Politics '12: Election year shenanigans.

[Idun]

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/03/remarks-president-associated-press-luncheon

This deserves to be read, but doesn't become intriguing until he discusses the myth of a trickle-down effect. I wonder what the rebuttal will be, because that probably deserves reading also.

[Grefter]

http://exiledonline.com/class-warfare-on-two-fronts-from-afghanistan-to-middle-america-the-untold-story-of-sgt-bales/

So turns out the guy that flipped out and shot a bunch of guys recently was completely and totally fucked over by society.  Who would have guessed?

[SnowFire]

What an abominably vile article.  Of course I've disliked pretty much everything The Exiled publishes, but that one takes the cake easily.

The article never spells it out (although I see reposts that get the message loud and clear with titles like "The 1%'s hand in the Afghan murders"), but its basic story is "Oh wow, so capitalism is really at fault for Bales' mass murder, because he took out a bad mortgage!"  Which is a load of pure bullshit.  I can't believe a leftist source is trying to explain away the horrific mass murder of Afghans with freaking mortgages and missed promotions, when there's a completely obvious motive available: Bales snapped and decided to wipe out "the enemy", or hated Afghans, or hated Islam.  Oh if only the Army had given Bales his promotion or something, then this all would've been averted.  Considering his later actions, the decision not to promote him is looking pretty good in retrospect, actually.  And the whole premise is offensively wrong.  Even in a socialist utopia, people will still have bad things happen to them, will suffer setbacks, will not always get what they want, and must deal with unhappiness.  Someone unstable enough to go on a killing spree should their life enter a down patch is a ticking time bomb anyway.  (Which isn't what I think Bales was, to be clear, but if a missed promotion was his freaking motive, then that'd be the case.)

Article stretches the facts in a bunch of places too, which is something you don't f**king do for mass murder.  I can't be certain if it's "hyperbole" to make a point or actually serious, but I suspect it's basically a socialist Ann Coulter: retreat into satire if ever challenged that her point was totally false, and let it stand out there for the true believers.  Yes, the One Percent winners are cackling as Everything is Going to Plan by arranging a massive punishment raid to slaughter Afghans, although maybe it was just Bales, but anyway he's a patsy for their evil imperial schemes.  Which by any objective measure were set back by the killings, but who cares.

A few comments which I suspect to be outright falsehoods as well.  The McMullen quote about slashing soldier's pay I can't find any good reference to on Google or Google News, and moreover, when soldier pay is in the news, it's normally the administration defending it while doing exactly the force cutbacks the article thinks they're not doing.  And calling Bales "highly decorated" is misleading.  There are medals you get for punching a clock, and there are medals you get for actual heroism.  Bales is "decorated," he did a bit more than ticket-punch, but he was no superhero.  And calling that article "censored" is stupid and misrepresents the word.  The WWE took down all their webpages celebrating Chris Benoit after he murdered his wife, whoa, act shocked that the miltary would do the same thing to an article putting Bales in a positive light.  "Censorship" implies it became illegal to publish, which is blatantly false.

I don't like their take on the mortgage crisis either, but whatever, it's not nearly as horrible as defending Bales as some downtrodden everyman who took out his anger at the mortgage companies by shooting & burning Afghanis, and getting more innocent Afghanis killed later in riots, and probably getting many more people killed since in ripple effects from terrorism / reduced civilians on the ground in Afghanistan for humanitarian aid & development / etc.  WTF.

[Cmdr_King]

Not really what I took away from it at all.  Guy who had no business being deployed, guy kicked around by the system time and again, sent into tense military environment and happens to kill a bunch of innocent people.  is filed under "he is defective, this shouldn't happen", article argues it should be filed under "what the fuck did you think was going to happen".  Which is correct; when you repeatedly send people into war zones for years at a time, after they have already been fairly grievously injured before, you are not going to get stable and restrained soldier.  The more surprising thing should be that this doesn't happen more.

Now yeah, Mr. Ames should really have stuck to that point and not made it a segue from a mortgage article, but I've read worse things from him.

[SnowFire]

CK, your take on the affair is more reasonable, but that's not really in the article.  The article is all about mortgage woes, not about combat stress.  And him snapping after too many deployments is also compatible with "he is defective;" an on-edge soldier who shoots first and asks questions later in a tense situation is one thing, premeditated massacre when not in combat is quite another.

(Also, can't say I really agree agree about "no business being deployed"; many soldiers have fought for years and been fine, so you can get stable and restrained soldiers, though obviously the chances of problems probably go up.  Additionally, rotating soldiers out too fast has its own problems that can get people killed.  The truer statement is that ideally nobody should ever be sent to war veteran or not, of course, but that's a side discussion.)

[Luther Lansfeld]

The article stated that he had sustained a pretty brutal head/brain injury in one of his previous deployments, so maybe a little analysis before re-deployment might have been in order?

[Cmdr_King]

the emphasis of the article is on the mortgage thing, which as noted is inappropriate.  However, the Bale stuff in particular covers a wider range of things that boil down to the guy being systematically kicked around by people more powerful than him, then being swept under the rug as a one-in-a-million anomaly rather than a predictable outcome from his prior experiences.  Guy wasn't just a vet, he was continually deployed in both iraq and afghanistan, and recieved multiple major injuries.  And yeah, his family being utterly scammed and getting no real support from the military or society in general was another way he was getting pushed into less and less suitability for this sort of environment (not just being a warzone, but being a war where you're pretty well surrounded by people who legitimately might be waiting to stab you in the dark, lead you into ambushes, join your nominal enemy for reasons beyond your understanding, etc.)

I guess what I mean is, the article is pretty nasty trying to tie two disparate ideas so strongly together, but taken separately there's two ideas here that really should be brought to light.

But experience is that Mark Ames likes to tread into conspiracy theory territory and that's just his style.  Not a pleasant guy, but he's at least putting some work into issues and isn't wholly vile.

[Grefter]

It is part of a larger series of articles that are about the way the current economic decline is effecting people's lives and as is the Exile's wont highlights the way that it has also kept afloat the richer parts of society at the cost of the lower and middle class.

http://exiledonline.com/the-brutal-life-of-one-l-goh-the-making-of-a-going-postal-rampage-murderer/

Here is the more normal type of article falling into the more standard "Going Postal" template that Mark Ames has written an entire book about.  So this isn't like it is a loan article out of nowhere from the guy.

Is he focussing on a smaller part of a clearly larger picture? Obviously, but at least he is focussing on the root cause of the clear psychological disturbance the man was suffering from, not just pulling the usual fucking "lone insane gunman" "Just snapped" "no one expected it" "he was always so nice" bullshit or the other angle that always gets taken painting the killer as some kind of monster instead of the human beings that they are.

Bales was a guy reacting to the exact stimulus that was provided to him. 

There is a reason people go on these kinds of shootings and when there is a consistent pattern to them of being "persons life was fucked" + "abused by people in power" + "no social support for them" -> "they shoot people" it is good to see someone addressing them even if it is in gonzo journalism that is sometimes gonzo for the sake of being gonzo (See recent Yasha Levine article about having Scabes and it probably from being arrested while covering OWS protests in California).

Edit - And yeah, it is gonzo journalism.  It isn't a story about Bales, it is a story about the systemic abuse of military families with predatory lending.  Bales is an excuse to publish it and a framework to build it around.  Just like the above reference article is primarilly to talk about mid term impacts people can face after being arrested for protesting and to touch on how terrible the Californian prison system is.  That is how that style works.  It sacrifices directness for impact.

[SnowFire]

Okay.  So let's ignore being offended under the cover of gonzo journalism for the moment, sure.  (I do still consider it offensive, mind, Bales basically deserves horns & a tail in any discussion of him.)

First off, while Bales' life was clearly troubled, I wouldn't call him in the most screwed-over category.  That is reserved for people who end up homeless, in-and-out of drug treatment programs, etc.  Obviously one doesn't need to be at max misery to go nuts, but it's a point against the theory.  (Goh was closer to fitting Ames' expectations.)

If stressful situations generate mass murderers...  why hasn't Greece seen a massive crime wave?  For that matter, Spain has like 26% unemployment right now.  To my knowledge there hasn't been any home-grown mass murders there recently, nor any particular uptick in crime (civil unrest in Greece, perhaps, but that's clearly different).  There's the Madrid train bombings, but Spain had a pretty good economy in 2004. 

Ames seems to acknowledge this a little by calling the whole snap-> mass murder "an exclusively American phenomenon specific to our time."  I'm not sure I agree with that, but whatever.  So why does Ames think it's uniquely American?  Because of... Reagan?  What?  I'm no fan of Ronnie, but there are parts of the world ruled by mega-conservatives who make Reagan look like Ted Kennedy, and to my knowledge they don't have noticeably more spree killings from the hopeless underclass.  And I'm sure many people have lost their bottom dollar just like Goh did in Greece, and have no faith in the government to keep them going.

It just doesn't fit.  Ignoring whether it's offensive or not, I'm not buying Ames' hypothesis.  I have my own theories about what can cause people to go on spree killings like Goh, or for that matter join Al-Qaeda / gangs / the Pakistani Taliban / etc., but maybe another time.  I also don't consider Bales' case to share that much with Goh; Goh was stuck in a hopeless situation and felt powerless.  Bales was not.  Bales, at best, was crazy, and at worst gave into his darkest instincts about wiping out enemies the easy way.


As a side note...

The idea that you can reinvent yourself, that your fate is in your own hands, that you have the power inside of you to make yourself a winner (and if you fail, it’s all your own fault) — this may be America’s most toxic cultural snake-oil.

Ames must not be very happy.  They've done psychological studies and having the belief that you control your own fate massively correlates to happiness, and mostly correlates to success.  Obviously some of this is people who end up successful like to take credit, but the belief has a strong impact if you check "before" you know if someone will be successful and then control for demographics, IIRC.  A culture that encourages everyone to believe it, in other words, will have happier citizens who take the initiative and do bold things, rather than resign themselves to whatever comes their way.  I find "you can do it" a profoundly liberal sentiment, while "know your place, nothing can change" is an old-guard conservative sentiment used back in the days of entrenched nobles.  I think Marx would agree with me here too - he didn't think the workers will doomed to suffer forever, that they could and would improve their lot - so buh at Ames for poo-poohing it.

[Grefter]

Edit - Rambling post written over like 6 hours or so at work, so apologies it is even worse for coherency than I normally am, but hey, words words words.


I am a little baffled by you not thinking a man serving his third (or was it fourth?) tour in Vietnam 2.0 was "most screwed over".  I hear war is pretty bad yo.  Especially when all you want to do is go home and lolno 2 bad 4 u we changed our minds!

It isn't that Reagan was a conservative, it is the rampant capitalism that went with it.  The hardcore Right in the rest of the world is far less corporation friendly than Reagan was.  They don't tout Trickle Down Economics.  They are busy with the whole Pres 4 Life "Democracy" or straight up selling fucking everything that isn't nailed down.  Less Corporate greed and far more personal greed.

He thinks it is uniquely American because of the work cultures and social environment.  Which he would argue is why you aren't seeing it in Greece, they are very European and have some very different core sentiments that shape their culture and workplace.  For example there is violence and rioting in Greece, increased suicide rates and they are blaming the people at the top when they commit suicide in a public place. 

I think you are drastically misreading the way he interprets the mass shootings.  It is just another extension of those basic tenets that Ames claims to cause the kinds of environments that cause the mass shootings.  It isn't a lone gunman snapping and then shooting people.  It is a lone gunman snapping and deciding that the thing they want in life isn't money and power any longer.  It is to be free of the burdens of the environment where they are being bullied and subjugated.  How do you do that when the power is all sitting in your hands and your hands alone to fix this?  Well the answer comes up for some people as .45 or 30.06.

I can even give you the outline of the sociological history on why that core principal of self driven with  is a uniquely American thing rather than something that the rest of the West has deeply ingrained in its culture.  The root of the you can be anything that you want to be as long as you work really hard at it is deeply ingrained and springs from the Quaker ethics that have their roots in the Protestant work ethic (which should not surprise you), coming in strongly from the initial founding and freedom and religion and all that jazz, with the Quaker roots digging in to early education.  Europe had similar impacts with a lot of Quaker ideals springing up, but there is a long history of education springing up from other branches of Christianity there (Catholic being the obvious example, or Anglican in England).  The big thing in Protestant Work Ethic that is the Deserving Poor.  Everything fits into god's plan, so if you are rich you were meant to be.  That is okay.  If you are lazy though and don't work that is your own fault, you put in no work.  So Protestant Work Ethic is that you should be working as hard as you possibly can, no matter what your place in life, because otherwise you will be Undeserving.  The Undeserving Poor are not going to be one of the preordained into Heaven.

Now if you want to get people on board with that you need to lighten it up a bit.  Thus in the US you get the Quaker movement that you can be anything you want to be as long as you work at it.  Most important of all in this is that whatever you get you deserve because you worked for it.

Now I touched a little on why Europe is a little less enamoured with this whole concept being that it is a bit less ingrained in them socially than in the US with more diverse education backgrounds.  However there is also a huge part being the difference in the Modernist movements in the two continents.  In the US the Quakers were getting bigger and stronger and developing all these education institutions.  Europe on the other hand was getting all these wicked cool Sociologists to go with stuff like Charles Darwin.  Tearing down social norms was king and there was all kinds of sexy ideas going around.  Now we aren't going to hyperfocus on Marx like you are expecting.  Europe got Max Weber.

Max Weber argued against the Protestant work Ethic, saying it is a disservice to mankind and pushes obscene pressure on them to work themselves to death for a place in heaven.  He was a Functionalist, with all the trappings that comes with it.  People working enough to do what society needs them to do, rather than as much as possible to work themselves into the ground.  Also poked at why people feel compelled to work themselves to the bone and who benefits from it and all that fun stuff.  (Also was a drunkard and a lapsed Protestant.  I like Max Weber a ton.  He is like the German response to Emile Durkheim, who is also great).  These ideas spread and grew out.  The Protestant work Ethic is no where near as dominant and central to the European mindset.

And now I am totally distracted by sexy sexy Modern political science figures and lost what little of a point I had.

But yeah the Protestant Work Ethic isn't unique to America (See Ireland and all that fun obviously), but it is unique to mix that mindset into education principles and to intertwine it so strongly with Capitalist society.  Also the only place I can think of to so strongly embrace the Deserving Rich as an ideal or concept to actually praise.

Of course Mark Ames isn't a happy man.  He is a Journalist working in the US after getting chased away from Russia.  He drinks and used to hit all kinds of drugs.  He is a socialist in the modern political landscape  and idolizes Hunter S Thompson.  None of that points to being a happy man.

Edit 2 - Yeah reading this again before I go to bed this shit makes like zero fucking sense.

[Hunter Sopko]

I actually agree more with Grefter on this one, at least in terms of how the sentiment is used in the country nowadays. While I'm still a very firm believer in it, you can't argue it's not a double edged sword, especially with how it's been used lately.

The positive side has been a key part of American success to this point. We take great pride in the Pull Yourself Up By Bootstraps ethic leads you to believe. It's a better argument than the alternative. But increasingly the "It's your fault if you fail" part has taken precedence, with a greater apathy towards those who get kicked around by the system. At that point, the positive side becomes a negative. It's almost a cruel joke to tell someone to take their fate into their hands and strive toward success after they've been beaten down by the system as far as Bales was. Because in reality, anyone how has dealt with administration and bureaucracy knows that sometimes it simply isn't true. Sometimes you make mistakes you simply cannot rectify. But fuck you, they're your mistakes. No one to blame but yourself, not the predatory lending practices of a company that doesn't give a shit about you, nor a government that refuses to stick up for its veterans and instead increasingly wears them down through extended tours of duty.

It's basically become an excuse to allow for the continued exploitation of ALL classes, even the rich. People forget that the way a true capitalist system works is that everyone actually gets a benefit out of it! Or else it's not worth doing! As the income gap wided at first, people became increasingly complacent with their level of comfort and gradually gave ground because hey, at least we have the highest standard of living in the world, right? Sitting back like that means it won't last for long though. The shrinking middle class means people are finally starting to wake up to this and the so called Buffett Rule should only be the tip of the iceberg. When people see the tax shit millionaires get away with, people lose their incentive to keep the system going the way it has. In a capitalist/consumer society, it shouldn't be about them having incentive to operate a business. If there is a market, there will always be someone willing to fill it. It's the American way. It should be us that has the incentives to buy their products and keep them in business.

Plus, I love the fucking mindset people have that an increase in the marginal tax rate of the rich will make people not want to work hard to become rich. Are you fucking kidding me? I mean sure, everyone would rather do as little work as possible to be rich, but one of the best aspects of humanity for capitalism is that we'll fucking compete over anything. People will still want to be rich and powerful no matter what you do. It's an insult to our intelligence to argue the opposite. Oh, so you lost motivation to run your big corperation after the tax rate went up? Want to stop investing because capital gains went up? Well, hope you can enjoy not spending money or you won't be rich for much longer, and whoop, we just filled your fucking seat with someone else who is willing to put up with those. Insource America, bitches.

I realize this is a gross oversimplification of it, and there are exceptions and certain inaccuracies, but honestly, it just feels to me that true capitalism has been perverted lately- not by those who seek to redistribute wealth, but by those who seek to keep it all to themselves.

[Grefter]

I think you could have phrased that a bit better.  It is by those that already redistributed the wealth into their own pockets by whatever means necessary.

[Hunter Sopko]

Nope. Sticking with that. Your classier version is a bit muddled. Are you saying my phrasing isn't classy enough for the likes you of, Commie? Fucking hypocrite.

[Grefter]

You know lower class is the only class I care about.

[Luther Lansfeld]

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/mitt-romney-refuses-to-answer-hannitys-question-about-president-obama-eating-dogs/

Hooray, Mitt refuses to talk about inane things.

[metroid composite]

Obama has gained coolness points:

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-announces-his-support-for-same-sex-marriage.html

He is now arguably more cool than Dick Cheny.



Romney has lost coolness points:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/10/mitt-romneys-campaign-calls-gay-teen-bullying-report-exaggerated/

[NotMiki]

Romney has lost coolness points

He had those?

Also: in more important Romney-gay-teen-bullying news
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/romney-threatened-lgbt-anti-bully-commission-as-governor.php?ref=fpa

[Cotigo]

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/justice-department-sues-sheriff-joe-arpaio-civil-rights/story?id=16321622#.T6xap7MzCmA

About damn time. 

inb4 b.d. "fucking secret muslim socialist how dare his justice department stop joe arpaio from protecting the good people of arizona from all them brown people"

[superaielman]

Let's not use real people's names on the forums.

And yeah, Sheriff Joe deserves all that and more. Good riddance.

[Cotigo]

Ol' BD is less a real person and more a hilarious caricature but OK whatever.

[NotMiki]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/a-lightning-rod-in-the-culture-wars-girl-scouts-come-under-scrutiny-from-catholic-bishops/2012/05/10/gIQA38Z4FU_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Catholic Bishops: what the fuck are you doing.

[metroid composite]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/a-lightning-rod-in-the-culture-wars-girl-scouts-come-under-scrutiny-from-catholic-bishops/2012/05/10/gIQA38Z4FU_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Catholic Bishops: what the fuck are you doing.

This article just gets more ridiculous the further in you get

Critics contend that Girl Scouts materials shouldn’t contain links to groups such as Doctors without Borders

[Luther Lansfeld]

That definitely hit me as the keynote of ridiculousness as well.

[Grefter]

I tried to read that while I listened to Zenny's link http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nMANMIe0ZZI

My brain broke down and I couldn't follow the text.

[Grefter]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-occupy-costs-20120512,0,5516507.story

Completely and totally reasonable.