For most of my lifetime most Republicans have been scoundrels and I have never gone far wrong simply assuming they were scoundrels until they proved themselves sensible citizens (as once upon a time some indeed managed to do). But now to be a Republican seems to be worse than to be a scoundrel, but something like an actual agent of evil, some kind of rampaging force for tyranny, confiscation, corruption, and hate. I'm flabbergasted to find myself living in a day in which I can say that I am unsurprised to find not a single member of the Republican party voting against a man who has formally endorsed torture becoming Attorney General of the United States.
And now, even more unfathomably, here are the Democrats who voted YES for Mukasey (among them the abominable snake Feinstein, eternal hack, Patroness of the Bomb-Builders, indifferent altogether to the sentiments of the State she claims to "represent," my own California):
Bayh (D-IN)
Carper (D-DE)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Nelson (D-NE)
Schumer (D-NY)
Glenn Greenwald Writes:
[C]hief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer… before voting for him, said that Mukasey is "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . "
Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It's just one issue, like any other issue… and just because someone is "dead wrong" on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.
Oh, as for the timorous paragons of righteous "realpolitik" who chose not to vote on this insignificant little matter:
Biden (D-DE)
Clinton (D-NY)
Dodd (D-CT)
Obama (D-IL)
Disgusting.
Just an observation:
ReplyDeleteA significant number (perhaps most) of the students who take Rhetoric course are pre-law or law students and probably some political science majors. Thus rhetoric profs are part of machine of turning out more lawyers. Most lawyers get hired by big companies (with more money) and big government and big government lobbyists.
http://books.google.com/books?id=c9T-NxWLNicC&pg=PA175&lpg=PA175&dq=percent+politicians+lawyers&source=web&ots=POLpOzZoXQ&sig=EyaQ4WiSS9k2fKxASu3ipbTtuOw
Lawyers are 55-74% of the senate.
Lawyers are 55-59% of the house.
A legislative loopholes for taxes and other issues are developed by lawyers working with highend accountants.
Rhetoric is one of the enabling tool used by those in the system.
I wonder if Karl Rove took rhetoric courses at the University for his Utah political science major.
There are good lawyers and evil lawyers, good scientists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians and evil ones. What's your point?
ReplyDeleteDale wrote:
ReplyDelete> For most of my lifetime most Republicans have been scoundrels
> and I have never gone far wrong simply assuming they were
> scoundrels until they proved themselves sensible citizens
> (as once upon a time some indeed managed to do). But now to
> be a Republican seems to be worse than to be a scoundrel, but
> something like an actual agent of evil, some kind of rampaging
> force for tyranny, confiscation, corruption, and hate.
From Robert Altemeyer's _The Authoritarians_
http://members.shaw.ca/perchaluk/drbob/chapter1.pdf
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Altemeyer )
------------------------------------------------------
Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference
By now you must be developing a feel for what high
R[ight]W[ing]A[uthoritarian]s think and do, and
also an impression of low RWAs. Do you think you know
each group well enough to predict what they’d do if
they ran the world? One night in October, 1994 I let a
group of low RWA university students determine the future
of the planet (you didn’t know humble researchers could
do this, did you!). Then the next night I gave high
RWAs their kick at the can.
The setting involved a rather sophisticated simulation
of the earth’s future called the Global Change Game, which
is played on a big map of the world by 50-70 participants
who have been split into various regions such as North America,
Africa, India and China. The players are divided up according
to current populations, so a lot more students hunker down
in India than in North America. The game was designed
to raise environmental awareness, 24 and before the exercise
begins players study up on their region’s resources, prospects,
and environmental issues.
Then the facilitators who service the simulation call for some
member, any member of each region, to assume the role of team leader
by simply standing up. Once the “Elites”in the world have risen
to the task they are taken aside and given control of their region’s
bank account. They can use this to buy factories, hospitals, armies,
and so on from the game bank, and they can travel the world making
deals with other Elites. They also discover they can discreetly
put some of their region’s wealth into their own pockets, to vie
for a prize to be given out at the end of the simulation to the
World’s Richest Person. Then the game begins, and the world goes
wherever the players take it for the next forty years which, because
time flies in a simulation, takes about two and a half hours.
The Low RWA Game
By carefully organizing sign-up booklets, I was able to get
67 low RWA students to play the game together on October 18th.
(They had no idea they had been funneled into this run of the
experiment according to their RWA scale scores; indeed
they had probably never heard of right-wing authoritarianism.)
Seven men and three women made themselves Elites. As soon as the
simulation began, the Pacific Rim Elite called for a summit on the
“Island Paradise of Tasmania.” All the Elites attended and agreed
to meet there again whenever big issues arose. A world-wide organization
was thus immediately created by mutual consent.
Regions set to work on their individual problems. Swords were converted
to ploughshares as the number of armies in the world dropped. No wars
or threats of wars occurred during the simulation. [At one point the
North American Elite suggested starting a war to his fellow region-aires
(two women and one guy), but they told him to go fly a kite--or words
to that effect.]
An hour into the game the facilitators announced a (scheduled) crisis
in the earth’s ozone layer. All the Elites met in Tasmania and contributed
enough money to buy new technology to replenish the ozone layer.
Other examples of international cooperation occurred, but the problems
of the Third World mounted in Africa and India. Europe gave some aid but
North America refused to help. Africa eventually lost 300 million people
to starvation and disease, and India 100 million.
Populations had grown and by the time forty years had passed the
earth held 8.7 billion people, but the players were able to provide
food, health facilities, and jobs for almost all of them. They did
so by demilitarizing, by making a lot of trades that benefited both
parties, by developing sustainable economic programs, and because
the Elites diverted only small amounts of the treasury into their
own pockets. (The North American Elite hoarded the most.)
One cannot blow off four hundred million deaths, but this was actually
a highly successful run of the game, compared to most. No doubt the
homogeneity of the players, in terms of their RWA scores and related
attitudes, played a role. Low RWAs do not typically see the world as
“Us versus Them.” They are more interested in cooperation than most
people are, and they are often genuinely concerned about the environment.
Within their regional groups, and in the interactions of the Elites,
these first-year students would have usually found themselves “on the
same page”--and writ large on that page was, “Let’s Work Together and
Clean Up This Mess.” The game’s facilitators said they had never seen
as much international cooperation in previous runs of the simulation.
With the exception of the richest region, North America, the lows
saw themselves as interdependent and all riding on the same merry-go-round.
The High RWA Game
The next night 68 high RWAs showed up for their ride, just as ignorant
of how they had been funneled into this run of the experiment as the
low RWA students had been the night before. The game proceeded as usual.
Background material was read, Elites (all males) nominated themselves,
and the Elites were briefed. Then the “wedgies” started. As soon as the
game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil
had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as
the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies
and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional
forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A
nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth--7.4 billion
people--and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune
of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.
When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn
out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then
the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning
back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The
former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time,
killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for
a “United Nations” meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no
agreements were reached.
At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but--perhaps because of
the recent failure of the United Nations meeting--no one called for a
summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so
the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped
regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing
with the social and economic problems “back home,” Elites began jockeying
among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to
confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room
and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start
another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager
resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of
collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the
crises--take your pick--and nobody came.
By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps
threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven
hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the
400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion.
Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs
managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world--although we, like some
battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.
The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the
character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own
pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s
Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World
Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high
RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of
people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other
and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from
the same page, but writ large on their page was, “Care About Your Own; We
Are NOT All In This Together.”
The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys tha
they care about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually
push and shove for the bucks. That is, they didn’t care much about the
long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example
a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s
forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable.
But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was
very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when
it came to birth control. Advised that “just letting things go” would
cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians
just let things go.
Now the Global Change Game is not the world stage, university students
are not world leaders, and starting a nuclear holocaust in a gymnasium is
not the same thing as launching real missiles from Siberia and North Dakota.
So the students’ behavior on those two successive nights in 1994 provides
little basis for drawing conclusions about the future of the planet. But some
of what happened in this experiment rang true to me. I especially thought,
“I’ve seen this show before” as I sat on the sidelines and
watched the high RWAs create their very own October crisis.