kelele!

2003-05-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

i really like this red candy

Note: A review of the Matrix: Reloaded, chock full of spoilers.

With the Matrix: Reloaded barely open, the backlash has already begun from those who want their appreciation of the Superior Original duly noted. I, like Gene, enjoyed the original movie. Unlike him, I enjoyed the sequel every bit as much, if not more.

On the plus side of the ledger:
- Breathtaking action. Literally breathtaking. I was, so to speak, jazzed by the action sequences of the original, but its novelty lay mostly in the fact that it was kung fu wirefighting action that actually had a rationale. Never did I find myself actually gasping and saying the word "wow." This time, I did. The extended freeway scene simply has to be seen to be believed... and I usually hate car cashes in action movies.

- Plotting. The Wachowski Bros. set themselves an enormous challenge in creating a suspenseful tale around a character (Neo) who is hyper-potent where most of the action takes place. They rose to the challenge and then some, and delivered a world and story that feels truly vast.

- Philosophy. Some people were turned off by the pseudo-Gnostic any-means-necessary attitudes of the heroic hackers in the original. I was one of them; the whole ideology just seemed uncomfortably close to religiously-inspired terrorism. Turns out the Wachowskis have been thinking about this, too; they deliver some new surprises and twists about the nature of the Matrix and its relationship to the real world, and include a whopper twist about the "prophecy" that guides Morpheus & Co and their supporters on the Zion Council. It's every bit as audacious and memorable as the scene where we first see the physical infrastructure of the Matrix in the original film.

- Characters. Forget Monica Bellucci's brief, much-ballyhooed appearance; the Merovingian and his ghostly twin enforcers are the real scene-stealers, every bit as enjoyable as baddies like Cypher and Agent Smith were in the original. [Favourite moment of Matrix pseudo-philosophy: the Merovingian's discourse on causality, power and... dessert.] Some of the new Zion characters, especially Link and Niobi, hold up similarly well.

On the minus side:
- Yes, it's kind of lame that Zion's "temple" ceremony is basically a big rave. This is, however, no more annoying than the gothy hacker fetish of the original.

- Now that Morpheus is no longer a Mysterious Sensei, he comes off more as a pompous and self-important ass than anything else. The good news is we don't have to listen to him talk as much; instead, he's at the core of much of the major action, and most excellently so.

- The only recurring character who felt contrived was Agent-no-more Smith. In the first film, Agent Smith exuded a kind of blank, menacing cool that made him the epitome of every tinoil-hatted black helicopter-watching X-phile's definition of evil. It was that sensibility that made his interrogation scene with Morpheus a classic moment in film. Weaving takes him too far over the top in Reloaded. The idea of a self-replicating virus in the Matrix that can affect anyone connected is great; they just didn't need to use Weaving for this. (Nevertheless, Neo's Battle Against the Hundred Smiths is another classic Matrix moment.)

- Some of the visual puns are a bit much. In one scene, the Oracle gives Neo red candy, and eats a licorice that looks suspiciously like the Red Pill. Yes, that was clever. We. Get. It. (OTOH, there's a cameo by a Japanimation-style giant robot that's all too cool.)

On the whole, though, the quibbles are minor and the achievements major. The Matrix: Reloaded surprised me by living up this well to its predecessor.

2003-04-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

Back from the trenches
Almost two months since I've posted here, I know -- aside from work, the onset of war kept me busy doing other things, among them flailing away on Stand Down. Now, the time has arrived to come up for air... at least until the next war drive begins.

One of the more depressing things about war is that, often, arguments over it can put you at odds with people you admire. Such was the case for me with Mark Rosenfelder, a.k.a. "Zompist," one of the most single-minded world-builders I've ever seen on the Web, and also one of the best-read and clearest-thinking folks from any profession I know. Certainly more so, than, say, certain high-profile WebPundits I could name.

It therefore came as a surprise to me, although perhaps it shouldn't have, that under the deluge of war propaganda, certain curious memes had made their way into Mark's discourse. His recent rant on the topic (which bears traces of the latest political thread on the Zompist board) repeats some of the most surprising of these.

For example:

"Liberals and lefties had better watch out: the neocons have turned the table on us. Twenty years ago, it was consie doctrine that "authoritarian" regimes were necessary for reasons of realpolitik; it was laughable idealism to seriously believe in democracy and human rights, and they could see no difference between Ted Kennedy and Stalin. Now the neocons are talking about democracy washing over the Islamic world, and many leftists find themselves muttering about how Iraq is not ready for democracy and how Bush's human rights record is worse than Hussein's."

It is, of course, false that opposition and support of the war can be boiled down to "left" and "right" positions (Chris Hitchens, mentioned in the same rant, is at least nominally still a leftist) -- but whatever the realities, it's not too surprising that that myth should remain potent. The left would in many ways still like to think of itself as the soul of American oppositional politics, while the antiwwar right is still -- to a large extent -- deeply uneasy at finding itself on the same side of the fence as Those Damned Hippies. The two tendencies show encouraging signs of learning from and about each other, and trying to move beyond the ancient barricades of stereotype, but there's still a long way to go. (Somewhere in that mix are the libertarians, whose assessment by Mark is mostly agreeable to me, although I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that, contra early indicators in the 90s, some of them really are serious about the civil rights-oriented parts of their agenda.)

No, what's more curious about that paragraph is that Mark appears to think there is something new about the neocon "liberation" rationale -- as though "defending" democracy had not been one of the canonical excuses for numerous American interventions and allegiances (whether or not they involved democracy) since at least Wilson's day. (George Kennan was railing against overuse of "democratization" as a rationale for foreign policy in 1948; defense of "democracy" was invoked too many times to count in favour of opportunistic US-backed thugs during the Cold War; Bush the Elder, in 1981, toasted Ferdinand Marcos with the words "We love your adherence to democratic principle, and to the democratic processes.") That rationale was usually cynical, of course, and undercut by "he may be a bastard but he's our bastard"-style realities -- but the use of this rationale, as well as its very probable cynicism, strikes me as one of the most canonically conservative of the neocon tendencies on Iraq.

This has also contributed to a very traditional leftist position (though not only a leftist position) that democracy must be rooted in populism rather than externally imposed-- jiving with a very traditional leftist anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. So, from that standpoint, there is little rhetorically new in the situation as "left" and "right" on either side of the war fence go -- and claim that there is seems a little bizarre coming from someone who is usually historically aware enough to catch such contradictions.

Even more bizarre is the claim that "many leftists find themselves muttering . . . how Bush's human rights record is worse than Saddam Hussein's." Maybe leftists in Chicago are a different breed? I move in pretty ultra-left circles from time to time, subscribe to an activist listserv that runs from centre to pretty much as far left as it gets, and regularly read a variety of antiwar and self-identified leftist sites and rages -- and I know of no-one who claimed this, even among the most virulently anti-Bush outlets on the Web. Noam Chomsky has never claimed this. Indeed, if anything the canonical leftist position has been to emphasize that the US was connected with Saddam when he was at his horrible worst.

So, where on earth could this claim be coming from?

Well, maybe Mark is basing this on some unverifiable private conversation, but it looks a lot to me like the torturous logic of a kind of pseudo-McCarthyite confessional politics is at work here -- a suspicion, I'll admit, born partly of Mark's quoting a Salon article employing just such logic on his board. This is the logic wherein someone who fails to ritually condemn the enemy of the day in any sentence in which they criticize a President is ipso facto a traitor who is rooting for the enemy (or at minimum, a delusional who thinks the enemy is better than his own government).

If you ask me, this is the key political achievement of the neocons. Would Mark ever accept an insinuation that the critical timeline of American interventions in Latin America that appears on his website is ipso facto proof that he thinks America has a worse HR record than the Soviet Union? The answer is probably no. Yet he sees nothing a teensy bit off in levelling an almost identical charge at contemporary leftists who oppose a programme of aggressive, ummm, "liberation." In this instance he seems to have internalized, without noticing it, a mode of argumentation disturbingly reminiscient of neocon attack dogs like David Horowitz.

I'm starting to think of this as an intellectual affliction of North America's liberal left -- the disease, we might say, of False Compromise, wherein commentators are often so intent on seeming fair, detached and impartial, on providing some kind of face-saving boost to their opponent in the name of intellectual honesty, that they are actually reduced to repeating intellectually dishonest arguments from one side or another as a rhetorical tactic. Arguments which, in other contexts, they would normally reject out of hand.

Another affliction, especially for "liberal hawks" -- or, in Mark's case, "liberals-who-would-like-all-the-war-criticism-to-now-go-away-please": the illusion that a war being waged by neocons will actually be the war you want to be waged: "let's hold the neocons to their word: let's insist on real democracy in Iraq," says Mark. An admirable goal, and one I happen to absolutely agree with, but it makes one wonder what political leverage Mark actually imagines he has to get the neocons on this page. Does he believe that liberals have more pull with the Bush Administration than, say, people like this?

2003-02-17T23:29:00.000-08:00

trans-bloggerism, questions 3-5

I'm behind on my answers and it's roundup posting time, so here are some quicker answers to questions 3-5 from the Cross-Blog Debate.

3. American and British military force has allowed Northern Iraq to develop a society which, while imperfect, is clearly a freer and more open society than existed under Saddam Hussein's direct rule. Do you agree that the no-fly zones have been beneficial to Northern Iraq --- and if so, why should this concept not be extended to remove Hussein's regime entirely and spread those freedoms to all Iraqis?

At least one premise of the question is false. The no-fly zones have nothing to do with humanitarian intervention -- their humanitarian benefits have been indifferent at best. Their preservation is very obviously not a goal of the planned invasion -- as even erstwhile flack Kanan Makiya has noticed. The argument that any part of Western policy viz. Iraq is in any way about humanitarianism is, to me, by far the smarmiest and most repulsive of pro-war memes -- but it's constantly pushed by those sectors of the pro-invasion movement who imagine their opponents to be a band of bleeding hearts, or those who have genuinely bought into the notion of themselves as "pro-liberation."

Even if there were anything humanitarian in the contemplated Iraq policy, would I support it? Given that what I'm basically being asked is "do you support the short-term slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in faith that the US government will then 'liberate' the rest," the answer is no. There is no reason to believe at this stage that whatever indifferent "freedoms" happen to be "enjoyed" by Northern Iraq as a side-effect of being a staging ground for a twelve-year bombing campaign will survive the invasion even in that region, let alone being spread to all Iraqis.

4. Do you believe an inspection and sanctions regime is sufficient and capable of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of the Hussein regime ---

The inspections regime in particular has obviously been quite successful, given that proponents of war have been reduced to making their case largely in terms of hypothetical future threats.

and should this be a goal of U.S. policy?

Better question: has this ever been a goal of U.S. policy? Not particularly. Why not?

Well, perhaps we should be asking why the Bush Administration isn't bothered by Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, which is in the hands of a government far more beholden to Muslim extremists and terrorists than Saddam Hussein's. The answer: WMD is already deterrable by conventional means. The scenario of dictators handing off weapons to terrorists has never really answered why those dictators wouldn't keep those weapons for their own protection -- which tends to be their greater concern. (No, "they hate America and they're mad!!!!" isn't an answer to this question.)

That's not to say that willy-nilly proliferation is the way to go. America should certainly take a stand against proliferation -- but anyone who imagines that such a stand can consist merely of invading anyone who has weapons you don't like is living in a fantasy world. If anything, that approach heavily motivates proliferation of WMDs and encourages people to point them at you. A better approach might be to throw some serious weight behind non-proliferation treaties... which the Bush Administration has not done, for reasons that probably relate to their National Missile Defense baby.

In what way is an inspection/containment/sanctions regime preferable to invasion? Civilian casualties? Expense? Geopolitical outcome?

Inspections and containment are preferable because they don't kill people and destabilize regions the way war does. Given that they've proven effective, it makes no sense to abandon them out of sheer impatience. The sanctions regime as it stands is counterproductive sadism fuelled by a number of pernicious myths, and is not necessary to containing Iraq; it has already generated an unacceptable number of civilian casualties. But better-targeted and more effective sanctions are theoretically possible and shouldn't be ruled out.

Geopolitical outcome? Likely a good deal better than alienating most of one's long-term allies and most of the Muslim world with an invasion of at best dubious legal, moral, strategic and military justification. If you're looking for leverage to remake the Middle East -- well, Iran, had a pretty robust reform movement going before the whole "Axis of Evil" thing started...

5. What, in your opinion, is the source of national sovereignty? If you believe it to be the consent of the governed [remainder of question irrelevant]

Consent is the source of justice, not sovereignty. There are good reasons why the West has made a practice of dealing with nations as sovereign whose leaders are not there by consent of the governed. First among them is pragmatism. In terms of advancing either democracy or its own economic and military interests, the West gains little from treating such nations as non-sovereign and has had a poor success rate in enforcing whatever is imagined to be "the consent of the governed" by invading foreign countries.

2003-02-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

trans-bloggerism, question 2

Just before I get to answering the second question in the Cross-Blog Debate from the pro-war crowd, a quick reference to N.Z. Bear's commentary on the "meta-debate". Bear is responding to a concern that the pro-war questions were more "loaded" than the anti-war side. In many ways, the "loadedness" of the questions was to be anticipated, and insofar as it reveals something of either side's base assumptions, I tend to agree with Bear that it's not the worst thing imaginable.

On the other hand, as others point out, "loadedness" inhibits debate and people's faith in the honesty of their opponents. Though, like Bear, I didn't attempt to eliminate loadedness entirely, I certainly tried to tone it down as much as I could get away with -- perhaps more than Bear did (bringing howls from a couple of the more extreme posters on Stand Down) -- and the result appears to have been questions that more people have an interest in responding to. This may well end up proving a point that many who are anti-war take for granted: that the pro-war side is inherently less interested in honest debate, which gives them a propaganda advantage. (Indeed, many anti-war posters just seem to view the pro-war questions as not worth a response right now, though there's more than half the week still to go before we do the roundup.)

I take a different view. Part of this, for me at least, is a learning process. Though it's fairly clear to me what motivates the Bush Administration, it's less clear to me what motivates its support base, particularly in the States. Certainly the usual collection of armchair warriors, bigots, jingoists and repugnant violence enthusiasts is there, but what's motivating the more intelligent sectors of pro-war sentiment is less clear and, I suspect, not at all unified. Added to which, more honest debate will be effective at smoking out ignorance and dishonesty and revealing them starkly for what they are, so the assumptions driving the less informed sectors of the pro-war camp will be laid bare (or should that be "laid bear") by this exercise. That's worthwhile even if (perhaps especially if) certain events and invasions overtake us.

So, enough meta-debate, and on to question two. The answer to this one is shorter.

2. Is there any circumstance that you can conceive of where the United States would be justified in using military force without the support of the UN Security Council --- or does the UN always have a veto against US military action for whatever reason?

As we all know -- or rather, as anyone commenting on the UN should take the trouble to find out -- Article 51 of the charter guarantees the right of self-defense to member states on the very well-founded logic that self-defense is the only reasonable rationale for war. The real question comes in, of course, when you start trying to define what "self-defense" is.

A militaristic definition of "self-defense" is very broad. In the Bush Administration's parlance, it has become sufficiently broad to include defending not against actual, imminent threats (Iraq poses none), but also against potential threats -- that Iraq might someday hand off such-and-such weapon to such-and-such terrorist group which it might be connected with even if there's no solid evidence of this who might then use it against America, or Britain, or Frane, or maybe even Canada. Of course, potential threats are, by their nature, speculative. There's no way of knowing if they'll come to pass. A situation where waging war on spec becomes normal thus really solidifies only one potential threat, namely the danger of people using military force to self-defensively pre-empt "threats" that are entirely nonexistent and/or unrealistic. Or worse, pretending certain peoples or states constitute "threats" by their mere existence. That approach not only unjustly terminates lots and lots of lives -- and, you know, that's kind of important, because people really hate you when you do that, especially on flimsy pretexts -- it also generates new and unpredictable threats.

In terms of the ethical consensus that emerged after Nuremberg, broad definitions of self-defense are untenable and lead to wars of aggression, which (being what wars are) are illegal, immoral and yes, evil. That consensus wasn't reached by happy aliens from Star Trek, but by people who had directly experienced the horrors of war and knew that tens of millions of people had just learned this lesson the hard way. So, I reject broad definitions of "self-defense" and prefer to confine it to a case of immediate threat to oneself or one's allies.

Of course, there are those on both sides who would like to dismiss the UN as a useless organization -- variously because it's a figleaf for American imperial ambitions or because it's a talking-shop full of European obstructionists. I think the UN is as strong, and as useful, as is the commitment of the greatest powers of the day to making it work. We've seen glimpses in it of the organization it could have been: namely a strong voice for (less often an implementer of) the consensus of international law, which is simply the best tool we have by which to assess the behaviour of states. We've also seen it hang immobilized between the vetoes of superpowers, or issuing only muted condemnations of profoundly destabilizing policies, or (as currently) bullied and browbeaten into ratifying wars as legitimate that plainly contradict its charter.

When the powers that be are overtaken by cliques who hate and fear international law and what it represents, organizations like the UN are pretty much doomed to follow the very path that destroyed the credibility of the League of Nations previously. For that reason, I'm not confident in the future of the UN as it stands. But its fate will fail to eliminate the obvious advantages of having a strong international organization that can legitimate power and provide ways, other than wars between random coalitions of opportunists, for states to vent their grievances. Something like it will always be necessary for stabilizing the international order.

2003-02-11T08:35:00.000-08:00

trans-bloggerism, question 1

I'll be taking the pro-war questions from the Cross-Blog Debate one at a time. First up:

1. If you were President of the United States, what would be your policy toward Iraq over the next year? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in your proposed policies versus the current path being pursued by the Bush administration?

I take it we’re assuming with this question that I’m stuck with all the actions of the Bush Administration to this point. In which case, to put it rather bluntly, I’ve talked myself into a corner and now have to deliver some kind of credible “regime change” or look like an utter fool not only to my critics, but also to my own power base.

The most realistic option open to me given that: I let the UN inspections proceed. More precisely, I let them go ahead and roam across the Iraqi countryside, crowing with triumph over every decayed stockpile and cluster of huts (sorry, “poison and explosives factory” -- it's a "term of art," see) they find. I then publicly pat myself on the back for having averted a nuclear or “WMD” buildup – it doesn’t matter if said buildup ever had any serious chance of getting off the ground – and I tell the world that my military buildup was a politically ingenious way of getting Saddam’s regime to “change” and enforcing UN resolutions.

Advantages:
- I get to portray myself as a political and/or military genius. The US media will be more than happy to comply, for the most part, since the regime will have “changed”: Andrew Sullivan will declare he knew this was my plan all along; Jim Lileks will crow over how I’ve stuck it once again to those bad old Europeans who thought I was a rude and simple cowboy; general (if somewhat muted) orgasm from most of the WarPundits. The rest of the world will chuckle, but very quietly under their much louder sighs of relief.

- My allies get to save face and return to their accustomed position of more or less supporting US policy, and I can rebuild damaged relationships with them.

- I’m freed up to deal with more urgent regional problems from the American credibility, security and reputation standpoint (the Israel-Palestine conflict) and the anti-terrorism standpoint (Saudi Arabia), and to try to step down the tension on the Korean peninsula.

- I’m freed up to quietly move my own country’s Iraq policy into actual compliance with the cease-fire agreement, so that I really have the moral high ground in future when complaining about Saddam’s violations of same.

- Major advantage: A lot of people are still alive in Iraq whom I would otherwise have incinerated with Operation Shock and Awe. This means future generations don’t regard me as an aggressor and mass murderer.

Disadvantages:
- This option is a bit past its sell-by date now that I’ve spent so much time tilting at erstwhile allies, talking tough, rattling sabres at every possible excuse and doing everything I could to sabotage and undermine the inspections. Some of my more rabid current backers – people who have seriously proclaimed that France and Germany are now no longer part of the “free world” because they dared oppose me – are likely to turn on me. Fortunately, the “memory hole” should take care of that minor difficulty in the US pretty quickly, so it’s not too debilitating.

- Major disadvantage: Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq, which sucks. Fortunately, he’s fairly toothless as a threat; that’s why I picked on him in the first place. And let’s face it, none of the candidates to replace him are exactly prizes themselves (behind door number 1, a Baathist general! door number 2, a Shiite radical! door number 3, a playboy con man with a life expectancy of about two years!) – so at least I’m not taking the real risk of worsening the situation there or directly installing more of the same.

2003-02-09T19:56:00.000-08:00

time to party like it's 1984
I'd rant at greater length, but The Sideshow already has a good commentary up on the astonishing cowardice and complacency that's the order of the day over Patriot Act II. Things get ever-more-surreal south of the border.

2003-02-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

slam dunkley
I encourage all and sundry to check out Wayne Dunkley's Share My World project. I'll be writing an article on Wayne's very interesting work this month, and I'm thinking about posting here those pieces of the article that don't quite fit within my 1,500 word limit -- because I'm sure there will be more than a few of those pieces. So check it out, and stay tuned.

2003-02-08T11:54:00.000-08:00

trans-bloggerism
I'm currently taking part in a cross-blog debate on the war, being coordinated through N.Z. Bear's The Truth Laid Bear for the pro-war side and Stand Down for the antiwar side. We're just coming towards the end of the first part of the process, wherein each side is gathering questions from their "team" and trying to round up the best five.

I'm curious as to which five questions will survive from either side. Looking over the comments on Bear's site, I don't see more than two or three clear winners in terms of popularity. To be honest, I'm hoping that some of the more productive questions will survive and get posted -- the ones that are specifically designed to elicit questions about legal, moral and defense rationale for the war. Both sides appear to have elements obsessed either with sanctimonious ranting or crafting elaborate question-begging anti-questions. I suspected this impulse wouldn't win out on Stand Down, and it looks like I'm going to be borne out on that. The pro-war side has its voices of caution on this as well; perhaps I'm biased in seeing them as more muted. We'll see.

In any case, check out both sites for the posted questions at the top of next week. It should, at the very least, be interesting.

2003-02-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

boulez pour vous
From the "taste of his own medicine" department, mail artist Josh Ronsen has an apt proposal for treating the work of Pierre Boulez, who once famously declared that "all art of the past must be destroyed."

In fairness to Boulez, I believe him that the comment was probably a tongue-in-cheek way of ridiculing over-attachment to tradition in the arts. The sentiment is fully understandable coming from someone who has worked in "classical" music. As a side note, it's intriguing that "continental" artists and philosophers have such a consistent habit of framing basically simple, commonsensical arguments in the kind of grand, sweeping language they must know will antagonize much of the West's Anglophone cultural milieu. (Another good one, mentioned in this interview: the "orderly anarchist.") Perhaps the antagonism is part of the sport -- can't say I'd blame them if it was. Regardless, it usually comes clear pretty quickly that the argument isn't quite so reckless as the slogan.

Though I don't buy Ronsen's contention that Boulez is "a true sympton of the paranoia and abuse of power that defines our modern era," his project is fascinating -- and consistent, as he notes, with the spirit of irreverence Boulez himself advocates.

I also like Ronsen's poetry, to be enjoyed in much the same way that snappy one-liners are to be enjoyed.

2003-01-29T20:50:00.000-08:00

gawking the fullness (or, "fuck the bullshit it's time to throw up")
A surprisingly wide assortment of people have recently been proclaiming the full-bodied wheaty goodness of Gawker, basically a Manhattan gossip column on 'roids (and electrons). Well, I can't blame them; it seems a damned sight wittier than People or Us, and who doesn't have a secret gossip-monger lurking inside just dying to learn about the latest in "radical Manhattanism"?

On the other hand, though, I have limited patience with launching platforms for the latest staggering genius. It's not that I mind over-the-top arrogance and bluster in a writer -- I mean, if you're a writer and you're in New York, I'd be disappointed if you weren't arrogant -- but it would be nice if the people involved actually showed some signs of being as smart, sexy or in-your-face (or whatever) as they obviously think they are. Sorry, James Frey filleth not this bill from what I can see here. I mean, for Chrissakes, you're in Manhattan and you haven't figured out yet that the "irony is dead" line was buried by the "irony's death is dead and therefore irony lives only to be killed again" line like, at least ten minutes ago?

Who knows, though? Maybe he'll produce the Ultimate Novel and I'll revise my opinion. In the meantime, I have a far, far hipper tattoo planned. In your face.

#1 on my list of things that seem already dated, but still cling tenaciously to some semblance of life: porno chic. For a mild manifestation, check out the "Celebrity Nudies" item on the Gawker page. My prediction: a year from now things like this will be turning up on tongue-in-cheek lists of What Not to Do on your Website. Any 15-year-old punk can surf for celebrity nudie pictures, for crying out loud.

2003-01-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

printing goes organic
Okay, how cool is this?

An excerpt: "Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs."

Of course, the stock market has caught wind of this sort of thing already. That leads to more sobering thoughts after the initial "damn, is this ever neat" reaction. Like, for example, how much further will this technology entrench the notion of treating biology as intellectual property? Or, supposing it proved possible to adapt it to, say, agricultural uses -- how much would it contribute to the uncontrolled and unplanned release of bio-engineered organisms into nature?

All things worth thinking about, and necessary to think about.

Still, though -- is that ever amazing.

2003-01-21T19:40:00.000-08:00

he'll huff, and he'll puff, and he'll blow concordia down
Sorry for the long silence. I've been doing most of my posting over the last little while on Stand Down. Since I've had my fill of yakking about the pros and cons of various antiwar groups and about the recent (very successful) protests -- to which Calgary added a very modest but very encouraging side note -- I thought I'd come back and have a look in my mailbox.

And what do I find but a screed about the row between the CSU and Hillel? From a prof at my alma mater, U of C, no less. David Bercuson, Director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and a history prof at the University of Calgary, sent this message out to his mailing list, obviously intending it to be as public as possible, so I see no harm in posting it here.

Before I get to the letter, though, what is it exactly that we're talking about?

Well, we're talking about this. The Concordia Student Union apparently discovered that Hillel was distributing an IDF recruitment flyer from one of their club tables. According to one councillor, the flyer was for the Nahal brigade, whose specific role is to create and defend West Bank settlements. If that charge is true, and no-one from Hillel appears to dispute it, then Hillel was breaking this Federal law along with the Fourth Geneva Convention. They were, in other words, abusing their club privileges in a pretty objectionable way.

That much seems clear enough, but the waters got muddier when the CSU tried to call Hillel to account. At this point, plenty of petty interpersonal conflicts seem to come into play, along with a long history of obnoxious conflicts between Hillel and Palestinian groups on campus. No doubt that history influenced the swiftness of the CSU's decision, amid accusations from Hillel that their suspension of privileges came "without notice" and was insulting, especially for an organization that represents an often-oppressed minority group. The whole thing smells like a group of people who are simply, fundamentally, sick of each other.

Problematically, the CSU suspension seems to have been justified not with reference to Hillel's use of their club privileges to break a Federal law (a much stronger case, in my opinion), but with reference to Concordia's ban on distributing racist hate literature -- a way of framing the issue that was bound to be inflammatory. Ironically, they might actually have thought they were doing Hillel a favour here -- one would expect that the penalty for violating the school charter is rather less steep than one for breaking a Federal law -- but unsurprisingly, Hillel didn't see it that way.

To make matters worse, the CSU then attempted a compromise, offering to reinstate Hillel if they signed an "anti-racism pact" that basically pledged them never to do anything like this again. Again, the "pact" was inflammatory because it apparently included the IDF as a racist organization -- something which the UN and many human rights organizations would likely support as functionally accurate, but which relatively few of the people involved could reasonably be expected to accept. The result was that Hillel walked out of the meeting and launched a lawsuit and a letter-writing campaign.

Apparently, matters remain there. I have to say that, on the strength of the initial allegation, Hillel doesn't seem to have much of a leg to stand on. However clumsily the CSU handled this, abusing one's club privileges by breaking Federal law is, shall we say, not cricket. Expecting your University to look the other way while you do so, no matter what minority group you represent, is beyond ridiculous. Even setting the larger moral issues (and issues with international law) of supporting the Israeli occupation aside, it's hard to see how Hillel is going to make a case that they had a right to continue using their club privileges to recruit for Nahal. (Maybe they're not going to argue this? Maybe they're going to argue over the way the incident was handled? But given that they can't dispute that they broke the law, wouldn't this strike a judge as mere quibbling, and of a particularly self-destructive sort?)

On, at any rate, to Bercuson's letter. In his preface to the mailing list, he misleadingly claims that Hillel have been "banned" from CSU activities (at the time he was writing the letter, they had been suspended pending investigation of the charge; it wasn't a unilateral and irrevocable banning of the organization and there has been no such action since). He also says "I want as many people as I know to be aware of this outrageous act of Anti-Semitism because Hillel is a JEWISH student organization, not an Israeli one," and calls the incident "an act that brings to mind Germany in the 1930s." The letter then states:

"To Frederick Lowy, Rector, Concordia University: I will be mailing to you next week my 1966 diploma, my honorary degree, and my 1966 silver medal. I was once immensely proud of my associations with SGWU [Sir George William University, which joined with Loyola University to form Concordia] and Concordia. Now these items are symbols of shame. Of course my fundamental objection is to the gang of Hitler Jugend who control the Student Union at your university. But I am equally disturbed at the complete failure of you and your board to take any action against that gang other than to quote rules about how student unions are constituted.

"Normal rules apply in situations of normal behaviour. When a gang such as the CSU moves to destroy a university from within, action must be taken. I don't care if you have to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to disbar this bunch because at least then you will be seen to be taking a stand to defend the values upon which Canadian universities must be based. I will also be circulating this letter as widely as I can to everyone I know in the media as well as academia so that the harsh might of public inquiry will be made to shine brightly into the dark corners of what was once an institution to be proud of." [emphases mine]

Now, the reader might have noticed this all sounds more than a little over-the-top when one looks at the actual incident. The CSU, after all, was basically suspending Hillel's club privileges for an illegal act that Hillel did not deny. Does that really sound like the act of a "gang of Hitler Jugend" or "Germany in the 1930s"? Is it "destroy[ing] a university from within" to expect its clubs not to break the law? Do "the values upon which Canadian universities must be based" include the right of certain groups to break the law at will? Looking at the case, it's hard to see what Bercuson's point could be.

My guess is that this overheated rhetoric is really about baggage -- namely, the assumption (energetically promoted by the Likud and the Israeli far right) that any attack on Israel is by definition anti-Semitism and that any attempt to interfere with Israel's "self-defense" -- including, presumably, recruiting for its armed forces any way you can -- is by definition an attack on Israel. That line has proved persuasive to many; after all, no-one can dispute that there are genuinely anti-Semitic organizations in the world who wish Israel, and Jews generally, ill. On the other hand, it has failed to persuade a broad cross-section of world opinion and an increasing number of Jews and Israelis, who aren't much impressed by Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories and view the occupation itself as fundamentally indefensible in every sense.

Speaking strictly about popular discourse in the States, Max Sawicky (a Jewish economist at the EPI in Washington) puts it well: "Jews in the U.S. are much too narrowly informed of what goes on in the Middle East, and particularly so with respect to political debates in Israel. The result is a solid, politically sophisticated, and influential core of support for fundamentally awful policies in Israel and the U.S." The statement could apply to North America more generally. The antidote, as usual, is a wider base of information. To that end, Max's links on kosher News Jews can Use are a good place to start.

2002-12-20T18:08:00.000-08:00

reese's pieces
Some useful words from Charley Reese on the direction of democracy, or rather its current downward spiral, and on why Dubya needs to put up or shut up. Of course, he'll do neither.

2002-12-20T18:01:00.000-08:00

merry christmas and a happy new war
Wishful thinking continues to abound, but come the end of January, the antiwar movement will almost certainly be protesting an actual invasion rather than a threatened one. And the reactivation, or should I say reinvigoration, of the COINTELPRO mentality means they'll likely be doing so under surveillance, while the Ashcroftian vision of American freedom gets clearer by the day. Meanwhile, the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" timetable for aggressive war in multiple theatres continues apace, as the Prince of Darkness explains.

So hey. Happy holidays, I guess.

2002-12-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

agrajag might have something to say about this
David Brin once again has an excuse to harangue us poor ignorant dopes about how the Enlightenment is good and hierarchy is bad -- because the rest of us just haven't noticed, apparently -- this time in the form of the Two Towers flick.

I'm actually more sympathetic to some of what he says than many of the respondents on Salon. Let's face it, though, there isn't much new here. Brin isn't the first to be disturbed by the implicit racism of Tolkien's world, with its tiny minority of white Westerners doing battle with a colossal swarthy horde (including the "cruel Haradrim" and the wild "Easterlings," who never merit more than a passing mention as tools of Sauron in any of Tolkien's works). Nor is he the first to find something wanting in the simplistic good versus evil dichotomy of Tolkien's tale. Nor is he the first to notice that Tolkien is a Romantic who likes pastoralism and despises the ugliness of industry.

More annoying, though, is that this isn't the first time Brin has ranted about how such-and-such fictional work is somehow "Homeric" and bent on inculcating us with the values of serfs rather than citizens. He trotted out this same line about Star Wars, after all. This whole point rests on a simplistic division of viewpoints into the "forward-looking" West and the "backward-looking" Everyone Else, a dichotomy which just doesn't hold. It never seems to occur to Brin that progress isn't as simple as looking forward and locating the Golden Age in the future; much more importantly, it involves awareness of what's useful -- and what's harmful -- in tradition. As a result, this is just not that interesting as a line of critique.

There are spots where it gets a little more interesting -- when Brin talks about bridging the gap between "art" and "science," for example. Although there's something a bit pitiful about his pretensions for SF having laid a "superhighway" between these two cultures, it's a valid point to raise. Similarly, he's right on the money when he urges people to take a critical and active approach to reading, rather than being passive receptors. If more fantasy authors had taken this advice to heart, fantasy literature as a whole might well have been spared many a dreary Tolkien clone.

It would be nice to see Brin tease out lines of inquiry like these. Myth criticism just isn't his bag.

2002-12-18T19:48:00.000-08:00

perchance to dream
Today's rant prompted by this rare bit of conservative introspection.

These must be tough times for American conservatives. These are people who, for the most part, spent the nineties in a kind of dreamworld. In their minds, communism had been vanquished -- proving the justice and perfection of its mirror opposite, Capitalism, which formed up with Christianity and Freedom into a kind of Voltron-religion of the Good Guys. America was at the End of History, the final product of human labours to produce the perfect society.

The only real thunderheads on the horizon were the old guards of Liberalism, Communism's evil second cousin which lay behind Many Nasty Plots to undermine American will and power -- like electing a Democratic President on a platform largely stolen from Republicans, or supporting outmoded notions like International Law and the United Nations, or clinging to quaint relics of the past like socialized medicine or welfare programmes or affirmative action.

This was the mentality of people who had been bewildered by the bad press the Vietnam War wound up getting and sought endlessly to rehabilitate it; people whose main reason for disliking Nixon wasn't his ham-handed attempt to undermine democracy, but rather that he didn't listen enough to their sort of people. People who longed for days when they could pine for the Glories of War without getting sniped at by liberal peaceniks, who spent years waiting for the chance to reshape American society to their will -- which any half-intelligent person would admit was the right way to do it, if only those whiny bastards would stop complaining.

The Bush Administration -- the most extreme single embodiment of this worldview yet to wield power in the States -- finally got that chance in the form of 9/11. But here's the catch: many American conservatives are finally starting to notice that the emperor has no clothes.

It's occurring to guys like Timothy Carney that maybe, just maybe, lurid fantasies borrowed from Rambo flicks aren't the basis for a sustainable foreign policy; that possibly, George Bush's folksy Texan charm (I guess charm is in the eye of the beholder) isn't really an excuse for failed and potentially disastrous policies; that perhaps, just perhaps, those darn "liberals" might have sort of a point about a couple of things.

In many quarters, the move toward consciousness is grudging in the extreme. A growing number of conservatives are, for instance, tossing around the notion that maybe this whole Iraq war thing is a tad hasty -- but they'd still rather be sniping at the existing peace movement rather than doing anything themselves. There's hope in that it's even dawning on Screaming Pundit William Safire that the magic word Freedom doesn't mean too much if you don't have, you know, freedoms; but how galling it must be for people who've spent years preaching about the totalitarian ambitions of Berkeley professors to realize where the real threat has been, all this time.

The awakening is beginning, but it's quite possibly too little, and too late. We'll be finding out soon enough.

2002-12-04T16:25:00.000-08:00

crashing the war party
The spectacle of the Bush Administration's panic over the too-smooth inspection regime would almost be funny if it weren't the precursor to global tragedy. The subject is being well-covered over at Stand Down.

There is a canny and often-missed observation in this article on Sunspot -- which is basically that the United Nations and particularly traditional American allies have bent over backwards to give the Bush Administration a face-saving way out of the Iraq disaster. Of course, since Bush and Co. don't much care if it's a disaster in conventional terms -- it's likely that they want perpetual war and aren't especially fussy about generating a more dangerous worldwide environment for American citizens and interests -- what they're really looking for is a face-saving way into Iraq. It looks increasingly that this isn't going to happen, so the American invasion is going to be orders of magnitude less credible than your average defense of democracy.

2002-11-27T16:50:00.000-08:00

incipient totalitarianism
An important discussion here of the implications of Homeland Security legislation, spineless democrats and the boundless neocon thirst for power. And yes, the time to end complacency about what's happening is now.

2002-11-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

word to your madre
In honour of American Thanksgiving, the international women's rights group Madre has posted an exhaustive summary of the antiwar argument that nicely captures the real issues involved in Iraq.

2002-11-27T10:05:00.000-08:00

every bomb says "i love you"
There are those in the incipient American antiwar movement, like Michael Berube, who would apparently prefer to spend the next few months temporizing and carping about NION, presumably because they can't be bothered to organize rallies or circulate petitions themselves. Fortunately, though, there are also those who continue to keep their sights on the real problem at hand: an abomination that must not happen. These remarks come from the former defense insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and they come with a realistic assessment of the Bush Administration's goal, which is simply to provoke war at any cost and by any means necessary, no matter how flimsy (or non-existent) the justification. Unfortunately, I think Ellsberg's "war before Christmas" scenario is a little more likely than John Mearsheimer's Bush Administration declares victory and avoids war scenario.

Ellsberg also hits the nail on the head in comparing the likely consequences of all this to Afghanistan, writ large. This is particularly on point because, while many people across the political spectrum abhor the ill-justified War on Iraq, most still hold on to the idea of Afghanistan as a "good" war that achieved its objectives and dealt a blow to the enemies of civilization. I have some differences with that, but I won't go into them here. The main point I want to take issue with is Berube's contention that the invasion of Afghanistan "slowed down" Pakistan's radicalization.

In the "comments" section over at MaxSpeak, where I first ran across this nugget of wisdom, someone remarked that this contention was "too stupid to require discussion" or refutation. I don't agree. If there's one thing the Bush Administration has taught us, it's that there's nothing that's too stupid to require refutation. Often several times. So, first things first: yes, Berube's comment would seem, to put it as politely as I can, misinformed. The war in Afghanistan contributed significantly to major political gains for extremists in Pakistan, and I've yet to see any observer of Musharraf's setbacks there who seriously disputes this.

But it's the logic underlying Berube's comment that concerns me. A key part of the war party's platform on Iraq is that it is fundamentally possible, and desirable, to influence Muslim world opinion in America's favour by dropping ordnance on them. Whether the warmongers are ill-informed enough to seriously believe this will lead to less terrorism is open to considerable doubt; Ellsberg doesn't think they believe it, and I tend to agree with him. But there are evidently those among the undecided who are willing to buy this line of reasoning, and for that reason, it's important to keep in mind two simple and related points:

One, that dangerously anti-American strains of Islamic fundamentalism draw their power from general feelings of insecurity and unjust treatment in the Arab world;

Two, that bombing and invasion -- particularly on flimsy or non-existent pretexts -- are very effective in promoting feelings of insecurity and unjust treatment in the Arab world (gee, go figure).

The recent growth of so-called "Islamism" in Pakistan is a perfect demonstration of this -- and that was a case where there was at least a plausible pretext for American military action, even if there were those of us who felt (and still feel) that it was exactly the wrong approach. Needless to say, there is no such broad-based consensus on Iraq.

All of which strongly implies that warmongering scenarios of an Arab world happy with, or at least intimidated into being happy with, a gratuitious invasion of Iraq are less than likely to materialize. Those really interested in belonging to a "responsible antiwar movement" would do well to re-examine their acceptance of the bizarre belief that ordnance can somehow promote America's image in the Muslim world.

2002-11-23T14:19:00.000-08:00

praying for a recovery
Check out this excellent set of links on Iraq. One sobering, and quite true, assessment here is that the question of war will really be decided not by Democratic or popular opposition, but in the struggle between the less-insane and completely-insane wings of the Republican Party.

2002-11-22T21:03:00.000-08:00

all i can say about this is...
daaaaaaaamn.

2002-11-22T20:06:00.000-08:00

riding in cars with poets
Though you can find George Bowering and Ryan Knighton's new title Cars online at the Coach House website, you owe it to yourself to buy and read it in book form. Yes, you. You know who I'm talking about.

I'll go easy on the Blurb-O-Matic 2000 language. For the record, Cars does not chart a topography of love and loss in a voice as raw and uncompromising as the Canadian Shield. It is, however, one of the best collaborative books I've read in recent memory -- a collection of flawlessly executed, playful postcard memoirs that are affecting precisely due to their lack of sentimentality. I often find myself using the word "restraint" when I'm describing poetry I admire. Cars is a perfect example of it. Restraint, gentle wit, and thoroughly amusing banter between poets who obviously play well together.

I'm starting into Rob Budde's The Dying Poem right now, another Coach House book. And one more thing I have to say: those books are beautiful. Even if you don't care for the writing (thankfully a rare occurrence with Coach House, at least for me), the mere physical fact of the book just makes you feel good to be holding it. You know, like... like a lover inviting you into the fractured jolts and fissures that make up the tectonics of a self and force you to come face to face with the realities of longing, sorrow and memory in a small Newfoundland outport...

What?

2002-11-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

back on top
Well, I think I'm finally going to be back to a more regular posting schedule, so thanks to the 1.5 of you who read this blog for being so patient with me. And not, you know, going all crazy and rioting in the streets or anything.

Apart from the forces of evil (or maybe just terminally shortsighted macho stupidity) now all-but-totally controlling that big country to the south of us, not much has changed. Dubya and friends continue to manoeuvre for their pet war, in latest news by drawing a fallacious comparison to World War II appeasement strategies to try to bring Europe's reluctant leaders on-side. [Newsflash for Dubya: if there's anyone in this whole scenario who represents a rampaging, aggressive threat that must not be appeased, it's you.] All the while, of course, studiously avoiding mention of that slippery Osama guy, who is apparently at it again.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Ashcroft and friends, now unfettered, continue to prosecute their increasingly spooky war on American democracy, complete with major decisions being made by secret courts in which only the government is represented. So it would appear the verdict is in, and an extremely dark chapter is about to be written in American history. Here's hoping the Republic (and the world) can recover from it, and all sympathies to the American voters who didn't ask for this. Whatever insensitive things the rest of us may have said, we really do like your country and never wished for it to turn into the lost draft of an Orwell novel.

On the home front, my friend jonny and I are collaborating on a new poetry weblog where we'll air our thoughts about aesthetics, theory, a book we're supposed to be working on together, beers with fellow poets and other such things. He's also posted some interesting notes on fetchpoetry definitely worth checking out.

2002-11-06T21:06:00.000-08:00

how to win friends and influence people
This sort of thing is the answer to that plaintive and oft-heard American refrain, "why don't people like us?" Is it right that millions of Americans will be tarred with the brush of bad behaviour? No. But the more American troops are deployed overseas, the more this sort of thing is going to happen. And the more people are going to grow up resenting it. Unless, of course, our friendly neighbourhood Washington chickenhawks see fit to give their troops some cultural sensitivity training... right.

Of course, the war party has, for obvious reasons, been strenuously trying to promote the notion that Afghanistan was a success and is now in the past, a shining example of what American resolve can accomplish. There are certain dissenters to this view whose assessment is, shall we say, a bit more reliable. Afghanistan remains unstable, the stated objectives of the invasion remain elusive, the "war on terrorism" continues to bog down in foreign policy that seems almost calculated to sabotage it. "Terror" has been a key part of the White House smokescreen on the war on Iraq, but one look at the situation in Afghanistan and its fallout shows how thin that smokescreen really is.