Links and Minifeatures 2008 01 18 (Friday)

The San Diego Special Edition

I have to agree with Don Surber on the economic stimulus package.

Yes, there are people who are getting hurt by the mortgage meltdown. The stimulus package won't help those who are consumers. The ones who are corporations made a bet and lost. That's why they make the big bucks - because they're supposed to, in theory, deal with it themselves if it all goes wrong.

Those corporations made those choices in full cognizance of consequences. Far as I'm concerned, they can. Suck. It. Up.

Photographs are easily understood. Unless they've been altered, they tell truth. Unfortunately, they only tell that portion of the truth seen from that camera's viewpoint when the shutter clicked. Neo-neocon has a beautiful example of how photographs can be used to lie.

I was 11 in 1972. I remember the reactions to those photos. For one, I found out the real truth almost immediately. For the other, I was in college (late 70's/early 80s) when I found out what had really happened. In both cases, however, the editors of the newspapers involved knew the stories at the same time they got the photographs, and nonetheless used these two very famous photographs to twist their representation of those events in the furtherance of their preferred narrative. For me, It was an early education in the way smart people get others to believe lies: Tell the truth, but only that portion of the truth that agrees with your agenda.

Whatever our opinion of our current governmental mess, we can all give thanks to whatever we worship that we don't live in Yemen, as Jane over at Armies of Liberation covers their seemingly escalating civil conflict.

Jeez, keep people in poverty and under the oppression of a ruthless dictatorship for a measly thirty years, a mere half dozen or so stolen elections on one hand, turn a blind eye allowing religious nutcases to arm themselves and organize...

And you have a recipe for disaster like any number of others. You really want the litany? It just makes me even more depressed.

Every single one of the people of Yemen is a human being, with as much human dignity and value as anyone else anywhere in the world. That we don't have to put up with it and they do is nothing more than an accident of birth, and I am embarrassed and mortified that the people of the developed world have let it come to this pass, and that I among them haven't done more to shut it down. I weep that there is no way any of the so called "wealthy, developed" countries of the world is going to do anything to help remedy the situation, and that many of the very people who pretend to care the most about the downtrodden have caused this in the name of immediate political expediency. I am deeply sorry that the people of Yemen, once one of the more promising countries of the region, have been sold down the river one tiny bit at a time over the last six decades in the name of what was convenient at the time.

Words fail.

When are we going to face the fact that anyone living in a repressed state anywhere in the world is the problem of everyone else everywhere in the world in these days when one mentally imbalanced "revolutionary guerrilla" with access to the right weapons can potentially murder hundreds of thousands of people that have nothing to do with their conflict? There may not be any immediate solutions, but that's no excuse for allowing these problem areas to fester. Can't we at least adopt, "Set up the conditions to make it better. Never let it get any worse" as a working creed?

To all the "international realists": Your butcher's bill has come due. Again.

Jawa Report is asking for help getting some terrorist websites shut down. If you want to feel a little bit better about yourself after the above, take some action in the propaganda war against repressive murdering scum that are also trying to kill our soldiers and a few million-sized lots of us civilians, if they can.

Christopher Hitchens on bigotry in The Perils of Identity Politics

I have nothing but contempt for anyone who votes for or against anyone upon the basis of such superficialities as skin color or gender. It is just as bigoted to vote for someone because they are black or a woman or a giant three toed tree sloth as it is to vote against them because you're not. Please, can somebody kill this undead horse of an idea once and for all so we can all stop beating it? Otherwise, we're going to end up in a tribalized mess like the former Yugoslavia, or any number of countries in Africa, to name only the most obvious examples.

I am not going to vote for a bad candidate because "it's time" for a member of whatever group they supposedly represent to be elected. Any representation that doing so can in any way be represented as sane or rational behavior is pure Male Bovine Fecal Matter.

Captain's Quarters on "Politicizing the Office"

Or, to use the morality of an eight year old: "It's okay when we do it because we're the good guys."

That one won't wash with anyone past middle school.

Much much more at Judicial Watch (via Michelle Malkin