Articles with the Tag us

Comment of The Day

Comment of the Day, liberalism, Life under Capitalism
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Hello again. Did I miss anything?

Anyway first day back online after a leisurely summer being poked prodded, dialysed and made hideously and explosively sick with antibiotics and weird blood chemistry and already I have my CoTD, on the death of Ted Kennedy. Exactamundo, WILFSSON:

WILFSSON

27 Aug 09, 2:12am (about 6 hours ago)

‘He became one of the great senators of our time’ says Obama and the Washington claque echoes him.

But, great as in comparison to who – or rather what?

Joe Biden? John Kerry? Jesse Helms? Hilary Clinton? John Edwards?

Considering a forty-year Senate career in which virtually every member has been a bought and paid for corporate hack, the question of greatness is surely rather moot.

He may have endorsed Obama, he may have helped the NI peace process but for all his eloquence on democracy and justice he would never have been in office had Kennedy senior not been a fascist, a bootlegger and an arms dealer Ambassador to Britain and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who essentially bought his sons into office with both money and influence. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes” he said. Ted Kennedy was a rich man from a rich family who expected to have political power.

So he lost two brothers to political assassination – “Hello. I’m Edwardus Kennedius Maximus, brother of a murdered politician, brother of another murdered politician” – but just because you’ve been bereaved it doesn’t make you any more moral. If that were the case humanity would’ve reached a much greater state of moral perfection by now.

He was untrustworthy in marital life and drove his first wife to drink with his many blatant affairs. He drank massively, which was a running joke in the media. Under the influence of drink and at a surprisingly late stage in his ‘distinguished’ life and career he played a very shady role in the commission and cover-up of a drunken rape by his nephew.

This is greatness?

There are those who will argue that tangled private life and personal peccadilloes like a few affairs and a constant smell of whisky have no bearing on the political greatness or otherwise of any given powerful man (because a woman would never recieve such generosity from the media, but that’s a whole other subject). It’s what He Does, not what he does that’s important – political achievements are somehow supposed to outweight complete arsery.

And he was an arse. What it always, always came back to for me with Kennedy is that the distinguished senator and sprig of American nobility left a girl to drown in a car wreck. He ran to save his own skin, and then he lied about it. He simply did not care whether she was alive or dead, provided he and his family not have any trouble. To me it said all that needed be said about his basic humanity, irrelevant of his politics.

Mind you I can’t let Kennedy politics go completely unremarked. They were of the white-bread, business as usual, carry on guys, let’s do a deal here school of politics, leavened with a hefty dose of guilt-fuelled ‘Hey, let’s be a little nicer to the servants, then we won’t have to deal with too much unpleasantness’ and a soupcon of “Oh yeah, lets give a concessions to the chicks, too while we’re at it. That’ll get me laid at least once.”.

Don’t get me started on the Kennedys and the Catholic church. I’ll be here all bloody day.

I Sentence You To Be Taken From Here and DNA Tested Till You’re Dead. Or Until We Get Our Sample. Whichever’s The Soonest.

Policing, Torture, Totalitarianism
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America may have a Democrat president charming the rest of the world but at home Cheney’s heirs are still in charge. And they’re still gaily torturing away willy-nilly, with judicial approval.

After police lost or contaminated an already willingly given DNA sample, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza issued an order requiring the suspect to provide another. Not so unusual, you might think except the order was issued ex-parte – which meant defence counsel had no chance to object.

Odd. Why ex-parte? Why would the defence object to a DNA test? It’s a quick and painless operation. Well actually no, it’s not. Not the way Niagara County does it. William N Grigg describes what happned to Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls, New York, a 21-year-old charged with burglary:

Smith was brought in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered; it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it was. Smith still refused to comply.

Confronted with an intransigent suspect who refused to provide critical evidence, the investigators reluctantly strapped the handcuffed Smith to a downward sloping table, covered his face with a towel, and waterboarded him. He broke within seconds, and meekly permitted the DNA sample to be taken.

On the basis of the DNA evidence, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment. He was also charged with “criminal contempt of court” for forcing his interrogators to torture him.

When Smith’s defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use of waterboarding as means of forcing compliance, as long as it’s not done “maliciously” or to “excess.”

This account is true and accurate in every detail, save one – the specific torture protocol that was used to compel Smith to surrender a sample of his DNA.

He wasn’t subjected to water torture; instead, he was given a brief taste of electroshock torture by way of a Taser that was used to inflict a “drive stun.” This involves placing the prongs of the device directly on the body of the victim for a brief, painful, paralyzing charge.

Oh, so that’s why it was ex-parte. I think should think the defence would have been sure to object if they’d known their client was to be tortured into compliance with a taser.

It may have been only a tasering (!) and not an actual waterboarding but that’s hardly the point. It was no abberation; those were no bad apples or rogue cops acting on their own warped initiative. The official torturers were acting on the direct orders of both a DA and a judge.

As Detective Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of Ryan Smith, instructed the police that “we could use the minimum force that was necessary” to force the suspect to submit to a DNA test.

Now, think carefully about that formulation: In principle, it authorizes the use of any amount of force needed to extract the sample, since the critical term is “necessary.” As long as the police were reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect; wherever they end up would obviously be the “minimum” necessary to accomplish their objectives.

Exactly. It doesn’t matter what method of torture the official torturers use; it’s almost irrelevant, though there’s something particularly distasteful and reminiscent of Pinochet’s Chile about Tasers. Torture is torture is torture. You’re using pain to make someone do something. Once that’s been judicially ordered the dam is breached and torture is official policy. In no time at all physical coercion becomes the norm – never the last option, but always the first. It’s practical everyday fascism; it may be red in tooth and claw but it’s always covered by the paperwork.

This week we’ve seen waterboarding reportedly used in London against drug suspects by the Met. Bad apples, say the police. That time it wasn’t, thankfully, court-ordered and was entirely unofficial – but given that British police methods slavishly follow the US as night follows day, it can’t be long before it is.

I Almost Wish I Had A Bloodsucker Too

Blogs, Meta
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Following Josh Marshall’s exposure of New York Times’ high profile columnistMaureen Dowd’s copying of his blogpost (and her subsequent ‘apology for her error’: where have we heard that one recently?), Salon’s Glenn Greenwald describes how mainstream papers and unscrupulous paid journalists prey on the work of mostly unpaid bloggers:

…now that online traffic is such an important part of the business model of newspapers and print magazines, traffic generated by links from online venues and bloggers is of great value to them. That’s why they engage in substantial promotional activities to encourage bloggers to link to and write about what they produce. Beyond that, it is also very common — as the Dowd/Marshall episode illustrates — for traditional media outlets and establishment journalists to use and even copy content produced online and then present it as their own, typically without credit. Many, many reporters, television news producers and the like read online political commentary and blogs and routinely take things they find there.

Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.

Exactly. A number of times I’ve thought I’ve seen ideas or things from this blog pop up in altered form in the Guardian’s comment pieces. But any similarity is usually too slight to pin down and most probably coincidental, anyhow. Think of the sheer volume of words that are written and published in English online just in the course of one day. There must be constant concurrences of ideas and the subject itself often suggests the tone and words used, so similarities are inevitable. ]

But I did notice it was usually dated in the vicinity of a visit by a particular IP address – we have few enough readers that I do notice that – but again it means little, if anything at all. Though they’re few, we get visits from all over. For all I know the journalist is based in Moldova or Yorkshire, not using a particular network in the City.

Though an unscrupulous hack looking for story ideas to vampire might well trawl low traffic blogs rather than popular ones – because there’s less chance of anyone spotting likenesses, there’s no real way to ever really pin something so slight down.

It’s probably sheer chance, a zeitgeistian thing and the sensible voice in my head tells me I’m being egotistical and paranoid. I should stop being so silly. It’s all very nebulous, and as nice as it would be to think anybody actually read this blog rather than came across it accidentally looking for dancing kitten .gifs, who on earth would want to copy my stuff? It’s just me ranting and there are millions of better bloggers to steal ideas from.

What could I do about it, anyhow? Complain? It’s hardly plagiarism, it’s impossible to prove and probably just my ego anyway.

So there I’ve left it.

However, one TPM blogger was inspired by Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism to go further. Unexpectedly he found he too had a vampire – so he dragged him smoking into the sunlight.

… I started using teh Google on some of my older blog titles. About five minutes later, I found a case of out-and-out, wholesale plagiarism of one of my own pieces.

I wrote the blog entry “Michele Bachmann – Unstable AND Unable” here on TPM on February 20, 2009.

A writer on Salem-News.com, Dorsett Bennett, wrote this article on February 27. To conserve space, I won’t quote it here.

The first half of Bennett’s article is, well, my blog.

More…

You know I really run some of my text or post headers through google too. I wonder what would turn up?

Nothing at all, most likely.

There’s my problem. Any similarity’s entirely in my head. That’s why I haven’t googled and I won’t google any of my writing. I couldn’t take the disappointment. I’ll stick with my nebulous suspicions while leaving the possibility that someone actually read something and liked it enough to steal it it still that, a possibility.

UPDATE:

Soopercali’s comment to Glenn’s post hits the target I was circling around spot-on:

What I’ve seen happen again and again is that the corporate media rips off the context in which bloggers place a story.

Bloggers will take a mainstream story and contrast it with something the original author missed. That’s when the rest of the media (most often, cable news talk shows) lifts the story and acts as if they thought of it themselves. It happens far too often to count.

That’s exactly it.

The Audacity Of Hypocrisy

Manufacturing consent, Religion, US politics
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Peterr at Firedoglake:

Never Again? That’ll be Quite a Speech, Mr. President
By: Peterr Tuesday April 21, 2009 4:20 pm

How does Obama speak at the national Holocaust remembrance commemoration on the topic “Never Again: What You Do Matters” one week after releasing memos outlining torture as an official US policy, and after declaring that those who employed it will not be prosecuted? We’ll find out on Thursday.

Oh, he’ll manage it; he knows all about the uses of rhetoric.