Have you seen the new Harper's yet?

Oh my goodness. The new essay by Lapham's replacement is so stunning I can't even type about it here, just in case someone is reading my keystrokes. Maybe someone else is brave enough to key in the first paragraph.

It's the June issue. Nothing about it is on their web site yet, but it came in yesterday's mail.

I just got my copy and unearthed it when I saw your post. Reading it now. Oh, my.

http://www.cjrdaily.org/politics/harpers_ben_metcalf_throws_his.php

"Hissy fit"? I admit it was a bit of a rant, but much of the country and world is thinking it. Let someone write it down!

Can we repeat this stuff? I`m stunned by this essay.

folks. We are not allowed, nor should we, to post violence.

I'd like to be able to discuss this, if it's so explosive.

Reprinting an essay that's already almost on the newstands is hardly treason or even a crime.

I'll put it up elsewhere and link to it, if it's that explosive.

Whatever he's saying, Harper's legal department must have approved it for publication, so it's hard to believe you can be put in jail for reprinting something from one of the country's largest magazines.

feels it is part of free speech. This is a forum. With rules. And part of the rules are not to do anything to ensight violence or threaten. As much as this new editor may be speaking from the heart to anger that is probably a shock even to his own dam self, we are not supposed to put it here. The reason is for safety and security reasons. And responsable adult management of this web forum.

There are rules. They are there for a reason. If this paragraph is as explosive as has been put out there..we still have to follow the rules of the DU. And the rule of law (don't know if that comes into play at all at this point).

Metcalf writes that he brings neither a message nor promise of violence but wants to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country.

without breaking DU rules. Great.

PM one of us...I'll publish anything that's already been published by an American mainstream magazine.

If we can't put it here, I'll put it on my site and point to it with a link.

Being teased is painful...and this sounds very interesting.

It begins on the third paragraph. The title is "On Simple Human Decency" and the writer is asking a very specific question about a threatened action that is prohibited. He's asking "Can I say XXXXXXX?"

...of a foreign country...or Ann Coulter calling for killing liberals?

Does Ben ask if it's okay to say a phrase that includes a word that suggests assassination and a particular member of our government (Bush, Cheney, etc.?)

It is very cleverly composed and very stunning. It's going to elicit a firestorm on the right, probably.

It hasn't hit the stands yet. Now, please tell us..

The author enlisted Floyd Abrahms opinion as to whether or not he can legally say this thing.

And oh lord, what he says about Judith Miller!

Send it to me and I will put it on.

...a firestorm of controversy.

I can't see a big firestorm of a controversy debating over XXXXX XXXXX!

(Unless someone objects to the letter "X"....)

True, George W. Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed-minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for American military lives alone warrants his impeachment, but what has it ever won us to say so?


And this....

I would much prefer that the president sleep soundly in his bed at night, even as the 2,376 American soldiers whose lives his lies have ended sleep soundly, if not so warmly, in theirs. I would ask that the president feel no pain whatsoever, as is felt daily or hourly by the 17,469 Americans blessed by his bellicosity with their wounds. I would hope him untroubled even by guilt, as might haunt any normal human being who had caused the deaths of more than 30,000 Iraqi civilians in order, it would seem, to invite the wrath of the world`s people down upon the heads of his own, so deeply does my kindness extend.

Metcalf writes.... Judith Miller converted the front page of The New York Times into a flyer for Bush`s prewar propaganda and then refused to name which of her administration "sources" had blown the cover of an intelligence operative who dared to be married to a man willing to say that our government was peddling murderous bullshit.

I am starting to feel like the tension that is building could hardly be cut with a knife.

Colbert. Metcalf. Fitzgerald and Rove.

:scared: and yet :grr: that the US has been pushed to this precipice.

discussion. Read the whole way through.

The Marketplace of Perceptions
Harvard Magazine


"The Supply of Hatred

While some try to surmount or cope with irrationality, others feed upon it. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Edward Glaeser began using behavioral economic approaches to research the causes of group hatred that could motivate murderous acts of that type. “An economist’s definition of hatred,” he says, “is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others.” In laboratory settings, social scientists have observed subjects playing the “ultimatum game,” in which, say, with a total kitty of $10, Player A offers to split the cash with player B. If B accepts A’s offer, they divide the money accordingly, but if B rejects A’s offer, both players get nothing. “In thousands of trials around the world, with different stakes, people reject offers of 30 percent <$3 in our example> or less,” says Glaeser. “So typically, people offer 40 or 50 percent. But a conventional economic model would say that B should accept a split of even one cent versus $9.99, since you are still better off with a penny than nothing.” (If a computer, rather than a human, does the initial split, player B is much more likely to accept an unfair split—a confirmation of research conducted by professors at the Kennedy School of Government; see “Games of Trust and Betrayal,” page 94.)

Clearly, the B player is willing to suffer financial loss in order to take revenge on an A player who is acting unfairly. “You don’t poke around in the dark recesses of human behavior and not find vengeance,” Glaeser says. “It’s pretty hard to find a case of murder and not find vengeance at the root of it.”

The psychological literature, he found, defines hatred as an emotional response we have to threats to our survival or reproduction. “It’s related to the belief that the object of hatred has been guilty of atrocities in the past and will be guilty of them in the future,” he says. “Economists have nothing to tell psychologists about why individuals hate. But group-level hatred has its own logic that always involves stories about atrocities. These stories are frequently false. As Goebbels said, hatred requires repetition, not truth, to be effective.

“You have to investigate the supply of hatred,” Glaeser continues. “Who has the incentive and the ability to induce group hatred? This pushes us toward the crux of the model: politicians or anyone else will supply hatred when hatred is a complement to their policies.” Glaeser searched back issues of the Atlanta Constitution from 1875 to 1925, counting stories that contained the keywords “Negro + rape” or “Negro + murder.” He found a time-series that closely matched that for lynchings described by historian C. Vann Woodward: rising from 1875 until 1890, reaching a plateau from 1890 until 1910, then declining after 1910.

.... SKIP"
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/print/030640.html

The Marketplace of Perceptions
Harvard Magazine

The Supply of Hatred cont'd...

"In the 1880s and 1890s, Glaeser explains, the southern Populist Party favored large-scale redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, and got substantial support from African Americans. “Wealthier Southern conservatives struck back, using race hatred” and spreading untrue stories about atrocities perpetrated by blacks, Glaeser says. “‘Populists are friends of blacks, and blacks are dangerous and hateful,’ was the message—instead of being supported, should be sequestered and have their resources reduced. sold this to poor white voters, winning votes and elections. Eventually the Populists gave in and decided they were better off switching their appeal to poor, racist whites. They felt it was better to switch policies than try to change voters’ opinions. The stories—all about rape and murder—were coming from suppliers who were external to poor whites.”

Glaeser applies this model to anti-American hatred, which, in degree, “is not particularly correlated with places that the United States has helped or done harm to,” he says. “France hates America more than Vietnam does.” Instead, he explains, it has much to do with “political entrepreneurs who spread stories about past and future American crimes. Some place may have a leader who has a working relationship with the United States. Enemies of the leader offer an alternative policy: completely break with the United States and Israel, and attack them. We saw it in the religious enemies of the shah . The ayatollah sought to discredit the secular modernists through the use of anti-American hatred.”

For Glaeser, behavioral economics can take “something we have from psychology—hatred as a hormonal response to threats—and put this in a market setting. What are the incentives that will increase the supply of hatred in a specific setting?” Economists, he feels, can take human tendencies rooted in hormones, evolution, and the stable features of social psychology, and analyze how they will play out in large collectivities. “Much of psychology shows the enormous sensitivity of humans to social influence,” Glaeser says. “The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments show that humans can behave brutally. But that doesn’t explain why Nazism happened in Germany and not England.”

.... SKIP"

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/print/030640.html

way of life is really threatened - then anger will be the result. Anger is just a rightfull emotion. While hatred is based on assuming someone or something will destroy your life.

So here - if this article in Harper's is as you say - is someone very angry with Bush. Angry with the ways the Bush cronies have gone about undoing the life of democracy and the society generations built. While the GOP and big Oil and crony attack on Liberalism is based on fear of not being able to maintain privilege or not having it. Really the sick portion of the elites in the USA are terrified at the whole world opening up. And terrified of their privilege being taken away. Of having to come up with something pretty dam fantastic to compete in a world that doesn't recognize their greatness. Not the fault of the American worker or the American liberal (minding their own business) - but that is who the sick elites in the USA have taken it out on. And set about to destroy the fabric of the Liberal movement. Which has succeeded in a few ways. And attacked what Liberals (progressives) hold dear. So why the angry Liberals. Because of the hatred of elites and the hatred elites have multiplied through tribilization in order to maintain a way of life they do not deserve - unless they are supremly talented or gifted or creative or such.

Just like with conspiracy theories (where a crime or cabal actually does exist it is not a conspiracy theory ie: Bush and the neocons do know each other and work together to an end). But liberals get nailed for being "conspiracy theorists" and "crazy" for talking of Bush/neocon myth-making. When it is neocons who are paranoid and mistrustful and hatefull and brought the disgust to themselves and their bubble on by their own repeated actions and and rue the loss of privilege & they deem only themselves fit for by virtue of their exceptionalism. Which made them hateful to begin with. And paranoid of loss of power in a new world they could not control.

Now, Liberals are being called "hateful". Nope. Anger is what it is. Rightful adult anger. And unlike "gay this and gay that".. the anger the Liberals feel is justified. And they direct their anger where it belongs. At the WH.

How much longer are we going to have to sit through "Liberals angry at this, pitchforks, blah, blah, blah"? Just smack em down and tell them to shut the **** up. They tribalized. They lied. They are in power. Now they are dealing with the real world (cause trying to control the world didn't work). And they are as mad as they were 20, 30 years ago when they faced it then.. democracy works when nobody gets everything they want. If you don't like it - go and move to a small island somewhere and write your own constitution.

Colonialism sufficed as an exercise in the degradation of human rights by Great Britain, US and France. Germany saw the examples but was not as successful in the competition for African and Asian colonies. Therefore as a primarily landbound power the lessons of racist treatment of subordinate populations came home to enlarge the German state as the primary source of power by expanding and delineating its territorial limits and slaves in racist terms. The man on horseback used a tank rather than a ship.

Nazism as a form of totalitarianism is the domestication of the abuse of human rights manifested in colonial subjugation. British soldiers commited murder and attrocities abroad. German soldiers did it at home and just across the border, pretty much because they couldn't compete abroad.

The current variant of unsuccessful american neo-colonialim abroad is accompanied by discriminatory police state practices at home. Domestic intolerance, particularly exemplified by Sunday morning TV evangelists preaching intolerance and war against muslims is a good example. Another is our failure to compete in the manufacturing sector which now forces us to conquer markets rather than earn them.

Go with service & tiertiary jobs. Cause when boomers retire.. you can't do all jobs. Plus anything tied to the use of oil will tank.

is risky as oil prices rise. Go with service & tiertiary jobs. Cause when boomers retire.. you can't do all jobs. Plus anything tied to the use of oil will tank. That being said - skilled labour and planning for manufacturing is good.

But really the whole immigration issue is about how the USA and Canada & Europe & Japan & Russia will require tens of millions of more workers in these next 40 years.

This is the corporate theory of labor. It's free market bullshit. They want to exact profit out of unregulated Asian slave labor and markets. The South Americans have had their fill and are sending US corporations packing.

One you abandon the concept of the nation state and national markets and let any amount of capital out without regulating it and without taxing it when it benefits from your resources, roads, your laws, your communications and your consumers you have just turned your standard of living over to the unelected corporate bean counters who could give a shit less about your standard of living, health care, education, or human dignity.

Sometimes I think people are blind. I hear educated people say they favor the "flat tax" as well. Do they really know anything about the distribution of the tax burden in this country or are they just repeating some non-sense they heard on CNBC or read in the Wall Street Journal?

it is stunning indeed!

I see what the big fuss was about.

and the other rethugs will have the same fate as Mussolini and his gang. A lot of people feel incredibly enraged at Bush et al.

For those listening in -- mind you, I'm not advocating any violence toward anyone -- I don't believe in capital punishment!

If so, it also contains the cartoons first published last year by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, in an article, along with other racial cartoons, and Indigo has pulled the publication from its 260 stores in Canada as a result.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060526.wxchapters27/BNStory/Entertainment/home

<snip>
Canada's largest retail bookseller has removed all copies of the June issue of Harper's Magazine from its 260 stores, claiming an article by New York cartoonist Art Spiegelman could foment protests similar to those that occurred this year in reaction to the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Indigo Books and Music took the action this week when its executives noticed that the 10-page Harper's article, titled Drawing Blood, reproduced all 12 cartoons first published last September by Jyllands-Posten (The Morning Newspaper).

The article also contains five cartoons, including one by Mr. Spiegelman and two by Israelis, “inspired” by an Iranian newspaper's call in February for an international Holocaust cartoon contest “to test the limits of Western tolerance of free speech.”

Harper's is just a plain great magazine. I started subscribing last year. It takes me two hours to get through it sometimes, because I enjoy so much of it.