Archive for March 27th, 2017
Trading Rights for Security? how_Boston_exposes_americas_dark_post_911_bargain
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 27, 2017
To put it mildly, this has been a bad week for democracy and a worse one for public discourse.
In the minutes and hours after the bombs went off in Boston last Monday, marathon runners, first responders and many ordinary citizens responded to a chaotic situation with great courage and generosity, not knowing whether they might be putting their own lives at risk.
Since then, though, it’s mostly been a massive and disheartening national freakout, with pundits, politicians, major news outlets and the self-appointed sleuths of the Internet – in fact, nearly everyone besides those directly affected by the attack – heaping disgrace upon themselves.
We’ve seen the most famous TV network in the news business repeatedly botch basic facts, while one of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers misreported the number of people killed, launched a wave of hysteria over a “Saudi national” who turned out to have nothing to do with the crime, and then published a cover photo suggesting that two other guys (also innocent) might be the bombers.
We’ve seen the vaunted crowd-sourcing capability of Reddit degenerate into self-reinforcing mass delusion, in which a bunch of people whose law-enforcement expertise consisted of massive doses of “CSI” convinced themselves that a missing college student was one of the bombing suspects.
(He wasn’t – and with that young man’s fate still unknown, how does his family feel today?)
We’ve watched elected officials and political commentators struggle to twist every nubbin of news or rumor toward some perceived short-term tactical advantage.
It was as if the only real importance of this horrific but modestly scaled terrorist attack lay in how it could prove the essential rightness of one’s existing worldview, and — of course! — how it would play in the 2014 midterms.
On the right, people were sure the Boston bombings were part of a massive jihadi plot – no doubt one linked to al-Qaida and Iran and Saddam Hussein and all the other landmarks in the connect-the-dots paranoid worldview of Islamophobia.
(In fact, many people are still convinced of that.)
On the left we heard a lot of theories about Patriots’ Day and Waco and Oklahoma City, along with the argument that it would be better for global peace if the bombers turned out to be white Americans rather than foreign Muslims.
(I sympathize with the underlying point David Sirota was making there, by the way, but the way it was phrased was deliberately inflammatory.)
How long did it take conservative pundits and politicians, after the bombing suspects were identified as Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, immigrant brothers of Chechen heritage born in Kyrgyzstan, to seize on that fact as a reason to walk back the supposed Republican change of heart on immigration reform? Was it even five minutes?
Never mind that the young men in question came here as war refugees in childhood, one was an American citizen and the other a legal resident, and we still have no idea what role their religion and national background may or may not have played in motivating the crime.
It’s hard to imagine what possible immigration laws could have categorically excluded them, short of a magic anti-Muslim force field.
And don’t even get me started on the irrelevant but unavoidable fact that the shameless, butt-licking lackeys of the Senate’s Republican caucus (with a few Democrats along for the ride) took advantage of the post-Boston confusion to do Wayne LaPierre’s bidding and kill a modest gun-reform bill supported by nearly the entire American public.
I might have assumed, in other circumstances, that the Family Research Council’s press release suggesting that the Boston bombings were caused by abortion, “sexual liberalism” and hostility to religion was actually an Onion article.
Or that right-wing pundit Pat Dollard’s now-famous tweet (“GEORGE BUSH KEPT US SAFE FOR 8 YEARS”) came from some Brooklyn hipster’s parody account.
But nothing, it seems, is too painful or stupid or wrong for this particular week. There are many reasons why this happened: A terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon is a big news story by any measure, and this news story happened in a disordered media climate that’s changing so fast no one can keep up with it.
Our political culture is so fundamentally broken and divided that people on all sides seized on the story as a weapon and a symbol long before we had any idea who was behind the crime.
(It would be almost too perfect if the loaded question of whether the Boston bombings were foreign or domestic terrorism turns out not to have a clear answer, as now seems possible: A little bit of both, but not quite either.)
But I think the real reason why this gruesome but small-scale attack sent the whole country into such an incoherent panic lies a little deeper than that.
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, by the way, I’m aware that the trauma felt by people in and around Boston, whether or not they were directly affected, is real and likely to last quite a while.
What I’m talking about is the media spectacle of fear and unreason delivered via TV, news sites and social media, the nationwide hysteria that made a vicious act apparently perpetrated by two losers with backpack bombs seem like an “existential threat” (to borrow a little bogus “Homeland”-speak) to the most powerful nation in the world.
Because it was, in a way.
We are supposed to be protected, and then something like Boston comes along, a small-minded and bloody attack that appears to have been conducted by a couple of guys flying under the radar of law enforcement or national intelligence, pursuing some obscure agenda we will probably never understand.
(We have recently learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his family were interviewed by the FBI in 2011, apparently at the request of Russian intelligence, and agents found “no derogatory information.” Is that the right’s new Benghazi I smell?)
Not only does it conjure up all the leftover post-traumatic jitters from 9/11 – which for many of us will be there for the rest of our lives – it also makes clear that our Faustian bargain was completely bogus, and the devil never intended to hold up his end of the deal.
We surrendered our rights to a government of war criminals, who promised us certainty and security in a world that offers none.
We should have known better, and in fact we did. At the literal birth moment of American democracy, Benjamin Franklin summed it up in a single sentence: “Those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Comparing election law alternatives for Lebanon’s this year Parliamentary election
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 27, 2017
Comparing election law alternatives for Lebanon’s Parliamentary election (in 2014)
Note: Mind you that this article was written in 2014.
Since then 17 alternative laws have been presented and none of them were discussed in Parliament, with the tacit intention of renewing their mandate without any election. This parliament renewed their tenure twice and is about to renew it for a few more months.
This year 2017 is witnessing the same process in order Not to change the law. Apparently, a form of proportional is becoming inevitable, though the districts are meant to retain the old feudal and militia leaders.
The new season and collection of political headlines is out in Lebanon, and this year’s theme is the electoral law.
It is all we can read and hear about these days no matter where we turn; national TV, newspapers, facebook, twitter, bakeries, and even coffee shops.
Let’s try to go through our different options together and objectively determine what law to support.
In case you are not familiar with the terms, simple majority means winner takes all.
while proportional representation means you get a seat if your support is just the right size (If small politicians do not support proportional representation then they are not small… they are micro).
The above presents five proposals with coalitions, the government, and independent politicians pushing and shoving for one over the other.
The only thing that is common, and that all our politicians practically agree on, is to keep the sectarian division. This means the Parliament is divided based on religious representation.
Some politicians might claim one proposal is “more sectarian” than the other, but that is just because they will lose a couple of seats in Parliament, not because of their ideals.
The sad truth is that the politicians today are negotiating the results of the elections. They are simply re-dividing the seats among each other and negotiating the distribution of power in Lebanon.
Most voters will continue to vote for the same leader they have been voting for during the past couple of decades.
What we are looking at is a simple game of rotating thrones between lords. The only difference is that we have more than 30 lords seeking the throne, and the Realm is one twelfth the size of New York State.
(Actually, only 5 leaders are deciding of everything in Lebanon. Once they agree, the process follow through)
So to answer the question I posed in the beginning of the article on which electoral law to choose, my answer is none.
I refuse to enter a selection process that is completely separated from the notion of freedom.
I will not wait for the results of the brokered deal to know how free the electoral law will make me. I am free today by making my own choices based on my reason, emotions, and beliefs.
I choose to do what is right for me and for the people in my society. That is the electoral law I will support.
Cedric Choukeir is the regional director of the the World Youth Alliance in the Middle East and North Africa.
What of the Idiots? And pre-judgmental rules?
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 27, 2017
What of the Idiots? And pre-judgmental rules?
Les fous, les marginaux, les rebelles, les anticonformistes, les dissidents…
Tous ceux qui voient les choses différemment, qui ne respectent pas les règles.
Vous pouvez les admirer, ou les désapprouver, les glorifier, ou les dénigrer.
Mais vous ne pouvez pas les ignorer. Car ils changent les choses. Ils inventent, ils imaginent, ils explorent. Ils créent, ils inspirent.
Tanimoto
Tant que mes jambes me permettent de fuir, tant que mes bras me permettent de combattre, tant que l’expérience que j’ai du monde me permet de savoir ce que je peux désirer, nulle crainte : je puis agir.
Mais lorsque le monde des hommes me contraint à observer ses lois, lorsque mes mains et mes jambes se trouvent emprisonnées dans les fers implacables des préjugés, alors je frissonne, je gémis et je pleure.
Laboritt
Chaque fois que mes desseins se sont élevés, sous l’influence de mes rêves, au-dessus du niveau de ma vie quotidienne, et que, pour un instant, je me suis cru dans les hauteurs, comme l’enfant en haut de sa balançoire — chaque fois j’ai dû, tout comme lui, redescendre au niveau du jardin public et reconnaître ma défaite. […]
Je suppose que la plupart des gens, croisés au hasard des rues, emportent eux aussi […] un même élan vers cette guerre inutile d’une armée sans bannières.
Et eux tous […] doivent connaître, comme moi, la grande, la sordide défaite, […] une défaite minable et boutiquière.
Ils ont tous, comme moi, une âme exaltée et triste. […] Ils ont tous, comme moi, leur avenir derrière eux.
Pessoa
Note: by Khalil Toubia on FB