Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Ramsey Orta


Are free speech absolutists the usual wad of MSNBC-entombed office drones? True Brooklyn's own Rancid Honeytrap thinks so, in a political essay masterpiece.

Part One:
White Supremacy is having a good month: On March 5, the ACLU put its weight behind Pro Football Inc’s fight to keep its Washington Redskins trademark.  A few days later, legal scholars from the right and permissible left along with The New Republic scolded Oklahoma University for expelling two SAE fraternity members who led the sickening racist song immortalized on viral video. That same week, notorious Islamophobe Pam Gellar won her battle to force Philadelphia to display bus signs featuring a photo of Hitler and proclaiming “Islamic Jew Hatred: It’s in the Quran.” Five days ago, the ACLU filed a brief in support of Confederate flags on license plates.

Of course, for the self-styled First Amendment absolutists among us it’s not white supremacy that’s winning here, but free speech. “The first attacks on free speech always come at the fringe,” they insist. “That’s where it needs to be defended.” First Amendment absolutists have been saying this at least since 1977, when the ACLU won the American Nazi party the right to march through Skokie, Illinois, where an estimated one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor.  In the ensuing 38 years, civil libertarians have ostentatiously supported cross burners, churches that promote race war, right wing Christians disrupting Arab festivals, and picketers of LGBT funerals, admonishing as authoritarian anyone who thinks their view of speech rights is imprudently simplistic at best.

While white supremacists were having such a good few weeks spreading freedom for all, Ramsey Orta, the man who captured Eric Garner’s murder by NYPD cops on video, was still struggling to make bail. Orta is enmeshed in a Kafkaesque nightmare of sadistic state reprisal against his supremely brave, selfless and heroic act. A murdered black man and a latino in a cage for bearing witness to the crime is what you could call a white supremacy twofer, as well as a complete disaster for civil liberties.

As of this writing, the ACLU and its New York branch have seemingly done nothing on Orta’s behalf — searches on their websites don’t yield one mention — and as far as I can tell none of the First Amendment cult’s leading lights has written about it.  Orta’s civil liberties don’t interest The New Republic like those of racist frat boys. But at least Time.com won a World Press Award two weeks ago for a video consisting almost entirely of Orta’s footage and his words in voiceover. So — if you overlook how that award embodies the parasitic relationship of press to whistleblowers, rich to poor and white to dark– there’s that.

Though forty years of contrarian First Amendment advocacy hasn’t produced obvious benefits for the likes of Orta, it’s doing quite a lot for corporations, whose ingenious lawyers, after establishing ACLU-supported corporate personhood,  have found the First Amendment endlessly useful as an instrument of deregulation. I can’t do justice to the orgy of litigating going on in this realm, but here’s a sample: the National Labor Relations Board can’t compel your employer to hang a poster informing workers of their rights; however, your employer can lobby you on how to vote and when to call your congressperson. There’s an effort afoot to remake corporate lies as First Amendment protected opinion, and mandatory disclosures an unconstitutional burden. Considering corporate and shareholder demographics, corporate personhood is indisputably a win for white supremacy too.

Surely there is an onus on advocates to demonstrate that a tactical alliance with white supremacists and corporations, that clearly benefits white supremacists and corporations, produces commensurate benefits for people like Ramsey Orta.  But if you want to make a First Amendment absolutist lash out, lie or robotically recite bromides, just demand conclusive evidence of such benefits. They can’t produce it, because no such evidence exists.

There are some, like Radley Balko, who, when confronted with this, will insist that we should support racist speech on general principle, regardless of what it does for anyone else, but this is a justifiably tough sell. Surely if First Amendment victories for white supremacists or corporations don’t meaningfully fortify the rights of people of color and anti-racists, any engagement with their cause should aim toward their defeat. It’s a really rather bizarre state of affairs when reluctance to ally with fascists in pursuit of freedom strikes otherwise intelligent people as repellently authoritarian, but that’s the state we’re in.

I’ve discussed a lot of this before in various issue-focused posts. What follows is an attempt at a more detailed, general critique, which examines the folly of Free Speech Absolutism in relation to white supremacy. At the outset I’d like to make a few things clear. My objections to Free Speech Absolutism have very little to do with laws and regulations. I am extremely ambivalent about Hate Speech laws. I am less ambivalent about Hate Crimes Law, though I don’t like laws generally since their primary use is to oppress and discipline people with very little power.

My main objection is to the doctrine of free speech absolutism. In addition to directing the attention, resources and goodwill of decent people to organizations and individuals that would imprison and murder them if they could, it perniciously minimizes the genocidal and avaricious politics with which it makes common cause; it promotes a view of power and social change so ahistoric and infantile it qualifies as magical thinking; and it promotes libertarian as opposed to communitarian values and politics.  By virtue of this doctrine’s wide adoption and promotion by revered adherents, it has a uniquely corrupting effect on political discourse and practice as a whole.

As one would expect from an extremely dishonest doctrine that is taught in public schools and enjoys avid support across political lines, it serves power far more than it serves anyone else.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Repay


An astonishment during a time of near total lividity. Vince Gilligan's extension of his Breaking Bad masterpiece is quieter, slower paced, more lonely, less complex and intense, funnier -- and just as good. A miracle.

Here ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut (immortal as played by the immortal Jonathan Banks) shows us what to do with bad bad cops.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Reasonable

Chris Floyd.
I was going to write a careful, reasoned commentary on this article in the Washington Post -- “War With Iran is Probably Our Best Option" -- written by a highly respected fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Joshua Muravchik. But in the end all I could find to say was this:  I hope this slavering, shrivelled-up, dead-souled little coward finds himself on the front lines of the war he advocates.

I’m sick to death of these timorous motherfuckers sitting on their well-wadded asses pushing for wars they’ll never fight. I want to see Muravchik standing on the Iranian frontier with a rifle in his hand.

I want to see him put his puffy gray face and his well-coifed hair in the line of fire. He’s so goddamned tough with other people’s lives. “Yes, we might absorb some strikes," he writes. He knows damn well he’ll never “absorb” a strike; that’s for other people, that’s for the cannon fodder this piss-ant empire sends to its wars.

No, by God, if he wants war, if he thinks it’s “probably our best option,” then let him drag his ageing ass over to Iran and put it on the line. Or else let him his shut his fucking mouth.

And I’m sick to death of the gilded robber barons like Jeff Bezos who publish bellicose bullshit like this day after day, wailing for war on Iran, on Russia, on Syria. I want to see Bezos in the front line too. Let him slap on some body armor and wade into the fight, in Tikrit, in Aleppo, in the Donbass.

He won't do it. Muravchik won't do it. None of them will do it. Every single one of our war-mongers and war-profiteers and policy wonks and politicians who endlessly call for war and war and more war, every single one of them would run a mile — would run a hundred miles — from the slightest threat to their own soft, pasty, well-protected persons.

They want OTHER people to die. They want OTHER people to kill. It makes them feel good. It makes them feel tough. It makes them feel righteous. It makes them want to run to the toilet in their sleek, comfy, carpeted office buildings and jerk themselves off at the excitement of it all.

Just as long as THEY don’t have to fight. Just as long as THEY don’t have to “absorb” any strikes. Just as long as some piece of riffraff does the dirty work for them.

I wish I could stand in front of this blood-thirsty coward and tell him this to his face. And then spit in his face. Then put a goddamned rifle in his hand and parachute him into Tehran. Go ahead, Muravchik. Go ahead, Bezos. You boys are so bad, you’re so tough, you’re so hard and hot for war. Go fight it yourself, you cowardly motherfuckers.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Of Pigs and Quislings


(And other things . . . )

Professor Chomsky on widdle Bibi and the punk President and government he regularly cornholes.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Deep


In a necessary two-hour interview, our best political historian Dr. Peter Dale Scott speaks about his recently released masterpiece The American Deep State. A state that gets deeper and deeper and deeper without end.