December 2009 archive

This will be short.  

I don’t know how to deal with this piece except to quote from Chris Floyd himself:

Here is another story in the news: in an isolated rural province in Afghanistan, 10 people were killed in a raid by American-led forces. The Afghan government, installed and sustained in power by the United States, said the victims were all civilians — including eight schoolboys.

But there was no international outcry about this incident; it barely garnered a few mentions in the global press. And even these were quickly shunted aside after a NATO official denied the claims of the Afghan government, and affirmed that all those killed in the raid were evil-doers. As the NYT reports:

A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s. … “When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.’s,” the official added.

Local officials on the scene in Kunar Province said otherwise. They said 10 civilians had been killed. They said eight of the dead were children:

The governor of Kunar, Fazullah Wahidi, said that “the coalition claimed they were enemy fighters,” but that elders in the district and a delegation sent to the remote area had found that “10 people were killed and all of them were civilians.”

But the NATO official said the Afghans were lying. We will never know the whole truth, of course, for the story will ultimately be controlled by the very force that carried out the attack: the American-led military occupation.

But what an instructive contrast. In one story, an attack which did not happen and which killed no one shakes the entire world. In another story, ten human beings, including eight children, were slaughtered in a sneak attack by night — and the world can scarcely be bothered to notice.

Karmafish at MLW says in the Question of the Day: “Yell Louder!”

Well, no, its not a question.

There are certain people who seem to think that we need to yell louder.  It’s as if they believe that if we wish to bring about positive fundamental change to the American system of governance than what is needed is… well… more yelling.   We need to yell and scream and rant and rage.  We need to jump up and down and shake our fists and howl at the mooon.

But, ya know what?  I’m tired of yelling.  I’m tired of listening to people yelling.  I’m tired of pretending that yelling somehow gets us anywhere.  I’m tired of self-righteous assholes, who barely know what the hell that they’re yammering about, insisting to the rest of us that their every syllable is right and true and good… while any who may oppose them, or merely even question them, are wrong and false and bad.

This is one reading of the “Yell Louder” text. I had a different one.

Choosing the goal.  Well that’s an idea I haven’t done much with and wouldn’t have a notion of how to present it or if it is even worth presenting.

Let’s put it this way … let’s muse about it.

Oh, first, jeffroby has really captured my imagination with his project (the name of which I forget at the moment … oh, here it is, the Full Court Press).  The idea would be to have a Democratic Party challenger in each and every district in the country.  The goal would not be electoral victory.

So I’m looking at goals.

Most folks who run for office have the goal of getting elected so they can have power.  For better or worse, moral or immoral, etc., being elected gives one power to do things one cannot do in the same way if one is not elected.

What if the goal of running for office was solely to reveal and expose how running for office in the 21st Century is a scandal and a joke and all those other “gasp” revelations that folks eat up like apple pie and so on.

Just as an example.

If the goal were different, then the entire view becomes different.

What is the goal?  To me, it’s to wake up as many folks as possible to the shell game that’s going on the US of A.

And I would like to hear some imaginative goals, unbound by convention or the win/lose bullshit mentality we have been spoonfed, like a goal being for everyone to wear blue shirts for one day and see what that would look like.

Just to break out of the box.

Strategy.  I don’t like strategy, it makes my  head hurt, I can play chess fairly well but I’m not a fan of it.  I am more comfortable in chaos.

Oh well.

So I freely admit this essay lacks even a scintilla of understanding or knowledge about strategy.

Except for the goals part.

Hello, all!  Sorry not to post at the regular time last night, but I was enjoying my final hours with the family this trip and did not intend to disturb them by blogging.  Please forgive me, but they are extremely important to me.  I am sure that you will understand.

Part of our activities last evening was to watch the new Star Trek motion picture.  It recently came out on DVD, and the former Mrs. Translator and the two boys remaining at home rented it for us to watch.  It was nice to be able to pause it and hit the good Christmas leftovers from time to time as well.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Update #2: It has been brought to my attention that my initial analysis on the subject of this diary, originally titled “SCOTUS legalizes TORTURE and creates legal ‘unpersons'”, and then edited to state 9th Circuit . . .  is factually incorrect. I apologize for the confusion and will be writing a thorough dairy tomorrow based on the facts of the ruling by the 9th Circuit court.

    I have left the full text of the original diary intact below the fold and will be glad to be further corrected. I seek to learn as well as to share what knowledge I have.

    But I will ask this: When? When do we start to see accountability, for the super rich, for the Corporations and their CEO class, and for the crimes and other excesses of the politically powerful. When?

Thank you, and apologies to all.

Cheers