Saheli* II

I liked this part from one of Matthew Yglesias's posts regarding Barack Obama's win of the Democratic nomination:

Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.

I have a friend whose physicist father likes to note that knowing a solution is possible is a huge help to finding that solution. In an arena as complex as, oh, fixing the world, finding future "solutions" requires both a healthy attachment to facts and evidence and a healthy ability to guess and approximate, to dare, to insist. Can we balance these demands, dramatically changing our future course without succumbing to either foolhardy risk or mind-numbing caution? I think the answer is yes, yes we can.

A few hours ago a glorious full moon rose over the land of Nadia, greeted with bugling conches and the sweet thunder of beating drums. The joyful noise is following it across the globe, in many town and villages, and soon enough it will be here. It's Gaur Purnima, the start of Gaurabda 522, and for all of you I wish a new year and a new season of kindness and good works. If you are so inclined, accepted my obeisances and wishes for a weekend of singing and dancing and feasting---otherwise, Happy Holi as well!

The 3731 soldiers who will not come home from Iraq, and the 583 who will not come home from Afghanistan.

Update: In exchange for not having to identify anyone on the tape or testify about what people told him at the protest, Josh is turning it over and being released, according to news reports. He's also posted it.

Josh Wolf is still in jail. You can read about his case on Wikipedia and at his own website. He's been in jail for over 200 days, held on civil contempt, for refusing to obey a federal subpoena to turn over tapes. Legal issues aside--the arguments about various interpretations of various shield laws are complex--he is steadfastly resisting the idea that the state should be able to rifle through his pockets on what, many agree, is a very flimsy pretext. In an age when we all have camera phones and email notes on each others' activities and opinions, I have to admire someone taking a stand against that trend.

Civil disobedience, however, hinges on the hope that the rest of us will notice and pay attention to other people's principled stands, and that we will speak up when we think our Government is acting badly. In this age of irony and ostriches, it's easy to ignore or cynically dismiss a random stranger. But I've met Josh, he's a kind and thoughtful person, and so I ask you to try to put aside your apathy or cynicism, just for a minute. Consider that if someone is willing to stay in jail for over 200 days to make a point, that point might be worth paying attention to. Some of the groups calling for Josh's release are: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Club, Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, the Northern California Media Workers Guild, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Center for Media and Democracy, Reporters Without Borders, the National Writers Union, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Contra Costa Times.

There's a new U.S. attorney who might reconsider the case, and Josh has a mediation meeting on Monday.

They're a couple days old, but there were some interesting observations on Iraq and Iran in my blogroll recently.
Chris Albritton of Back-to-Iraq cites his friend George Packer's New Yorker article and his own experience in noting that the United States's refugee policy is particularly humiliating and embarrassing when it comes to Iraqis who have served as American translators. Over at Rhinocrisy Hedgehog makes an oft-repeatable point about the amount of money we've spent on this war and occupation compared with most Iraqi's annual income.

The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years.

The American military is a tremendously powerful and flexible instrument, but it must be employed skillfully and with great care. If we blunt its edge in Iraq, or break it, we may suffer terrible consequences down the road.

As far as I can tell, there are about three modes in which one supported the invasion of Iraq and might still support the war in Iraq. I address this to to those people.

1) Perhaps you honestly thought that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, and was bent on harming the U.S. or harming U.S. interests in an untenable way. You see the invasion as a pre-emptive act of self defense, protecting your life and liberty and way of life. You are defending you and yours against this regime, having decided that the consequences are worth it.

2) Perhaps you honestly thought that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were powerfully enough linked, and that Iraq either had some responsibility for 9/11 and/or was conspiring to cause more of the same. Again, you saw your support of the invasion as defending you and yours, and you also perhaps saw it as a kind of revenge. You decide the consequences are worth it.

3) Perhaps you believed that it is the place of the United States to topple oppressive dictatorships and bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. You have decided that the consequences are worth it.

Alright. Have you understood which position or combination of positions you are in? Good. Now imagine a scenario where you are in a crowded street. Suddenly one man,A, goes swinging, with a giant pole, at another, B, who is next to you. A bashes B 's head in. He also manages to break your knees in the process--it's just a very long and unwieldy pole. A is very rich. You are very poor.

Everyone knows B was about to kill A, and A was acting in self-defense. Or everyone knows that B killed A's mother, and A was acting in justified revenge. Or everyone knows that B was murdering his toddlers, one by one, and also slapping you around, and A just had to make it stop. Fine. Since A just decided the consequences were woth it, didn't ask you or give you an opportunity to get out of the way, or put much effort into getting the shortest, unwieldy pole---doesn't A owe you some help with the knee surgery?

One of my favorite movies as a child was Superman II. A disempowered Clark gets beat up at a truck stop by a jerk. Later he gets his powers back. He goes back to the truck stop and beats up the jerk. In the process he messes up the truck stop. Hre hands them a huge wad of cash to more than pay for the damage. It's a stupid, stupid example, but I think it's an accepted principle in America. Good guys accept responsibility for their actions.

I'm not going to comment here on the politics, policy, and strategy of sticking around when most Iraqis want us to leave and many, many people agree things would get better if we did leave, except to note it. I am, however, going to note that $50 Million is a paltry amount to dedicate to addressing the needs of civilians we are directly responsible for hurting--the consequences that we have so self-importantly decided are worth it. (pdf.) I'm just going to assume that the best-intentioned supporters of the war want to break the cycle of destruction, want to accept the consequences they politically supported, and don't mind spreading peace and goodwill through means other than bombs. Right? Right. So:

--UNHCR
--CIVIC-WORLDWIDE
--World Vision

Those who are against the war--hopefully you don't need reminding that peace is not cheap. Good, I'm glad we found something we can all agree on.

Yesterday a golden full moon ran a commemorative victory lap around the earth, greeted by a joyful noise in many towns and villages. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. The whole universe is one family. May there be good fortune throughout the universe, and may all envious persons be pacified. Yesterday was Gaur Purnima, and today is the feast celebration--if you are so inclined, I hope you have a joyful weekend of feasting. (Yesterday the paintings on one wall were all carefully straightened before the party. Afterwards they were all crooked and akilter, dizzy with the dancing.) If not, Happy Holi.

Sarmad Ali is a young Wall Street Journal reporter. I have been hearing about him for two years now, because he is a classmate and very good friend of my friend Cyrus Farivar. They both went to J-school at Columbia right after me; Cyrus went to Berkeley and came back to the bay after he graduated. Cyrus bubbles over with enthusiasm and regard for his friends, and even though I've never met Sarmad, I feel some warmth towards him--it has just rubbed off from Cyrus.

Sarmad is Iraqi. Today he wrote in the WSJ about the disappearance, two months ago, of his father. He still does not know where his father is; it seems to have been a while since he has heard from any of his family. The war has taken a great toll on his family. It is a difficult piece to read, but I think it is important. War is eating at our lives, our friends' lives, the lives of the friends of our friends: acid waves propagating through our single, shared world. We cannot ignore the flood, however high we seem to stand. You can read Sarmad's piece on Cyrus's blog; at the Wall Street Journal site. I hope he gets some message of relief soon.

So there's this new song out by The Killers that makes my brain go to the strangest place. It's called "Read My Mind," (lyrics here), and it doesn't make me think of killing or mind reading or Main Street USA, or anything like that. Instead it makes me think of . . Sanjay Leela Bhansali's .Devdas.
Yeah that's right. These guys:

make me think of this:

What the hell? This has been bugging me for days, perhaps weeks. It's specifically the main choral chord of the Killers song which reminds me of Devdas. (Killers YouTube video here.) And I've been convinced that it's the same as a specific chord or theme that runs throughout the soundtrack of Devdas, which I haven't heard in months or weeks--so much so that when I heard it on the radio tonight I wanted someone to make a mashup of the two. But when I dug out my copy of the soundtrack, I realized I couldn't quite find it--it was in neither of the spots in the movie I thought it was in, though something slightly similar is. (YouTube videos after the jump.) Now maybe it's somewhere in the movie in some form more similar to the Killers song. Or maybe they really are different but still deeply similar. Or maybe they are similar in only that superficial and common way that musical amateurs are often overly impressed by, as described in this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe the Killers use a major version and Devdas uses a minor version? Or maybe I'm totally crazy. But even though the Killers' chord isn't in any of the clips I've found, it still reminds me of Devdas. Is there a term for this kind of auditory confusion? Anyone have a similar experience with some other odd pairing of musical sources? And is there any hope for a decent mashup? (The lyrical themes are not totally contrary.)

Click the jump to see all three videos.

Continue reading "Music Lessons" »

One of my J-school professors, Michael Moss, has a disturbing and important story in today's New York Times--it's the tale of an American citizen who was imprisoned in Iraq for almost three months, most of it without access to a lawyer, after informing the FBI of suspicious activity at the security company which employed him. You should read it.

In light of discussions of General Pinochet's death which try to balance out 3000 or so disappeared with the business activity that warmed up during his reign (see the BBC), I'd just like to establish once and for all one of my basic beliefs.

Murders can't be justified merely by economic growth.

It's surprisingly cold on the west coast, surprisingly early.It's not that it's that cold in absolute terms, or that it's the very coldest it gets in the Bay Area, but it's much colder than usual--and drier and clearer, making the unseasonableness more noticable. Well, I don't know what the reason is, but I'm noticing it a lot more this year. I was talking to Sidra about it. "This sucks. And it really sucks for the homeless people." It was a spontaneous thought that slipped onto my tongue before I even realized it, and as such has managed to stick in my brain rather gnawingly. A little over a year ago this SF Chronicle article estimated that the Bay Area had about 35,000 homeless people. That's around half the population of Mountain View, California. The temperature here is going to dip into the low 30s tonight, and in Seattle, where it was snowing this weekend, it will probably be freezing.There are emergency warming centers in Spokane. In this post-Thanksgiving pre-Christmas season, I hope you are all warm and safe, and perhaps have some time to remember those who aren't.

Over at Unfogged, the lucid Lizardbreath dives into the latest case of NYPD gun slaughter and notes that by speaking in terms of moral culpability instead of competence we create a useless dichotomy of punishment versus no consequences. Instead we might want to focus on consequences delivered to police officers not as punishment but as force-improvement:

the conversation always seems to be about whether the police made an honest mistake that they aren't morally culpable for. And the answer there is usually that probably they did: the police aren't sociopaths, they don't have any reason to want to kill random innocents, this sort of thing is probably going to almost always be an honest error where they thought the guy was genuinely dangerous and the cops shouldn't go to jail. That's easy.

But they are terrible at their jobs. The reason why we allow the police to walk the streets with loaded weapons is that we trust their training, and competence, and good sense, enough to know that they aren't going to hurt anyone unless they have to in order to keep the rest of us safe. And a policeman who gets rattled enough in what he thinks is a dangerous situation that he starts shooting when there was no need for it, is a policeman who is too poorly trained, or too nervous, or too stupid to be allowed to walk the streets of a dangerous city with a gun. He's not keeping us safe, he's making life more dangerous for the rest of us.

But these are not just local problems or moral problems. In discussing the fate of the world with friends, the answer always comes back to sustainable living, and sustainable living always comes back to better, denser cities for non-rural workers. And looking around, getting better, denser cities always comes back to getting better schools and better crime prevention.

I observed Veterans Day by watching Flags of our Fathers, though the date didn't occur to me until I was already sitting down. It's a well-crafted examination of both the battle of Iwo Jima and the pressures put on soldiers by civilian society's need to fete them--in this case the three survivors of the famous flag-raising photo. The main characters' are uncomfortable with being called heroes, especially given their heavy dose of survivors' guilt. It eerily resonates with this editorial written by the Phil Carter from Intel-Dump, about his feelings on returning from Iraq.

The movie cuts back and forth between the tour the three survivors went on as part of the 7th War Loan bond drive, their preparation for war, the battle itself , and the "present day" when James Bradley, the son of flag-raiser John Bradley, and author of the book, is piecing together the story. Since his book is a widely cited source on the internet, I have to guess it's all fairly accurate.

Continue reading "Ira Hayes" »

I hang my coat up in the first bar There is no peace that I've found so far The laughter penetrates my silence As drunken men find flaws in science

I really like Snow Patrol's album Eyes Open. Smooth dreamy vocals, interesting lyrics, and throbby, strummy bass and drums. Probably a little too mellow (emo?) for some people, but right now I'm finding it a rather nice combination of sweet but strong. Ah, those moody Celts.