I opposed the Iraq War. If you’d asked me before the war what my foreign policy philosophy was, I’d have said “liberal interventionism”. I supported the Kosovo and Bosnia missions and believe that early intervention in Rwanda could have saved millions of lives. My feelings about Kosovo, Bosnia, and Rwanda have not changed, but I want no part of any group or movement that includes George Packer, Paul Berman, and Michael Ignatieff. I think many liberal interventionists — especially those at think tanks and establishment media outlets — care more about the warm feeling that making “moral” arguments gives them then they care about thinking through the details of an invasion. Anyway, no one ever lost their job at a think tank or establishment media outlet by advocating a disastrous war.
Anyway, I’ll tell you this: Iraq completely destroyed my faith in establishment media, convinced me that think tanks — even ones that purport to be liberal or centrist — are usually propaganda factories, and made me enormously skeptical of interventionist foreign policy.
Michael Gerson has an uncharacteristically thoughtful piece on why more and more people identify as having no religious beliefs. He posits two reasons why this might be happening: (1) the rise of the religious right alienates people and (2) the broader trend of people losing faith in institutions. Apropos of (2), a Pew report today shows that Americans’ opinion of SCOTUS is near an all-time low. Anecdotally, a friend who is a high up at bank told me not long ago that he thinks that large companies (or the government) need to have regulations in effect to prevent senior management from, in his words, “looting the company”.
The right has done a lot of boo-hooing about how younger Americans distrust institutions. As a liberal, I find it concerning too, since rejection of the government often leads to glibertarianism. But I wonder if it’s inevitable: any reasonable person who looks at companies, elite media, churches (or most other institutions) would have to conclude that all too often, they get taken over people whose aims are completely at odds with what their customers or readers or employees or parishioners might want, who in fact don’t care at all what customers or readers or employees or parishioners might want, and who are incompetent and careless with regard to everything except their own money and power. It’s not necessarily the institutions themselves that people are losing faith in, it’s the sociopaths who have gained control of the institutions.
ruemara
yes.
Villago Delenda Est
What ruemara sad nearly as succinctly as I would have said.
I’d say “si” or “ja” and use one less letter.
gogol's wife
What you say about churches is not true of liberal Protestant churches like UCC, and I don’t think it’s true of many Catholic churches as they exist in their local communities. Unfortunately, the churches that actually strive to live the word of Christ are the ones that are rapidly losing membership. I wish this were not true.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
The problem is that the prevailing ethic is increasingly more lying and putting yourself in a rentier position than exchanging value for value. You’re not in business to sell goods and services; you’re there to fasten onto a revenue stream like a lamprey and never let go. You’re not in an organization to work in exchange for reasonable pay; you’re there to secure your own money and power while the company attempts to screw you over in search of greater profits.
So in America people assume that that’s what government workers do too. It’s not the common assumption elsewhere – yet.
Mike E
OT but sorta relevant: Seven things you should never say to a vet.
Omnes Omnibus
Forty or so years of propaganda denying the existence of “common good” is bound to have an effect.
Like you, I come from a liberal interventionist POV, but I always tried to temper it with realism. That is we should only intervene where there is a real possibility of have a net positive impact and we should be very careful about weighing our options. For example, I am rather doubtful that we could have sufficient troops into Rwanda to have had a positive effect.
Most of what people in think tanks are trying to sell as “liberal interventionism” since about 2003 is just an attempt to rebrand the neocons.
BC
The media lost credibility because of the Iraq war and the Terry Schiavo fiasco. Their reporting on these issues left people who can think going “WTF?” The media also elevated the rightwing religious grifters – Huckabee, Reed, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham – to be the moral arbiters of our society (the “values” gurus, if you will) and people who can think again went “WTF?” So if the institutions are losing credibility, blame the grifters and the media who elevate them. I’m a member of a liberal Christian community and it pains me to have the media using those above plus the pedophile-hiding Catholic bishops as the face of my faith.
cleek
think tanks — even ones that purport to be liberal or centrist — are usually propaganda factories
all organizations exist in order to push an agenda. the best you can do as an observer is to figure out what that agenda is and calibrate how you interpret what they’re saying accordingly.
JGabriel
Nice allusion in the title, DougJ.
Omnes Omnibus
@JGabriel: I don’t recognize the song though.
A Ghost To Most
Name one institution in America that is not corrupt
I’ll wait.
cmorenc
A huge proportion of the Bush National Security inner circle and of the neocons who pushed for the Iraq war, never served in harm’s way or even in the military themselves. Rumsfeld did serve as a Navy pilot, but entirely in peacetime. So was George Bush, the NG Reserve pilot who pulled special priviliges to get into the unit to avoid the draft and then slacked/AWOL-ed out the instant there was no further threat of being sent to Vietnam combat if he did so. Paul Wolfowitz…no military service whatsoever. Of course not Condolezza Rice. John Bolton did serve in the Maryland National Guard, but was never sent to Vietnam, and expressed that he had no desire to be sent there, because in his humble opinion the war was already lost due to the prevailing opinion of opponents of the war. HOW CONVENIENT! As to five-times draft-deferred Dick Cheney…well… How about private-sector neocons? Bill Kristol…hahahaha of course not!
SEE A PATTERN THERE? I do. Chickenhawks every damn one of them, eager for the glory of war fought by other people and other people’s children. The business of strategizing war is for the 1-percenters. The business of fighting it for the bottom 70-percent-ers.
Lord Jesus Perm
@Omnes Omnibus: It is a reference to The Great Gatsby.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Include HOAs in your list.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lord Jesus Perm: I know that.
ETA: DougJ usually goes with song titles or lyrics, frequently Elvis Costello or The Clash, and I was playing off of that.
ranchandsyrup
I suppose I would be OK with (or at least understand) the propagandizing if it were in furtherance of some deeply held conviction by ze media. But it is just in furtherance of access.
maurinsky
The Great Gatsby, not a song.
I just watched Food, Inc. last night, and my faith in institutions was shaken a little! I can understand why the young folks don’t believe or belong to any. Of course, the only way to make institutions better is to shine some light and get some intervention. At least with government (thus far, anyway), we do have our votes to help us steer them, although the Supreme Court is the institution behind what will likely end the power of the vote.
cvstoner
I think the bigger question with regards to these institutions is: is this a new phenomenon, or have they always been this corrupt?
JGabriel
@Omnes Omnibus: The Great Gatsby. Book, not song. Tom and Daisy were basically rich socialites who got someone killed and let someone else take the blame.
.
Lord Jesus Perm
Something obviously went over my head. My apologies.
JGabriel
@Omnes Omnibus: Post too dry to tell. Not everyone has read it, y’know.
ETA, though I suppose most of us Americans were probably taught it in high school.
.
penpen
@Lord Jesus Perm: @Omnes Omnibus: Actually I’m pretty sure DougJ is quoting the play Gatz.
Hungry Joe
@Omnes Omnibus:
In his book “Shake Hands with the Devil” Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who was the force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, wrote that with another 5,000 or 10,000 troops — and he begged for them — he could have pretty much stopped the whole thing. He didn’t get them, of course, and though he managed to save thousands of lives with the relatively few troops he had, the overall failure of the mission broke him, all but destroyed him. Devastating book.
Mandalay
@gogol’s wife:
This is certainly true for the best church of the lot (IMO):
Sad. Apart from their belief in God, Quakers seem to have a wonderful perspective on life, and how it should be lived.
Omnes Omnibus
@JGabriel: Ack! I might have out-subtled myself.
@Hungry Joe: Thanks for the reference. I’ll look for it.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@cvstoner:
They’ve often been this corrupt. The difference now is that the corruption is more centrally directed which in turn makes it more effective.
Mandalay
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t know enough about that to argue either way, but Bill Clinton cites ignoring the situation in Rwanda as the biggest failure of his presidency. So I guess he thinks he could (and should) have done something.
Kathleen
@cvstoner: I think they’ve always been this corrupt. See “Remember The Maine”, Gulf of Tonkin, Butler, Smedley (“War Is A Racket”)and The Gilded Age. I do, however, think that at one time there were more companies who believed in providing good products.
JoyfulA
@BC: Yes, the media elevated Pat Robertson and his ilk as the face of Christianity and never showed a moderate or liberal Christian on TV.
Worse than that, they would not take our cash money to run our ads. They said our ads were “divisive” because they showed our denomination as welcoming everyone, regardless of class, race, sexual orientation, or any other factor.
I don’t know why media hates leftish, Jesus-focused Christians.
Hungry Joe
@Omnes Omnibus:I reviewed “Shake Hands with the Devil” in 1994.
John O
No. It is something in the nature of institutions themselves that creates the rot. Name me an institution, and I’ll show you some serious rot, pretty much commensurate with the seriousness of the institution. There’s something else going on besides the flies being attracted to the feces.
Hungry Joe
@Omnes Omnibus: Here’s my review of “Shake Hands with the Devil” (1994):
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@BC:
The Village media’s descent into the joke it’s become began first with the Clinton Impeachment, then went into second gear with the run up to the 2000 election.
Everything thereafter was shifting into 3rd, 4th gear and beyond.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandalay: My concern with interventions is that just because something horrible is happening does not always mean we can effectively do anything about it. My memory from the time, and per Hungry Joe’s link above it may be wrong, was that there were serious concerns about the ability to put in and supply sufficient troops. It is possible (hell, even likely) that Dallaire want the troops very, very early and did not get them, and then, once it blew up, putting sufficient troops to end rather than prevent it was not possible.
stinger
Even after 8 years of the illegal Fratboy/DarthVader presidency, I still consider government the best of the lot, because average people have *some* influence and can even toss the leadership out if they are so minded. Not the case with corporations, media, think tanks, and (most) religions.
Another Halocene Human
Gerson says 20% of Protestant kids quit being Protestant (not a terrible rate of attrition–I believe within evangelicalism the rate’s a lot worse), while 40% of the kids of “nones” (which is an amalgamated group including theists who quit church) become affiliated with religion, but it’s that data from a generation ago, back when “none” was 7% and as he points out, there was more social pressure to be a religiously-affiliated agnostic? Also, as I recall, there was a lot of interest in Eastern religion, roll-your-own-religion, and evangelicals were proselytizing like crazy. Now everybody knows about them.
How does he know the kids of Millennial “nones” will take up religion at that rate? What if this is an S-curve and the rate of religiously-raised becoming nones picks up?
He also never mentioned the scandal in the RCC. If not for immigration the Catholic church would be shrinking. Family size has plummeted and the child abuse scandal has broken the cycle of indifferent Catholics forcing their children to be confirmed, etc, ad infinitum.
Ash Can
People are losing faith in the institutions because of these sociopaths, but you do touch upon an important point. No institution exists without the people who founded/run/populate it. Any institution run by decent people with a strong sense of service will be revered. Likewise, it only takes one bad apple at the top to wreck a good institution, and many institutions that are currently crumbling have way more than that.
Hungry Joe
Yet again, I can’t get the link-thingy to work. It might — just might — be me. So I’ll try this: http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041219/news_mz1v19salm.html
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You could make a parallel argument about the moralizing of Serious Democrats and self-ID’d-liberal centrists who fetishize The Deficit, Simpson-Bowles and “pain” (Ed Rendell, I’m looking at you). Shockingly enough, they’re a lot of the same people who supported the Iraq War.
DaddyJ
Who could have known that the Randian elevation of self-interest in the late 70s and 80s (“Looking Out for Number One”) would have toxic effects decades down the line, in all walks of life?
Chris
I find it concerning simply because institutions, however flawed, are how you translate general public sentiment into concrete political results.
There may be (or have been, it’s fading now) a lot of social conservatism out there favorable towards Republicans on social issues, but the network of churches was how you translated that into actual votes, if only by having preachers remind people to vote, tell them what’s on the ballot and scare up some fire and brimstone.
There may be a lot of billionaires out there favorable towards Republicans on economic issues, but things like the Chamber of Commerce are how you translate their money into concrete results (and when the billionaires go off and do their own thing, you get a clusterfuck like this past election cycle).
Fifty years ago, unions performed the same function for the Democrats and the occasional liberal Republican. They still perform that function in much of the Northeast and Midwest. Fifty years ago, political machines did the same thing for both parties.
So much as I’ve learned to distrust institutions, I think it’s also fair to say that you need them if you’re going to succeed in politics, especially over the long term.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hungry Joe: Thanks.
PeakVT
It’s not necessarily the institutions themselves that people are losing faith in, it’s the sociopaths who have gained control of the institutions.
My sense is that people have a hard time separating the two. A new leader may restore some of the faith, but the institution doesn’t ever get completely rehabilitated.
Ash Can
@John O: Where’s the rot in, e.g., Doctors Without Borders, Habitat For Humanity, or, as Mandalay says above, the Society of Friends? Like I said, any institution is only as good or as bad as the people who make it up, and no institution exists independently, in a vacuum.
Chris
@cvstoner:
Always been corrupt, in many cases. Watergate and Iran-contra, for example, are when people started really paying attention to the intelligence/security state’s corruption, but the previous half-century of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI pretty well disproves any claims that it was anything new.
? Martin
Other trends related to no beliefs:
1) The role of all religious institutions has diminished as their ability to impact the community has waned, mainly because the financial resources are either diminished or the challenges have increased to such a degree that they are not seen as influential. Churches always maintained a very distinctive role in the community. That role is much smaller now.
2) The church is no longer the social focal point of communities. Much better places to get dirt on your neighbors now. Many other better opportunities to connect with others. The church hasn’t kept pace – none of them have. They cater to their elders (being invested, they are vocal) and fail to serve the needs of their youth (who simply leave). How many congregations use social media well?
maya
@A Ghost To Most: I was going to say the Smithsonian, but then, there’s this
RareSanity
@Kathleen:
This.
The main problem, in my opinion, is that executives in larger companies, are so far removed from what the company actually does, that everything is about a number on a spreadsheet.
I’ll never forget when this became clear to me…it was when Bob Nardelli was fired as CEO of Home Depot –for damn near running the company into the ground with his “HD Supply” venture–and then was almost immediately hired as CEO of Chrysler after it emerged from bankruptcy. He is currently still the head of Chrysler, and I guess he’s doing an acceptable job, but the transaction said two things to me:
1.) Why the hell does a car company hire the failed CEO of a home improvement company, to attempt to overhaul and modernize a car company?
2.) Company executives, mostly, don’t know shit about the product/service their company offers. They wouldn’t know if something was “broken” about their offerings (other than decreasing sales), and if they did, wouldn’t know how in the hell to fix what was broken. Therefore, they don’t give a shit about the actual product/service offered by the company. All they care about is doing what needs to be done to give the appearance to Wall St., that they are profitable every 3 months, collect their multi-million dollar paychecks, and continue doing it for as long as humanly possible.
Then after they get fired, move on to the next gig, rinse and repeat.
Of course they start racking up the “memberships” on these various Boards of Directors along the way, so they will continue to collect checks whether they actually get hired as a CEO again or not.
Sweet job, if you can get it…
ranchandsyrup
@Hungry Joe: Hey Hungry Joe, how do you feel about the UTSD these days?
PeakVT
As a liberal, I find it concerning too, since rejection of the government often leads to glibertarianism.
I think it mostly leads to apathy. It only leads to glibertarianism among emotionally-stunted employed white males, which you may encounter disproportionally.
Another Halocene Human
@gogol’s wife: What you say about churches is not true of liberal Protestant churches like UCC, and I don’t think it’s true of many Catholic churches as they exist in their local communities. Unfortunately, the churches that actually strive to live the word of Christ are the ones that are rapidly losing membership. I wish this were not true.
I think any time that life in the middle class becomes precarious the middle class churches are going to lose members. Look at the 1930s and how much faith people had in organized religion then. Not a lot!
Me personally, I was raised middle class and that was pretty okay in the 80s. My household’s combined income would put us at low end of middle class, rather than poor, like most of my coworkers (which is BULLSHIT, they do a tough job that not everyone can do where public safety is involved FUCK THAT ROBBING THE WORKING CLASS SHIT), but we can’t always aspire to the same kinds of things. We work all kinds of wicked hours which means church-going even if we wanted to is off the menu. We are sometimes found lurking at the local Episcopalian Church but feel a little out of place amidst well-off retired people and professionals. Some of our gay friends want us to come to the UU church but there’s nothing drawing us there and I work until 3:30 in the morning on Saturday. My wife refuses to become a member of a synagogue, no matter how liberal, as she doesn’t relate to the liturgy and her mom’s family, including her grandparents, are religious refuseniks who got out of Eastern Europe, said “fuck Rabbis” and held all the important Jewish holidays at home. Yes, they were working class Jews. Such attitudes are not totally uncommon, as I’ve found out. But I grew up with comfortably middle class Jews, college professor’s, lawyer’s kids who all participated in formal religion, even if it was a small, quirky havarah meeting in the basement of the Lutheran Church.
Veblen tells us there’s a link between the conspicuously consuming leisure class and religion.
And there’s a religion for the poor, too, the opiate of the masses which numbs their pain and holds out a hope their life doesn’t provide. (With Assemblies of God, it’s the hope to see happy people suffer, but not everyone gets their kicks through prosperity gospel, eh?)
Probably Sweden had a religious dropoff as the desperately poor of that country were brought to a high standard of living. Because in Europe religious institutions were state-aligned franchises they adapted too slowly to changing conditions and have now become irrelevant. Every upheaval in the US is followed a generation later by an even more robust religious movement, it seems. I wouldn’t count religion out yet. Religious decline in the US has not followed a straight line at all. However, this generation has pulled away from religion in a remarkable way so that is certainly different from the boomer attitude which was to remain religious but to try new things. I’m glad that there’s been a backlash against the oppressive open religiosity and enforced religion.
John O
@Ash Can:
Those are good examples, AC, but I don’t think they quite qualify as institutions yet, at least in terms of political power or influence.
Chris
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I think the main difference is that in the past, institutions (be it corporations, churches, local governments, the feds) could be corrupt while still performing some functions for the public. Political machines are a good example – there was crony capitalism, vote suppression, deals with the mob, the works, but they often also provided jobs and the earliest forms of welfare, because they realized that the public had to get something out of the system if they were to tolerate the corruption.
Not anymore. Politicians, businessmen, clergymen, the entire fucking establishment, since the Reagan years, has convinced itself that the fucking public is asking for too much if it’s asking for the rich and powerful to actually take it into account when making its decisions. The simple fact of living in the same country as the rich and powerful should be honor enough, and if we don’t like it, well, fuck us.
TL/DR: yes, the system was always corrupt, but there used to be more to it than just corruption. Nowadays, there isn’t. Shoveling money and power to the already rich and powerful has become the be-all and end-all of the system, with no carrots to sweeten the deal for the rest of us.
PeakVT
@RareSanity: Nardelli has been gone for years. Sergio Marchionne from FIAT heads Chrysler. And it wasn’t Chrysler the car company that hired Nardelli; it was Cerberus, the “private equity” firm that bought Chrysler from Daimler, which brought him on.
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
And it’s important to realize that the nearly simultaneous promotion of bad apples to so many important institutions is not a coincidence. We used to have rules that helped to keep bad apples from getting to the top, and more rules to restrict the rot if they did. But at least since the Reagan administration we’ve been systematically dismantling those rules in the name of deregulation, and the Republicans have been doing their best to block enforcement of the ones they can’t formally dismantle. The Republicans who are so upset that nobody trusts our institutions anymore need to look in the fucking mirror.
BethanyAnne
I just finished “War Is a force that gives us meaning” by Chris Hedges. He doesn’t talk as much about Iraq 2 as he does Kosovo, El Slavador and war in general, but damn it sure fit the pattern. Bleak as hell to read, but very well written.
And I think the institutional rot has become more noticeable as America slides into inequality and widespread poverty. There a vein of desperate folk fueling much of the righting craziness. They’ve lost economic and social security, and blame Teh Gheys, wimminfolk, and Mooslims. This crazy is part of America’s DNA, but bad times brings it to the forefront.
Another Halocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Most of what people in think tanks are trying to sell as “liberal interventionism” since about 2003 is just an attempt to rebrand the neocons.
The problem is, Star Trek: The Next Generation went off the air. The show was like one, long, impassioned, and sometimes over-the-top argument for pretty much never intervening at all unless your own country’s security was at stake. (What I mean by that is that Picard picks a side in the Klingon Civil War because he wants to head off a resumption of the Klingon-Romulan Alliance that would threaten the Federation’s security. If not for that concern, he wouldn’t have touched it with a ten foot pole. If anything, Picard seems almost too dispassionate, arguing that people should die because the moral dangers of intervention were too great. Kirk did break the rules sometimes and I wonder if it’s because the whole Vietnam thing changed Roddenberry’s views on the subject.)
Cris (without an H)
Slightly related, this week Ron [Paul] is tearing into Bill Kristol on this same subject.
Another Halocene Human
@A Ghost To Most: U.S. Geological Survey?
cckids
@A Ghost To Most: Girl Scouts.
handsmile
DougJ is a man of many allusions, not just musical.
Nevertheless, searching for a Great Gatsby song, I did just learn that Baz Luhrman (director of Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge et al) will be releasing an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece later this year. With music by Kanye West and Jay-Z, it will likely offer lyrics to be plundered for future post titles. (Also too, the movie will likely be atrocious.) (Also three, I suspect that DougJ was not quoting from the libretto of “The Great Gatsby” opera composed by John Harbison.)
On the issue of liberal interventionism (a now tattered principle), one of the most insightful and provocative books I read last year was: Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (2011).
This volume presents essays written by current and former members of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) examining/reassessing the mission and activities of the organization since its founding in 1971. While several essays address the evolution of its humanitarian goals, most are case studies of MSF projects in specific countries, e.g., Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Gaza, Nigeria. With MSF as an internationally admired institution of the liberal public sphere, it serves to illuminate the challenges and perils of foreign intervention.
If the subject is of more than passing interest, seek this book out. Most highly recommended.
Mnemosyne
@A Ghost To Most:
In addition to the other ones already named: Girl Scouts of America.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: I remember seeing stuff about Rwanda and thinking “that’s really horrible. There’s nothing we can or should do about it.”
Everyone needs to remember (in case they don’t) that the intervention on Somalia went bad on us very recently (October, 1993) before the Rwandan genocide commenced in 1994.
Just because bad shit happens in the world, that doesn’t mean we have to invite ourselves to take part, and it also doesn’t mean that we should feel guilty when we don’t. We’re not the only country in the world with a military. There are other countries who can step up. Particularly when it’s their national or economic interests at stake more than ours. And lastly, not every single problem, even many of those involving violence is best addressed by military force.
Oh, and Omnes–the title of the post refers to the Great Gatsby, and not a song. I wasn’t sure if you didn’t know this yet.
Hungry Joe
@ranchandsyrup:
The problem with that question is that once I get started I can’t stop. But I’ll keep it as short as I can: It’s a disgrace. Reached a low point when it ginned up a fake poll to show DeMaio ahead 10 points before the mayoral election and splattered the results atop A-1.
That said, there are still a few good people (not JUST friends of mine) doing good work there — keeping their heads down, stayin’ alive.
Joey Maloney
Congratulations, Doug, you’ve just summarized the collected works of Max Weber.
ranchandsyrup
@Hungry Joe: Papa Doug will turn our fair city into a conservative paradise, whether the people like it or not. I quit the UT and the NC times cold turkey.
You ever checked out their morning news show? unintentionally hilarious.
Another Halocene Human
@Kathleen: I do, however, think that at one time there were more companies who believed in providing good products.
They may have said that, but before regulations came in the shelves were full of stuff that would kill you. Not to mention the lobbying done by the chemical companies to get leaded gasoline legalized right after the government had banned lead paint because they recognized it was toxic. Let’s blow it into the air, what could go wrong!
The NRA continues to lobby to prevent any product liability on their products. Not so long ago a big name brand was selling a handgun with a tendency to blow up in the user’s hands.
GM knew their dashboards were deadly (the meat cleaver) but refused to build safer cars b/c they thought that the market had spoken. After Nader’s book came out, the people forced the government to regulate the industry in the face of industry resistance.
Diana
Power corrupts.
What the hell else is it for?
TriassicSands
Since estimates of the total number of deaths in Rwanda are between 800,000 and 1,000,000, it seems unlikely that a different policy, no matter how interventionist, could have saved “millions” of lives.
Mandalay
@Ash Can:
Not sure about that; some institutions are inherently flawed. I am old enough to have been told as a very young Catholic that I would burn in hell for all eternity if I died with mortal sins on my soul. That was coming from the institution, not the people who made up the institution. It was “company policy”, and was portrayed as the word of God.
You see the same thing in a milder form with public corporations, which have an obligation to “maximize profit for the shareholders”. That is baked in to being a public corporation, and no amount of good people can counter the effects of an inherent flaw like that. Every news cycle provides examples of how bad things happen when a companies take that obligation seriously.
RP
@A Ghost To Most: Most of the federal government.
Chris
@Another Halocene Human:
There are forms of “religion for the poor” that are actually for the poor, demanding changes in society and even imposing them by force if need be, in a very leftist sense. Liberation Theology in Central America is the big example, but even the Iranian Revolution had more than a touch of third-worldist, anti-imperialist revolutionary ideology.
Of course, like its communist brethren, that ideology was put to use legitimizing a dictatorship once it actually came to power… Still, I thought that form of religion deserved a mention. Religion isn’t always the opiate of the masses; sometimes, it puts them on a sugar high of “I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!”
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt:
Aarrgghh! I probably read the book before half the people commenting on the thread were even old enough to read. Dagnabbit.
I differ with you on Rwanda, if we could have done something, then we should have done it. Of course, I am the guy who was going to withdraw his resignation in order to volunteer for duty in Bosnia had we sent troops in 1992. It, of course, didn’t happen.
ArchTeryx
@maya: Oooh, yeah. I moved to DC shortly after that exhibit was put in – it was basically because of Bush Administration pressure. A fair few good people, including top administators, left the Smithsonian over that debacle.
Funnily enough, with the change of administrations, the Hall of Origins is still there – and still is one of the biggest draws of the museum.
The bitter irony? Not too far from Smithsonian is the Koshland Science Museum, a tiny little hole-in-the-wall place that the National Academy of Sciences runs – more or less – as a big, multimedia classroom open to the public. One of it’s two exhibits focuses entirely on global warming, and it pulls absolutely no punches.
Yet it pulls in about 0.1% of the foot traffic that the Hall of Origins alone pulls in.
Another Halocene Human
@Ash Can: Institutions need good procedures, and they need to have the resources to be run properly. Lack one or both and you get corruption.
The MCC, unlike the RCC, has never had a child rape scandal because they started on the assumption that any one of them could be under suspicion (indeed, falsely accused) as it’s a gay friendly denomination. So they made strict rules which are enforced that adults are never alone with children or teenagers. The RCC ran on awe, superstition, and trust. (And then when stuff happened, they covered it up to preserve same.)
A lot of small institutions end up with misuse of funds or the president/treasurer stealing money. Not enough volunteer time, not the right tools to comply with all the laws, the ease of access, the stress/pressure, and the lack of transparency make stealing money almost inevitable.
An overworked, undereducated, not sleeping, stressed out populace, institutions that run on handshakes and trust instead of open accountability procedures, and a culture that says if you ask certain questions you’re the bad guy. (Boy, I’ve found Brits are not shy about getting to the heart of matters like these–while Americans avoid, avoid, avoid.)
As for politics, it’s all about money, and when the spigots open, the corporations win. Including war profiteers.
Southern Beale
Honestly, I’ve learned to relax about the trend toward distrust with institutions. I wouldn’t have said that a a year or two ago, but I’ve come to believe, increasingly, that institutions are generally bad things. Some may do good things, government can sometimes be good, but look at it under Republican/Tea Party control. It’s ban abortion and mandate the 10 Commandments and oppress the blahs. So, fuck institutions, fuck’em all. To the extent that we can without living in anarchy, I mean.
Yesterday I was listening to Radio Sweden on XM/Sirius. I was going to do a blog post on this, actually. Still may. Basically the horse meat scandal has hit Sweden really hard, it’s not just Ikea it’s some of their biggest food chains. They just found out that sliced roast beef sold in stores was 100% horse meat. Major institutional failure, that. So some townships want to be able to change the law which sets where schools must buy their food for school lunches. They want to buy from local farms. It’s a big buy local movement because of a massive institutional failure.
The law forbids this in Sweden, so what they’re looking at doing is actually having school districts grow their own food and meat, incorporate it into the educational program, and use that to feed the kids. That sounds like such a great idea.
What was really interesting to me was that the party suggesting this idea was their center-right party. And the interviewer asked, “Isn’t buying local food a liberal idea?” And the woman said no, it can also be a conservative idea because it’s about “small government” and supporting small businesses. I thought that was hilarious. Apparently in Sweden these things aren’t just talking points foisted on the rubes by the oligarchs, they’re actual, y’know, principles.
Anyway, this all got me thinking that institutional failure can be a good thing, if what comes out on the other end is better than what you had before. When institutions get too big it’s natural that they’ll self-destruct. Isn’t that some law of thermodynamics or something?
SatanicPanic
@A Ghost To Most: Are we talking about at the top or just in general? Cause I would say that the Catholic Church is pretty corrupt throughout, but the federal government is only corrupt in places near the top. That makes a difference in terms of how reformable they are.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris:
In other words: Institutions: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.
I think the core of the problem is that institutions naturally tend to be co-opted and decay into a stale of corruption, self-serving empire building, and regulatory capture. There is no avoiding this, so to serve a positive role in society our institutions have to be periodically rebuilt, either by renewing them from within, or from without by building new institutions which compete against the old, stale, corrupt ones and replace them. Getting the balance between renewal from within vs. destroy-replace from without is hard because neither is easy and there are obstacles and pitfalls on every side, a political case in point being the troubled relationship between the Democratic Party and the New Left during the 1960s and early 1970s.
If things are worse off today and we aren’t just looking at the recent past thru a haze of nostalgia, then it is because we aren’t getting this done very well these days. Something is blocking our ability to renew/replace our institutions above and beyond just garden variety human nature. On the other hand maybe we are doing fine at this and it just doesn’t seem that way to us because in today’s culture our time scales have been recalibrated and we want everything to happen faster. Or a third option is that the problems we are facing today (AGW for example) don’t give us the luxury of time, so the normal pace of change isn’t good enough relative to our objective circumstances.
Another Halocene Human
@? Martin: The church hasn’t kept pace – none of them have. They cater to their elders (being invested, they are vocal) and fail to serve the needs of their youth (who simply leave). How many congregations use social media well?
You must not be familiar with Evangelical churches.
Their dogma is so out there, however, that when their young people get really good at #internet they start finding out that YEC is a laughing stock and that there’s a whole world out there of people who don’t indulge in Weekly Hate.
Hungry Joe
@ranchandsyrup:
Hilarious, all right: Blondes with plenty of cleavage and offensive jocks with plenty of dumb. Jaw-droppingly awful stuff.
catclub
@Another Halocene Human: “Kirk did break the rules sometimes and I wonder if it’s because the whole Vietnam thing changed Roddenberry’s views on the subject.”
I thought it was usually because there was a pretty female alien involved.
The Moar You Know
Neither have mine. We never should have been involved. Let other people fight their own wars. We aren’t taking care of business at home.
Another Halocene Human
@Chris: Jeremiah Wright.
But, see, Black people know they are oppressed. Just as Iranians knew they were oppressed under the Shaw. Poor whites in the US think their birthright has been stolen by n_____s. Hence the delight in the suffering of others.
(There are a few who know they’re oppressed. They tend to be commies.)
Also, I guess I was talking overall of how people interact with religion. I know in the pews there’s all this uplift, souls to the polls, etc, but away from church, the whole theology is there to get you through difficulties. That’s tougher to do when you’re an atheist.
gvg
Corruption goes in cycles. America isn’t very old. The Catholic church has been corrupt before and had to clean up…read about before the reformation. Militaries have a big tendency to become “corrupt” then clean up, then slide again. Especially common when it’s family tradition to join, son’s of friends getting promotions till the incompetance gets noticed, clean up, better for awhile, then again. Companies tend to crash and burn when they get corrupt tho not for awhile. Our government has gone through cycles.
I don’t find it that upsetting. It reminds me of the cycle of life. there is always work to be done.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
This. The thing about severe inequality is that it’s corrosive of any ethics or measures of self-worth beyond your net worth and income.
For instance, being an inner-school middle school teacher or community college lecturer is great and serves the public, but right now what it will get you is a crappy apartment, a fifteen-year old car and yearly threats of getting pink-slipped.
Meanwhile your much less smart brother-in-law or cousin is getting rich selling dodgy gold investments to Fox-watching seniors or flipping real estate and driving an Audi.
Is it any wonder the person in public service might feel they’re a sucker?
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
The other aspect of this is that, IMHO, states don’t have humanitarian impulses. We might wish they did, but they don’t. Since they don’t, military interventions are going to proceed from different motives, which (because they’re different) are going to lead to outcomes which aren’t that desirable from a humanitarian viewpoint.
RareSanity
@PeakVT:
Noted on the fact that Fiat does own Chrysler now. I think I skimmed the Wikipedia article to quickly.
However the second point you mentioned, sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
CorbinDallasMultipass
@cleek: or be a participant
Xecky Gilchrist
@Mandalay: That is sad about the Quakers – but I suspect their membership in 1972 may have been inflated by people joining up to get Conscientious Objector status. What were the figures like before then?
RareSanity
@? Martin:
You know it took me finally looking at this site from my phone to see what the character in front of your name is…
Always wondered, now I know.
Another Halocene Human
@catclub: Au contraire, mon frere.
In the episode “The Apple” (get the metaphor? get it? get it?) nobody in the Enterprise crew is getting flirty with the locals, who actually don’t reproduce because they don’t have to. Vaal, big, crusty, cranky computer/weather control device/home defense system provides for their needs and sustains their life.
Kirk decides, probably on account of his own cultural bias, that this is “wrong”. There’s also the persuasive factor that Vaal is off its electronic rocker due to centuries of rusting in a humid tropical environment. Anyway, Kirk does Vaal in and kind of irresponsibly gives the natives nothing more than a glib talk about sexual reproduction and children which is remarkably short on practical specifics. Then they leave. Despite Kirk’s arguments that their culture is “stagnating” so the PD doesn’t apply, what’s the chances they all died in horrible ways with both Vaal and Starfleet gone?
Kirk did get with a chick on that Roman Empire planet but I think the crew actually refrained from breaking the PD in that instance.
Kip the Wonder Rat
@Omnes Omnibus:
Illiterate philistine… ;)
The Moar You Know
@ranchandsyrup: Lotta San Diegans here.
I remember when we had two papers, the Union and the Tribune. They were both of a disgracefully conservative bent. The UT had a few years when it was not quite a one-sided partisan tool.
That didn’t last long. And Christ, it is unreadable now under the rule of Papa Doug.
Keith G
Trust? It was never about trust.
The upper class/caste inevitably presses its advantage over all others. Thus it has ever been.
Historically, the question has always been how far could the abuse be pushed until a critical mass of violent backlash erupts.
A pacified and multi-dimensional (read that: divided on many axis) society looked over by a massive security infrastructure means that historically important breaking mechanisms are missing.
Will the new American upper class on their own really act with long term wisdom?
It’s gonna be an interesting century.
Hungry Joe
@The Moar You Know:
The stuffy Union was disgracefully conservative; the saucy Tribune was moderately conservative. (Yeah, I was at the Trib.)
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: “Aarrgghh! I probably read the book before half the people commenting on the thread were even old enough to read. Dagnabbit.”
Point to me.
The thing about Rwanda was that there was no US national security interest implicated by what was happening there. One can argue (and I’d agree) that American values were at stake, but let’s remember the political environment for a moment–after the Somalian fiasco with all of its video of supposedly starving Somalis dancing and dragging the bodies of US personnel through the dirt* and a President who had just gotten a rhetorical punch in the nuts from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs over allowing homosexuals to serve openly** and a Congress that wasn’t about to go along with another “humanitarian” intervention on the African continent.
*yes, before you all get wound up, I know that the body draggers weren’t the ones starving. That’s utterly irrelevant, because they were the only Somalis on TV and the only ones American people were thinking about.
**he should have relieved Powell the moment Powell publicly crossed him, but that’s a different issue.
catclub
@Another Halocene Human: “Just as Iranians knew they were oppressed under the Shaw.”
Hence, Shawshank Redemption will be the codename for the bombing/invasion.
GBS was also overweight , so there is that.(Not intended as a factual statement.)
John O
@Keith G:
Like.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
So 17 U.S. soldiers are worth 800,000 Africans? (The Interhamwe sure learnt that lesson – they killed ten Belgians and got the Belgians to withdraw their troops.)
On Bosnia – if Albright had allowed NATO to intervene with air strikes on troops , that would have prevented the safe havens being overrun and the Dutch peacekeepers being used as hostages. Read Willem DeKoonig’s book on Srbernica. On Kosovo, we’d seen the pattern before in Bosnia and in Croatia in terms of paramilitaries coming in to ethnically cleanse in advance of the JNA.
Just because the Neo-Cons wet dream of Iraq went bad, does not let us off the hook for lack of intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, nor make intervention in Kosovo a mistake.
450 UNAMIR troops, with a shitty mandate and Rules of Engagement, still managed to protect 25,000 Rwandans from the genocide. It wouldn’t have taken much from the UN to slow down the Interhamwe. (Jamming the radio broadcasts calling on Hutus to kill “cockroaches,” as they called Tutsis and moderate Hutus, would have helped as well.)
Chris
@Keith G:
Our society is “pacified” because the creation of the welfare state has given us enough of an investment in society that even now (for the moment), in really bad economic times, we still have too much to lose to want society brought down. In other words, Bismark’s welfare state did its job.
Continue on the trend we’ve been on for the last thirty three years, and eventually we’ll be back to the same level of insecurity we had before the New Deal. At that point, shit will get real again. (Note that I don’t necessarily think this would be good for us – breakdowns in social order are just as likely to bring fascism or military dictatorship as New Deal style reforms).
Comrade Dread
I think this hits the mark pretty closely.
I also think the advent of the internet which can expose kids to a lot of divergent viewpoints on God, religion, politics, and economics far earlier than college probably gives them a less doctrinaire attitude and encourages a more flexible mindset.
And I think a lot of churches are too focused on ensuring a rigid orthodoxy and less concerned with talking to kids like rational creatures, acknowledging doubt and questions and talking about them.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Don’t know about Sweden, but there have been enough food safety scandals in the EU to . Often food safety is under their ministry of agriculture, which sets up a conflict of interest in that any recall for food safety will hit farmers and distributors (i.e. the client group for the ministry of agriculture).
For all its flaws, the FDA doesn’t have that conflict of interest. The FDA also dodged the thalidomide disaster (depending, on who you speak to, because they had higher scientific standards or because the guy reviewing thalidomide had a messy office and lost the file so that approval was delayed until after the teratogenic effects became evident).
Mandalay
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Ahh…hadn’t thought of that. I can’t find much on historical membership numbers, but its interesting to note (in the link I gave above) that the Quakers are predicting their own demise!…
It’s not often that an organization’s propaganda is predicting the date of its death.
Bill Arnold
It’s not necessarily the institutions themselves that people are losing faith in, it’s the sociopaths who have gained control of the institutions.
ranchandsyrup
@The Moar You Know: @Hungry Joe: OT, but I’m going to put out the invite for the SD meetup shortly.
Chris
@Bill Arnold:
Strong and continued involvement by the public in the way these organizations are run?
IMO, the most corrupt institutions in our society are that way simply because we don’t dare to demand accountability. When the clergy gets embroiled in child abuse scandals, all too often the response from the congregations is to “pray for the church” and rally around their good holy men of God, unjustly crucified by liberal meanies. What’s the incentive for the clergy to clean up its act? None. Fuck, they pretty much have an incentive to have more of these scandals, given the way it rallies their congregations around them.
Ditto any case of abuse by police or military personnel, where anyone who raises the issue pretty much gets shouted down as a DFH who hates the brave people risking their lives. Ditto any case of abuse by CEOs and other 1%ers, since any attempt to hold them accountable is shouted down with “hush, you’ll make the God-Kings angry and then they’ll hurt us even more!”
Sasha
It’s what happens when then Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Iron Law of Institutions are in full force.
Soonergrunt
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: “So 17 U.S. soldiers are worth 800,000 Africans?”
That is certainly the case for the families and friends of those American Soldiers.
What American national interests at stake? Because values are not interests. How would attempting to stop a genocide in Rwanda have made the lives of the American people better?
How many are you willing to see killed, wounded, or maimed?
Because by the standard of “A few dozen US Servicemembers for hundreds of thousands of civilians,” you’re about to tell us how you support us invading Syria, right?
Joel
@Omnes Omnibus: That about sums it up for me.
Joel
@Omnes Omnibus: That about sums it up for me.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Mandalay: It would be sad if the Quakers died out, indeed.
I should attend meetings more often! It’s the church I’d go to if I got religion.
ETA: you’re right that it’s unusual that an organization’s literature would frankly discuss its own demise. It’s one of the things I like about the Quakers – that unflinching honesty.
Mandalay
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Me too. Here is what they have to say about the role of Quakerism:
Quakers are pretty cool.
Hungry Joe
@ranchandsyrup: I’m in. If I miss the announcement (i.e., don’t respond), lemme know via my FB page.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: The argument I would make is that it is in the US interest to be public and squarely against genocide. Call it PR, but it has value. At present, I am against any deeper involvement in Syria than we currently have because I don’t see the net positive impact from it.
@Mandalay: Wasn’t Nixon a Quaker?
muddy
@Mike E:
Thank you for that link. A lot to think about. I also have PTSD and found many of his comments on the condition very helpful and illustrative.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Fine, but then we need to actually be replacing (or renewing) the institutions we have a problem with – which I don’t really see happening right now.
Liberty60
@Soonergrunt:
And even if the cost were 0 American lives; the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan pretty clearly show that the end game is almost impossible to accurately predict; So we need to be pretty damn sure the goal is important enough to cover the unexpected costs that we can’t even assess yet.
Ted & Hellen
This.
I know a lot of folks whose faith in government in general has plummeted since Obama’s first inauguration, as a direct result of his tepid form of Rockefeller Republicanism and his fetish for bipartisanship.
Let’s talk about that too.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: “The argument I would make is that it is in the US interest to be public and squarely against genocide. Call it PR, but it has value.”
True, but I’ve never heard any western democracy ever declare that they were for genocide, either. I think that’s kind of assumed by the people whose opinions we care about.
The fact remains that any number of other countries, including some that had financial, and therefore national interests in Rwanda sat it out and did nothing. A couple of other countries did the bare minimum with which they could conscientiously get by.
Just a few months earlier, we did Somalia when we had nothing really to gain there, and look what that got us.
The Ancient Randonneur
Criteria: Is it a cause I am willing to sacrifice my children for? Korean War is borderline and Afghanistan, WWI & WWII are a definite yes. Call me isolationist if you will but after Uncle Sam sent me on my Asian Vacation I am not quite as keen to send Other People’s Kids to far off lands to die for someone else’s idea of “justice and freedom”. Funny that.
Roger Moore
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Unfortunately, FDA isn’t in charge of all of our food inspections. Meat and eggs are regulated and inspected by USDA rather than FDA. It’s one of those wonderful historical quirks of our government.
VFX Lurker
@A Ghost To Most:
In addition to the many good suggestions upthread (ex: Doctors Without Borders), I trust Vanguard to be corruption-free when it comes to serving its clients’ best interests.
Vanguard has a unique client-owned structure. Anyone who purchases a Vanguard mutual fund becomes a shareholder in Vanguard. Any profits Vanguard makes gets returned to its customers in the form of lower fees and expense ratios.
White Trash Liberal
An SD meet up? Yes!
One of my relatives worked for the Trib and was let go when the UT merged. The paper was awful under Copley, and was incredibly corrupt in its support for the new baseball stadium paid for by hotel taxes that never materialized. Their coverage of the pension scandal further undermined their credibility… And now Doug has killed it off.
And now it looks like the City Attorney is going to use it to attack the mayor. Ugh
Maude
@Soonergrunt:
Hey, Somalia got us a movie.
McCain calling for US military to get involved in Syria is just the tip of his insanity. He may just think that somehow, we’d get into Iran. He probably doesn’t know where Iraq is on the map.
catclub
@Soonergrunt: “True, but I’ve never heard any western democracy ever declare that they were for genocide, either.”
Ever? Um, who is on the twenty dollar bill?
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: I’ve said this on other threads; liberal interventionism involves walking a tightrope. One doesn’t want to be co-opted by the neo-cons and the bomb everyone crowd, but one also doesn’t want to look back and realize that that one let a genocide happen without doing anything. And further to DougJ’s point in the OP, with the media we currently have one should certainly cast a really jaundiced eye on calls for involvement the are couched in LI terms; most are probably tarted-up neo-con plans.
Heliopause
Wow, what stupid reasons to be irreligious, or to be unaffiliated with an organized religion. Since Gerson implies that “nones” are coming mostly from those who grew up mainline protestant (1) is no explanation at all. (2) might be an explanation but simply ignores confounding factors and more parsimonious explanations.
Kathleen
@Another Halocene Human: Good point.
Chris
@Maude:
McCain’s never seen a war he didn’t like.
One of my first clues that his “reasonable Republican whom even liberals can respect” public image was horseshit came when reading General Zinni (former head of CENTCOM)’s biography, when he relates an idea floating around in Congress in the 1990s that just refused to die that involved arming Chalabi and his supposed militias inside Iraq to overthrow Saddam. McCain was one of the plan’s biggest backers. Pretty much tells you all you need to know.
Roger Moore
@Roger Moore:
And while I’m mentioning FDA, I want to point out that 21CFR152 — Fruit Pies is sufficiently cool that Cleek absolutely needs to find a way of incorporating it into the next version of the Pie filter.
Chyron HR
@Ted & Hellen:
Jeepers, Tim, we’d like to talk about the multitudinous crimes of the nefarious Obama, but you repeatedly told us we’re not allowed to pass judgment on people (George Zimmerman, Jerry Sandusky, etc) until they’ve been convicted in a court of law. So we won’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris:
QFT
Hungry Joe
@White Trash Liberal:
The (real) powers-that-be are still reeling from the awful reality of a progressive mayor and a (slightly) left-leaning San Diego city council. On Sunday the U-T ran an “investigative” piece on campaign violations from a group that supported Mayor Filner, noting only briefly (and, you couldn’t help but sense, reluctantly) that the allegations of corruption had been looked into and dismissed by state election officials. Expect the paper to crank its batshit craziness to 11 … sorry, from 11 to 12.
JGabriel
@handsmile:
Sigh. I hate that I know this, but: there’s an Olivia Newton-John song, circa 1980, based on the ending of Gatsby, called Boats Against The Current — honestly, calling it “based” is being too generous, it just blatantly rips off the book’s last paragraph. It’s really pretty bad:
.
oldster
“why more and more people identify as having no religious beliefs”
Maybe because the religious beliefs were false?
At least sometimes, people stop believing that there are any gods, because there are no gods.
Kinda like what happened with phlogiston, dragons, and unicorns.
Did Gerson consider that explanation?
Ted & Hellen
@Chyron HR:
Well, slime bucket, when Obama has been charged with any crimes and/or brought to trial we can discuss THAT. THAT would be the appropriate time for authoritarian fetishists such as yourself to pronounce him GUILTY before a verdict as you are wont to do.
Meanwhile, as per usual, you’re just misdirecting traffic while cradling Barack’s fuzzy testicles in your mouth.
Ted & Hellen
@oldster:
I respect that as a belief or theory.
Meanwhile, how is it that you claim standing or knowledge to make such a blanket statement?
Mandalay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wow, did not know that! His presidency suggests to me that he had strayed more than a little.
More famous Quakers…
Soonergrunt
@The Ancient Randonneur: This.
Soonergrunt
@catclub: And did you continue reading to the part where I mention “the people whose opinions we care about”?
Cause I’m pretty sure that Jackson has been silent in recent years about American foreign policy.
BruceFromOhio
@A Ghost To Most:
The Smithsonian!
BruceFromOhio
@maya: Oh hell. It was a thought anyway. I still like Habitatit for Humanity, Doctors without Borders, as mentioned upthread.
Damn you Koch-suckers!
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Ted & Hellen: Douchenozzle, I gotta agree with you on this one.
I was a rabid atheist for most of my life until one day I came to the realization that if there was such a thing as a “God”, such a being would be so utterly beyond the bounds of human perception and comprehension that I might be staring such a being in the face every day and not know it.
Of course, those who believe face the same issue. If there’s a God, believer, even the fact of such a being’s very existence is well beyond your ability to imagine, much less comprehend.
So I gotta march under the flag of the agnostic, and say in all honesty that I really don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Nobody could.
Nice post, douchenozzle. You can go back to your miserable existence as a hateful attention whore now.
Ted & Hellen
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I agree completely.
Come on…give us a hug now. :)
Elizabelle
OT: Peter Sellers movie, Carol for Another Christmas, is on Turner Classic Movies today at 6:30 Eastern.
1964 film; TCM synopsis: Three ghosts teach an industrialist the importance of international peacekeeping.
Anne Laurie recommended this film highly, uh, back in December.
shepherdwong
It’s not your father’s (it’s your grandfather’s) elite.
http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/eliten/Robber%20Barons.htm
BruceFromOhio
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Meh, too easy.
Ask yourself two questions:
Do I believe there are powers in the universe that are greater than me?
Do I believe there are powers in the universe that I do not understand?
The bully kid from my youth provided a resounding “Yes!” to both of those. So do black holes and supernovas.
Suddenly, Gaia is everywhere, that lurking earth mother.
Mandalay
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
You can be an atheist without affirming that there is no God; the two positions are not incompatible. Richard Dawkins would be a prominent example of someone who takes that position. It is perfectly possible and reasonable to:
– Acknowledge that it is possible that there is a God, however unlikely that may be.
– Live your live in all aspects as an atheist, on the assumption that there is no God.
To adopt that position is very different from being agnostic.
We do a similar thing when we buy a lottery ticket. We acknowledge the very remote possibility that we might win, but we really don’t expect to win, and don’t change our lives in any way on the assumption that it is going to happen.
ETA I think Hitchens also held the Dawkins position, based solely on grounds of logic.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Soonergrunt:
Those 800,000 Tutsis (and Hutus) had families too.
Further, the Tutsi in the RPF, concerned the psychos in the Interhamwe who’d fled to the Congo would come back, then backed interventions in Congo which led to the Second Congolese War. Which has claimed 5.4 million lives, left millions orphaned, hundreds of thousands of refugrees and involved eight nations.
If you don’t think that six million dead and instability in Central Africa impacts the U.S., then you lack imagination. Such as the imagination to think how those six million might have contributed economically, intellectually, developmentally to their countries. At the very least, think of the export markets, even if their deaths mean nothing to you.
All for something that a brigade of NATO troops might have halted if Albright and Clinton had had the political will.
There are sins of commission, and sins of omission.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
What Mandalay said. Don’t understand how that’s practically different from being an atheist. If there’s a God that’s wholly beyond our understanding and ken, how is that different in terms of practically living our lives, or in how we conceive of the world. A God who’s beyond our ken and understanding is also beyond caring what we do or believe.
And he’s not useful like the square root of minus one.
jefft452
“(1) the rise of the religious right alienates people”
“(2) the broader trend of people losing faith in institutions”
I think 1 more then 2
The religious right makes people choose, “you are with us or against us” they say, well I have a busy life, I don’t normally spend a lot of time thinking about other people’s religions, but if you put it that way – OK, I’m against you
Accommodation used to mean that even though a job posting for a minister at a Lutheran church discriminated against Catholics, well OK, we can bend a little on employee discrimination laws
Now it means that Pharmacists can refuse to fill your prescription if they don’t approve of the medication you take
jefft452
@The Ancient Randonneur: “ Afghanistan, WWI & WWII are a definite yes”
Why WWI?
Passchendaele?, Verdun? Half a million casualties to move the front line 50 feet? No Thank You!
El Cid
@BruceFromOhio:
If I agreed with this statement, what would that say about the existence of some Supreme Being?
Roger Moore
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
I think this version of agnosticism is basically a weak kneed version of atheism. I firmly believe that there is no God in the sense that theists talk about God, i.e. one who has a noticeable effect on the universe. I feel comfortable with this belief because there’s no evidence to the contrary and, repeated claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the absence of evidence of something that ought to produce evidence is evidence of absence. Refusing to take a positive stand as an atheist because there might possibly be a God who’s incomprehensible and doesn’t actually do anything is just chickening out.
El Cid
@jefft452: The occurrence of World War One should be seen as a stark indictment of the failures of the most advaned industrialized and electorally democratic nations of that time to prevent it. The same applies to those nations’ respective social and labor movements.
Its aftermath includes the crushing of any political forces which attempted to halt their nations’ involvement in the imperial tussle, and the setting in place of policies directly leading to the horrors predating and then taking place during and after WW2.
Not to mention that it was the firm opinion of the US and UK governments that after World War One, they would soon be caught in an inevitable war between them, due to the prerogatives of Atlantic empire.
The whole thing is awful, shameful, sad.
frednash
@A Ghost To Most: ? Meals on wheels
jefft452
@oldster: “At least sometimes, people stop believing that there are any gods, because there are no gods.
Kinda like what happened with phlogiston, dragons, and unicorns”
Hmmmmm.. no I think it takes more than that
I could easily live life as a “Unicornist”, believing that somewhere a Unicorn exists, while still assuming that anybody who wants to sell me a Unicorn horn is a con man. Functionally, my life would be no different than that of an “Aunicornist”
Since believing in Unicorns wouldn’t harm me in any way, I wouldn’t have a pressing need to stop believing in them
Feeling like a sucker for buying a fake unicorn pelt, watching a crypto zoologist on TV condemning my loved ones for believing in the wrong species of Unicorn, etc, etc
Now that might do it
jefft452
@El Cid: “The whole thing is awful, shameful, sad.”
You said it better than me
Chris
@jefft452:
This is why I asked “which wars were worth fighting?” a week ago and specifically wasn’t sure about WW1. From the American perspective, that is. Was involving ourselves in the war worth it to prevent the Central Powers from dominating Europe and, by extension, the world? I think it certainly does matter who’s number one in the international system (the Klingon-Romulan alliance analogy that was made back up there), but that doesn’t necessarily mean our part in WW1 was necessary.
Chris
@El Cid:
Really? I didn’t know that. I know there was a lot of bad blood throughout the nineteenth century but thought they’d mostly settled down in an amicable relationship by 1900. I would’ve thought they had bigger concerns than each other even after WW1.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris:
An awful lot turns on whether or not you see the German system of govt as dominated by Ludendorff’s quasi-dictatorship (i.e. in the later stages of the war) as being incipiently Fascist or not, and if so whether you think that having won the war they would have reverted back to a more parliamentarian system after the war was over, or not. I’m inclined to answer those questions with: yes, and no, so I tend to fall into the camp of “yes, on balance it was a good thing we intervened on the side of the Western Allies”.
With regard to the horror of the trench-lines hardly moving despite the immense slaughter, that is a different issue. Both WW1 and WW2 turned into wars of attrition involving the killing of millions of civilians, which continued until one side was exhausted. The difference is that during WW2 the contemporary war-making technology was mobile enough to transport the killing machines to the civilian populations and murder them in-situ, whereas during WW2 contemporary war-making technology was still crude and not very portable, so it was necessary to bring the civilians to the killing machine, which was done by putting uniforms on them and calling them combatants. But most of them weren’t soldiers in the sense we understand the term for wars before or since, they were civilians in all but name.
jefft452
@Chris:
Plan Red was last updated in 1934
The Washington Naval treaties were primarily motivated by the desire to limit the Anglo-American arms race, not the Japanese-American balance of power
The Great Anglo-American war of 1925 is a fascinating topic for me, especially since it never actually happened :)
debbie
@Soonergrunt:
You can chalk that up to tribalism, which is basically what “not in America’s interest” is too. It’s tribalism that’s killing this world.
Rawanda was the last time I thought, “He won’t go through with what he’s threatening.” Clnton’s right when he says Rawanda was his worst moment. I can still see the NYT front-page photo of a river so filled with bodies that it resembled those 19th century photos of Canadian log jams.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I’m not really even considering the “incipiently fascist” angle; just looking at it in terms of “democracy vs dictatorship.” Which is enough for me to lean towards agreeing with you (“on balance.”)
The “civilian-by-another-name” military model pretty much goes back to the French revolution, if memory serves. Insofar as you can call any military strategy “moral,” I kind of prefer the concept of raising an army when needed and sending most of the soldiers home afterwards, than having a permanent one.
Stillwater
Iraq completely destroyed my faith in establishment media, convinced me that think tanks — even ones that purport to be liberal or centrist — are usually propaganda factories, and made me enormously skeptical of interventionist foreign policy.
This. I completely agree, tho my skepticism was already pretty well entrenched before Iraq. Skepticism strikes me as the correct – pragmatically, morally – view to take.
And just so this doesn’t sound to radical, I too support what we can call “liberal interventionism”. But only if there is an overwhelming amount of evidence of two things: that our actions are justified and that they will actually lead to the stated outcome.
jefft452
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: “An awful lot turns on whether or not you see the German system of govt as dominated by Ludendorff’s quasi-dictatorship (i.e. in the later stages of the war) as being incipiently Fascist or not, and if so whether you think that having won the war they would have reverted back to a more parliamentarian system after the war was over, or not. I’m inclined to answer those questions with: yes, and no”
My answers would be maybe and yes, so my conclusions would be different than yours
But it’s a fair argument
I am pleased to see that you recognize “Ludendorff’s quasi-dictatorship (i.e. in the later stages of the war)” as the product of the war rather than the pre war default
But wouldn’t you agree that Britain and France saw a lot of the same creeping Fascism as the war went on?
Don’t forget that here in the US, Wilson was rounding up union organizers and civil rights advocates under the excuse that they were hurting the war effort – and didn’t stop just because the war ended
Chris
@jefft452:
And before.
Funny thing is, before the inter-war period, I don’t think anyone would’ve listed Germany as the number one candidate for a fascist government. France would probably have been at least as high, what with the Dreyfuss Affair and all.
But antisemitism, nationalist madness, etc were widespread enough that I think it’s safe to say whichever countries lost the war would’ve seen a powerful fascist movement rise up afterwards. The sentiment of defeat was one of the biggest ingredients that triggered that.
Ted & Hellen
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Why must that be necessarily so?
jefft452
@Chris: “and before”
True, but (outside of Russia at least) there were limits
Sure, we’ll toss a Suffragette in jail, but cracking her skull is going too far
By all means, crack the skull of that striking miner, but he’s an Englishman, you cant just shoot him like we do the Fuzzy-Wuzzies
Limits died in the trenches
Now they are not just protesters, they are traitors
If we shoot one of our own soldiers a week after a drum-head court-martial for cowardice, why do you think there are any limits to dealing with dissenters?
lojasmo
@Ted & Hellen:
Shorter: “all my friends are racist republicans.”
Thanks for the insight.
El Cid
@Chris: It isn’t until right at the edge of the outbreak of war that there is even a weak consensus that fascism was a huge problem — after all, the fascists hated communists and all the other such types.
Chris
@jefft452:
That’s true enough. The seeds were there, but the war made them grow.
@El Cid:
Also very true.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, it’s a recurring pet peeve of mine the extent to which World War Two history’s been rewritten to obscure the amount of pro-Nazi sentiment that was around in the West (and who that sentiment was coming from).
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@jefft452:
I think there’s a useful distinction to be made between the militaristic and dictatorial means employed in all the combatant nations, including the USA, GrBrtn and France, and sliding into a system of govt in which the glorification of armed might and conquest becomes a foundational element in establishing the legitimacy of the state on an ongoing basis, not just as wartime propaganda. I’m influenced in thinking along these lines by Bobbitt’s treatment of The Long War (I.e. both WW1 and WW2 combined) in Shield of Achilles in which he discusses the ideological competition between different forms of post-monarchical mass politics during this period. Agree with the comment above that Fascism was going to arise in whichever states came out on the losing end of the contest, but by late 1917 I think the Germans were also in danger of turning Fascist as a winning power and were somewhat unique in that regard. The unique character of the German imperium in Ukraine and other former Czarist Russian territory had they won would have had a distorting effect on German domestic political development in a bad way, IMHO.
On the other hand we would have been spared Stalinism.
mclaren
Excellent piece in the blog economicprinciples about the vile role played by the biggest and most influential newspapers in the runup to the Iraq war.
jefft452
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: “The unique character of the German imperium in Ukraine and other former Czarist Russian territory had they won would have had a distorting effect on German domestic political development in a bad way, IMHO”
Hmmmmm
Not sure that I agree, but it’s the best argument that I’ve heard
Like Fagan, “I think I better think it through again”
Ted & Hellen
@lojasmo:
Ummm…no. I know exactly zero republicans in my personal life.
It’s the Democratic Democrats he pissed off with his post-election milquetoast governing.
But keep rolling BO’s nuts in your mouth, and work that tongue a little more aggressively while you’re at it.
jefft452
@jefft452: “Plan Red was last updated in 1934”
Oh, PS
The 1934 change?
As soon as American planners saw reports of the effect of gas on the western front, the idea of bombing the naval base at Halifax with Chlorine or Phosgene got added to Plan Red
In 1934 they added planned gas raids on civilian population centers in Canada, and added a contingency of using Mustard if Canada issued gas masks to civilians
jefft452
@jefft452: “Like Fagan, “I think I better think it through again”
Just to clarify
I will rethink my opinion on what a victorious Germany would be like
Bat as this whole side track started with @The Ancient Randonneur: “Call me isolationist if you will but after Uncle Sam sent me on my Asian Vacation I am not quite as keen to send Other People’s Kids to far off lands to die for someone else’s idea of “justice and freedom”. Funny that.”
Would I be keen to send my granddad and his contemporaries “over there”? Hell no
And I aint rethinking that, even though granddad volunteered
Brantl
Toe-may-to, Toe-mah-to.
Mnemosyne
@Ted & Hellen:
Tim, honey, if your friends are more pissed off at Barack Obama than they were at George W. Bush, they’re not Democrats.
Ted & Hellen
@Mnemosyne:
Hey Spleen, could you quote where I said anything about George Fucking W Bush, let alone that friends were less mad at him than BO?
Again, you dissemble. It’s become pathological.
Soonergrunt
@debbie: And how many American Soldiers are you willing to see killed and maimed to stop that? One? One hundred? One thousand?
More to the point, how many of your brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews (and yourself if you’re of military age) are you willing to risk death or dismemberment upon to try to prevent that?
And how many of them shall we kill to keep them from killing each other?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Jewish Mother logic: Because if he cared, he’d call.* And then would not be beyond our ken or understanding.
[* Aside from ergot- or temporal-lobe epilepsy induced visions by Middle Eastern nomads recorded few thousand years back, that is.]
Herbal Infusion Bagger
If we could have saved 800,000 Rwandans by intervening, I’d say 7,999,999. Or are Africans worth less than Americans in your eyes?
Edo
@gogol’s wife: It’s not true. Not entirely, at least.
The birthrate’s a problem, and the fact that a lot of mainline churches didn’t bother justifying themselves beyond “We are the Church of Our Demographic Niche” didn’t help. What nobody’s talking about is the fact that the mainline churches have also been through 30 years of a one-sided campaign to break them up.
jefft452
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: “If we could have saved 800,000 Rwandans by intervening, I’d say 7,999,999. Or are Africans worth less than Americans in your eyes?”
Are you willing to be one of the 7,999,999?
How many Rwandans would it be ok to kill to save 800,000?