Wired State

George Packer Takes Down Silicon Valley - But Not Too Hard

Obama had dinner with all these tech CEOs -- and they got SOPA/PIPA removed so they could go on prevailing over Hollywood and other content businesses. But what did the country get?

I've always loved George Packer's writing at the New Yorker. His takedown of Obama's Cairo speech was state-of-the-art. I'm not as leftist as Packer, but I surely appreciate his work.

It's a shame that his great article criticizing the Better Worldism of Silicon Valley (as I call it) is -- symptomatically -- behind a pay wall. Maybe the financial elves at the New Yorker realize that there's nothing that Silicon Valley loves to do more than read about itself, and this is a lure to get some of them to help sustain East Coast intellectual life in the form of the New Yorker, struggling like all print media, even having moved online.

I recently subscribed, in fact to get the tote -- and the tote was a total rip-off. I expected at least a full-size Adidas-style flight bag; instead I got a glorified smushed book bag, if that. Don't fall for it. It's tacky. The magazine is worth $20 if you get one of those offers. Otherwise, buy it on a case-by-case basis. It's had way too much Julia Ioffe for my taste lately. Isn't it enough that she's at TNR?

Recently I saw a list which I can't find now of the top Silicon Valley moguls and their philanthropies. So you saw that Sergei Brin was donating to Parkinson disease research because he has the genes for it himself. And somebody else was donating to some project to extend life a la the Singularity University. And somebody else was spending on something else that was, in the end, about me-me-me. I remember out of the whole bunch of them, the only one who seemed to be giving to more societal-type of philanthropy of the more classic type was Pierre Omidyar, who funded minorities education, NGOs that work on human rights, and so on. It was sad to see. There was recently an article about a billionaire couple that was putting everything into obesity research and education -- you know, those "broken" schools. They were slender and perfect themselves, but they thought this was an area where they'd make a big impact, finally cracking the nut of obesity by just spending a lot on it with someone they felt was the "smartest". It's like what I was saying in my previous post about the Spartan way -- taking the few select men and training them intensively, away from society, to perfection, but having them turn out to be authoritarians; or the Athenian way, training the entire class democratically in the hope that the geniuses would appear among them and flourish, too.

Anyway, George is troubled by Silicon Valley's creepy insularity just as I am, but he comes to a more socialist-style critique, much like Evgeny Morozov. As Packer writes, Morozov grumps that Silicon Valley won't care about health institutions and sustaining them (ObamaCare?) but will just create an app for you to track your own health. But to me, the problem is sustaining the kind of society with large, medium and small business -- pluralism -- where companies and people can pay for their own insurance.

In any event, George's piece takes apart all the things you'd expect in the Better Worlders -- the vast disparity in wealth between their moguls and the homeless people in the Mission forced out of their homes by gentrification

I doubt George Packer, even though he is from Palo Alto evidently, has read the novels of Kathleen Townshend Norris from the turn of the century, one of my favourite authors, but she wrote vividly of the great disparities in wealth in San Francisco and the other cities in California even 100 years ago. The poor you always have with ye.

In New York, the giant towers where the moguls and their middle-class staff work require a working class of people running delis, drug stores, gyms, hardware shops, etc. down below, making up a more diverse economy. But in Silicon Valley, all of these services, or a lot of them, are put inside the Big IT campuses themselves -- even a bus comes from Google to pick you up in the morning so you don't take a cab or pay for public transportation. In a way, it reminds me of the problem of Washington, DC, where it can actually be hard to find a sandwhich or a xerox shop -- because there are so many federal buildings with subsidized cheap cafeterias for federal employees. There's disparity in Washington, DC, too, you know.

To me, the problem with Silicon Valley isn't that they don't engage in more philanthropy or somehow subsidize their towns more with higher taxes to create bigger welfare classes -- a concept I don't think is such a great solution for urban progress, really -- the problem is the technocommunism. It's the way all of these moguls scrape data and get ad clicking and get creation or uploading of loads of content and private information for free -- in a collective farm for us -- that enriches them. We might toil all day on Facebook writing and clicking on ads and uploading photos, but we get nothing for it. They get stock which they still seem to have enriched themselves considerably with, despite their poor IPO showing.

But for George Packer, it's about mere inequity which presumably he'd fix by more philanthropy and more taxation, social democracy style, rather than by a social justice challenge to these billionaires to start cutting us in on the pie.

There are fifty or so billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires in Silicon Valley; last year’s Facebook public stock offering alone created half a dozen more of the former and more than a thousand of the latter. There are also record numbers of poor people, and the past two years have seen a twenty-per-cent rise in homelessness, largely because of the soaring cost of housing. After decades in which the country has become less and less equal, Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places in America.

I understand Lanier, in his new book, has spoken of the need to create ways for customers to get paid more online with all these products, but we know how fiercely somebody like Kevin Systrom resists that notion that would mean "friction" -- and Anil Dash and Gizmodo and all of the tech press and investtors.

Packer has done the public service for the East Coast intelligentsia and gone around and interviewed these Big IT guys, the same ones who met with Obama before his election.

We never got much gossip out of that dinner, and now we get more -- but mainly it's about Zuckerberg fretting that too many of his colleagues were looking for things like tax incentives or an immigration bill (for their own cheaper engineers from India or Russia), but not for things that had more resonance -- he conceded then the need to broaden the immigration issue.

Packer quotes Gavin Newscom, the mayor of San Francisco, as saying "technology has rendered our current system of government irrelevant". Sigh. When will technology render people like him irrelevant?

George gets his number and the number of the others instantly: "many of the tasks of government are outsourced to citizens with smartphones," he concludes. And that won't be viable. It's government only for the wealthy and the connected, not the rest of us.

He makes short work of Steven Johnson and his "peer progressivism" and "liquid democracy" which despite its seeming democratic credentials actually involves reducing your participation in a corporativist type arrangement where you transfer votes to those you think have more expertise in some area.  I wish these jerks would spend even one day actually trying to practice these ideas in a commune, they would get over them quick.  Steven Johnson makes money from his best-selling books or his speaking fees, not by using Facebook to find a friend whose couch he can surf on, or somebody who will accept him spending an hour of his time to give him some intangible -- or even food. These nuts that say cash will disappear and people will merely be collectivized and working happily in the commune just never studied Soviet history. And this is collectivism -- communism -- not libertarianism -- it's libertarian only for the person harvesting the cash from it, not us. That's what I wish George would understand.

Even so, Packer gets the cultural inanity of it all:

"It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up."

Packers asks everyone: how it could be that this revolution coincided with a broader economic decline?

Answer -- and I don't think Packer himself realizes -- it's the Internet that in fact is destroying the economy -- not only the print, music, news businesses but the government and financial sector.

I don't know if George Packer will stick with this topic and read more and realize just how bad it is -- that this isn't just a social equity problem with some rich guys in California not paying more taxes so their cleaning ladies can have been homes and schools for their kids. This is about a raging, destructive power that wants to uproot and eliminate institutions as we know them, including Congress, in the technocratic notion that they are "broken" and need "fixing".

Maybe he will figure it out -- but one thing that's very refreshing is George's nonchalant take on FWD.us. He writes how this effort to create a lobbying arm of Silicon Valley and work on political issues, headed by this friend of Zuckerberg's Joe Green, has been criticized fiercely for going outside the bounds of the accepted party line, because in order to get their hands dirty in politics, they had to back candidates, and that meant backing people who have different views than they do on some subjects. So if they want Lyndsay Graham, a southern Republican, to get on board with their immigration position, they have to accept that he's going to back things that some of their more touchy eco-friends will hate, like oil and gas. Of course, I don't know what it is they put in their cars every morning, maybe it's fairy dust, but Musk, the electric car guy, pulled out of FWD.us *gasp* because of these values gaps.

Parker thinks this is just part of Silicon Valley growing up as a political bloc, and doesn't seem that upset about it, although Bill McKibbon may be along any minute. I actually hope myself that Zuckerberg's lobbying group doesn't fail over sectarian sniping from the hard left because I think his prevailing is in part what may someday modify and even out the extremists in his midst and gives us a more tolerable and less destructive Silicon Valley (dare we to dream?)

Joe Green, Zuckerberg's friend who was a member with him of Harvard's Jewish fraternity, even collaborated on Facemash, the precursor to Facebook that rated classmates for "hotness" that landed them before the college disciplinary board. Joe Green had a strict father, a math professor at UCLA, who didn't want that sort of thing happening to his son, and he urged him to get off the project. He also urged him to stay away from Zuck when later Green had spent some time working for John Kerry's presidential campaign and then wanted Zuckerberg to make a political network out of Facebook. Green went on to make Causes with Napster's Sean Parker and NationBuilder on their own without Facebook's interest, although you could argue that Facebook's crucial role in the Obama campaign surpassed all that fooling around with Causes.

I personally dislike Causes as it tilts too far to the left and constantly pushes left-wing causes at me. In theory, more centrist or even right-wing causes could be put there, but then they won't be promoted by either curation or algorithm. When I first joined, for some odd reason, I found I couldn't make a petition, it wouldn't let me log in and do that, although it kept sending me others' petitions. Finally, I was successful after literally months in getting the system to generate a new account and now I think I could make a petition -- but I just don't like the cramped space, the friend-forcing that it shoves at you trying to get you to send your cause to every single one of your Facebook friends, etc. NationBuilder I haven't used and I understand that it has been criticized lately for in fact not tilting to the left but being more evenhanded. I'll have to investigate.

As Packer reports,  Green doesn't think that the Silicon Valley methodology necessarily transfers to politics.

"Whereas politics is transactional and opaque, based on hierarchies and handshakes, Green argued, technology is empirical and often transparent, driven by data."

Well, the data-drivers in the Harper Reed machine sure won the day for the transactional and opaque!

Let's hope that New Yorker will get stronger in mounting a really serious, sustained critique of Silicon Valley that doesn't just amount to socialist weeping and saying "oh, poor people, not rich like those tycoons, and they don't care".  Ken Auleta's writing on Stanford and the insidious connections between business and the university and its corrupting influence on academia are also an important start here.

So here's my question: Atlantic has been taken over by Silicon Valley -- and it's awful. The New Republic has been taken over by Silicon Valley -- even more awful. At what point will the New Yorker cave, and how?

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The DQ: George Packer on the perverse worship of "reform celebrities"

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My Twit-Fight with Jeffrey Sachs: Who Develops and Where's the Democracy?

Top Silicon Valley Advisor Explains The Key Rules Behind Every Great Startup Idea

In Silicon Valley, philanthropy does not begin at home

My Twit-Fight with Jeffrey Sachs: Who Develops and Where's the Democracy?

I'll put this here, because it can be very hard to access old tweets now -- you can't get them more than a month or so before today's date, and even Topsy may not have everything.

I had been meaning to post this and forget about it and was reminded again by coming across Sachs pontificating on the Millenium Development Goals again. And I was reminded again just how wonderful Armin Rosen's article was, critiquing Sach's idea about African development (see at the very end).

I don't know if this exchange needs much explanation, but just in case: I got into a debate at first with a woman about whether the US and Europe were to blame for Africa's disruption. I think this is myopic and unfair and part of that anti-Western Marxist mentality you see in Western campuses and some African political organizations -- but not all. I think it's more complex than that, and while the scourges of colonialism naturally have to be blamed, and US machinations and oil companies and all the rest, at a certain point, you have to seek personal accountability, and you can't go on forever blaming whitey and the West. That's my conviction. And when I see the kleptocrats and maniacs leading some of these countries, I stand by it. I don't think they can be fixed by adding more mosquito nets.

But regardless of what I think, this story is about how the debate gets framed. Jeffrey Sachs has long been supported intellectually and financially by George Soros. He is typical of the can-do technocratic elite figure that George loves to back as a doer and maker, not in the Silicon Valley way -- George doesn't really seem to have an affinity with Silicon Valley -- but more in the old fashioned way of scientific development approaches -- economic solutions to political problems. There's more than a little third-way social democracy, even socialism in the ideals of this billionaire, and he tends to fund the leftwing and "progressive" organizations that fit these ideals.

Some time ago, he more or less revised -- abandoned? -- his ideas of the "open society" a la Popper, and began to believe that picking the one, true, scientific "progressive" way with rationality and free will was the way to advance society -- and then give the strongest organizations that extra boost, rather than funding pluralism for pluralism's sake.

As Alex Goldfarb, a one-time aide to Soros, once put it: It's the difference between funding the entire class, and hoping that out of that class of mixed abilities will come one or two geniuses, and the rest will have benefited from all being funded or funding those one or two geniuses because they are the strongest and best and you shouldn't waste money on failures or mediocrities. (This is also described as the Athenian versus Spartan form of education). 

I think arguably Soros has moved from the former to the latter belief, especially with his investments in American politics, but at any rate, Jeffrey Sachs is one of his big investments -- and by that I mean not necessarily in some literal dollar amount that Sachs may get today but more about his ideas, and advancing them either personally with Sachs, or many NGOs that will listen to Sachs and at least not criticize him.

There's almost no criticism of Sachs anywhere, and I think this is a function of the fact that there's a kind of taboo on that -- Soros grantees -- and there are a lot of them! -- don't want to fall out of favour. Even those without a direct Soros grant, say, a university, don't want to speak out of tune with the great one. This is incredible pervasive throughout the progresso-sphere -- this Partiinost' or Party discipline, and I really find it repulsive. What this interchange I had with Sachs shows is the enormous lengths he will go to -- narcistically -- to keep the adulation intact.

You would think normally someone of his magnitude wouldn't have time to come and interrupt a Twitter chat between two strangers who happen to use his handle merely to indicate they were discussing his article. But he did. He challenged my claims about the critique of his ideas for Poland and Russia -- which at the time were very controversial and caused a certain amount of dislocation. Maybe they worked better in Poland; Russia was beyond him. He doesn't answer that challenge.

But when I invoke Bill Easterly, a thoughtful writer on the great wrongs of international development, Sachs actually points me to the 22nd minute of a video (!) where on a panel, Easterly is basically forced to retract his past critique of Sachs. I marvelled at this. I couldn't understand it. Easterly had already gotten a reputation to standing up to Sachs, but then he stopped. I surmise he stopped evidently because the flak he was getting not only from Sachs' supporters and the Soros-funded "system" -- and Sachs himself! -- was going to harm his career possibly; he felt that constantly being the negative nabob, the sourpuss as the celebration of Sachs' lovely ideas was just too much hard work. Nobody wants to be negative all the time.

I had to marvel that Sachs would waste time arguing with me, a minor blogger, yet he did because the vanity and the imperative to keep the rep ever bright was so great. In the end, I made the crack that Armin must not get a Soros grant because he was able to eloquently take apart Sachs' ideas -- which truly are missing the vital component of governance and democracy.

I've told these stories many times that sum up the entire fandago that is "development" via international organizations. The first comes from a Russian human rights activist in 1995 at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, where the Soviet Union had already collapsed, but its old pupils were still demanding the erosion of civil and political rights by insisting on the primacy of economic and social rights. Vienna represented a certain truce on these two issues, but not really. One of the compromises the UN had to put up in order to get the acknowledgement of the civil and political rights out of the worst abuses in the world like Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, etc. was to create this "right to development" concept and the whole clumsy (and expensive) infrastructure that still exists today around it. The third-world countries kept yammering about how they had to have the right to development. The Western concept of this is different than the Marxist/Eastern one of course, and in the US, economic rights aren't even recognized. Finally, exasperated at this constant demand for positive rights, coming from a state that was finally at last getting out of the way of the negative rights, this dissident said, "Nu, develop already!"

And to be sure, in a certain sense, that's all you can say to people and countries asking for a big shakedown and a handout. What's stopping you from developing? Stop stealing the foreign aid and use it to help your people. Life is more complicated than that, of course, and I have come to see that in fact the international system and states have to invest in certain areas like health care and education to ensure justice in their societies in tandem with the civil liberties. This idea of balance isn't one libertarians/Randians share but in fact the rights lexicon can help these developing countries, as they are called, wrest commitments out of those autocrats. But there's more.

The other story comes from a time I brought a Tibetan scholar in with our organization to take part in this panel at which a Chinese diplomat was speaking about development. The Chinese official went on and on about how wonderfully everything was going with adding railroads or schools or whatever in places like Tibet. To which the Tibetan could only ask: who develops? Indeed. Who? The Han people deliberately flooded into the region to erode the population of Tibetans, or the Tibetan people?

Re: Benghazi I just wrote about how I thought the development approach to terrorism just wasn't working and was misleading and even dangerous -- but then, on the "democracy" side there are just as many idiocies, such as the fetishization of elections in places like Afghanistan. In any event, here it is, the rare challenge to Jeffrey Sachs, one I don't have the ability, scholarship, or funds to sustain, but one in which I hope others will take up.

1. Hellen Otii ‏@hellenotii 9 Jan

   .@JeffDSachs: We should really understand how much the U.S. and Europe have destabilized Africa over the last 60 years #ForesightAfrica

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2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9 Jan

   @hellenotii @JeffDSachs So murderous regimes like Bashir's in Sudan, civil wars in DRC, these aren't destabilizing?

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3. Hellen Otii ‏@hellenotii 9 Jan

   @catfitz @JeffDSachs of course there are many factors contributing to destabilization - does affirming 1 negate others?

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4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9 Jan

   @hellenotii @jeffdsachs sounds like the usual "blame America first"

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5. Hellen Otii ‏@hellenotii 9 Jan

   @catfitz history is history not about blame, more looking at the whole picture, this part has been glossed over

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6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9 Jan

   @hellenotii I don't buy the narrative on Africa at all. Let's go back to @JeffDSachs damage in Poland, Russia, then take it from there.

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Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs

@catfitz @hellenotii Poland's success surpassed that of the other countries in the region. Here are some facts. http://jeffsachs.org/2012/03/bolivia-poland/ …

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1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

   @JeffDSachs @hellenotii If you could fix the world by freeing prices or supplying mosquito nets, no one would be migrating from those places

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CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

@JeffDSachs @hellenotii You don't mention Russia. And as for Poland, at what price? And facts? Well, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-easterly/sachs-ironies-why-critics_b_207331.html …

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs @hellenotii Maybe if the entire world wasn't on a Soros grant, you would have more worthy critics.

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• Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs 10 Jan

  @catfitz @hellenotii You're a bit out of date. Please see Bill Easterly's comments http://www-2.iies.su.se/Nobel2012/video_public_panel1.html … at 22:00 onward.

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• Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs 10 Jan

  @catfitz @hellenotii If you can save children with bed nets I'm going to do my best to do it.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs No. I'm not out of date. I'm just not cowed. When you set out to smear someone's rep, you succeed, and they back down, I guess

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs That's nice. Save them for what? Unemployment? Terrorism? MDGs succeeded on child mortality Now what? Nobody ever talks abt that

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs Bed nets, price freeing -- these are all technocratic solutions, combine Western tech with South's centralized kleptocrats.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs that you have to refer to some 22nd minute on some video to some minor blogger on Twitter lets me know the size of your ego

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs the MDGs are missing one big thing: human rights. Governance, free media, accountability all missing & nods 2 these bureaucratic

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• Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs 10 Jan

  @catfitz I feel that a comment by you deserves a respectful response. That's what I tried to offer.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs Letting me know that you somehow bullied @bill_easterly into capitulation isn't winning. Citing Polish "facts" isn't winning.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs Figuring out to do with all those kids now alive you & the UN save might win, but nothing in your philosophy can accomodate

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  It's the Politics, Stupid: What Jeffrey Sachs' Development Work Is...

  The founder of the Millenium Villages Project espouses a geographically deterministic view of African conflict.

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  CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs @ArminRosen must not get or need a Soros grant. Bravo! http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/its-the-politics-stupid-what-jeffrey-sachs-development-work-is-missing/267054/ …

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What's Never Discussed Around Benghazi: The Fallacy of the Developmental Approach to Terrorism

Gregory Hicks testifying in Congress in May 2013.

There's so much noise about Benghazi now that it is hard to make any other point heard. And hard to justify even attempting to try to sound some different note that is already being sounded by the left and right. So much of the commentary in fact is about "honour and dignity" -- it's emotion. What a coup for the left that Robert Gates, the former Bush Defense Secretary, describes the current right-wing attacks on the Administration's handling of Benghazi as "cartoonish". But whatever the right-wing congressmen's understanding of how the military works, they are right to continue to ask questions because there is a disturbing way in which Obama personally keeps minimizing the nature and danger of terrorism. He most definitely did not use the term -- and the generic "acts of terror" that wouldn't be tolerated which he included in his much-discussed Rose Garden speech was not a substitute for acknowledging the nature of Benghazi. Imagine,  he could give a speech at the UN after Benghazi about the future "not belonging to those who insult the prophet" -- as if insult isn't protected speech and as if there isn't something fundamentally wrong about letting insult regarding your religion serve as a pretext for violence.

Trudy Rubin knows exactly how bad the Arab Spring has turned out, contrary to its high expectations by liberals, because she's reported it exactly. She knows exactly what Obama is all about, because she's reported the Administration's inaction on Syria accurately, yet still can't resist scolding the right -- Daryll Issa for "politicizing" Benghazi.

That's what I mean about emotion -- whether pinning the problem on Susan Rice or Hillary Clinton, neither of whom is the problem -- or expressing indignation about even keeping the topic open -- which it most definitely should be -- there is a sense of distractions and taboos.

Yes, there's the constant sense that the right-wing, even Sen. McCain who should know better, are partly barking up the wrong tree. Susan Rice is irrelevant; the US does not view the UN as that important, and people at the UN do not make policy, even if they are in the Cabinet; they read talking points. And the issue isn't really about trying to bring in airplanes from Tripoli within an hour's notice, either. We get that.

And yes, Hillary was supposed to be in charge, but as we've been told many times, the CIA were running this operation, not the Secretary of State; diplomacy was at best a cover or a sidebar. If the real mission in Benghazi was to get back arms given to rebels (so the story goes) and not open up a hospital wing, is it any wonder there was an attack, and on September 11? I simply don't buy the excuse invoked by "progressives" (who suddenly care terribly about the CIA they usually hate) that Petraeus had to urge that references to Al Qaeda be scrubbed from the talking points to protect sources. Nonsense. They could have generically referred to Al Qaeda affiliates or even simply "terrorists" without having to mention the precise name of the splinter group.

Even so, there are so many disturbing questions, and I keep coming back to Sean Smith's last words, his sense that the people guarding the US compound were not trustworthy, his gallows humour with his gaming buddy in Eve Online using his game name "Vile Rat":

(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures

It's not about planes from Tripoli; it's why we are guided by a force that "melted away" in the words of Eli Lake, but worse, I think, may have been in on it, if we think about Sean Smith's last warning.

Why the hell were they taking pictures? Were they casing the join and emailing them to their buddies in the terrorist group that attacked the compound to help them out?!

Every time I've been in a country overseas and visited the US embassy or consulate, I always found Marines guarding it. Oh, but I must not have gone to war zones (I have never been in any), because apparently there, they rely more on contractors. I can't imagine the thinking that even goes into hiring something called the "February 17th Brigade" named for a battle. Why weren't these at least US-based contractors? Is this because you *have* to use local people...or else? The New York Times pointed out the problematic nature of hiring the local militias after the fact.

Ansar al-Shariah actually guarded the hospital that Amb. Stevens was taken to -- the very hospital he was planning to visit the next day to open a new wing.

And that epitomizes the problem I tried to explain in a post at the time, "The Taliban in the Building" -- an expression that was used by an official in the hearings then to summarize the problem of those at the State Department who minimize and even deny terrorism.

I wouldn't go so far as calling them "the Taliban" but I would describe it as two (at least) warring camps -- those with the USAID or "development" approach, and those with the "freedom" or "democracy" approach (in fact, maybe it is at least three camps as "freedom" boosters and "democracy" builders are usually divided between Republicans and Democrats).

The point is, as I put it in the past post, is that we view the world as a place that we can fix easily with development programs after having technologically superior brief wars:

But there's no question that a mindset of our elites -- that we can go overseas and change foreigners with various aid programs supplemented or preceded by surgically-precise high-tech warfare -- is a real problem in the world and sadly, the reason for a lot of our failures. It's a mindset of projects and contracts instead of deterrence and counterpropaganda.

To be sure, we have some deterrence of course in our nuclear and conventional weapons and of course we have counterproganda of sorts where experts go and put comments on jihad sites and such in local languages. But this is not robust, effective, and vocal. It's wan, and those with the "development" approach are definitely winning under Obama. (The entire saga of the CIA in Benghazi is a relevant but other point which I will address in another post.)

The piece by Ethan Chorin, who could have been the last person to talk to the Ambassador in fact, is really telling of the mentality of the "development" approach -- which Amb. Stevens shared (my blog is quoted next, with Chorin's excerpts in italics):

I keep coming back to thinking of these men sitting late at night in this facility with shoddy security where they were soon to meet their deaths.

The ambassador wrote in a diary that -- again, we had to learn from CNN about, and not the State Department, and despite the complaints of relatives -- he was uneasy about his security. And yet he didn't feel so uneasy as to not hold a meeting there after hours with a Turkish diplomat until 8:40, and he didn't feel that it was a place he should avoid on the horrible date of 9/11 -- when terrorist threats of attacks on that date had been made around the world.

In fact, as we know from a piece that has fallen out of sight, the ambassador was expecting to go to a hospital the next day to assist in the launching of a program -- the sort of activity you do in a country when you think the war is over and the reconstruction has begun.

The piece is an op-ed by Ethan Chorin, who was supposed to meet Amb. Stevens on the day after he was killed. I say "fallen out of sight" simply because it says a lot about the ambassador's actual activities and preoccupations, yet hasn't been discussed.

Chorin writes on September 13 -- two days after the attack:

ON Wednesday morning [September 12], my colleagues and I were to meet in Benghazi with J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, to discuss a plan for a new division of emergency medicine at Benghazi Medical Center, the largest and most modern hospital in eastern Libya. The meeting never took place. The night before, militants laid siege to the American Consulate in Benghazi, killing the ambassador and three other Americans. The ambassador was taken, without a pulse, to the hospital we hoped to upgrade.

So the ambassador was thinking of Benghazi -- always described as an "opposition stronghold" during the war -- as a place safe enough to work on hospital upgrades -- reconstruction work, not war. Of course, he was a very savvy and seasoned man and spoke the local language, but he seems to have treated the dangers of the area more as a kind of occupational hazard that was under control than as a real threat -- we know he had suspended his morning jog after some attacks but then resumed them.

Chorin writes:

The draft agreement we were working on was the kind of visionary effort to improve life in Libya that Ambassador Stevens liked — in this case, a collaboration between doctors in Boston and Benghazi, brokered by a nongovernmental organization that a Libyan-American and I had organized after the recent revolution.

In horror, Chorin describes how he spoke to the ambassador late Tuesday night about plans for the hospital visit and how enthusiastic Stevens was, and then spoke to the security detail about the logistics -- only to have him swear and hang up after saying "We have a problem here."

Further, he describes the ambassador's thinking on the "root causes" of the problems of Libya:

Mr. Stevens understood that Libyans had suffered under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and that conflict and post-revolutionary instability were to be expected. He also understood that some, if not all, of the hatred that had pushed some of Libya’s youths to join radical factions in Afghanistan and Iraq had sprung from years of neglect and oppression. Now, he felt, new opportunities needed to be created to wean these people away from ideologies rooted in hate.

No doubt that was one reason he made a point, as ambassador, of continuing to visit Benghazi, the East’s largest city, despite the clear risks; there had been attacks on other high-level diplomats there in the previous months. It is a mystery at this point why the consulate compound was so lightly fortified, but I would not be surprised if Mr. Stevens had decided to stay overnight in Benghazi simply because his list of planned meetings with Libyans there was too long to be accomplished in one afternoon.

If the "development" mindset didn't prevail, there'd be a healthy awareness that this was a country still at war; that the attacks on the UN chief's convoy and the British ambasador weren't aberrations but realities of a country still at war. There would be a heavier military presence and there wouldn't be the naivite that you could simply open up hospital wings to pacify the locals.

Chorin's careful reproduction of Steven's belief -- the beliefs of LOTS of people in the building and overseas serving as FSOs -- is nuanced enough not to attribute "all" hatred to developmental problems  -- "He also understood that some, if not all, of the hatred that had pushed some of Libya’s youths to join radical factions in Afghanistan and Iraq had sprung from years of neglect and oppression"

Even so, there's this belief that with enough early childhood nutrition and after-school programs, supplemented by job corps, why, people will stop clinging to their guns and religion. Imagine if ObamaCare could get all those Wal-mart shopping SUV driving gun-toters to give up their 2nd amendment obsessions if they had free mental and dental!

I never understood why the State Department didn't learn from the collapse of the Soviet Union -- that in fact led to the worst wars in decades for this region in Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Tajikistan and Georgia -- and led to some of the worst problems of inequalities and oppression of civil liberties -- that democracy and liberalism doesn't always bring good results for everybody. Oh, maybe they did learn but the people who learned this died out or went into the private sector as oil and gas consultants, and now most of the foreign service is made up of young people who don't remember the Soviet Union or its aftermath.

What's happening nowadays with the upsurge of the "progressives" and the "realists" (RealPolitik) is that the "freedom and democracy" gang is being trashed as too utopian and naive and even deadly, in getting America into wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan (for too long) and then having the world turn against us.

But Libya is all Obama's -- that was his quick, surgical technocratic strike that he thought would "lead from behind" and work rapidly and effectively. Obama didn't attack Libya out of a "freedom and democracy" ideology -- he doesn't share that ideology and it has always been alien to him. Rather, he did it out of a technocratic calculation that in fact was actually developmental (socialist) in nature -- that if only they could take out the oppressor by letting the Arab world and the EU take the lead, why, the developmental work we did subsequently would all work -- just like those PRTs that started under Bush and were continued under Obama were supposed to work in Afghanistan.

They didn't, for the most part. The "development" approach is as bad as the "freedom and democracy" approaches when they look for quick fixes or simple explanations of human behaviour. We left Iraq, after spending zillions.  This week, 66 people were killed in suicide bombings without us there, just as hundreds of times over, 25 or 50 people were killed every month in other bombings there we had nothing to do with, except to be blamed for because we were present.  The world is way more complicated than those myopic and juvenile comments flung on Foreign Policy to the effect that "the US is to blame for everything" and "kills the most people". It doesn't. Terrorists and extremist movements like the Taliban do, with the consent and even aid from theocratic authoritarian states like Iran.

I'm all for development aid -- we don't give enough of it. And I think democracy and freedom programs have every right to be central to that development aid -- and that when things like the expulsion of USAID from Russia occur, or the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Turkmenistan occur, for largely benign (and ineffective, even) programs, we should announce that all those funds are going to be kept for funding exile groups instead. This isn't "interference in internal affairs," it is part of what gives the universality of the best parts of the UN or OSCE its operational life.

But to accomplish this, I do think we have to face down this bureaucratic "Taliban in the building," if you will, who have prevailed for 50 years with their belief in their own superiority and the efficacy of fixing unhappy childhoods.

BTW, a good example of the insanity of this approach is the back-patting going on at the UN or State on the fulfillment of some of the Millenium Development Goals, i.e. lessoning the percentages of child mortality -- without any thought as to how jobs, let alone sustainable economies and goods, are going to be supplied to this now living, larger population. Did we just create a rising tide of expectations that is going to end only in more civil wars and terrorism against the West?

For too long we've had this belief that the foreign and civil service corps are "beyond politics" and "professional" and not bogged down in "partisan conflicts". That's just not true and maybe we have to drop this fiction. I think much more research and writing has to be done about these different warring camps at State and NSC and in particular confront the Obama Administration with their stubborn clinging to the developmental approach to terrorism (which also engenders their determination not to have a "war" on terrorism but instead to have a "police" approach).

A man like Gregory Hicks who is likely a Democrat *is* such a professional man with deep knowledge and experience of the Middle East region.  But until the context he works in, and the highest leadership, decides that the "developmental" approach is central to America's errors -- and deaths! -- abroad, they will keep on happening -- as they did in the tragic death of Anne Smedinghof, a 25-year-old foreign service officer,  as she delivered books in Afghanistan in a war zone. The State Department reversed a claim they originally made that the five Americans killed in this suicide bombing were in an armoured vehicle, and acknowledged that they were on foot.

We as a nation of conscience should give foreign aid and should promote both welfare, prosperity and democracy and freedom abroad. But to make it more effective and less deadly, we have to debate the actual nature of terrorism and its "roots".

 

Related articles

A look at why the Benghazi issue keeps coming back

Why The Benghazi Problem Won't Go Away

CNN's Crowley Admits Obama Didn't Call Benghazi a Terror Attack

Benghazi 'cover-up to protect Hillary'

You Should Be Upset That CISPA Didn't Pass, and Don't Gloat, it Will Be Back!

People need to get their heads on more straight about CISPA -- which just got cabbaged in the Senate and now may only survive in dismembered chunks.

My comment:

Say, were any of you unhappy that when the Boston marathon suspects blew up bombs and killed 3 people and injured some 200, that the following things happened:

o private stores had surveillance video tapes that they instantly gave to law-enforcement
o hundreds of people had phone pictures and video footage they gave to law-enforcement
o police and FBI were able to go instantly to the suspects' social media accounts and look at them and gain access to them, public and private
o they could geo-locate the terrorist because his escaped hostage's phone was in the car and it could be instantly traced
o Reddit was able to freely discuss hypotheses about suspects and compare pictures with others that might fit the description -- without facing arrest or censorship.

Were any of you a little worried that this also happened and yet...it wasn't enough to stop them?

o These suspects, who killed people and removed the legs and arms of numerous victims with their deadly act, had a year's worth of extremest jihad video viewing, including videos that even liberal Google had to remove
o A foreign power without much scruples about people's privacy saw and noted this and warned the FBI what it meant, as they also had other intel about the kinds of groups and movements these people were in touch with possibly (Russia)
o The FBI could study their social media viewing habits, and learn about their travels abroad and other movements

And then this:

o Some people got wrongly identified by Reddit, although no false arrests were made.

See, that's how you have to think about this. How these things will be balanced and really done, using common sense principles that already existed, like insisting that the protection of free speech ends where it becomes incitement to imminent violence.

You can't think about abstract hypotheticals that some teenage Tumblr blog or hip-hop site is going to be taken down unfairly. You have to think about how you're going to really fight terrorism practically as it socializes and spreads. You won't have the moral luxury to think of it any other way.

Cory Booker, You're So Facebook, What Happened with Zuckerberg's $100 Million for Newark Schools?

Cory Booker is insufferable -- I really don't care for him. He's a populist blowhard, always distracting from the hard questions with feel-goods. Right now he's using Twitter to fund-raise to run for the Senate. He's endlessly "leveraging" social media where he has gadzillion followers, many of them gushing fanboyz and fangirlz, and it always feels like a concoction.

The Times' Anand Giridharadas ran a gushy article about him as a politician "of the future" (because he's on Twitter, whoop de do) saying Booker was from "the Googley-Facebookish wing of the party" -- and and that elicted Bruce Sterling's dry tweet. Get out your barf-bag, here's Anand on Cory:

He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat, so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.

Honestly, Cory! Being mayor of Newark, NJ is hard enough -- you should just concentrate on that and do that right rather than exploit this poor town and its problems as a springboard to more power in the Senate!

And hey, Anand, why couldn't you ask about what happened to Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark schools!!!

I've asked this over and over again on Twitter of Booker for the last two years, and in various blogs  -- I see Mother Jones has finally taken this up just three days ago:

In Newark, a local foundation established by Zuckerberg and the state have spent more than two years deciding how to best create a schoolyard revolution with $100 million dollars. At first, the "Facebook money," as it's called in Newark, helped the state hire consultants and establish several new charter schools. But the reform effort has floundered at moments: The first million dollars went towards a poorly conducted community survey that had to be re-worked by Rutgers and New York University, and criticism was fierce when a foundation board established to decide how the Facebook money was spent included only one Newark resident: Cory Booker. ("Yes, it's their money. But it's Newark's kids," an op-ed that ran in the Star-Ledger read.)

Then last November, nearly $50 million of Zuckerberg's money went to pay for a new teacher's contract, the first in New Jersey to offer performance pay for teachers who are deemed as "highly effective." The contract offers up to $12,500 in bonuses for the teachers rated as the best in the district. It's the first contract in New Jersey to offer performance-based pay, a policy that's been instituted in a few cities such as Washington, DC. In DC, the plan was so controversial that it might have cost Mayor Adrian Fenty his job. "I think it helped—I know it helped—to be on our side of the table and have deeper pockets," one school district official said about the Newark negotiations.

Somehow, I'm not surprised that the teachers' unions got their hands on this to pay themselves more.

I didn't realize that questions around this money were persistent enough that even the ACLU filed a lawsuit to get the emails and files on this gift.

Hey, Booker may plan a run at the presidency some day so the stakes are higher -- who knows, perhaps he is the One Obama might annoint, as we know there will be *somebody* he will annoint and give the word to for Obama for America, now renamed Organizing for Action, that has all the coveted -- and locked-up -- data bases of drilled social media data that helped Obama win  the elections, and will be turned over to his choice in 2016.

So....I was a bit surprised to see Bruce Sterling mention this  -- and I don't know whether it was with a bit of archness because what amounts to the Alec Ross or Anne Marie Slaughter wing of the party is still likely to the right of him, where he's located, which is far more to the technocommunist extreme. I figured Bruce Sterling roots for the hackers, and therefore inevitably does Google's business.

But perhaps Google isn't close enough to its hacker roots for Bruce anymore, I don't know. His account is on private, so you can't tell. Rayne, an Empty Wheel blogger is one of the lucky ones (along with some 25,000 verified special persons) allowed to see his closed account, which is how he  focused on this -- and seems to take a further response from Sterling (which we can't see) as meaning he still doesn't "get it" -- about oh, that evil Democratic Leadership Committee which "coopted" the party (even though Rayne himself seems to be fighting to interpret Booker on his side).

So Rayne fulminates in indignation that anyone might not sufficiently appreciate People's politician in this manner.

But keep that barf-bag handy, because here's what Rayne thinks Magical Cory produces for the People:

What both NYT missed, besides categorizing Booker as belonging to the “Googly-Facebook” portion of the Democratic Party:

— Booker’s efforts with regard to his one-on-one interactions with constituents do not compare with a considerable portion of the party to which he belongs;

— His actions are highly transparent, his words sync with his deeds right there in the public forum of Twitter;

— The tool he uses for outreach more closely matches his constituents’ demographics, not that of the “Googly-Facebook” crowd.

— Booker uses “big data” to make and justify decisions; “big data” is merely a contemporary expression of polling data used in the near-term past and present.

Rayne seems unburdened by the need to prove any of these claims.

My comment on Empty Wheel (before Mother Jones!)

The extraordinary efforts put in to denying Sterling’s apt comment about Booker and then Lanier’s valid critique let us know just how deep the sickness is.

I marvel how you could get through this entire piece and never mention Mark Zuckerberg’s huge gift of $100 million to the Newark schools — a gift that Cory Booker no doubt benefits from in reputational enhancement value and in having pots of money to manage as he wishes, if not personally. Booker is essentially a fake, in my view. He uses the “community managing” populist technique of appearing to be “down with the people” on Twitter, but it’s highly selective. He does star turn after star turn engineered for its retweet value, shovelling snow, running into burning buildings, living on food stamps. But the big picture issues he ducks.

Time and again I’ve asked him how that $100 million is doing, and if we can get some serious report on the abysmal schools in Newark, and whether any improvement is actually coming out of throwing all that cash at them, and I never, ever get an answer. I ask whether it was in Facebook stock and whether that is now devalued and there isn’t any $100 million and I never, ever get any answer. And he never talks about this subject at all. As you don’t. Why? Of course he’s Googly and Facebooky — I’d be Facebooky too, if I had $100 million to play with on the schools from FB.

Then there’s the remarkable — eye-popping, really — refusal to here to criticize Harper Reed and company and the huge, awful Obama data grab that went on — which is now all locked up in a private nonprofit with big spenders that is not the public political party that ran the candidate, and is not available to that party — the DNC. That’s wrong. That’s unethical. That’s been questioned by many including the Sunlight Foundation.

And to think that elections aren’t decided by big data and its drilling! Come now, we’re not children. The entire gambit with the 47% is exactly an example of how social media (Youtube and Twitter) were galvanized and manipulated to turn public opinion into a seething frenzy of hate. In fact, there wasn’t factually anything untrue about the statement Romney made, as louche as it was. In fact, the bartender who taped him didn’t even focus on that remark, but thought the bigger scandal was moving the factory to China. In fact, David Corn and other “progressive” journalist operatives made hay with this often by not really quoting the original statement accurately — Romney didn’t say people were welfare mooches, he just said they were dependent. The entire story then became a “story” pushed relentlessly through all the social networks, emails, DMs on Tweets, etc. etc. It’s *that* use of weaponized social media that is troublesome.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/harper-reed-and-the-soulessness-of-the-new-machine.html

I've never gotten an answer about the Zuckerberg $100 million when I directly asked Mr. Transparency, and never heard from anyone. I figured it  probably got pissed away buying computers, gadgets, ed-tech consultants, etc. etc. and probably had little or no effect. Now we're learning finally from the ACLU's probe and Mother Jones that it went to paying teachers' bonuses -- without sufficient community input to determine how effective that is.

The comments at Empty Wheel are filled with critiques of Booker, in fact, accusing him of corruption because he has "privatized" schools (i.e. gone with school vouchers) or he has ties with "private equity" which they find "evil," of course, being socialists. I don't know the facts here, but for me, Booker is largely a fraud -- there's nothing about him that's "transparent" just because he's tweeting inanities on Twitter, if he doesn't answer about the big questions -- and frankly, that $100 million is one of them (not to mention questions about how well the entire school system is doing, given the controversies over vouchers and such).

Now I can see more clearly the issues around Booker -- the leftist anti-corporate socialist wing of the Democratic Party doesn't like him and they will try to sink him around the $100 million and other issues. I questioned the same thing, but from the liberal center, where the more Googley-Facebooky Democrats are still to the left but not as left as Empty Wheel  -- they are Hillaryland, not Obamaland, but I don't want them to become worse than they are. It's a terrible thing when your support of free enterprise in the Democratic Party has to hinge on these sorts.

Meanwhile, Audrey Waters, who I've followed on social media for some years, has an interesting blog post up reviewing Morozov's book and questioning the ed tech stuff.

 

What's Wrong with Obama's Speech in Jerusalem

Obama's speech in Jerusalem, widely appreciated by the Israel-supporting left such as Peter Beinart, and viewed as a public friending of Israel intended to remove all doubts about US support for Israel under Obama, still contains with in it troubling indications of his essential world view. That view harks back to the 1960s-1980s socialist left's view of the Middle East, and support for "national liberation movements" and violent solutions to the problems of peoples.

Until that changes, there won't be peace in the Middle East. It doesn't change by a myopic focus on Israel's real or imagined sins; i.e. the story of the Palestinian journalist's baby killed, which was widely portrayed everywhere as the faul of Israel, turned out to be the fault of Palestinians. Who noticed, besides Breitbart?

I could put this post in my Different Stans blog, since it covers Iran -- and other conversations about international affairs.

But since the Middle East is the favourite thing everyone loves to argue about on Twitter, I thought I'd put it here for more discussion and any time someone starts one of those factological debates on Israel based on endless scientism about what each side did or didn't do over the last century, I'm going to point to this blog to get at the essential problem I think is never addressed in these debates: the Soviet past and the left's support for violent national liberation movements. These issues will never be solved on Twitter and I will not be changing my own views on them.

Typical example: The other day I got into a Twitter debate with a developer named Benjamin Black. He came to my attention first by re-tweeting my blog posts about unethical hackers, and even made the point that Threat Level at Wired magazine was filled with snitches who were unethical. I replied that I hadn't studied the characters there as much as other hackers like Weev and I would come back to it.

The next time I heard from him, he was criticizing my views on Israel and Palestine. I made the point that Israel will never have a "partner for peace" until Palestine renounces violence and terrorism -- for real. It has never done that. It has never really felt concerted pressure from the left and the international liberal commentariat on this issue. If Palestinians had behaved like Tibetans the last 20 years, instead of like terrorists and a militant, defiant movement advocating violence, they might have had more success. A key reason why the Tibetans could gain as much sympathy as they did is that the Dalai Lama did not advocate violence and Tibetans did not use violence. (BTW, their recent spate of desperate self-immolations are a form of violence, and it was my understanding that the Dalai Lama did not condone suicide as a form of protest.)

If the Palestinians had even behaved like the IRA -- another Soviet-supported "liberation movement" and converted itself into a political opposition that renounced terrorism and violence, even if imperfectly -- we might have a better Middle East. But it didn't, and we don't.

I'm not an expert on the Middle East and I don't follow it closely. Even so, I'm just as entitled to an opinion on it as anyone else, and I've found that those who keep arguing from "expertise" will never admit that any expertise is enough given their ardently and emotionally held views on this subject.

No study of the Middle East is complete without a full-bore recognition of the way that the Kremlin designed, implemented and funded most of the mayhem for many years by supporting terrorist movements in the Arab world and elsewhere against Israel.

To me, the most important thing that has been said about the Palestinians in recent years has been said by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet political prisoner and refusenik -- and recently reiterated eloquently by David Keyes, who once worked with Sharansky: Palestine faces a democracy deficit, and until it changes along with the rest of the Arab Spring changes for the good -- and is sustained (in ways some of them have not been), we will not see peace. It's not merely about Israel, as it always seems to be portrayed. Partner for peace really does mean, well, partner for peace.

For anyone who has followed the Soviet Union, a key element of Soviet policy was to fund the terrorist organization called then the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and to protect Palestinian violence politically as a "national liberation struggle," in keeping with Communist belief about nationalist liberation struggles everywhere against imperialists (except for their own imperialism) and capitalists. The Soviets supported the ANC in South Africa with this idea and injected this politics into the apartheid struggle which is still felt in the South African government's antipathy to Israel today. The entire BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) is based on this essentially Soviet-produced perspective and politics of decades ago, that demonizes Israel, that claims falsely that "Zionism=racism," and that tries to portray Israel as some kind of imperialist/capitalist/oppressive force like the targets of other Soviet-supported national liberation movements around the world.

The Soviets obviously never accepted that idea that their own Soviet Jews would like to be liberated from their notion of "liberation," and fled in huge numbers from antisemitism, many to settle in Israel, like Sharansky, and embrace the legitimate idea that Zionism is nationalism for the Jewish state and is legitimate as such (an idea that Obama is careful to reiterate in his speech to distinguish himself from Farrakhan).

Mindful of the Soviet dimension involved in externally, artificially, and massively funding the Soviet anti-Western perspective through movements from Africa to Palestine and of course Latin America, Sharansky and others with this perspective have always said that until a "perestroika" comes to Palestine, and until the Palestinian regime reforms, and until the Palestinian people have genuine democracy, which means not a mere majoritarian tabulation of votes, but liberal democracy in which due process and protection of minority viewpoints and minorities is paramount, we will not see change for the better.

Most of the world places their hopes for change in the Middle East on trying to change Israel, as Israel isn't the murderous, terror-mongering oppressive authoritarian power that Palestine is, and seems amenable to pressure. After all, Israel conducts investigations of human rights violations -- Palestine never does.

Even those that demonize Israel and call it the "apartheid state" (merely a reformulation of the discredited "Zionism=Racism" gambit in fact renounced by the General Assembly when the Soviet Union collapsed) don't think it is somehow immune to pressure -- that's why they pressure it relentlessly. Nobody ever pressure the Palestinians directly -- either because they believe they are victims with a "defensive jihad" alibi, or because they rightly know that such pressure is deadly, especially from the inside, as "traitors" are dragged to their deaths by thugs on motorcycles. People pressure Israel because they can; because they are a liberal democratic society with critical newspapers, opposition, and even a Supreme Court that can sanction torture. You may not like the hardline government, but that government is in a context where it is pressured by an opposition, and a liberal to left opposition at that.

Not so Palestine, where different fighting factions don't represent civil society pressing for the rule of law against authoritarian thugs, but merely various forms of thugs struggling with each other for power.

Hamas has rightly been declared by the US as a terrorist organization, and it controls Gaza. When it won by "democratic" elections in a setting in which the population is mobilized for violence and hatred and is not free to form any critical factions under penalty of arrest, torture and death, the West responded by freezing aid and demanding that Hamas, this lovely democratic thing, renounce violence, which is what democracy really means in the civilized world, and acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, which is recognized in the civilized world.

It didn't.

Then there was the Hamas-Fatah split and all the rest which you can read about in Wikipedia -- and look for alternative sources as I don't know if it is accurate.

In any event, two key features of Obama's past visits to Israel, or Obama administration officials to Israel, or the visit of the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, or any number of other Western liberal politicians have been: a) denunciation of the settlements, to put pressure on Israel b) silence about Palestinian violence and terrorism and failure to make a direct call on Palestinians of all factions and forms to stop. Now, maybe you can Fisk this statement and find something that looks like a hemi-demi-semi denunciation of violence, but you won't likely, because I've noticed for years that the Soviet line, permeated the left to this day, always retains: no one ever ceases to legitimize the violence of the "national liberation struggle" to overturn "the imperial power"  -- least of all Obama, who came out of the socialist movements in the US of the 1980s and follows many of their basic precepts -- unrecognized -- to this day (which is why I always call it "stealth socialism").

So it was with this understanding that I made a bet about Obama's latest trip to Israel that he would denounce the settlements and fail to denounce directly Palestinian violence. You know, equal-opportunity bashing, a plague on both your houses (which is the best you can expect with liberals who will never see the authority based on revolutionary violence and repudiation of the rule of law as worse than the state based on affirmation of the rule of law and state violence as self defense).

It looked like Obama might get through the trip never mentioning the settlements, as clearly this was a feel-good, back-patting trip to sweeten the environment, the way the dinner with the GOP in the expensive restaurant was.

But sure enough, true to form, and true to the socialist idea laid in stone by the Soviets in their communist doctrine of national liberation struggle, Obama denounced the settlements:

Israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace, and that an independent Palestine must be viable– that real borders will have to be drawn

Then he didn't denounce Palestinian violence directly -- he "pulled a Durban," as those of us who have watched the world left's gyrations since the UN World Conference Against Durban have termed this cunning exoneration of excessive focus on Israel every time, and refusal to denounce Palestinian violence every time.

Oh, but wait, you cry! This speech is filled with references to Israel's right to defense; it has even this very poignant phrase about how Israelis live in fear and have a right not to live in fear:

When I consider Israel’s security, I think about children like Osher Twito, who I met in Sderot – children, the same age as my own daughters, who went to bed at night fearful that a rocket would land in their bedroom simply because of who they are and where they live. That’s why we’ve invested in the Iron Dome system to save countless lives – because those children deserve to sleep better at night. That’s why we have made it clear, time and again, that Israel cannot accept rocket attacks from Gaza, and have stood up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Sounds so robustly empathetic with Israel, right? Yeah, but did you notice that isn't directly a criticism of Palestinian violence? That it shifts the entire thing to Israel -- once again. It makes it seem, well, subjective when it does that... It's empathy with Israel "We can understand how Israel gets like this" -- but it isn't a firm call-out of what is objectively Israel's situation -- unremitting violence from Palestinians who will not renounce violence.

It's negotiation-speak -- "Hey, Palestine, try to appreciate Israel's subjective point of view here, they don't feel safe" -- without saying *those are your rockets being lobbed at them*.  It's leftist empathy-speak -- which is why Slate can grab on to it and endorse it and try to isolate the right with it.

But it's not a voice of conscience speaking directly to pressure Palestine: "Hey, Palestine, stop those rockets. They're wrong. Renounce violence. Then you can be a partner for peace. You are not one now."

Contrast that with this other paragraph, which is supposed to be the other book end in this matched book-end set of moral equivalency:

But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished.  It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

Note here, the evil Other, that "foreign army".  That's Israel. Israel is cited as the problem -- the Other that is the Foreign and is responsible for the insecurity of little Palestinian children. The blame is cast -- on that foreign army. That the foreign army's acts in fact may be justified by Palestinian state violence -- never, ever denounced by the left -- are portrayed as if they have no context -- the context that includes that foreign terrorist organization, Hamas.

Not so in the preceding paragraph which cast the sense of insecurity that the Israeli child feels as not the responsibility of *the aggressive neighbour* and *the aggressive Palestinian state recognized by some, not all* and *a foreign terrorist organization" -- speaking of foreign stuff -- but just cast completely with the accent on Israel in neutral terms as something Israel "cannot accept" with those "rockets" never having an origin and an address -- in Palestine. Why can't Obama denounce the rockets directly? Why is it merely that Israel can't accept them?

Obama, I saw what you did there.

Pretty cunning and crafty, and the sort of thing that Israel will not formally be able to complain about without sounding whiny. After all, um, their concerns were technically checked off.

And that's what's wrong with this speech. Even when it pretends to assign equal blame, it never actually does that, but does some fancy footwork worthy of the WCAR Durban final declaration that winds up singling out only Israel, and then essentially reiterates the "Zionism=racism" canard it pretends to reject by placing the "plight of the Palestinians" under a section of racism and implying that Israel has a racist policy -- which it doesn't. The real problem is that Palestine has a violence policy -- and nobody ever wants to call it out.

Then there's the other cunning and distractive thing that happens in this speech, and people who know more about all this can explain it to me, but it looks pretty deliberate to me -- no direct confrontation of Hamas.

You'd think in a speech like this, where Obama is willing to pull up his socks on Iran and say very clearly, without mumbling about talks without prerequisites, that the US will not allow a nuclear Iran, that he could also state what is, well, American policy: that Hamas is a terrorist organization, designated officially as a foreign terrorist organization, and as long as you had a FTO that would not renounce violence in Gaza, you won't get peace.

Instead, he does something hugely cunning, and says this:

And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Why couldn't he say that the US and the civilized world expects that? Why couldn't he put this in objective instead of subjective terms, making it seem as if it's all on Israel? Why couldn't he say "And the US has designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization precisely for this reason?"  This might be subtle, and no doubt some might find it nit-picking, but I don't think it's an accident, comrade.

And I think the reason for this is that if you put the candle under Obama's speech and make the Democratic Socialists of America and "community organizer" socialist doctrine show up in the purple dye under the speech, burning away the rest of the distractive rhetoric, you will find it's because Obama and company are reluctant to drop their deeply-held concept -- despite what other security elements of the US administration have compelled with the FTO designation -- that Hamas is some kind of national liberation struggle for whom violence is justified -- like the Soviets always claimed when the KGB dropped off Moscow gold to these movements.

Having failed essentially to explicitly reiterate US policy that Hamas is a terrorist organization and therefore the world calls on it to renounce violence, Obama then switches the conversation to Hezbollah, which is easier to do because Hezbollah is not formally part of the Palestinian state but only backs it, and is tied to Assad, which the US -- Obama -- finds easier to denounce now than Hamas, and which is easily tied to the evil regimes of Iran and Syria.

Note that in this Jerusalem speech, the Syrian people  "have the right to be freed from the grip of a dictator who would rather kill his own people than relinquish power" but the Palestinian people are never acknowledged as having the same right despite having murderous dictators in charge of them as well. To claim so would be to depart the sacred Soviet framework of the national liberation struggle (African leaders have gotten a pass on the basis of this same doctrine as well).

The left and the anti-neo-con RealPolitickers will be so preoccupied with Obama's sturdiness on Iran (maybe his mind personally got concentrated on this wonderfully when the Iranians were found to have stolen the plans for the presidential helicopter from a consultant's laptop) and so preoccupied with his support for the Syrian opposition, that they won't be molified by his failure to mention and denounce Hamas roundly. Or his failure to confront Palestinian violence directly. Few on the left would be placated in any event, given that he still backhandedly pushes the onus on to Israel's perception about itself, which may still be "too much empathy" for them. And Israel already has enough "sweeteners' in this speech, even with the garbled Passover stuff and the cloying mention of "Bibi" that they won't want to seem churlish by mentioning this Hamas gap.

But I saw what you did there and it explains why Obama isn't a partner for peace, either. Until he can renounce and relinguish the socialist left's preference for politically-correct violence, whether in the hands of Palestinians or Putin, and until of course Palestine itself renounces this violence as a method, there isn't going to be peace. You can endlessly argue about what Israel is supposed to do and how its self-defense causes human rights violations at times -- no one needs any help from me on this as Human Rights Watch and the rest of the zealous miners of factoids take care of this.

Yet the essential truth about the "partner for peace" issue is that violence continues to be accepted as a "national liberation struggle" paradigm out of the KGB's playbook. Until this is finally defeated, we will never see peace in the Middle East.

 

 

Weev Goes to the Big House: "He Concocted a Fiction"

Andrew Auernheimer or Weev in July 2012. Photo by pinguino.

Wait a minute.

Not a single one of the tech tweeters and the TechThings could report this, that the prosecutor -- and the jury! -- simply never bought the trollish line of Weev?

"When it became clear that he was in trouble, he concocted the fiction that he was trying to make the Internet more secure, and that all he did was walk in through an unlocked door," U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said in a statement. "The jury didn't buy it, and neither did the court in imposing sentence."

 

"He concocted the fiction." This is my favourite quote of the year so far -- after "the Boomerang never returns to the hand. This one does" --  and helps mitigate the sheer deluge of lies coming out of the tech lapdog press and its obedient RCA Victrola dog (lots of dogs here!), the mainstream media tech departments.

This was clear to me from day one about this hacker, nick-named Weev whose real name is Andrew Auernheimer --  and I'm glad it was clear to the jury or I'd really have to worry about our country.

We need more and more of these jury trials -- hey, drop the plea bargains, big fellas. We need jury trials. This is how we can burn it in. You concocted a fiction.

Yet Orin Kerr, the former DOJ prosecutor and libertarian who writes on The Volokh Conspiracy, will defend him. Presumambly not on the grounds that he "just did a math problem" or "engaged in free speech" but on some argumentation hinging on the "unauthorized" concept -- trying to limit it so that it doesn't mean, er, "probes" or "explorations" like this.

Sure, everyone needs a lawyer, and on appeal especially. But this is then a political gambit which Kerr uses as an activist to reform the CFAA. I don't see it needs reforming.  The hacksters are edge-casing and concocting fiction. The idea that "he didn't access a server" (the favourite gambit of Shava Nerad as well re: Schwartz); or that he merely engaged in free speech aern't going to fly.

This argumentation is exactly like Bragg v. Linden. Bragg pretended the "offer was published" for cheaper-than-normal sims on the secondlife.com website merely because he was able to force up a back page he discovered accidently in the auction process. He found he could get a hot sim and re-sell it. But it was an exploit. The makers of the site didn't intend for their product to be accessed for free or at a deep discount by jimmying the URL. Just like AT&T didn't think its customers with ipads should provide their personal emails to the public. URL scams like that may not be technically "hacking," but claiming they are merely proper access in an, um, innovative way is just plain thuggish agitprop.

Baloney. Hopefully for reason and sanity, the appeal will fail.

First I got into a Twitfight about these cases with The Verge's Tim Carmody, whom I have watched for weeks on end spouting the usual hacker open source gabble. Then I was surprised that he answered me. He conceded that his gadget-selling publication's take on the other big verdict of the day -- the RIAA suit against the lady "who took 24 songs" was really about her contempt of court. I then took him to task for his Swartz story. He disagreed. I specifically asked him why he didn't report things like the judge's order to Swartz at his bail bond hearing to seek mental health because he needed it. He overlooked this tweet, ignored it later when asked, then said that The New Yorker story was good. Mkay. But his piece was sickly-sweet and never asked any questions.

I raised Matthew Keys' case -- and now Tim just felt there were "too many things" I was raising, and it was just awful to combine them all. Um, I pointed out that things move fast on the Internet, and the CFAA was what they all had in common! I tried to explain that Swartz, Weev, Kews, his take -- this is all part of selling Google ads, really.

But obviously, that needs unpacking. And I'm happy to unpack it. Hackers want to liberate information so that people share it more. When they share it more, they click on more ads. Google gets more revenue. The end. Now, that wasn't so wild and wacky was it?

He couldn't take the heat, and blocked me and denounced me as a troll. Yes, I totally get it when strangers come up to you on Twitter and give you full-blown tweet-length argumentations from a coherent world view that isn't your own, it feels like a conspiracy, a troll, stupidity. By why those instant labels, blocks, nerves? When I get someone who tells me that everything is all a plot by Big Sis (Janet Napolitano and Homeland Security) and I should buy gold, I ignore them. If they say something specific to me, I answer it. If I get someone less weird who says, "But you said X but it's Y," I answer it. Or not. I don't feel that need to block them unless they are spamming me with porn or violent threats. Why this fear of free speech by these denizens of Internet freedom? Why are they so fake?

I was surprised that someone thanked me for my comment, said it was good, and said there was more of this bad sort of faith at Wired's Threat Level. I haven't had a chance to study that but of course Quinn Norton is there, Swartz's ex partner.

I put this comment on The Verge:

Yet another tech darling story involving the CFAA and prosecution and you report it as if you only sat on 4chan or reddit or read @lessig and @ioerror all day on Twitter.

Come on guys, man up. You’re supposed to be one of the more thoughtful newer tech publications, not like all the other TechThings.

Why are you buying these Fisky Eddie Haskell arguments?!

Look, even if you don’t access a server, you can still hack that server by using it in ways not intended — it’s called “an exploit”. If you do that and expose a company to harm and cause them harm — violating their customers’ privacy — then you are violating the law. Full stop. It’s not about your “information wants to be free” playground.

Your contortions here with the hackster set just aren’t worthy of journalism, even lapdog tech journalism meant to sell the gadgets.

If you see a car with the key in the ignition and steal it, you didn’t, um, access the car. You didn’t re-sell it. But you may still face charges because it’s still theft. The Internet works the same way, even though you keep trying to contort yourself into a pretzel to show it is not.

You don’t get into Weev’s bad character. But given the loving attention to detail in the lachryomose story about Aaron Swartz with every supportive cast of characters weeping, you should have a character piece on Weev too. He is not tried for his character and shouldn’t be. But some of his acts pose moral and ethical concerns, and maybe some are actionable, too. It is said he has admitted to be the one to harass Kathy Sierra, dox her, and make death threats to her because he didn’t like her blog. He drove her from blogging. This is creepy. This gets to the whole mangy, vile heart of Anonymous and related hackers who take away others’ freedoms while endlessly demanding their own like infantile pigs.

Unauthorized access means you didn’t have authorization from that servers’ owners and its network personnel to use their servers as your sandbox — derp. They don’t adopt your open source culty view of this. To be sure, it will be damn interesting to see how the libertarian and former prosecutor Orin Kerr, who is taking up his defense because he wants to reform the CFAA, does with this. I’m pretty sure he isn’t going to use the “it was just math” or “it was just free speech” argumentation.

As for this juvenile crap about how prosecutors “don’t understand computers,” that’s nonsense. For one, they aren’t the precious rocket science you imagine. For two, whatever context in which they said that or were forced to say that hasn’t been rendered here in full, but we only have the tendentious twist of a partisan voice on it.

Do journalism! Do journalism!
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/03/total-protonic-reversal-but-soon-weev-will-be-right-where-he-needs-to-be.html

* * *

Well, I don't see a thing wrong with 3.4 years for this hack of people's private addresses, bragging about it, victory-dancing with it, and claiming it was just exploration of a security whole. It's fiction.

The lawyer, Tor Ekeland, said his client would appeal. He said the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act doesn't clearly define what constitutes unauthorized access.

"If this is criminal, then tens of thousands of Americans are committing computer crimes every other day," Ekeland said in an interview. "There really was no harm."

But it does not mean that because tens of thousands of people don't peer at Flickr screenshots of gadgets, triangulate it with their own gadget's numbers, think about how spoofing and access to servers work; write up a big old grabby script to grab stuff fast, then operate it at top speed to grab. Very, very few people do that. Hello.

As for "unauthorized," even if it's 1984 and there's no Internet to speak of when the law was written, it doesn't matter. Because It's self-explanatory. It's access by unauthorized persons. That means people who do not have log-in credentials and who spoof them or crack them or take advantage of a loophole to enter and use the system as it was not intended. If the CFAA is to be redrafted, it has to be written around preciously Weev's snotty assholery here to criminalize that exact sort of snide jimmying and pretending it's okay. Again, it was not a walk-in -- a walk-in is giong to att.net and clicking. It was:

o seeing a screenshot of the necessary number to access the emails on Flickr

o and seeing that number on the device itself and/or using those two data points to figure out the range and pattern of numbers

o using them to poke into the system to retrieve 130,000 emails that were not supposed to come to you as an individual user

o writing a grab script

o testing and running it

o getting the hot loot of 100,000 people's addresses, quite a few of them famous

o bragging about this to the press and let the press (Gawker) publish it, even if redacted

None of that is clicking on att.net.

I don't think 3.4 years is too much for this, because it's deliberate. It's not accidental. It's cunning and insincere. It's on purpose, with a cherry on top. Deterrence is important. Orin Kerr himself has written often of the importance of deterrence in prosecution. Now he's undoing that for the sake of his own fetish about "unauthorized" that he wants to test on this creep.

It's not a Boy Scout good deed to hack people so they "know about their security breaches" either. There isn't a law that would punish AT&T for not securing email lists when they had devised a system in which this was not supposed to happen. You can't be punished for not thinking cunningly like a hacker and contorting yourself and triangulating data to perform an exploit like this.

 

"The Hackers Are the New Communists"

"Outcry Over Computer Crime Indictment," reads the tekkie's URL name for an article posted with the CSM at the New York Times.

The actual headline is a bit more sedate: Hacker Case Leads to Calls for Better Law.

But it's not just about that Better World with that Better Law and the narrative framed by the hackers and their enablers in Google and such -- it's about how casually criminal journalists can become when allying with hackers.

Charlie Savage, who also covered Mannings' trial, does a far better job than any tech media or bicoastal liberal tech media sympathizers in covering the story. He pushes past the scare headlines from the TechThings (TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechMeme, The Verge, the Next Web, CNET, etc.) and actually, you know, makes phone calls. Talks to prosecutors and experts. And explains that the hypothetical maximum sentence is only that in the indictment, and not the actual sentence.

The perspective of the lawyers is framed as partisan, and indeed it is -- just like the perspective of former prosecutors and security consultants, and indeed they are. At least we hear from all sides. We never do in the tech media. Writes Savage:

Mark Eckenwiler, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s computer crime section, said that statutory maximums cited in department news releases are “purely theoretical” in most cases, and that it would be inappropriate for the department to speculate at the start of the case about what an eventual sentence would be.

“The truth is that a lot of first-time offenders may well come in the very bottom band” of the sentencing guidelines, he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Keys’s defense team stoked the furor. “I think hackers are the new Communists for the D.O.J.,” Tor Ekeland, a Brooklyn-based lawyer representing Mr. Keys, said in an interview. He maintained his client’s innocence and said that he intended to “vigorously litigate” the charges.

Stoked is exactly right. Well, I'm here to tell you that the hackers are the new Communists -- period. Not merely for the DOJ. Not in a "witch-hunt". Not in "McCarthyism," but in their actual beliefs about "expropriating from the expropriators" and "the end justifies the means".

Few want to contemplate the realities of technocommunism -- how their views have played out and how they have been allowed to take over -- as in fact we can now see since they were all given a pass in the 1990s, with Mitch Kapor's fine help.

 Jaron Lanier said very matter-of-factly that nothing good had come from web 2.0 as a result, although he retained hope for the Internet as a whole.

 

The New Pope Is Not About Your Penis -- Or Your Uterus

Anti-Pope protest in UK. Photo by Catholic Herald.

So we got a new pope today, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit and the first Latin American.

And that means a deluge -- a veritable tsunami -- of hate, vicious rumour, false claims, bigotry, hysteria, insanity -- nearly all of it revolving around the ever-popular themes of gay rights and women's reproductive rights, and the hypocrisy of an old institution that opposes these rights as a matter of ancient doctrine, yet is found itself to have clergy members who committed the crime of sexual assault of children.

We get all that, truly we do. But how many priests out of the millions of priests in the world -- what percent -- are caught in pedophilia or cover it up? It's not some huge percent. The Church combats this vigorously nowadays as do Catholic schools -- I know, I've raised my children in them.  What is this really about for you? Isn't it really more about the fear that your own personal freedoms might be in jeopardy -- and your externalization of this on to an easy target? But why?

On Twitter, when one of the faithful tweeted the news about the post and made little stick figures with their arms upraised, rejoicing, some twit claimed this was six little boys with their buttocks spread for pedophiles.

Sick.

That's how gross it gets -- that's how constantly sick, gross, and obsessed it gets, and never stops.

I joked that Google's servers probably fell over today with frantic searches of the terms "Jorge Bergoglio" and "pedophilia".

I had to endure Facebook friends instantly typing that they hoped the new Pope would be better to gays.

But why? It's not a position of the Catholic Church to validate homosexuality and bless LGBT marriage.

That may not square with the views of many people, particularly in the United States, and my personal views, but it's the Church's position. Why the zeal to reform it when it does not affect you?

As I wrote very bluntly to one of the many zealots on this score sounding off:

I assure you that the new Pope, just like the old Pope, will not get in the way of any of your orgasms or uses of birth control, Draxtor -- or indeed, anyone else's. Rest assured. He has no army.

And that's just it. Whenever someone starts in about gays and the Catholic Church, I ask them if they personally had any Catholic official stop them from being as gay as they wished. They never can come up with any real stories. I ask anyone if they couldn't buy or use birth control as they wished. They never come up with any real stories. Then...what's this really all about?

As for pedophilia, when are we going to stop the hysteria on this?  Yes, it's a real issue -- but it's a real issue being prosecuted, and first and foremost, addressed by very active Catholic parishioners themselves. Why do *you* need this?

Here's how I answered this hysteria on the Daily Beast from  Geoffrey Robertson, a lawyer with a political axe to grind -- he called for declaring 100,000 cases of pedophilia to be a "mass crime against humanity". I urged that all cases be prosecuted, most certainly. But who is he to demand that the church change the age for the administration of the sacraments to 13 or older, simply because of his theory that fear and reverance cause young children to be molested?!

There may not be that many cases; there may be more. But seriously, guys? A mass crime against humanity, when it is not a policy and not endorsed and in fact combatted? If the superiors moved the offending priests around and didn't help prosecute them -- and we know that's what they did -- then sure, that's wrong and that's to be vigorously fought. But mass crime against humanity? And you never show up -- ever -- to talk about hanging of gays in Iran or killing of women who go to school in Afghanistan. That's just the problem. There are real mass crimes against humanity in the world, and it is not the Catholic Church that perpetrates them. You know that in your heart. Why the obsession about Catholicism? Because you can?

I called for Pope Benedict to resign when I heard that he suppressed information about pedophiles and prevented prosecution. Not many Catholics did that. But later I was told that Christopher Hitchens, whose articles on this I believed, were not correct about this.  I will have to study up on this, but I still think that the appearance of impropriety still matters even if there was not any criminal act. In that thread, you can see one of the faithful taking the position that "Popes don't resign". Well, they do. Benedict did, in the end. He faced not only infirmity and the scandals of pedophile cases but the financial scandals of the Vatican as well. The institution is coping with it and has now elected a new Pope. It isn't about you -- if you aren't Catholic and don't wish to remain Catholic -- something you can opt out of, like other major religions who keep you in thrall -- with the help of government goons.

I wrote a complaint recently to the New York Times about an oped piece urging Catholics to give up the Church itself for Lent. I just thought it was one too many straws of hate and bigotry and ridicule that the Time has endlessly indulged -- especially with Frank Bruni and Maureen Dowd. They would never run a piece like that about Judaism or Islam -- it's just not on. Catholicism has to serve as the whipping boy for every modern "progressive's" need to reform -- or eradicate! -- religion because, well, it can. The costs for bashing it aren't as great. You won't face an angry mob ready to burn down your house. Happy?

The zeal to reform the Catholic Church by those who aren't in it, or have lapsed from it, always puzzles me. Why the obsession? Frank Bruni, who is openly gay, is particularly notorious for putting out column after column fretting about Catholic policies. Join the Episcopalians, Frank! The new Pope is not about your penis! You are free! Why not appreciate that you have that freedom, unlike people who live under theocratic states, and appreciate that the new pope is focused on helping the poor, and call it a day?

No, it's not about silencing criticism of the Church, or telling people they can't have freedom of expression  critical of the Church -- which of course, they don't need my permission to enjoy in vast quantities. Not when the din, the roar, the screeching, the fury, the tsunami of social media are all so amplified and pervasive against Catholics and the Catholic clergy. No, it's about something else at this point: conceding that Catholics who support their church, critically or not, have a right to do so, and you can find another church or group or no group at all if you are not happy with it. They will either opt out of their church and move to other religious institutions that are more modern on social issues -- or they won't, for various spiritual and private reasons. It was supposed to be about choice always, remember? Your pro-abortion stances? Remember how Clinton put it, "Safe, legal, and rare?"  Now you've dumped that stance, and converted it to "health".

I got into a debate with an ardent Planned Parenthood pro-abortion rights woman the other day who was hysterically flogging the "war on women" narrative and producing as evidence a study that said...about 100 women who waited until late in the third semester and couldn't then get legal abortions were stuck having kids and most regretted it. Well, that's unfortunate, but...why did they wait? Did their birth control fail or did they not use it? Did they think they could hold on to a man this way? And they're a small sample. Nine out of ten abortions take place in the first semester -- the drop-off is sharp then to the second, and a very small minority are in the cutting off point of 24 weeks. So why are we having this hysterical outrage? What would you talk about if you didn't have these tiny edge cases to flog? The huge cost of Obamacare, maybe?

Then there's always the person who says, but there was that rape victim who couldn't get treatment at a Catholic hospital, or couldn't get a needed partial-birth abortion during a miscarriage. Well, just 11 percent of the hospitals in America are Catholic-operated. Most of the time, you have a choice. In those very, very few -- one? two? three? -- cases you've read about from the screaming leftist media, was there really no choice? Really? And would it really be a widespread problem given that the cases are rare in the first place, and the number of Catholic hospitals in fact dwindling? (The one in my neighbourhood was closed, for example).

Oh, and now you're going to say the Pope is responsible for AIDS in Africa, having been thwarted from moving me with your hysteria about the "war on women". But...there are under 10 percent of Africans in the Catholic Church. Even those who are Catholic don't follow the Pope on the question of birth control. You're going to tell me with a straight face that non-Catholics, and people who are no different than Catholics in America in terms of using birth control if they can access it, are scared into not using condoms and get AIDS *because of the Pope*? That ordinary Africans who aren't Catholics and maybe not even religious at all are scared of...the Pope?

That's just insane. The real problem is African men who feel it diminishes their manhood to use trojans, and feel women aren't spontaneous if they use birth control -- and some of them who still believe that having sex with virgins or underage girls will cure them of AIDS. Is that the Pope's problem?! If the Catholics don't offer you birth control, other US-funded programs under Obama in Africa *do* -- not to mention many other programs from private charities, other countries, and the UN. What is this really about? It's about hate and hysteria. The Church is not going to change their views on this. They are going to continue to help people in Africa. They are not what prevents Africans from getting and using condoms. Next.

If you fail on the sex front -- and really, the new Pope is not about your personal penis and your personal vagina and you remain absolutely free from interference in their use, I assure you -- then perhaps you can dig up something on the political front? Argentina was the site of a bloody war against communists and socialists in the 1980s, known as the "Dirty War" that defined for many people their understanding of human rights, justice, and the complicity of the US in human rights abuses abroad.

The New York Times worked furiously to dig up some dirt on the new pope in that regard, and waved the "Dirty War" flag around -- as many did, but in fact the cardinal was not found to have done any wrong-doing. The human rights movement is strong in Argentina. If they had a case, they would make it. That doesn't stop legions of Anonymous -- who else -- from retweeting the claim -- false -- that this Pope is responsible for kidnapping two Jesuits. WikiLeaks re-upped their release of all cables on this Pope -- he was a runner-up in previous elections. Guess what -- the cables don't show any wrongdoing.

Naturally, the fact that this pope is an anti-communist and opposes liberation theology is going to be mined for all it's worth. Keep mining! It will not affect the ability of anyone to ascribe to communism or liberation theology if they wish. Politics in Argentina are fairly free and I think they've got it covered. Meanwhile, what about women who get shot and killed in Afghanistan for administering vaccinations to children?

I expect endless raging and ranting about the Pope now, until everyone moves on to the next thing -- maybe the Kardashians will get pregnant or married or something.

What I didn't expect was this nasty exchange with Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who I know socially, with a high degree of venom and even craziness. What spawns this in people? Being told the truth? Getting a push-back on their closely-held narratives like "the war on women"?

Read it, if you want to see why the left, or at least more immediately the Nation, is doomed.

Meanwhile, it's interesting that the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, had this to say:

The United States offers our heartfelt congratulations to His Holiness Pope Francis, who will lead and guide the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and serve as a symbol of faith and hope to all. For Teresa and me, our Catholic faith is a source of strength and comfort every day, from Sunday to Sunday, in moments of difficulty and moments of joy, and an inspiration to act on issues of social justice and global responsibility. Teresa and I will keep the Holy Father in our prayers as he begins a new era for our Church. On this momentous day, the United States renews our commitment to working closely with the Holy See to advance our shared belief in peace and humanity. We offer the Holy Father our warmest wishes of success in advancing peace, freedom, and human dignity throughout the world.

That's the position supported by Obama, whom I didn't vote for, by a new Secretary of State, about whom I've been critical of (on Magnitsky).  I was surprised to see him reference his own faith and it even felt inappropriate to me, but that's how he did it. He engineered it to fit in with Obama's secular socialist agenda, "an inspiration to act on issues of social justice and global responsibility".

But that's okay. The Catholic faith is that, for many people, including me. And it does have 1.2 billion adherents, and some 20 percent of the population in the United States. Why can't that be respected? Take what you will from it, and leave the rest alone. Kerry did this diplomatically and respectfully. The State Department has an elaborate program in defense of LGBT rights. They didn't feel they needed to flog it in the message to the Pope. The US now opposes the Vatican at the UN on these issues. But they still could feature working together on some humanitarian causes.

No, it is not about your sexual organs. They are intact and untouched. The Pople doesn't have an army. What he has is an ancient doctrine of dignity that does not suit modernity.

 

 

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The Republicans and Their Digital Help -- Again

TechPresident has a piece up now about the Republicans' chronic problems with finding good digital help -- and can you believe it, they are still touting Democratic consultant solutions and citing the publisher of Slate. What, are they saboteurs? Of course they're opposed to the Republicans! TechPresident is a leftist, "progressive" outfit that only has a thin veneer of "bi-partisan" cover which is creates mainly out of libertarian Republicans like Darell Issa.

They continue to wave around the names of various software products -- all made by Democrat campaign operatives or Democratic voters -- and expect that many some of these can be re-tooled for Republican campaigns. This is stupid.

I'm going to triple down and link to my controversial piece about Orca again, and also the piece refuting that this is "racist," and make the same points I've been making.

Look at Silicon Valley, home of the Better World companies. The state itself is in a shambles with poverty, especially for Hispanic and black minorities, increasing in percentage as the price of a home is out of reach. These companies don't bring their taxes home, of course, squirreling them off to Ireland and such as Google does. But it's also because they don't really have a vision of anything except technocommunism, which is oligarchy for themselves and a very thin social layer around them, and communism -- poverty and hardship -- for everybody else, equally.

They are not good for business. They are not good for the country. And this will become more clear as there is more of a dot.com style bust with web 2.0 and those 425,000 app engineers that Eric Schmidt's consulting group falsely claimed is out there with jobs just never really materializes.

My comment on TechPresident:

It's odd that you didn't mention the failure of Orca, which was emblematic of a number of things that what went wrong with Romney's campaign, although certainly not the cause of it literally -- which began with the hubris about "buying the best on the market" and extended to the unfounded belief in ability to beat Obama's tech team and continued on to the over-centralization and insufficient latitude for the grassroots.

There is a tendency for the "progressives," imbued with the scientism of Harper Reed GOTV code or Nate Silver's demographic drill-down, to ascribe a mystical ability only to Democrats to harness technology to win because only they are "scientific". This is pure Marxism.

The reality is that it's not about technology so much as people and team spirit.

And so there's some basic things that the Republicans have to do here.

1. Do not hire Democrats. They keep doing that. Romney hired Obama's 2008 analytical director and Al Gore's digital guy was in the mix. And here you're telling us of the role of Slate's publisher Krohn -- Slate, a leftwing online publication that hates Republicans. There is no reason to hire Democrats. Not for Republican campaigns -- hello! Note that Obama does not hire Republicans for his tech work or any work at all. This idea that these skilled Democrats are going to be professional enough to add the esprit and cohesiveness and sheer determination to win is just all wet. No Democrats. No.

2. And again, that means do not fill your teams up with people who are not going to vote for you, but vote Democrat. Yes, that means you are crippled at the starting gate in going out to get the very demographics you need to offset the Republican disadvantage -- and of course, the scientists would have you believe that you can "never" get them. But of course you can. Use the same technology that was used to drill and distill and purvey the "narratives" and "stories" like "war on women" or "voter suppression" (whatever their partial truths) with counterfactuals -- you know, like about all those Democratic women who won, and hey, Obama himself won, too, you know? Use it to get the discussion to more real politics than these distractive and divisive narratives cooked up by CAP and the other Soros grantees. It can be done.

3. Keep everything in house. That's how Obama did it. He did not scatter all the digital functions of the campaign across dozens of companies -- apps here, GOTV over there, servers out yonder on a light tether. They were tightly, tightly held -- hey, the data was so tightly held that now Obama has *privatized it* into Obama for America and *the Democratic Party no longer has it*. Play that news up -- show the people who volunteer for your and sign up with you that you don't view them as the product for some post-election consulting gigs for people like Jim Messner or Alex Ross to pick up.

4. Don't give up TV and talk radio -- which of course are less and less important but still crazily and hysterically hyped by the left because in fact they are an important way to reach people that the left has never been able to harness with PBS and NPR. Use it. But...Fox has 2 million viewers; Huffpo has 40 million every month (which is why the leftist hysteria about Fox is so stupid). So please, let's get a grip here. The right needs its Huffpo -- and American Spectator is not it, whereas Red State might be more appropriate.

5. Keep in mind that in any shop, technology can be in the hands of the enemy. Geeks do tend to tilt left and have Anonymous in their midst or tend to golf-clap Anonymous and be light on ethics. That means finding tech help that understand what *customer requirements* are and not just open-source cultist app engineers from failed start-ups. Adult supervision is needed. And that has to be the kind of adult supervision that is not cocky and out of touch with reality like Zach Moffett was.

6. Stop looking at all these stupid software products and the hucksters hawking them. Many of them are Democrats. They are not going to vote for you. They are not really going to do for you. Find engineers from solid Big IT who will vote for you and make it work. That is all.

***

As I think about this some more, I think the Republicans have to concentrate on building an organization that the software serves, not expecting that the organization will spring magically out of the software (that only works for Democrats because they weld their beliefs first into the tools in various ways and because they have a headstart on Twitter).

Some other thoughts:

o Facebook is more important than Twitter in reaching people where they live in their communities with their real names and where they can link *and* write full paragraphs. Twitter does not have as much influence on politics as people think, as polls show

o Concentrate on getting some good blogs and publications -- like the Huffpo and the DailyKos only on the right. I think Red State, especially as they've shed the loons in a statement after the elections, is a good start but it needs more work and there needs to be more publications.  One of the problems really hobbling the right now in my view is that it does not have good intellectual small journals or thick journals of the right. That is, there lots of them. But they are old and tired and inaccessible to young people; they're inaccessible even to middle aged people. They should offer everything that the Democrats don't offer in fact on their very heavily controlled top-down centralized agitprop sites -- interactivity, real voting, real discussion of petitions that can merge and come out, livestreams, citizen reporting, etc.

o Go after the 53% and be proud of it -- the demographics that are not enthralled with socialism or communism, the Hispanics above 30 and all the others indicated in Pew polls. You need your own Nate Silver, but you also need to reach all the businesses in America and make them understand what ails them

Ultimately, I think only if the Republicans can both do better on race and class but also steer the eternal leftist obsession with these issues as stand-ins for real politics of economics and participation will they have a chance. I don't think they much do. I think it's probably going to be 10-20 years before they breed those people they have to start breeding now from birth or elementary school to do their tech.