Month: August 2014

Confusion reigns on the right about black people and guns

by digby

My piece for Salon yesterday was about the Black Panthers, Ronald Reagan and guns:

It may be apocryphal, but the story goes that in 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan agreed to sign a California gun control law that made it against the law to walk around in public with a loaded gun after he saw a Black Panther rally. If it’s true, it was probably this rally:

[…]

30 members of the open-carry group the Huey P. Newton gun club did march in the streets of Dallas earlier this week, armed with AR-15s, shotguns and rifles, chanting about Black Power. One of the marchers by the name of Drew X, with the New Black Panther Party, was quoted as saying, “If they don’t get these people under control with this police brutality and this abuse, this gonna be an international crisis.”

And this has the right wing very confused. A quick look around the Internet finds some perfunctory commentary supporting the group’s right to bear arms, but eventually people are pointing out the fact that one cannot be a “felon” and own guns. Finally they get down and dirty with assertions that the demonstrators must be bloods and crips and start whining that African-Americans are racist for mentioning that people of color are particularly at risk from police abuse. And then there are the hilarious jokes like this one: “If black people could get some marksmanship training it would really cut down on the number of innocents killed by stray bullets in certain neighborhoods.”

Read on. Let’s just say that one of the revealing aspects of the whole Ferguson crisis is that the gun proliferation activists are shown to be far less concerned about fighting the government than they are about fighting “certain elements” they believe are endangering society. Just listen to Wayne LaPierre:

We don’t trust government, because government itself has proven unworthy of our trust. We trust ourselves and we trust what we know in our hearts to be right. We trust our freedom. In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want. We know in the world that surrounds us there are terrorists and there are home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, knockout gamers, and rapers, and haters, and campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse our society that sustains us all.

They don’t trust the government but it’s not because the jackboots are coming to put them in FEMA camps. It’s because they believe it’s failed to protect them from the boogeyman. It’s important to understand the difference.

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But what happens when the programs get smarter?

by David Atkins

This “refutation” on Vox of the job mechanization is simultaneously troubling and hilarious:

Will automation take your job away? No, argues economist David Autor in a new paper presented at the Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday. Instead, it’ll just push you into a menial low-wage job.

That, at least, has been the recent past of technology’s impact on the labor market, Autor suggests. We’ve seen what he calls “job polarization” where automation has increased the demand for highly skilled managers and creative types, plus the demand for low-paid food prep workers and such. He offers these two charts as evidence…

This chart shows that across a whole bunch of different European countries, we’ve seen high-wage jobs grow and low-wage jobs grow while middle-wage jobs shrink…

Autor says this more or less shows the importance of improving education. Someone who might once have been qualified for a pretty good secretarial job is nowadays only going to be qualified for a job at Chipotle, since modern technology reduces the need for secretaries. To save her from the dismal future of a burrito stomping on a human face forever, she needs to be trained up to the level where she can get a job as an app developer or devising burrito marketing campaigns.

OK, that may be true. Temporarily. But that’s a little short-sighted, and a failure to recognize that technology isn’t limited to taking middle-class jobs whatever they may be. It’s just that middle-class jobs are the only ones that technology is currently equipped to take.

Blue-collar jobs have already been decimated by technology, and even the Chipotle burrito-rolling example used by the author isn’t safe: if our lattes are being poured and our burritos rolled by humans in 20 years, it won’t be because there aren’t machines fully equipped to do those jobs better than humans, but because we as customers might get creeped out by it. But I wouldn’t count on that.

More importantly, the author assumes that creative jobs will be protected from technological advance. Think again. Right now creative marketing is seen as a combination guesswork and genius, and folks like Malcolm Gladwell will point to examples of brilliant campaigns that caught fire due to human intuition and creatvity. Less noticed are the thousands of campaigns that simply fall flat, but people get paid lots of money to produce regardless.

Eventually it’s going to be simple for a combination of basic marketing research and big data algorithms to go through every campaign for a similar product and turn out very functional and effective campaigns without the need for a bunch of big ad agency money. And the same goes for most other creative work.

Moreover, the trend will eventually flatten the value of creative work. If everyone becomes an app developer, suddenly the value of app development plummets. Today’s “app developer” is yesterday’s “web designer.”

The programs are going to keep getting smarter. High-paying jobs are already being hurt by the internet-enabled flattening and by automation, and more and more industries are being flattened.

Pushing more STEM education simply puts a few more rats higher up on the mast of a sinking ship. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

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Can you hear the drumbeat?

by digby

The war drums:

I wonder if all those isolationist, libertarian Tea Partiers are impressed. Any bets?

Sweatin’ to the oldies

by digby

McCain this past week-end on the Obama foreign policy

“This is an administration of which the kindest word I can use is ‘feckless,’ where they have not outlined the role that the United States has to play. And that is a leadership role,” he said.

December, 1999:

President Bill Clinton, McCain said, has presided over a “feckless, photo-op foreign policy” that has sent mixed signals to allies, and unmistakable signs of hesitancy and indecision to adversaries.

The man a big believer in feck.

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Dinesh D’Souza says “the left” is responsible for ISIS

by digby

In the narration to his “documentary” film 2016: Obama’s America, right wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza famously said “incredible as it may seem, there are people within America who want a world without America.” He was talking about that perennial boogeyman “the left.” But last week he was a little more explicit about who the enemies of America really are. I’m sure you can guess who that might be:

I think this is a really — this is a serious issue, because here you have guys like, you have Obama, you have Holder, and you have Al Sharpton. Now, can a cop acting under the exigencies of his job expect justice if those three guys were deciding the outcome? I mean, it seems really clear that they are fostering an atmosphere in Ferguson that basically goes, “Let’s declare that this guy is probably guilty and let’s see what we can do to put him up against the wall.” The idea that he would get impartial justice is becoming highly questionable, so this has become a real problem.

Now, historically, blacks have faced this problem and it looks like what we’re seeing is a kind of complete flip, so that we’re going from one set of injustices to another. And that’s, you know, what the common thread between ISIS and what’s going on in Ferguson is you have these people who basically believe that to correct a perceived injustice, it’s perfectly OK to inflict all kinds of new injustices. Behead guys who have nothing to do with it. Go and loot shops from business owners who are not part of the original problem whatsoever. And all of this is then licensed by the left and licensed to some degree by the media.

Beheading and looting are the same thing. And “the left” is responsible for all of it. I’m going to guess that plenty of his compatriots think the same thing.

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Yet another middle east wrinkle

by digby

On the 100th anniversary of WWI, you cannot help but look at something like this, on top of everything else, and have a little shudder go through you:

Twice in the last seven days, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have secretly teamed up to launch airstrikes against Islamist-allied militias battling for control of Tripoli, Libya, four senior American officials said, in a major escalation between the supporters and opponents of political Islam.

The United States, the officials said, was caught by surprise: Egypt and the Emirates, both close allies and military partners, acted without informing Washington or seeking its consent, leaving the Obama administration on the sidelines. Egyptian officials explicitly denied the operation to American diplomats, the officials said.

The strikes are another high-risk and destabilizing salvo unleashed in a struggle for power that has broken out across the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolts, pitting old-line Arab autocrats against Islamists.

Yeah, that’s happening too.

All the smarter foreign policy pundits keep saying that this problem will only be solved by people in the region banding together to fight the Islamists. But according to the article these strikes are doing no good and the US thinks they are counterproductive to some plan they apparently have to cool the situation. I wonder. Maybe it’s actually better if they don’t “consult” with the US — or at least nobody admits to it. Our constant interference is part of what’s fueling this upheaval and the less involved we are seen to be, it’s probably the better. On the other hand, the “collateral damage” from air strikes is always awful so …

Yes, everything feels like more destabilization in the region. On the other hand, it’s already destabilized, partially thanks to our ridiculous invasion of Iraq, so that ship may have sailed.

This is just one of half a dozen stories that are appearing int the major papers each morning. That shudder I feel is getting stronger every day.

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It’s not their religion that’s the problem

by digby

It’s the excuse but not the reason:

Can you guess which books the wannabe jihadists Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed ordered online from Amazon before they set out from Birmingham to fight in Syria last May? A copy of Milestones by the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb? No. How about Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama Bin Laden? Guess again. Wait, The Anarchist Cookbook, right? Wrong.

Sarwar and Ahmed, both of whom pleaded guilty to terrorism offences last month, purchased Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. You could not ask for better evidence to bolster the argument that the 1,400-year-old Islamic faith has little to do with the modern jihadist movement. The swivel-eyed young men who take sadistic pleasure in bombings and beheadings may try to justify their violence with recourse to religious rhetoric— think the killers of Lee Rigby screaming “Allahu Akbar” at their trial; think of Islamic State beheading the photojournalist James Foley as part of its “holy war”—but religious fervour isn’t what motivates most of them.

In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the Guardian. It revealed that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could … be regarded as religious novices.” The analysts concluded that “a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation,” the newspaper said.

The article goes on to discuss various psychological profiles that show these guys are basically a young man’s desire for action and meaning:

… what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world.” He described wannabe jihadists as “bored, under­employed, overqualified and underwhelmed” young men for whom “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer … thrilling, glorious and cool.”

Which means that all this fearmongering among our hand-wringing leaders like Huckleberry Graham is extremely counter-productive. As the author says,

If we want to tackle jihadism, we need to stop exaggerating the threat these young men pose and giving them the oxygen of publicity they crave …

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“There’s a huge amount of bombing that could be done!”

by digby

William Kristol, yesterday:

“I would like a little overreaction by the President now. He should go to Congress right away to get authorization. But meanwhile he’s acting under the War Powers Act, and he shouldn’t wait. He shouldn’t wait! There’s a huge amount of bombing and damage that could be done to ISIS tomorrow if the president orders it.”

Runferyerlives!!!

General Kristol doesn’t specify what all that bombing and damage should be and he’s not promising that we won’t get our hair mussed. But if there’s one thing he knows in all his years of military leadership bombing indiscriminately is the best way to stop terrorism.

You could see the excitement among the warmongers yesterday. They are stimulated and energized. They’re getting ready to go.

The question is, barring another financial catastrophe before 2016, what presidential candidate might emerge on the right to take up the cause? Most of the Governors are without foreign policy cred. Is there someone out there who could step in to out-macho a woman candidate? (And make the woman candidate even more hawkish?) Looks like an opportunity …

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Same As It Ever Was 

by tristero

Scientific American, September, 1914

People are so suspicious about wars nowadays. One wonders even if patriotism isn’t rather stupid. One has the preliminary thrill; there is flag-wagging, the blast of a trumpet, the glorious traditions of the Fatherland, and then this vague but persistent vision of a fat, beady-eyed financier lurking in the background. We have been sold so many times, one becomes wary. One could fight wholeheartedly in a war for the end of war, but in no other sort of war whatever.

Ah, yes, the war to end all wars. One hopes that whomever wrote this realized that the notion of a war to end all war was just one more cynical sales pitch. Unlikely, sorry to say.

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Too extreme to take the opportunity of a lifetime

by David Atkins

Jon Chait has a good piece on the GOP’s demographic trap, and how it stops them from taking up the President’s misguided Grand Bargain on cuts to earned benefit programs like Social Security. Chait’s thesis is essentially that the GOP has cornered itself into becoming an older party that can’t afford, electorally, to risk actually making cuts to programs it would like to, because they might get backlash from their base.

I riffed on that thesis yesterday at Washington Monthly:

The easiest way for the Republican Party to escape would simply be to abandon its pretense of fiscal austerity—it is, after all, a kabuki show that closes up whenever a Republican is president—and wholly embrace becoming a party of elderly voters driven by cultural resentment. The GOP could, in effect, treat cuts to Social Security and Medicare as equally sacrosanct with cuts to the military, and then suggest that literally everything else in the budget be cut first. If they can get a Democratic president to go along with it, then so much the better for them.

Some Republicans are doing that already, of course. But the challenge for conservatives is that a new generation of lawmakers and activists grew up actually believing the Objectivist rhetoric of fiscal austerity and intend to see it enacted. Not only are Republicans unlikely to start treating spending on retirees as a sacred cow, they’re even moving away from protecting military spending as well.

GOP leadership knows that in the medium-term it has to reach out to younger voters and voters of color. But their base rejects out-of-hand any of the policy changes that would be required to even begin to do that. In the short-term conservatives could make gains by adding Social Security and Medicare to their list of sacred cows, and watch Democrats tie themselves into foolish knots trying to be “fiscally responsible”, but their new generation of hyper-conservative activists won’t let them.

So instead the GOP just plods along incoherently, moving opportunistically to capitalize on fear and cultural prejudice, but lacking in a broader strategic vision for its future. It’s so hostage to its own extremism and demographic traps that it can’t even take advantage of an amazing opportunity to enact their policy agenda, even when a Democratic president offers it to them on a silver platter.

We can only hope that progressives within the Democratic Party help stiffen the Party’s resolve against these sorts of Grand Bargains before the GOP figures out this problem and takes the deal it is being offered.

Lobbying the Dems from the outside isn’t remotely enough. We need more good people on the inside, too, to get the job done.

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