Open Letter to Television and Movie Producers Everywhere

While the so-called "left-wing" blogs remind me the ongoing strike exists, I am not here at their exhortation. Nor am here to copy their form letter or follow their bullet points. I'm here to remind you of one simple, incontrovertible fact:

You're wrong.

If it were possible for me to force your browser to fill your screen with the text, "You're Wrong!" flashing red, I would do so. Because apparently you've managed to ignore every other message that you're wrong.

I am well aware of the byzantine rules and regulations that plague unionized work in Hollywood, and which all but asphyxiate a lot of creative work. But I also know that those rules were born out of a need to thwart a coordinated, pathological effort by studios to keep as much money and control to themselves as possible, and to hell with everyone else.

I don't know where you get this sense of entitlement when it comes to the disposition of other people's work, but it seems necessary to inform you that it is wholly unmerited. The ball you're sitting on and threating to take home does not, in fact, belong to you. And everyone watching you knows it.

It's probably also worth pointing out that the Internet -- the vehicle with which you hope to add to your revenues -- can also be the instrument of your undoing. It is no longer necessary to go through you to get creative works produced and distributed. And, despite your childish and highly destructive efforts to stop it, Internet distribution of entertainment media continues unabated. If you remain inastringent too long, the writers may elect to bypass you entirely and develop and release their work to the Internet directly. At which point, you will have nothing, and the true value of your contributions to the industry will be revealed.

As for me, I don't watch a lot of television, and I can subsist very well on my small library of DVDs, the buffer in the TiVo, Web surfing, and video games. So I frankly don't care if new TV shows come out or not. Yet I have taken valuable time out of my day to tell you this:

Your position is indefensible -- ethically, morally, and fiscally. In short, you're acting like a jerk, and everyone knows it. Even people who don't care about television know you're acting like a jerk. And, just in case it's been unclear to you all this time, acting like a jerk is a bad thing.

Grow the hell up and give the writers their fair due.

"...And That I Will Preserve, Protect, and Defend The President's Ass."

It's getting darned depressing listening to the news these days. You can either listen to authoritarian media and get angry at all the things they refuse to cover, or you can listen to "left-wing" news and get angry about the things they are covering.

Today's unplesant revelation came in a broadcast of NPR's Fresh Air, who was interviewing Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage. He previously earned fame covering Bush's unprecedented use of "signing statements," which Bush believes allow him to creatively misinterpret or flat-out ignore laws Congress has passed. Savage now has a book out entitled Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.

The little trick Savage details here is the use of the little-known Office of Legal Counsel. This is a wing of the DOJ that researches and writes legal opinions for the President, advising him/her on the legality of programs the President may wish to implement (such as torturing prisoners of war for information, or comprehensively wiretapping the entire US citizenry without a warrant or even probable cause). Such ideas are submitted to the OLC, who then research precedent and laws on the books and render an opinion.

Well, when Bush was elected installed in 2001, the OLC was stacked with legal "scholars" who were, to put it mildly, out of their tiny little minds. Hand-picked by authoritarian extremists who bristled at the limits Congress imposed on the Presidency following the Vietnam and Watergate disasters (*cough*Cheney*cough*), these new appointees were given affirmative instructions to roll back or circumvent those limits and, "Leave the office in better shape than when he came in."

To that end, the Office of Legal Counsel has been issuing opinions that are shared by virtually no other legal scholars in the country. The opinion that said torture was okay? That was OLC's work. The opinions that said the President can wiretap anyone he damn well pleases? OLC.

The legal dodge here is that, by consulting with the OLC, the Bush League can claim they weren't going off half-cocked on their own initiative, but that they can be said to have been, "acting in good faith." "Hey, we consulted with our lawyers, we asked for their expert opinion, and they said this was okay. How could we possibly have known something was wrong with it?"

This claim is, of course, fatuous on its face. However, not being a lawyer, I have no idea how much time and energy it will take to blast through this facade of, "good faith." While consulting with the Office of Legal Counsel may lend an appearance of, "good faith," the Office itself was clearly staffed in bad faith, and all opinions rendered thereafter must therefore be tainted. Whether Congress has any recourse here aside from impeachment is unclear.

It's beginning to look as if the corruption of the DOJ has been more complete than anyone initially feared.

The Winning Hand

In Betting on 00, I described an analogy to compulsive gambling. That is certainly one way to view the Stay The Course(TM) mantra, but it is perhaps not the most charitable one. So, carrying the analogy a bit further...

Stay The Course(TM) may find its roots in the typically American belief that, "We Are Right, We Are Just, We Are Strong, and We Can Totally Kick Your Ass." Few would dispute that the US military is unmatched on the planet. Our fighting forces are the best trained and the best equipped anywhere in the world. It is inconceivable that, given an objective, the US military could not achieve it.

At least, it was inconceivable until Vietnam. It was a colossal, unmitigated failure. It proved that even the finest, most powerful tools can be misused with disasterous results.

But that's not the lesson the authoritarians took away from their failure in southeast Asia. You may have recently heard transparent attempts at revisionism, saying that we failed in Vietnam because those Dirty Fucking Hippies made us stop lose. The Liberals chickened out and made us leave lose. We didn't Stay The Course(TM). If we'd stayed, we could have won...

Every time I hear this line of "reasoning," I find myself thinking of a game of poker. One of the players -- the US -- has been dealt a winning hand, in the form of our incredible military. Four aces, royal flush, whatever you like, the pot is ours. All we have to do is get to the end of the round and rake it in.

But there are a couple of problems. First, it's a no-limit table -- the stakes can grow arbitrarily high. And second, there are at least two other people at the table. And they're batshit-crazy. They keep raising, each against the other. And that would be fine -- the pot gets bigger -- except that that's all they're doing. We keep calling, they keep raising, we call, they raise again...

You've seen the turned-up cards. You know no one else can possibly beat your hand, so could we get to the end-game, please? But no, these crazy players keep raising each other, seemingly trying to scare each other out, but it's not working, and we keep calling, waiting for the cycle of madness to end.

Eventually, we look at our wallet and realize we can't keep this up much longer. Maybe we can borrow some money -- go to Congress and ask for supplementary funding. Great, we can keep calling the raises for a while. Surely they will soon tire of this brinksmanship. But they don't. Because they're crazy. And the raises continue...

Eventually, money needed for other things is now sitting in the pot, waiting for the game to end. The entire citizenry, which hitherto had been dilligently pursuing their own interests, are now sitting with us at the table, their own fortunes also in the pot, watching and waiting for the crazy people to stop being crazy and the game to end so they can get back to their lives. And still the raises continue...

In such circumstances, when does Stay The Course become plainly ridiculous and foolhardy, even when you have the winning hand? I think our leaders are having trouble figuring that one out.

One difference, I think, is that, if we leave the table, the other players will not -- as I suspect our leaders imagine -- snigger amongst themselves and split the pot. They will keep raising against each other, unto the end of time. Our mistake was not that we left too early, or stayed too long. Our mistake was that we assumed they were playing poker when, in fact, they were playing another game entirely.

Betting on 00

This month -- September -- has been variously described by the authoritarians as the do-or-die month for the "surge" in Iraq. This is when we'll "know" whether it's working and, based on that, decide what to do next. Well, as you may have noticed, it's not working.

It was obvious that it wouldn't, of course. Out of 15 benchmarks required by Congress, only three have been met, and even then only if you stare at them just right. Report after report is coming out of Iraq saying that violence is rising, deaths are rising, refugees continue to stream out of country, and the Iraqi government exists in little more than name only.

Yet already the presses are being primed to spin one or two minor improvements in minor details as sufficient cause to Stay The Course(TM). "Just give us another Friedman Unit and then you'll really see improvement."

In other words, exactly the same rubbish we've been fed for the last four and a half years.

This whole Stay The Course mantra reminds me less of steadfast determination and more of a compulsive gambler, hovering over the roulette wheel, always betting on double-zero. Everyone around him urges him to spread his bets, cover other numbers, place an easy bet on red or black, or even move to a different game entirely. But no, he persists with double-zero.

Eventually, the ball falls on his number. Heedless of how much he has lost to get to this point, both in money and in reputation, he punches his fist in the air and victoriously proclaims, "See?? All it took was faith and determination!"

No. All it proves is that, by random chance, even an abject fool will on occasion be right.

Astonishing

Read this:

Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren't Listening.

I've been sitting here for five minutes, trying to come up with some original commentary, or even a (printable) quip, but I can't. I'm just too stunned, too flabbergasted to learn that such thinking still exists within our borders.

What Are You Thinking?

Yesterday, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama had this to say about impeachment:

"There's a way to bring an end to those practices, you know: vote the bums out," the presidential candidate said, without naming Bush or Cheney. "That's how our system is designed." [ ... ]

"I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president's authority," he said. [Emphasis mine.]

*blink* *blink*

Let's review:

• Torture of prisoners in US custody, in violation of the Geneva Convention and the Fifth , Sixth, and Eighth Amendments.
• Comprehensive wiretapping of every domestic telephone line, without a warrant or even probable cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
• Leaving New Orleans and surrounding area to rot in the wake of hurricane Katrina.
• Fabricating "intelligence" before Congress as a pretext to war (Congressional perjury).
• Compromising a covert intelligence agent's identity -- destroying that agent's value in the field, and destroying the intelligence network that agent created and maintained -- solely for political retaliation.
• Refusal to comply with Congressional subpoenas.
• Refusal to cooperate with oversight agencies.
• Refusal to tell the truth about any damned thing at all.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Tell me, Mister Senator: If this does not constitute, "grave grave breaches and intentional breaches of the President's authority..." What, pray tell, does?

Seriously. I'd like to know. We would all like to know.

Ad Hominem

In debate circles, one of the available tactics to participants is the ad hominem attack -- the personal attack. Rather than deconstructing or attacking your opponent's arguments and assumptions, you simply attack your opponent. You call into question their character, or their intellect, or their religious faith, or their fashion sense, or their personal hygiene, etc.

This tactic has seen a surge of use in authoritarian circles against dissenters of all stripes in the last few years. Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly have made careers out of it. Once their handful of genuine arguments is exhausted, they resort to personal insults. This typically takes the form of questioning the dissenter's patriotism, but occasionally it descends even further into sneering remarks about the social mores of their region of residence, the quality of their haircut, and other non sequiturs.

As debate tactics go, it's quite lame, and says more about the weakness of the attacker's position than of their target. Long-time readers of NetNews are all-too familiar with it, and eventually learn to discount insult-laced screeds out of hand.

That's why I find posts like this disappointing. We are shown a video of President Bush stumbling through yet another unrehearsed public address, and the accompanying copy reads, "See how lame he looks. Wow, that's lame. Must've been painful to have been in the room with all that lameness."

Look, Bush's public speaking skills have always been below par. That's not news. I'm no friend of this President, but the linked post is essentially content-free. It's an ad hominem. It's not even weakly couched inside a broader commentary about immigration policy ("The President's speech about immigration today, which was really lame, spoke of Congress' need to cooperate..."). No, it was just a personal attack, and nothing more. And not even a very good personal attack.

We can do better than that. In fact, we must do better than that. Authoritarians resort to ad hominem because their positions are ethically and logically weak or, quite often, wholly bankrupt. Our positions are strong, well-reasoned, and bolstered by facts. I enjoy the occasional imaginative, well-crafted snark as much as anyone. But, like candy, it should be a lightly-used garnish rather than the whole content. We have the luxury of a wide variety of fine argumentation tools at our disposal. We don't need to reach for that blunt instrument. Put it away.

Why "Blowback"?

Happily, Blogger lets you change the title (and the URL, apparently) at any time. But before I knew that, I sat bashing in various phrases ranging from snotty to ridiculous ("The Correct Pulpit," "You Aren't Paying Attention," "Rantopia," "Environmentally-Conscious Dilithium Crystal Mine") and seeing how they looked. Eventually the word "blowback" spilled on to the keyboard, and it seemed to resonate.

"Blowback" has a few definitions, but the one I immediately seized on was the slang interpretation among the government intelligence agencies referring to unintended consequences resulting from covert operations. It occurred to me that the entire "netroots" movement could be thought of as blowback resulting from decades of misdeeds by right-wing authoritarians. The history of the United States, as romanticized as it is, is replete with examples of Bad People doing Bad Deeds. Sometimes, only the prism of hindsight reveals Deeds or People as Bad. But when Bad Deeds or Bad People are instantly obvious to rational individuals as Bad, and those people do nothing about it, is when the opportunity arises for them to become Very Bad Deeds and Very Bad People.

It's easy to get the idea that things, as they are now, are the worst that things have ever been (or the best that things have ever been (Charles Dickens, call your office)). Without omniscience, we cannot know, in relative terms, how grave the excesses of the current Administration are compared to the excesses of the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, the Islamic Caliphates, the emperors of China, and so forth. But it's pretty obvious to see that our Administration is doing Bad Deeds.

Let me emphasize that: That our Administration is doing Bad Deeds is, at this point, obvious. There is absolutely no rational basis for believing otherwise, and little excuse for not being aware of it. Yet, the Bad Deeds continue, and the people tasked with looking for Bad Deeds and putting a stop to them (the Justice Department), or at least shining a bright light on them (the media and press), have steadfastly remained inert and silent. And that leads inexorably to Very Bad Deeds.

There are zillions of us who recognize Bad Deeds are happening. But we expected -- indeed, we were taught -- that there were other people who would take care of it. The press would shame them into stopping, or the police would haul them off to jail. And in fact that worked in the past.

But today, for some reason, it's not working. It's broken. In fact, it's worse than broken -- it's backwards. The press is shining a light on these Bad Deeds, and telling us they're good things (or, if you push them in to a corner, that they're necessary things, made necessary by the vagaries of war). The police likewise are looking straight at the Bad Deeds and saying, "What are you complaining about? There's nothing wrong." In some cases, the police themselves are doing the Bad Deeds. Lawyers and Officials are trying to inject uncertainty and semantic ambiguity into what used to be taken for crystal-clear language and actions, and building self-serving arguments on top of them. And then the media uncritically broadcasts these arguments without so much as a hint of dissent or even ironic commentary. Bad Deeds are happening, everyone can see they're Bad Deeds, and yet an enormous amount of effort is being put into telling us they're not Bad Deeds, and we should shut the hell up about it.

...And thus is born the conditions for Blowback.

I get the impression that the "netroots" movement came as something of a Complete Surprise to right-wing authoritarians. "How dare they question us?" seems to be the principal refrain. "How dare they attempt to rise above their station?" I suspect this is the same general class of Complete Surprise as was the Shah of Iran being deposed in the late 1970's. Or the various "leftist" movements in Central and South America, displacing US-supported dictators. That this reaction comes as any surprise at all illustrates one of two things:

1. These people are stupid,
2. These people are paying attention to something else.

I hope to explore the latter possibility in subsequent rants. It's easy to demonize people doing Bad Deeds as Bad People, but that's a cop-out. It "discards" the people without analyzing their motivations. I don't believe sociopaths make up that significant a fraction of the population, so I'm prepared to believe these are intelligent, possibly well-meaning, people who are thinking about something else. Some other ethical structure or framework is in their mind that will immediately explain their actions, and all that remains is for us to discover it. Then we can all have our "Ah-ha!" moment, correct or address their misconceptions, and move on.

But in the meantime, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people who are angry and frustrated. They are angry and frustrated because they know Bad Deeds are happening, they know Bad Deeds when they see them, and know that they need to do something to make them stop before they become Very Bad Deeds. This blog is a result of that frustration.

This blog is Blowback.

Update 2007-06-29:11:09: As I'm just getting started, it should be pointed out that everything, including the blog's title, is subject to change.

I only bring this up because my sweetie informs me that she very much would have preferred "Rantopia." *sigh*

C:\> format blog:

This blog was created on impulse. As such, there's no plan, no strategy, no vision of things to come. (#include <iraq_punchline.h>) I have vague ideas about contemporaneous political and social rants but, honestly, I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.

As is my fashion, I've immediately become distracted by the goodies to control page design and layout, so I'll probably start by wasting far too much time with that.

But, as the old Chinese proverb goes, "A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a three-hour schlep to the airport." We have to start somewhere, so let's call it here.