1. “Attack of the Cyborg Insects
The dangers of science in the service of the state
“Telepathic helmets. Grid-computing swarms of cyborg insects, some for surveillance, some with lethal stingers. New cognitive-enhancement drugs. (What? Adderall and Provigil aren’t good enough for you?) Lethal autonomous robots. Brain-chip-to-weapon platform control systems on a ‘future force warrior‘ platform. American military technology is getting very frisky.”
As my friend Lew Rockwell put it, “The article, a defense of sci-fi war, is a reminder, not only of how much loot is taken from us for these murderous purposes, but how many scientific and engineering brains are enlisted into Starship Trooperism. How much freer, wealthier, and more advanced our civilization would be without the Pentagon, the CIA, the whole military-industrial complex. How many people would not have had their lives ended too soon.”
Militarism distorts the development of civilization, deforming the natural evolution of culture and even science: the end result is the birth of misshapen monsters, such as nuclear technology, the love child of war and the Leviathan. Allenby’s cyborg insects are the Bizarro World version of productive achievements: they are the cancer cure, the clean power source, the life affirming and life-prolonging innovations that might have been invented, but weren’t. “
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/05/20/attack-of-the-cyborg-insects/
2. Ugh:
“40,000 NATO Troops in the West Bank?”
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/05/20/nato-in-the-west-bank-reports-say-abbas-open-to-idea/
3. “Stay Out of Bangkok
Dictatorship in Fiji. Civil strife in the Solomon Islands. Enduring divisions in multi-ethnic Indonesia (in truth, the “Java Empire”). Political conflict in Burma. Authoritarian rule in Cambodia. Continuing fragility in East Timor. A semi-failed state in the Philippines. Assorted movements pushing for autonomy or independence in Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. And now, chaos in Bangkok streets.
Having failed to prevent such problems, America’s military presence offers no solution for any of them either. Precisely what could Washington do in any of these cases? None of these disputes plausibly warrants American military intervention.
But if not any of them, then what realistic scenario would justify American military intervention?
It’s time to reverse the presumption of U.S. policy. Rather than assume American involvement in other nations’ conflicts, Washington should plan to keep out. Rather than position U.S. military personnel to intervene promiscuously half a world away, America should redeploy its military to defend the United States.
Americans will long remain active in East Asia. But U.S. interests do not require military plans to intervene in local strife, whether within or among nations. Thailand demonstrates how the region’s most likely problems lie well beyond America’s control.”
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23408
4. “Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review”
Can you smell the hypocrisy? How could anyone miss its pungent, suffocating odor? Apparently, what Obama called “a legal black hole at Guantanamo” is a heinous injustice, but “a legal black hole at Bagram” is the Embodiment of Hope. And evidently, Obama would only feel “terror” if his child were abducted and taken to Guantanamo and imprisoned “without even getting one chance to ask why and prove their innocence.” But if the very same child were instead taken to Bagram and treated exactly the same way, that would be called Justice — or, to use his jargon, Pragmatism. And what kind of person hails a Supreme Court decision as “protecting our core values” — as Obama said of Boumediene — only to then turn around and make a complete mockery of that ruling by insisting that the Cherished, Sacred Rights it recognized are purely a function of where the President orders a detainee-carrying military plane to land?
Independently, what happened to Obama’s eloquent insistence that “restricting somebody’s right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer; in fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe“? How does our policy of invading Afghanistan and then putting people at Bagram with no charges of any kind dispose people in that country, and the broader Muslim world, to the United States? If a country invaded the U.S. and set up prisons where Americans from around the world where detained indefinitely and denied all rights to have their detention reviewed, how would it dispose you to the country which was doing that?
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/21/bagram/index.html
5. “The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change
Can anyone even imagine for one second Barack Obama standing up and saying: ”My administration believes that the American state has become too authoritarian”? Even if he were willing to utter those words — and he wouldn’t be — his doing so would trigger a massive laughing fit in light of his actions. While Nick Clegg says this week that his civil liberties commitments are “so important that he was taking personal responsibility for implementing them, and promised that the new government would not be ‘insecure about relinquishing control’,” our Government moves inexorably in the other direction.
I don’t want to idealize what’s taking place in Britain: it still remains to be seen how serious these commitments are and how genuine of an investigation into the torture regime will be conducted. But clearly, what was once a fringe position there has now become the mainstream platform of their new Government: that it’s imperative to ensure that their country is not “a place where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question.”
That’s exactly what the U.S. has become, as each new Terrorist attack (or even failed attack) prompts one question and one question only, no matter which party is in power: ”which rights do we give up now”? And each serious government crime engenders new excuses for vesting political leaders with immunity. And no new government power of detention, surveillance, or privacy-invasion is too extreme or unwarranted. Unlike in Britain, the term “civil liberties” or the phrase “the state has become too authoritarian” is, in the U.S., one which only Fringe Purist Absolutists utter. Unlike in Britain, efforts to impose serious constraints on unchecked government power are, in the U.S., the exclusive and lonely province of The Unserious Losers among us. And unlike in Britain, the notion that political leaders should actually do what they vowed during the campaign they would do is, in the U.S., a belief held only by terribly un-Pragmatic purist ideologues. Whatever else is true, it is encouraging that a major Western country — one that has been the victim of a horrific terrorist attack and that has a substantial Muslim population — has a government that is explicitly advocating (and, at least to some extent, implementing) these ideals.
UPDATE: It is worth noting that this can happen in Britain — but is not close to happening here — because their conservatives’ advocacy of “limited government” actually extends beyond the mere desire not to pay taxes into actual, substantial concepts of liberty, whereas only a tiny portion of the American Right is even capable of thinking in those terms (that the British Conservative leadership is receptive to supporting same-sex marriage — whereas the American Democratic Party is not — underscores the vast differences). Similarly, that country’s multi-party system enabled the British Left under Labour, unlike most American liberals under Democratic Party rule, to remain independent of the party in power, and thus retain a serious commitment to objecting to and limiting the unchecked power of political officials. “
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/21/britain/index.html
