Quoteworthy
On war and peace
There is no way to peace — peace is the way
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
- John F. Kennedy
Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.
- Howard Zinn in “Terrorism And War”
Given all the damage that remains in Iraq, it is no wonder that some Iraqis are confused and angry at the rosy pronouncements about Iraq’s path to progress. Without masking his hostility and frustration, Jassim Al-Assawi pressed Ambassador Hill to explain why, despite all the problems Iraq is currently experiencing, he remains so optimistic. After waxing poetic about the heroism and drive of the Iraqi people, Hill simply insisted, “There’s no going back, only forward.”
This last statement encapsulates what is perhaps the most important function of the success narrative. All this talk about moving forward is also an insistence on not looking back, especially not to 2003. The U.S. has sought to control the past of the Iraq war by rejecting and effectively erasing it, willfully marginalizing the very act that got this whole story going in the first place. The Bush administration needed to scratch 2003 out in order to minimize its own role in the destruction of Iraq and the suffering of its people. Now, the Obama administration has picked up the eraser in order to convince everyone that this is a “responsible” withdrawal.
No matter how much the U.S government erases the past or predicts the future of Iraq, ordinary Iraqis will continue to face the more messy and complicated realities of the present. I dare Obama and everyone else in the spin machine to go to Iraq and look a child in the eyes. A child who, seven years after the U.S. invasion, still lacks adequate housing, drinking water, sanitation, electricity and education. Now, tell that child that the war in Iraq was a success.
- Hannah Gurman, from her article, The Iraq withdrawal: An Orwellian success on salon.com
Like almost every other stupid interventionist project of the last twenty years, the Libyan war was founded on the assumption that attacking another country would drive the population to turn against the government instead of realizing that the completely normal, human reaction of the majority of every nation on the planet is to resent foreign attacks and usually to defer to the government in an emergency. This is what we would do, and it is as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning, but for some reason we have to go through the same exercise of overconfident miscalculation, puzzlement, and then the dawning realization that bad and unjust governments don’t automatically collapse simply because we wish they would. Perhaps next time, if there must be a next time, our government should come up with a plan that doesn’t rely so heavily on the willingness of regime loyalists to commit the equivalent of treason.
- Daniel Larson of The American Conservative
On civil liberty
Having people do bad things is the price we pay for freedom. There is a cost to all liberty. Having to hear upsetting or toxic views is the price we pay for free speech; having propaganda spewed by large media outlets is the price we pay for a free press; and having some horrible, dangerous criminals go free is the price we pay for banning the Police from searching our homes without a warrant (the Fourth Amendment) and mandating due process before people can be imprisoned (the Fifth Amendment). The whole American political system is predicated on the idea that we are unwilling to accept large-scale abridgments of freedom in the name of safety, and that Absolute Safety is a dangerous illusion.
- Glenn Greenwald writing on his excellent blog on Salon.com
On religion
This is the old advertiser’s tactic: invent a problem, convince people that they have it, then offer to sell them the cure, promising that it will make them cooler, sexier, better-smelling than the teeming masses. Whether it’s tooth-whitening strips or eternal salvation, the selling points are the same. And just like the corporations that rake in the bucks from exploiting consumers’ insecurities, the evangelical pitchmen have built an empire of wealth and political influence on belief in Hell. It serves the dual purpose of coercing people to stay in line through fear, then rewarding them for their obedience by flattering them that they’re the savvy ones who know how to escape what the rest of the world has got coming.
A faith that made no demands for everyone to join, unlike the evangelical theology of exclusivity and judgment, might be superior in the moral sense. But in the memetic competition, it’s probably doomed. It just wouldn’t be able to outcompete religions which demand allegiance and obedience and threaten those who won’t go along.
- The web site Daylight Atheism
On the death penalty
Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it. … I have concluded, after looking at all the information that I have received, that it is impossible to create a perfect system — one that is free of all mistakes.
In many ways the death penalty today resembles the system struck down in 1972, when the Court
could find no justification for the small number of death sentences and executions chosen arbitrarily
from so many eligible cases. The new system approved in 1976 was supposed to carefully guide
prosecutors, juries, and judges in administering a more rational system. Today, the promise of a fair,
sensible, and effective system of capital punishment has proven false. As distrust of the system has
grown, the death penalty is again infrequently applied, and a host of arbitrary factors still strongly
influences who lives and who dies.
- Death Penalty Information Center in “The Death Penalty in 2011: Year End Report”
On criminal justice
“We say that Bush was the president of torture, but Obama is the president of extra-judicial killing. The difference between the two is that while one used to extra-judicially detain people, the other has gone a step further and extra-judicially kills them.”
- Former Guantano prisoner Moazzam Begg, who is also a member of Cageprisoners
Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would ‘demean the seriousness’ of the offenses.
So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It’s not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry. That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What’s next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?
The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They’re attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone’s claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.
On labor
In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining. …We demand this fraud be stopped
- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1961
On the environment
What we know today about human-induced climate change is the result of painstaking research and analysis, some of it going back more than a century. Major international scientific organizations in disciplines ranging from geophysics to geology, atmospheric sciences to biology, and physics to human health – as well as every one of the leading national scientific academies worldwide – have concluded that human activity is changing the climate. This is not a ‘belief.’ Instead, it is an objective evaluation of the scientific evidence.
…Climate change deniers cloak themselves in scientific language, selectively critiquing aspects of mainstream climate science. Sometimes they present alternative hypotheses as an explanation of a particular point, as if the body of evidence were a house of cards standing or falling on one detail; but the edifice of climate science instead rests on a concrete foundation. As an open letter from 255 NAS members noted in the May 2010 Science magazine, no research results have produced any evidence that challenges the overall scientific understanding of what is happening to our planet’s climate and why.
The assertions of climate deniers therefore should not be given scientific weight equal to the comprehensive, peer-reviewed research presented by the vast majority of climate scientists.
The determination of policy sits with you, the elected representatives of the people. But we urge you, as our elected representatives, to base your policy decisions on sound science, not sound bites. Congress needs to understand that scientists have concluded, based on a systematic review of all of the evidence, that climate change caused by human activities raises serious risks to our national and economic security and our health both here and around the world. It’s time for Congress to move on to the policy debate.
- A letter from 17 scientists to Congress
On the media
We all know true objectivity is a myth. We use unconscious biases to filter billions of bits of sensory information every day, just to function. Reporters sorting through mountains of data must do the same thing. So is this impartiality obsession just about appearance? And do we need to keep up that appearance to retain the trust of the news consumers?
The price of maintaining that appearance can be high. It can lead news outlets to refraining from calling a lie, a lie. It can lead them to give equal time to very unequal positions, distorting the truth in the process.
- National Public Radio’s Brooke Gladstone in a commentary on MSNBC’s decision to suspend Keith Olbermann
