1. “The Obama Boomerang
Pro-Obama lefties get slapped down – by the FBI
I think it’s safe to say the antiwar movement was unprepared for this kind of attack from an administration they hailed as “a very good development,” and I’m not just talking about FRSO. The idea that the election of a black man whose resume reads “community organizer” is going to change the face of US imperialism even slightly is an illusion brought on by the identity politics that have long since replaced Marxism (or any coherent ‘ism) in the canons of the left. If many have wondered who let the air out of the antiwar movement, it was precisely those “radical” leftists who, like the “orthodox” Marxists of FRSO, signed on as the “left” wing of the Obama cult. That’s why they didn’t see the mailed fist of the State coming even when it was a few inches from their faces.
The Minneapolis and Chicago raids are just the beginning. The logic of the “war on terrorism,” and its legal machinery here on the home front, is an ever-expanding campaign to associate political dissent – and, specifically, dissent from our interventionist foreign policy – with violence and treason. And it will be a lot easier to pull this off under a “progressive” veneer. Remember, Bush’s political police just spied covertly, as well as targeting Islamic charities and shutting several down: Obama’s KGB is conducting open raids on the offices of domestic antiwar organizations. Anybody who gave a dime, or an hour of their time, to the Minneapolis and Chicago antiwar groups in which FRSO involved itself is now apt to be on an FBI “terrorist watch list.” Under this “progressive” President, the FBI isn’t just taking photos of us at antiwar events and following us to the grocery store: it’s kicking down the front door and taking our stuff.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/09/26/the-obama-boomerang/
2. “Chappell asked his audience to guess what percent of American soldiers during World War II who were in a position to fire at the enemy and were “supposed” to do so actually did so. I guessed 20 percent. The actual answer was 15 percent. In Vietnam, by contrast, it was 90 percent. What changed? Chappell’s answer was that people in the U.S. Army during Vietnam had been trained to kill.
The way to train people to kill, he said, is to dehumanize those being killed. He listed three ways of doing this: (1) psychological distance, (2) moral distance, and (3) mechanical (physical) distance. The way to create psychological distance is with things like racial slurs: calling the North Vietnamese “gooks,” for example. To create moral distance, governments try to get their soldiers to think, “I’m good, you’re bad, and God is on my side.”
http://original.antiwar.com/henderson/2010/09/26/an-afternoon-with-paul-chappell/
3. “So a midterm election is an election in which rich cranky old white people predominate as voters. Thus, it really is remarkable, and sad for the Republicans, that even with such a favorable electorate (i.e. a shrunken and weird one), they likely can’t take the Senate back. And without the Senate, they won’t be able to get up to much mischief. Every theatrical bill they pass in the House will be quietly buried in committee, and in the unlikely event it came to a vote and passed, it would simply be vetoed; and the veto would stick.”
http://www.juancole.com/2010/09/new-polls-dems-very-likely-to-keep-senate.html
4. “The Obama administration’s war on privacy
UPDATE: What makes this trend all the more pernicious is that at exactly the same time that the Government is demanding greater and greater access to what you do and say, it is hiding its own conduct behind an always-higher and more impenetrable wall of secrecy. Everything you do and say must be accessible to them; you can have no secrets from them. But everything they do — including even criminal acts such as torture, assassinations and warrantless surveillance — is completely off-limits to you, deemed “state secrets” that not even courts can review in order to determine their legality. This is all driven by Francis Bacon’s observation that “knowledge is power”: the idea is to make sure that they have full knowledge of what you do (i.e., full power over it), while you have no knowledge about what they do (i.e., no power).
UPDATE II: For those insisting that the Government must have the technological ability to eavesdrop on any and all communications in order to stop Terrorists and criminals, what are you going to do about in-person communications? By this logic, the Government should install eavesdropping devices in all private homes and public spaces, provided they promise only to listen in when the law allows them to do so (I believe there was a book written about that once). For those insisting that the Government must have the physical ability to spy on all communications, what objections could one have to such a proposal? We’ve developed this child-like belief that all Bad Things can be prevented — we can be Kept Safe from all dangers — provided we just vest enough power in the Government to protect us all. What we lose from that mentality, however, is quite vast yet rarely counted. A central value of the Internet was that it was supposed to enable the flow of information free from the surveillance and control of governmental and other authorities.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/27/privacy/index.html
