http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sat, 26 Oct 2002 14:23:59 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/26/142359.php Gene HealyIf you're looking for a good read, and one that confirms what you may have suspected about the international war on drugs, I heartily recommend Mark Bowden's recent book Killing Pablo. You may know Bowden from his previous book, Black Hawk Down, about the 1993 debacle in Somalia that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead. Killing Pablo hasn't received as much attention in the press, but it's every bit the equal of Black Hawk Down.In Killing Pablo, Bowden tells the story of the U.S.-led effort to kill Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. As he did in Black Hawk Down, Bowden tells it straight, without editorializing. But you'll bristle at the wasted resources and moral compromises involved in the whole sordid mess. After an 18-month long manhunt involving Delta Force, CIA, and the U.S. Army's "Centra Spike" spy team, a group of Delta-trained Columbian paramilitaries called the "Search Bloc" finally killed Pablo Escobar. That's nothing to cry about. As the book makes clear, Escobar was every bit as bad a guy as U.S. propaganda made him out to be. But just about everything else in this story is tragic. The drug war is devastating the rule of law and the political culture in emerging democracies to our south. And it's doing so in service of a crusade as futile and immoral as any in recent American history.The drug war enriches men like Pablo Escobar by giving a competitive advantage to distributors who specialize in violence. And the members of Pablo's Medellin cartel were certainly specialists. They routinely assassinated politicians, judges, and reporters, kidnapped and killed members of the Colombian elite, and occasionally buried their enemies alive or (an Escobar specialty) hung them upside down and set them on fire. Fighting dirty often elicits a response in kind, and that's what happened in this case. In the midst of the manhunt, a clandestine death squad called "Los Pepes" emerged, and began murdering Escobar's associates, relatives, lawyers, and even his lawyers' families. It's unclear whether U.S. officials helped create Los Pepes, but it is clear that American authorities were criminally complicit in the gang's operations. As Bowden notes, Los Pepes somehow got access to charts prepared by U.S. intelligence, listing key players in the Medellin cartel. The hits carried out by Los Pepes corresponded neatly to the charts. In the name of the drug war, U.S. operatives became accessories to murder. Eventually, the Columbian "Search Bloc" killed Pablo. But killing Pablo didn't do much more than clear the field for the Cali cartel, and after that, the North Valley Cartel. A policy of targeting drug manufacturers and distributors contains the seeds of its own undoing. By shrinking supply, you raise the price, thus sending a signal to ever-more criminal entrepreneurs that profits can be made in the drug supply business. You also bring about all the unpleasant social consequences attendant to deliberately enriching violent criminal distribution networks: gang warfare, corruption, organized crime. And all the while the drugs keep flowing across the border as long as Americans want to use them. Cocaine shipments from Colombia continue to hit record levels: an estimated 450 tons last year, almost twice the level of 1998. If you've ever doubted that the drug war is a struggle between clumsy statists and criminal capitalists--and that the capitalists are winning - you might want to take a look at this article from the July issue of Business 2.0, "The Technology Secrets of Cocaine, Inc." As it recounts, in 1994 the DEA discovered that Colombian cocaine distributors had obtained the entire call-log from the phone company in the city of Cali, Columbia. The Cali cartel used data-mining software and a high-powered computer to determine who in their organization was in contact with the authorities, and eliminate them. Since that time, the Columbian drug cartels have only gotten more technologically sophisticated. The North Valley cartel has set up a sort of money-laundering intranet trading platform that renders their profits untraceable. And that's not all:The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs -- sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. "Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you're in," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service. Most of the cartels' technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it are American-trained. High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs. Alas, the futility of this struggle hasn't deterred U.S. policymakers; waist deep in the big muddy, they continue to urge us on. In fact two battalions of US Marine Jungle Expeditionary Forces have recently received deployment orders for insertion into Colombia this coming February 2003. Here we go again... Books1521@blogcritics.org Sat, 26 Oct 2002 14:23:59 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/24/232155.php Gene HealyHere's the irony in having a quartet of psychiatrists review each episode of the Sopranos: near as I can tell, one of the principal themes of the show is that psychiatry is bullshit. Right now, Slate's team of therapist-commentators is in a tizzy over Dr. Wendy Kobler, the therapist that Melfi recommended for Meadow, and that Meadow saw in the last episode. The Slate crew is calling Kobler a "cliche-ridden parody of a psychotherapist." It's true that the Sopranos writers lay it on a little thick--Kobler asks Meadow whether her father or mother have ever molested her and tells her, essentially, screw college: get a Eurail pass and go find yourself--but the Slate Shrinks' impression that the show portrays their profession positively is tough to swallow. From Tony's encounter with jargon-armed school administrators who tell him A.J.'s got ADD ("what would be appropriate fidgeting?" he growls) to Melfi's loading a mob boss up with Prozac and turning him on to Sun Tzu, the psychiatric perspective is portrayed as one of the things that's wrong with the world in the world of the Sopranos. The main reason the Slate Shrinks have that view is that they don't understand the show. And they're not alone in this. In the intro to the book The New York Times on the Sopranos, critic Stephen Holden writes:the closest Tony comes to admitting evil is during a therapy session in which he offers the lame excuse that what he does is no worse than a businessman illegally dumping toxic waste. But isn't that how we all get by in life without tearing ourselves to pieces? For aren't all values relative?Well, no, they're not. In fact, the show's perspective is close to the opposite of what Dr. Melfi's ex-husband calls "the cheesy moral relativism" offered by psychotherapy. One of the many things that makes David Chase a genius is that for the first two seasons he let the audience develop affection for the motley cast of mobsters--and then in the third season, he rubs our face in it. Through the first two seasons, we come to know and love Tony's crew, with all their quirky little habits. Look: Paulie Walnuts, tough hit man that he is, is a connoisseur of hand creams; isn't that cute? By Season Three, if you're paying attention, you're starting to feel a little guilty about the sympathy for the devil syndrome you've bought into. Paulie, after all, is an amoral wretch who makes it his mission to emasculate Christopher--sniffing Adriana's panties in plain sight, forcing Chrissy to drop trou, and standing ready to sell him out at the drop of a dime. Christopher's assessment in the Pine Barrens episode--that Paulie would kill him in his sleep if he could benefit by it--is accurate. Nor is Tony all that different than Ralph Cifarretto, the "hooor"-killing thug whose idea of a relaxing evening is watching Faces of Death. At this point in the show, to name just a few offenses, Tony's engineered the murder of his best friend's son (Jackie Jr.), killed one of his best friends (Pussy), and terrorized Pussy's widow for the heinous crime of complaining to Carmela about her rough financial straits. (I've had more than one Sopranos fan tell me, no, Tony's a good guy because he didn't beat Angie Bompansero's dog to death after he smashed her car windows with a baseball bat.) Here's the point of the Sopranos, to the extent a show as rich and multifaceted as it is can have "a point." The show is about an evil man with some vestigial traces of a conscience making his way in a world that has decided that feeling warm and fuzzy about yourself is more important than being a decent person. And everywhere Tony Soprano goes--Jennifer Melfi's office included--he finds people willing to indulge that view. His depression, which is palpable, is largely a result of that conscience. He knows he's a reprehensible person, and he's half crying out to hear it from someone. Case in point: in Season Two: Tony's just offered Meadow her high school classmate's car, a car he secured from the kid's dad, "a degenerate gambler," in Tony's words, who gives the car up in lieu of having his legs broken. Knowing that his daughter would know whose car it is--she'd been driven to school in it in the same episode after all, Tony gives it to Meadow. Of course, Meadow recognizes the car and refuses it, prompting a high-decibel fight about what Tony does for a living. In therapy, Tony tells the tale, and Melfi comments that he must have been trying to teach his daughter an important lesson about life. "Wait a minute," says Tony, "I rub my little girl's face in shit, and you're trying to tell me I did something noble?"One of the few times Melfi's gotten really animated (outside of when Tony's physically threatened her) is when last season he accused her of judging him. "I've never judged your sex life!" Well, why the hell not? He's a grown man with two kids "sticking [his] dick into anything with a pulse," as Carmela puts it, including an obsessive Mercedes dealer who might have caused serious trouble had Tony not been in a position to threaten her with death. Out of all the shrinks portrayed on the Sopranos, Dr. Kobler isn't the hardest one to buy as a character. Dr. Krakower is. You remember Dr. Krakower? Carmela goes to see him in Season Three, after marital therapy turns out to be a bust. Dr. Krakower hasnt adopted the cant typical of his profession; for him, the point isn't feeling good about yourself, feeling carefree--it's being a responsible adult. (He's also the character that comes closest to expressing Chase's views on Tony et al. Myles Kantor has the goods on this.) The dimunitive shrink tells Carmela to leave her criminal husband. Crying, she responds, "so, you're saying I should define my boundaries better, not internalize as much?" Krakower: You're not listening. What did I say?Carmela: Leave him? Krakower: Take only the children, what's left of them.Carmela: I thought psychiatrists weren't supposed to be judgmental. Dr. Krakower: Many patients want to be excused for their current predicament because of events that occurred in their childhood. That's what psychiatry has become in America. Visit any shopping mall or ethnic pride parade to witness the results.On top of that, Krakower refuses her money. And Slate's Shrinks think Dr. Kobler is unbelievable? Video795@blogcritics.org Tue, 24 Sep 2002 23:21:55 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/21/173952.php Gene HealyNoam Chomsky's 9-11 is a slim volume for the concerned citizen; it can be found near the counter in trendy, Bobo bookstores like the one where I picked it up. Made up of email interviews with the aging leftist linguist, it sets out Chomsky's case against the war on terror. I wish it was better. There's something disturbing about near-unanimity of support for all aspects of a government policy even where, as here, our government's ends are legitimate, and the case for total inaction is quite weak. There's something even more disturbing when an important slice of the political spectrum loses the ability to distinguish good arguments from bad. Chomsky indicts the war against the Taliban by comparing that approach with other British and American reactions to terrorist attacks: "When IRA bombs were set off in London, there was no call to bomb West Belfast... When a federal building was blown up in Oklahoma City... [and the source of the bombing] was found to be domestic, with links to the ultra-right militias, there was no call to obliterate Montana and Idaho." Well, yes. That's because, you see, Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and other local authorities were actively working to locate the perpetrators. Similarly, the state governments of Montana and Idaho did not support terrorism against federal targets and were not engaged in shielding right-wing terrorists. In contrast, the Taliban permitted Al Qaeda to operate terrorist camps on Afghan territory, and shielded Al Qaeda operatives from U.S. authorities after 9/11. The situations are not remotely comparable and it's patently stupid to compare them. Chomsky makes a comparison between 9/11 on Clinton's 1998 bombing of Sudan that's similarly provocative and similarly unintelligent. He makes a convincing case that destroying the region's lone pharmaceutical plant on the pretext that it was manufacturing nerve gas killed led to thousands of deaths from treatable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. But criminal culpability is not simply a matter of tallying up numbers. The law distinguishes between negligence and recklessness on the one hand, and premeditation on the other. Clinton's motivation in bombing the plant was to distract the media from his inability to keep his pants up and the disastrous failure of his televised nonapology for the Lewinsky affair. He didn't want to kill thousands of Sudanese, and I doubt he fully realized the consequences of blowing up the plant. I think he should be jailed as a war criminal, but putting him in the same category as Bin Laden is like comparing a drunk driver to Ted Bundy. Generally I think it's a waste of time and a nonargument to label someone a racist, or anti-American, or the like. Collect all the suspicious-sounding Pat Buchanan quotes you like, but once you've compiled your "portrait of an anti-semite" dossier, you haven't done anything to prove Buchanan's wrong about U.S. aid to Israel. Go ahead and convince me that Al Sharpton hates whitey (it wouldn't be hard), but that's not any kind of an argument against his position on slave reparations. But Chomsky really makes it hard to resist the temptation to descend into ad hominem. If he wants to avoid the "anti-American" label--and he should, if only to avoid distraction from the thrust of his argument--then he could do better than to start out the book by noting that: "During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico (in fact, the territories of indigenous peoples, but that is another matter), intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Phillipenes (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos) and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change." And one from which it's apparent that the author draws some satisfaction. About time we got our comeuppance, huh? This is as nutty in its own way as Bin Laden invoking "the tragedy of Andalusia" as a justification for jihad. Really, what does any of that have to do with the receptionists, stockbrokers, and IT help desk jockeys who got incinerated in the World Trade Center? I wouldn't go so far as to say, as Glenn Reynolds does, that "Chomsky is an America-hating anti-Semite whose sole organizing intellectual principle seems to be siding with genocidal cretins." I can't look into the guy's soul. But whatever demons are motivating him, they've caused him to lose the ability to argue effectively. He treats almost every question about our current predicament as a jumping off point to sputter on about U.S. war crimes in Nicaragua. There are serious people making serious arguments about the events that led up to 9/11, about the relationship between foreign policy interventionism and terror, and about the difficulties of asymmetrical warfare in an age of weapons of mass destruction. Chomsky's not one of them. Books: Nonfiction731@blogcritics.org Sat, 21 Sep 2002 17:39:52 EDT