Useful Idiots

Fortunately for the world, Princess Snowflake's hypocrisy junket to the Magic Kingdom is nothing but a meeting wrapped around an arms deal. Snowflake reads a good game on combating terrorism, but nobody who knows anything about radical Islamic terrorism and its origins takes this guff seriously, not when the speech is coming from the blackened, beating heart of -- wait for it -- radical Islamic terrorism.

Hey, I'm fine with the aggro "drive 'em out of this earth" rhetoric of the speech. In fact, I don't have any real problem with the content of the speech itself -- except it denies most of the reality of where radicalized Islamic terrorists come from, who bankrolls them, and it seems to take sides in a 1,300-year conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, a fight in which we really have no dog to speak of.

And the practical reality is that our coddling of the Saudis takes actual sides in the wholesale carnage of SA's barbaric war in Yemen. Snowflake is too dumb to know that putting his comically small thumb on the scale will have unintended consequences. You'd think that since he has interests in a hotel in Baku that's financed in part by the Revolutionary Guard, he'd be more careful about that sort of thing, but maybe someone needs to slap his name on a place in Tehran for him to get the picture.

AmCon's Daniel Larison has written knowledgably and passionately on this subject, and places Snowflake's empty words and promises in their proper context. This is nothing new; every American administration since FDR has been guilty of this nasty open hypocrisy. This is the unfortunate price we have collectively chosen to pay for our shameless oil addiction.

The difference here is that past administrations have not (at least as far as we know) pocketed money for themselves for such deals. As Larison point out, the idea that Saudi Arabia -- where, as Snowflake's christofascist goon followers never tire of pointing out, it is illegal to possess a Christian bible -- belongs to a group of "nations of conscience" is hilarious at best, but mostly just disturbing.

Of course, as with everything else he does, it is all too easy to find any number of tweets from a couple years ago featuring Snowflake's trolling of Obama doing exactly what Snowflake and his entourage are doing right now. It was some sort of high crime that Michelle Obama refused to wear a headscarf, but totally fine for Melanoma and Joanie to do the same thing. Toby Keith playing a concert that only men are allowed to attend (little known fact:  Toby Keith is in Saudi Arabia what David Hasselhoff is in Germany. Go figure.). As the first commenter in the Balloon Juice link notes, it's all worth it to see Steve Bannon surrounded by towelheads, with no booze in sight.

In the end, this is just the first stop on a trip that goes next to Jerusalem, where the Israelis are already pissed at Snowflake burning an intel asset whilst showing off to his Russian masters, and then to the Vatican to visit a pontiff that he, Snowflake, has repeatedly insulted. Good luck, fatboy.

So nothing new to see here, but this is less about the administration in particular than the US' ongoing geopolitical strategy in general. A practical strategy balances potential regional hegemons against each other, if neither one is favorable to the superpower's strategic interests in that region. And in this case, since our operational strategy in terms of money and foreign policy effort expended, is Israel, which both Saudi Arabia and Iran propagandize against routinely.

Beyond the ME prism of Israel's interests, there is of course the strategic interest of preserving our access to oil, and now in containing the burgeoning displacement and refugee crisis, which again has been exacerbated greatly by the meddling of Saudi Arabia and Turkey at least much as by Iran.

The corporate media don't even bother reporting on these issues anymore, since for one, they are owned and operated by conglomerates which have vested interests in these imperial adventures, and for another, most 'murkins couldn't find these countries on a map, much less keep them straight in a discussion of geopolitical strategies of past, present, and future.

Perhaps if someone could spell it out for them how much a gallon of gasoline really costs once all the externalities are factored in, they might pay more attention, but probably not. All they care about is the imagined optics of this thing, but the reality is that Princess Snowflake was every bit as empty and obsequious as Chocolate Hussein Thunder, or any other figurehead who goes to pay tribute to the keepers of the holy spigot. Snowflake's speech might meet the lowered expectations that he seems entitled to on every goddamned thing, but that's about it.

Say the Magic Words

The right-wing obsession with politicians -- particularly, of course, Democratic politicians, who are always and forever having to prove their loyalty to this country, never to any avail -- using the phrase "radical Islam" to describe incidents of domestic terrorism, is nothing short of pathological. It is the lapel flag pin of this decade. They are as pathetic as Stallone saying "cup my balls, say my name" to an extra giving him a blowjob in his trailer. (Best hot mike incident ever? Yes. Best. Ever.)

Any attempt to tease out the practical ramifications of the obsession with this magic phrase is almost certainly wasted motion, yet reveals much about the people who insist on it. Obama, of course, has wisely resisted their imprecations, for the same reason that we don't (officially, at least) negotiate with terrorists. (HFC, on the other hand, had no problem with rightly throwing the phrase right back in their faces.) You delegitimize yourself when you give idiots equal standing, or validate their moronic arguments.

Ideological Consistency

Oh, so you're saying that a woman-hating, boy-raping death cult has different rules for different people, that when one of their "leaders" takes a break from molesting farm animals to butt-fuck a teenager, they kill the teenager? I, for one, am shocked. I guess we should expect more intellectual honesty from barbarian fanatics.

More seriously, you really want to defeat ISIS, like for reals? Are you sure? Because here's the thing -- while our so-called foreign policy geniuses want to focus on "enemy" (translation: states that don't want to be compliant clients) nations like Iran and Syria, they're not really the problem. The countries that are exacerbating the situation in various ways are our closest "allies" in the region:  Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey.

One thing Obama's critics have right is that his foreign policy is a sheer clusterfuck, especially in the Middle East. It is at best ineffective in some areas of the region (the air-bombing campaign in ISIS territory), and is actually worsening the problem in other areas of the region (Yemen).

World On Fire

The Republicans are basically the proverbial car-chasing dog who, once he's caught his quarry, has no idea what to do with it. If they really want to stick with their formula of Johnny Walnuts having a permanent seat at the Sunday morning follies, the usual think-tank monkeys agitating for war with whoever looks good, and Ted Cruz making an ass of himself at every turn, hey, go with what you know, guys.

It's become a well-worn truism that football (yes, American football, dammit) has become more dangerous in recent years not in spite of better technology, training, and protective gear, but because of those things. Instead of average-sized men holding off-season jobs to make ends meet so they can play football for a couple months in the fall, you now have superbly conditioned, freakishly proportioned men colliding with one another in suits of technologically sophisticated armor, at much higher rates of force and impact than in the era of Chuck Bednarik.

Similarly, the rapid advancement of drone technology has emboldened the hawks to instantly assume that airstrikes and drone-bombings are the "safe" option. And they are safe -- for us. Drones give policy-makers, armchair generals, and average joes alike the ability to just not think about there being any consequences to military actions. Not that they think about those things unless they or one of theirs is in the line of fire.

It's bad enough that we have been bombing -- maybe not indiscriminately, but not all that carefully either -- civilians in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But airstriking Iranian nuclear facilities means hitting cities. Tehran and its suburbs have somewhere around 20 million people. The nuclear labs have been quite deliberately placed in populated areas, albeit mostly underground. They make it sound so simple, we'll just "take out" their facilities, knock out their program, end their attempt at regional hegemony. Done and done.

Did we not just finally extricate ourselves from a decade-long clusterfuck that was sold as a slam-dunk, one that we'll be paying the financial, ethical, and medical costs for the next generation? Is the region not worse off in every way since we barged in and gave them their sweet, sweet freedom? Is there really a preponderance of 'murkins that thinks it's a simple and good plan to "surgically strike" the Iranians pre-emptively, that moral considerations aside, it would even just accomplish what its advocates say it will accomplish, nothing more, nothing less?

I don't think anyone has any illusions about what Iran is up to here. They really are moving, quickly and with purpose, to expand their influence in the Middle East. They are Bashar Assad's lifeline; they do flex nuts in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad -- and now in Sana'a, Yemen. They are surrounding the Saudis, waiting for the off chance that they flinch and provoke the Iranians, or more likely, waiting for ISIS to continue streaming into Saudi from the north, radicalizing an already radical citizenry, overthrowing the petrocrats, sending that country and probably the world economy into (to put it lightly) a turbulent situation.

So no one's saying that they're the good guys, the mullahs. But when the very same people who got us into Iraq are insisting that we simply must start it up with Iran, that it'll be quick and precise and work better than any other option, well, that's the time when you look at the people and politicians in this country, the United States, and see if they're ready to fall for that one again, so soon after the last one.

Some of them will; some of them are always ready to fall for whatever affirms their assumptions about how the world works. Some of them have trouble remembering that while we are friends to Israel (and they have the checks to prove it), our foreign policy is supposed to protect our interests first. But if it's a majority that's in favor of that mess, then you have a real problem.

Cities of Salt

By now no doubt most people who are interested in geopolitical goings-on, beyond the usual "the Middle East is burning while Obammy fiddles" Chicken Little plaints, have read this exhaustive analysis of the ISIS movement. It's a valuable take on a subject that is simply too complex for a teevee -- or even most print outlets -- summary of the situation.

It takes some doing to go to London and Melbourne and sit down and listen to these cold-blooded psychopaths, who are using their religion as an excuse to fuel their apocalyptic fantasies, and address grievances that are legitimate, but are really the grievances of their parents and grandparents.

That said, I think the freshest thinking and writing on the subject is from John Robb at Global Guerrillas. Graeme Wood postulates in his Atlantic article that a theological movement whose doctrinal weight must eventually place it in a situation where it can no longer operate in the way it intends. Robb, on the other hand, sees these "open jihad" things as stigmergic, constantly iterative, with a clear short-term goal of taking down the Saudis, at which point they obviously are in a real position to write their own rules.

(Not that the Saudis have been great friends or anything.)

It should be clear by now that where the US has failed in its war on terror is in more or less the same mode as the Soviets failed in Afghanistan:  the approach has been rooted in ideology, rather than in a practical application of systems theory, as Robb approaches it. The Islamic State actors embrace both things almost equally well, which is another clear indication that a good part of their success is attributable to the Iraqi Army regulars who have defected to that cause, since we managed to fuck the dog so thoroughly in putting a corrupt Shiite gubmint in charge of what had been a mostly Sunni command infrastructure.

In other words, our obsession with de-Ba'athification post-Saddam worked in perfect congruence with the destabilization of Syria in the wake of a record drought (and please don't ask about who controls all the water that flows into Syria and Iraq). When people ask whence ISIS sprung and gathered momentum, those are the two big conditions that fed the beast.

In hindsight, it would have been wise to temper our expectations about the "Arab Spring" of a few years ago, so it would be wise now to carefully consider our viable options now that that false promise has faded into a haze of chaos, violence, recrimination. The usual right-wing armchair tough guys want to blame Obama for all that, and they're right insofar as geopolitics doesn't seem to be Obama's strong suit.

But, uh, it wasn't Fredo's strong suit either. I don't think anyone has the right answer, because the foreign policy of the hegemon is mostly all or nothing, especially since you can't use checkbook diplomacy with these Islamic State creeps. At the same time, you can't just let them overrun the Saudis either (and yes, all the precious oil). Iran and Saudi are mortal enemies, of course, which makes the dynamics of all this so much more compelling -- and dangerous.

The US has obviously had no talent for knowing which corrupt petro-douche to throw its support behind, and how (or how much). Strangely, it may turn out in retrospect that the biggest missed opportunity was to not have gotten the Russians involved to help strike a balance of great powers to assist in stabilizing the region (which again has not worked out too great so far, but look what's happened with no presence at all).

Putin did us a solid in helping dial down Bashar Assad's chemical assaults on his own people (not that that's stopped the Syrians from just dropping barrel bombs on "rebel" entities, who of course are hiding among civilians). And while the Russians' actions in Ukraine over the last year have been contentious, to say the least, there's been zero effort on our part to work any of it out, no acknowledgment of the fact that Russia considers a NATO state on its borders as unacceptable as we would consider Mexico becoming a Chinese or Russian satellite.

So what do you do about this region, and how? Our previous bungling empowered and cleared the way for these psychopaths, we have some moral obligation to at least think about options to help the captive populace. Forget the idiots from western countries who are going over there for jihad; no one will miss them if they get droned.

But more practically, maybe it's time to get serious about renewable energy sources, to dump Marshall Plan money into a Great Project -- akin to landing on the moon or Mars -- to make those sources viable and scalable. What powers the Middle East is oil revenues, and the second those are gone, the wealthy Saudis and Kuwaitis will get out one step ahead of the surging mobs, escape to their Greek island hideaways, and those places will sort themselves out. There will be voices calling for us to jump in, and again perhaps we have a moral obligation to do that in some respect. But it has to be done with the knowledge that innocent people will die, regardless of our good intentions, no matter how careful we try to be.

And it has to be done with a systems outlook that is responsive and agile, that adjusts as quickly as they do. It could all end up in another decade of chasing shadows in a miserable moonscape regardless, but that approach is the only way you stand a chance against a faceless, implacable foe.

Tout Le Monde N'est Pas Charlie

If you run a blog, one geared primarily toward current events, it makes sense that when events occur, you jump on it with a quickness and register some sort of observational analysis, one that pinpoints your approval or disdain, ultimately. Counter-intuitively, I find myself more and more inclined to wait, to bide time, to consider as many elements, if not all "sides" of the event or argument. This is less a matter of some high-minded mission to craft the ineffable pronunciamento, and more of a recognition that, no matter how obvious something might appear at first, there is almost always more than initially meets the eye.

The initial base reaction to the mass murder of the Parisian satirists at Charlie Hebdo magazine is (and should be) revulsion. Brave stand, I know. Seems like an easy thing to condemn, like human trafficking, or animal cruelty. Setting aside the official iniquities of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and their policy heirs, ordinarily people have the right to be angry and disgusted not just at this massacre, but at other such horrors perpetrated, if by isolated cells of radicals, still radicals of a generally like-minded bent -- to kill, to destroy, to hurt and maim, not necessarily against "westerners," but against any and all people who are inconvenient to their murderous ends.

Cross Purposes

I wasn't aware of this freaky asshole until just the other day, and right away you wish you didn't know about him. It's at least some consolation that his small congregation has lost more than 80% since 2007, so it's more like a black Westboro, an insular claque run by a closet-case nutjob and supported by family members and assorted dead-enders. The story and dynamic of James Manning and his silly circus draw some interesting parallels (at least to me) about cultural norms and expectations, and our responses to religiously inspired bouts of lunacy.

No doubt you are aware of the recent kerfuffle involving Bill Maher, Ben Affleck, and UC Berkeley. Maher had been invited to speak at Berkeley's December commencement, but was disinvited after he and Affleck (along with professional atheist author/provocateur Sam Harris) got into a shouting match over Islam on Maher's HBO show. The issue was that Maher had defamed Islam with his comments, which were certainly strident to say the least, and he got called out on it yet again just last week with Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal.

(Gratuitous sexist editorial note:  Rula Jebreal is smokin' hot, and really sharp, which of course just makes her hotter. I don't agree with every single thing she says, but good grief, she's beautiful. Even if she is married to a Goldman Sachs heir.)

It takes some unpacking, and perhaps some extra attention -- along with the acknowledgement that Maher, in his bluster, is broad-brushing a bit with his portrayals of Islamic fanatics -- but the fact is that the core of Maher's contention is correct:  Liberals (meaning Western liberals, Americans and Europeans) don't do a very good job of acknowledging and decrying not just the video atrocities of the fanatics, but of the day-to-day oppression people endure under putatively Islamic regimes.

One thing I think Westerners don't quite get about Islamic societies is how interwoven religion and culture are. The most-cited "big distinctions" between Christianity and Islam are that Islam has not had a Reformation or Enlightenment type of large-scale adjustment, nor does it have a centralized authority or hierarchy. On the one hand, that latter factor allows for more dissenting voices; on the other, it makes it tougher to crack down on the violent wingnuts that spring up. But the church-state separation that we take for granted -- even if it is with a wink and a nod in the south -- is practically non-existent in the belt of Islamic countries.

Stretching west to east from Morocco to Indonesia, it's not exactly a continuum or spectrum, but at least in those two bookend countries one finds a more secularized, even liberalized (compared to some of the more infamous countries in between) co-existence of religion and government. Even poor Tunisia recently had a step in the right direction, and Jordan has long been a bastion of moderation in a sea of fanaticism. And it's not as if the greed for oil in the west hasn't played a huge part in stoking said fanaticism. There are no clean hands here.

But liberals, whatever their ecumenical aspirations, need to more forcefully acknowledge that they would not want to be female in most of these countries, would not want to be gay in these places. The things they complain about the most when it comes to American Christian goofballs -- which, while annoyingly routine, are not quite normative -- are commonplace and worse in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan. Your average Duggar-smacking limo-lib would not last two weeks in Yemen, or any country whose official name begins with "The Islamic Republic of". Bokay? That's just how it is, and false pieties about cultural imperialism and such like don't change that fact.

Either you believe that women should be allowed to drive, or not have the shit beaten out of them for going to the store alone, or not be buried up to their waists and have rocks thrown at them until they die for "adultery," or that homosexuals shouldn't be hung by cables from cranes, or you don't believe those things. Or hell, just that women need to spend their entire adult lives sweltering in a fucking beekeeper suit, because it's the seventh century or something. That's the stuff that goes on and on, every goddamned day, whether it gets reported in the corporate media or not.

I refuse to acknowledge the feasibility of societies that repress their people in such ways for such picayune things. I'm not gonna pretend that it's not bullshit, that more generations of the people who live in those countries need to just wait it out, and hope that their great-great-grandchildren won't be butchered for throwing away a Qu'ran or teaching girls to read. If we call bullshit on our homegrown loons, we have to do the same with those abroad.

Don't get me wrong. I do not in any way wish to impose western values and mores upon any of these societies, beyond the universally obvious ones of basic human rights. Western societies certainly have their flaws to answer for, but violent over-reaction to nonsense is not one of them. We do not riot and kill people for writing books, not even shitty books. (I don't mean that The Satanic Verses is shitty, I mean that we have an overabundance of crap in general.)

As far as I'm concerned -- and I believe that Maher has made himself clear that this is where he's coming from on this -- is that to the extent one needs to voice their support or disapproval of various comings and goings and deeds of seven billion fools heading in almost as many directions, there should be some consistency as to what sort of things (that is, actions) one disapproves of or supports. Again, soon as you start parsing whether it's "one of ours" doing something awful as opposed to "them," you've lost the thread. It's the action that's horrible; frequently it's the person committing the deed as well, but the focus should be on the deed itself. The world never runs short of morons and assholes doing and saying stupid things, change the things and you hopefully change the people doing them. Eyes on the ball, son.

Nor would I advocate for a complete abolition of religion. Sure, there are countless examples of it poisoning the proverbial well, substituting for critical thought and motivating violent action. But there are just as many examples of it providing comfort and solace to the desperate and hopeless. The religion itself -- whether Islam, Christianity, Scientology, whatever -- is not the problem, the problem is absolutism, the problem is seriously thinking that violence is the best solution to transgressing that absolutism.

To be sure, I have given the cafeteria believers a hard time, but certainly a more syncretic belief system, however much "outside" the club rules, is preferable to the lunacy that pervades the Wahhabist strains of what was once a scientifically and intellectually innovative system of thought. And as Jebreal points out in the Salon interview, liberal Americans who support Israel (and I'd count myself in that group) also need to be critical of Zionist actions that oppress Palestinian lives heedlessly and needlessly. It is what it is, as the kids are fond of saying, but the corollary is that it usually doesn't have to be the way it is.

The truth is that the most virulent adherents of all three Abrahamic religions routinely excuse or ignore their transgressions and vicissitudes, and even their more moderate co-religionists will squint and wince rather than protest. So it is with any belief system, or more precisely, any power bloc. Because that's really all any religion is.

Which brings us back to "Pastor" Manning, and more specifically the anti-gay tirades that his church and other black churches have indulged in over the years, and encouraged their congregants to vote on. Considering that much of the anti-gay-marriage rhetoric in general has echoed the arguments fifty years ago against blacks and whites marrying, it would seem that black organizations and black individuals have perhaps an emphasized responsibility to speak out forcefully against such discrimination. And to their credit, the NAACP, other black organizations and politicians, and individuals black Americans have said exactly that.

But you're never going to get 100%, for a variety of reasons, just as you're never going to get 100% of Muslims around the world protesting the actions of ISIS, or the Saudis, or the Iranian mullahs, or whoever. They have lives to live, and sometimes the best they can do is just to stay out of it, and at least not even tacitly endorse it.

And the more we drone-bomb "terrorist" areas, without troubling ourselves much to ensure that everyone -- or even anyone -- hit by the strike is actually a threat to us or anyone else, the more we radicalize the Muslims in the area who are already on the fence, and the more we risk alienating the moderate Muslims who live and work in western countries.

But people of whatever race, religion, sexuality, etc., who profess to uphold liberal ideals of basic human rights and social justice, have a principled obligation to decry all of those things. Is it racially or culturally "insensitive" to insist that human beings should be treated well and as equally as possible, that treating women like farm animals and using gays as scapegoats is unnecessary and regressive? So be it.

As for the campus groups that tried to remove Maher, and have removed speakers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, they need to keep in mind that freedom of speech is also a putatively liberal ideal, and that it is only important when it protects people we might not agree with. Intelligent adults should be able to hear things they don't agree with and take them into consideration, weigh them against their already-held principles. Only children and demagogues need to hear the soothing amen choir every single time.

Nothing to Kill or Die For

This rapey-bible pamphlet that a Florida atheist group plans to pass around is amusing enough, as far as that goes. Couple of points, though:

1. While it's good and important that, over the last decade or so, atheists have organized and disseminated their thoughts enough to get out of the margins and into the mainstream radar, some of your more professional atheists -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher -- might need to pause and ask themselves what their goal is. If it's simply to ridicule the idea of faith, as opposed to pure reason, or to poke fun at people of faith, that's fine. They're doing a pretty good job of all that, and in fact, many of their bolder assertions needed to be said. Hell, I've certainly done that here over the years, countless times.
   
   However, simply reiterating how religion poisons the mind or the debate or whatever doesn't convince or persuade very many people, and in fact probably angers more people than it convinces. That doesn't necessarily mean that the approach must be softened or diluted, but perhaps that the argument might be broadened, and different strategies might be applied.
   
   For example, one spurious argument floated by people of faith is the idea that atheists, unmoored to any codified value system, cannot by definition be as ethical as even the most louche person of faith must be, simply by dint of their professed belief. Now, you know and I know that that's a heroin-pure line of horseshit if there ever was, but perhaps putting some effort into debunking that canard would pay dividends. Can't hurt to try. The odds have to be better than repeatedly insulting people.
   
   Sometimes they need and deserve insulting, no doubt. But if we want to convince any of them -- and when you're as overwhelmingly outnumbered as atheists are, by religious people along the spectrum of belief -- you need more than one predictable punch in your arsenal.
 
2. Like any good American atheist, I find the endless prayers and benedictions, at everything from sports events to school board meetings, to be pointless, tedious, even counter-productive on some levels. However, it's important to keep in mind that aside from Europe and China and maybe some urbanized parts of South America, the rest of the world, whatever their religion, is waaay more publicly pious and insistent than Americans. Here your various professional Christian lobbying outfits will get butt-hurt over the rapey-bible pamphlet, and maybe even take them to court, seek an injunction, tie things up until the atheist group decides to fight a different fight, whatever.
   
   But what do you think would happen if the atheist group decided to go after the Qu'ran instead of the Bible, decided that it would be good fun to put out pamphlets luridly pointing out that the 53-year-old prophet of Islam consummated his marriage with a ten-year-old? I think we all know what would happen in that instance, and it would not involve paralegals and indignant denunciations from talking heads on the nightly news. There would be violent riots and death threats, and the very real threat of violence.

Religion has always made people do and say strange things, and react violently to words and deeds that other people would just ignore and walk around. The promise of the last half-century of freer thought and more permissive, secularized culture, was couched in the idea (at least in part) that powerful technologies and newer ways of governing the masses would liberate them in a sense. In other words, a government that was no longer overly concerned with getting people to church, combined with the advent and democratization of technology, would allow individuals to truly self-actualize, to find their own path, one of many putatively parallel (more or less) paths to being engaged, well-rounded citizens.

Heh. Silly idealism, right? What no one counted on, in our post-scarcity technocratic paradise, was the greedheads pulling every damn thing to themselves, leaving the masses to fight over their crumbs, temporarily sated by their selfies and smartphone games, but mostly scrambling to pay $160/month phone bills and other routinely escalated prices of "normal" existence. No one counted on the median wage stagnating for forty goddamned years and counting, while the one-percenters raked in more than ever. It doesn't matter if the pie gets bigger, if the same few simply take more of it.

While there are certainly religious wealthy people, it seems incontrovertible that radicalized religious beliefs are mainly the province of the poor and marginalized, who have nothing left to lose, and nothing left to believe in or hope for. People who were promised an opportunity to be stakeholders in a great society, and instead given Honey Boo Boo and Bejeweled and a bullshit McJob that can be packed off to Shenzhen or Bangalore at a moment's notice.

G.K. Chesterton (supposedly) famously said something to the effect than if you don't believe in something, you'll believe anything. I would suggest a corollary -- that when your earthly masters have given you nothing to believe in but empty promises and self-serving bullshit, that many people may choose to grab onto ideas that, by their very nature, cannot be empirically disproven, and thus provide solace -- however temporary or false -- that what is around them refuses to.

If we want people to think for themselves, we first need to give them the luxuries of time (and by association, discretionary income) to actually do so. But the fact of the matter is that, religious or not, the people who own this country and own all the systems want compliant wage slaves to take what they're given, pray to whatever suits them, and go on about their way. They rent pseudo-intellectual assholes to lecture the proles on their morality. They know that most people like their useless warm-pink-blanky rituals and benedictions, are conditioned to expect them, and so they give them freely as routine placation.

But the masters are terrified at the prospect of an informed, engaged populace, just as the peons are every bit as terrified of losing their comfort mechanisms, without which they would have to face the fact that they are well and truly fucked. That's a much more compelling dilemma than simply trying to provoke people by flicking them shit for their beliefs.

ISIS Crisis

On the 13th Anniversary of Never Forget Day, we find ourselves ready to head back into Iraq, on a seemingly more justifiable mission than last time, but still a fool's errand with no happy ending. It's not that you can't make a respectable case for military and humanitarian intervention in the region. And if it's remotely true that the group has considerable assets and volunteers from a variety of countries, it is entirely conceivable that a non-Arab cell could sneak, say, a nuclear suitcase into Miami or Baltimore.

What should give pause is what is seemingly not being said, at least as far as I've seen or heard. The fact of the matter is, as Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and any number of countries in the region demonstrate, we don't know what we're doing there. We don't know anything about these people, we don't understand why they hate us, we can't figure out the difference between the various groups. We don't know the cultures, the languages, we can't find them on a map.

When you don't know jack shit about a country and people you want to bomb or otherwise commit violence upon, isn't it time you checked your basic premises? Does there have to be a larger casus belli than "I think these guys might be assholes, if these are the guys I'm thinking of."? Weren't some of these ISIS cells rebelling against Bashar al-Assad just a year ago, and weren't we ready to arm them in their fight?

Nowhere in this "spreadin' freedom" effort of the last decade or so, nowhere in the premature triumphalism of the Arab Spring, was the possibility noted that, just because the citizens of these countries had chosen to free themselves from the torturous yokes of (sometimes American-supported) despots and dictators, that they automatically wanted what we had to offer -- an emotionally-retarded culture buttressed by an economy mostly based on rackets and pilferage. Shit, they already have those things.

Look, even if these ISIS assholes aren't a direct threat to American geopolitical interests -- and they almost certainly are, if not a direct threat to the US mainland itself -- it is also difficult to simply stand by while they decapitate foolhardy journalists out in their desert moonscape, while they seize dams and terrorize cities and civilians, while they attempt to exterminate minority religions in the area. But it must also be taken into account that our track record has been one of going in and leaving a bigger mess than when we got there.

Wars and insurgencies, whether they are wrought by religious terrorists or secular governments, are fought for one reason and one reason only -- to establish and legitimize power. Clausewitz's saying about war being politics by other means is as true as ever. It might be helpful if for once, we knew what we were getting into before getting into it.

Peace Frog

There's having the right to defend yourself, and there's being a dick just for the sake of being a dick. Israel's land-grabbing is not going to help it, not in the long run. They are being outbred by the increasingly pissed-off Palestinians, and the breeding of the settlers and lazy ultra-orthodox will not be enough.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before some sort of attack takes place, gets portrayed as ISIS, and we get involved before finding out the truth of it. It's probably a good time to invest in the companies that make Hellfire missiles and Predator drones.

#notallassholes; Or, Shart Week

Taking into account two fresh new stories that might make one consider the merits of capital punishment:

First is the heartwarming tale of one Douglas McAuthur (sic; Jesus H. Christ, do people not own a fucking history book or a liberry card?) McCain. Now, while Doug is not (as far as we know) related to our good friend Poor Ol' Straight Talk, he did make the fateful decision to leave his decadent, meaningless existence in San Diego, and join up with the world's most notorious terrorist group, to bravely slaughter villages of unarmed unbelievers and behead infidel journalists. You can sort of get why a kid in some horrid Middle Eastern despotism might say "the hell with it" and take up arms against whoever and whatever. What possesses a homegrown dipshit to head to one of these god-forsaken places to murder and pillage, who knows? Sounds like he got what he was looking for.

Second is this charming little story from England, where piece-of-shit "gangs" preyed upon children while the authorities turned a blind eye and scorned the victims, some of them as young as 11. Because nothing says "tough guy" like preying on sixth-graders, amirite? Forget all that claptrap of "the state has no right to take life," every one of these gang assholes needs to be lined up against a wall, and the "authorities" that let it go on need to do some serious time. I would seriously suggest that someone who participates or facilitates the gang-rape of children is not a fucking human being, and therefore you're just ridding the world of a rabid animal.

These are the sorts of things that serve as a reminder that the planet won't miss us when we finally push its climate past the point of no return.

Pawns

Another day, another Gaza cease-fire, another opportunity for Hillary to get some distance from Mr. Popularity and burnish her fo-po cred for the inevitable '16 run -- which, since it's only 27 months out and hundreds of millions of dollars need to be raised, should be official any day now. (Even better, rather than Jeb, conventional speculation is now projecting Clinton's opponent to be none other than Mitt Romney. Again. Awesome. Is this the greatest political system on the fucking planet, or what?)

So as much as nobody really wants to consider all sides on the awful, insoluble subject of Israel vs. Palestine, perhaps no other issue demands close attention to both clear perspectives. Neither side has ever expended huge amounts of effort dealing in good faith; unilateral withdrawals from a seething seaside ghetto mean little when elsewhere, families are uprooted from their homes because Zionist settlers want their property for themselves. And Hamas insists on indoctrinating its hate early and often, and doubling down on its charter's stipulation of killing and driving out all Jews.

American politicians have long been accustomed to prescribing clear, simple pronunciamentos -- almost all of which are at the very least devoid of context or perspective, and are frequently just flat-out wrong. This reinforces the notion that electorate craves or needs simplistic resolve, that there is no room for nuance. Certainly it must never be admitted that maybe large swathes of people around the world don't like us and are riled up because we haven't been friends to them.

Every year on December 7, there is a solemn ceremony of remembrance at Pearl Harbor, the attack on which took place in 1941. No doubt there will be similar ceremonies for 9/11 long after you and I and our children have passed on.

The mantra for these tragedies is that we must never forget, which is certainly clear, simple, true, resonates with just about anyone, regardless of their political bent. And yet it seems inconceivable to most Americans that other countries -- who lost many times more people, not to mention generations of strongmen, torture, fear, and all the other trappings of authoritarian regimes propped up by American support over the years -- might hold a grudge. We must never forget, but they've just got to let it go.

I am not suggesting that the way to end all strife is to have a massive group hug and chant "Kumbaya". I am suggesting that basic empathy, on the part of all sides, is key to achieving any resolution. Israelis need to understand that treating every Palestinian miserably, in all aspects of their daily lives, is going to beat them down until they have nothing to lose. Palestinians need to get that, as long as they keep endorsing leaders who use women and children as human shields, while they themselves kick back in Qatar or Bahrain and watch the bloody PR campaign from afar, Israel simply has no percentage in accommodating Hamas' tactics.

Doing the Same Thing Again and Again, Expecting a Different Result

The civilian body count in Gaza continues apace, despite the unsurprising revelation that the incident that triggered the current round of conflicts was not perpetrated by Hamas after all. It will end after some number has been reached to generate sufficient outcry by the rest of the world at Israel.

Not that that absolves Hamas in particular -- they really do dig tunnels and stockpile missiles in civilian areas, specifically to goad the Israelis and gin up world outrage, while the Hamas leaders sit in Jordan or Qatar or wherever, and watch it all take place on TV.

But Israel also needs to get it through their heads that, between Gaza and the settlements, the outrageous treatment of Palestinians in their daily lives leaves them quite literally with nothing to lose. Anyone would figure that if there's no reward for good behavior, only more punitive actions, then you might as well try another tack.

At the end of the day, though, Israel really is the only thing resembling a democracy in the region, and certainly more democratic than its neighbors (excepting perhaps Lebanon, which tends to be too weak to avoid meddling and infiltration by Syrian and Iranian entities). The world may be repulsed at the civilian body count Israel is producing, but most are also repulsed at the radicalized Islamist "culture" perpetuating right in Israel's backyard.

It's okay to be objective and call horrible things and people for what they are. What ISIS and other radical groups do in the context of Islamic religion or Arab culture should be separated from those things specifically. What those groups do and impose on their hapless people is nothing more than raw power. Sure, there are things about decadent western society that repulse even most decadent western sensibilities.

But the difference is that we don't force, with violence or the threat of violence, our women to wear beekeeper suits, or beat them if they leave the house unaccompanied, or whip or stone them for having sex. That would be at least one way in which you could differentiate one culture as being objectively superior to another, especially one that hasn't produced anything useful or innovative for hundreds of years.

Back to Gaza. Israel is going to have to make a good-faith effort not just to stop the fighting, or to make concessions entirely contingent on the cessation of any and all hostile incidents, but to curtail the activities -- again, at a local or even neighborhood level -- of settlers and ultra-Zionists, who make the lives of Palestinian residents as miserable as possible. If they do something about that, they might not find themselves back in this fix every year or so.

We Just Disagree

The settlers are dicks. So are Hamas. This nonsense will continue until the Palestinians get that they are basically the Washington Generals playing the Harlem Globetrotters, over and over and over again, destined never to win. There will always be these radicalized events that escalate into official violence, and when neither side is willing to give in on its most egregious tactics, you're going to get what you got, which is one side with a missile defense system that actually works against the constant barrage of rockets, and another side whose death-cult propaganda allows for their kids to be martyred. In turn, the rest of the Arab Middle East uses the plight of the Palestinians for their own propaganda purposes, while studiously refusing to take any of them as refugees.

A frequent tactic of modern religious believers -- evangelicals in particular -- is to contrast death counts between believers and atheists, comparing the hundreds of years of religious wars against the 20th century totalitarian systems that murdered millions of people for the sake of atheist ideologies. It would be easy enough to characterize this most recent spate of violence in Israel as a Jews vs. Muslims religious cage match, or the ISIS insurgency as Sunni vs. Shi'a internecine bickering.

The root of these issues are really just the usual old things -- power, control, water, territory. Religion is part of it, sure, as are culture and history, and the inability to drop a fucking grudge. But it always comes back to monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground.

Planet of the Apes

You know, there's rarely an opportunity missed to take cheap shots at 'murkin culcher burble, slack-jawed fish-in-a-barrel watch-the-neighbors-sort-their-sock-drawers crap that we all get saturated in, or the deeper, darker, oppression of minorities, gays, women, etc. Those things are all true.

Yet this sort of thing puts all of the above to shame. Or this. The people, the cultures that perpetrate "honor killing" or execution for "apostasy" are nothing more than a skid mark on humanity's collective underwear. They have nothing to offer, nothing to add to the world. It needs to be said.

Even when they're not murdering their daughters for imaginary transgressions, they oppress them every moment of their lives, covering them in beekeeper suits, marrying them to their own cousins, beating them to keep them cowed. They have a pathological hatred of women, one that makes your garden-variety pro-life goofball in America look like an amateur.

There are knuckle-dragging assholes everywhere, but the ones in the "Islamic republics" seem to be determined to show up everyone else. Folks, it ain't a contest. The rest of the world just looks at your toxic behavior and wonders what the hell is wrong with you.

[Update 5/29/14 19:00 PDT:  It gets better. These people are just all kinds of awesome.]

All Poodles Are Dogs, But Not All Dogs Are Poodles

I've seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a number of interview and panel segments over the years, and I get where this writer is coming from, in that Hirsi Ali is one of the more caustic critics of Islam in general, and militant Islamists in particular. I suppose having one's clitoris forcibly removed, and having a friend murdered in the street, with a death threat to oneself attached to said murder victim, will sort of do that to a person.

That said, it is a crude comparison at best to categorize the collective lumping of over a billion individuals in with the few thousand most violent practitioners, with anti-Semitic or anti-gay criticisms. It shouldn't even need to be said that, while perhaps Jews and gays no longer face the horrors of genocide or systematic violence, it really hasn't been all that long since they did face those things (and in fact still do in many countries -- how are gays faring these days in, say, Uganda or Iran?).

It is not fair to insinuate that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of a small but virulent percentage of lunatics, but when seemingly nothing at all is said or done in that regard, it doesn't absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever to address the issue. The experiences Hirsi Ali has endured in her life, both from outdated "cultural" traditions and from ideological fanatics, are real, and for many areas in the world, still normative. I mean, ten bucks to the first person who can guess the religion of the folks behind this, or this.

I don't know what to make of people who emigrate to other countries that already have long-established legal systems, and expect those new places to conform to the female-hating third-world holes they left behind. It can be difficult to parse cultural norms from religious precepts in many instances, but uh, I can assure you that as a decadent, hedonistic westerner, I am a great deal more offended by the consistent treatment of women as illiterate chattel, than they are by a satirical drawing of the prophet (PBUH). But since I am a rational person, and not guided and goaded by this or that collection of Levantine folk tales and regressive sky-buddy whispering, I can fight their bad ideas with better ideas, and still express my resentment at my own gubmint thinking that it can and should handle the situation with a fleet of killbots raining hell on villages. Some of these folks seem not to have made that seemingly modest intemellectual leap.

It might be more productive for concerned Muslims to address the fanatics in their attic already, instead of raising false equivalences about what sort of speech is offensive, as if the typical respective reactions to being offended were remotely the same -- someone maybe losing their job for talking shit about Jews or gays, versus riots and violence over comic strips and movies.

Off-topic but still fun, given the post title:  the one and only Ken Ham discourses on poodles.

Can't Win Them All

After eight years in a coma, the world's leading living dead man, Ariel Sharon, finally shuffled off this mortal coil. Stranger perhaps than the pre-loaded, fake-shocked encomia from the press are the contradictory assessments of the man from the polar opposites of the Israeli political scene.

Palestinian youths at the Khan Younis refugee camp burned Sharon’s photograph and handed out candy in celebration of his death. A leader of the Fatah Party in Ramallah called him a war criminal. A spokesman for the Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, said Sharon’s hands were “covered in Palestinian blood.”

Sharp-edged assessments of his legacy were not confined to Palestinians. A leftist historian recalled Sharon’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. A human rights activist branded Sharon a symbol of impunity for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut that year. But some of the harshest words came from supporters of Israel’s settler movement.

Orit Struck, a member of the Israeli parliament, called Sharon “one of the great builders of the land of Israel, and its greatest destroyer.” She said she thanked God that Sharon was struck down by a stroke before he could return more land to the Palestinians.

So Sharon was, it seems, more or less equally despised by all. The Palestinians despise him for expanding Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories; the Palestinians and Lebanese hate him for invading Lebanon and tacitly encouraging the atrocities of Sabra and Shatila; and the Jewish settlers loathe Sharon for withdrawing from Gaza and evicting Jewish settlers. Maybe it's a "confederacy of dunces" thing, maybe it's just that no one can win in that corner of the world.
Maybe the next generation will be able to remove themselves from the transgressions and assumptions of the previous generations, but probably not. It's more a matter of Palestinians simply outbreeding Jews, aside from the Orthodox and the settlers, with whom mainstream Israelis have some issues to begin with.
Sharon probably did what he felt he had to do for the good of his beleaguered nation, at any particular time. That doesn't help; nothing does. When you have one group claiming to be an exalted chosen, and another group vowing to drive the first group into the sea, you're just not going to win. If both sides must hew to holy books, maybe they could each start with the Golden Rule, and have just an atom of empathy.

Back Spin

Newsmilf Lara Logan has had her journalistic moments in the past, for a corporate media implement. But she and her show screwed up royally in backing that crackpot's Benghazi yarn, which has had notable implications, The thing is, the political weasels who use tendentious reporting to bolster their biased claims don't care when said claims are proved empirically false. Their credibility is orthogonal to their veracity.

60 Minutes and Lara Logan, on the other hand, have nothing but their word on something. So when they broadcast as gospel the politically-charged jabber of a guy who admitted to falsifying his AAR (which I'm assuming is worthy of discharge or even court-martial for armed-forces personnel, and a firing offense for even half-assed PMC outfits -- if not, it should be), they're stupidly sticking their necks out for an unsubstantiated hunch.

Don't get me wrong -- I'd probably watch Logan read aloud from a phone book [slaps forehead; like typewriters and fax machines, phone books only exist on a technologically marginalized periphery anymore], while dry-humping the teevee. But my desire to make ferocious, sweaty monkey-sex with Lara Logan is an entirely separate matter from her role in propagating disinformation, intentionally or not. Hell, Dan Rather's career went knuckled straight into the crapper after the kerners went go on him questioning Fredo's stout defense of the Rio Grande back in the day.

It doesn't help matters that apparently this Davies character had a book deal going, since scuttled, with the same "publisher" that handles inbred hacks like Glenn Beck and Jerry Corsi. Gee, ulterior motive much, Chief? Thought so. Logan got played by this schmuck, badly. At least she's finally getting out in front of it and taking the hit.

The whole episode puts the bigger picture in the region in sharp relief, and may even provide some rationale for Logan's seeming willingness to be gulled by this guy, given her abuse by an Egyptian mob in the early days of the now-dormant "Arab Spring." It makes sense that these eructations of exceptional violence, spread to Libya, Syria, et al, would have additional import to Logan. She saw firsthand the simmering brutality of a mindless mob, and that same raw, chaotic power resonated in the events in Benghazi that fateful night.

Where have those heady days gone, that brash optimism of 2011, when these savages were supposed to finally get with the program and go with Democracy® and Freedom™ Incorporated? Gone in successive waves of longstanding internecine conflicts, accelerated by the (ahem) democratizing, in terms of more evenly distributing power and influence on micro-scales, technologies at hand. If not democratizing necessarily, then at least decentralizing, lessening the concentration of those things in the hands of very few. At this stage of the game, only force is concentrated. That is all that maintains the mechanical, operational aspects of the Westphalian nation-state construct.

What we've been observing this past decade, in the Maghreb, the Persian Gulf, in the Horn of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, is not, in my humble opinion, past chaos allowed back out of their bottles, but the wave of the future in unstable areas. This is the coming anarchy Robert Kaplan presciently wrote about in the late '90s, before 9/11 Changed Everything, these are the global guerrillas John Robb has been warning about for years, disrupting and resecting massive, seething populations in Egypt, Nigeria, Congo, etc.

Advanced technologies have enabled disenfranchised peasants in third-world shitholes to seek something else, to disengage from their corrupt systems, from Qaddafi personality cults and American-propped kleptocracies alike. They all want something, whether money or raw power or a medievalist theocracy that treats women and children like farm animals. One thing they all have in common is that they want us the hell out of there.

Of course, we can't accommodate them on that; Africa is the last great outpost for a variety of rare-earth metals, vast oil deposits, and who knows what else. And the Chinese are beating us to it so far. And they're every bit as committed to hegemony as we are; indeed, the maintenance of political and economic empire, the ability to muster military force, is the central systemic feature at this point.

The real problem with Benghazi is not the tragic events of the embassy massacre, or the administration's inept response to it. There were plenty of embassy attacks and deaths around the world on Fredo's watch, and no one said shit. No, the problem with Benghazi is that no one seems to have a plan moving forward, no clear ideas for how a large, populous, strategically important but volatile nation -- which sits right next to another large, populous, strategically important but volatile nation -- can retain control of and capitalize on its natural assets for the good of its restive citizens.

When corporate media entities allow themselves to be utilized as patsies for an extremist faction of Congress to make mountains out of molehills, they play right into the hands of the people they should be most fearful and contemptuous of. But hey, whatever pays the bills.

Syria-sly, Folks

These geopolitical strategies and predictions are interesting enough, until considering all the possible ramifications and permutations give even the most astute observer a ginormous headache. But no matter, we are apparently going to pimp-slap Syria, even though it will definitely jack oil prices up on a precarious world economy, and has enormous chances for flaring into a serious regional conflict.

Everyone should be able to agree that Bashar Assad is a turd of a human being, following closely in the bloody footprints of his old man. The Alawite regime in Syria is overwhelmingly outnumbered by a Sunni population, and like Saddam Hussein, can only hold power by the most ruthless of means, since they don't actually represent any real constituency other than themselves.

But the trick here -- and this is where Obama and the would-be humanitarians need to pay close attention -- there are no good guys here. Americans hear "rebels" and they think of George Washington's ragtag bunch at Valley Forge, or valiant "freedom fighters" striving for Good in the cruel face of ineffable evil. Or they think of Star Wars.

But all indications of the Syrian rebels are of loose militias of jihadist animals -- one cell was busted in May in Turkey with a couple kilos of sarin gas. Whether or not Assad actually used sarin, it appears that the rebels would be more than happy to give it a spin as well, should the opportunity present itself.

(And not to play devil's advocate for horrible forms of weaponry, but why precisely is sarin so much worse than, say, cluster bombs? Either one seems like a pretty miserable way to go. The idea that the use of cluster bombs is somehow acceptable or moral because we "deeply regret" the civilians and children who come across unexploded bomblets is pretty monstrous in itself.)

So there are no good guys in this, and we have a consistent recent history of going into places we know nothing about, blundering through and fucking things up. If Obama thinks this might be his Kosovo, a quick in-and-out six weeks of air sorties followed by a peacekeeping camp of Burger Kings and workout gyms, he's almost definitely wrong, to the extent that you could bet serious money on it.

Remember when the Arab Spring was a thing? Good times. How's all that turning out now? The problem is that we know nothing about these countries, or how their people feel about us, or how the best move for us is to stay the hell out of their shit altogether for a while. Yes, Russia and China will step in and reap the rewards -- and the headaches. Let them, they'll learn soon enough.

In fact, this has all the makings of a serious clusterfuck -- Iran will almost definitely do something in response, probably send Hezbollah over the Lebanese or Syrian border to provoke Israel to jump in. Not to mention that Russia and China have registered their vehement disagreement, so a supporting UN resolution will be practically impossible.

Hegemonists will respond -- rightly to some extent -- that it shouldn't matter what asshole governments think if we're trying to do the right thing, the humanitarian thing. And no, we don't let Putin or anyone else dictate our foreign policy for us.

But we also don't (in theory, anyway) go rushing into military action if the risks outweigh the potential benefits. And here, as we finally wind down and limp away from two costly, ill-conceived wars, as the world economy is precipitously positioned, there is almost zero upside and massive potential downside with this.

So of course we'll do it. We can't help ourselves, and more importantly, we haven't yet internalized that the world is no longer unipolar like we'd prefer, but apolar, with no clear single sphere of influence, just large competing interests, all ultimately at the service of transnational merchant princes with no particular loyalties.

Damage Control

Could the half-baked excuses offered by the seventh-century death cultists for shooting schoolgirls possibly be a sign that they're losing traction? Who knows. What's really something is the sheer balls this guy displays in his pretzel logic:

"If you were shot [by] Americans in a drone attack, would [the] world have ever heard updates on your medical status? … Would you were called to UN? Would a Malala day be announced?"

It goes without saying (or should) that incidents of indiscriminate drone bombing are horrific and despicable, and deserve the censure of decent human beings around the world, since their governments give far less than a shit what anyone thinks. But the attempt to morally equivocate that with the deliberate, systematic abuse and terrorizing of women and children is about as craven as it gets.

We definitely need to get the hint already that drone-bombing, among other tactics, creates as many or more terrorists as it removes. That does not absolve these bastards, if we left tomorrow, would still routinely be violently subjugating the weak, and perpetuating their regressive, dead-end creed.