prole

Yeah! Wow, have you been watching and listening to the economic news lately? I think we're really close to proving how great Bush's policies have really been!

Dirty Harry spotted in LA!

The American social context in which Dirty Harry originated and held some appeal is an interesting one. Defeat in Vietnam, racial unrest, women's lib movement, Hippies, free speech movement. These all contributed to a reactionary fear of "social decay" and the notion that democratic liberal society had "gone too far". It's not surprising that such ideas might make a comeback these days and become socially relevant to immigration issues (particularly in Europe) and legal treatment of (real or perceived) threats to the American state.

We're not like you. Thank God. Perhaps you'd like to explain the personal appeal that vigilantism, open contempt for law, easy dismissal of civil rights, racist overtones, and general barbarism present in Dirty Harry holds for you. Please don't attribute such an appeal to the rest of us or the American people as a whole.

I certainly don't know anything about the "appeal" of Dirty Harry. Who are you people?

I don't know about "our" distaste, but it seems that bombing people from space is politically more salable than torturing people.

Hey yeah PeePee, keep up the good fight man! History will prove that you were right, a real truth-seeker, stickin' it to the confused and willfully ignorant! Fight the Power!

Good times.

Hmmm...This might be important.

Norman Podhoertz and now Pat Robertson. That's a winner of a foreign policy team! Where's Richard Perle and Daniel Pipes? Should be fun!

Here is a synopsis of an excellent BBC documentary on this subject. It appears in 3 volumes available in the US on the Wholphin dvd's.

Yeah, then JayB and Co.'ll be trying to get us to invade Eurabia:

Is this the intellectual equivalent of "Where's Waldo?," where the Waldo in question is a coherent argument? Try taking a hit on the inhaler between sentences next time. After reading your missive, I'll attempt to paraphrase a bit for the sake of clarity. "All people of conscience should support regulations that force poor people, especially in third world countries, to pay artificially high prices for food, clothing, and other consumer staples in order to satisfy the ideological strivings of vastly more fortunate North American parlor activists like me, and I don't care for people who suggest otherwise." How's that? But what about the folks who wear Birkenstocks and sip Lattes? Don't they get a vote? He's got a point about your anti-intellectual schtick, in my opinion. What exactly is wrong with being either educated or intelligent - the core of Webster's definition of the term? In attacking the "ivory tower" or whatever it is (that is Fairweather's whipping post, I think, and maybe not yours) you often seem to reduce the whole thing to a cartoon just like railing about the ininformed opinions of those who wear Birkenstocks and sip Lattes. There's a number of distinctions between intelligence and/or educational attainment and the identity and character of those who fill or aspire to fill the role of the "intellectual" in public life that I think you are either unaware of or have deliberately ignored here. Translation: As all the world's important questions have been answered, and the remedy to the world's remaining problems can be solved by the application of the correct economic model administered by enlightened technicians, we can do away with the "intellectual in public life". Except of course those whose job it is to explain the model and its effects to the ignorant complainers. With respect to "the model," in question, the Mexicans consumers clearly didn't require any coaching or political agitation to change their shopping habits in a manner that they determined was in their best interests, but it did require the agitations of various left-wing activists and shopkeepers who controlled local commerce in order to prevent them from doing so, so these charges of elitism, "explaining the model," etc are rather ironic. Who's the one insisting on reverential deference to one's betters here? Your increasingly Fairweather-esque red-baiting and and broad-brush generalizations about "intellectuals" hardly amounts to legitimate criticism in my mind, at least. I think anyone who values critical thought and open inquiry should find it quite disturbing, given the historical record of such attacks. Your response above to the issue of externalities confirms the critique of economists as myopic, graphpaper-brained technicians unable to relate to culture, history, human social interation to their dry quantitative analyses. The anecdote you cited above is not suprising. The poor by definition must be primarily concerned with price as their self-interest may lie only with getting their next meal. But only by the narrowest defintion of self interest (the price of tortillas) can one be said to be acting in self-interest. This is why economists and the business press push so hard for human beings to place themselves in the role of consumer. Only when we identify and understand ourselves as "consumers" while supressing our identities as workers, children, parents, Mexicans, elderly, environmentalists, intellectuals, etc. do the arguments placing the "lowest price" in a priviledged position make any fucking sense at all. This is why the POOR place so prominently in economistic criticisms of antiglobalizationists, leftists, etc. because by definition the poor MUST privilege price without regard where and how something was actually produced. Anyone arguing against the lowest possible price for anything or for the internalization of environmental costs or the raising of wages or the collective bargaining rights of workers then become anti-poor by definition. Quizzically, this is the rare time when the poor actually make an appearence in the arguments by proponents of market fundamentalism. Poor people priced out of markets by regulation=BAD; poor people priced out of markets by the "natural" operation of the market=GOOD. Furthermore this argument says nothing at all about poverty, its source or prescriptions for eradicating it. Has Walmart actually done anything to improve the lives of its shoppers? No. Is there evidence that Walmart does more to degrade the communities in which it does business? Yes. Has the Walmart economy proved sustainable, viable, and beneficial in the places where they are already established? No. By appealing to those who have no other choice than Walmart because they are absoutely destitute while accepting their situation as natural and disregarding any alternatives to their predicament is cynical, unimaginative, disingenuous and exploitative. Perhaps, instead of using poor people to prove that Walmart is actually good in contradiction to the vast evidence that Walmart is a parasite, you may start working towards a global society in which people can look beyond the lowest possible price for their most basic necessities. By the way, your suggestion that the left is entirely or primarily composed of intellectuals or of the middle-class is historically inaccurate as a whole and for Mexico in particular.

Is this the intellectual equivalent of "Where's Waldo?," where the Waldo in question is a coherent argument? Try taking a hit on the inhaler between sentences next time. After reading your missive, I'll attempt to paraphrase a bit for the sake of clarity. "All people of conscience should support regulations that force poor people, especially in third world countries, to pay artificially high prices for food, clothing, and other consumer staples in order to satisfy the ideological strivings of vastly more fortunate North American parlor activists like me, and I don't care for people who suggest otherwise." How's that? But what about the folks who wear Birkenstocks and sip Lattes? Don't they get a vote? He's got a point about your anti-intellectual schtick, in my opinion. What exactly is wrong with being either educated or intelligent - the core of Webster's definition of the term? In attacking the "ivory tower" or whatever it is (that is Fairweather's whipping post, I think, and maybe not yours) you often seem to reduce the whole thing to a cartoon just like railing about the ininformed opinions of those who wear Birkenstocks and sip Lattes. There's a number of distinctions between intelligence and/or educational attainment and the identity and character of those who fill or aspire to fill the role of the "intellectual" in public life that I think you are either unaware of or have deliberately ignored here. Translation: As all the world's important questions have been answered, and the remedy to the world's remaining problems can be solved by the application of the correct economic model administered by enlightened technicians, we can do away with the "intellectual in public life". Except of course those whose job it is to explain the model and its effects to the ignorant complainers.

How about here:

Your outpouring of paternalism and ongoing crusade for "economic freedom" once again masks the savagely elitist and cynical underpinnings of that ideological freakshow that comprises your worldview. You should be more honest with your CC.com audience instead of treating them like children, doling out crumbs of disaggregated data and economic arcana with large dollops of tired Friedmanite clarion calls to capitalist utopia. Your inability to recognize or answer to any of the charges made against Wal-mart by the other posters speaks volumes about your use of narrow economistic criteria here and elsewhere. The myriad (and thoroughly documented) ways in which Walmart has harmed communities apparently represent either externalities or are trumped by the manna of "increased purchasing power". Even disregarding for a moment the systemic injustices perpetrated by this leviathan, are you so dazzled by the spectacle of the array of "goods and services", efficiencies of scale, the MAGIC of the marketplace as to actually believe that the production and consumption of mass produced, overly-processed, monocropped, exported, cheap plastic crap is the highest aspiration of humanity? Oh, but of course, we are talking about the poor, the objects of all your paternalistic attentions, the patients who never seem to survive (or survive in spite of) the administration of your economic medicine. Given the proliferation of WalMarts across the landscape, one would expect poverty to have been eradicated completely! But that isn't what you are saying. Purchasing power! Yeah, only if it's shoddy enough, dangerous enough. For you, it's okay for people to be poor, in fact it's natural and beneficial for your system as a whole (and for WalMart especially). They just need more change in their pockets for 2-liters of Coke and lawn furniture. Voile! Now they're "absolutely" wealthy! Wealth creation? All that's being created is a new dependency that parasitic companies like Walmart exist on by exploiting. At least be honest about what you and your philosophical forebears really think about greed, class-rule, and "human nature" instead of exploiting people's natural empathy to further your fucked worldview by appealing to the poor. Whack MC indeed. You should've been a preacher. Leftist intellectuals? Instigators and provocateurs? As if poor and working-class people don't know when they’re getting screwed! But of course your economic technocratic elitism only requires that they understand the model. Anybody who complains is just ignorant even when they can see with their own eyes that it’s rotten. Give us some graphs Jay_B. Make us understand. All will be revealed behind the curtain! You're a shyster, a snake oil salesman and the planet is starting to awake from your spell. By the way, your anti-intellectualism should surprise no one, it's become a hallmark of all your postings. It's also a hallmark of fascist and totalitarian regimes that have always made appeals to "common sense", the "common man" and the poor. Go figure.

According to Wikipedia: "The Merriam-Webster definitions for the word geek are "1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake...It is commonly believed that the word "geek" originates with side-show "circus geeks" — performers at carnivals who swallow various live animals, live insects, and so forth. Sometimes this would extend to biting the heads off of snakes, chickens, or other living animals."

More interesting is the article itself, the vast bulk of which is dedicated to convincing us that this man is a REAL scientist. The meat of what is actually being said is given exactly one sentence: "To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena." No corroboration, no elaboration. Wow, compelling stuff.

Given that the dismantling of the Iraqi state and the privatization of state assets created the unemployment that in large part fueled the insurgency, we can add Iraq to the list of states in which neoliberal policies have wreaked disaster. Ironically, now that Iraq is in complete meltdown, it may have become just about the oil. Although I, like others on this board, question how the Iraqi Oil Law is likely to survive any future state that opposes it.

Funny, I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed that Sheep Stout's arrival coincided with your latest departure. Fairweather=Sheaf_Stout!! Please take your alter-ego with you back to the ASSensionist.

Who's business are you referring too? What about all the people that have died? Is is good for their business? You know the answer already- the companies who make the bullets and bombs- you know the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. Some of the best analysis from the post-invasion period sheds light on these and other questions, placing the second Iraq war in the broader context of US imperialism and neoliberal globalization. A good antidote to the "all about oil" arguments.

Extend the time scale on the graphs back far enough, say 4 billion years, and you could make a case that nuclear holocaust wouldn't be so bad.

From Asia Times:

The good news is that in relative terms, these people are wealthy!

But showing that the US lags behind the rest of the developed world despite its "richest nation" status might induce one to ask questions as to how this problem might be solved.