The Breaking Time

Israel: the match meets the powder

Israeli naval commandos storming the Mavi Marmara, the flagship of a relief flotilla piloted by pro-Palestinian activists. Photo from The Guardian

An Israeli raid on a pro-Palestinian relief flotilla has backfired terribly, in part because the convoy was traveling with the support of Turkey — until very recently one of Israel's staunchest allies — because the raid killed 10 activists and, lastly, because the raid happened on international waters.

Foreign Policy sums it up in a post entitled, accurately, Why the Gaza boat deaths are a huge deal:

While we don't yet know all the facts, the apparent killing of at least 10 people aboard a ship bound for Gaza with humanitarian aid already has all the hallmarks of a massive public-relations disaster.

It does sound like there might have been some kind of violent response from the activists on the boat, and the Israeli military is claiming its forces encountered “live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs."

But the international response has been swift. Turkey has recalled its ambassador and warned of "consequences," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for an investigation, European governments have expressed shock, and I imagine thousands of outside observers like me are wondering just what possessed the Israeli government to risk such an outcome when it sent naval commandoes to board the vessel.

As Haaretz's Amos Harel puts it, "The damage that Israel has caused itself internationally can hardly be exaggerated." Harel warns that the rumored presence of an Israeli Arab activist among the victims could lead to riots and perhaps even "a third intifada."

Another liberal Haaretz commentator, Bradley Burston, comments, "We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam." 

When Turkish leaders are calling the Israeli actions "state terrorism," something that would have been unthinkable as recently as 2008, you know the diplomatic shit has hit the fan.

What we may be witnessing is the fracturing of the web of alliances and support that's allowed Israel to maintain its current position for some time. 

Israeli leaders, whether politicians like David Ben-Gurion or military commanders like Moshe Dayan, understood that Israel's power vis a vis other nations depended both on a measure of firm diplomatic support and a very well-trained, advanced army.

However, the newer leadership of Israel seems to essentially believe that military power alone is enough to preserve their state's authority. That is always a mistake, and dangerous one. Botching relations with an important ally like Turkey so thoroughly would have been nigh-unthinkable even under comparative hard-liners like Ariel Sharon or Menachim Begin.

What will emerge from this fallout? I don't know, but unless this storm is quickly put down, Israel will emerge a radically different country, both in its internal battles and its position in the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt stands down the Klan

Peaceful doesn't mean defenseless

I'm headed out to the wilds of Western Virginia for some R&R, so there will be a blogging hiatus through the holiday. But before I go, I think I should share the following. The lovely and extremely talented Leigh Nelson dug up the above picture of Eleanor Roosevelt packing a revolver. The picture, from the FDR archives, is at first surprising because it seems to contradict the image of the tireless campaigner for peace and non-violence.

It shouldn't. Here's an account of Roosevelt, in her older years, standing up to threats from the Klan:

NARRATOR

Even in her 70's Eleanor still sparked controversy.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

And the suggestion that we do not consider our own citizens as equals makes them feel there is something really radically wrong in everything that we offer them. So they’ll take a good look at what the Communists offer. (voice - off "What can we do about this?") Face it. And realize that we can’t afford to have two kinds of citizens. We must have equal citizenship for anybody in our country.

NARRATOR

Conservative newspapers, disturbed by her ever more outspoken support of civil rights, dropped her My Day column. Protestors picketed her appearances, threats were made on her life. In 1958 the Ku Klux Klan learned she was going to speak at a civil rights workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

Allida Black

The day before she’s supposed to go, the FBI contacts her and says, "Mrs. Roosevelt, we can’t guarantee your safety. The Klan’s put a bounty on your head, a $25,000 bounty on your head. We can’t protect you. You can’t go." Eleanor says, "I didn’t ask for your protection. I appreciate the warning. I have a commitment. I’m going."

Vernon Jarrett

She was relentless. She made a statement to the effect that if you don't take a stand, you got to leave the impression that you're cowardly. She used the word "cowardly."

Allida Black

So Eleanor flies into the Nashville airport and she’s met by this 71-year-old white woman. No Secret Service. No cops. No young muscle men around her. You know, this elderly white woman picks up a 74-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt. And here they are, they're going to stand down the Klan! They get in their car, they put a loaded pistol on the front seat between them, and they drive up at night through the mountains to this tiny labor school to conduct a workshop on how to break the law, how to conduct non-violent civil disobedience. And she drove through the Klan to do it.

Let that be a lesson in how to deal with violent cowards, and to all of us in the virtues of relentlessness in pursuit of a better world. Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

The Rundown: Technology Will Crush You

Maybe Magnus was right...

Oh bloody hell, where to start?

* Bizarre writer and friends get microchip implants Of the variety used to ID pets. They're cheap and apparently not all that hard to install or read, as Emma Mendes Da Costa and a few of her friends were able to get one implanted just fine in a local body mod shop.

The article's fun and tongue-in-cheek, but it indicates how a once-scary, science fictional tech is becoming increasingly common. So far it's mostly a novelty, because the infrastructure to read those chips on a massive scale doesn't yet exist. Mark my words, though, given our current times of turmoil, the potential for oppressive backlash on this particular technology is huge.

While I of course believe in people's right to install, tinker or put whatever they want into their body, there's no way in hell I personally want a chip of any sort under my flesh. Piercings are lovely, tattoos too, but there's an extra level of intrusion there that I'm deeply uncomfortable with.

Which brings us to the next item...

* First human 'infected with computer virus' Oh my, how I love our species. No sooner has a new technology started to become widely available than we begin figuring out ways to infect and corrupt it. Brilliant, and a process that happens with laws and attempts at repression too as well as machinery.

In this particular case, British scientist Mark Gasson, installed with the Cadillac version of the chip Da Costa and her friends received, managed to infect said chip and then spread the virus to surrounding machinery. Now we see  a future where humans face mechanical viruses as well as biological ones.

Of course, then there's the matter of the oft-forgotten workers who are building those and similar objects of tech-fetish lust...

* Apple's Chinese suicide problem From Andrew Leonard, of the superb How the World Works, comes news that, after a spate of recent suicides, workers assembling iPhones in China are asked to promise they won't kill themselves. 

Leonard writes that the situation is pretty dire:

I don't know about you, but if I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, plugging circuit boards into Apple gadgets that sell for more than I might make in a month, and I looked out the window and saw nets being installed to keep co-workers from dashing their brains out on the streets below, I'd start to feel a little depressed. Top that off with an explicit corporate request to refrain from suicide and I'd be seriously questioning my career path.

However, he also notes that by Chinese standards, a job at the Foxconn plant is considered pretty good. In some ways, perhaps, Foxconn is lucky, Johann Hari's excellent piece on hideous working conditions in China reveals that labor uprisings often include kidnapping management.

Meanwhile, Apple's market capitalization just exceeded Microsoft's. I believe this sums it up.

Naturally, my Apple shit-talking is written on a Mac.

* Robots replacing Damien Hirst and your baby A creepily thought-provoking exhibit in (where else?) China highlights how easily the dreaded robots can replace a number of basic human functions.

Robots can have Hirst, but I don't want to live in a world where my rickshaw drivers ain't people.

The hippies are loose

An excerpt from Harry Reasoner's 1967 documentary on hippies. Posted because it's an interesting look at how a social movement is viewed as utterly strange and full of portent at the time of its inception. Nowadays, however, hippies are viewed as one among many subcultures, and not very much threat to the mainstream (and my how that definition has changed) at all.

Food for thought, certainly.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Poems for Friday: Invictus

William Ernest Henley

Today's poem is a classic of individual determination written by William Ernest Henley, a Victorian poet who survived tuberculosis of the bone and the amputation of part of his leg. It reflects a steely-eyed refusal to surrender but was much idealized by the mentality of his day. It's a vision with its dark side (as are they all), but it is a classic for a reason, and bears repeating:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

The Rundown: Razing Arizona edition

Flank attack!

* LA boycotts Arizona. Arizona threatens to cut off power LA invades Arizona, rounds up supporters of draconian anti-immigrant law and deports them to Mexico. Ok, so I'm making that last part up (though, as Grumpy Owl points out, LA already has their marching music).

On another note, the fight over Arizona's law illustrates a number of interesting breaking points and important shifts. The first is how ill-equipped state lines mostly drawn in the 19th century are to dealing with today's environmental and resource issues. One of the major things states fight about is resources: who's stealing whose water, power, etc. Part of this is because environmental regions are hacked up, pie-style, between any number of arbitrary boundaries. The basic support system for a modern city stretches across many political jurisdictions, something that makes tackling disagreements or problems extremely difficult.

Also, notice that it's LA fighting Arizona: a city versus a state. Within Arizona, Phoenix is notable as a hot-bed of opposition to the law. As more and more people move to cities, they become greater centers of political power, often deeply at odds with the surrounding territory. Forget Red States and Blue States (one of the dumbest political memes of the past decade), look at a more accurate map and you'll see that the biggest political divide is urban-rural.

* New Social Networking Site Changing the Way, Oh, Christ, Forget It "Let someone else report on this bullshit." The Onion goes there. Spectacularly.

* Is the Drug War more militarized than the military? A soldier argues that raids in Afghanistan and Iraq often have more restrictions than SWAT teams busting in the doors of suspected drug traffickers. An interesting read.

* Robot conducts wedding in Tokyo No word yet on if the infernal machine seduced the bride beforehand. 

An interesting example of how culture can drive technology as much as the other way around. Japan has more (and often more sophisticated) robots than anywhere else in the world. This is partly because Japan's is a first-world industrial power with the resources to build such devices. However, there's also a cultural fascination that shapes what it builds with that capability, and what ends it's put to.

Speaking of...

* Because Every Country is the Best at Something Yes, Japan actually is number 1 in the world in the robotics department. The US leads in, uh, serial killers (send them to fight the robots, I smell a hit movie here). The UK leads in CCTV cameras and France in sugar beets. It's a strange world.

* The French Anti-Burqa Jihad An excellent column by Indian atheist Shikha Dalmia on the crusading and dictatorial impulses behind France's new law. Includes this passage, which could stand to be repeated often:

Nor will it do to justify this ban on grounds that it will save women from having to make painful personal choices. It is not the job of liberal governments to make personal tradeoffs painless--just possible. Giving individuals the right to exit without fearing physical retaliation provides an automatic check on oppressive traditions without taking away the crucial tool that minority communities in liberal polities have to perpetuate themselves: moral suasion. Banning the burqa or the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke is tantamount to telling observant Muslims, Sikhs and Jews that they don't have a right to exist.

Despite years of sectarian bloodletting, if Indians still intuitively understand this and take a benign view of the burqa, it is hardly because they are inherently more rational. It is because their secularism has been shaped by India's dominant religion--Hinduism--whose non-monotheistic ethos allows the space for multiple faiths. In this sense, Hinduism is perhaps more profoundly in sync with liberal tolerance than monotheistic faiths.

More crucially, however, there is nothing in Hinduism that makes an individual's spiritual salvation anyone's business except the individual herself. By contrast, Hitchens, et al, who have been raised in the cradle of a Christian civilization, have imbibed a certain comfort level with the crusading notion that people can--and ought to--be saved even against their will. Hence, it does not matter if Muslim women don't regard the burqa as oppressive. They have to be given sartorial liberation in the same way that the heathens need to be given spiritual liberation.

This is a profoundly anti-liberal and anti-secular idea. Indeed, if the French and Hitchens were serious about either secularism or liberalism, instead of asking Muslim women to shed the burqa, they would be shedding their own proselytizing prejudice against it.

Amen. I've always found it interesting that the anti-Roman Christian sects ended up becoming the heir to the Roman Empire. Similarly, I can't help but wonder if a certain strand of atheism won't end up embodying the crusading and socially meddlesome mentality of its worst foes. The wheel turns...

Surprise: big tech acts like big business

The porn-freer, back in the day

Let's have a quick review, shall we? There's increased rage over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's cavalier attitude towards privacy, and it turns out that back in his younger days he was calling people dumb fucks for trusting their info to him (I'm not jumping FB, but Adriel Hampton has an interesting post on why he is). Meanwhile, Steve Jobs wants to rid the world of porn. This comes after a legally shady and brutal raid fell upon a tech blogger who got ahold of an iPhone prototype.

That's not all, of course. Google's setting their own goddamn foreign policy, while Microsoft doesn't pay its taxes and cracks down on whistleblowers.

Why does this all sound so terribly familiar?

Because from years "don't be evil" and "think different" tech companies, and the subcultures attached to their products, have pushed the idea that they were somehow a new and superior mutation. Here was the fusion of idealism and capitalism: they were going to build a better world while making piles of money at the same time. This pitch is not new: innovative industry always believes that it is somehow fundamentally different from its predecessors. Hence technologists who work for massive companies can tweet on about stopping "big business" from the latest outrage. They mean, of course, other big businesses, outside their sector.

So forget that old Apple ad. Tech companies are companies: their primary purpose is and always will be to make money and expand their own power. Often, like any company, they're not too picky about using harsh methods to do so or keeping their word. Trust and mercy aren't their primary purpose. 

Further, it turns out tech companies are just as driven by their founders' egos and prejudices as they are by their personal ideals.

Traditionally, that's exactly why laws are developed to govern business and set the rules of the fight; to keep it from getting too out of hand.

One of my main gripes with the current course of Gov 2.0 and any number of other technologist projects is a blindness to this simple fact. The reason I believe technology (and those who make it) are best incorporated as part of a broader movement is because of the nature of the beast. It's not like the tools these companies create don't have a use, but depending on their altruism is foolish.

Something similar to what Jobs, Zuckerberg and the rest are doing was inevitable. Instead of shock, the reaction should be an effort to restrain the flaws of big businesses that are, at the end of the day, still big business.

Poems for Friday: Clamor

Marines in Afghanistan. Photographer unknown.

The following poem, written by Elyse Fenton while her husband was stationed as a medic in Baghdad, seems about perfect for today. Or tomorrow.

Staking fencing along the border of the spring 


garden I want suddenly to say something about


this word that means sound and soundlessness


at once.  The deafening metal of my hammer strikes


wood, a tuning fork tuning my ears to a register


I’m too deaf to understand.  Across the yard

each petal dithers from the far pear one white 


cheek at a time like one blade of snow into


the next until the yard looks like the sound


of a television screen tuned last night to late-


night static. White as a page or a field where 


I often go to find the promise of evidence of you

or your unit’s safe return. But instead of foot-


prints in the frosted static there’s only late-


turned-early news and the newest image of a war 


that can’t be finished or won. And because last


night I turned away from the television’s promise


of you I’m still away.  I’ve staked myself

deep to the unrung ground, hammer humming


in my hand, the screen’s aborted stop-time still 


turning over in my head: a white twist of rag 


pinned in the bloody center of a civilian’s chest, 


a sign we know just enough to know it means 


surrender, there in the place a falling petal’s heart would be.

The Rundown: Sanity break edition

Holy shit, there's a lot going on out there.

This post, gloriously, is concerned about none of it. 

This post is about letting some steam off for a second and watching some utterly hilarious, random videos from around the internet.

There's Betty White. There's semi-literate gold prospectors with their own cable talk shows. Also, the muppets meet the Sex Pistols. And Pirates. Sodom-tastic pirates.

Enjoy.

Why happiness?

If you know the source for this graphic, tell me

Browsing around the other day, I found a lightning bolt article on Salon by Rebecca Traister. Succintly titled Screw Happiness, it's an excellent takedown of the pervasive idea that we must be happy, all the time:

When it comes to social science and economics, women lately seem especially prone to having the contentment thermometer thrust at them, and their temperature always seems to register at "dissatisfied." A study by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, as well as one by Princeton economist Alan Krueger, have shown a decline in female happiness in the years since the second wave, a trend that has been cheerily used as proof of exactly how unhappy increased social, sexual, professional and economic liberation has made American women. Even those who dare make claim to general life satisfaction are told not to get too comfortable; as Marcus Buckingham, the author of "Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently" gloomily warned any aberrantly chipper chicks in a piece last year, "as women get older they get sadder."

But really, how could they not, given the aggressive messages about happiness and how they must achieve it, and unhappiness and how they must avoid it that are foisted on them from every direction, making them feel like failures if they are not warbling and grinning their way through life?

---

But the thing is, "not happy" has its own rewards.

Unhappiness is propellant; disappointment and dismay prompt us to work for a better grade, to ask for a promotion or seek a new job, to search for a more affordable or comfortable abode, to go out at night and meet someone new, to try to get pregnant or decide not to have another kid. More specifically, the elements of life that make us sad or upset or bored show us what we do not want; they give shape and specificity to what it is we do want and perhaps the motivation to work toward it. That which leaves us empty prompts us to find what we want to fill us up, whether it results in picking up a phone to talk to a friend or picking up and moving to Bali.

In archetypal American rags-to-riches stories, the dissatisfactions of poverty and degradation are what provoke heroes to make their giant forward leaps. In my far more privileged experience, fear, humiliation and error provided me with the fuel, the desire and the ambition to move away from where I was and toward something else, something that quite often turned out to be better. For that transformative power, I give unhappiness a lot of credit.

And Amen to That, I say. While Salon labels Traister's column as "feminism," which shouldn't be as pejorative a word as its become (or at all), it's applicable to all of us. The insistence on "happiness" as our average condition had become endemic, with consequences for all of us, male and female.