A hard path to walk that leads to any place and to no place

9.20.2016 Leave a comment

Immanuel Kant wrote:

Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibition, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion. Nothing is so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exempted from this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons. Reason depends upon this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto [(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 738-9), emphasis added].

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Quote of the day

9.21.2013 Leave a comment

The issue recently addressed by Alfredo Lopez is net neutrality and the work some corporations perform which is meant to undermine this practice. Those corporations are mostly the largest providers of retail broadband services to end users — that is, to common consumers. They wish to impose a model of broadband provision which mimics the model they use when providing cable television access. In other words, cable providers want to charge consumers economic rents beyond the costs and profits they now earn when they provide simple and direct internet access. The issue at stake is not only a moral-economic one, for this profit-motivated attack on net neutrality entails the existence of a power to determine who sees what while surfing the internet, when they see it, how they see it and at what cost. It is no stretch at all to claim that some cable companies wish to become censors. This is the power they want the federal government to give them. Thus, Lopez asks:

Do you trust huge corporations to protect your access to all the information you need and want? Do you trust them to protect your ability to give everyone else access to information you want to spread?

The answer, unless you routinely purchase Brooklyn Bridge shares, is “no”. They can’t be trusted with the power over your right to communicate. They shouldn’t ever be trusted with that power. And the Constitution of this country makes clear that they aren’t trusted.

To be sure, the federal government was also considered an untrustworthy source of social-moral regulation, and thus Congress was prohibited from making any “…law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These rights were soon attacked by a fraction of the Founders. The federal government still threatens to undermine these rights. Today, as we know, the private powers, as found, for instance, in the possession of some corporations, are so massive that they dwarf the powers feared by the authors and ratifiers of the First Amendment. We should fear private power too.

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The well-armed DHS

4.11.2012 1 Comment

The Department of Homeland Security, another dubious post-9.11 artifact, recently ordered 450 million rounds of .40 cal. hollow-point bullets from the defense contractor ATK. The quantity ordered is massive when compared to the current population of the United States (estimated to be 309M as of 2010), and immediately raises questions about the purposes to which this ammunition will be put.

The quality of the item purchased is also questionable because these bullets serve only one purpose: To efficiently kill human beings. Because this kind of bullet is so destructive and deadly, the Hague Conventions of 1899 banned its use in international war.

David Lindorff asked some of the relevant questions generated by this disturbing news:

First of all, why does the DHS need so much deadly ammo? Are they anticipating a mass surge over the Mexican or Canadian border that would require ICE agents to slaughter the masses “yearning to breathe free”? Are there so many terror cells in America that they feel they need to be ready for a mass extermination campaign? Or are they worried that eventually the quiescent and submissive US population will finally decide it’s had it with the crooked banks and insurance companies, and are going to start taking the law into their own hands, so that the government will have to institute martial law and start gunning down masses of citizens?

If not any of the above, it seems to me that the order for 450 million rounds of ammunition, hollow-point or not, is pretty wildly excessive.

But secondly, I’d suggest we need to rethink this domestic obsession with killing. In the U.K., police are not routinely issued hollow-point rounds. Many other foreign police agencies also do not use them. Here in the US though, they are standard-issue for cops on the beat.

…

Finally, when it comes to Homeland Security, the situation is really different [than the kind of situations faced by most law enforcement officers]. Most of the gun-toting officers working for Homeland Security are not in the business of chasing down vicious killers. They are ICE officers who are going after border crossers, TSA personnel who are patting down air travelers, and the Federal Protective Service, who are really glorified building guards tasked with protecting federal property.

The work these armed personnel do can on occasion be dangerous, I’ll grant, but for the most part their work does not require killing people or dodging bullets. Do we really want them shooting to kill with hollow-point bullets?

The DHS has yet to publicly defend its purchase of this product. While its silence is unsurprising in the current political situation — which is defined by excessive governmental secrecy, global war-making, expansion of the security-surveillance apparatus, prosecution of whistleblowers, erosion of civil and political rights, suppression of popular dissent, etc. — it is disturbing in its own right, for a federal agency quietly and unnecessarily arming itself to the teeth provides just another data point among many which shows the United States abandoning the rule of law, a modern public sphere and a modern civil society.

Is it too soon to identify the government of the United States as a terrorist state?

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Quote of the day

10.16.2011 Leave a comment

The plaza of Zuccotti Park.

The plaza of Zuccotti Park.

Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times used the ongoing occupation of Liberty Plaza (Zuccotti Park) in New York City to discuss the political degradation of public space in America as well as, but less obviously, the local political community which formed in Liberty Plaza during the occupation:

Much as it can look at a glance like a refugee camp in the early morning, when the protesters are just emerging from their sleeping bags, Zuccotti Park has in fact become a miniature polis, a little city in the making. That it happens also to be a private park is one of the most revealing subtexts of the story. Formerly Liberty Park, the site was renamed in 2006 after John E. Zuccotti, chairman of Brookfield Office Properties, the park’s owner. A zoning variance granted to Brookfield years ago requires that the park, unlike a public, city-owned one, remain open day and night.

This peculiarity of zoning law has turned an unexpected spotlight on the bankruptcy of so much of what in the last couple of generations has passed for public space in America. Most of it is token gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger, taller buildings. Think of the atrium of the I.B.M. tower on Madison Avenue and countless other places like it: “public” spaces that are not really public at all but quasi-public, controlled by their landlords. Zuccotti in principle is subject to Brookfield’s rules prohibiting tarps, sleeping bags and the storage of personal property on the site. The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).

The reasons corporations shun pure public space should be obvious. Public space is part of the commons, and few corporations consider every citizen of a country to be a member of their target markets. Indeed, they typically seek to control access to their quasi-public spaces because they fear so many, and seek to exclude them as unworthy of entering space they consider to be a part of their domain. Some of these quasi-public spaces are little more than cordon sanitaires meant to separate the safe space within from the dangerous space without. Liberty Park is not a cordon sanitaire but an economic convenience given by the city to a private corporation, one which a fraction of the public could put to good public use!

The polis endures!

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A bookstore chain dies

7.18.2011 Leave a comment

Borders est mort

First the chains demolished the local stores and then the internet retailers demolished the chain stores. The latest casualty:

Ann Arbor-based Borders Group Inc. plans to liquidate, marking the culmination of a years-long decline for the nation’s second largest bookstore chain, which had fallen into disrepair four decades after it opened its first store in downtown Ann Arbor.

I cannot say that this news makes me happy. The death of the Borders monster only removes another impediment to a market dominated by a few entities. This situation, should it come to pass, could prove dangerous to the exercise of unfettered political discourse and social criticism. The largest media conglomerates already impose themselves on so much of the public sphere that they threaten diversity merely by existing and having interests of their own. They would accomplish this simply by the “framing effects” produced by their preferences and strategies.

The internet, of course, can and does counterbalance this power and influence accumulation achieved though capital accumulation. We can immediately discover the truth of this claim simply by appreciating the fact I wrote about and published this notice on the internet!

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Quote of the Day

5.3.2011 Leave a comment

Ishmael Reed wrote this passage while discussing Joan Walsh, Salon.com and Ishmael Reed:

And after taking abuse from a Jim Crow media for a couple of hundred years has cyberspace provided a blogger underclass with the ability to talk back? To be heard and not just seen? To have a voice instead of being confined to providing musical interludes between serious “progressive” talk, like in the movies where the folks were brought up to the big house to belt out a few numbers. Are we arriving at a time when we get the opinions of the rest of us without being interpreted and explained by intermediaries?

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Chris Hedges discusses the Huffington Post

2.21.2011 Leave a comment

Journalist Chris Hedges’ latest piece is an obvious and understandable lament for the kind of investigative and critical journalism he practices and prefers. He also provides a somewhat restrained critique of those entities and practices that make journalism of that kind difficult. Hedges writes:

[My] encounters [with citizen journalists requesting interviews], which are frequent at public events, break my heart. I see myself in the older bloggers, many of whom worked for newspapers until they took buyouts or were laid off, as well as in the aspiring reporters. These men and women love the trade. They want to make a difference. They have the integrity not to sell themselves to public relations firms or corporate-funded propaganda outlets. And they keep at it, the way true artists, musicians or actors do, although there are dimmer and dimmer hopes of compensation. They are victims of a dying culture, one that no longer values the talents that would keep it healthy and humane. The corporate state remunerates corporate management and public relations. It lavishes money on the celebrities who provide the fodder for our national mini-dramas. But those who deal with the bedrock virtues of truth, justice and beauty, who seek not to entertain but to transform, are discarded. They must struggle on their own.

The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism. The Huffington Post, as Stephen Colbert pointed out when he stole the entire content of The Huffington Post and rechristened it The Colbuffington Re-post, produces little itself. The highly successful site, like most Internet sites, is largely pirated from other sources, especially traditional news organizations, or is the product of unpaid writers who are rechristened “citizen journalists.” It is driven by the celebrity gossip that dominates cheap tabloids, with one or two stories that come from The New York Times or one of the wire services to give it a veneer of journalistic integrity. Hollywood celebrities, or at least their publicists, write windy and vapid commentaries. And this, I fear, is what news is going to look like in the future. The daily reporting and monitoring of city halls, courts, neighborhoods and government, along with investigations into corporate fraud and abuse, will be replaced by sensational garbage and Web packages that are made to look like news but contain little real news.

Although I agree with Hedges’ complaints about journalism as it is mostly practiced today and especially with his remarks addressing the faults specific to the Huffington Post and to Arianna Huffington’s gross profiteering, I also believe that Hedges misses out on the greater significance the internet has had with respect to the practice of journalism today. What he misses is the fact that the internet provides to everyone who has access to it a low and therefore scalable entry barrier. Internet publishing is as inexpensive as an internet connection. Seed money is no longer a problem. And it is because this barrier is so low that common citizens — Alan Simpson’s “lesser people” — can now report the news they witness, analyze what they have reported and participate in a public debate about the meaning of the events that affect their lives.

More importantly, these common citizens can create self-funding public entities that are nothing but the presence of an enduring counter-public sphere, one able to defend its autonomy by refusing to adopt a for-profit economic model or by refusing to ally itself with the capital-intensive media, as Huffington did when she opted to join AOL. Journalism thus practiced has more in common with the famous little magazines which once made New York City the intellectual core of American politics and culture than it has with the New York Times and the Washington Post, with ABC and Fox News. Today, thanks to the internet, America’s alienated public intellectuals, its citizen journalists and its nearly voiceless citizens need not live near to each other in order to form a cohesive public. They can form a viable public simply because the internet provides the technical means for widely and almost costlessly distributing the news they report and the analysis they feel compelled to make.

It is for these reasons that I consider the internet as having deepened and intensified the civil features of what we call civilization. Opportunists like Arianna Huffington only sully this advance in civility. They cannot destroy it. Citizen journalists will survive their defections. They will survive because they truly are citizens and depend only on their own capabilities and on the rights needed to participate in the larger and inclusive public sphere.

Cross-posted at Fire Dog Lake

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