Month: March 2015

A cultic milieu

by digby

Bradblog posted about this conversation with Eric Burns over the week-end, a journalist and media critic who worked for Fox for many years. What he says about it is intriguing:

The way to understand what is going on right now at Fox in the wake of the allegations against O’Reilly, Burns explained, “is to make a distinction between the words ‘culture’ and ‘cult'”…

The man who, for a decade, hosted his own weekly show on FNC, described the people who watch the channel as “cultish”.

“For many years, conservatives have been extremely upset in this country because the only newscasts they had to watch were liberal — you people at CNN and how liberal you are, and NBC and ABC and CBS — and they never had, the extreme right, they never had their own television station. When they got one, their appreciation, their audience loyalty — and I know what the audience loyalty was like when I was there — their audience loyalty soared.”

“And, so, O’Reilly, as the head of the cult, is not held to the same standards as [NBC News’] Brian Williams, who was part of the media culture, the larger culture,” said Burns.
[…]
“I thought that as Fox got more and more popular, that Roger Ailes, who runs the network, would think: ‘Well, the Right has nowhere else to go, so if I move a little more to the center, I can get a bigger audience and not lose my core audience’,” said Burns. “He did just the opposite. He went more to the right.”

“We have a story now for two reasons. One is context — Brian Williams has set up the media to be looking for things like this. And the second reason is that O’Reilly did what he was supposed to have done, when he was with CBS. It doesn’t matter that he does it with Fox. But when he did it with one of the major networks, the attempt is to make more of a story out of it. Yet, the cult, the Fox News cult — to the Fox News cult — this kind of thing doesn’t matter.”

Fox viewers see it all as little more than “a lie from the ‘liberal media’. Who cares what it is? The point is, it doesn’t matter.”

As for those who run Fox, and their failure to substantively address the documented facts about their star anchor: “They’re not addressing the controversy. If you’re charged with lying and you say ‘our ratings are up’, you’re not answering the question of whether or not you told a lie. I think it’s astonishing that that’s the way they operate.”

I think “cult” is a good way to think about Fox:

Pioneering sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) found that cults based on charismatic leadership often follow the routinization of charisma. Sociologist Roy Wallis (1945–1990) argued that a cult is characterized by “epistemological individualism” meaning that “the cult has no clear locus of final authority beyond the individual member.” Cults, according to Wallis, are generally described as “oriented towards the problems of individuals, loosely structured, tolerant [and are] non-exclusive”, making “few demands on members”, without possessing a “clear distinction between members and non-members”, having “a rapid turnover of membership”, and as being transient collectives with vague boundaries and fluctuating belief systems. Wallis asserts that cults emerge from the “cultic milieu”.

And these guys too:

In an article on Al Qaida published in The Times, journalist Mary Ann Sieghart wrote that al-Qaida resembles a “classic cult”, commenting: “Al-Qaida fits all the official definitions of a cult. It indoctrinates its members; it forms a closed, totalitarian society; it has a self-appointed, messianic and charismatic leader; and it believes that the ends justify the means.”

Former Mujaheddin member and now author and academic Dr. Masoud Banisadr stated in a May 2005 speech in Spain :

If you ask me: are all cults a terrorist organisation? My answer is no, as there are many peaceful cults at present around the world and in the history of mankind. But if you ask me are all terrorist organisations some sort of cult, my answer is yes. Even if they start as [an] ordinary modern political party or organisation, to prepare and force their members to act without asking any moral questions and act selflessly for the cause of the group and ignore all the ethical, cultural, moral or religious codes of the society and humanity, those organisations have to change into a cult. Therefore to understand an extremist or a terrorist organisation one has to learn about a Cult.

Huh.

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Think of the ladies

by digby

When you hear some right winger throw out the “fact” that women have never historically achieved or contributed much to civilization compared to men, don’t start thinking about all the structural impediments that have been put in the way of female accomplishment, like denial of education, legal rights or the fact that they were often burdened with decades of constant child-bearing. Those are valid reasons, of course. But who says women haven’t achieved? Think of this story about the inventor of Monopoly. Guess what? It wasn’t the guy they always said it was. It was a woman. Like a lot of women down through the centuries she just didn’t get the credit:

It turns out that Monopoly’s origins begin not with Darrow 80 years ago, but decades before with a bold, progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie, who until recently has largely been lost to history, and in some cases deliberately written out of it.

Magie lived a highly unusual life. Unlike most women of her era, she supported herself and didn’t marry until the advanced age of 44. In addition to working as a stenographer and a secretary, she wrote poetry and short stories and did comedic routines onstage. She also spent her leisure time creating a board game that was an expression of her strongly held political beliefs.

Photo
Elizabeth Magie Phillips, in a circa 1937 portrait. Credit The Strong in Rochester, New York
Magie filed a legal claim for her Landlord’s Game in 1903, more than three decades before Parker Brothers began manufacturing Monopoly. She actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time — people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

And yet it was the monopolist version of the game that caught on, with Darrow claiming a version of it as his own and selling it to Parker Brothers. While Darrow made millions and struck an agreement that ensured he would receive royalties, Magie’s income for her creation was reported to be a mere $500.

Amid the press surrounding Darrow and the nationwide Monopoly craze, Magie lashed out. In 1936 interviews with The Washington Post and The Evening Star she expressed anger at Darrow’s appropriation of her idea. Then elderly, her gray hair tied back in a bun, she hoisted her own game boards before a photographer’s lens to prove that she was the game’s true creator.

“Probably, if one counts lawyer’s, printer’s and Patent Office fees used up in developing it,” The Evening Star said, “the game has cost her more than she made from it.”

In 1948, Magie died in relative obscurity, a widow without children. Neither her headstone nor her obituary mentions her role in the creation of Monopoly.

I would guess there are millions of such stories in human history. And yes, men had their ideas stolen from them by sharpies and grifters too. But I have a sneaking feeling that there were many, many more women whose contributions to civilization were “appropriated.” Why not? What were they going to do about it?

h/t to MS

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America is not yet finished

by digby

I like James Fallows’s take on Obama’s Selma speech. I have been oddly immune to the emotion his speeches usually evoke but this one got to me too. Maybe it was this picture, which gave me a lump in the throat:

Fallow writes:

These are the parts of Obama’s speech that rang truest to me, after spending much of my life thinking about the country from afar, with emphasis added:

And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? …

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

And:

The American instinct that led these young men and women to pick up the torch and cross this bridge, that’s the same instinct that moved patriots to choose revolution over tyranny….

It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.

That’s what makes us unique.

And the riff near the end, with its artful repeated emphasis on we:

We were born of change. We broke the old aristocracies, declaring ourselves entitled not by bloodline, but endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights….

Look at our history. We are Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. That’s our spirit. That’s who we are.

We are Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer, women who could do as much as any man and then some. And we’re Susan B. Anthony, who shook the system until the law reflected that truth. That is our character.

We’re the immigrants who stowed away on ships to reach these shores, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free –- Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. We’re the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life. That’s how we came to be.

We’re the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South. We’re the ranch hands and cowboys who opened up the West, and countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights.

We’re the fresh-faced GIs who fought to liberate a continent. And we’re the Tuskeegee Airmen, and the Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied.

We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.

We are storytellers, writers, poets, artists who abhor unfairness, and despise hypocrisy, and give voice to the voiceless, and tell truths that need to be told.

We’re the inventors of gospel and jazz and blues, bluegrass and country, and hip-hop and rock and roll, and our very own sound with all the sweet sorrow and reckless joy of freedom.

Political speeches are masterworks of base-touching references to different icons and interest groups. This list in this speech is different from what most politicians would offer — you’ll know that the GOP is serious about competing for non-white votes and thus for the presidency when you can imagine one of its candidates presenting a similar list — and it is one that matches my sense of what I love about my country. That is who we are. That is our character. That is how we came to be.

I don’t know if who we are, or at least who we usually are. I do know that it’s who we should be. Obama went on:

We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit.

Gosh, I hope so. But we sure have a bunch of old white folks who think the country is falling apart at the seams. And they seem to have most of the money and wield a whole lot of power. But then there’s not a lot new about that.

*I don’t mean to sound cynical. I liked the speech very much. That picture says it all.

Update: This is cool

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It never gets old

by digby

“I’ve been very good over the last year and a half about not posting things about Obama, but this one was too good to pass up,” wrote Maine Republican Senator Michael Willette on Facebook on March 1st before posting an image with the caption “Why haven’t I done anything about ISIS? Because I’ll deal with them at the family reunion.” superimposed over a photo of the president.

He apologized later. While rolling his eyes no doubt.

QOTD: a crazy person

by digby

I’d like to believe that he was being metaphorical here, but I don’t think anyone in his position could possibly be so stupid as to think that was a decent metaphor under current circumstances. So, I’m going to guess that he was being serious:

[Israeli]Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman calls for harsher measures against Israeli-Arabs who support terror.

“Those with us, should receive everything” in terms of rights, he says, according to Channel 2. “Those against us, it cannot be helped, we must lift up an ax and behead them — otherwise we will not survive here.”

He says Israel is too “stupid, stingy, and soft” on the matter.

During this election campaign, Liberman has repeatedly called for the death penalty for terrorists.

“Israeli citizens who raise a black flag on Nakba day — from my perspective, they should get out of here, and I would willingly and with great pleasure hand them over to Abu Mazen [Abbas],” he adds, referencing his plan for land swaps in the event of a future Palestinian state, which he has argued should absorb Arab Israelis.

So, deporting citizens who exercise free speech is on the menu. Good to know.

Poisoning the water

by digby

This is truly nuts:

A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.

Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber’s entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.

I told you Tom Cotton was a force to be reckoned with. Damn.

Oh, and in case you were wondering if this is really just a ploy to give the administration a “stronger hand” as Senator Mark Kirk said, think again. Here’s Cotton last week:

The United States must cease all appeasement, conciliation and concessions towards Iran, starting with the sham nuclear negotiations. Certain voices call for congressional restraint, urging Congress not to act now lest Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always absent moderates in Iran. But, the end of these negotiations isn’t an unintended consequence of Congressional action, it is very much an intended consequence. A feature, not a bug, so to speak.[Emphasis added.]

Real men go to Tehran.

Oh, and note that one of the Real Men is the isolationist peace candidate Rand Paul.

Update: Even the Villagers are shocked. (Note how they say “the political world is still obsessing over Clinton’s emails” when they mean themselves.)

We know that the political world is still obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s emails — and it’s possible we could hear from Hillary on the subject sooner rather than later — but there’s a more stunning political story this morning. As the United States, western nations, China, and Russia are negotiating with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions, 47 Senate Republicans led by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) have made an extraordinary — if not unprecedented — countermove: They’ve sent an open letter to Iran to suggest they can undo whatever President Obama’s administration agrees to. “First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them… Second … President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then—perhaps decades.” This is extraordinary, because for a GOP Congress that objects to Obama overstepping his bounds, the president is commander-in-chief and conducts the nation’s foreign policy. Just asking, but what countermove is more over the top — Netanyahu’s speech from last week, or this letter trying to scuttle a deal before it even happens? Let’s officially retire the phrase that politics stops at the water’s edge. Because it just isn’t true.

By the way, seven GOP senators didn’t sign the Cotton letter: Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Dan Coats, Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Rob Portman. Still, 87% of the Senate GOP caucus signed this letter. It’s stunning. And it’s a rebuke on an international stage that doesn’t really have a precedent. Imagine Democrats micro-managing the START talks in the 80s by sending an open letter to Gorbachev? It just wouldn’t have been viewed as an acceptable political move while the talks were still happening.

Update II: Former Bush administration official and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith schools the Senators a little bit on the constitution:

Josh Rogin reports that a “group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.” Here is the letter. Its premise is that Iran’s leaders “may not fully understand our constitutional system,” and in particular may not understand the nature of the “power to make binding international agreements.” It appears from the letter that the Senators do not understand our constitutional system or the power to make binding agreements.

The letter states that “the Senate must ratify [a treaty] by a two-thirds vote.” But as the Senate’s own web page makes clear: “The Senate does not ratify treaties. Instead, the Senate takes up a resolution of ratification, by which the Senate formally gives its advice and consent, empowering the president to proceed with ratification” (my emphasis). Or, as this outstanding 2001 CRS Report on the Senate’s role in treaty-making states (at 117): “It is the President who negotiates and ultimately ratifies treaties for the United States, but only if the Senate in the intervening period gives its advice and consent.” Ratification is the formal act of the nation’s consent to be bound by the treaty on the international plane. Senate consent is a necessary but not sufficient condition of treaty ratification for the United States. As the CRS Report notes: “When a treaty to which the Senate has advised and consented … is returned to the President,” he may “simply decide not to ratify the treaty.”

This is a technical point that does not detract from the letter’s message that any administration deal with Iran might not last beyond this presidency. (I analyzed this point here last year.) But in a letter purporting to teach a constitutional lesson, the error is embarrassing.

Not to To Cotton it isn’t. Such technicalities are the last things he cares about.

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Inequality for dummies
by Tom Sullivan

Corey Robin considers the irony of how white children learn about Martin Luther King while attending schools that have essentially re-seregated since the Nixon years. He casts a jaundiced eye on the effort for Salon:

In the United States, we often try to solve political and economic questions through our schools rather than in society. Instead of confronting social inequality with mass political action and state redistribution, we prefer to educate poor children to wealth. Education can involve some redistribution: making sure, for example, that black, Latino and working-class students have comparable resources, facilities and teachers as white or wealthy students. But one need only compare the facilities at the Park Slope school my daughter attends with those of an elementary school in East New York—or take a walk around James Hall at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science, and then take a walk around the halls at Yale, where I studied political science—to see we’re a long way from even that minimal redistribution.

Sometimes, our self-deception can be downright funny. Two weekends ago, the New York Times profiled a group of fancy private schools in New York City where wealthy, white and privileged students learn that they are … wealthy, white and privileged. There’s even an annual “White Privilege Conference,” which is being held this year at Dalton School (tuition: $41,350). More and more private schools, according to the Times, “select students to attend” that conference. These students are so select (and these schools so selective) that they have to be selected to attend a conference on their selectedness.

No amount of talking about class advantage this way will change it, Robin believes. He’s right. It’s not the kind of learning that comes from classroom exercises or a book.

But still, as children of advantage, doesn’t talking about structural inequality feel right in a truthiness kind of way? To talk about inequality and believe you’re actually doing something about inequality, the way clicktivism feels like activism. Season the lessons with terms like “micro-aggressions,” have students create and discuss “identity cards,” and such conversations become buzzword bingo. Corey Robin calls this kind of education “the quintessential American hustle.”

“Bingo, sir.”

An elite minority of superstitious high priests


by digby

This is apparently the cover of the Guardian tomorrow.

When I saw it, I couldn’t help but think of this:

Officials responsible for making sure Florida is prepared to respond to the earth’s changing climate are barred from using the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in official communications, emails and reports, according to new findings from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

“We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” said Kristina Trotta, a former Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee.

Another former employee added, “We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it.”

You have to love the idea that someone told scientists that they are not allowed to discuss anything that isn’t a “true fact.” Presumably they would not likewise be barred from talking about God …

It makes you wonder if that Naomi Klein quote accurately reflects the problem. It’s true that this small band of elites have unfettered power but they are more reminiscent of the Inquisition than anything in the 1920s. (If you click that link you can see the original Vatican document declaring the Copernican system “foolish and absurd.”)

What could possibly go wrong?

by digby

Don’t tell Huckleberry Graham about this or he’s likely to foul his trousers on the spot:

World leaders have fretted for years that terrorists may try to steal one of Pakistan’s nuclear bombs and detonate it in a foreign country. But some Karachi residents say the real nuclear nightmare is unfolding here in Pakistan’s largest and most volatile city.

On the edge of Karachi, on an earthquake-prone seafront vulnerable to tsunamis and not far from where al-Qaeda militants nearly hijacked a Pakistan navy vessel last fall, China is constructing two large nuclear reactors for energy-starved Pakistan.

Hey look, over here! We need to invade Iran immediately to stop them from getting nuclear capability or the whole world will be in danger…

Headline ‘O the Day

by digby

As Atrios says:

It’s amazing how turning everything to shit can be “useful” if your last name is Bush. I wonder how that happens.

Meanwhile, here’s a story about how the White House stonewalls the press. Gosh I wonder why:

THE PRESS CONFERENCE, just the fourth formal, solo question-and-answer exchange Obama had held in the White House in 2014, has come to define the current state of White House reporting, one in which there is a gulf between the press and the head of state it’s charged with covering. The answers are long, leaving time for just a few questions from a press corps with already-limited access to the president. Actual news is almost never made, since the White House has new tools allowing it to release and manage news on its own schedule and terms—its online news report is but one of these.

The press, meanwhile, shows itself to be a willing hostage to the modern demands for a click-worthy story and a tweetable quote. At press conferences, the overwhelming tendency is to ask about the day’s headline or to look for the “gotcha” question, instead of addressing long-term accountability issues. Frequently, one journalist after the next will ask the same question, as they did during the post-election news conference. Reporters ask questions not to get information, but to get a reaction. And even with that strategy, they rarely succeed.

Honestly, I get why the press might be hostile to the administration due to the relentless pursuit of leaks and journalists. But that doesn’t seem to be what bothers them. In fact, they don’t seem to care about that at all. They want their gossip and their armchair psychology and they want it now. And the administration just won’t give it to them.

The article is about the unprecedented lack of access the administration has given to the press and it’s quite interesting. But frankly, you cannot blame them when the press is consistently so shallow and puerile.  This is what they do. They get very excited over silly things. Like 2 year olds. Obama takes the position of just ignoring their tantrums. And I’d say it works pretty well for him.

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