For those of you as "thrilled" with the Lame Duck Session managing to pull together and pass the majority of its rotten agenda as I am, let me explain to you why this isn't a cause for concern.
Lame Duck Sessions have a well-deserved reputation for un-accountable and corrupt policies pushed through by retiring or ousted politicians serving their special interests, especially in years when control of one or both houses will shift once the new Congress is sworn in. They are an opportunity for the defeated majority to engage in all the "midnight legislation" voters don't approve of, based on the philosophy of "they didn't re-elect us anyway". However, THIS Lame Duck Session has been very peculiar and illustrates a trend that both party leaderships continue to pretend not to notice, but that will hit them right between the eyes the day the new Congress is sworn in. I realize the term "bi-partisanship" is a fairly recent invention, but I think the level of inter-party cooperation we've seen in this Lame Duck Session is almost unprecedented in the history of Congress as a whole, much less in Lame Duck Sessions which tend to see very unilateral movement.
Obama may have peddled "bi-partisanship" for the last two years like it was going out of style, but in practice the Democrats did almost everything unilaterally: stimulus bills, Obamacare, climate change treaties - hardly any of this got a single Republican vote and most of it had significant revolts from the fringe left, but the supermajorities allowed the establishment Dems to ignore these conditions while chanting "bipartisanship" like groupies on LSD. Well, it would appear the midterm election instantly brought everyone back from the 1960s Collectivist trip. I remind you that its called a Lame Duck session because it is still the old Congress, not the one we elected in November, and yet NOW, despite one of the most unilaterally operating compositions in history, NOTHING is passing without massive inter-party compromise. The stimulus and unemployment extension that this same Congress passed unilaterally on multiple occasions died in Lame Duck Session TWICE. The Republican hostage-holding of the Lame Duck Session was bad for other reasons, but don't be fooled by the insipid rhetoric that Democrats HAD to compromise to keep the under 250k tax cut. The House passed it and the Senate was blocked from voting on it rather than poised to fail it, the new Senate could have voted on it the day it took power, and despite Republicans having gained a net of 6 seats, it would have passed just fine; I'll discuss why in a moment. It was a similar story with the rotten-to-the-core-as-usual budget bill, START, and the drowning of the one decent economic proposal of the session in the DREAM Act - each of these votes saw 0 party unity on either side of aisle. Obama's party still has super majorities in both Houses, and he's had to compromise and woo a large number of Republican votes to pass his Lame Duck session agenda, known historically to contain the most unaccountable and unpopular one-sided policies.
The reason for this is very simple. The Democrats were obviously punished in this election by voters for their assinine unilateralism in an economic meltdown, but no matter what John Boehner or Mitch McConnell says, the Republican establishment got a thrashing, not a "mandate". Unfortunately for them, Democrat unilateralism came too soon after the unapologetic and wanton tyranny of Bush Jr. and his Republican Congress, and the memories of those days are still too fresh even in the minds of the uninvolved and ignorant American electorate. THIS is why Republican establishment candidates dropped like flies in their own primaries; if we gave the GOP any kind of mandate, it was a mandate toward austerity, NOT compromise. The fact that Boehner, who once spearheaded the doomed austerity campaigns against Obamacare and the stimulus packages, is now as willing to sell his testicles to Obama as Obama is to McConnell and he is absolutely unsurprising. But what is heartening is that Boehner and McConnell are as unpopular among Republicans as Obama and Reid among Democrats despite having gained significantly on paper. In this Lame Duck Session, their sudden enamorment with bi-partisanship has only succeeded in giving Obama enough votes to make up for his revolting fringe, and pissing off their own base ever more while they're at it.
This trend is about to become exponentially worse. The Republicans may have gained a net of 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate, but the change in composition is a lot more than this. The 63 is a NET number because Republicans actually picked up 69 or 70 new seats in the House, but lost 6 or 7 to Democrats, adding up to a total of almost 80 district take-overs from one party to the other. And neither the House nor Senate net accounts for the dozens more seats picked up by new legislators who have replaced retiring members from the same parties. These new legislators had to win a primary with no incumbent within their own party to get to the general election, and while the media was obsessed with reporting on incumbents losing primaries, it grossly under-reported just how badly non-incumbent establishment candidates got slaughtered in open seat primaries across the entire country; and this refers to BOTH parties, not just Tea Party vs establishment Republicans. Seeing as the old Congress with mostly establishment legislators has already begun to revolt against party leadership in light of this election, come January we are going to see the kind of austerity this country hasn't experienced since the late 1930s and the derailing of the New Deal.
In short, the short-lived "bi-partisaship" we have seen in this Lame Duck session is nothing more than the death throws of the obsolete corporate and special interest cronyism of both party establishments; cronyism that we've had to choose the lesser evil of for decades but that is now having to join forces against the country's ever-growing disgust with it - not "compromise" - to get things done. Once the new Congress takes power, these establishment proposals will get equal amounts of votes from both sides of the aisle and STILL not have enough to pass, now THAT will be entertaining to say the least. I have this crazy theory that for any kind of representative government to work, it has to be made up of multiple factions that strongly disagree on everything rather than loosely defined party lines that are identical with the exception of the special interest that holds their leash. I'm not saying any of these are saints, but we are finally approaching an age in which Congress will be fragmented between at least 4 dramatically different factions - Progressives, the stalwart social conservative and civil libertarian factions that the Tea Party will almost invariably split into - who will still come together for economic votes, and the remnants of both party establishments that may as well merge into a faction called "the old corrupt luddites". Of course there will be alignments and alliances on various issues, but the 3 former factions agree in that they absolutely detest the 4th, and whether or not it declares any sort of formal unity, it will continue to take electoral beatings until it is reduced to insignifcance. Its not a mandate for either party, its a mandate to get rid of both. Viva the re-alignment, its about damn time.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Wikileaks: The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?
OK, so I know its far-fetched, and I certainly don't believe in any sort of astrological predictions of the future - although I can lecture for hours on how every world religion derives from astrology - but the more this Wikileaks controversy develops, the more I entertain the idea that it will ultimately usher in a new age in the social evolution of humanity, even that Assange may be viewed as a messiah of sorts by future generations in a few hundred years.
Think I'm crazy? Well, let's examine the facts.
For one, Wikileaks is absolutely unstoppable. Remember how the government craked down on truly disgusting trends in internet publishing with a clear victimization such as child pornography and now no one can find that type of thing on the internet? Me neither. Remember how the US Congress passed that law against US banks doing business with online casinos and now no one in the US gambles online anymore? Me neither. Remember how two lengthy, troublesome, expensive lawsuits shut down Napster and Limewire and all the other peer-to-peer file exchange programs got terrified and followed suit in closing their doors? Me neither. Even the Chinese government has reportedly achieved very limited success in restricting the access of their populace to content on the internet they disapprove of despite a complete absence of accountability and arguably unlimited resources for the accomplishment of this task. Undoubtedly, as demonstrated by the case of child pornography, the inherent lawlessness of the internet has its costs, but what I'm pointing out is that it is a medium not even the most draconian government can effectively control or censor. The reasons are multiple; its conduciveness to anonymity, its capacity to adapt to restrictions and circumnavigate them far faster than the blunt and inefficient instrument of government can crank them out, and its global nature that essentially makes it impossible to outlaw the dissemination of anything as long as it is legal or, more accurately, not enforced against at least SOMEWHERE in the world. Censoring the internet is like ant-proofing a house - patches everywhere, the whole place reeks of poison, and they are still coming out of every hole. Perhaps, in a decade or two, the governments of the world will adapt and form some sort of consensus that allows them to police the medium with at least reasonable efficiency; but judging by Wikileaks own accounts of how little said governments agree on and how petty they are about their differences, this isn't happening any time soon. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is here today and it is not one person but a broad and difficult to detect network that merely gives easy access to information that has been toxic and sought after for centuries; the idea that one government or another will stop it is just the believers in government holding on to their fantasy of government being all-powerful when it is not.
Secondly, Wikileaks is not by any means a new idea. I couldn't stop laughing the other day when I saw someone post a comment on Wikileaks' own facebook page praising it for being a check against the "growing culture of secrecy" in government. I don't know if said person failed their world history class in high school or took it in the USSR, but in order for a culture of secrecy to be growing it has to not already be operating to its maximum capacity in the first place. Classified information may be a relatively new concept introdicued in the 19th and 20th centuries, but transparency has always been lethal to anyone holding any sort of power in line with the compliance and not coercion premise of FYG. The Vatican ruled Europe for centuries not by force, but by convincing an effectively large majority of people there that Christianity as they defined it was not only real, but that they represented it and hence should be bowed down to. The one event that is most commonly cited as bringing about the end of their tyranny isn't some territorial conflict or breakthrough scientific discovery, but the invention of a little contraption called the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Slowly but surely, this allowed common people in Europe to read the Bible for themselves rather than trust some authority's interpretation and lose their faith in theocracy by virtue of realizing how much their authorities had lied to them, even if they still considered themselves devout Christians. To a lesser extent, the effects of late 19th century industrialization on availability of cheap reading materials and rising literacy rates among commoners can be credited with the loss of faith in the feudal-industrial complex in Europe in North America. It turned out that when women, minorities, workers and peasants, and so forth could READ the US Constitution, French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and so forth; they became far more difficult for the corporate cartels to dupe into trusting the supposedly representative governments the latter had on a short leash. The people demanded rights and accountability, and while by the accounts of many they have not achieved them to their full potential, few would argue that the inequality situation is worse now than it was 130 years ago. Wikileaks has strong potential to become the next development in this series. Various forms of information distribution that expose the pettiness, corruption, and ulterior motives every government has always held but managed to keep secret on a grand scale have always had a considerable market of consumption, but the media available in previous decades have allowed for their successful censorship and marginalization, usually culminating in the masses accepting the leaked information as an exception rather than a rule. By using the uncontrollable and easily distributing nature of the internet for these same purposes, Wikileaks may well be the next crucial step in eliminating the naive faith that the masses have in government being benevolent and representative of their interests.
Finally, similar to what I said about the Tea Party but on a global scale, Wikileaks thrives on attention and bad press that attempts to marginalize it only empowers it. The internet may be impossible to censor, but as I would have learned with this blog if I didn't know already, it is also very difficult to attract attention to yourself on it due to the immense volumes of competition. If I could somehow piss off Sean Hannity or Rachael Maddow enough to provoke them to mention this blog's web address, even in the most negative light, on their television shows - I'd be a national celebrity and have 1000s of hits overnight. Wikileaks has already accomplished this. The various news agencies may call it "controversial" and give a voice to assinine politicians like Hillary Clinton and Peter King who in turn call it dangerous and terrorist with their mind-numbing hyperbole, but to quote the show Married With Children, "at least they call it". Every report on the dangerousness and controversy of Wikileaks sends more traffic its way, as does every lemming who still believes the Patriot Act was a necessary measure to protect the American people that bitches about Wikileaks endangering him in a local bar, church, or other public establishment. Sure, some people who discover Wikileaks agree with these negative views of it (and then go on to spread them in a similar fashion), but this also encourages others who are open-minded to discover it and the information being distributed by it, lessening the aggregate faith of humanity in modern government structures. This is conjectural, but I'm not convinced Julian Assange didn't purposely turn himself over to the British authorities over these controversial sex crime charges, and not even to raise the question in people's minds of him being pursued by governments for ulterior motives, but simply to get his face on TV. The idea that the man who is the face of an organization like Wikileaks and gets away with this couldn't evade regular law enforcement if he wanted is pretty far-fetched - he turned himself in after all; whereas his resulting celebrity status from turning himself in and the ensuing debates over his guilt or innocence have kept him and Wikileaks in the news for weeks. Previous leak releases resulted in feverish reporting and similar backlashes from politicians, but these died down relatively quickly. Like the Tea Party, the more opponents and detractors fear Wikileaks, the bigger it gets - and in the case of an organization whose objective is to distribute information, this is an assured path to victory.
In a sense, adjusted to the modern world, these qualities make Wikileaks and Assange somewhat comparable to the various messiah figures of the past and their ultimate impact on human civilization. Whether or not Jesus Christ or Siddhartha the Buddha existed as actual historical people, and whether or not one succumbs to the religious convictions associated with either, it is easy to make the case that the legacy of these figures eradicated faith in the widely accepted structures that preceded them and redefined how society as a whole perceived the world it lives in. In the case of Buddha, this culminated in the evolution to mainstream the previously extreme idea of abstension in Eastern practice, in sharp contrast to the indulgent hedonism inherent to various Asian Pagan faiths like Hinduism and Shintoism. In the case of Christ, a similar embrace of abstention came to replace the indulgence of Roman and Norse Paganism in Europe, with the introduction of additional elements of tolerance, non-judgment, and religion as an intra-personal relationship that does not require any sort of ritual - most accurately a return to the essentials of Judaic religion but in sharp contrast to the policies of its theocratic establishment in Jesus's time. The modern world may be the most secular it has ever been in human history, but the absence of religion is not interchangeable with the absence of faith. Fewer people may believe in god, or more accurately in a strictly dogmatic definition of god that involves ritual and practice, but most people continue to believe in something. Modern faith ranges from broadly defined and eclectic spirituality and moralism to kooky conspiracy theories of an impending New World Order to quite simply the benevolent and representative nature of government. We have come a long way from a society that strictly imposes a rigid set of faith-based norms on all its members to one in which faith differs significantly from one person to another, but we have as far if not farther a road ahead of us to a society in which even a significant majority learns to question everything surrounding them in a scientific fashion rather than falling victim to the plethora of logical fallacies that lead them to accept ideas on faith. If this isn't evident already, I am a quite unapologetic enemy of faith. My conclusion from observation and research is that no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned the nature of a faith-based belief, the ease with which it is usurped to motivate people toward enforcement of oppression against others and tolerance of oppression against themselves will always cause it to bring more harm than good. Wikileaks just may be a pioneer in the next step of social evolution by which a significant majority comes to this same realization, even if this is not what it intends to do; and the ensuing abandonment of faith as a whole may bring about a world very different from the one we are currently familiar with.
Think I'm crazy? Well, let's examine the facts.
For one, Wikileaks is absolutely unstoppable. Remember how the government craked down on truly disgusting trends in internet publishing with a clear victimization such as child pornography and now no one can find that type of thing on the internet? Me neither. Remember how the US Congress passed that law against US banks doing business with online casinos and now no one in the US gambles online anymore? Me neither. Remember how two lengthy, troublesome, expensive lawsuits shut down Napster and Limewire and all the other peer-to-peer file exchange programs got terrified and followed suit in closing their doors? Me neither. Even the Chinese government has reportedly achieved very limited success in restricting the access of their populace to content on the internet they disapprove of despite a complete absence of accountability and arguably unlimited resources for the accomplishment of this task. Undoubtedly, as demonstrated by the case of child pornography, the inherent lawlessness of the internet has its costs, but what I'm pointing out is that it is a medium not even the most draconian government can effectively control or censor. The reasons are multiple; its conduciveness to anonymity, its capacity to adapt to restrictions and circumnavigate them far faster than the blunt and inefficient instrument of government can crank them out, and its global nature that essentially makes it impossible to outlaw the dissemination of anything as long as it is legal or, more accurately, not enforced against at least SOMEWHERE in the world. Censoring the internet is like ant-proofing a house - patches everywhere, the whole place reeks of poison, and they are still coming out of every hole. Perhaps, in a decade or two, the governments of the world will adapt and form some sort of consensus that allows them to police the medium with at least reasonable efficiency; but judging by Wikileaks own accounts of how little said governments agree on and how petty they are about their differences, this isn't happening any time soon. Meanwhile, Wikileaks is here today and it is not one person but a broad and difficult to detect network that merely gives easy access to information that has been toxic and sought after for centuries; the idea that one government or another will stop it is just the believers in government holding on to their fantasy of government being all-powerful when it is not.
Secondly, Wikileaks is not by any means a new idea. I couldn't stop laughing the other day when I saw someone post a comment on Wikileaks' own facebook page praising it for being a check against the "growing culture of secrecy" in government. I don't know if said person failed their world history class in high school or took it in the USSR, but in order for a culture of secrecy to be growing it has to not already be operating to its maximum capacity in the first place. Classified information may be a relatively new concept introdicued in the 19th and 20th centuries, but transparency has always been lethal to anyone holding any sort of power in line with the compliance and not coercion premise of FYG. The Vatican ruled Europe for centuries not by force, but by convincing an effectively large majority of people there that Christianity as they defined it was not only real, but that they represented it and hence should be bowed down to. The one event that is most commonly cited as bringing about the end of their tyranny isn't some territorial conflict or breakthrough scientific discovery, but the invention of a little contraption called the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. Slowly but surely, this allowed common people in Europe to read the Bible for themselves rather than trust some authority's interpretation and lose their faith in theocracy by virtue of realizing how much their authorities had lied to them, even if they still considered themselves devout Christians. To a lesser extent, the effects of late 19th century industrialization on availability of cheap reading materials and rising literacy rates among commoners can be credited with the loss of faith in the feudal-industrial complex in Europe in North America. It turned out that when women, minorities, workers and peasants, and so forth could READ the US Constitution, French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and so forth; they became far more difficult for the corporate cartels to dupe into trusting the supposedly representative governments the latter had on a short leash. The people demanded rights and accountability, and while by the accounts of many they have not achieved them to their full potential, few would argue that the inequality situation is worse now than it was 130 years ago. Wikileaks has strong potential to become the next development in this series. Various forms of information distribution that expose the pettiness, corruption, and ulterior motives every government has always held but managed to keep secret on a grand scale have always had a considerable market of consumption, but the media available in previous decades have allowed for their successful censorship and marginalization, usually culminating in the masses accepting the leaked information as an exception rather than a rule. By using the uncontrollable and easily distributing nature of the internet for these same purposes, Wikileaks may well be the next crucial step in eliminating the naive faith that the masses have in government being benevolent and representative of their interests.
Finally, similar to what I said about the Tea Party but on a global scale, Wikileaks thrives on attention and bad press that attempts to marginalize it only empowers it. The internet may be impossible to censor, but as I would have learned with this blog if I didn't know already, it is also very difficult to attract attention to yourself on it due to the immense volumes of competition. If I could somehow piss off Sean Hannity or Rachael Maddow enough to provoke them to mention this blog's web address, even in the most negative light, on their television shows - I'd be a national celebrity and have 1000s of hits overnight. Wikileaks has already accomplished this. The various news agencies may call it "controversial" and give a voice to assinine politicians like Hillary Clinton and Peter King who in turn call it dangerous and terrorist with their mind-numbing hyperbole, but to quote the show Married With Children, "at least they call it". Every report on the dangerousness and controversy of Wikileaks sends more traffic its way, as does every lemming who still believes the Patriot Act was a necessary measure to protect the American people that bitches about Wikileaks endangering him in a local bar, church, or other public establishment. Sure, some people who discover Wikileaks agree with these negative views of it (and then go on to spread them in a similar fashion), but this also encourages others who are open-minded to discover it and the information being distributed by it, lessening the aggregate faith of humanity in modern government structures. This is conjectural, but I'm not convinced Julian Assange didn't purposely turn himself over to the British authorities over these controversial sex crime charges, and not even to raise the question in people's minds of him being pursued by governments for ulterior motives, but simply to get his face on TV. The idea that the man who is the face of an organization like Wikileaks and gets away with this couldn't evade regular law enforcement if he wanted is pretty far-fetched - he turned himself in after all; whereas his resulting celebrity status from turning himself in and the ensuing debates over his guilt or innocence have kept him and Wikileaks in the news for weeks. Previous leak releases resulted in feverish reporting and similar backlashes from politicians, but these died down relatively quickly. Like the Tea Party, the more opponents and detractors fear Wikileaks, the bigger it gets - and in the case of an organization whose objective is to distribute information, this is an assured path to victory.
In a sense, adjusted to the modern world, these qualities make Wikileaks and Assange somewhat comparable to the various messiah figures of the past and their ultimate impact on human civilization. Whether or not Jesus Christ or Siddhartha the Buddha existed as actual historical people, and whether or not one succumbs to the religious convictions associated with either, it is easy to make the case that the legacy of these figures eradicated faith in the widely accepted structures that preceded them and redefined how society as a whole perceived the world it lives in. In the case of Buddha, this culminated in the evolution to mainstream the previously extreme idea of abstension in Eastern practice, in sharp contrast to the indulgent hedonism inherent to various Asian Pagan faiths like Hinduism and Shintoism. In the case of Christ, a similar embrace of abstention came to replace the indulgence of Roman and Norse Paganism in Europe, with the introduction of additional elements of tolerance, non-judgment, and religion as an intra-personal relationship that does not require any sort of ritual - most accurately a return to the essentials of Judaic religion but in sharp contrast to the policies of its theocratic establishment in Jesus's time. The modern world may be the most secular it has ever been in human history, but the absence of religion is not interchangeable with the absence of faith. Fewer people may believe in god, or more accurately in a strictly dogmatic definition of god that involves ritual and practice, but most people continue to believe in something. Modern faith ranges from broadly defined and eclectic spirituality and moralism to kooky conspiracy theories of an impending New World Order to quite simply the benevolent and representative nature of government. We have come a long way from a society that strictly imposes a rigid set of faith-based norms on all its members to one in which faith differs significantly from one person to another, but we have as far if not farther a road ahead of us to a society in which even a significant majority learns to question everything surrounding them in a scientific fashion rather than falling victim to the plethora of logical fallacies that lead them to accept ideas on faith. If this isn't evident already, I am a quite unapologetic enemy of faith. My conclusion from observation and research is that no matter how benevolent and well-intentioned the nature of a faith-based belief, the ease with which it is usurped to motivate people toward enforcement of oppression against others and tolerance of oppression against themselves will always cause it to bring more harm than good. Wikileaks just may be a pioneer in the next step of social evolution by which a significant majority comes to this same realization, even if this is not what it intends to do; and the ensuing abandonment of faith as a whole may bring about a world very different from the one we are currently familiar with.
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