I’ve blogged about this before, but now some academics have done a really fancy study that affirms what many of us have suspected for awhile: DHS is fucked up!

Ugly Americans Abroad.

“An Urgent Warning to Critics of the Iraq War”…

Consider these familiar assertions:

1. If Donald Rumsfeld had listened to the generals and invaded with more troops, Iraq would be stable today.

2. If the U.S. had provided security and basic services after the initial invasion, Iraqis would have embraced America’s presence and agenda by now.

3. If Paul Bremer had neither de-Ba’athified nor disbanded the Iraqi army after the invasion, the insurgency would have been manageable or non-existent.

If you agree with any of these claims, you are an unwitting participant in American Imperialism. You criticize the “handling of the war” but you display faith in the capacity of the US to remake the world in its image through military force and administration. Such faith reinforces the logic of imperialist misadventures like Iraq, and paves the way for future ones. This illustrates an important feature of the discourse surrounding the war: In the wake of failed imperialist projects, critics often leave military imperialism itself unquestioned and unchallenged. Indeed, they participate in its rehabilitation.

… read the rest at Counterpunch. Part one of a three part series, “Becoming Imperialist,” by Arjun Chowdury, Mark Hoffman, and Kevin Parsneau (U of Minnesota political scientist grad students). And here’s part 2: “The Can-Do Troops and the New-Anti Politics”.

One important lesson: democrats may nominate mediocre judges. But republicans want to nominate lunatics that think that the supreme court has been going down hill since the thirties.

Glenn Greenwald lays out the saga of the right wing and Plamegate.

I think this is a great example of how propaganda works. The smart propagandist knows that you don’t need to convince the people that a lie is the truth. You only need to sew enough doubt that people stop believing the actual truth. If you ask many people that came of age in china after Tienemen square what they think happened, even those who have lived overseas and heard the actual story of what happened tend to view it as a wash: people say many things, who knows what is true. When people doubt reality happened it might as well not have.

Evolution opponents exploit this, even though they don’t realize they aren’t telling the truth. They throw long lists of untrue or discredited criticisms of evolution. To refute them is long and tedious so evolution goes from reality to “disputed”.

(note: this post is heavily influenced by the last chapter of Kindom Coming by Michelle Goldberg) There is a meme out there that I assume was started by some campaign staffer for Regan that has become official gospel of America: somewhere in Iowa, or maybe Ohio, there is a middle aged, working class white man who is a “Real American”. He is the one that votes, the one that has a Nielsen box and the man the represents Real American Values. Washington journalists tend to believe that they speak to this guy and represent this guy. Who, as we all know, is a centrist.

I would like for you all to know, that in my opinion this is total bullshit. There is no such person. There is no real american. One in sixteen americans lives in New York. A full 10% of americans live in New York or Los Angeles. We ARE real americans. When I vote, starting in the last election, I am going to vote for the people who represent me best, not people who are going to appeal to a non-existent average american.

I’ve been reading about the Christian right, I recommend both books: Kingdom Coming and American Fascist. Very interesting, even in light of the self-destruction of the right wing coalition. An important take away for me was that we must not forget that the crazy right wing christians actually believe what they are saying. Their followers vote for “moral issues”, against their own self interest, because they think that those issue are more important. Also, these people are unreachable. We cannot change their minds or convince them of the error of their ways. They are true believers, and we can only fight them when they try and impose their beliefs on the rest of us.

As Eli says (and Vijay commented earlier), one of the difficulties in “fixing” education in the US is dealing with what Eli calls the Ideology of Meritocracy. Which I think is as good a name as any for what I think of as “protestant values”, the idea that hard work and virtue will bring success. I think many Americans deal with the reality of inequality by rationalizing: “I am a success because I deserve it, those who fail must also deserve their fate”. I have been reading more about the problems in California schools, specifically the deep inequality that exists there. Not only are poorer districts actually funded less (about 20% of school funding in California comes from property taxes in the district) but poorer schools and to a greater extent, schools with high numbers of black and latino students are actually funded less* in the same districts. (despite legislation that prevents this) Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s story, Elite Colleges Open New Door to Low-Income Youths, seems to have its heart in the right place. It’s an uplifting story about an African-American kid from a poor family in Miami who got a full scholarship to Amherst, and did well there, eventally being nominated for the Rhodes scholarship. With his 1200 SAT score, he would not have been admitted had it not been for Amherst’s new policy of taking into account economic background in admissions decisions.

Although these programs of affirmative action on the basis of economic class are a step in the right direction, I think that they do more to reinforce an ideology of meritocracy than to address the deeper problems of economic inequality. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens.   But this is pretty amazing!