* Real Life Horror galore today, and I didn’t even watch the Republican presidential debates! (I understand the Golden Rule was booed.) This represents a couple weeks’ worth of pertinent political links and thoughts, and once again I’m segregating them from the rest of my posts so that people who remember that I am a proven fool about such matters may better ignore it all.
* Despite pushback I saw in various quarters, some politically motivated and some not, the New York Times’ Public Editor really was unsure whether it’s appropriate for reporters to shoot down incorrect “facts” asserted by the people it covers rather than simply providing a platform for them — the sneer-quoted term “truth vigilantes” made this clear, and the Times’ own Executive Editor had no problem deducing so in her rebuttal to the piece — and this really was as depressing and disconcerting as it seemed at first glance.
* I don’t really have a pithy summary of this Glenn Greenwald piece on how outwardly directed violence via war and human rights violations has a disproportionate impact on minorities, the poor, and the otherwise disenfranchised here at home, so you should certainly read the whole thing. I think Greenwald remains too sanguine about Ron Paul, not only in terms of his hideous newsletter but how the policies he endorses to this day about pretty much everything but war, drug policy, and civil liberties would be devastating to the social contract and, yes, civil liberties, just in different ways and for different groups than those targeted by our current policies. That said, he quotes extensively from Martin Luther King Jr. about the necessity of opposition to war as a prerequisite for social justice, which is always welcome. And he notes that the range of views considered disqualifying for higher office should probably be broadened to include many of the policies more or less shamefacedly but still robustly embraced by the current President and his party, to say nothing of the atavistic brutality with which they’ve been embraced by his potential opponents and their party. It’s more or less impossible to vote for someone who isn’t totally disgraceful.
* Greenwald also links to Jonathan Turley’s excellent, Facebook-it-so-your-parents-can-read-it list of 10 reasons the United States isn’t really a free country anymore; freedom is a privilege afforded you by virtue of being non-Muslim and by grace of the Commander-in-Chief.
* Still on the Greenwald beat, this piece and this piece combined make for a particularly nauseating case study of sham American justice and jurisprudence, immunizing the powerful for their crimes and reducing victims and accused criminals to legal nonpersons. I find the insistence that those targeted for death must personally challenge the government’s right to do this, at which point they can then be more easily targeted and killed, particularly deliciously nauseating.
* And back on the Ron Paul beat, Ta-Nehisi Coates is slowly but surely crunching numbers and citing primary sources to debunk the easy claims made by Paul, Howard Zinn, and others on both the left and the right (though let’s be honest, mostly on the right) that the American Civil War need not have been fought because a non-violent solution, perhaps one aided by buyouts of slave owners for their human property, could have been reached. The answer is basically “you’ve got to be kidding me.” Part one; part two; part three; more to come. You’d do well to read them all from start to finish, I think. For one thing, I don’t need to tell you how pernicious the myths about the Civil War and its causes have become for America, how pernicious they’ve been for a century and a half in fact. For another, I welcome the challenge to my newfound, might as well say it, pacifism. It won’t do to wave things away with platitudes and bullshit. The rubber must needs meet the road.
* The oral history of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the cancerous tumor that made America break bad.
Tags: real life