And Then There Is Joe -- Blow, That Is

"The more one dissents from political orthodoxies, the more the attacks focus on personality, style and character." So says Glenn Greenwald in his latest article about Noam Chomsky. And people wonder why I blog as "Joe Blow."

It is bad enough that I have had to put up with the likes of some locals such as Ernie Branscomb, Eric Kirk, Hank Sims and not to forget the illustrious newspaper opinionater, Dave Stancliff, but to subject my family to the consequences of their juvenile rancorous invectives was a bit much.

Glenn's "How Noam Chomsky is discussed" expresses my sentiments on this issue to perfection. He begins by saying:

"One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, "style" and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed "crazy", as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in most cases,what is actually "crazy" are the political orthodoxies this tactic seeks to shield from challenge). 

This method is applied with particular aggression to those who engage in any meaningful dissent against the society's most powerful factions and their institutions. Nixon White House officials sought to steal the files from Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office precisely because they knew they could best discredit his disclosures with irrelevant attacks on his psyche. Identically, the New York Times and partisan Obama supporters have led the way in depicting both Bradley Manning and Julian Assangeas mentally unstable outcasts with serious personality deficiencies. The lesson is clear: only someone plagued by mental afflictions would take such extreme steps to subvert the power of the US government. 

A subtler version of this technique is to attack the so-called "style" of the critic as a means of impugning, really avoiding, the substance of the critique. Although Paul Krugman is comfortably within mainstream political thought as a loyal Democrat and a New York Times columnist, his relentless attack against the austerity mindset is threatening to many. As a result, he is barraged with endless, substance-free complaints about his "tone": he is too abrasive, he does not treat opponents with respect, he demonizes those who disagree with him, etc. The complaints are usually devoid of specifics to prevent meaningful refutation; one typical example: "[Krugman] often cloaks his claims in professional authority, overstates them, omits arguments that undermine his case, and is a bit of a bully." All of that enables the substance of the critique to be avoided in lieu of alleged personality flaws. 

Nobody has been subjected to these vapid discrediting techniques more than Noam Chomsky." 

 To continue reading the rest of the article, please click this link.

Glenn says in defense of Chomsky, and I offer this paragraph for Eric Kirk's benefit:

"But the strangest attack on Chomsky is the insinuation that he has changed nothing. Aside from the metrics demonstrating that he has more reach and influence than virtually any public intellectual in the world, some of which Edemariam cites, I'd say that there is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues than he. If you accept the premise (as I do) that the key to political change is to convince people of pervasive injustice and the need to act, then it's virtually laughable to depict him as inconsequential. Washington power-brokers and their media courtiers do not discuss him, and he does not make frequent (or any) appearances on US cable news outlets, but outside of those narrow and insular corridors - meaning around the world - few if any political thinkers are as well-known, influential or admired (to its credit, the Guardian, like some US liberal outlets, does periodically publish Chomsky's essays)." 

 Glenn concludes by saying and I quote:

"But what is at play here is this destructive dynamic that the more one dissents from political orthodoxies, the more personalized, style-focused and substance-free the attacks become. That's because once someone becomes sufficiently critical of establishment pieties, the goal is not merely to dispute their claims but to silence them. That's accomplished by demonizing the person on personality and style grounds to the point where huge numbers of people decide that nothing they say should even be considered, let alone accepted. It's a sorry and anti-intellectual tactic, to be sure, but a brutally effective one." [Emphasis mine]

 In that, to be sure, as an avatar, I should know.

--Joe

The Future of Liberal Power

Glenn Greenwald explains in detail what everyone can expect from a newly reelected Barack Obama and his trenchant liberal supporters. What he explains is exactly as I've seen coming for five years. Actually, I expected more of this in his first term. Glenn details how the "fight will proceed" in six detailed steps.

There is one caveat I need to add, that is, once his liberal supporters realize they've been betrayed - sold out- AGAIN, I expect them to simply shutdown and walk away, from him, the Democrats, from government, from everything, everything but family and simple survival. That's when the real battle begins.

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Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?

With fights over social security, Medicare, ongoing war, and other key progressive priorities looming, what will they do with their new power?

Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 November 2012 10.39 EST 

The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night's election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant.

To begin with, it is hard to overstate just how crippled America's right-wing is. Although it was masked by their aberrational win in 2010, the GOP has now been not merely defeated, but crushed, in three out of the last four elections: in 2006 (when they lost control of the House and Senate), 2008 (when Obama won easily and Democrats expanded their margins of control), and now 2012. The horrendous political legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney continues to sink the GOP, and demographic realities – how toxic the American Right is to the very groups that are now becoming America's majority – makes it difficult to envision how this will change any time soon.  [Read the rest at the Guardian.]

The END

After free speech, the death of everything else important to a free society.
Glenn Greenwald follows with:

Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent
Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism – 'disposition matrix' – the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a government can claim

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Here is the first paragraph. I encourage you to read the complete article.

A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign.

Keep reading.

--Joe

The Death Of Free Speech

Glenn Greenwald touches on a subject close to my heart: Free Speech Versus Community in his Guardian column for Sunday, October 14, 2012. It is reprinted here for the benefit of all would-be consumers.

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1) In Sunday's Washington Post, law professor Jonathan Turley has a superb Op-Ed on the gradual death of free speech in the west, and he places the blame squarely where it belongs: on the veneration of "sensitivities" over the free flow of ideas, and relatedly, the adolescent need on the part of many adults to plead with authority figures to shield them from views they find offensive. His essay is well worth reading in full, but here is the crux:

"Free speech is dying in the western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony. . . .
"Of course, free speech is often precisely about pissing off other people – challenging social taboos or political values. . . . 

"Such efforts focus not on the right to speak but on the possible reaction to speech – a fundamental change in the treatment of free speech in the West. The much-misconstrued statement of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that free speech does not give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater is now being used to curtail speech that might provoke a violence-prone minority. Our entire society is being treated as a crowded theater, and talking about whole subjects is now akin to shouting 'fire!' . . . . 

"The very right that laid the foundation for western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed inflammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship. 

"As in a troubled marriage, the west seems to be falling out of love with free speech. Unable to divorce ourselves from this defining right, we take refuge instead in an awkward and forced silence."

I'm accused with some frequency of focusing my critiques on the US - the reason I do so is set forth here in reasoning I adopt in full - but vibrant free speech protection is a core liberty which the US, though very far from perfect, still safeguards better than most countries.

What has always driven repression of speech are the same universal human traits that are now flourishing as part of this latest effort: the tyrannical thirst for the power to silence ideas one dislikes, the self-regarding belief that one can apply objective principles of decency, "community" and Goodness to decide which modes of expression and which ideas should be barred, authoritarian trust in leaders, and – worst of all – the refusal to understand that endorsing repression of ideas leaves one with no principled grounds to object when one's own ideas end up on the prohibited list.

Throughout history, it has often been the case that today's "hate speech" becomes tomorrow's enlightenment. Today's "incitement" becomes tomorrow's righteous subversion of unjust authority and flawed orthodoxies. Add to all that the ignoble tendency to object to - or even recognize the existence of - repression only when it affects one directly (a dynamic I described here when writing about the inability of many passive, obedient western citizens to acknowledge the repression of their own governments because such citizens are never the ones targeted for repression), and it's clear that the opposition to free expression is grounded in the worst of human attributes.

In sum, it takes a staggering amount of hubris to believe you're in any position to decide which ideas are so objectively and permanently wrong that they should be barred. It takes an equally staggering amount of childishness to want some central authority to protect you from ideas that you find upsetting. And it takes extreme historical ignorance not to realize that endorsing the maintenance of a list of prohibited ideas and then empowering authorities to enforce it will inevitably lead to abusive applications of that power and, sooner or later, will likely result in the suppression of your own ideas as well. [Emphasis added]

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I reprinted this article because we find the same disease festering in this community (Humboldt County) among local bloggers and newspapers. Those that are out front always beating their chests about promoting and defending free speech are the first to censure over unknown reasons.
[Picture Source]

--Joe

On The Brink

Is America really on the brink of darkness, desolation, and despair? Or do they still trust in the voice of hope? Or are they on the brink of losing all hope of ever having any say in their lives or their future?

The following is an excerpt from Naomi Wolf's column in the Guardian:  The NDAA'ssection 1021 coup d'etat foiled -- 
One brave judge is all that lay between us and a law that would have given the president power to detain US citizens indefinitely

“This darkness is so dangerous not least because a new Department of Homeland Security document trove, released in response to a FOIA request filed by Michael Moore and the National Lawyers' Guild, proves in exhaustive detail that the DHS and its "fusion centers" coordinated with local police (as I argued here, to initial disbelief), the violent crackdown against Occupy last fall. You have to put these pieces of evidence together: the government cannot be trusted with powers to detain indefinitely any US citizen – even though Obama promised he would not misuse these powers – because the United States government is already coordinating a surveillance and policing war against its citizens, designed to suppress their peaceful assembly and criticism of its corporate allies.”

Glenn Greenwald also wrote about this matter in his column today entitled:  Federal court enjoins NDAA -- An Obama-appointed judge rules its indefinite detention provisions likely violate the 1st and 5th Amendments
I'd say it is all well beyond "the brink" right here in Humboldt County when you already see the implementation of the "surveillance and policing war" in operation.

--Joe 

Judgment Day

Are the Palestinians going to stand up and claim their rights as legitimate people same as all others, including the Jews and Americans? Or are the going to roll-over like a horny, mongrel dog and justify what the Jews did to them these past 63 years? Judgment day has arrived...

Steve Lendman thinks Palestine's Abbas has already capitulated, sold out and betrayed the Palestinian People. Considering the leadership in this country for the past decade, I'd say he's in good company. Problem is, neither people can see beyond their wants and desires - and to a large extent, their misguided beliefs in Jew Value.

An apparent contravening point of view is expressed Leeds Palestine Solidarity Campaign

– A State of Palestine would backfire on its own people - Also in The Guardian.

Interestingly, both articles support the same premise: the Palestinian People are sold out or betrayed; totally devalued as a legitimate people. What the Americans and the Jews understand is that any legal recognition, whether it be tacit, abject or de jure delegitimizes Israel's right to exist in any state. Thus mandating the only viable solution for any kind of peace – A single state.

[Source]

--Joe