Celebrating the War on Iraq with the New York Times

Manufacturing Consent, War on Iraq
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list of blogs read by the US media

Here are the clowns they booked to help the party started: Paul Bremer, Richard Perle, Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, Frederick Kagan… Yes, these are all people who were either incredibly, stomach churningly wrong about the war, or people who actively helped bring it about. No, nobody from the anti-war side was invited for this. That would’ve drawn too much attention to what the NYT itself was up at the time; better to stay safe in the bubble of likeminded fools and pretend “nobody could’ve known” the claims about weapons of mass destruction were false.

Perhaps not unrelated: Henrry Farrell and Daniel Drezner’s study (PDF) on the power of blogs which reveals which bloggers the “elite media” (their term) were reading in late 2003, as shown in the chart above. Not the most inspiring of lists, with Atrois being the most outspoken anti-war blogger on it. The elite media was for the most part cheerleading the war and it seems their favourite blogs did the same. At the time it was not hard to find evidence that Bush and co were lying about the war, that it was an incredibly bad idea with horrific onsequences, but if you don’t go looking for it, you’ll never find it…

London calling

"Literature", Art & Criticism
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Curt Purcell, of the excellent pulp/weird fiction/horror/sci-fi/etc blog Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror has been inspired to explore “the ultimate urban setting, the original Big Bad City, the real Metropolis: London”. The list of books he plans to read is interesting in its diversity:

Here’s a listing of what I’ve set aside in my to-read stacks. I don’t plan to read these in any particular order, and I may not get to all of them this time around. In any case:

  • Soft City by Jonathan Raban
  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • London: A Pilgrimage by Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold
  • The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
  • The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
  • At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
  • Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke
  • London Under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman
  • London Dossier by Len Deighton
  • Burden of Proof (retitled Villain) by James Barlow
  • The Long Firm by Jake Arnott (also with something about the BBC television adaptation)
  • Tainted Love by Stewart Home
  • The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman
  • SAM 7 by Richard Cox
  • The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
  • Mother London by Michael Moorcock
  • London Fields by Martin Amis
  • Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green
  • London Revenant by Conrad Williams
  • Caballistics, Inc. from 2000 AD

It’s a list that can be almost infinitely extended, because there are few cities that have had such a hold on the public imagination as London. Sure, every big city has literature associated with it –even Amsterdam has writers associated with it, like Simon Carmiggelt– but London is different in that its attraction is worldwide, perhaps matched only by New York. Even Rome is only a village compared to London, as Nancy Mitford teased. Unfortunately, that does result into a certain amount of arrogance and navelgazing on the part of the London based media and literati circles, the illusion that because London is so important, they and everything they do is important.

Evolutionary psychologist is just another word for loon

sciencebollocks, wingnuts
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Two years ago I blogged about Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who argued that Asians cannot make basic contributions to science, despite being, well, you know. Now if that wasn’t enough to completely destroy the already dodgy reputation of evolutionary biology, he’s upping his game this year. Not content with just slandering whole races, he’s now blogging on how much better the war on terror would’ve gone with president Coulter in charge:

Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens died

Comix
Published on

the rocketeer

According to Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat, Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens has died:

I’ve just received word that Dave Stevens, the artist of the Rocketeer, died yesterday at age 52. Stevens had dropped out of sight for the most part in recent years and had been battling leukemia, a fact which he kept as private as possible.

Stevens was known for his meticulous artwork, reminiscent of the greatest illustrators of the past and the whiz bang pulpishness of the 30s and 40s. He was, of course, also obsessed with model Bettie Page. These came together in The Rocketeer, which was published by Eclipse, Pacific, Comico and Dark Horse in its various incarnations. In 1991 it was turned into a Disney film starring Billy Campbell and a young Jennifer Connelly. The film underperformed at the time but has become very fondly remembered.

The Rocketeer started as a six page backup strip in Mike Grell’s Starslayer comic, back in 1982 and was an immediate hit. Dave Stevens took all his pulp, movie serial and Betty Page pinup influences and mixed them together into one gorgeously drawn, exuberant story about Cliff Secord, a smalltime stunt pilot who finds a rocket pack stolen from a certain six foot tall giant bronzed scientist, uses it to become The Rocketeer and win fame and fortune, but gets drawn into more adventure than he had hoped… The story was simple, but effective, the art was gorgeous and as Heidi says, it was made into a somewhat overlooked but effective and fun movie in 1991, even if the Betty Page aspects of Secord’s girlfriend were lost. Stevens was always a slow cartoonist and Rocketeer was his only real project, though he was much in demand in the eighties as a cover artist. But it was enough.

(Found via James Nicoll.)

Monkeys at the zoo

Auntie Beeb, Racism
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Owen Hatherley on what the BBC’s reducing of the experience of the “white working class” to having a bee in one’s bonnet about immigrants means:

This middle-class reductiveness (pioneered in Michael Collins’ sentimentalist The Likes of Us) is something that I find particularly infuriating, as it constantly declares that the white working class that make up most of my family – mostly politically active, with an autodidact or two amongst them, committed to working class solidarity and education – don’t exist, never did exist. Similarly, the history of the East End has to be rewritten in a way that ensures that the Great Dock Strike, Cable Street, decades as one of the few places in Britain where ‘Communist’ wasn’t a pejorative, are all secondary to a Sun reading bestiary. All particularly grotesque in an area that has seen the mass social cleansing that is gentrification expel working class inhabitants, black or white, off to the peripheries.

That is perhaps the core appeal of this whole white season: watching monkeys at the zoo slinging poo, only in this case the monkeys wear flat caps or hoodies and hurl racial abuse. Both the vicarious thrill of being racist by proxie and the moral superiority of knowing that you aren’t like those people, as if the readership of the Daily “welfare cheat bogus asylum seekers bearing aids force drop in house prices” Mail isn’t largely middle class. The racism and bigotry of a large part of the English bourgeoisie projected on the working classes.

The real plight of the working classes and its causes is not investigated. Asians riot and whites vote BNP and that’s just the way it is, and that misjudged racial visionary Enoch Powell saw it would be this way. Ignored remains the virtual destruction of Britain’s industries from 1950 onwards, the hollowing out of the unions, the abandonment of the working class –white or otherwise– by all political parties, the development of a two tier health system, a two tier eductation system, a two tier…

If only the BBC had taken a real look at what has happened to the working classes in the forty years since Powell, instead of falling into the same old easy middle class cliches, instead of looking at monkeys at the zoo.