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An Iranian journalist (writing under a pseudonym) explains what powered the uprising [e.a.]:
Before the Revolutionary Guards stepped into the fray on June 20, the young militants of the Green Wave withstood days of unrelenting attacks by the fanatic Basij militia and the regular riot police.
What powers this new militancy? The Islamic Republic is not a dictatorship in the normal sense of the word. Its practitioners believe they are doing God’s work on earth. Guiding the wayward by persuasion and coercion is among their chief tasks. Nearly every young person in Iran, particularly young women, can recount dozens of stories of humiliation and discrimination at the hands of government agents and supporters. For them, each rock thrown at the police, each hand-to-hand combat with the militiamen and vigilantes, each confrontation with the heavily armed Revolutionary Guards is not just an act of political defiance but a cathartic experience of personal liberation.
Makes sense to me.
(via Sullivan)
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, explains why totalitarian regimes are doomed [e.a.]:
“The internet is the strongest force for individual self-expression ever invented,” Schmidt said, during an interview hosted by Maurice Levy, the chief executive of ad agency holding company Publicis Groupe.
“Governments around the world, even democratically elected, have difficulty with [the flow of] information online. Dictatorships and closed communities one after the other will try and shut down communication from inside. Strategies governments use trying to shut down people’s speech are terrible strategies and will not succeed,” he added.
TigerHawk publishes an apt reminder for those of you who are feeling blue:
The years that sucked more than 2008
# 1979 – Iranian revolution; oil price shock with gas lines; Mr. Ed dies; Jimmy Carter attacked by a rabbit; Susan B. Anthony dollar introduced; Chrysler asks for and receives a federal bailout the first time; Iranian hostage crisis begins; Pakistanis attack the American embassy in Islamabad, are repulsed; the U.S. dollar falls to record lows against the Deutschemark; the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan; dollar inflation hit 10%, and “core” inflation was over 9%.
# 1975 – Real GDP falls more than 9% in the first quarter, inflation exceeds 14%, and the unemployment rate tops 9%; Bill Ayers’ organization, the Weather Underground, bombs the State Department headquarters in Washington; South Vietnam collapses, and America withdraws in humiliation; Cambodia falls to the Khmer Rouge, and the slaughter begins; the Mayaguez incident, in which American hostages are rescued and some small quantum of American honor is restored at the cost of 38 servicemen; Jimmy Hoffa disappears; crazy women try to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford, twice; the United Nations declares Zionism a form of racism; New York City asks for and gets a financial bailout; a bomb goes off at LaGuardia; and Carlos the Jackal and others kidnap OPEC delegates.
# 1974 – The Watergate crisis dominates the news, with Nixon resigning under threat of impeachment in August; Patty Hearst kidnapped; the Arab oil embargo, in force since late 1973, continues until March — the price of oil rises from around $3.29 to $11.58 per barrel; dollar price inflation exceeds 10%; a “super outbreak” of tornados hits the United States on April 3, with 149 tornados killing 315 people and injuring 5000, and George W. Bush had nothing to do with it; the Symbionese Liberation Army, reinforced by Patty Hearst, terrorizes California; the Cleveland Indians sponsor a “ten cent beer” night that turns out to be “ill-advised”; the IRA bombs Parliament and the Tower of London; Ted Bundy is killing women right and left; Japanese “Red Army” terrorists attack France’s embassy in the Netherlands, just one of numerous radical left terrorism attacks over the next several years; the United Nations grants the Palestinian Liberation Organization “observer status” at the General Assembly, just two years after Munich.
# 1968 – the “Prague Spring” begins, only to be crushed by the subsequent Soviet invasion; the Tet offensive begins, including an attack on the American embassy in Saigon — the United States achieves a decisive military victory but the American press declares it a defeat and Walter Cronkite throws in the towel; the Norks seize the USS Pueblo, which they hold to this day; My Lai; RFK assassinated; MLK assassinated; students riot across America, and take over Columbia; France narrowly avoids revolution after weeks of general strikes and protests; radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol; Saddam Hussein becomes Vice-Chairman of the Revolutionary Council in Iraq, after a coup; the Cincinnati Bengals are founded; the candidates for president are Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace (in case you did not like your choices in 2000, 2004, or 2008); and the Democratic National Convention is even harsher outside the convention hall.
Those are the ones I remember. The rest are here.
Happy new year, and don’t forget to laugh!
Me, I’m going to see Australia tomorrow, because I loved Baz Luhrmann’s other movies, and it can’t possibly be as bad as everyone says … can it?
Happy new year, dear neglected readers.
It has been months since I posted, and I wanted to check in to say that I’m still here … but that I’ve been sidetracked by other, more pressing endeavors, which leave me time for reading but not for thoughtful posting. So I’ve stopped.
But I’m still a blogosphere reader and follower. And I note that 2009 has started with a bang if this post by Jules Crittenden is any indication. What great writing (and, of course, what great wit):
[M]aybe I’ve been a little too airy-fairy cocktail-party blase, bogus pretentious offhand in mine. It’s like the basic black of “Abouts.” Look at me, I am so minimalist, yet cool. With that lower case “jules crittenden,” no less. And maybe one or two or three too many areas of reportage listed, like I’m trying to impress someone.
Who am I kidding? I’m a second-string tabloid scribbler who parachuted into a few places back in the day. Big deal. Excuse me while I yawn …
You know, you could read that precious little turtlenecked blurb and not even have a clue that …
Jules Crittenden, a rightwing American tabloid editor based in Boston, is an international adventurer, art thief and rogue who has lived in five countries, worked in 10 or 12, depending on how you count, passed through about 40, and expected to be dead by now, but has failed to achieve that or produce much else of lasting worth, except three wonderful children …
OK, better already.
Crittenden was born in California in the second half of the 20th century to an Australian engineer and his wife, a registered nurse, who had come to America to make more money but quickly figured they could make even more if they went back overseas again.
Crittenden spent his early years in the jungles of Sumatra, where his first language was a combination of English and Bahasa Indonesia. He learned to squat before he learned how to sit.
After his father’s driver was shot in the head during the period of political unrest depicted in the Mel Gibson film, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” the wife and four kids were packed off to Sydney, New South Wales. Crittenden’s most enduring memories of this period include eating meat pies with his Auntie Helen at the lunch counter at Grace Brothers in Bondi Junction, and throwing up in Auckland, New Zealand.
Hmmm:
Results
We think http://how-infotaining.com is written by a man (79%).
Actually, how-infotaining.com is written by a woman (100%). But you may as well check out your own results …here.
This one was closer to the mark:
The analysis indicates that the author of http://how-infotaining.com is of the type:
INTP – The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.
They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.
Everybody is too uptight about this election.
Both men are competent to serve as president.
Obama is way too full of himself, and he’s got a self-righteous streak that is deeply irritating. He has too many hopes and dreams and plans, is too grandiose.
McCain, on the other hand, has no vision or deeply thought out plan. He wants to right the ship of state.
On the campaign trail, he’s just not likeable.
On SNL last night, though, he was really funny. Both of the McCains were great sports, I thought.
And Ben Affleck did a most satisfying and devastating takedown of Keith Olbermann. It’s long, but its subject is worth skewering over and over and over again:
Obama Lays Plans to Kill Expectations After Election Victory
Barack Obama’s senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week’s election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harboring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.
The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of “hope” and “change” are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.
One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair.”
Dear readers: I promise I will try to avoid falling into despair if Barack Obama is elected president and fails to deliver on his 1,001 promises.
But I dunno. My gut tells me that Obama is not going to win. (Believe my gut at your own peril.)
Despite his huge money advantage and his many admirers in the MSM and despite his having scurried into the cold embrace of Bill Clinton, Obama has still not persuaded the electorate that he’s The One. He’s not convincing.
That’s because he’s not a real leader. He only plays one on TV (sometimes with the aid of $700,000 in staging and lighting).
Just 14 percent of the stories about John McCain, from the conventions through the final presidential debate, were positive in tone, according to a study released today, while nearly 60 percent were negative — the least favorable coverage of any of the four candidates on the two tickets.
The study, by The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan journalism watchdog organization, examined 2,412 stories from 43 newspapers and cable news shows in the six-week period beginning just after the conventions and ending with the final presidential debate.
Folks, this is your media—now an official part of the corrupt, self-dealing political class of your country—able to make or break a political candidate by amplifying or drowning or distorting his message.
What to do?
Do not support the disgraceful purveyors of media that you loathe.
Do not spread their poison: don’t link to them.
Create your own voice and your own media channel.
That’s all, folks.
update: Daniel Henninger explains how our recent election cycles have come to be so disgusting
If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash.
Meet one undecided (and presumably low-information voter:
Among undecided voters in the region is Evelyn Worthington, a 58-year-old unemployed waitress.
“I usually don’t vote, but this time it seems like a good idea” because the economy is so bad and the stakes are so high, the Vicksburg resident said. “But I keep going back and forth between the two. I can’t figure out which one is telling the truth.
Hmmmm.
So I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m not sure if I’ve run out of steam for the blogging enterprise or if I’m just too damn busy to keep up and keep things fresh around here. (There’s no point in simply keeping up. Anyone can do that without blogging. The point of this blog is to keep up and to observe acutely, from a little distance, events and pseudo-events as they unfold, to get to the essence of what’s happening rather than allow myself to be merely swept along in the whitewater that is the Mediathon (thank you, Frank Rich, for that great term and concept!).
Whether I decide to keep it going or to let the blog go, I feel like I’ve done my bit. Not that Infotainment Rules and I have had a whole lot to do with it, but I don’t think there’s a sentient being in America today who doesn’t know that what we used to call the “news” is nothing of the sort. Who doesn’t know by now, for example, that Fox is a “conservative”-flavored operation and that MSNBC is the new “liberal” alternative?
On TV, the “news” isn’t something that aims to add to the sum of public knowledge. Rather, it is a steaming pile of showbiz-flavored manure excreted from the juiciest morsels of red meat (i.e., conflict-filled stories) of the day. ** Moreover, to add spice to the menu, it’s a steaming pile of partisan showbiz manure excreted from the juiciest morsels of red meat of the day.
The sociologist Neal Postman warned a long time ago that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death when we suck off the mass-medium teat known as television. Well, almost three decades later we Americans are demonstrably not dead, but it’s pretty obvious that when we watch TV, we do prefer to be brain-dead.
We don’t turn on the tube (or YouTube) in order to be educated. We turn it on to be entertained. This is true even when it comes to “the news.” And people get that—even “low-information” people get that, as Tim Cavanaugh writes [e.a.]:
Are the great American habits of directness, foursquare honesty, and a hearty handshake being undermined by fancy-pants French critical theory? You betcha! From the Obama-McCain struggle to find the proper meta-analysis of the word celebrity to the deconstruction of the mainstream media’s treatment of John Edwards, from the “framing” and “repackaging” of political constructs to the rise of identity politics for white people, the trend is clear: We are all postmodernists now.
The mainstreaming of pomo thinking has been largely a stealth project, something Americans do without committing overt acts of academia. We thought we were trying to clear away the cobwebs of shoddy analysis and elite hypocrisy, but all along we were bringing the tools of critical thinking to the masses. Go into any bar in the country, and you’ll find somebody unpacking the assumptions in someone else’s text.
Indeed! We are all media critics in the era of News 2.0. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that even if the news media are not adding much to the sum of public knowledge, it does mean that when we in the audience ingest their paltry offerings, we aren’t exactly brain-dead after all; it means that we do question what we see, hear, and read, and that we are somewhat skeptical of what is fed to us via the many channels of the pop culture (and the “news” is under this umbrella: pop culture is what’s happening?, and news is what’s happening now?).
And despite the clear and total showbizification of the “news” and of public life (known as pipolisation in France and as Dianafication in England) and despite the fragmenting of “news” shows into partisan camps, there is an encouraging sign even in this new reality.
As the Pew center reported this week, news audiences still manage to pick up a fair number of facts:
Of course, the “political knowledge” of audiences revealed in this Pew survey doesn’t amount to much—particularly when it comes to foreign affairs. And nothing in this survey discusses the quality and depth of the knowledge that are being communicated to people by the media outlets listed. But the scores do indicate that basic facts about our public life are being communicated, even to people whose news diet consists of tabloids, People magazine, and daytime TV talk shows, and who are demonstrably not tuning in to the news (but to entertainment) when they plug in to these media channels.
The media reduces an avalanche of information to a few simple fables each day that everyone can understand and relate to. If you want to know more than that, you’re on your on.
Good night and good luck!
———–
** In March 2006, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the state of the news media in 2005, noted:
The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame.
The NYT’s Kit Seelye live-blogged the debate, and she got in some of the best commentary of the evening. (Hint: it had nothing to do with the snoozefest in Nashville [e.a.]:
Palin’s Watching | 9:28 p.m. Our colleague Julie Bosman, who is traveling with Gov. Sarah Palin, Mr. McCain’s running mate, reports in that Ms. Palin just took her motorcade, reporters and all, to a pizzeria in Greenville, N.C., to mingle with locals and tune into the debate. She signed autographs and posed for pictures with people who were very surprised to see her walk in — having changed out of her three-inch heels and white suit jacket, she’s blending in with the crowd in a purple Nike track jacket and jeans.
As the debate began, Ms. Palin sat down at a table with Senator Elizabeth Dole, Senator Richard Burr and his wife, Brooke, and Patrick McGrory, the mayor of Charlotte, N.C. (For the record, Ms. Dole eats pizza with a knife and fork.)
Ms. Palin is intermittently watching a television screen overhead, working her BlackBerry with her left hand and taking notes with the right hand.
So that’s how she does it all!
Yuval Levin makes an interesting point in comparing Obama’s and McCain’s colorful associations:
McCain’s response to that scandal should certainly be compared with Obama’s Ayers explanations. McCain has spoken and written about every detail of the Keating mess, has expressed open contrition for allowing himself to be drawn into it even tangentially, and devoted years of his career to combating corruption as a result. He even badly overreacted and pushed for vastly excessive regulation of campaign financing. He has said (in a book in which he details his and others’ actions in the matter) that merely the appearance of impropriety involved makes his involvement with Keating “the worst mistake of my life.”
Had Obama done and said something similar regarding the sort of radicalism Ayers represents, he would now have an answer to offer. Instead, he has worked with Ayers, supported his causes, and denied any significance to the links between them. That, too, makes this a legitimate question about a man who would be president.
I’m not afraid of Bill Ayers and Obama’s association with him—indeed, I’ve got worse associations and other things in my background that would disqualify me from running for president. The difference between me and Barack Obama (apart from my not wanting to be president) is that I have the decency to understand that no matter how brilliant I may be and how great my political gift, my associations and out-of-the-mainstreamness disqualify me from the presidency and place me forever in the camp of the loyal opposition.
Obama’s associates don’t even put him in the camp of the loyal opposition. And that is the problem with electing Barack Obama to the presidency: he is almost unbearably naive. He considers no radical too dangerous.
The next four years could get pretty interesting. I hope all my readers are battening down the hatches.
Granted, this dates to before the total collapse of confidence in the financial future, but it’s still interesting:
Four weeks and one day to go before we can stop hearing about what a liar everyone is.
A huge percentage of independent voters is still uncertain about whom to vote for:
In the last week, more voters have come to believe that McCain would pursue different policies than Bush:
After three weeks of relentless Palin-bashing, her favorables have come down. What a surprise!:
The New York Sun may be out of business, but there are still some responsible journalists left who believe it is necessary to remind Americans that poisonous rhetoric isn’t “just words.” Here’s Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times:
Ahmadinejad’s evil words aren’t just talk
[We Americans] don’t expect public men or women to speak the truth from public platforms. When it comes to our own parochial affairs, there’s probably a bit of weary realism in that. However, this casual expectation of rhetorical hypocrisy has inhibited from the start our ability to recognize and deal with the threat posed by Islamist radicalism.
Time and again, the spokesmen for these movements have told the world precisely what they intend. Time and again, the scant handful of Americans who bothered to take notice have dismissed what was said as the product of political alienation, as the consequence of economic marginalization, as a hangover of post-colonial insecurity or as tactical bluster.
No. These people mean exactly what they say, and they mean it for precisely the reasons they say they do. They genuinely believe in the extreme and often heretical variants of Islam to which they cleave, that faith guides their actions, and their public statements are expressions of that faith.
Time and again, though, we willfully have blinded ourselves to this fact, partly because modern minds balk at accepting what is essentially medieval reasoning at face value, and partly because it’s the conveniently amicable thing do to.
Rutten cites Ahmadinejad’s recent address to the UN as words worth listening to for their strongly and classically pre-World War II anti-Semitism [e.a.]:
“The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner. It is deeply disastrous to witness that some presidential or premier nominees in some big countries have to visit these people, take part in their gatherings, swear their allegiance and commitment to their interests in order to attain financial or media support.
“This means that the great people of America and various nations of Europe need to obey the demands and wishes of a small number of acquisitive and invasive people. These nations are spending their dignity and resources on the crimes and occupations and the threats of the Zionist network against their will.”
Rutten concludes:
When the delegates to the U.N. General Assembly applauded Ahmadinejad’s speech last week, and the American media passed over it in silence, this is the sentiment to which they gave their respective explicit and tacit approval.
Shame on them; shame on us.
Indeed.
