Dampening Debate

punditman says...
As Peacenik muses about Apocalypse 2012, and the end of whatever, Punditman has been pondering more mundane matters, such as the stifling of debate on all the stuff that we still have to deal with before December 21, 2012.

Punditman thinks that on December 22, 2012, there's a good chance we'll still be dealing with stuff like this. It's the kind of thing that drives punditman bonkers. If you think you live in a free society, then read, watch, listen to, or attend a debate. Any debate. Chances are, you will not get the spectrum of opinion that you would hope a truly free society would offer. The panel discussion I refer to is one that took place at the Brookings Institute on August 25 concerning Afghanistan, and it is summarized by author Robert Dreyfuss. The self-described "nonpartisan public policy organization" presented four panelists who were all hawks. None of them questioned the legitimacy of the war. Only how to win it, and how long it would take. That's a friggin' debate?!

A debate is supposed to involve opposing arguments. To quote Michael Palin in Monty Python's Argument Sketch, "An argument is a collective series of statements intended to establish a proposition." Aparently the so-called "liberal" Brookings Institute is not the right room for an argument.

You might find diversity of opinion in some obscure panel discussion in some back water college somewhere or on some internet radio show that has twenty-seven loyal listeners. Or you may find a bunch of people agreeing with themselves there as well.

The point that punditman is trying to make is that when it comes to the big issues of our times, such as war, terrorism, Iran, civil liberties, swine flu or rising beer prices, you are being bamboozled into a type of fascist groupthink by Big Media and Big Experts from Big Institutes.

Sure there are debates-- fake ones that is, where "opposing" viewpoints are presented, but in reality, it's just a bunch of elitists and politicians screaming over top of one another for entertainment value (afterwards, the rivals can be spotted in the pub next to the studio congratulating each other on their performances and caring nothing of rising beer prices).

As Noam Chomsky and others of his ilk have been saying for years, despite the myth of a free and open "marketplace of ideas," the framework for debate within most democracies has always been relatively narrow when it comes to the big issues, compared to the potential. The reasons have to do with profit, advertising revenue, self-censorship and concentratrion of media ownership. Now this may seem counter-intuitive in the internet age, but punditman intuits that despite the abundance of new media, a narrowing of opinion on crucial matters is more evident than ever before.

Observe the following statements:

The war in Afghanistan is a war of necessity and a noble cause.
Terrorists hate us because of our freedom.
Iran is a monolothic Islamofascist state intent on nuking Israel.
Swine flu is a dangerous pandemic that requires everyone to be vaccinated even if we don't have time to safety-test the vaccine.
Beer prices need to rise because...ummm, rising costs or something...

Whether you agree with any or all of these statements or not, ask yourself whether you think the counterpoint to each of these statements gets a fair shake.

One Ricks Makes a Wrong

by Jeff Huber
www.antiwar.com

Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.

Ricks’ most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a FireDogLake.com book forum. In reply to a commenter who asked if "more deaths in Iraq are worth it," Ricks said, "I think staying in Iraq is immoral. But I think that leaving Iraq is even more immoral." In a nutshell, Ricks framed the core fallacy in the long-war philosophy: that two wrongs can make a right. This theme dominates Ricks’ work these days. The Gamble and the media blitz that accompanied its debut were dazzling examples of what Voltaire was talking about when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Ricks continues to exalt Gen. David Petraeus, who he has known since Petraeus was a colonel or a light colonel (Ricks says he can’t remember which). Ricks became King David’s chief legend-maker when the Iraq surge began in January 2007. In a radio interview that month on WNYC in New York, Ricks described Petraeus as a "fascinating character" and "just about the best general in the Army." He specifically cited Petraeus’ "very successful first tour" as commander in Mosul after the fall of Baghdad, but he made little mention of the fact that the general tamed the city by handing out guns and bribes, and that months after Petraeus left Mosul the chief of police defected and the place went up for grabs again. (Mosul remains a major trouble spot to this day, and Petraeus is still arming and bribing militants.)

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punditman says...

Some people will believe anything the mainstream media tells them. It is like they worship "important" or "prestigious" institutions. Thomas E. Ricks is a military correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the tricky kind that a lot of liberals fall for, because he appears critical of the establishment but in fact is far from from it. A brief search reveals that besides the book mentioned in the intro of the above article, he also wrote a book called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Even to come up with a name like that is automatically suspect; of course everyone knows it has been a freakin' fiasco! But the problem is that Ricks thinks the war was just a question of mismanagement instead of recognizing it for the moral and legal atrocity and imperial hubris that it is.

Ricks therefore functions as a Pentagon shill, or more specifically as General Petraeus' personal propaganda machine. Punditman finds the worshipping of any General to be a rather worrisome activity. Thankfully, there are internet journalists like Jeff Huber and Gareth Porter to set the record straight.

Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

The Déjà Vu Flu

By MICHAEL CALDERÓN-ZAKS

OK, we get it: somewhere in Mexico lies the epicenter of an outbreak of swine flu. It doesn’t really matter where because any part of the country would suffice for the hate-mongers in the media (Malkin, Beck, etc.), for which only Keith Olbermann has called out within the mainstream media. Is the swine flu really the next major human catastrophe? More people have died from “regular flu” since January, roughly 36,000. So then why isn’t there hysteria about that? Most of the deaths attributed to swine flu have taken place in Mexico, about 150, and only one in the US so far. Even so, the real culprit was probably Smithfield Foods, an Anglo-American company that owns factory pig farms.

This latest epidemic will probably prove to be an epidemic that isn’t, as was the case with several others leading up to today. Yes, there’s a tradition of using disease epidemics to prevent immigration along racial lines, and its been documented by historians. I recommend two thoroughly researched books: Alexandra Stern’s Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (University of California Press, 2005), and Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (University of California Press, 2006).

In 1916, the US Public Health Service established quarantines at El Paso and Laredo to quarantine Mexican immigrants. The USPHS was heavily influenced by Eugenics, or race science (1). Then as now, some efforts were made to distinguish good and bad Mexicans along racial lines. Light-skinned Mexicans arriving in 1st class passenger railcars could bypass the quarantine while darker Mexicans arriving in second-class cars were quarantined, and then deloused in kerosene (2). At the El Paso station in 1917, a grand total of three Mexicans were acknowledged to have had the deadly typhus fever—after almost 800,000 Mexican bodies had been inspected. Almost 2,700 bodies were inspected per day in El Paso, in contrast to Ellis Island, which inspected about 350 a day (3). And while the Eugenics movement obsessed about eastern and southern Europeans through the 1930s, the latter had some protection from the Democrats. Mexicans had none back then, and very little now. These practices at the border lasted until the late 1930s (4).

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punditman says...See my comment on a related post, here.

Turning away from the onslaught of angst

punditman says...

While Punditman's trusted sidekick and blogging companion, Peacenik, was feigning survivalist within the confines of his cottage and driving across literally hundreds of yards (<<< looky there!) of flooded roads with nothing but beer and love to fuel him, Punditman was growing more depressed by the nanosecond within the confines of his own mind.

As usual, Punditman blames this state of being on the Big Media monolith. Don't get me wrong. I think we should be informed. But we are saturated with mass media these days, and yet we're in more trouble on more levels than ever before. Maybe it is because the majority of today's mass media messaging can be classified as one of the following: negative, biased, insidious or trivial.

Negative media puts the emphasis on bad news, most of which we can do very little or nothing about. An accident here, a murder there, a disaster somewhere, a war over there. As a reminder of our helplessness, this onslaught of angst arrives via TVs tuned to what I call the "bad news channels." Ticker tape tales tell of dire economic conditions, unwinnable wars, fresh international sabre-rattling, random acts of insane violence by mainly males who suddenly explode in fits of rage at age 41, 23, 59, 10...terrible mishaps by stressed out cell-phone distracted, headset-enhanced cyborgs and that great cruel equalizer, the natural calamnity. These 24-hour plasma invaders now dot our public spaces, leaving precious little area of reprieve from the planet's daily carnage. It's one flashed headline of awfulness after another.

I honestly don't know if social psychologists have begun to study the long-term effects of all this mediated mayhem on our already frail psyches, but they should be. Twenty-four hour bad news stations now serve as the fallback channel in (gasp!) pubs (the wait staff never could figure out how to program the 7,000 channel all sports satellite service). So until some geek arrives, it's the bad news channel, no volume necessary. Ditto for the banks. Like everything else they do, banks never care to ask what we want. So there you have it: two places where we don't need to catch any more negative news. Thank you very much, Mr. Banker and Mr. Publican.

Biased media is self-explanatory. It comes in the form of most everything you see or hear on the corporate media networks, from the way the economic crisis is being reported and covered up to the narrow range of allowable foreign policy debate. Switch channel in disgust. Hey, it's another another commercial for more Big Pharma dope with possible side affects worse than the original ailment. This place is nuts.

Then there is insidious media, my very own pet peeve. Insidious media, for purposes here, are those violent video games that desensitize our children. I notice they are now advertised on prime time TV. Adults can now get a little glimpse of what their sons are doing for 10 hours a day up in their bedrooms.

When Punditman was a kid watching Hockey Night in Canada, he may have seen a Tiger in your tank Esso commercial or the old "I'd like to teach the world to sing" coke commercial. Yes it was corporate propaganda as all advertising is, but compare that to today's kids who are subjected to ads for the Grand Theft Auto video game, which apparently has a few critics. Rightfully so. Could violent video games end up causing more damage to society in the long run than a thousand jihadists? No wonder our boys are adrift.

Trivial media includes celebrity gossip and anything else that has no bearing on your life but is nevertheless pushed at you 24-7 as if it really mattered. It really doesn't matter that the Leafs missed the playoffs yet again (does it?). Okay, maybe.

Quality media on the other hand, engages us because it involves actual thinking—the awake, critical, creative, insightful, inspiring and uplifting kind of cognition. But it it is harder to find because you have to first sift through all the clutter being shoved in your face. But it is there. In books; in parts of newspapers; in online or offline documentaries. Peacenik has found one such web gem, by Carolyn Baker, here. It happens to sum up much of the minutiae that has been floating around Punditman's brain these last few days.

The article deals with the "...daily now, almost hourly-rampant eruptions of violence throughout the so-called developed world" and sees it as the inevitable outcome of a collapsing empire. Punditman notes that wackjobs appear even during the so-called good economic times of "empire." Ms. Baker claims that it is the psychology of empire itself that leads to these episodic psychoses of mass violence, "a culture in which one's reason for being lies entirely outside of oneself." You work, you consume, you pay taxes. You feed the growth machine. If things go awry, it's all your fault. Actually, for many people—an inner life that allows for a modicum of reflection or perspective is simply unattainable. What's more, the isolation of modern life means that millions lack a viable social support network. Thus for some, when their organism is distressed, the default position is madness. How many more human cluster bombs must go off before we realize that something in the social fabric, in the way we organize ourselves, in the way information is mediated, is very deeply flawed?

Two years ago, Punditman had this to say about another American massacre:

Is there any correlation between the horrific events at Virginia Tech and the daily carnage unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world? There may be no direct link, but it has been shown that domestic violence does increase when nations go to war, as outlined by the landmark study, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, published in 1984 by Yale University Press. The hypothesis posits that when countries do violence to other human beings, this incites their citizens to perpetrate more violence than they would normally commit. So the phenomenon extends well beyond the returning war vet who becomes a ticking time bomb (although this is a huge problem as well).

In Collapse psychosis: navigating the madness, Ms. Baker uses civilization synonymously with empire. I quibble, slightly: what I call civilization is synonymous with society. And society always seems to muddle on through, decade to decade--almost like there is a kind of collective brain at work (Margaret Thatcher be damned!).

The good news is that after we emerged from the primordial slime, we evolved into our current apish frames and began to form civilizations around 11,000 years ago, after the last glacial epoch. No easy task! What's more, since 1970 humans have created and stored more information than in the previous 5,000 years. Granted, a lot of it is negative, biased, insidious and trivial. But at least we're a persistent bunch. With any luck, we could get through this current phase of stupidity without slipping totally into the abyss.

Enough niggling. If you are wondering how to make sense of all the mayhem, Ms. Baker's piece is highly recommended. Read it. Then go for a walk outside.

Who's Telling the Truth About Iran's Nuclear Program?

by Muhammad Sahimi

Since February 2003, Iran's nuclear program has undergone what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself admits to be the most intrusive inspection in its entire history. After thousands of hours of inspections by some of the most experienced IAEA experts, the Agency has verified time and again that (1) there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, and (2) all the declared nuclear materials have been accounted for; there has been no diversion of such materials to non-peaceful purposes. Iran has a clean bill of health, as far as its nuclear program is concerned.

This is not what Israel, its lobby in the United States, and its neoconservative allies had expected. Such a clean bill of health deprives them of any justification for advocating military attacks on Iran. The illegal act of sending Iran's nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council and the subsequent, highly dubious UNSC resolutions against Iran have also not been effective. So what is the War Party to do?

It has resorted to an international campaign of exaggerations, lies, and distortions. This campaign involves planting lies in the major media and on the Internet, making absurd interpretations of what the IAEA reports on Iran, and issuing dire – but bogus – warnings about the speed at which Iran's uranium-enrichment program is progressing. Such warnings have been around for over two decades. In 1984, West German intelligence predicted that Iran would make a nuclear bomb within two years.

The campaign uses all the instruments of the U.S. political establishment to advance its agenda. The Bush administration routinely talked about "Iran's nuclear weapon program" or "Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons," without ever bothering to present any credible evidence for their assertion. Iran's drive for nuclear weapons has become an article of faith even to President Obama, who, in my opinion, is not pro-war. LeonPanetta , the new CIA director, recently said, "From all the information I've seen, I think there is no question that they [Iranians] are seeking that [nuclear weapon] capability." What information, Mr.Panetta? Enlighten us, please.

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punditman says...I would guess that the vast majority of people out there, despite their political affiliation, would simply assume that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon and is playing a game of Monty Python's Olympic Hide-and-Seek with the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency. You, dear reader, may be one of these people. The only problem is that there is no evidence for such an assumption. None.

Punditman also makes the safe assumption that most people do not know that even the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 said Iran "halted" its nuclear weapons program in 2003; and, if they don't know that, then Punditman would bet his fictitious dividend cheque that most also don't know that this same report did not present any evidence that an Iranian nuclear program has ever existed (none, ever)–so it couldn't be "halted" in the first place!

This speaks to the power of media- and political-propaganda, working in tandem.

Is Punditman defending Iran? Not at all. Does Punditman trust Iran? Punditman does not trust any State. Punditman is simply defending the facts.

Mary Dejevsky: Why did the West ignore the truth about the war in Georgia?

The US and UK left the impression that Russia was the guilty party

Thank goodness, they might be thinking at the US State Department and the British Foreign Office, for the financial crisis. Were it not for the ever-blacker news about the Western world's economy, another scandal would be vying for the headlines – and one where the blame would be easier to apportion. It concerns our two countries' relations with Russia and the truth about this summer's Georgia-Russia war.

Over the past couple of weeks, a spate of reports has appeared in the American and British media, questioning many assumptions about that war, chief among them that Russia was the guilty party. Journalists from the BBC, The New York Times and Canada's Embassy magazine, among others, travelled to South Ossetia, the region at the centre of the conflict, in an effort to establish the facts.

Not the "facts" as told by the super-slick Georgian PR machine at the time, nor the "facts" as eventually dragged from the hyper-defensive and clod-hopping communicators of the Kremlin. But the facts as experienced on the ground by those who were there: civilians, the local military commander, and the small number of unarmed monitors stationed in the region by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The journalists travelled to the region separately and by different routes. They spoke to different people. But their findings are consistent: Georgia launched an indiscriminate military assault on South Ossetia's main town, Tskhinvali. The hospital was among the buildings attacked; doctors were injured even as they operated.

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punditman says...

Where were these reporters when it really mattered? Punditman has been documenting the blatant use of propaganda by Western governments in the Georgia-Russia war — accompanied by hopelessly biased reporting in the western press — since that conflict occurred last summer. This occurred despite the indisputable fact that Georgia launched an indiscriminate military assault on South Ossetia's main town, Tskhinvali — which led to a Russian response.

It seems there is now some pull back from the official position.

Nevertheless, a recent case in point: In a November 12th broadcast, BBC's HARDtalk programme host, Stephen Sackur accused Russia alone of starting the war when he interviewed Konstantin Simonov, Director General of the National Energy Security Fund, Russia. It was as if the West and Israel played no role whatsoever in stirring up and training Georgian forces, and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili is all lilly white.

So this is all old hat. Does that make us "pro-Russian"? No. Does it make us truth-seekers? Yes, because we smelled a rat from the beginning — and we were right.

Why Obama Could be in Trouble

By Robert Parry, Consortium News.
Posted August 7, 2008.

Instead of acting like journalists, the mainstream media have become McCain's personal assistants, regurgitating his B.S. without question.

It might seem unlikely that the United States would elect John McCain to succeed George W. Bush when that would ensure continuation of many unpopular Bush policies: an ill-defined war with the Muslim world, right-wing consolidation of the U.S. Supreme Court, a drill-oriented energy strategy, tax cuts creating massive federal deficits, etc., etc.

Read On...

Why does Peacenik read stories like this that make him feel sick? Peacenik is very sick of the 20 or 30 media types who seem to shape the public's perception of an election campaign. The Cokie Roberts, David Broders and George Wills of the media elite. But there is hope. At least the media has not spent multiple news cycles on the cost of Obama's haircuts. At least the media has not accused Obama of plagiarizing an academic paper. And at least the media hasn't spent weeks speculating on whether or not Obama wears French cuff shirts. There is hope.....there is hope.

Media Disinformation: Iran's Link to Iraqi Insurgents

New York Times vs McClatchy by Greg Mitchell

Global Research, May 6, 2008

Editor and Publisher - 2008-05-05

Michael Gordon, the military writer for The New York Times who contributed several false stories about Iraqi WMD in the runup to the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2002, has written several articles in the past year about Iran’s alleged training of Iraqi insurgents -- or supplying them with weapons to kill Americans. He produced another major report on this subject for today’s Times – based solely on unnamed sources -- which is at odds with an account from McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau.

Gordon asserts that “Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran…An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.

“The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.

“But the Americans say the reports of Hezbollah’s role at the Iranian camp offer important details about Iranian assistance to the militias, including efforts Iran appears to be making to train the fighters in unobtrusive ways.”

But McClatchy has a quite different take.

Leila Fadel, the bureau chief, and Shashank Bengali report: “The Iraqi Government seemed to distance itself from U.S. accusations towards Iran Sunday saying it would not be forced into conflict with its Shiite neighbor. And Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki ordered the formation of a committee to look into foreign intervention in Iraq.

“As the government appeared to back down from its hardening stance against Iran, four marines were killed in Anbar in the deadliest attack in the Sunni province in months.

"The government spokesman, Ali al Dabbagh, told reporters Sunday that a committee was formed to find ‘tangible information’ about foreign intervention, specifically Iran's role in Iraq rather than ‘information based on speculation.’

"’We don't want to be pushed into any conflict with any neighboring countries, especially Iran. What happened before is enough. We paid a lot,’ Dabbagh said, referring to the eight years war between the two nations in which an estimated 1 million people died.”

Also today from Agence France-Press: “Iraq said on Sunday it has no evidence that Iran was supplying militias engaged in fierce street fighting with security forces in Baghdad.

“Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said there was no 'hard evidence' of involvement by the neighbouring Shiite government of Iran in backing Shiite militiamen in the embattled country. Asked about reports that weapons captured from Shiite fighters bore 2008 markings suggesting Iranian involvement, Dabbagh said: ‘We don't have that kind of evidence... If there is hard evidence we will defend the country.’"

Here is a list of Gordon’s sources in his Times article:

-- “An American official”

-- “But the Americans say”

-- “American officials”

-- “American officials”

-- “The Americans “

--“American officials”

--“An American official”

-- ditto, and so on

Greg Mitchell's new book explores Gordon's and McClatchy's past reporting on Iraq and Iraq. It is titled, "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq."

© Copyright Greg Mitchell, Editor and Publisher, 2008