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bloodyminded

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Everything posted by bloodyminded

  1. Where do you get "a week in jail" versus "a couple of minutes of lashes?" Violence has achieved a different level in public consciousness than it used to. (Incarcertion is, arguably, a form of violence, but I think we understand the implied distinction. I think your questions here are philosophically interesting ones, but I think there are serious differences. Well, in a way it comes down to what is most affecting for the victim...I mean criminal, so I take your point that far. Most people would prefer a day in jail to public lashings (and why public? Another interesting topic, less to do with justice than sadism, I think....). As for longer jail terms; well, we aren't talking about lashings i lieu of prison for serious offenses...and I think most people would object to that based on the notion that the criminal is allowed immediate freedom, just as much as antipathy towards State violence. At any rate, we've moved more and more away from state-sanctioned violence of criminals for several reasons; but one of them is that physical violence is not precise, and the consequences can too easily be disproportionate, accidentally or otherwise. The same is true for incarceration, yes, but I'm not seeing them as "as good as each other." Yes, but because of the view of corporal punishment, you'd have an entire legal industry built up around exactly this matter, both prosecutorial and defense. More to the point: think now of the increasing fixity with which police are scrutinized for too-violent and allegedly too-violent behaviour. Multiply this by a hundred, and you'll see what sort of can of worms is opened here.
  2. Did they have competitive, "free market" courts of law? I'm not convinced you've thought all this through.
  3. Which business is going to pay for the infrastructure? You want sky-high costs that almost no one can afford? And what about our militry adventures, the ones in which the Superfriends flit about battling evil and protecting liberty? Who's going to pay for that? Private industry? Oh, wait: You don't think a market-based justice system, and competitive courts (how would that even work, by the way?) isn't going to be an abortion, completely soaked to the skin in miscarriages of justice? Anarcho-capitalism is an idea dead in the water.
  4. Exactly. Debating whether or not some monolithic entity called "the Government...controls the CBC" or not is hardly semantics. It's an argument based on a huge misunderstanding of what "the government" actually is...but it's not semantics. What people often fail to understand is that public broadcasters generally are mandated, as a central premise, not to be beholden to government. Can anyone really argue with a straight face that CBC news, radio or television, is more sycophantic and less combative than the private networks? I'm just not seeing it. And such a claim demands good evidence, not shouts about "the Government!" (Analogously, many people think the Queen is a tyrannical part of Canadian government, when in fact one of the points is to avoid potential (and partisan) tyranny.) I hasten to add that I'm making no claims specifically about the CBC itself; I'm only objecting to the idea that a public broadcaster is part of "the government," with the connotations that immediately arise in using that word.
  5. Please. The entire "day of remembrance" was not some apolitical act of grieving; it was a politicized day inherently. "Political ritual" one writer has accurately termed it. If you're going to tell me that the Western powers do not take innocent life because they don't like or agree with other countries' foreign (and domestic!) policies, then you certainly have lost any right to be condemning "propaganda." Your comment is, in fact, entirely what I meant in my first point: your views on these matters are 100%, entirely as politicized as those you denigrate.
  6. I don't care for the pissing contest myself; you claimed that "lots of scholars" agree with your points, which evidently you arrived at through your own intelligence. First of all, no you certainly did not, as you echo the talking points of that contemporary right-wing sector of left-obssessives. Unless they have been cribbing from you all along, I cry foul. Second, you remain unwilling to name the scholars, and maybe even offer us some quoted insights. As I did, for the sake of this debate. I quoted them because they know more about the subject than you or I...especially more than you. They offer actual, substantive remarks against precisely some of the points you've been making. Why not take them on, if it so "self-evident" that fascism is a leftist phenomenon? Several posters have offered strong arguments...and the historians I linked to and quoted directly explain it quite specifically. I take it you didn't read any of their remarks. That's fine...but what's not fine is to ignore the pointed arguments that are made, and then claim they never existed! And in fact, Dre and Jack Weber have offered a lot here, as well. Why pretend they haven't put forth arguments? The fact is that the fascists--of Germany, of Italy, of Spain--despised the left. They couldn't stand them. They tended, in fact, to kill them.
  7. Yes, I understand, and arguments against a public broadcaster are certainly different from the arguments agaisnt which I'm objecting. No, there's some crucial differences: (And to get a simple matter out of the way, there is no whiff of a claim of "conservative bias" in the East Timor example, nor in most of the ones the authors use. (Not that you're making the claim; but I wished to clarify this point for those who believe MC is about "right-wing bias.") The East Timor example isn't cherry-picking, for several reasons: First, it's not about the NYTimes, but all the major media organs. They concentrated on the Times because it is (or at least was) the most influential mainstream newspaper in the world, the "paper of record," from which so many other news sources have drawn their example and acted as secondary agents of disseminating the news. Second, the case of East Timor was not, in the book (nor quite in the inferior movie), solely about itself; they used it as a test case for a couple of matters, and it provided the perfect storm, a great confluence; simultaneous to the initial horrors unfolding in E. Timor were the horrors unfolding in Cambodia. And we can see, from the Times and elsewhere, that one was a horror-chamber (Cambodia and its enemy communists) and one was not even a story (E. Timor and its state terror perpetrated by our allies and with our material aid). So the reporting on the two was completely different, although the criminality and monstrosity were similar. Different agents of destruction is the only substantive difference. To this day, people try to tell me that our "looking away" is not parallel to intentional slaughter...it's as if there's no eyewitnesses, and no declassified record which informs us exactly of what's going on. It's astonishing, frankly. Further, the case of East Timor matters in a way that "leftist bias at the CBC" does not, because of the scale. (And CBC too was part of this bias, by the way.) We're talking one of the worst mass slaughters by percentage of population in the last half of the 20th century--and there's lots of competition. We can be horrified at Milosevic, without recognizing that the crimes with which we were intimately involved totally and utterly eclipse anything by the Serbian killers. (Since the East Timor slaughters went on so long, Chomsky and Herman had the opportunity to compare those two situations as well...an even more shameless media production, since at least Pol Pot's murders were on a similar scale to Suharto's, while Sebia's most certainly were not). This is difficult for Westerners to wrap their brains around, thanks to the profundity of the doctrinal tendencies and the screaming depths of the propaganda, but consider it; how could we call that "cherry-picking," and compare it to some lame and dubious examples of CBC "leftist bias," when we're talking about state terrorism on a scale that vastly overshadows Hamas or any other rank amateurs; hundreds of thousands dead, innumerable others "disappeared", tortured, all the usual, awful stuff...and all done with the full, including material, support of some Western democracies, the US and UK leading the pack of miserable criminals by some measure? No one "looked away," except the news media. This was not "allowing it to happen"; it happened precisely because of Western support for illegal invasions, state terror, and mass murder. It really happened. It's mind-boggling, but there it is. In short, the news media failing to report (or reporting totally incorrectly) a crime of this magnitude cannot be passed off as "cherry-picking." Yes, and this has been noted. Pointed out are instances of "liberal bias," but almost always within narrow parameters. At any rate, "ownership" is only one of the "five filters" they posit, along with advertising, flak, sourcing (ie overwelmingly business and government spokespeaople, specifically trained in the art of Public Relations), and, yes, ideology. The original final point was "anti-communism," but they've since revised that to "official enemies," and even conceding that the orginial may have been too narrow in scope. Nevertheless, there is a confluence of influences (quite interrelated in most cases), not merely profit-motive. They are indeed, overall, "neutral," but again, only within relatively narrow parameters. In domestic politics, the field is much larger and more open to debate; in foreign subjects, particularly when we're involved in military action, the debate narrows immediately, with precious little theorizing about motives...a near-sacred cow. Canada is arguably worse than the US in this sphere. So we can argue about the wisdom of this or that war, and even the methods....but the essential, bottom-line morality of it is only even mentioned by "fringe" elements, "the wild men in the wings." This is true of media regardless of public opinion, in some part because professional journalists are part of the political class, hobnobbing and friendly...and crucially, dependent on good government graces for Sourcing. This is not so clear. Did the major nerws organs, including the CBC, lose revenue for their piss-poor "reporting" on East Timor? For providing us with a propaganda video during the fall of Saddam's statue? (A few dozen Iraqis trucked in by the military, and then filmed to make it look like a large, spontaneous crowd)? Hell, The Times, in a moment of actual journalistic lucidity, published an extensive, multi-part report on the Pentagon's propaganda offensive during the run-up to the Iraq War: the "independent analysts" present on every major network (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and FOX) were actually "message force multipliers" in the words of the Pentagon, briefed for talking points by high officials before vomiting these words back on the tv news, under the guise of "independent analysts." To my knowledge, the networks lost no revenue over this. But to be fair, they didn't report on the Times piece at all, so..... - His argument isn't of right-wing bias. Most simply put, it is bias towards Power. Here, that involves the State (particularly the War State) and Big Business. In the Soviet Union, it would be the State, and whatever agencies of elements most favoured by Central authorities. But propaganda is a different animal in the two states: ours is much more sophisticated, full of many more half-truths. Which makes sense, sinc epropaganda as we know it is primarily a US/UK invention, beginning in earnest around WW1. I'm not claiming anything; I'm arguing agaisnt the notion of some rampant "leftist bias," a hypothesis containing no institutional analysis whatsoever.
  8. That's the idea normally proposed, yes. PErhaps von Mises agrees with that, as well...but feels, simultaneously, that fascism provided a useful tool against Communism. I can't really say.
  9. This is flatly untrue. And yes, what you're saying is "clear," perfectly so. Is that really your argument for your being correct? Not at all. You've already claimed that lots of scholars agree with you, and you summoned the name of an intellectual who agrees with you...etc. And suddenly they don't matter...once you realize that others can actually cite multiple scholarly sources on the subject, rather than making bland claims about it as you have done. Yep, everyone's been lying to Bob, his whole life. Teachers and professors--not even mistaken, but lying to Bob. This is pretty extreme paranoid delusion, and amounts to one of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories I've yet heard. I realize this is comforting for you--and allows you to assume that the political Right is utterly free of responsibility for any horrors (aside from the fact that they kowtow too much to this monolithic "Left"). Comforting, but not too wise.
  10. Sure, and I wasn't trying to disparage the "strategic support" notion, or to imply that one must always vote for someone holding all the proper ideals for all the "correct" reasons. That would give us all some difficulty in finding politicians to support, wouldn't it?
  11. You're right, except I can foresee a few minor bits of decontextualized and selective "evidence," produced by these fine scholars who believe that'll make their case. What I'm looking for is something expansive and coherent. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman made an excellent case: a coherent and testable hypothesis, and then reams of evidence. But you're right, it'll be a long wait. As in forever.
  12. It's not always easy to admit to errors, so kudos.
  13. It's amusing, isn't it? I've heard this from other supposed proponents of some mythical "free market": they get morally outraged and sanctimonious about any mention of morality and ethics in Business. They want it both ways. Well, they can't have it. The late Ludwig von Mises has been an important part of the intellectual-libertarian movement. A very sharp guy, no question. Once offered some defense of fascism as a temporary bulwark," an important "emergency makeshift" against Communism. Not a terribly popular notion these days, so it's little wonder his adherents never mention it.
  14. I agree completely. And this interesting cross-grain of support for Paul--from sectors of the Right and the Left--shouldn't obscure the fact (to his Leftist supporters) that Paul is not speaking from the usual left-progressive views on international relations, but rather from a conservative non-interventionist stance. That doesn't mean one shouldn't support him, if that's what one wants to do; but they should be aware that it's an alliance of convenient convergence, not one of actual values and beliefs.
  15. No, you've got it exactly backwards. The problem isn't, or not usually, with a few "evil individuals" cackling wildly as they perform horrendous deeds. The vast majority of individuals working within corporations are as normal and decent as anyone else. It's an institutional issue, in the same way that honest and intelligent journalists can pormote statist propaganda without quite seeing it this way.
  16. What does their rate of income have to do with anything? If they make so much less than you....you resent their opinions on such matters? What's one to do with the other? So if someone makes roughly equal (or greater) income than you do...their opinions on the subject become more valid? But I appreciate this, Derek, the sort of reasoned sentiment that seems to symbolize your style. I don't mind being characterized as naive and misguided; of course I don't think it's the case, but I'm open to the possibility, always. But the notion that there's some sort of deep moral corruption in me that allows for my views is a non-starter. It's absurd. Wrong? Possibly. Sinister--or a (financial) "loser"? Those are just factually incorrect.
  17. I don't see how Sharia elsewhere can be "inherently threatening to the West."
  18. I agree, identity politics at their worst. Harper's had the right idea: this is an intellectual Leftist publication, in which I have little doubt the editors and writers probably did not much like those cartoons. (I'm guessing, yes, but trust me, I know lefties.) And that's fine; you don't have to appreciate the cartoons. You can think they're not a great idea. But you publish them anyway. Why? Because virtually no one would. If everyone was doing it, ok, there's no point, really. But in publishing them, Harper's was taking a political stance, and a principled one. Support the right of expression of ideas you don't like....or you don't support the right at all. Period. In North Korea, everyone has the "right to free speech." You can insist on Jong-ils magnificence to your heart's content.
  19. No...those most infamous for their hatred of young black males. "Curb-stomping" has long been a popular White Nationalist meme; more dank fantasy than reality, thankfully. Just as it was used here by CPC.
  20. I would love some expansive evidence of this massive left-wing media apparatus. I have asked many times, and so far only Pliny has even attempted to debate the matter. (He was wrong, of course, but I appreciated his interesting and intelligent attempt.) So far, the Chomsky/Herman "Propaganda Model" remains light-years ahead of all opinions posited by the "leftist media" theorists. Which begs the question: why, after 22 years, has no one--no one!--managed to summon a worthy response to Manufacturing Consent? (Trivial sniping at marginal matters aside.) What's the hold-up?
  21. I was already aware of this perverse view. What about the other aspect of my response...where I bitch-slapped your preposterous idea that America (and, I assume, by extension Canada, the UK, France, et al) share zero responsibility for the horrible state of affairs that have occurred in many other countries? I'm surprised anyone can actually believe such a thing.
  22. Yes, you've named one. You could also name the John Birch Society and Lyndon LaRouche, though I'm not sure you'd appreciate their company. I gave you several with "intellectual credentials" on a single page. You could find hundreds more, if you liked. I point this out only because your Appeal to Authority here has been rather outdone. Actually, as you implicitly concede elsewhere, those arguing with you are adhering to the mainstream, consensus scholarly view...not the soundbites commonly dismissed as "101" this or that in these sorts of arguments. You see, that derisive response itself implies that a serious scholar who spends more intensive time on the subject will arrive at a different view. But the serious, intensive and expansive view is the one I have been proposing here, not you. Define "many," and who are they?
  23. Actually, it is in line with the right--by definition. You're taking the libertarian or pseudo-libertarian strains of conservatism and trying to force them into history; in other words, you're favouring theory (or, worse, bland claims about theory) over actual lived reality. The number of violently authoritarian right-wing governments have been legion. And you know that. Liberals and Leftists were, and remain, fascism's primary enemy. It is precisely what fascists most rail against...that, and intellectualism. Contemporary fascists run the gamut between "White Nationalists" of the type we can uncomfortably browse on "Stormfront" (I have done so...and these are conservatives to the core), all the way to the more intellectualized adherents self-labelled "Falangists," who have abandoned racism, but remain typically fascistic otherwise (right-wing populism/authoritarianism peppered with a few Left-statist components). What I asserted was that fascism is an extreme-right ideology with strains of leftist ideology embedded within it. In other words, the conventional scholarly consensus. According to scolars of fascism, like Robert Paxton and Raul Hilberg (both conservatives, if that eases your mind, and the latter of whom is singularly responsible for the entire field of Holocaust Studies), the well--worn thesis you're here advocating is the product of ultraconservative ideological pseudo-history (notably the John Birch Society!!!!) popularized in the 1940s, now thoroughly discredited by every serious thinker on matters fascist. Fascism defines itself against both liberalism and socialism--that is, fascism is inherntly in opposition to the political centre, the centre-lleft, and the far left. That's because of its inherent (and inherently deep) right-wing impulses; these impulses are not its definition entire, but they are absolutely crucial and intractable. I mentioned the ridiculous Jonah Goldberg because he, more than any contemporary writer, and in the vein of anti-historians like Ann Coulter, has been a key proponent of the resurgance of the simpleminded, polemical, discredited historicizing. For a brief smack-down of Goldberg's ideas (which you are repeating practically verbatim), check out the following scholarly rebukes: Matthew Feldman: Roger Griffin: Michael Ledeen: There's lots more here, if you care to look. And of course, any serious sources on fascism that you care to peruse is going to give you similar discreditaitons of what you're trying to assert. http://hnn.us/articles/122245.html
  24. This is a fairly dank and depraved post. Your bit about "civilians," complete with scare quotes and some vague determination that they don't deserve much value to their lives is especially grotesque. And of course several nations, certainly including Western democracies, and obviously including the United States, shares profound and unquestionable culpability for many ills elsewhere. No, certainly, the West, much less America alone, is not solely responsible. But that doesn't let us off the hook. Not for subverting democracies, for murdering people...and for outright support of terrorism on a grand scale. It's cowardly to even write what you've written.
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