Skip to content

Month: August 2014

Lucky Duckies and Fortunate Sons by @Batocchio9

Lucky Duckies and Fortunate Sons

by Batocchio

A high school teacher of mine told the story of playing a trading game as part of teacher training on race and social issues. The kicker was that the game was rigged. My teacher wound up in the group the game was rigged against. A competitive guy, he grew increasingly frustrated, and eventually stood off to the side and asked others to play his turn for him. Throughout the game, the group the game was rigged for downplayed or outright denied their own advantage and that the game was unfair. They urged him to keep playing (most in a kind manner, some gently upbraiding him for being a sore loser). They insisted that he was just unlucky, and that things could get better.

The lessons he took from this were:

1. People tend to grow discouraged when the game is rigged against them.

2. People benefitting from a rigged game are reluctant to acknowledge that the game is rigged.

The game from his story, StarPower, is more of an experiential teaching tool than traditional game. The Wikipedia entry provides some information and the webpage for the actual game is here. Donella Meadows wrote a good description of what normally happens in the game, while Carol C. Mukhopadhyay has written a lesson plan for it and a detailed description of the game pieces. The experience works much better if the participants go in not knowing the game’s nature, and the game’s replay value is limited. I haven’t played it myself, but apparently the game has made a lasting impression on some participants.

From Meadows’ account:

The game starts with players drawing colored chips from a bag. Different color combinations have different point values. The players trade chips, trying to increase their point counts. Very ordinary. Slightly boring.

After the first round, those with the most points are given, with much fanfare, badges with big purple squares on them. The lowest scorers get badges with demeaning green triangles. Those in the middle wear red circles.

Then comes the insidious part. For the next trading round the Squares draw from a bag laced with high-value chips. The Triangles’ bag has low-value chips. After this round a few players change fortunes and switch to a higher or lower group, but mostly the Squares stay Squares, the Triangles stay Triangles, and the gap between them widens.

At this point the Squares are given the power to change the rules. They can reshuffle the chip bags, give away free points, do whatever they like. They can consult the other players on rule changes, if they want to.

They almost never want to.

Predictably, and usually gleefully, the Squares rig the game to favor Squares. The Circles concentrate on elevating themselves to become Squares, so they can bend the rules in favor of Circles. But the few Circles who do gain the hallowed status of Squares start to act like Squares.

The poor Triangles, with less and less power, wealth, or hope, first get angry, then apathetic. They sit around waiting for this dumb game to be over. They come to life only if they think up a way of cheating or of creating a revolution. Only subversion brings out their interest and creativity.

After about an hour the game is stopped and the players talk about what happened. There is usually an emotional outburst. “I can’t believe how much I hate you guys!” a Triangle says to the Squares. “Why? We were managing things pretty well!” a Square replies in honest surprise.

The Squares seldom see how systematically they oppressed everyone. The Triangles are a mass of smoldering resentment. The Circles are shocked to discover that Triangles consider them materialistic sell-outs, while Squares look down on them as incompetent pseudo-Squares.

A simple, unpleasant game. A crude representation of a much-more-complicated world. Unforgettable to those who play. It’s one thing to know intellectually about social classes. It’s another to spend an hour experiencing the rage of a Triangle or the self-righteousness of a Square.

When tempers have cooled, I find that surprising insights remain. Having watched myself act like a Square or Triangle, I have to admit that my behavior depends greatly on where in the social structure I sit. Nearly anyone exposed to Square perceptions, pressures, and rewards acts like a Square. Nearly any Triangle gets apathetic.

Those few who don’t are easily handled. Once I watched a Square try to convince her fellow-Squares to even up the rules. “This game is unfair, and unfair games are boring,” she pleaded. The other Squares appropriated her points and demoted her to a Triangle. They weren’t mean people, they were just Squares.

Suppose we could admit that most of us act as we do because of our places in the system. Suppose we turned our energy from blaming each other to blaming the structure of the games we play. Starpower games — games in which the winners gain ever more power to win again — occur everywhere, on both the Right and the Left…

My teacher’s story about the board game stuck with me, probably because studies in the social sciences, life experiences and conversations with others about theirs have consistently borne out his conclusions. It’s also persisted because those conclusions about the way people tend to react to a rigged game – discouragement or selective blindness – are pretty common sense, yet are vociferously denied nonetheless by significant segments in the United States.

Digby’s noted before that Americans are more likely than Europeans to attribute poverty to a lack of character rather than to unfortunate circumstances. Racism often plays a role in these attitudes, but not always. The StarPower experience is somewhat reminiscent of Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment. Several more recent studies show that, as social psychologist Paul Piff puts it, “As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.” (Interestingly enough, some of his studies have also employed rigged board games.) Piff performed another study that indicated that the poor were more charitable than the rich. Regarding the behavior of the Circles in StarPower, studies on last-place aversion are relevant. Meanwhile, social psychologist John Jost’s multiple studies on system justification are also valuable.

(To counteract these negative dynamics, some programs do try to encourage the development of empathy. The chronically underfunded arts also have a fine track record in this regard. Discussing the social contract in more depth in our national political discourse could be nice, too.)

Some people (particularly conservatives) tend to get upset when they hear the term “privilege” in relation to themselves. I believe it’s because it feels like an accusation that they haven’t worked hard in their lives, and that often isn’t the case. Yet acknowledging privilege doesn’t disregard the presence of hard work or setbacks – it just recognizes consequential advantages. John Scalzi, in a good post (and two follow-ups) using a gaming analogy, called “straight white male” the “lowest difficulty setting.” That doesn’t mean a guaranteed win, or a life free from struggle, or a better outcome than everyone in a different demographic (being rich tends to be an awfully good trump card). Still, all other things being equal, the odds are better with some “settings” or starting positions than others. Horatio Alger stories of rags to riches can occur, but relying on them makes for poor public policy. A fairly recent study suggests that socioeconomic mobility in the United States hasn’t changed much in decades, but also that it isn’t great compared to other industrialized nations, and as John Cassidy points out, the study “doesn’t mean that the effects of inequality aren’t more serious than they used to be.” (Since by definition there will always be a poorest 10% and 20%, perhaps it’s wise to ensure that relative poverty is less dire and some basic needs are met for everyone.) Hard work and talent are indeed important, but the reality is that luck, and “choosing one’s parents at birth,” play an enormous role in success, and certainly prosperity. It takes a pretty cloistered life not to realize this.

Although cloistered, privileged, entitled wankers have always been with us, it does seem that in the last decade or so they’ve become more aggressive crowing about their own preciousness and expressing contempt for the (supposedly) lower orders. It’s hard to keep up all the extremely wealthy figures indignantly insisting that a slight raise in their taxes would be like Hitler invading Poland, or Kristallnacht, or making similarly ridiculous claims. (Unsurprisingly, they won’t mention that tax rates for the rich are lower than in earlier decades or provide context about the significant and increasing wealth inequality in the U.S.) We’ve seen periodic rants from egomaniacal Wall Street players that read like parody but have been linked approvingly by conservative outlets. Nor is it hard to find material that, for instance, praises Ayn Rand and insists that the ‘99% give back to the 1%’ – countless pieces give voice to the persecuted privileged and promote the plutocratic, neofeudalist view.

Jonathan Chait’s 2009 piece “Wealthcare” (about the conservative adoration for Ayn Rand) took a good look at this mentality:

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as “That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!” and “That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!” Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: “Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?”

There seems to be something almost inherent in the right-wing psychology that drives its rich adherents to dismiss the role of luck–all the circumstances that must break right for even the most inspired entrepreneur–in their own success. They would rather be vain than grateful. So seductive do they find this mythology that they omit major episodes of their own life, or furnish themselves with preposterous explanations (such as the supposed handicap of making it in American television with a British accent–are there any Brits in this country who have not been invited to appear on television?) to tailor reality to fit the requirements of the fantasy.

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that “the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America.” In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

In addition to describing the rich as “hard-working,” conservatives also have the regular habit of describing them as “productive” . . .

This mentality fits perfectly with Mitt Romney’s infamous 2012 remarks about the “47 percent”:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. . .

Romney’s claims were at best grossly misleading, and taken in larger context were outright false. Still, that didn’t stop him from sticking by them (as did many surrogates), eventually apologizing, then making similar remarks and finally claiming he didn’t say what he did. It’s also worth noting that he said this behind closed doors, at a private event, which suggests that Romney really believed this bullshit himself or at the very least thought his donor base did. Likewise, for the past several years, Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan has offered various plans to funnel more money to the rich while gutting the social safety net, an old con that never seems to go out of fashion with conservatives. The essential story of the past fifty-some years for movement conservatism and the Republican Party has been selling bigotry and delivering plutocracy, of the Southern Strategy and Reaganomics (also know as supply-side economics or trickle-down economics). The theme for one day of the 2012 Republican National Convention was “We Built It,” referencing clumsy remarks by Barack Obama taken out of context, lacing them with resentment, and pushing any sort of “debate” about the social contract and the role of government to a petulant, childish and dishonest extreme. The leaders of movement conservatism agree that the game is rigged, but they deny it’s for the benefit of the rich and powerful, instead offering scapegoats such as liberals, Democrats, feminists, ethnic minorities, gay people… (really, something for everyone – but then, that’s why Republicans are the inclusive, big tent party).

In recent years, there’s been an interesting variation on the ol’ “I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps” claim. The stories to deflect charges of privilege and about the value of hard work from Rick Santorum, Ann Romney, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, among others, have focused on their fathers and grandfathers. Naturally, they don’t come right out and say ‘I’m not privileged because my (grand)father worked hard,’ or ‘I deserve it all because of my (grand)parents,’ but that is the gist. (Apparently virtue, like money, is passed down through the generations.)

(I’ve focused on conservatives and Republicans here, but obviously, the Democratic Party has a significant plutocratic, corporatist faction, and that shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to reform efforts. That said, the Republican Party is definitely more plutocratic and their rep in that regard is well-deserved. Despite several notable electoral defeats, it still doesn’t have anything beyond lip service and dogma for the middle class, not to mention the poor – remember them? It certainly has nothing comparable to what the Congressional Progressive Caucus offers, policy-wise.)

Sadly, conservatives have become increasingly intent on screwing the poor and anyone fallen on hard times, with consistent attacks on food stamps forming one of the more glaring examples. More striking is the relentless demonization, including claims that Jesus hates the poor (who have it good), that Jesus opposes progressive taxation and social services, that the filthy homeless should stay out of the sight of their betters, that those who have lost their homes should be mocked, that food stamp recipients are akin to animals, and that that starving schoolchildren should dive into dumpsters for food.

The game is rigged. Some people are too cloistered to know it. A percentage of that group can be reached. But some people know the game’s rigged, want to keep it that way and tilt the game even further. And some are so filled with hatred it’s unlikely they’ll ever significantly change their views. After all, in contrast with those lucky duckies they decry, theirs is a hard life, and it requires sustained cruelty for them to live with themselves.

Housekeeping note

Housekeeping note

by digby

I’m doing some travelling over the next few days and so I have enlisted some friends to help out with the blogging here and keep the conversation going. I’m sure you will enjoy their literary stylings.

.

What a good little authoritarian

What a good little authoritarian

by digby

Joe Scarborough yearns to be a subject:

There is a lot of unanswered questions here, but I do know this. When a police officer asks you to pick up—I’ve been in places where police officers said, “All right, you know what? This is cordoned off, you guys need to move along.” You know what I do? I go, “Yes, sir,” or “Yes, ma’am.” I don’t sit there and have a debate and film the police officer, unless I want to get on TV and have people talk about me the next day.

“Say yes, sir and yes ma’am.” And be sure to tug your forelock and bow while you’re at it.

I know it’s unnecessary to point this out but we have a bill of rights. It allows certain freedoms. One of them if freedom of the press. Another is freedom of assembly. Another is due process of law. Those were put in there so that the people didn’t have to genuflect to the authorities whenever they told them to do something.

The authoritarian impulse is vividly on display among the right wingers today. They hate government — until it brings the hammer down on people they don’t like. They are loving the sight of those Robo-cops on the streets of America.

They do care about their personal freedom to carry guns and not pay taxes. So there’s that.

.

The “if you build it, they will use it” daily update #Ferguson

by digby

Now they’re arresting reporters:

One of our reporters, Ryan Reilly, was arrested this evening in Ferguson, Mo., along with a Washington Post reporter, because that’s the kind of thing that happens now, apparently. He is there covering the protests in response to the killing of Michael Brown. Below is a statement we put out condemning the arrest, and here’s our report on it. Meanwhile, both of our reporters there are now stranded at the police station, a long way from their rental car. If anybody on this list lives in the St. Louis area and feels like giving them a lift, shoot me a note.

“We are relieved Ryan Reilly and Wesley Lowery are safe, but we are disturbed by their arrest and assault.

“Ryan was working on his laptop in a McDonald’s near the protests in Ferguson, MO, when police barged in, armed with high-powered weapons, and began clearing the restaurant. Ryan photographed the intrusion, and police demanded his ID in response. Ryan, as is his right, declined to provide it. He proceeded to pack up his belongings, but was subsequently arrested for not packing up fast enough. Both Ryan and Wesley were assaulted.

“Compared to some others who have come into contact with the police department, they came out relatively unscathed, but that in no way excuses the false arrest or the militant aggression toward these journalists. Ryan, who has reported multiple times from Guantanamo Bay, said that the police resembled soldiers more than officers, and treated those inside the McDonald’s as ‘enemy combatants.’ Police militarization has been among the most consequential and unnoticed developments of our time, and it is now beginning to affect press freedom.”

I have been writing about this for quite some time now. It’s an inevitable result of the combination of paranoia, DHS money and lots and lots of spasre military gear being sold cheaply to police agencies all over the nation at taxpayers expense.

This is the problem:

Ex police chief Joseph McNamara addressed this dynamic in this op-ed:

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence. On the other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today. Each of these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we owe support to those who protect us. On the other hand, this isn’t Iraq. The need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a life as a last resort.

“Officer safety” is the excuse for tasers — even on elderly women at traffic stops and unruly children having tantrums. In fact, it’s commonly used so that the officers can demand instant compliance from the citizens regardless of the circumstances. I’m certainly sympathetic to the idea that policing is a dangerous job. But the pursuit of officer safety to the exclusion of everything else is to create a world in which the bill of rights is an anachronistic abstraction.

Being a cop in a free society is a tough gig. I think they deserve all the early pensions and great benefits they get for doing it. Anyone would burn out early from a job like that. But giving them carte blanche to use pain devices on the citizens in order to gain instant compliance and avoid any kind of physical altercation can’t be right. Over time that war on crime morphs into a war on citizens.

And now we have Ferguson.

.

Uber-charged and under-regulated, by @DavidOAtkins

Uber-charged and under-regulated

by David Atkins

Last week I wrote about how Republicans and neoliberal Dems will rue tying themselves too closely to car-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. While they may seem hip today, ultimately the glories of the “sharing economy” are just another thinly veiled flattening of the labor market that reduces wages and worker protections across the board. And, of course, ultimately the car-sharing transportation “revolution” will result in no jobs as Uber and Lyft fight it out to become the driverless vehicle cab companies of the future.

But there’s another reason to wonder if this supposedly awesome deregulated transportation market is such a great idea: surge pricing.

For the 200,000 attendees of San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music Festival this past weekend, where a three-day pass cost $275, Uber’s hated “surge pricing” scheme made sure that exhausted revelers ponied up hundreds of dollars to get a few miles across town.

Uber has a habit of gouging their customers when they need it the most. They famously pulled their “surge pricing” trick during a blizzard that crippled New York last December, sticking riders with bills 7.75 times the normal rate.

By comparison, Uber’s 5x rides in San Francisco were a bargain. But one passenger tells us that drivers were taking particularly long routes while under surge pricing—ostensibly to avoid the traffic leaving the festival.

For example, Alex’s driver made a four mile trip into an 11 mile ordeal, racking up $391 in charges in the process.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Without fail, deregulated markets lead to gouging, rent-seeking and consumer exploitation. When politicians–whether out of foolish ignorance, blind ideology or simple greed–talk about how important it is for government to “get out of the way” so that the deregulated market can work its supposed magic, what they’re really doing is throwing consumers into a shark tank.

That doesn’t mean that, at least until self-driving cars put all the drivers out of business, a car-sharing model can’t disrupt some staid business models. But they should be subject to the same consumer and wage protection regulations as everyone else. If they can do a better job than the competition while doing right by consumers under the watchful eyes of regulators working on behalf of the people, then more power to them.

But it’s cringeworthy to watch politicians on both sides of the aisle suck up to Uber and Lyft’s “sharing economy” as if it’s the wave of the future. It’s not. Google car is the future. Uber and Lyft may be a part of that future, but only if they observe the same rules designed to avoid consumer price gouging that most of the rest of American business is expected to follow.

.

“The only acceptable person”

“The only acceptable person”

by digby

Does she mean that in all the world only Lauren Bacall was better than her? Or is she saying that she is actually more “spectacular” than Bacall who, after all, evidently failed to nail Ben Bradlee? (Perhaps that’s why Bacall had to settle for Jason Robards, who only played Bradlee in “All the President’s Men.”)

It’s hard to know. But rest assured, everyone now recognizes that Sally Quinn and Lauren Bacall are very much the same. In fact, Quinn is the real femme fatale. She won the big prize.

Quinn just never fails to amaze…

.

Frankenstein mad. Very mad. #MississippiTeaParty

Frankenstein mad. Very mad.

by digby

Liberals are used to hearing this sort of thing from conservatives. They regularly wish us to burn in hell. But this invocation at a Mississippi Tea Party event must be a little bit startling to someone like Haley Barbour:

“We ask for your blessing upon the conservatives in this state, that they might stand strong and firm. Father, we even ask for you to bless our enemies, and Lord they are truly our enemies that head the Republican Party and the whole political establishment.

We’re asking, Father, for two things. We’re asking, Father, that you would expose them, set division amongst them, set them one against another, bring confusion and fear into their camp, into their thinking, for the purpose of pulling them down, for casting them down out of their high offices and reducing them, Lord, to having no power in this state. So, Lord, that you might raise up and seek the righteous in the positions of power that this state might once more be a state that honors you in all that it does.

Father, we’re asking that in all of the tribulations were asking you to bring upon them, that it would work change in their heart — that you would use it to bring true Godly sorrow, that they might truly repent for their iniquity and their wickedness, for that they would be restored to you, that you would have honor in the state of Mississippi for the great works that you’ve done in correcting and purifying the government and rescuing and saving the worst of us.”

Welcome to our world, bubba.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they created this monster and now they’ve lost control of it.

The funny thing is that these guys really do scare the power brokers of the GOP. It’s not because they’re so all powerful. It’s because they know intimately just how angry and crazy they really are — after all, they’ve been nurturing it for decades. They are understandably nervous about that energetic lunacy being turned on them.

.

Good reasons not to do stupid shit

Good reasons not to do stupid shit

by digby

Mark Lynch wrote a very illuminating piece in the Washington Post about whether or not the US should have armed the rebels in Syria and if it could have stopped the rise of ISIS and the current carnage in Iraq. He surveys what all the US players at the time were saying from Obama to Clinton to McCain, and even the more hawkish of them weren’t very optimistic although they famously hoped for some “space” for the level heads in the country to iron out all those political, religious,cultural, economic and environmental problems that cause the conflict in the first place. Lynch points out that there was very good reason to be pessimistic — the data shows this kind of intervention just does not work:

Would the United States providing more arms to the FSA have accomplished these goals? The academic literature is not encouraging. In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve (for more on this, see the proceedings of this Project on Middle East Political Science symposium in the free PDF download). Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective. The University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s Patrick Regan have suggested that external support for a rebel group could help when all the external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end. Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of civil war.

Syria’s combination of a weak, fragmented collage of rebel organizations with a divided, competitive array of external sponsors was therefore the worst profile possible for effective external support. Clinton understands this. She effectively pinpoints the real problem when she notes that the rebels “were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming.” An effective strategy of arming the Syrian rebels would never have been easy, but to have any chance at all it would have required a unified approach by the rebels’ external backers, and a unified rebel organization to receive the aid. That would have meant staunching financial flows from its Gulf partners, or at least directing them in a coordinated fashion. Otherwise, U.S. aid to the FSA would be just another bucket of water in an ocean of cash and guns pouring into the conflict.

I know that it’s terrible the United States could not save the day. It has been one of the most sickeningly violent civil wars in our lifetimes. But there is good reason to believe that one should be very reluctant to get involved lest you prolong the agony, which it’s almost guaranteed that you will do.

Iraq is going to present us with many of the same questions. People will tell us that ISIS is a supernaturally evil group that must be stopped at all costs and that only the US military is capable of stopping them. That is the moment everyone should do a very deep gut check and contemplate exactly what that means. President Obama is reluctant to get the nation into the business of “keeping a lid” on these conflicts in the middle east. Maybe he’s wrong about that. But if he is, it’s important to understand that this means a very long-term commitment to troops, manpower and vast amounts of American taxpayer money.

There is plenty of time to think all that through. Right now, the US and others are trying to help the Yazidis and the Kurds. They’ve finally been putting pressure on the Iraqi government to get rid of Prime Minister Maliki and let go of some long standing baggage about what Iraq is supposed to look like. But there are a whole lot of people starting to hyperventilate about ISIS being as existential threat to American babies. There’s no need for that. ISIS is very busy in Iraq and Syria right now — I’d imagine that invading Tucson or Newark is down on their list of priorities. We can think this through and not let panic artists talk the nation into more war without end.

Obama is right to be cautious on this stuff. I would have thought that after the last decade everyone would be. Remember, it wasn’t just Republicans that were gung ho about Iraq in the first place. A lot of Democrats were too. There’s no guarantee that just because a Democrat is for it that it’s the right decision. Over the past 5 decades, Democrats have made these mistakes just as often as Republicans. It’s bipartisan hubris.

.

QOTD: Michael Shaw at BagNews

QOTD: Michael Shaw at BagNews

by digby

He examines the various news photos and headlines coming out of Ferguson over the past few days. He juxtaposes the shrill heds about looting with various other pictures of young African American men engaged in protests. And he says this:

[T]hese acts and images to do more than express the release of anger over one more senseless killing — fueled by the invisible crisis in America of a two-tiered economic system, the rage over institutional racism and the persistent harassment of black youth on town and city sidewalks by increasingly militarized police departments — is still another textbook example of America’s racial and class polarization. The looting photos should not be fodder for finger wagging or utterances of “what do you expect?” Rather, as transient reactions to the same impoverished and marginalizing conditions that spawn these meager “convenience” franchises in the first place, acts of violence — sensationalized as they are — are little more than one more (albeit shocking) expression in a constellation of of cause-and-effect.

Click over to look at the pictures and the faces. They illustrate his point forcefully.

.