Retaliation

Apparently they're about to have another election in Israel.

Here's just yer basic blindingly obvious summary:

First, they find a pretext.

In this case, that was an anti-tank rocket fired from the Palestinian resistance at an Israeli jeep on November 10, which Israel and its apologists in the US media described as the initial provocation in the latest round of hostilities.

We know, for three reasons, that this is a lie.

The first is because we read the news. We know that the occupying forces encircling the Gaza Strip murdered a mentally unfit man approaching the border fence on November 4... And we know that on November 8 Israeli forces shot at Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa, who was playing soccer with his friends 1500 meters from an Israeli military post when a gunman put a bullet through his abdomen. He died soon after. Ahmed was 13.

The second reason we know that this is a lie is because the assault occurred after a 24 hour lull in the violence, induced by an Egyptian-brokered truce. ... Israel... shatter[ed] the truce with the November 14 assassination of senior Hamas military leader Ahmed Jubari, continuing a long-standing Israeli pattern of deploying targeted killings ... to break cease-fires and ramp up the cycle of violence at strategically opportune junctures.

The third reason any explanation involving the word “retaliation” is a lie is because the category of Israeli “retaliation” does not exist. The occupation is constant terror, and it is what breeds the Palestinian violence Israeli leaders can adduce as a retroactive justification for the policies they pursue in purported pursuit of the chimera of “security.”

Max Ajl at Jacobin. I might, to get technical, prefer the term siege to occupation in relation to Gaza, but the point still holds. Media dissemblers might wish to explain how the Israelis can "retaliate" against anything, as by definition a military siege remains the opening act of aggression between combatants until such time as it is lifted.

I Could Be Happy

Just to prove I can be glass half full, I'm happy to acknowledge there is some good news from the most recent democratic carnival in the hub of the empire: anti prohibition votes in two states, anti marriage-discrimination votes in four, Puerto Rico voted for statehood, California approved the notion of people actually paying for what government does, Michigan voted down some cashed-up tosser's attempt to preserve his international bridge monopoly, a number of crusadis and likudniks got kicked out or severely kicked, and there were wins for Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Orc Assassination Rogue Santiaga to name but a few. As for enjoying ultra-rightists losing their shit, so far it has been absolutely delightful, it truly has.

Glisser

Via Laughing Squid via Colossal via The Curious Brain.

Moderation

Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.

This month's Mr Obvious, William Saletan.

Cultural Decay

If a Democratic presidential victory* provides nothing else it at least grants you an opportunity for a double dose of schadenfreude, if that's what rubs your rhubarb. First you get to laugh as mad Republicans wax hysterical when their guy loses and civilisation, as they see it, collapses, and then some months later you get to laugh at formerly smug Democrats when they realise they've elected a Republican. Again.

Eh, who cares? Will a result that gives the popular vote to one candidate and the electoral college to the other persuade Americans to reform their stupid system? Doubt it. Will a Democratic loss clearly explicable in the lower turn-out of voters overall persuade the DPUSA that they need to stop moving right to pick up GOPer votes and instead demonstrate a reason for those non-voters who on other occasions voted Democratic to bother showing up at a polling booth? Doubt it, and they could argue a "left"-ward move would endanger their access to the support that's important: campaign finances and favourable media coverage. Will a Democratic loss spur them to work to wind back the increasingly plutocratic nature of US politics? It never did in the past. Will a Democratic loss, particularly in circumstances of bodgy counting, or, hell, the failure of a Democratic win to significantly change policies for the better, get it through various heads that voting and democracy are not synonymous? I won't be holding my breath.

There's a bunch of things I despise about this quadrennial carnival, but prominent among them is the regular arrogant hectoring from Dembots of those who see no value in tossing up between imperialist corporate whores, especially when it comes with their nonsense that the result is a matter of civilisation-saving importance. (In GOPers, on the other hand, predictions of a mule-victory ordained islamo-satanic apocalypse cum libertine-collectivist dystopia are more hilarious than annoying.) If the thanksralphers honestly believed that to be true, they'd hold off on their finger-wagging and instead get down on bended knee and beg for leftwing votes, promising anything, everything to the disaffected third party supporters and no-shows to get them to pull the Donkey lever. But apparently the impending crisis is never quite so terrifying as to compel them to drop the attitude, or to stop them lecturing about "realism" (presumably the kind of realism characterised by rewarding a party for kicking you in the teeth in the hope that it will kick you more gently next time) as opposed to actually attempting to win hearts and minds amongst the dime's-worth-of-difference types, not even in 2004, when I recall Kossacks and their ilk warned that the re-election of Dubya (the fella who did more damage to the American empire in 8 years than the Soviets managed in 80, which is another reason I oppose term limits, ho ho) would bring about some kind of fascist dictatorship. Really? Wouldn't that require a commitment to defeating this awful threat by any means necessary, regardless of the electoral outcome? Well, yeah, unless of course your partisan Cassandras are simply over-excited wankers.

But I digress. Coz it's fun.

Never mind me. Here's a proper rant, inspired by Rebecca Solnit at her drippiest:

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act.

...

Who really is the enemy of truth and fact, a plutocrat who represents plutocrats or a fake progressive who uses radical slogans in the service of destroying everything that threatens Wall-Street profitability? If truth is what matters, isn't Obama, who campaigns on false promises and a completely bogus record, the real enemy of "truth and fact"? If cultural decay there is, is not the Republican bible thumping the negative of progressives who champion the power of vapid positive thinking while acting as Wall-Street's vote aggregators? The right has nothing to offer. And never has. Who wants to live miserably? Who wants to be poor? Who wants to be ignorant? Who wants to live in constant fear? The only real promise of the Right, its real force, the source of its ability to mobilize, has always been that it was the lesser evil. That's not a very new argument. St. Augustine makes in his 'City of God'. We're just not good enough to enjoy freedom and so we need to be oppressed to save us from ourselves. And who makes that argument better than a Left that gives up all claim to speak the truth, that cheers for someone who spent four years making hell more hellish for billions of people, in the name of opposing "cultural decay"? Is there something more toxic, more corrosive of a culture, of truth, than passing in silence the mass murder of strangers because it is convenient? Is there something more destructive for a culture of truth than shilling for a servant of the 0.0002% in the name of helping the most disadvantaged, as Solnit does?

Word. Which is why it's odd I'm hoping Obama wins, purely for the symbolism and because I'm easily amused by rightists losing their shit. Whoa, deja vu.

* Feel free to consider that a prediction.

If It's Not Close...

... we can carry on deluding ourselves our electoral system isn't a corrupt lottery.

Never mind me. Go watch A Message from The Greatest Generation(NSFW) and laugh:

While funny, this anti voter-suppression video from MoveOn isn't as funny as the related GOPer whining on the indignation-seeking clone page.

I Can Has Ennui?

Think Local

Just because it's the end of the world doesn't mean we have to acknowledge the rest of the world exists.




Spot the US covers.
h/t Caustic Cover Critic

Stockholm Syndrome

Punching Above Our Weight

I for one feel full of pride that in matters of geopolitics over the next two years people will end up thinking that "the United States and Australia" is all one word.

Amygdala

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. - Emo Phillips

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.

...

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression.

- David Eagleman in The Atlantic

If the psychopath has an amygdala which is shrunken by 18%, which is functioning more poorly when they are making moral decisions, then how just is it of us to punish psychopaths as harshly as we do in the criminal justice system, given I presume that psychopaths did not ask to have a shrunken amygdala? Or go back to cavum septum pellucidum; these individuals, these young babies did not ask to have a limbic system that was maldeveloping. To what extent should they be punished just as much as other people who lack these brain abnormalities?

And a last implication here is the extent to which we should or should not use biological data like this in order to identify children who are at risk for antisocial behaviour, and to what extent should we or should we not develop new biological interventions to try and reduce crime.

- Adrian Raine on The Science Show

As everyone agrees, the word for getting rid of a whole subspecies is not “cure”. I’m not quite sure what the right word might be, but it’s probably somewhere between extermination and genocide. (Let’s call it cultural genocide, in deference to the fact that the biological organism persists even though its identity has been eradicated.) We’re even seeing the flowering of something like civil rights advocacy, in the form of the neurodiversity movement that’s been picking up steam over the past decade or two.

From what I can see out here, though, that movement seems to be an Autistics-Only club: what’s lacking is any sort of pro-Sociopath lobby along the lines of, say, the American Vampire League from True Blood. One would think that both groups would warrant the same kind of advocacy; the arguments of cognitive subspecieshood apply equally to both, after all. You’re stepping onto a pretty slippery slope when you claim that the occupation of a distinct neurological niche warrants acceptance of one group, but this other group over here — no more responsible for its wiring than the first — should still be wiped ou— er, cured.

- Peter Watts at his blog.

Well, this all seems to be shaping up nicely. And I find myself thinking of neuroplasticity and the treatments based on it, and of the intellectual work-arounds that can help a person move from being low-functioning to high-functioning despite neurological disability, (the amusing Moffatism suggests "function" may not just be about autism and Asperger's). Would mental training help the psychopath become less of a psychopath, or, like the LSD enhanced encounter sessions described by Jon Ronson in his book, just make them better, and more dangerous, at being psychopaths? And, as I always wonder, if you can train yourself to be less mentally ill, could you train yourself to be more so, where that might prove useful? Even if it did mean losing your sense of smell? Ah, let "me" think...

Moving Still