Indian, the Mexican, the German, the Filipino, the German, the Japanese, the Russian, and soon, the Chinese
You forgot one.
You keep the enemies foreign, or you improve your own marksmanship.
Ogged, this post gratifies my withered little left-wing heart, so maybe you need to work on getting back to the cock jokes and the "who's hotter?" posts.
You just cop to hating America. 'Seasy!
I'd been seduced by the rhetoric that casts the right as bed-wetters who are irrationally afraid of infinitesimal risk.
I'm not sure that you need to abandon one for the other.
You forgot one.
Indeed. I was so concerned about not spelling Filipino with a "ph." Sorry about that.
In this context, I was talking to someone not all that long ago -- must have been Idealist, given the content of the conversation -- and found out that 'Indian country' is still current military slang for "an area in which it is possible that you will be unexpectedly attacked."
This reminds me of Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence:
[A] sweeping 1975 survey of American Colonial and early Republican literature... His argument...is that, as the British colonists established their own societies in the wilderness, they expressed their regional desires for territorial expansion and self-rule by reinventing their history. Their narratives, according to Slotkin, revolved around frontiersmen who internalized, then disciplined, the "savagery" of their new environments, using their newfound mastery of nature to transform the wilderness into a revitalized civilization.
Link is from Amazon.
I'm not sure this is unique to the US. See Faces of the Enemy.
From the Amazon summary
Each nation seeks to justify warfare by creating a monstrous image of its enemy. Killing is made a source of pride, murder a patriotic duty; war becomes a holy war "with God on our side." Keen (The Passionate Life) uses political posters and cartoons to demonstrate that belligerent countries have consistently characterized the enemy as aggressor, barbarian, devil, rapist, insect, germ. Noting that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. need to view one another as evil, he urges a massive overhaul of fixed postures and attitudes.
Every country demonizes the enemy during wartime, but America seems to need to do the demonizing even without a war (and often as a way to gin one up). Anyway, I'm not sure it's important that it be unique.
I'm not sure that this is a distinctly American tendency, rather than a more general feature of human nature. Everyone has an Other (c.f. Said). What is more particularly American is a kind of societal messianic complex. This strain runs from the "City on a Hill" through manifest destiny to wilsonian foreign policy and,eventually, fukuyama. Thus whereas a normal country might freak out over terrorism and bomb an unrelated country into the stone age, we must turn it into a "beacon of democracy."
Ogged, there has been a unified German state, and hence only one "the German", for almost two decades now. Do try to keep up.
12 -- I was going to ask if you were familiar with the Japanese (one of the most xenophobic cultures on the planet) but I think you're correct that uniqueness isn't important.
So how do other countries avoid getting into stupid conflicts?
I've seen pre-WWII German propaganda about the vicious provocations of the Czechs and the Poles, but I didn't save them. They would have educational value for sure.
16: You didn't save the Czechs and the Poles? Well, don't feel too bad, Emerson. You're only one person, after all.
Collaberationist bastard.
15, 18: To the extent they exist, I think they manage by being too small and weak to pull it off, while not having anything their neighbors want. Samoa's had a very peaceful foreign policy in the almost 40 years it's been independent.
I think this phenomenon is related to the brand of American exceptionalism that believes we are Good. And if we are Good, evil must always be external to us.
Of course it's not uniquely American, but the violence/demonization dynamic plays out here in its own unique way and (see 9) in its own unique historical context. By contrast, Japanese xenophobia, for example, tends to play out in contemporary society through personal attitudes and institutionalized racism rather than through thuggish violence. That they've been about as peaceful as the Samoans since WWII owes to their defeat, but hey, whatever works.
It's sickening that it has to be so, but abortion providers are prudent to take extra precautions after the Supreme Court upheld the PBABA. For the anti-choice spokespeople you hear on NPR, the decision meant "at last, the system is working for us," but for a lot of their allies, it meant support for whatever means necessary against the murderous enemy. God shed his grace on thee, America.
When I read this story yesterday I simply could not believe that a terrorist attack was foiled in the U.S. of A. and it didn't even make the news. I mean, what the hell? Seriously?
Maybe the clinic itself doesn't want the publicity for fear of encouraging copycats.
15,18:
Its difficult to describe instances of avoided wars since they didn't actually occur, but one can examine how various countries dealt with actual stupid wars. We "persuaded" the UK to cut their losses in Suez in 1956,after which the PM resigned. Other approaches include double-or-nothing (WWI-WWII) and killing the offending leader and his family (Russo-Japanese)
Its worth noting that, whatever their other flaws, all of these conflicts had some concrete motive,be it regular territorial aggrandizement in the case of WWI-II, or economic as in the cases of the other two. I honestly can't come up with an instance of a war that rivals Iraq in sheer pointlessness. Surely there must have been at least one? The Soccer War maybe?
I trust that everyone saw this WWII-era comic, in which the Justice Society of America takes on ten centuries of German militarism and perfidy?
The Iraq war had a concrete motive, didn't it? Get a government in place who would be on the same side as Bush's friends in the oil business?
I din't know Billy Pilgrim was a member of the JSA!
Yes, as we seen in 26, the Iraq War was not the most stupidly conceived war of all time. If this was a hundred years ago, we would not have hesitated to commit genocide in order to actually accomplish the goal (replace Saddam with Ahmed Chalabi, maintaining the same institutional structure), and it would have been a mighty act of imperialism.
Here's one candidate, although this article portrays Paraguay's decisions in a much less stupid light than I've usually heard.
Not surprising thougth --- isn't it easier to see these things as anomalous? A temporary slip of judgement, a temporary hysteria, rather than a flaw in national character (insomuch as that is a useful construct)?
26:
You'd think so, but you'd have a tough time proving it. If all they wanted was a pliable client state, they could have installed Chalabi. Indeed, according to Cobra II, that was the plan of the Rumsfeld-Feith-Cheney axis, but Bush vetoed it and insisted on elections. Trying to discern motive in a situation like this is always going to be speculative, as it is difficult to separate malice from incompetence. But what I mean by "pointlessness" is not necessarily that there is no point, but rather that the informed observer cannot readily identify it.
30: I'm pretty sure `idealistically driven, malicious incompetence' covers most of the bases with this lot.
20: On the contrary - ogged isn't describing American exceptionalism. Rather, he is flirting with a form of American exceptionalism himself.
In fact, I'd argue that his first instinct - blame the Republicans - is correct. After all, had the will of the American majority been carried out in 2000, the current American situation would be a lot different. And even given that Bush almost got the plurality in 2000, he ran on a platform that was essentially the opposite of what he actually did.
Competence at home and humility abroad was his pitch.
Asking why we invaded Iraq is like asking why the stock market went up or down on a given day. Analysts will trot out theories, sometimes very plausible theories, but we'll never really know.
30: I see Bush as the idealistic one here. By "idealistic" I mean "ignorant and fixated on some nebulous idea of his historical legacy." What you had in the Iraq War was cold-hearted evil (the whole Chalabi thing, guarding only the oil ministry, bringing in the Heritage Foundation interns to run the "reconstruction effort" for the first year) mixed with pie-in-the-sky idealism (Debaathifying everything, thinking the war would be funded by Iraq's oil, calling for elections during a time of anarchy when people were obviously going to affiliate with whatever death squad was protecting them at the time).
The result is a bunch of strategic decisions that were completely incompatible with each other. Hey, let's spare no expense when it comes to reconstruction funds; after all, deposing Saddam has not been without its downside for some people. But wait, our principles force us to outsource all government activity so that the free hand of the market can manifest itself in no-bid contracts with guaranteed profits, so instead of giving money to Iraqis we have to give it to Bechtel and Halliburton and let the magic of trickle-down do its work. Damn those ungrateful Iraqis, they're still shooting at us after all that reconstruction money! Sounds like what they need is another joyful injection of grassroots democracy, and a new flag based on the Israeli one. Let's live and let live. But with extreme prejudice.
Radical Islam is no greater a threat to America than were
Filipino immigrants? Only someone who went to college could believe something that stupid.
Hey guys, Jose brought pastries!
Look out! As a college graduate, I can tell you there's a Filipino immigrant sneaking up on you right now!
Jose Chung will not keep you safe from the Filipino menace. Appeaser!
37: Evidence suggests, as we've learned, that one who tries to jump you won't get far.
M.Rab's point seems to be that a sense of historical perspective keeps you from appreciating the threat to America from outsider groups. I think that's exactly what ogged was trying to say.
30 & 34 - is it true that elections were Bush's idea? I thought the consensus was that the Bush admin only went forward with elections at the insistence of Sistani.
I don't know what idea was whose. I think Cheney would rather have tried to replace Saddam with Chalabi, and if Sistani disagreed he would replace Sistani with a puppet, and so on and so forth. I think Bush believes all the nonsense he spouts about how democracy is the natural state of society and it springs forth when you remove the abnormal aberration of an autocratic ruler. But then again, he was a history major, so is that even possible?
Asking why we invaded Iraq is like asking why the stock market went up or down on a given day. Analysts will trot out theories, sometimes very plausible theories, but we'll never really know.
My hillbilly sense of agency says that we invaded Iraq because the leaders we elected to run the executive decided to invade Iraq, and in our political system they had the power to do so. Why we elected them and why they wanted to invade Iraq are more complex questions, but these questions aren't completely mysterious either.
34 is great, Ned.
As for exceptionalism, even my comprehensive store of ethnic and national stereotypes doesn't qualify me to judge whether Americans are unique in this respect. I suspect not. I was just trying to describe what seems to be at the heart of our reaction of 9/11, and the hysterical reaction to a much weaker and outnumbered enemy struck me.
41:
That's what I assumed at the time, but Cobra II's authors maintain otherwise, and they seem relatively credible.
Also, John, most Americans were in a mood for another war against some Muslims. And the press (characteristically) went along with the rulers. And the leaders' reasons are, I think, diverse. And The Decider's mind is clearly a black box of mystery.
I just ate a couple of hours ago and I'm still feeling pretty satisfied. Can't the trolls get their act in gear and show up before lunch, when we've worked up an appetite? Sheesh. It's just as well, I guess, given that the ol' "educated people r teh dum haw haw!" chestnut indicates he'd likely bring half-price day-olds that are all sticky, no sweet, anyway.
It's easy to forget Wolfowitz's importance in the war. He liked Chalabi and believed a lot of the INC's bullshit, but he also really believed in the liberation-->democracy model. I suspect that once the idea of installing Chalabi was shot down (with Sistani adding his voice to a pretty sizable bloc within the US government), Wolfowitz might have pushed hard for his democratic Iraqi utopia vision.
Wolfowitz is very idealistic, he doesn't seem to fit in with Rumsfeld and Cheney at all. I feel quite sorry for him. Without him, I don't think Colin Powell or any number of other people in the government would have been able to convince themselves "Maybe there's something to this plan other than opportunism and imperialism."
Bush's mind is not really a black box of mystery. He chose Cheney as a running made, and Cheney is a long-time militarist of roughly the PNAC / "national greatness" type (granted that the two types are not identical). The 9/11 attack made justification easier, but the reasons why they invaded Iraq after Afghanistan were unrelated to the 9/11 attack -- Iraq had been in the sights for years.
48: the marvel of it all being how such superficial thinkers actually manage to get to positions of significant power.
I don't know much about the other neocons, but it may be that they were all played for chumps, with their only contributions being the idealistic/optimistic public face for what the guys behind the curtain (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Chalabi) were hoping to make into a bloodbath of imperialism.
52: How can you be played for a chump when what you've been begging to have happen for years finally happens? Because it turns out to be a shitty idea? Then you are a chump.
Bush's mind is not really a black box of mystery.
This is true. Bush's mind is a idyllic wonderland, a place where dreams take wing. The black box of mystery is stashed under his jacket, and the two are forever fighting to determine what comes out of his mouth.
I generally take a more hopeful view of America and Americanism - an Emersonian view, one might say, without needing to be too specific about which Emerson. In this view, America's current situation was partially the result of historical accidents, and was entirely preventable without altering any signficant aspect of the American character.
I agree with Emerson that GWB's mind is not particularly a black box of mystery here. Saddam was a Bush family enemy. For GWB, it was just that simple. Or rather, GWB is just that simple.
The rest of the neocons (as well as deluded liberal hawks) had their own reasons for supporting the invasion, which may not sum up to any single coherent "Why America Invaded Iraq."
Don't forget the 2nd Amendments invlovement in the frontier mentality. Virgin Land and all that.
35: A guy who calls himself "Jose Chung" defending Filipino immigrants against radical Muslim-loving college graduates? Hm. It's Michelle Malkin's fat basement half-brother, Rommel, who had to drop out of Rutgers-Camden and has only seen Muslims outside the news on NBA games.
Or someone exactly like that.
See, 50 and 56 are both plausible but different descriptions of Bush's motivations here. I doubt Bush himself could give a coherent explanation of why he chose war -- he certainly hasn't managed this feat so far. (And of course, Bush's choosing war is hardly the only relevant cause of the war.)
44: Even beyond the attempt to generalize inappropriately about the American character, there are other problems in this post.
One striking aspect of the war in Iraq is our *failure* to demonize our enemies - or even coherently identify them. Who - beyond Al Qaeda - does our rhetoric actually cast at the enemy in Iraq? Who does the United States so deeply oppose in Iraq that we can't imagine allying with them a year from now?
The entirety of American rhetoric is built on the idea that we are there to help the Iraqis. We've seen a turn lately toward blaming the Iraqis for their failure to be helped, but that's a different flavor of racism.
Another objection: Whoever our enemies actually are in Iraq, they aren't powerless or wildly overmatched. In almost any reading of American objectives in Iraq, our enemy (whoever that is) is pretty clearly going to win.
And one more gripe: The description of the Indians that you supply was not some outrageous demonization - it was probably more-or-less accurate. The problem with the governor of Minnesota is that he took that behavior out of its proper context, not that he reported it inaccurately.
invlovement
A Freudian slip if ever there was one.
PF, the post wasn't about Iraq; I had al-qaeda and the threat of domestic terrorism in mind. And the descriptions of the perfidious muslim terrorists are also accurate, but one can still detect the hysteria.
Bush's difficulties of expression come mostly when he's lying. There's always been a big gap between the explanations and justifications of the war and its motives. Take a few words and phrases -- oil, Israel, preponderance, unipolar, projection of power -- and you've got it. Most civilian populations these days have trouble accepting the idea that war is an intrinsically good thing as long as you win, and that reasons can always be found.
I found Lynd's "Made in Texas" very convincing. He sees Bush non-metaphorically as an heir of the Confederacy through East Texas. One key shared value is anti-democracy -- planter civilization was based on an uneducated, impoverished, powerless, disenfranchised working class. Another was the planter resource economy and expansion into areas populated by darker races. (The Civil War stopped that, but otherwise the Mexican War would just have been a beginning -- there was even a foray into Nicaragua in 1857.)
Ogged, I'd consider accuracy to be an ironclad defense against accusations of hysteria - just as it is an ironclad defense against accusations of libel. For something to be hysterical it must, by definition, be inaccurate.
I see that you didn't mention Iraq, but I think Iraq is the primary manifestation of the "overreaction to the threat from muslim terrorism." Other than that (and the hysteria about Iran, which I suppose you are also excluding), I'm not sure what real hysteria we've seen.
Yes, yes, saying that is like saying "Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" There's been plenty of hysteria. But you're the one who wants to exclude these things.
I admit it's presumptuous of me to disagree with someone who personally may be better acquainted with anti-Muslim hysteria, but what are the elements of this hysteria that you find interesting in this context? Overdone airport security? ABC firing Bill Maher? Gitmo?
58 - Nah, it's a super-dated TV reference (to a good, jokey episode of The X-Files).
Seriously, PF? You want for examples of hysteria? What about the Patriot Act, or Gitmo, or the gutting of habeus, or the ban on liquids on planes, or the Boston police shutting down the city because of an ad campaign? I could go on, for quite a long time.
Smallville public libraries having terrorism plans.
I thought I posted on this thread. Jose Chung's From Outer Space.
Also, I think ogged has the symptoms right but not the diagnosis. Americans seem to define themselves as ruggedly individualistic, and always overcoming obstacles. Revolutions, civil wars. It's a perpetual underdog syndrome; david sticking it to goliaths.
No one wants to be the guy that overcame his iPod and his new minivan or freaked out, so every threat gets inflated into an existential threat.
67: the astonishing thing is how well goliath can delude himself into thinking he's david.
68: Hmm. We've had Grendel; has anyone ever attempted a telling from Goliath's point of view?
There's a lot of continuity between the authoritarian responses to drugs and gangs, and the authoritarian response to terrorism, even though the targets and threats are completely unrelated (except presumably to Jonah Goldberg and that kind).
70: The authoritarian response to percieved threats is pretty one note, as a rule. Whatever it is, declare pre-emptive war and never stop believing.
72: I like that - but you're not being literal, right?
If we aren't going to be literal, I'd add Tom Wolfe.
No, I meant literally. Literature celebrating and justifying the strong is not rare.
Idp was being literal--I was not--all leading up to wonderful hilarious confusion!
Then again, there is that poem of his, "Time To Smash David".
I think we should separate the American "overreaction" to the threat of Islamic terrorism into a foreign-policy sphere and a domestic-affairs sphere.
On the foreign policy front, yeah, you have the invasion of Iraq. Hard to ignore that one. But even in Iraq, we're not demonizing a race, religion, or culture. We're trying (if not succeeding as much as we'd like) to help ordinary Iraqis while defeating the terrorist groups who are killing them in an attempt to spread chaos and thereby increase their own power.
On the domestic front, claims of an "overreaction" look downright silly. I mean, right after 9-11, you have Bush making a speech where he calls Islam a religion of peace and invites an imam to speak as well. America did not, and still has not, seen a rash of hate crimes against Muslims (as opposed to the conspicuous trend of hate crimes committed by Muslims against Jews in, say, France.) In fact, Americans recently elected a Muslim congressman.
Americans are understandably edgy about another 9-11, and may be erring a bit more on the side of caution than you would like in cases when, say, a group of imams start shouting Allahu Akbar at a boarding gate. But really, an overreaction? Let's save that until the pogroms get started.
Separately, Ogged, I strongly disagree with your proposition that America is somehow engaged in the normalization of violence against women. We just saw three young men at Duke dragged through a media feeding frenzy for a whole year due to one woman's false claim that they raped her. This is not the sign of a culture that treats violence against women as normal.
If you ranked all the countries in the world in order of the rights and freedoms they guarantee to women, and the legal recourse they make available to redress wrongs, America would come out pretty well, I suspect. The same goes for the notion that American identity is somehow defined by "hysterical warring with an ostensibly implacable, hostile and uncivilized other". As other commenters have noted, all countries do this to some extent (or want to, but don't have a big enough military to make it possible). What does make American identity different from that other countries is the extent to which people from all over the world can share in it by immigrating here. I could live in Japan my whole life, even take Japanese citizenship, and I still wouldn't be treated as "Japanese" here. I also would have a pretty hard time assimilating into any of the Muslim countries of the Middle East, what with my not being Muslim and all. America is distinguished by its acceptance of the other, not by its demonization of it.
"that other countries" s/b "that of other countries"
when do we start ignoring GB?
GB, the domestic "overreaction" consists of a rather small number of specific cases which, as precedents, comprise a nullification of a large number of civil-liberties principles which were taken for granted before 9/11. That's been explained above. The fact that there are only a small number of cases indicates to me that the threat supposedly being addressed is not very great, and that the real target is the civil liberties themselves. Some of the new powers the Bush administration has granted itself haven't been used yet, but America has changed. (And the Clinton adminstration too. A lot of the people cheerleading Bush's power grab screamed bloody murder at some of Clinton's legal innovations, in many cases rightly so. Only a few of them, e.g. Bob Barr, are saying anything about Bush's much greater provocations.)
There's no evidence that the nullification of habeas corpus has been necessary or useful in the war against terrorism. But if not overturned by the Supreme Court or a subsequent administration, the handful of cases involves means that American law has been totally transformed. That's what we call overreaction.
You've got a point there, John. I wasn't considering the legal aspects of the reaction to 9-11; I was thinking about Iraq and public opinion. Of course, nothing you wrote affects what I said about what's happened (and hasn't happened) in those areas, or anything I wrote in #78.
I should have read 64 and 66...
GB. I think that in a real-world context your "downright silly" phrase in #77 makes you look like a dumbfuck. In #66 Ogged made it clear that when he spoke of overreaction he was thinking about exactly the same kinds of things I was tlking about in #80.
Of course, the US has done all sorts of crazy stuff in the name of a perceived threat in times of war, like cramming Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Our civil liberties and our law survived that era, and indeed became even stronger. I'm confident that the current troubles won't break the back of the American legal system.
#84: True, and as I admitted in #83, I hadn't read #66 before posting. So sue me. I am sure this is the first time in Unfogged history that someone has commented on a thread without carefully scrutinizing every other comment that's been posted to it previously.
I sense a lot of hostility in you, young Skywalker.
There's also a general tendency to conflate anything bad with potential terrorism. Asian shooter at VA Tech? Maybe by "Asian", they meant "Indian", by which they meant "Pakistani" by which they meant "Saudi student terrorist hijacker from China", in the early speculation on the shooting. Poisoned pet food? The terrorists are attacking our cats! A lot of people's first thought is terrorism, no matter the incident.
And that's what's weird about the lack of response to the clinic bomb. Imagine the bomb had been found and detonated at a post office or a schoolyard. You'd not be able to swing a comment box without hitting posts about the threat of terrorism. It hits a clinic? Crickets. The charitable answer is that violence against women isn't as important as the global war on moisture; the not-so-charitable answer is that we know exactly who bombs clinics, and they're not Muslim.
The not-so-charitable answer is the correct one, I suspect. See, terrorism only counts as terrorism if it's performed by terrorists, and in 2007, the word "terrorist" doesn't include Americans.
Given that many (most?) abortion providers are men, bombing a clinic cannot be considered violence specifically against women. It's definitely an attempt to terrorize women so they won't get abortions... but it's also an attempt to terrorize doctors, female and male, so they won't perform them. Indeed, the victims of pro-life terrorism are often male.
Sure abortion doctors can be male, but unless men are getting abortions these days, let's not kid ourselves about the likely target of the violence or whom it threatens or intimidates. Women and the people who care for them.
And men like Dr. Slepian. Did you read the linked article in 89? Pro-life extremists hounded Slepian for over a decade, and finally one guy shot him through the window of his house. He was individually marked for death and murdered because of his role as an abortion provider.
91: That's a bit like saying that Dixiecrats who harassed and harmed white supporters or the Civil Rights Movement were going after all Americans. Or, as that was clearly not true, specific individuals that could not be properly placed in one easily defined group.
I'm not sure why it matters, though.
Yes. He counts as "people who care for them", right? I'm not getting how the presence of one prominent male victim means that violence against abortion clinics doesn't affect women primarily and disproportionately.
Pro-life terrorists's primary targets are abortion providers (whom they consider to be "mass murderers"), not pregnant women, who, after all, are carrying the fetuses they're trying to save.
No shit, GB. In #85 you give no reason for your confidence, and no reason why anyone should care about whether you feel this confidence. I have always regretted that you have chosen Unfogged as the place to unload your stale argumentation. There are actually a few people here whose point of view is not terribly far from yours, but none of them is as annoying as you.
However, politically I am not representative of Unfogged, which tends center-left. Like some of the other Minnesotans here (Frowner and Mineapolitan) I tend left-liberal or left.
I'm not quite sure why you're arguing this, GB, because it's not making a lot of sense. Abortion's traditionally construed as a women's issue and of concern to women; someone plants a bomb at a clinic and it gets less attention than the *threat* of bombing a high school. Ogged's theory is that the silence stems from the idea that violence about women's issues aren't really serious news. I don't think this is the best explanation of the silence; it's that the bomber is probably a white Christianist jackass, not someone who feeds the terrorist hysteria. But I'm not going to try to deny that by arguing that bombing a women's clinic isn't an intimidation tactic against women, even if the pro-life terrorists really don't want the women dead.
Bombings in the South during the Civil Rights struggles often targetted white people (teachers, poll workers) who helped out with the movement, but I can't see you arguing that if the Klan targets a white teacher, it's really not stemming from racist violence.
My confidence comes from the resilience and robustness of our legal system, as proven over 200+ years. It's a hell of a track record.
But I'm curious, John: if my point of view is not so far from that of several other people here, why do you find me so annoying?
It's definitely an intimidation tactic against women, as I specifically said in #89.
I can blame America with the best of 'em, but it seems to me that G. Biker has this right: "America is distinguished by its acceptance of the other, not by its demonization of it."
Also: It seems dubious to me that we should talk about hysteria over anti-Muslim terror and exclude the manner in which we, you know, actually kill and threaten to kill Muslims in a hysterical response to terror.
But lest I be accused of being insufficiently committed to the War On Biker, I have to say that abortion clinic bombings - and the assassination of physicians - is unambiguously a matter of political violence against women, regardless of the gender of the direct victim. If a terrorist in the early 1900s limited himself to killing male proponents of, say, women's right to vote, I think even G. Biker would have to admit that this violence was aimed at women.
why do you find me so annoying?
Because you serve up canned arguments like we haven't heard them a hundred times already. You trust that the signifiers in your native opinion-community will work the same instant discursive magic they do here as there. You don't approach conversations here like you might have to do some work first to establish shared premises. That's why we I find you so annoying.
"they do here as there" s/b "here as they do there"
Wow.
Shorter SB: more groveling!
Thanks for the partial support, football. I think the difference is that "proponents" of an idea like civil rights for blacks, or giving women the vote, doesn't actually make that idea a reality on a case-by-case basis.
An abortionist is personally, terminating a fetus (or, as the terrorists would have it, killing a baby) each and every time he performs an abortion. Killing him advances the cause in a way that killing a white civil rights supporter does not.
I think GB's contributions are kind of funny, in a meta way. He shows up when pretty much everybody else is asleep, chews up a thread, then leaves as people wake up and find the result. For some reason it reminds me of grooming a ski trail overnight.
Every time a civil rights supporter kills a baby an angel gets its wings.
What SB said. We've all heard almost everything you say many times before, in most cases rejecting it. Your offereings have a sort of kabuki debate-society flavor, too, as if the way you work is "These people all think X, so I'll say not-X". But you seem to believe that you're boldly forcing us to think about things in an unaccustomed new way.
#101: It's ironic and sad that you think I would "trust that the signifiers in [my] native opinion-community will work the same instant discursive magic they do here as there."
I'm not a regular commenter on any conservative/right/neocon/etc. blogs, mainly because I like exposing myself to different ideas and opinions. I expect to be challenged here; it would be nice if it could be done in a less sneering, dismissive manner, but you can't have everything, I guess.
And be fair: do you really think that my arguments are "canned", while every argument the left-leaning commenters here advance is breathtakingly unique and original?
#105: That's me, making sure you wake up to fresh comment corduroy.
This is getting dumb, but the theory here is that the media is accepting of violence against women, broadly construed (read the linked post), in a way that it wouldn't be were the target of the violence something else. Insisting that it can't be violence against women because it could kill a man (or even intend to kill that man) doesn't help your argument at all.
#107: Nothing is more annoying that someone who thinks, "These people all think X, so I'll say not-X".
I always really do believe not-X. I'm not just trying to jerk you around.
Can we concede that GB has a pointlet, and the OP would have been more accurate to say "terrorism against women and supporters of women's rights" rather than "violence against women", and move on?
We just saw three young men at Duke dragged through a media feeding frenzy for a whole year due to one woman's false claim that they raped her. This is not the sign of a culture that treats violence against women as normal.
Mmm, that's an exceptional case that isn't easily generalizable to much of anything. There were 90-some-odd other rapes here in Durham alone last year, and I can't tell you a single thing about any of them.
"other rapes" s/b "other reported rapes"
Safe to assume the actual number is higher.
And how many murders of men were there that you couldn't tell me about either?
I can't tell you a single thing about any of them.
On the advice of my attorneys, of course.
100 -- Our country, culture, and history are certainly big enough to demonize and accept at the same time. A favorite example is the Virginia statue against interracial marriage, which imposed a one drop rule, but had an exception so that descendants of Pocahontas would be considered white. Or Roger Williams' banishment from Massachusetts Bay.
There was a funny letter to the editor in the Post today, noting the coincidence a few days ago of an article about cracking down on illegal immigration next to an article about the settlement at Jamestown.
On the GB front, I have to say that I see mistaken legal precedents lasting longer, and doing more damage, than he does. The unjustifiable internment of the Japanese Americans hasn't, as a constitutional matter, been repudiated. Even though nearly everyone in our society knows it to have been a gross overreaction (at best) and a serious betrayal of our values. This precedent, like Eisentrager, for example, is a loaded gun waiting for someone bold enough, and contemptuous enough of American values, to use it.
OK, step two, I find your apparently sincere unconcern about the civil liberties issues here intensely annoying. On the one hand, they seem to me something you should have thought of even without Ogged's post. On the other hand, Bush is no more than one Supreme Court Justice away from having a packed court which will supprt his point of view for years or decades into the future. And on the third hand, one important reason for the resilience of the American civil liberties tradition is the fact that many Americans are pretty vigilant about such things, and most of us here are such people, but you don't seem to be one.
I think it would be safe to say that most violent crimes against individuals are ignored by society. When you selectively group together all the crimes in which a woman was the victim, you get a big scary "violence against women" trend, suitable for ginning up the annual "Take Back The Night" march at a campus near you.
But American men are four times more likely to be murdered than women are. And then there's rape. A man getting raped in prison is a punch line. And we're supposedly desensitized towards violence against women?
the Virginia statue against interracial marriage
Who's it a statue of?
118 -- I generally agree with you here, john, but on one point: I strongly doubt that any significant portion of neo-cons, or Supreme Court justices, are going to think that a President H. Clinton (or, some years hence, President J. Jackson Jr.) will legitimately have anything like the unfettered Executive powers the current president claims.
120 -- Long ago, I put the blame for any and all typos on the associates, who ought to be writing fisrt drafts of, and the proofing, all of my comments. You just can't get good help any more.
OK, Charley, but what that would mean is that we don't even have rule of law at all. Precedents set by one president have to be valid for succeeding presidents.
The unjustifiable internment of the Japanese Americans hasn't, as a constitutional matter, been repudiated.
As a Constitutional matter, arguably the 14th amendment, as understood today, would prohibit internment camps. And correct me if I'm wrong, Charley, but the Supreme Court can't "repudiate" Korematsu unless another case presenting roughly the same issue comes before it.
In other words, Korematsu will never be repudiated precisely because we'll never have another case about a minority herded into camps, unless Michelle Malkin becomes president.
The Bush-Gore 2000 decision was, in fact, explicitly crafted to be a non-precedent decision. Perhaps that's the future of American law, and original intent, original meaning, strict construction, judicial restraint, and the rest are also purely and simply nonce rationalizations customed to the immediate purpose at hand, to be discarded as convenient.
I want to make a joke involving the fact that precedent and president sound kinda the same, but I got nothin'. Off to bed.
119 -- Prison rape isn't accepted by society at large because the victims are male, but because they are criminals.
Similarly, it'd be interesting to look at the murder stats, and control for victims killed while (a) selling drugs in someone else's territory, (b) hitting on someone else's SO, and (c) engaging in a robbery or other serious crime. I would guess, with no basis whatsoever, that while this would reduce both male and female victims, the former reduction would substantially exceed the latter.
A local newspaper in Portland publishes a complete list every year of the homicides for the previous year. The total is small, and when justifiable homicides and disputes between criminals are eliminated, it's smaller still. Most of the remainder are family, relationship, and neighborhood disputes, which seems to be where the enforcement should go. The criminal-stranger killings of law-abiding citizens were less than a third, as I remember.
123 -- I'm not saying we don't have the rule of law. Just that I think there are a whole lot of people who don't believe in it.
124 -- The Court could have repudiated Korematsu a couple of times, and it doesn't have to have an exact duplicate case to do it. Hamdi, for example, was based on a statute which was intended to overrule Korematsu. The Court could have repudiated the whole concept. Instead, it bent over backwards to imply into the statute authorizing retaliation against Bin Laden and the Taliban the explicit authorization to hold citizens prisoner indefinitely.
125 -- Hence, no one but a true partisan thinks BvG even remotely legitimate as an exercise in constitutional interpretation. I think they thought they'd be greeted as liberators, and that the risk would be worth taking. Too bad they squandered their capital to such a poor end.
i should qualify: some of the gang-related killings may target very nominal associates of gangs, in neighborhoods where young men are forced, or assumed by default to be affiliated with one gang or the other. These really shouldn't necessarily be classified as criminal-on-criminal homicides.
If the people not believing in the rule of law are a majority of the Supreme Court and a majority of the executive, I'd say that we no longer have rule of law. The opportunism and deviousness of conservatives is infinite.
But really, an overreaction? Let's save that until the pogroms get started.
Did no one already point out that this is repulsive? Maybe it was meant as some kind of dark humor, and perhaps I am simply humorless, but I find "don't complain about race- or religion-based discrimination until we're killin' a whole mess of 'em" to be beyond stupid.
I must be misunderstanding, right?
I meant that in the context of other examples (both throughout history, and in the present day) of cultures or nations being hostile toward outside "others", America's current status quo toward Muslims doesn't even rate. So calling it an overreaction is, well, an overreaction.
As has been detailed above, concern about the state of America's legal system and civil rights post-9-11, as opposed to its attitude toward foreigners, may be somewhat more justified. But even there, we often hear about how the Bush administration has used 9-11 as an excuse to grab for itself the new powers and push through the new laws that it always wanted anyway. If that's the case, unwelcome developments on the legal front are not really a reaction to 9-11 and the Islamic terrorism threat at all.
Well, the Cheney/Yoo theory of government (a) would never have gotten accepted anywhere without the overreaction of so many people to 9/11 and (b) actually depend, in very fundamental ways, on the existence of a state of war. The war on drugs, or sin, or whatever they'd've had to come up with wouldn't've worked.
in the context of other examples
This is one of the lamest and, to me, most annoying tropes of what calls itself conservatism. Respond to some criticism of US government/culture by pointing out that someone else is worse. OK, Bush is better than Stalin. Rush Limbaugh is better than the Rwandan radio guys. The US is more welcoming of outsiders than Japan. Big goddam deal: when I make a criticism -- and I'll speak for millions in this -- I'm not talking about whether we're better or worse than Hitler or Idi Amin. I'm talking about how well we are doing at living our faith. The response that Zimbabwe is worse is lame and ineffectual misdirection.
Indeed. "No pogroms yet!" seems like a pretty lame thing to be proud of.
I actually agree with GB on the issue he chose to talk about. Compared to everywhere but Latin America, the U.S. is very accepting of immigrants, conditional on their Americanizing. Even highly Germanized third-generation Turks are still not fully accepted in Germany, not even legally as citizens. Many third world countries are accepting of rich powerful foreigners, but not of anyone else. In Portland OR, for example, there is an old, small, but quite influential Arab-American community which has elected as many as half a dozen members to offices as high as governor.
In the US there is a big discrepancy between the treatment of indigenous peoples (Native Americans, Latinos, and even sometimes French) and black Americans and the treatment of immigrants. the initial treatment of Chinese and Japanese was pretty bad, and all immigrant groups had some complaints, but a lot of countries have behaved much worse.
119: Yeah, violence in male culture is endemic in the U.S. (and a lot of other places). This doesn't mean that violence by male culture against not-males (i.e., women) isn't also endemic.
This is late, but I was gone for the weekend and didn't realized I'd been linked to until now. Something I didn't write in my post that got brought up way, way back in 60:
politicalfootball writes, "And one more gripe: The description of the Indians that you supply was not some outrageous demonization - it was probably more-or-less accurate."
Not to start a fight over historical veracity, but in that year there were only three documented cases of rape; mutilation and massacre were tactics used by both sides, true (and who knows what went on unreported). But Western papers, fueled by this terror, literally advocated genocide: rhetoric of the 'there will be no peace until every last one of them is dead' variety, and it's pretty clear that wild exagerration was the rule, not the exception.
And - I could have written about this, but I didn't - there was at the time an interesting rhetorical conflation of the Sioux with the Confederate secessionists - both standing in the way of Civilization & Progress. Southern partisans were compared explicitly to Indian raiders - for a brief historical moment, both were the demonized Other.