perfidy

A couple things. First. I sincerely doubt that the RIAA lawsuits named today (I really should provide links, so here you go. Here too. not bothering -ed.) will go to trial. I suspect that these are primarily a scare tactic aimed at curtailing trading through the simple threat of prosecution. And, they did choose their targets carefully-- people who maintained libraries of tens or hundreds of thousands of files. Not even I have bought that many albums. I could be wrong though. The RIAA's leadership seem to live in a dream-world where copyright law trumps individual privacy, so it is possible they could proceed, and even sue more people.

Next. I am fully aware that trading thousands of songs via peer-to-peer networks is mainifestly illegal. While I believe that suing people that engage in this behavior is offensive and wrongheaded, I also think that such people are ruining a good thing for the rest of us. So-called victimless crimes like going 70 in a 65-mile-per-hour zone, downloading a single track, like say the ? and the Mysterions klassic kut "96 Tears", or sneaking your recycling in with the neighbors, are fairly innocuous though nominally illegal. Much as I would be furious at all parties if a bunch of teens started drag-racing their riced-up shitmobiles down I-95 with the result that all speeders automatically recieved jail time, I am furious at all parties here, both defendants and plaintiffs.

There's a lot of us in the pool, folks. Stop dropping Baby Ruths in it.

This government web site here, counsels citizens on matters relating to terrorist attacks, and how Americans might be prepared in the event of an attack. Duck and cover! For a further explanation of the government's preparation advice, check out this site here. Be prepared. (Second link was dead. -ed.)

Matthew Yglesias has an insightful post up about that Iraq dealie we're in right now. In the interest of poking Buckethead with a sharp pointy stick, I'm just going to throw most of it up here verbatim.

". . .you can't just let a political process determine a military goal (remove Saddam Hussein from power) and then let the military pursue that goal by whatever means they deem appropriate and then declare victory when the war is over. Rather, you need to make sure that the way in which the war was conducted actually achieves your specific political goals rather than simply the broad task of defeating the other guy. 

One of the problematic elements of Operation Iraqi Freedom is that it was never really clear what these specific goals were. Instead you had lots of different people accepting different reasons for invading. On the assumption that the war would be a cakewalk, there was no problem with this, since folks could stay united around the military objective regime change and then continue the fight over political goals in the postwar period. Now that that scenario doesn't seem to be playing out, however, it seems to me that the administration is in danger of falling into the trap of redefining its political goals in purely military terms. Hence, our objectives now seem to be (a) capturing Baghdad, (b) destroying Republican Guard regiments, and (c) killing Saddam Hussein. Those are reasonable (and achievable) military objectives, but it's not clear to me that they're going to accomplish any important political goals at all."

While I think it's a little early to worry to seriously about the implementation of political goals (since we may be months from a military conclusion), it is a very real concern for this reason: nobody seems to know for sure what the political goals will even be. I've seen at least four different plans for post-war Iraq, all purportedly from gub'mint sources. Since I for one haven't seen a compelling, detailed, plan for reconstruction, my feeling is that that Matthew Y is right. Are we setting up a protectorate? A shadow government? A constitutional monarchy? An anarcho-syndiclast commune? Who gets the oil? Who develops Iraq's infrastructure? Who gets first crack at capital investment? What about trade arrangements for that same oil? What day is this? Is it dinnertime yet? Where are my pants? 

n.b. Historically, this war still definitely counts as a cakewalk. However, there are lesser and greater degrees of cakewalkitude, and my sense is that the needle is rolling over to the lesser side of the dial now. Just saying.

also n.b. Unlike my compatriots, I am not much of a political scientist. So, in choosing to separate military and political ends in my argument, I may have made a big mistake from a poli-sci standpoint. I realize that if we are at war to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, then that matters now. But, we are also at war to create a new government in Iraq, and that doesn't so much matter until the shooting dies down. That seems to me to be the true political goal, hence my disconnecting the two. If I have in fact made a big mistake, well... nyah.

From The Morning News, this beautiful creed:

I believe in Iggy, Jimi, Chryssie, and Joe Strummer, the Parents Almighty, Creator of heaven on earth; I believe in Malcolm McClaren and Sid Vicious, His only Son. I believe in punk, lo-fi and gangsta, indie, post-punk, indie-pop, rock, singer-songwriter, and insurgent country, conceived by Uncle Tupelo, born of Jeff Tweedy who suffers, as does Lou Barlow. I believe in Squirrelbait and Johnny Cash. I believe in the Motor City. I will respectfully love and fear Tad. I believe in Superchunk and PJ Harvey. I believe in new bands and will never pretend to know music I have never heard, so my mind may stay open and I will sitteth at the right hand of Mission of Burma so I may one day ascend to heaven, where I will be greeted by Sonic Youth, Eazy-E, and Mike Watt. I will not listen to rock critics, but trust my own ears. I believe in DIY, zines, Yo La Tengo, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of Cobain, and rock everlasting. Amen.

-May the Rock be with you. 

-And also with you. 
 

This is indeed a serious problem. Unfortunately, there isn't much anyone can do other than writing to people in Congress and voting against those who support it. The civil liberties of Americans and those residing in the U.S., as I stated in a previous post, have been consistently whittled away during my lifetime. Like all humans before us, however, we are all subject to injustices due to circumstances beyond our control. Once the reps have gotten their letters and the votes cast, it's just a matter of finger crossing and hopes for the best. Once again, I lack optimism on this, as well as most other issues. I, as Johno indicated, am the kind of person who contributed money to perhaps the sort of organization that would fall on the wrong side of things under Patriot II. 

Iraq and political goals 

A recent report on PBS Frontline outlined the causal factors and what political goals do exist for the Iraq war. According to the report, members of George Bush the elder's government, who referred to themselves as neo-Reaganites, wanted to seize Baghdad and eliminate Saddam Hussein in 1991. They were checked by Bush the elder, who pursued the limited goal of expulsion from Kuwait. Now, some people who sought the removal of Hussein, such as the current Vice President Richard Cheney and current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are back in power and employing the attacks of 11 September 2001 as an excuse to remove Hussein from power. I reiterate though, there are no real links between al Qaeda and Hussein. The Ansar camp recently taken is in Kurdish, nominally U.S. controlled territory, spitting distance from the Iranian border. It seems more likely that if any governments supported the Ansar camp, it was probably Iran and not Iraq. 

Maybe After the passage of Patriot II Johnny will have to put his two cents in from a cell. We can carry on discussions by tapping through the wall to each other in Morse code, as in Darkness at Noon. 

SARS, the Iraq war, Patriot II, it all makes things look pretty bleak these days. 
 

As an added fun Wednesday bonus, check out these nutty charts and documents from the Total Information Awareness Office! 

Those government pointy-heads sure have some ca-razy ideas! 
 

Andrew Sullivan is writing over at MSNBC about the government's increased efforts to rely on private data-collection firms to get the information they are barred from collecting themselves. 

Now, that's just a dirty trick, not to mention stupid. Private data collection firms don't have a great duty to verify the truth of their data any more than the government does. It has taken Li'l Sister Two-Cents years to clear her name, after another person with the same name ran into huge credit trouble. The databases just never seemed to be be updated, time and again. 

This is the awesome power the Gubmint wants to harness? I guess we shouldn't look forward to them changing the name on the J. Edgar Hoover building after all. 
 

I've been reading more and more about civil liberties, and the proposed revisions to the USA-PATRIOT act that are apparently forthcoming soon. It's chilling stuff. 

A story is out today that that a senior Intel engineer has been detained without being charged for giving money to an Islamic charity. The FBI claims that the charity in question has ties to Al Qaeda, but upon investigation, The Register has found that those connections are mostly imaginary. The best they can do is demonstrate that one time, a member of Al Qaeda gave money to the same, prominent, charity-- not the other way around. 

Think about that. A real guy, a computer nerd regular smart-guy Joe, detained indefinitely, without due process, for giving money to a charity that a branch of the government decided in retrospect may be loosely associated with terrorism. I don't like the implications of that one goddamn bit. 

Anyway, on to USA-Patriot II. Matt Welch has an update today on Alternet, and Nat Henthoff had a cutting analysis in the Village Voice at the end of February. Thanks to the Center for Public Integrity I have my own copy of the bill to read. Here's what I found. Among other fun pursuits, the US government would be given the power to:

• revoke one's citizenship --" the intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct"
• hold any person indefinitely in secret, without notifying a soul
• make it a crime to tell anyone about subpoenas served under Patriot II
• start a national DNA database of arrestees, as long as they are labelled as potential terrorist conspirators of any kind, or as long as the DNA "may assist in the investigation and identification of terrorists and the prevention of terrorism"
• specifically limit the recourse of private citizens, and the recourse of courts acting on their behalf who have been wrongly detained or investigated
• wiretap anyone for fifteen days, without a warrant, provided that at some point in the recent past that Congress has approved military action or a national emergency has been called
• grant immunity to businesses who report on employees' activities, even if the tips are false
• revoke habeas corpus for permanent resident aliens
• and spy on US citizens on behalf of other countries.

The document also contains language that would make the "sunset" provisions in the original PATRIOT act -- this is, certain draconian measures set to expire in five years -- permanent. There's also a bunch of more minor nibbles at liberty -- the government could look at your credit report at will (secretly), would operate under less judicial control when wiretapping citizens, gets expanded FISA powers, etc., etc., etc. 

As I've said before, it's a bad thing when the residents of a free nation begin fearing their government as I begin to fear mine. The worst part about it is the powerlessness I feel. What can I do? Write my congressmen? Write John Kerry?? I wouldn't trust John Kerry to save orphans from drowning, if he could find a political downside!! 

I'm going to do write them, but whoopdiddleydoo. I'm a broke secretary who doesn't have the scratch to donate to campaigns. Therefore, I don't count so much. Sure, I'll vote against anybody who supports the act, but by that time, the law will be in place and since it's all secret police without due process, it will be very, very hard for someone to sue the government for acting outside the bounds of the Constitution. Bye bye, checks and balances! These could be dark times indeed, if the Justice department uses the war as cover to ram through measures such as these. If I may be totally cynical for a moment, this is one of the reasons I thank God that terrorists have not been able to hit us again as they hit us two years ago. 

And you don't think any of this could happen to you? Did you ever give money to Irish causes? How about PETA, ELF, or a Right-To-Life cause? Or to an Israeli relief charity? A Palestinian relief charity? Your local mosque? Good luck to you then. I understand full well that I'm looking at the situation and seeing the worst possible outcome. But, for some reason, I tend to do that when it's civil liberties at stake. Must be the idealist in me. I better get to work on repressing that.

Once again, huzzah and kudos to Bootsy to pointing me to this depressing article from Editor & Publisher. It discusses the media's coverage of the Iraq crisis prior to the actual war, suggests that the American public is horribly misguided about the war in Iraq, and blames the media for making the situation worse. I'm not going to argue with the media-bashing, but more worrying are the poll numbers. Check it out: 

In a Jan. 7 Knight Ridder/Princeton Research poll, 44% of respondents said they thought "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17% of those polled offered the correct answer: none. This was remarkable in light of the fact that, in the weeks after 9/11, few Americans identified Iraqis among the culprits. . . . In the same sample, 41% said that Iraq already possessed nuclear weapons, which not even the Bush administration claimed. Despite being far off base in crucial areas, 66% of respondents claimed to have a "good understanding" of the arguments for and against going to war with Iraq. . . . 

The same survey found that 57% of those polled believed Saddam Hussein helped terrorists involved with the 9/11 attacks, a claim the Bush team had abandoned. A March 7-9 New York Times/CBS News Poll showed that 45% of interviewees agreed that "Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," and a March 14-15 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found this apparently mistaken notion holding firm at 51%. . . . 

Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Research Center, told me last week: "It's very rare to find a perception that's been so disputed by experts yet firmly held by the public. There's almost nothing the public doesn't believe about Saddam Hussein."

Oh, for God's sake. It's not old news that the American people will believe anything, but this is remarkable. 

Well, maybe it's not so remarkable. 77% of Americans believe angels exist. Half of Americans believe that humans once co-existed with dinosaurs. Reportedly, 60% of Americans believe in psychic powers. Luckily, only 7% of Americans believe The King is still alive. 

All of this only proves that public opinion, whether for or against the war, is not rooted as much in facts as in each person's personal interpretation of history. And, as we all know, history is not necessarily fact-based.

As I'm sure we all are insanely aware, the Supreme Court is hearing the UMich affirmative action case today. I suddenly find within me an overwhelming urge to support affirmative action, mainly because Justice Scalia is such a penis.

I have been hacking away at a huge wordy essay detailing why I think that affirmative action causes more problems than it solves, and I have axed it in favor of this simple statement: Affirmative action causes more problems than it solves. Rather, affirmative action is not equipped to address the problems it should be, and stands in the way of its own ultimate goal of reducing America's obsession with race.

AA comes from noble sentiments and honorable motives, and I support it in principle. But, without dismissing several hundred years of history and systematic repression, there are many social, cultural, economic, and geographic factors aside from race that determine how a child's education should go. It's my sense that economic factors influence more about a person's educational path than does race, yet colleges do not consider economics when deciding admissions policy. You can show me case after case of a brilliant student who, since he or she is from Bushwick, doesn't have the chance to go to Yale. I will in turn show you case after case of brilliant hillbillies from Bluefield who are in the same boat. Worse, affirmative action stands in its own way. Now, when we want to talk about race-based issues in education, we talk about affirmative action. Unfortunately, AA doesn't address the big race-based education issues that remain. For example, take the high incarceration rate among young black men. A felony rap means not being eligible for federal student aid, a Clinton policy that cut off a large swath of society from easy access to higher education. Affirmative action can't touch that, though it's partly a race-based education issue. Public schools are in the shitter all over the place, and students advance grades without learning basic skills. Affirmative action can't compensate for that either, though that's what it was meant to do. Instead, the debate remains confined to a few issues such as quotas/not quotas, and cuts the real problems out of the debate.

Two problems ensue. First, by leaving some of the biggest issues outside the discussion, AA weakens its own agenda of equalizing access to education regardless of race. Second, every day that AA programs continue to exist is one more day that race remains an issue in education-- hardly a step towards an institutionally colorblind society.

The US is not, and should never be, colorblind. Black identity, and for that matter, Irish identity, Latvian identity, and Ohio Briar-Hopper identity are too rich to discard. But affirmative action is a right-minded half-measure that does not address the full complexity of the problems it purports to solve. Institutional colorblindness (as opposed to social/cultural colorblindness) is a noble goal, and it's becoming clear that affirmative action won't achieve it as currently structured. Am I in favor of getting rid of it totally? Not really. But a major re-thinking of its fundamental premises are in order, to ensure that it actually does the job it's intended to do.

Did I mention that "Scalia" means "penis" in Ewok?

n.b. Reasonable people may differ. I welcome any and all discussion, rebuttal, and ad hominem attacks. I'm a big boy now.

[wik] Dahlia Lithwick has a great synopsis of the proceedings at Slate, including a sound-clip of an extremely eloquent argument from Justice Breyer. From the article: "Everyone seems to agree that the racial divisions in this country are a terrible problem, and almost everyone agrees that they need to be handled via subterfuge: The affirmative action camp is for "critical masses" that look like quotas and for "diversity" that may not bring about diversity. The anti-affirmative action camp is for pretending that other remedies work when it's clear that you can't fix race problems by ignoring race. These are not really legal questions at heart; they are almost insoluble social and moral ones. Take heart in the fact that the court at least respected us enough today to address them as such."

[alsø wik] "Scalia" also means "penis" in the ancient language of Atlantis.