Wright Enough

Ok haterz, my latest thoughts on the US presidential election are these: most likely scenario is that John McCain is going to win and Iran will get bombed. Second most likely scenario is that Hillary Clinton will win, after some sort of about turn among Democratic party superdelegates, and Iran will get bombed. The third most likely scenario is that John McCain is going to win and Iran will not get bombed. It is hard to see any circumstances under which Obama might win, since his campaign will be overshadowed by intense media focus on his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The best possible outcome, for people who don’t want to see another catastrophic war, would be the third scenario outlined*. I have no doubt that Clinton would bomb Iran without blinking, and would be just as aggressive as an unrestrained McCain in the pursuit of what is often described as ‘protecting US interests abroad’. The third scenario would be achieved by Obama running an unsuccessful campaign, during which Jeremiah Wright appears on every news show imaginable, speaking at length about US foreign policy, race, class, and any other subject that takes his fancy.

A letter to the Washington Post illustrates the sort of effect he might have:

Like millions of Americans, I watched clips from the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.‘s sermons and thought the man was just another demagogue. But then I listened to his recent speech before the NAACP in Detroit and got the opportunity for the first time to hear a full expression of his ideas and opinions.

He is being mischaracterized by the media and others. He is a great and thoughtful speaker whose views on history, religion and race make perfect sense to me, a patriotic white American.

As he himself notes, Wright is unencumbered by the need to get elected, and could use the platform provided to denounce the blind racist imperial arrogance of the US system. He could make a series of increasingly strident accusations that Obama in fact shares his view that US shouldn’t drop bombs from a great height on civilian populations, and so on. Obama would then have to come out and denounce these outrageous views every night on prime time TV. At some stage, after a couple of months of listening to media pundits raking over every detail of Obama’s failure to call full-bloodedly and unequivocally for the bombing of everyone everywhere, the penny would drop for hundreds of millions of people in the US, who would begin to realise the need to dismantle the US military industrial complex and its TV channels, and by the time McCain got elected he wouldn’t be able to bomb Iran because it’d be ‘politically impossible’, as the saying goes.

*I never said it was a likely scenario.

Update: Dennis Perrin on liberal hatred of the Wright. I liked this:

Digs wasn’t the only lib throwing spitballs at Wright; nor was she alone in denouncing Wright’s “egomania” and “self-aggrandizement” (some added that Wright “envies” Obama’s success, and thus wants to tear him down, because, you know how certain brothers get when another begins to rise). These epithets are swiftly employed when liberals sense that their worldview is being challenged. Ralph Nader was and remains a selfish egomaniac, while Al Gore just wanted to serve his country. Jeremiah Wright borders on the sociopathic, while Obama and Hillary are merely exploring ways to save this great nation. And of course, there’s nothing egomaniacal about liberal bloggers and commentators sliming Wright while telling Obama what he must do and when he needs to do it. They’re simply humble patriots, heads held high under fluttering flags, doing their bit for the US of A.

One Two Three

I loved this film when I saw it for the first and last time about 20 years ago one Saturday night. In the never-ceasing spirit of celluloid necrophila, there will be a remake next year starring John Travolta.

What Crack Would Jesus Smoke?

I think it’s always a bad move to criticise someone’s position based on the religious creed they profess to follow. When Tony Blair slabbered about things like ‘the true voices of Islam‘, he was taking it upon himself to decide what the true voices of Islam actually were. And who decides that? If it’s a matter of faith, then my faith is just as true as yours. If someone believes that slamming a plane into a tall building is an authentic expression of Islamic values, as many people do, there are no grounds for arguing that it is not. That is, what constitutes an authentic expression of faith is totally subjective. You could point out that most Muslims don’t approve of this sort of thing at all, but that doesn’t take you any closer to resolving the matter of what is authentically Islamic. Sadly for some, in terms of belief, there is nothing truly Islamic, or truly Christian. All there is is a series of contests, which result in things like Ian Paisley having a go at the Pope at the European parliament.

The Coca-Cola man was saying the other night that to exist as a profitable global entity his company had to develop its products in such a way that they were acceptable to every local culture. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was trying to emulate Jesus, who is the master of glocalisation. Jesus would change his brand identity, depending on where he was. He could express a desire for love, social justice and universal harmony in some places, and in others he could approve of genocide while disapproving of sex before marriage. He could be the ultimate avenger, destined to return in a flaming chariot to flay the non-believers, the Jews, the sodomites and the communists. Or he could demand that getting exploited and starved by your masters was all part of his plan for you to take up his cross. Then he could be simply a regular guy, not too judgmental about stuff in general, but tending to favour a free-market approach to the provision of public services.

In some parts of Northern Ireland, like in the residence of the Bishop of Derry, Jesus disapproves of the current system of academic selection. A short distance away, at Lumen Christi College, which plans to introduce its own form of academic selection to replace the 11-plus, he thinks academic selection is a good idea.

“We find nothing inconsistent with Catholic social teaching in offering academic selection,” he said.

Mr Doherty said parental choice was the main motivation behind the school’s decision. “For us the most important single thing is the primacy of parental choice. Catholic teaching clearly establishes that parents are the prime educators of their children. Parents certainly will most dearly protect the interests of their children and her imposition of a one size fits all model will deny that parental choice,” he said.

Like I said before, you are on a hiding to nothing if you try and argue that those at Lumen Christi are wrong and that in truth Jesus doesn’t want academic selection. The best you can do, when confronted with words like these, is try and see what role Jesus is playing this time.

The way I see it, Jesus is playing the role of free marketeer. In education, as with the provision of all public services under neo-liberalism, the corollary of ‘choice’, as referred to by the principal, is competition. The funny thing here is that ‘parental choice’ is nothing of the sort, since a system of academic selection, by definition, has nothing to do with choice made by parents, but with the choice made by the academy.

Jesus is also laying down the law here on the separation of sheep from goats. Ontologically speaking, there cannot be academic selection without academic rejection, just as a privilege cannot be a privilege if everyone has it (the mealy-mouthed idea of ‘underprivilege’ is fundamentally ludicrous). Protecting the interests of your children via academic selection then, means destroying the interests of other children through academic rejection. Preserving middle-class privilege means maintaining others at a disadvantage. There is, as the lady said, no alternative. And Jesus, this time, agrees.

The Friday Religion Post Volume 957

If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being – God – to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made, and of which we are now the stewards.

Daniel Dennett.

True, ‘we’, that is, human beings (there any other we? Can one can talk seriously in terms of ‘we the people and the birds and the fish’?), have developed hugely effective sewage systems, highly developed methods of agriculture, anaesthetics, methods of rapid transportation and so on, but these are only good in so far as they address human needs. And the concept of making wonderful things only makes sense if you can wonder at them. But how can you really wonder at things that have been made by humans and are therefore comprehensible in human terms? It might be a source of wonder if we came across a dog who had developed a keen grasp of the essentials of international economics, since that is something we do not expect to dogs do. But humans, like any other species, only do things that they already have the capacity to do.

Do I get a sense that what’s envisioned in Dennett’s phrase is something similar to the shiny happy Christian world of All Things Bright and Beautiful, but with the omnipotent god subtracted? Just as that hymn represents a pleasant world full of nice flowers and the purple headed mountains, but excludes war, famine, pestilence and death, the ‘world of goodness’ blocks out a coeval ‘world of badness’, evidence of which abounds. Furthermore, since Dennett’s ‘world’ is made by humans, he is asking people to treat what humans have made with ‘respect, loyalty and intense devotion’. But isn’t the danger here that the religious worship of one object -the image of an omnipotent god- is substituted for the religious worship of other objects -institutions, political systems, slogans etc? It’s as if Dennett has no problem with forms of behaviour normally classified as religious: he just thinks they should be directed elsewhere. But there are plenty of bad examples of what happens when people become intensely devoted to democracy, or civilization, or other things commonly recognised as motors of progress.

Then there was Robert Winston:

Religion is built into human consciousness and there is plentiful evidence of it being a cohesive force. Apart from the survival of our prehistoric ancestors, in recent times there are powerful examples of how a notion of the transcendental has spurred humans on in desperate situations. Viktor Frankl, in the midst of the extreme deprivation, dehumanisation and despair of Auschwitz observes how, in his assessment, only those with some spirituality – not necessarily a belief in God – survived the depravity of the camp.

The problem I have with this is (apart from the rather dodgy implication that a cohesive force might be a good thing in itself): if he can say that religion is built into human consciousness, then the ability to be aware that religion is built into human consciousness must also be built into human consciousness (he is human, after all). And if this is the case, the religion he describes as being built into human consciousness can’t be religion as we know it (otherwise one could say things, according to the same criteria, such as ‘the sun is built into human consciousness’), leaving one to contemplate if what he is describing is religion at all, in any useful sense of the term.

I have confused myself a bit with the last paragraph. Might need a feed of drink tonight.

The World Is Flan

Haw. Thomas Friedman gets the Tiswas treatment.

Via A Tiny Revolution.

Nuts are we

Brian Feeney writes of Peter Robinson:

You can see how desperate the efforts are. All the examples offered are slightly weird. The inescapable conclusion is that Peter Robinson is the Steve Davis of Norn Irn politics.

You remember the satirical show Spitting Image dubbed him Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis precisely because he wasn’t.

Even when Davis was doing wondrous things with snooker balls no emotion ever showed on his face. When he was interviewed about his amazing performances his responses were uniformly boring and his voice monotonous if not toneless. Likewise all attempts to show that Robinson is ‘interesting’ are doomed to failure.

A couple of weeks ago, to my surprise, I had a brief conversation with Steve Davis. Nice guy. Not boring at all. On the contrary, quite funny. And surprisingly tall.

Smart The Week

Prospect is running its feature again on the world’s top public intellectuals. It seems as though a third of them have already written articles for Prospect, though I doubt that influenced the selection criteria.

Some people say it is a silly thing to make a list in ranked order of these people. I agree, but so what? Why shouldn’t top public intellectuals get listed and discussed in roughly the same way as top risqué comedy moments from children’s TV programmes, or top places to get laid in Paris? It’s not as if people like Alain Finkielkraut or Mario Vargas Llosa are there to be taken seriously.

My only complaint is, if you’re going to present intellectuals in such terms, at least be a bit more than just half-arsed about it. If Thomas Friedman is an intellectual (he writes books and newspaper columns), I’m an accomplished formula one driver (I drive cars).

Here are my votes, and why.

• Bernard Lewis, Orientalist, for looking like Baron Greenback.
• Malcolm Gladwell, Blinker, for writing the worst book I have ever read. And I’ve read books by Marian Keyes.
• Joseph Ratzinger, Pope, for services to the Hitler Youth
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Caged Virgin, for services to the American Enterprise Institute
• David Petraeus, General, for killing loads of Iraqi civilians, quietly and thoughtfully.

Pyjamas Media

Sorry, Risin’ Time with Maxi isn’t the only thing I listen to on the radio. I heard something else today. Not sure what station it was, 98FM maybe, and there was a phone-in about people who wear their pyjamas down the street.

There was one girl trying to convince the listeners that wearing pyjamas down the street was cool, and in doing so pointed out that posh people also wore pyjamas down the street. Another girl disagreed, saying, in effect, that only poor people wore pyjamas down the street. Some dick in the studio, called Jeremy, said people who wore pyjamas were, quite simply, ‘scum’ and that pyjamas down the street were disgusting, for lazy people.

All were more or less agreed: the pyjama-wearing poor are vile.

Have you ever seen a man wearing pyjamas down the street, or is it only women? I passed a couple of women wearing pyjamas the other day. Big deal. I don’t like pyjamas myself, and only wear them in hospitals, bho am I to tell people what to wear? If someone wants to take their child to school in a Big Bird outfit, then more power to their elbow.

What I can’t stick -it got said on the programme tonight- is when the likes of Jeremy start saying that people who wear pyjamas give off the impression of being lazy. I agree: they do. But the difference between me and the likes of he is that I don’t see anything wrong with laziness (though I think idleness is usually a more appropriate term), whereas the yoof on radio phone-in shows want people to wear clothes that demonstrate hard work and moral rectitude.

Well, up theirs.

Busby Flips The Bird

Workers at BT Ireland are to stage a protest in Dublin today to highlight what they say is discrimination against the company’s workforce in the Republic.

Staff claim management are refusing to treat employees in the Republic and the North equally, despite operating its business on a 32-county basis.

I don’t know many details about this particular case, but I was thinking about the general question of how great Northern Ireland is as a ‘nearshore’ solution to keep wages down, particularly in service industries where the nature of the work is such that it may be too risky to transfer to the likes of Bangalore. Unhappy with your wages? There’s a chap two hours up or down the road who’ll do the same job for 25% less, so I’d get the head down if I wuz you. That’s the light in which the recent announcement about the 5,000 IFSC ought to be viewed.

In this case it looks as though there is union representation in the North and none in the Republic. So it isn’t really a matter of one location existing permanently as the most favourable option. The point here at the moment seems to be: run an all-Ireland operation so that the company is in a position to tell the Communications Workers Union to go to hell. Then, once the union goes to hell, the firm can start playing one location off against the other in order to drive costs down further.

The Goodness of the Mighty

Raging news exclusive as the New York Times reports on how the Pentagon mounts vast propaganda operations to give a false impression of U.S. military activities in the media.

The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

Good work. The Times had a couple of other stories today of interest – one was an exposé of the Pope’s Catholicism, and another one about bears…you know the rest.

Still, well worth reading for the ‘human interest’ side of things:

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

What I like about this man is that he doesn’t appear to be some sort of neo-conservative technocrat who thinks that one should lie to the public for its own good, because the truth would be too much to bear. He seems to be a genuine honest-to-god fascist who thinks people should be brainwashed for the glory of the nation.

Slightly related, I was wondering the other day about the lack of decent popular songs about US imperialism  played on the radio these days. This may have something to do with the fact that the only radio I get to listen to is ten minutes of Risin’ Time with Maxi.

Anyway, here’s a couple. Hurt Me Soul by Lupe Fiasco isn’t so much about US imperialism as about everything ever.

It goes:

So through the Grim Reaper sickle sharpening
Macintosh marketing
Oil field auguring
Brazilian adolescent disarmament
Israeli occupation
Islamic martyrdom, precise
Yeah, laser guided targeting
Oil for food, water, and terrorist organization harborin
Sand camouflage army men
CCF sponsorin, world conquerin, telephone monitorin
Louis Vuitton modelin, pornographic actress honorin
String theory ponderin, bullimic vomitin
Catholic priest fondlin, pre-emptive bombin and Osama and no bombin them
They breakin in my car again, deforestation and overloggin and
Hennessy and Hypnotic swallowin, hydroponic coughin and
All the world’s ills, sittin on chrome 24-inch wheels, like that

Love that last line.

Then there’s this one, Empire, by Dar Williams, which I heard on Democracy Now! the other day. The music isn’t my tasse de thé, but the lyrics are strong stuff.

An excerpt:

Who’s afraid of the sun?
Who’d question the goodness of the mighty?
We who banish the threat,
When your little ones all go nighty-nighty.

Well, there’s no time for doubt right now
and less time to explain.
So get back on your horses,
kiss my ring, join our next campaign.

And the empire grows with the news that we’re winning.
With more fear to conquer
and more gold thread for spinning.
Bright as the sun, shining on everyone.

Rest here.