Worldview From The Cloud?

A Reddit conversation on the growing information gap between those, to paraphrase Mike Soron, who are “connected” and those who are not.

Bryan Klausmeyer

How Much Did Rumsfeld Know?

TIME:

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had never seen any approved CENTCOM campaign plan, either conceptual or detailed, for the post-major combat operations phase. When I was on the ground in Iraq and saw what was going on, I assumed they had done zero Phase IV planning. Now, three years later, I was learning for the first time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job.

That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

Bryan Klausmeyer

Hillary Clinton, Populist Extraordinaire

Matthew Yglesias:

Economists, environmentalists, everyone who’s thought about the issue for ten minutes, etc. I’m not going to say that our public policy should blindly conform to the consensus among the economics profession, but the gas tax holiday is an illiteracy on a much deeper level — there’s simply no support for this idea among people who’ve looked at it in a serious way. That’s not elitism, that’s reality, and what Clinton’s selling is Bush-style misgovernment.

Bryan Klausmeyer

Selling the War with Iran

Nir Rosen:

Moreover the dominant parties in the government and in those units of the security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today. Moreover, the Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don’t want them. So Iran is a convenient scapegoat to explain the strength of the Sadrists, a strength actually resulting from the fact that they are a genuinely popular mass movement. Blaming Iran also lets the Americans maintain the illusion that the Mahdi Army’s ceasefire is still in effect.

… To the Post as to most establishment officials in the media and government, all social and political movements in the Middle East are either al Qaeda or Iranian plots, or for Senator McCain, a bit of both. These people are unable to see social and political movements in the Middle East as the collective action of poor and oppressed people. People in the region were anti-American before Islamism became the dominant trend, and they were battling American imperialism as secularists and nationalists. During the cold war every popular movement was blamed on a Soviet conspiracy. Now people in the region battle American imperialism as Islamists, but it is the fight that created the movements, not the other way around. And the fight continues.

… Most of those who fight the Americans in Iraq do so not at the bidding of a foreign power but out of genuine and sincere opposition to the American occupation. The Americans never grasped this and always assumed it was about the money, or al Qaeda, and now part of a silly Iranian conspiracy. After at first siding with Iraq’s Shiites much to the consternation of America’s so called “moderate” Sunni allies, the Americans are now targeting Shiites and perhaps even Shiite Iran as Bush prepares for once last war on his path to the “New Middle East.” But without the help of an acquiescent media supplicating to Bush administration and US military officials they might not be able to go to war once again.

(Via A Tiny Revolution.)

Bryan Klausmeyer

Obama No

A provocative article in the Progressive from outspoken professor of political science Adolph Reed, Jr. on Obama:

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

… Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

And then where will we be?

(Via I cite.)

Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments

Why Žižek Matters

Naught Thought:

What makes Žižek important is the simple fact that he approaches the topic of subjectivity and freedom (among other issues) by using psychoanalysis as a lense to examine German Idealism, and that this analysis allows for, and even encourages, a theory of the subject that takes into account but manages to narrowly escape, the scientifically fueled determinism of our age.

Bryan Klausmeyer

Inside Dylan’s Brain

Take a look at this fantastic Vanity Fair “portrait” of Bob Dylan vis-a-vis his themes, favorite artists and strange remarks from his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. It’s pretty great:

Re: Jimmy Lewis – “He sounds as bad off as a rubber-nosed woodpecker in a petrified forest.”

Re: Tex William’s Brother Drop Dead – “Some people die too soon. Others, you’re kind of hoping. Tex Williams has a song for such a situation.”

They say the earth’s warmin’ up. Be careful of that global warming, and wear your sunscreen.

Sometimes when you look at a menu, it’s hard to decide what to get. Life is like that, full of difficult choices.

I want everybody to go out and paint their cars red and white tonight. We want a PINK CAR NATION.

In the comments section, Roryks points out a connection between David Lynch and Dylan:

Your near-exhaustive list - brilliant, by the way - missed out the Wild At Heart movie reference in the recent “Heat” episode: Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern)to Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage)”Uh oh. Baby, you’d better get me back to that hotel. You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”

Amazing.

(Thanks to Jenny.)

Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

Il Berlusconi

The Guardian:

Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the new Falange.” Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters.

… On Monday night, the area around Rome’s city hall rang to chants of “Duce! Duce!”, the term adopted by Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German “Führer”. Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

(Via Daily Kos.)

Bryan Klausmeyer

Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French

This article in the Times makes an interesting point about the legacy of May 1968 forty years later:

Forty years ago, French students in neckties and bobby socks threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that the sclerotic postwar system must change. Today, French students, worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits, are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

I also thought this remark on Sarkozy was particularly insightful:

“Sarkozy is the first post-’68 president,” Mr. Glucksmann said. “To liquidate ’68 is to liquidate himself.”

It seems to me that, following Kojin Karatani’s advice in Transcritique, the goal of any emancipatory political struggle (starting with the currently benign status of student activism) should not be to admit defeat by relegating one’s activities solely to the pragmatic doldrums of disparate factionalism (environmental, sexual, humanitarian, etc.), nor to consolidate these groups under some “master signifier” group. Instead, the student Left must (re-)formulate the very foundation upon which a larger political goal is to be conceived. I find Karatani’s espousal of New Associationism to be quite compelling, especially in regards to his remark that consumer advocacy and the labor movement are fundamentally one in the same.

May ‘68’s legacy is both inspiring and tragic: it demonstrates the potential for society to mobilize around some regulative idea, yet at the same time it was ultimately a failure to the extent that what was lacking was “fidelity to the Event,” to use Badiou’s terms. However, the movement should not function as a source of nostalgia for the lost radical past, but perhaps as a “regulative idea” in and for itself that could guide us towards some authentic Act. Now the goal should be to provide an economic safety net in the temporal gap between such an Act and what precedes it. New Associationism serves this function and therefore seems worth pursuing.

Bryan Klausmeyer

Keith Richards Dislikes David Bowie

This is sort of disappointing since I have a lot of respect for both of them.

The Stone, when asked what his favourite Bowie track is, said he is “not a huge fan” of the legendary and pioneering artist. He chooses track Hunky Dory track “Changes” as the only one he can ‘remember’. Richards also goes on to say “It’s all pose. It’s all fucking posing. It’s nothing to do with music. He knows it too. I can’t think of anything else he’s done that would make my hair stand up.”

But when you think about it, I have a hard time imagining Keith Richards enjoying say, Life on Mars or the Berlin trilogy. Still, not even one of the glam rock Ziggy albums? There are some great rock and roll tracks on those albums.

Eh, in the end it’s not really anyone’s business.

Mark Elliot Cullen 1 Comment

Working Life (High and Low)

A great piece of journalism by Stephen Greenhouse in the New York Times on the ever-worse working conditions for many Americans. (Via A Tiny Revolution.)

Bryan Klausmeyer

The Phenomenal Slavoj Zizek

Terry Eagleton has just written a quasi-humorous book review of Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes for the Times Literary Supplement. It accomplishes its task in making Zizek seem like a psychopath. This, I thought, was a great remark:

[Zizek] was, he tells us, tempted to suggest for the dust jacket of one of his books: “In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders”.

For a decent summary of Zizek’s overall project and a few good jokes, I suggest reading this in its entirety. (Via The Weblog.)

Bryan Klausmeyer