Sunday, June 6, 2010

Poets and Gutters has moved.

www.poetsandgutters.com

Saturday, May 15, 2010

The Authoritarian Mindset

Did you know that the President has authorized the killing of an American citizen based on secret evidence without any judicial oversight? How could this possibly be legally justified?

In the fullest administration statement to date, Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, said in a March 24 speech the drone strikes against Al Qaeda and its allies were lawful as part of the military action authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as under the general principle of self-defense. By those rules, he said, such targeted killing was not assassination, which is banned by executive order.

That is to say, wherever there sits a suspected terrorist (suspected based on secret evidence, remember), there is a war zone. In these sorts of places we send unmanned drones, drones that have killed about 14 terrorists for every 687 civilians. Given that we tend to trumpet this whole rule of law thing (ya’know, pillar of our government and all) we ought to probably ask how it is we know this terrorist is a terrorist if he hasn’t been convicted of any terrorism related charges. But that would be a silly question, al-Awlaki is a terrorist because the President says so. That’s the authoritarian mindset. At least somebody is mad about that:

But I’ll be god damned if I’m going to pretend it is ok to start ordering the assassination of American citizens, even if it is done “legally” and ordered by politicians I generally like. This really is not a tough call at all. This is not because I am some crazy civil liberties absolutist. This is just basic common sense, and this kind of thing would set an absolutely horrible precedent. It is beyond me how anyone could get upset about Gitmo and Abu Gharaib and then think assassination of citizens is ok. Personally, I’ll take terrorized by guard dogs and waterboarded over a bullet to the brain pan.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Kagan: The Quiet Careerist

Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan represents one of the worst features of liberal academia, the conscious effort to approach profound injustice with dispassionate objectivity. Scholars who either refuse, or are incapable of, expressing genuine moral outrage towards the more nefarious aspects of our political establishment (like illegal NSA wiretapping and the ever-expanding, constitution-shredding executive branch) give the illusion of normalcy to what is in fact a radical departure from legal tradition. Elena Kagan, this shielded scholar, ought to have made her viewpoint clear and vociferously attacked the executive abuses of the past eight years, but she was almost entirely silent on all the important legal issues of the day.

It has become clear that Kagan is far more concerned with her career objectives than the world of ideas. Kagan—who appeared in her high school yearbook wearing judge’s robe and holding a gavel—has so carefully shielded herself that even people around her simply haven’t a clue what, if any, strong personal convictions she might have. Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog described her reserved character: “extraordinarily – almost artistically – careful. I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.” The New York Times editorial page has even asked Kagan to “open up,” for she has “spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view.”

You wouldn’t marry somebody after five cold and apprehensive dates, so why would you want to select a justice based on the five narrowly technical and non-ideological scholarly papers she has written? In fact, it’s even easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get somebody off the Supreme Court! The process of selecting Supreme Court judges is very much to blame for the shielded lives that prospective judges lead. David Brooks has argued the politics of the selection process “gives a brilliant and gifted person a strong incentive to be reticent and cagey.” What a strange system we have crafted for filling this lifetime position, a system that demands we trust the President’s choice simply by virtue of it being the President’s choice. We simply need to know more, or we could, as Glenn Greenwald argues, very well end up moving the court to the right.

Some critics have found this uncertainty simply unacceptable, and the confirmation process a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis." Critics like Elena Kagan circa fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, Kagan has vowed to renege that critique and be more reserved when she is questioned by the Senate. This is a very disturbing trend in the selection of Supreme Court justices, a trend that weakens the ability of the Senate and the public to pressure the President on this decision of profound importance. People in positions of authority undoubtedly desire to manage and manipulate information to service their ends. If we have learned anything over the past decade it is that the only way the public can protect itself from these abuses of executive authority is to demand full disclosure on matters of such importance. Others, like Larry Lessing, friend and supporter of Elena Kagan, have lauded her secrecy, “she has spent her time, not blogging, not twittering, not trying to be out there in the forefront of every single legal issue, just doing her job, and doing it extremely well.” I think we’d all be a little bit more comfortable if she had a Twitter account.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Up in the mornin' and off to school, teacher is teachin' the Golden Rule...

photo credit: Jon Chiang

School is just wrapping up for many; Summer's fast approaching. For others, like myself, the limited Summer term (at The University of British Columbia, see photo above) is just beginning. This presents the perfect opportunity to share with you my pick of school songs. However, my main concern is to relieve myself of these nagging thoughts about the music industry. Enjoy the music, because here comes a diatribe. Perhaps you would like to listen to my picks while I rail against the music industry? In any case, my top ten songs about school (or at least songs that use school as a device to speak to more important manners, namely, love and war):




1. Homework - Otis Rush

2. What did you learn in school? - Pete Seeger

3. Wonderful World- Sam Cooke

4. School Days - Chuck Berry

5. Another brick in the wall - Pink Floyd

6. Good morning little school girl - Muddy Waters

7. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin

8. Maxwell's Silver Hammer - The Beatles

9. Hey Little School Girl - Marquees

10. School's Out - Alice Cooper




The songs I've chosen all have something in common, a characteristic one would hope all music has, they're all about something. I'm not going to sanctimoniously argue that the only music worth listening to is moving and poetic music that transforms the way we perceive of love, school, the political arena, etc. In fact, that couldn't be further from my view, one needs only to look to the abundance of crude and superficial selections I've made. Take for instance Maxwell's Silver Hammer, what new perspective on modern life does this murderous med student give us? Absolutely none. My number one choice? No depth to Homework, the song is simply describing the struggle we've all had to do our homework when there is a pretty girl around. These songs are not tightly crafted philosophical arguments, but they have real substance that I can point to without embellishing their value. They present a particular message, situation, or feeling in a coherent manner. In essence, it's possible to answer the question what is the song about? or even the question what is this song's thesis? For example, Chuck Berry's School Days leaves one with the conclusion that Rock can save you ("delivery me from") from the oppressive and monotonous experience that is school. Pete Seeger's What did you learn in school? leaves one with the rather grim conclusion that school might just be propaganda. 




What of contemporary popular music? Well, the majority doesn't warrant discussion. One simply needs to read the lyrics and they'll see that most songs are void of substance and hold no particular view on anything. We shouldn't damn them all though, sometimes they present a sort of formulaic coherency (why can't Lady GaGa answer her telephone? She's too busy dancing!) That's about as far as popular music will take you in terms of meaning, and that's OK. 

However, the level of uniformity in popular music is disquieting. These artists would perhaps better understood as commodities. They are synthetic frauds, auto-tuned ("like plastic surgery"), their sound pre-fabricated for total uniformity, their beats tightly crafted for the purposes of selling ringtones ("There's only music so that there's new ringtones.") Even the dancing, rigid steps helped along by quick camera cuts. You can tell Michael Jackson is a good dancer because his camera panned out to let him dance, the same way Bruce Lee's camera panned out to let him fight. When you don't have a Bruce Lee or a Michael Jackson talent then you're left with nothing but strategic camera cuts and editing tricks to give the illusion of talent. Today's pop music is full of these tricks, featuring about as many quick and dizzying cuts as a Jasan Statham movie, but I digress. 




The economic structure of the modern music industry is very much to blame for the high levels of conformity in popular music. The reality of the modern recording industry is that the record itself is but a small part of a larger brand. Sponsorships, endorsements, clothing labels, perfume, ring tones, and live shows all serve to marginalize what used to be the product (that is, the record). Despite what the record industry tells you, there has been nothing better for corporate America than the dwindling record industry and the proliferation of internet music downloads. As the record loses its economic importance, the corporate world can refocus on doing what it does best, manipulating us into buying their stupid bullshit. The music is now but a delivery system. We have come so far as to embrace what used to be labeled "selling out," as artists shamelessly boast of their commercial success. Wherever our celebrities now go, they are traveling mannequins.


The heavily centralized nature of today's marketplace furthermore stifles artistic expression. These large institutions are in fact defined by their incentivization of conformity. Why would a record label or large corporate sponsor want to get behind a dangerously subversive character who has no regard for polite society or artistic convention? That would be both artistically and politically risky. From an economic perspective, such risks are stupid and irresponsible. It simply takes the most elementary of reasoning to realize that it would not be an economically sound decision to disrupt the order from which you profit.


As for indie or alternative music, we can’t as easily generalize such a fragmented market. But I’d like to again emphasis the point of coherence. Detached hipster musicians so often pretentiously hide behind their craft rather than revealing anything of themselves or their view. We often run into the problem of music being about nothing. We haven’t solved all the questions surrounding love and war, yet some artists have decided to just not sing about these things and play with their synthesizers (presumably they’re in the grip of postmodernism, or perhaps they just have nothing to say). I feel utterly hopeless when people embrace incomprehensible nonsense only to abandon it at the point it becomes too popular and therefore uncool.


So I’m not so optimistic about contemporary music, but let me temper my critique by saying that I am speaking only of general trends--there certainly remains many good contemporary finds. But take a look at the masters of old, you should never be waiting on something new to arrive when there is so much more gathering dust as it waits on you.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

At least those who destroy the environment are polite.


On Friday, Greenpeace activists held a protest at Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff's UBC talk:

What started as an opportunity for Ignatieff to reach a politically apathetic generation turned into a heated demonstration held by Greenpeace activists.

During the question period, one activist asked Ignatieff about his stance on the Alberta tar sands. He was interrupted by Greenpeace protestors before he could answer.

The crowd grew restless and confused as Greenpeace continued to make its voice heard. Some students started to boo the protesters, some clapped, and others squirmed in their seats from the awkwardness of the atmosphere.
The student response has been decidedly against Greenpeace and the way they handled themselves. Much like the Blake Frederick kerfuffle over tuition policy, UBC students were too preoccupied with the crude breach of protocol to address the very real issue being raised. Most of the discussion has centered around the way Ignatieff held himself in the face of these foolish, rude and bombastic philistines. A student comments:
What was so remarkable about the situation is that Ignatieff didn’t seem phased at all, rather he gave an answer and did a remarkable job explaining his position
And a few more representative samples:
fuck greenpeace, that was just embarrassing and rude on their part, misrepresented UBC, kind of pissed me off

these tree hugging hippies definitely embarrassed UBC!
Notice the very clear evasion of the issue in favor of this meaningless discussion of image, poise, and respect. One might not agree with Greenpeace's methods, but to rally around Michael Ignatieff for the purposes of demonstrating your pompous sense of civility is simply cowardly. This nonsense about how well Ignatieff did or did not handle the situation is borderline idol worship, a poisonous trend in our political discourse. These are not personalities to psychoanalyze and revere for their gravitas, they are embodiments of actual policies (in this case, very destructive policies). Unhealthy reverence for the political elite and their etiquette is, on the whole, trivial and ruinous because it focus' political energy on the superficial and marginalizes the dissent (which is necessarily rude) needed for political change. The passion we saw on the part of these activists suggests the matter of the tar sands warrants further investigation, the protest should be used as an opportunity to speak substantively on the issue of climate change and our role in the matter.

Among the chaos, the very polite room of University students seemed not so concerned with something that I felt was much more worrisome, Ignatieff's rationale for continuing the tar sands:
“If you’re asking me to shut down the tar sands, I’ll tell you frankly, it is not in the national interest of our country to do [so].”
In the opening of the talk, Ignatieff continuously alluded to a “race against other nations” for matters of Canada's national interest. When one astute student asked Ignatieff to clarify the interesting choice of words, Ignatieff said he was referring to acquiring market share in emerging markets. This rationale is hardly out of the ordinary, it's pervasive in our political discourse. But self-serving attitudes are incredibly detrimental when addressing climate change and other matters that require international co-operation and compromise (Canada is public enemy number one here, thanks to the tar sands). The "national interest" justification--met with such thunderous applause--is nothing more than thinly veiled tribalism, hardly a just or liberal motivation. Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed exposed this insanity at the Copenhagen summit:
Every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first. This is the logic of a mad house, a recipe for collective suicide.
The IPCC AR4 "Summary for Policy Makers" has recognized this problem:
Fossil fuel exporting nations (including annex one countries) may expect lower demand and lower GDP growth due to mitigation policies.
but...
Those in weakest economic position are often the most vulnerable to climate change.
We may be satisfied that we play the role of climate criminal number one with the appropriate level of civility, but I think those most adversely affected by climate change will hardly be impressed by our good manners.