send a butler to unpack my bags.

And the shopping?

Clube Chocolate is so chic that it has no display windows and is so exclusive that security guards flank the heavy wooden door that hides the glorious, airy interior. How would you know that inside there's a bright, three-story atrium with floor-to-ceiling palm trees and a sandy beach that you reach by descending a polished steel circular staircase?

Not once does the author mention that next door to this opulence lives an enormous slum population nearing 1 million people. The tiny percentage of Paulistas who have access to the city's luxuries, and who use private helicopters to commute between their high-security enclaves and jobs in the business districts, rests atop a working class of some 7 million, not to mention the absolute squalor of the under class. Perhaps the security guards that form a motif unnoticed by the author in his piece might have something to do with all this?

But to mention this would be bad form - it might be upsetting for rich New Yorkers to contemplate that the hotel charges for their weekend in São Paulo amount to far more than the yearly earnings of many hundreds of thousands of residents in the city.

It's taken a long time, but we'll get back to eugenics yet

Remember the good old days when we could rely on genetics to explain the undeniable cultural and psychological differences between nations? The holocaust did a number on that, and then insidious Communist ideas like the influence of the economy over culture and bothersome notions of the fluidity of identity just made things worse.

Fortunately we finally seem to be escaping those dark days. For the last 25 years we've seen the rise of a new Social Darwinism, known as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. (This corresponds with a broad reorientation of capitalism leading to skyrocketing inequality and the dismantling of the liberal welfare project - but only a Communist would see a link between the two.) Up to now sociobiology has been used in the popular arena primarily to attack feminist theories of how gender is socially constructed, plus a few crude forays into racism.

An article in The New York Times Week in Review signals a new and richer approach: culture is a product of biological evolution. (The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA) "Humans have continued to evolve throughout prehistory and perhaps to the present day, according to a new analysis of the genome reported last week by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. So human nature may have evolved as well." Therefore, "[e]volutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures."

The reporter, Nicholas Wade, makes a bit of leap from genetic differences in "taste, smell or digestion" to the conclusion that "the concept of national character could turn out to be not entirely baseless". Or from the fact that "Oxytocin [a chemical that in some experiments is associated with a higher degree of trust] levels are known to be under genetic control in other mammals like voles" to the conclusion that trust is a biological trait that can come to characterize a society. But, as the author points out, a biological basis for culture explains why Amerindians are fierce and Jews are smart, so we seem to be on the right path.

(I guess I know why my girlfriend's smart, but it's still unclear how the evolutionary pressures on my farming forebears in Germany, Ireland, Wisconsin, and Iowa caused me to be smart. Further research will clarify this, I'm sure.)

The writer also implies that Jews and East Asians are smart because of genetic similarities - "Dr. Pritchard's team detected strong selection among East Asians in the region of the gene that causes Gaucher's disease, one of the variant genes common among Ashkenazim". And he very quietly hints at why black people and Latinos might be dumb: "a demand for greater cognitive skills...might well have arisen among the first settled societies where people had to deal with the quite novel concepts of surpluses, property, value and quantification."

The "first settled societies" emerged in Iraq, Egypt, northern China, and northern India/Pakistan, but don't be too surprised if people who take up this line of thinking use it to explain why whites and East Asians are the smartest people. Indeed, the process seems to already be under way. In Wade's news article on the story ("Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story"), he writes, "Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago."

The emergence of Southeast Asia as a Sino-American battleground

In the blinding spotlight of news coverage and commentary on terrorism and Iraq, what the United States is doing in the rest of the world has been mostly ignored. Yet in many ways, how the USA is dealing with the rising power of China will be far more important in the long run than anything that's going on in the Middle East now.

Preserving American power over Southeast Asia is a key component of the American strategy to contain Chinese power and defend US hegemony. Following closely a playbook written in the Cold War, American planners are restoring close patron-client relationships with the region's militaries. The goal is to ensure that, should it come to a showdown with China over control of Southeast Asia, the men with guns will be on the American side.

Yet the situation is very different from Cold War days, when revolutionary China inspired and aided left-wing uprisings against colonialism and national elites. Then, America brutalized Indochina and armed the military dictatorships in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Vietnam, and Thailand, all to keep the region in its grasp. Military aid was used mainly to suppress internal anti-American left-wing movements. Southeast Asia's national elites stood united against against this threat and looked to the USA for protection.

Now the threat is very different. China no longer stands for revolution, but instead for the capitalist status quo. Southeast Asia's national elites exterminated those who challenged them and now face no significant internal opposition. As the internal and external threats to Southeast Asian elites have receded, the fear that drove them into the American embrace has as well.

That leaves them exposed to the blandishments of China. China is no longer the closed country of the past, sponsoring attacks on established power in the region. It has become an economic powerhouse and a cautious participant in regional politics. As China forges more and more trade links with Southeast Asia's business elites, political authorities are less and less fearful of China's rising power.

Since 9/11 the US government has redoubled its efforts to counter China's growing influence. America has little advantage over China in monopolizing the affections of Southeast Asia's business elites, but it has much more to offer the region's other main powerbrokers - military men. Under cover of the war on "terrorism", the USA has rapidly rebuilt extensive links with militaries thruout Southeast Asia (see my analysis of the Indonesian case).

This is a dangerous game - dangerous, at least, for the people of Southeast Asia. Only thru great effort and sacrifice were military dictatorships pushed aside, and despite the winning of bourgois democracy the militaries of the region retain inordinate power. US strengthening of these militaries not only subverts Southeast Asian countries' autonomy in making decisions about their foreign relations, it also threatens to undo what few advances toward democratic societies have been achieved. And should an open confrontation between China and the United States develop, it promises to embroil Southeast Asians in another cold war. The last one cost millions of lives.

With all this in mind, USA-Southeast Asian relations should be a key topic of debate in the United States. Yet the media simply pass on the American government's bland public pronouncements on the situation, typified by this Council on Foreign Relations q-and-a, "New Focus On U.S.-Southeast Asia Military Ties" (also published on The New York Times website here). Like other coverage, this article ascribes American motives to the war on "terrorism" and blithely ignores the containment of China as an explanation for American moves in Southeast Asia. It provides distorted information on Southeast Asia's Islamist groups, casting them as mere Al Qaeda affiliates rather than exploring the much more salient domestic factors that gave rise to them. It misrepresents the Indonesian military (TNI) by playing down its continuing abuses, uncritically accepting the State Department's clearing the TNI of involvement in the killing of several Americans in Papua, and completely suppressing the bloody history of the Cold War relationship between America and the TNI. Worst of all, it fails to raise the key issues of how American military aid could tip the balance of power within Southeast Asian countries toward undemocratic forces, and the potential repercussions of using Southeast Asia as a proxy battleground in the developing contest with China.

New book by Michael Albert

As anyone likely to read this knows, I'm a big proponent of participatory economics as a replacement for capitalism. In my opinion, Michael Albert - one of the two who first proposed the parecon system - is one of the most important theorists of leftist politics now working. Altho I'm less taken by his prose style and interpersonal skills, I strongly recommend Albert's writing for anyone interested in progressive social change.

Albert's new book, Realizing Hope: Life beyond Capitalism is coming out this month. In it he goes beyond his previous work on parecon and movement building to discuss much more broadly what kinds of social arrangements we might work toward for a society of equality and participation. He takes up race, gender, the political system, and the environment; more narrowly focused issues like education, art, and crime; and ideological debates around Marxism and anarchism. He explores how a participatory economy would interact with these systems, and what our strategy could be to pursue radical change.

I haven't kept up with Albert's writing over the last couple years, so I'm interested to see what he has to say (especially on the matter of "other species", since his disdain for animal welfare/liberation movements has been all too evident in the past). Thinking thru the institutional basis for the kind of ethnic/racial, gender, and political relations we should be fighting for has been almost entirely abandoned by the left, and enunciating what kind of society we want is an urgent priority. Our strategy for pursuing radical change is similarly neglected, and sometimes it seems like Albert is the only one out there raising these issues. Hopefully this book makes the kind of vital contributions Albert has made in the past, and even more important, that it helps stimulate the discussions we need to be having on vision and strategy.

book info and table of contents
Introduction to the book
interview with Albert on the book

Doctors, journals, drug companies - teamwork!

As if it wasn't already clear enough, here's some more evidence that the pharameutical system is massively messed up. The Wall Street Journal had an article last week on medical journals publishing drug company-commissioned articles under the names of ostensibly independent researchers:

Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the bylines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats.....

The practice of letting ghostwriters hired by communications firms draft journal articles -- sometimes with acknowledgment, often without -- has served many parties well. Academic scientists can more easily pile up high-profile publications, the main currency of advancement. Journal editors get clearly written articles that look authoritative because of their well-credentialed authors.

And drug companies get propaganda that looks objective. Well I guess everyone wins, then.

I think it's fairly obvious that producing pharmaceuticals for profit leads to prioritizing research for the treatment of problems that afflict those with money. It provides a strong incentive for rich countries to strong-arm poor countries into respecting their "intellectual property" and thus go without drugs that could be produced cheaply. And as this article once again makes clear, it corrupts everyone involved. There's nothing magical about profit that leads to better R&D - drug companies should be nationalized and run in the public interest.

Aw, India's growing up

The USA is trying to browbeat India into signing on to its anti-Iran policies. American leaders see this as acceptable because over the last 10 years India has moved to ally itself with the USA, and everyone knows that American allies better do exactly what they're told.

In this context, an unnamed senior US official says, "The Indians are emerging from their nonaligned status and becoming a global power, and they have to begin to think about their responsibilities." This rhetoric is fascinating! So once you agree to subordinate yourself to American power, then you're a global power (seems somewhat counterintuitive). And global powers (American lackeys) have a "responsibility" to fall into line behind US diktats. Isn't it amazing how almost any formulation can seem correct and natural once you use the right language?

American ambassadors in Latin America say the damndest things

"Nobody is going to support a situation in which a democratically elected president is removed in a very dubious manner."

-- US Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul Trivelli

I guess that depends on which day of the week it is.

Why do we celebrate Labor Day?

"Labor Day was started in September of 1882, and quickly became an official holiday at the same time May Day spread throughout the world. Labor Day is a time to celebrate the contributions American workers had given their country, unlike May Day events, which focused on the international class struggle. It remains a patriotic holiday, and compared to the first May Day demonstrations, Labor Day is recognized by relatively staid parades and speeches."

May Day: what happened to the radical workers' holiday?

Send forth the respectable protesters!

Todd Gitlin is once again calling for the domestication of the antiwar movement. He wants "the 'Giant Puppet,' 'Bongo circles for peace,' and 'Street Theatre' crowd" to stop running protests so as to avoid alienating mainstream support and allow the "adult" protesters to "increase their leverage and avoid getting painted into a corner."

He's making two substantive points: 1) "weird"/"immature" Americans participating in protests gives war apologists a chance to appeal to mainstream Americans - who might otherwise be skeptical of the war - on grounds of shared cultural identity; 2) the movement's attempt to link the war in Iraq to other issues, such as "the World Bank, Israel, and [a] demand [for] unilateral Nuclear Disarmament", is, well, it isn't good. He doesn't explain why, but we can assume it's because it distracts from the goal of getting American troops out of Iraq, which is easy to unify people behind, and brings in a lot of unrelated issues that might alienate mainstream supporters.

The first point is well-taken, but what's the point in blaming the left for it? Right-wing smear artists (and the media) will always play up elements in the protests that seem strange to mainstream Americans. And really, is street theater that alienating to average people? It's just puppets for godsakes. What Gitlin seems to want is to have serious men in business suits - the antiwar "adults" - negotiating with the serious men in business suits who are killing Iraqis. Those protesters who don't conform to the rules - both political and cultural - laid down by the people who run our society are to be excluded.

The second point? It's true that making connections between the war in Iraq and other aspects of American foreign policy, or global capitalism, or cultural imperialism will to some extent diffuse the power of the movement. But we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of the movement? Is it merely to get the troops out of Iraq? What would that accomplish, other than saving the lives of a small number of Americans? (Iraq is headed for civil war, as it was from the moment Saddam Hussein fell, so the USA leaving probably won't save any Iraqi lives.)

No, the most important goal of the movement is to use an unusually high-profile political issue to educate people on the fundamental source of the Iraq disaster - the global American system of political and economic domination. Drawing connections between that system and its consequences in Iraq and every other country in the world is our task. Pulling the troops out of Iraq will not prevent the next war, and will certainly do nothing to address the countless other human catastrophes currently under way because American global hegemony.

So the first thing the movement must do is radicalize people, ie show them the structural sources of problems that are usually attributed to the individual ineptitude or immorality of particular political leaders. Then it must bring them into the movement, because the only way that such deep-seated structures can be rooted out is thru an overwhelming popular mobilization. If the movement merely sends forth its respectable-looking representatives to negotiate an end to American involvement in Iraq, as Gitlin would have it, the whole thing will have been in vain.

The Times blames the victim, again

Kyle has a good analysis of the shockingly bad New York Times article on the UN killings in the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil. (Shocking? Okay, it's not that shocking.)

The original article is here.

The last time the USA considered nuking China

It's interesting how deeply hypocritical public culture is. Two poor countries constantly threatened by the most powerful country in the world try to develop nuclear weapons in self-defense, and are branded immoral and insane. American leaders talk about actually using nuclear weapons offensively, and it barely registers.

The Bush administration, of course, has talked publicly about using low-yield nukes, but what are they talking about behind closed doors, in records that the public won't have access to for 40 years? We don't know, but we do know what everyone's favorite liberal, JFK, was talking about in 1963:

'63 Tapes Reveal Kennedy and Aides Discussed Using Nuclear Arms in a China-India Clash

That's right, the Kennedy administration was seriously considering nuking China if it got into another war with India.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told Kennedy, "Any large Chinese Communist attack on any part of that area would require the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S., and this is to be preferred over the introduction of large numbers of U.S. soldiers." Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor says, "I would hate to think that we would fight this on the ground in a non-nuclear way." Kennedy goes along with them.

Jesus Christ! Using nuclear weapons so you don't have to send troops? It's surreal how matter-of-factly they talk about it. Yet another case of the banality of evil.

Yet it really shouldn't be that surprising: American leaders seriously considered using nuclear weapons in the wars in both Korea and Vietnam, and that would have killed far more people than presumably isolated nuclear bombing in the Himalayas - unless the hpyothetical war escalated. Yet it is surprising, because as Americans we're taught to see our leaders sympathetically, not as the demons foreign leaders are frequently made out to be. Yet the cold evidence is there: leaders both American and foreign act, and often think, in exactly the same ruthless ways and with the same blood-drenched results.

The icing on the cake is the quote from über-liberal George Ball (the only high administration official who opposed the Vietnam war): "If there is a general appearance of a shift in strategy to the dependence on a nuclear defense against the Chinese in the Far East, we are going to inject into this whole world opinion the old bugaboo of being willing to use nuclear weapons against Asians."

A classic liberal argument: don't massacre people, because it might make us look bad. It certainly tells you how debased the discourse - or possibly the person - is, when you have to appeal to the national interests in order to argue against that old bugaboo, mass murder.

The Times article, btw, misrepresents the border war between China and India as "an invasion of India by China, which sought to acquire disputed border territories". While border disputes left over from colonialism pretty much never allow for clear apportioning of blame, it's generally acknowledged that Indian provocations started the war, even tho China decisively won.

The delicate task of criticizing Tolerance

When I was in LA a couple weeks ago I went to the Museum of Tolerance. What is the Museum of Tolerance you ask? Well it turns out that it's mainly about learning to tolerate Jews and not kill 6 million of them. But it also comes out against all kinds of intolerance, from ethnic strife to homophobia to class hatred.

Hold on! Class hatred? A significant fraction of the time I spend talking with people is spent subtly encouraging class hatred, thru the insinuated disparagings of "rich people", "fancy shit", "bourgeois taste", "fatcat semi-fascist bastards, blood-suckers of the working class", and the like.

Sure it's nice to have little slogans telling the kids that "hatred is bad". But it's one thing to accept cultural diversity, quite another to tolerate Nazis and slaveowners and bosses - and I'm not uncomfortable grouping the last one in with the other two.

There was a sense of vacuity about the whole the place, of empty moralizing against "hatred" with little to no explanation of what causes hatred or how we can end it. Might intolerance have to do with struggles over control of resources or the state, or with politicians looking for a mass base to support their rise? Might all the different supremacies - based in race, gender, class, culture, or species - be fundamental parts of individuals' identities, structuring how people see the world and allowing them to accept all the many other ways it crushes them underfoot? If so, what structural social changes should we make, what strategies should we pursue, who are our allies and who our enemies?

Who knows? But I did learn this: Hatred is bad.

Isn't that cute? Bollywood wants to be like grown-ups

Bollywood's Leading Actor Goes Mainstream

This isn't a bad article on Bollywood movie star Aamir Khan, but what drew my attention was the headline.

Khan is making a high profile English-language movie in the hopes of breaking into international markets. Therefore he's going "mainstream".

The presumption here is that the American (British, Australian) market is central or normal, everything else is merely appealing to some niche audience. In this case a niche of 1 billion people.

The cultural arrogance is overwhelming, and it's exactly this sort of thinking that props up American and Western hegemony by casting the West as the lodestone around which the rest of the world rotates. The West works its will upon the rest of the world while everyone else waits with bated breath to see whether it will accept their importuning. Unfortunately, this is sometimes true - but the history and current practice of global inequality which lie at its root are rarely explored. And more often than not the people of other parts of the world are perfectly happy with their own cultural resources and don't see themselves as part of some marginal culture outside the "mainstream" of those (actually a rather small global minority) living in the rich countries.

The rotating door between government and corporations

Remember Michael Powell, Colin Powell's son who - definitely thru his own qualifications and not at all because of nepotism - became chairman of the FCC and did his utmost to end any sort of regulations on the rapidly consolidating media industry? (Is there even more than 1 company left now?)

Well, again exclusively thru his own qualifications and not at all because his political connections will enable him to manipulate the government, he's won a job as senior adviser to Providence Equity Partners, an equity firm whose main job is making deals and buying stakes in media corporations.

This illustrates one of the key processes in American elite formation and reproduction: the rotating door between government agencies that regulate corporations and high-paying consultancies with those same corporations. Someone holding a high position in a regulatory agency or working on regulations in Congress, as soon as he (occasionally she) leaves government, can expect to receive sweet job offers from all the companies he was just overseeing. Unless, of course, he did a good job regulating them, in which case the sweet jobs will not be forthcoming.

Having become "senior consultant" or whatever, he then goes on to use his connections in the bureaucracy or Congress to convince the people who succeeded him (themselves looking forward to sweet corporate jobs), of how closely the interests of his company line up with the public interest. Frequently the corporate consultant cycles right back into a regulatory position a few years down the road. This is a longstanding pattern, certainly not an innovation of the Bush administration.

Might this practice have some influence on the quality of the regulating process?

Adding insult to injury, this important and nearly universal phenomenon goes almost unremarked upon in the media. The Michael Powell story should count as one of the more egregious and high-profile examples of its kind given his crass pursuit of the media companies' interests during his tenure as regulator and his rapid move to working for the same companies. Yet it received only capsule treatment on page 14 in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times didn't report it at all, and the Reuters article is literally a press release from Providence Equity Partners.

But surely TV news, freed by Michael Powell from the suffocating effect of all those rules and now able to properly do its job as watchdog for our great democracy, will come to our rescue.

I also have a less strident side

I've started a new blog to humor my less political impulses.
http://surpluslabor.blogspot.com

But fear not! I haven't given up on this one. Expect a fascinating new post soon.