Schlagwort-Archive: oddly enough

oddly enough, US Politics

Who likes Iceman?

This time Maureen Dowd got it wrong. W’s campaign video shooting on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln just off the Californian cost may be provoking comparisons to ‘Maverick’, the protagonist of Don Simpson’s and Jerry Bruckheimer’s 1985 hit-film TopGun – but it’s dead wrong.

‘Maverick’ is a good cowboy, not a bad one. He’s the bearer of the good America of my youth. He’s the mustang that roams and runs wild in Marlboro country. He’s disregarding the rules until he learns that, sometimes, they do make sense. He loses a friend, then faith, he lives at the edge of despair, but he grows and returns as a wiser man. And, hey, he gets the girl.

We may be not be flying F-14s on a daily basis, but I am pretty sure most of us aspire to be some kind of ‘Maverick’, ‘the best of the best’, in whatever we do.

The screenplay for TopGun II, ‘the Washinton connection’, that Maureen Dowd is proposing today, would not survive any producer’s scrutiny for more than five minutes. No one would want to see a film in which the dull and rational Iceman would become the bearer of truth. Of course, W’s PR people know that, and that’s why they made him play ‘Maverick’.

But he’s not. Or, let’s say – should W indeed be Maverick, we would be only 20 minutes into the film. And I am pretty sure that Ms Dowd is not favoring another seventy minutes of a W presidency, including the question which horrible incident would make W lose faith and self confidence.

Let’s just hope we’ll never know who would have to play ‘Goose’ in the sequel…

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Iraq, oddly enough, quicklink, US Politics

Saddam Hussein, MBA.

This is good. Condoleeza Rice has presented a new rationale for the current lack of Iraqi WMDs – while admitting that

“Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war”,

she readily explained why that should have been expected anyway – Saddam knew about “Just-In- Time” manufacturing – “Just-in-time assembly” and “just-in-time inventory”. Now really. But speaking of management buzzwords, I guess one could make a real case for Saddam excelling in “global sourcing”… (from the Autralian f2-netowork via Tom Tomorrow).

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intellectual property rights, Iraq, music industry, oddly enough, quicklink

They take no chances.

If this report by Telepolis is right, then Hillary Rose, the former chief RIAA lobbyist, is currently rewriting the copyright laws of Iraq. Just in case the Iraqi ideas about intellectual property rights should differ from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Actually, the journalist Gregory Palast is not unjustifiedly wondering whether the combination of sharia and the DMCA would result in hands being chopped off for filesharing. Hmm, I guess I am favoring a kinder, gentler version – just chop off the index-finger. After all, isn’t it always that bad guy that clicks on ‘download’?

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oddly enough, quicklink, US Politics

Bush vs. Masturbation

Following on Sen. Santorum’s recent intervention concerning the legal status of homosexuals’ privacy in the US,

“President Bush is proud to introduce an ambitious new phase in the fight to preserve all that is decent in America. Conceived and championed by the revered Republican think tank Americans for Purity, ‘Operation Infinite Purity‘ is dedicated to the complete eradication of masturbation from American soil by the year 2005.”

From the Whitehouse.org

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compulsory reading, German Politics, Iraq, oddly enough, US Politics

Reality Construction.

One of the currently more popular theories of US-war-blogosphere regarding the German and French government’s opposition to the war is that they opposed it in order to conceal the extent to which they were involved in the built-up of Iraq’s pool of WMD. This theory has been prominently publicized by Steven DenBeste.

For all those who hold the opinion that no thinking human being could oppose the war for non-selfish reasons, DenBeste’s theory seemed to be a logic explanation of reality. But it has serious flaws. It is certainly not flawed to say that there is a certain possibility that a number of German and French companies (as well as companies from other nations…) sold suspicious stuff to Saddam’s regime pre-, but especially post 1991 in breach of UN sanctions. It is, however, flawed to argue that the French and German government’s opposition to the war must have been informed by this, including the possibility that the governments actually found out about such a breach by companies legally residing in the respective country. In fact, such a conclusion is actually illogical – although chances are, we will never find out, because whatever is or is not reported to be found in Iraq is entirely within the discretion of those in control of the area.

Thus, depending on the US’ government’s intentions of how to involve Europe in the reconstruction of Iraq (that’s what denBeste calls the ‘blackmailing strategy’), the theory could well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eamonn Fitzgerald today points to an article in the New York Times that illustrates this rather well – now that the US and the UK are actually in charge of Iraq and will soon be in control of whatever remains of the previous administration, they are unlikely to reveal information that would put blame on themselves for whatever remains of WMDs they may find down there. And I suppose they will find something eventually – they simply have to, after using the Iraqi WMD-threat as a pro-war-discourse element for so long. So it is very likely that the stuff they will acknowledge to have found will be of Old European production – French, I suppose – and, again, the amount of stuff revealed will probably depend on the development of the transatlantic relationship in the coming weeks and months.

Looking at the problem from this perspective, the DenBeste theory does not make much sense. Had Germany’s and France’s governments been involved in the military build-up of Iraq in a way they would have deemed necessary to conceal, the logical policy would have been to be as involved in the invasion as possible in order to retain as much control over what will be found and what will be published now. Being as closely allied to the US as possible is certainly a better way to achieve that than publicly angering the Pentagon’s PR people, don’t you think?

But even though the theory may be wrong, the result may eventually be close to what Steven DenBeste predicted. Some reality will be constructed, even though, in the end, no one will actually know what has been going on.

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almost a diary, Germany, Iraq, oddly enough

To Guard The American Poo

Ok, I know this place is getting progressively mono thematic. And I know there is a lot of note/newsworthy stuff going on that too many people, including myself, are forgetting about because the war in Iraq is requiring too much of our sensory bandwidth. But there’s hope: yesterday morning, for the first time in weeks, if not months, something not Iraq related – a bank-robbery-and-bus-hijacking in Berlin – was the number one news item in German media. But as no one died in Berlin today, Baghdad was back on top by 4pm. Isn’t that sending a message to all hijackers – “listen, perpetrators, the attention threshold has risen significantly. If you still want your fifteen minutes, try at least to hurt someone badly.”

Anyway. I just wanted to show you a funny good-night picture I found on www.totalobscurity.com where I was sent by Lillimarleen. I know what you think: Photoshop. I did too, but totalobscurity.com claims it is a real product…

To Guard The American Poo

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compulsory reading, Iraq, oddly enough, Political Theory, US Politics

A Tale of Perle and Pirls

So Baghdad sort of fell today. The Iraqi regime seems to have disappeared overnight. This is clearly a very good thing. I still believe that this war was unnecessary as well as unwise and I still believe that it is going to be far more costly – monetarily as well as in lives and in terms of international security – than the US administration seems to have reckoned in their calculations. And it is not over yet.

But I am ready to admit that I was moved by the Iraqi people welcoming the US troops – and I felt reminded of the tales my parents told me about US soldiers handing out chocolate to starving German toddlers after WW2. Whatever the regime that will follow on the US military government will be like, whether authoritarian, in order to handle the ethnic clashes and distributive conflicts that will in all likelihood arise now, or possibly truly democratic – as Paul Wolfowitz said today, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, a government of the Iraqi people, by the Iraqi people, for the Iraqi people – life in Iraq will in all likelihood be better in the future than it was in the past. And not just because of the “tax refunds” some Iraqis claimed today in the form of previously administration-owned furniture.

However, for the time being, I still do not share the US neoconservatives’ assessment that the American Prometheus can indeed bring good governance and enlightenment to the middle east. Certainly not within a few years. And that’s a huge part of the problem. The Saudis welcomed the US in 1990. Four years later, they were already regarded as semi-occupiers of Islamic holy land. Candy for kids is not going to modernize the region by itself. Just as Brad DeLong notes today –

… we could still turn operational victory into strategic defeat, and harm the national security of the United States. The story the world needs to tell itself is that the United States overthrew a cruel dictator and gave Iraqis a much better life, not the out-of-control United States bombed and invaded a small country because President Bush wanted to get his hands on its oil.

I suppose, there is indeed a tiny, tiny chance that social modernisation by tank could work. And it remains tiny, even though the professionalism of the allied troops that made this war a short campaign without too many civilian victims has clearly increased it significantly. But however minuscule it is, the US has – against the will of many – committed itself and the rest of “the west” to embark on this adventure.

I contend I do not believe it will work. But this is a problem where I would love to be proven wrong in the end. If all goes well, I am hereby inviting Richard Perle to publicly lecture me in, say, 15 years about the right attitude in international relations with the following fable. It was, interestingly enough, part of the recently published “The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study” (PIRLS) which assessed a range of reading comprehension strategies of ten year olds in 35 countries. I thought about adapting it to “Weasel heralds the War!” but then decided against it – after all, it is a fable that is very likely to remain just that.

Hare Heralds the Earthquake
by Rosalind Kerven

There was once a hare who was always worrying. “Oh dear,” he muttered all day long, “oh deary, deary me.” His greatest worry was that there might be an earthquake. “For if there was,” he said to himself, “whatever would become of me?”

He was feeling particularly anxious about this one morning, when suddenly an enormous fruit fell down from a nearby tree – CRASH! – making the whole earth shake. The hare leaped up. “Earthquake!” he cried. And with that he raced across the fields to warn his cousins.

“Earthquake! Run for your lives!” All the hares left the fields and madly followed him. They raced across the plains, through forests and rivers and into the hills warning more cousins as they went. “Earthquake! Run for your lives!” All the hares left the rivers and plains, the hills and forests and madly followed. By the time they reached the mountains, ten thousand hares pounded like thunder up the slopes. Soon they reached the highest peak. The first hare gazed back to see if the earthquake was coming any closer, but all he could see was a great swarm of speeding hares. Then he looked in front but all he could see was more mountains and valleys and, far in the distance, the shining blue sea.

As he stood there panting, a lion appeared. “What’s happening?” he asked. “Earthquake, earthquake!” babbled all the hares. “An earthquake?” asked the lion. “Who has seen it? Who has heard it?” “Ask him, ask him!” cried all the hares, pointing to the first one. The lion turned to the hare.

“Please Sir,” said the hare shyly, “I was sitting quietly at home when there was a terrible crash and the ground shook and I knew it must be a quake, Sir, so I ran as fast as I could to warn all the others to save their lives.” The lion looked at the hare from his deep, wise eyes.

“My brother, would you be brave enough to show me where this dreadful disaster happened?”

The hare didn’t really feel brave enough at all, but he felt he could trust the lion. So, rather timidly, he led the lion back down the mountains and the hills, across the rivers, plains, forests and fields, until at last they were back at his home.

“This is where I heard it, Sir.” The lion gazed around – and very soon he spotted the enormous fruit which had fallen so noisily from its tree. He picked it up in his mouth, climbed onto a rock and dropped it back to the ground. CRASH! The hare jumped. “Earthquake! Quickly – run away – it’s just happened again!”

But suddenly he realized that the lion was laughing. And then he saw the fruit rocking gently by his feet. “Oh,” he whispered, “it wasn’t really an earthquake after all, was it?” “No,” said the lion, “it was not and you had no need to be afraid.” “What a silly hare I’ve been!”

The lion smiled kindly. “Never mind, little brother. All of us – even I – sometimes fear things we cannot understand.” And with that he padded back to the ten thousand hares that were still waiting on top of the mountain, to tell them that it was now quite safe to go home.

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German Politics, oddly enough

Anti American Room Cleaning.

Although it could be, this entry is not about the certainly soon-to-be-amended amendment to the White House war financing budgetary requests excluding German, French, and Russian companies from receiving US funds for the future Iraq reconstruction that the American legislature passed two days ago.

In these times of increasingly global interaction, there are more and more people who can tell stories about the limits of citizenship regimes which are organised along classic national lines. Personally, I know a number of people who are legally German but never actually put a foot on German soil. I know a guy hailing from Argentina who is a Swedish national and now lives in the United States. Every member of a close friend’s family holds a different – or even combinations – of the following nationalities – Spanish, Mexican, British, and American.

And here’s an added political twist, given the recent row between GWB and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. In a recent interview, Schröder stated that the daughter of his fourth wife, Doris Schröder-Köpf, is an American citizen, actually, she is *only* an American citizen – for she was born when Doris Schröder-Köpf lived and worked as a journalist in New York some years ago. I don’t know if Schröder legally adopted her child, but he does refer to her as “our daughter”.

So the German chancellor does have an American daughter. I guess she will have fun invoking his alleged “anti-Americanism” when he tells her to clean up her room.

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compulsory reading, oddly enough, Political Theory, US Politics, USA

Desperately Seeking Simplicity

Somehow, I hate to restate something as obvious as this – the world we are living in is an extremely complex system. A system far too complicated for any individual to understand. That’s why we tend to categorize and model the world in order to reduce complexity and gain a little insight into the “underlying causes” of the reality constructed by our sensory system.

But somehow, I guess it is necessary. Fellow German Blogger “Lilimarleen” wonders how people living in a world featuring violent anti-globalisation demonstrations and politicians desperate to cater to the needs of multinational corporations with the ability to go “regime shopping” can actually believe that there is something like a “national” product that can be boycotted without harming anyone but a clearly (nationally) identifiable producer (and oneself, because of the choice not to engange in a otherwise utility enhancing transaction).

The answer is evident, in my opinion – they are looking for simplicity – and ways to regain control of a global system that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control. Knowing that their individual *political*, ie “non-market”, influence on the relevant international players’ actions is not even negligible, they are turning to a different institution of imaginary popular control – consumer “democracy”. As one of Lilimarleen’s reader’s remarked –

“Boycotting is the only way that I can make a difference.”

Well, should the problem of collective action indeed be overcome by a specific momentum like the current wave of “Freedom”-branding, they could indeed have *some* influence. But in an extremely complex system like the world economy, there is no way to predict the indirect ramifications of their actions apart from the fact that everyone will suffer from reduced economic exchange.

In order to uphold this illusion of influence those boycotting “French” products need to adopt a simplistic view of the transactional structure through which the good in question has been created.

I suppose it’s a bit like driving fast in a car – a mechanism of mental self protection. Rationally, I know that there are quite a lot of things that could lead to an accident that are entirely out of my realm of decision making. But I don’t think about that because holding the steering weel emotionally reassures me that I am in control of the machine I am sitting in. I am deluding myself, and I know it.

But otherwise, I would not be able to drive (fast) at all. And there is no way I would renounce to that.

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media, oddly enough, Political Theory, US Politics, USA

Stalinism.

Andrew Northrup is concerned with the distorted reality that mass media is constructing in our heads, specifcally by the notion that the western public is more and more appalled even by small numbers of wartime casualties, citing an article by Greg Easterbrook who seems to hold this opinion –

“[a]s we weep for the Iraqi dead – whoever slew them, they did not deserve their fates–we should reflect that the recent trend both of general war, as in Iraq, and of ‘armed conflict,’ as in other places, is for fewer people to die, while the threshold of what constitutes an atrocity is steadily lowered. Both are good signs for the human prospect.”

Northrup, on the other hand holds that

“… media coverage, and world opinion, has basically nothing to do with actual magnitudes, and basically everything to do with scoring political points. … Is a single Palestinian or Israeli death global news because a precious, precious life was lost, and life is the most precious, precious thing there is? Or because it lets someone say “I told you so”?”

He certainly makes a good point by citing an Economist article about another – far bloodier – war that is being waged these days without global attention – in Africa, Congo, to be precise, a forgotten country on a forgotten continent –

“… if the Economist’s figures are to be believed, the death toll of the past half-decade in Congo is about the same as the entire population of the occupied territories, or Israel, or Baghdad. Put another way, it’s 3 orders of magnitude greater than Intifada 2, probably 4 powers of ten greater than GW2 (so far…), and has received 3 or 4 orders of magnitude less press coverage than either one. The explanation for this is politics, not the greater caring and sensitivity of 21st century man.”

I agree that domestic and international political/ economic salience is clearly an important variable to explain media attention – but I think that casualty numbers do have some importance, albeit not quite in the way that Mr Easterbrook alleges.

I doubt human beings have become any more emphatic in recent years than they have been before. But low casualty numbers allow a stronger expressions of empathy than higher numbers – mostly because of psychological “bandwidth restrictions”. We might be able to grasp the suffering of a few people, but not that of millions. Factor that into the media’s programming decisions and there is an additional explanation for overproportional coverage of “small scale” atrocities.

Maybe Andrew Northrup forgot about a point once made by Joseph Stalin: while the Soviet dictator was undisputably wrong in pretty much everything he ever said or did – after all, depending on whom you ask he will be a close runner up to Hitler or even top the Austro-German monster on the list of the most evil men of the 20st century – he seems to have had a certain grasp of mass media constructed reality and human psychology when he once stated that –

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

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