by matttbastard
You ever watch something so vicariously embarrassing, so painfully awkward that it almost gives you a full-body toothache?
Yeah. That.
h/t @Humanity Critic (via HuffPo)
by matttbastard

Sincere thanks to everyone who voted for yours truly in the Support Bro category. Is truly an honour. Also, heartfelt congrats to Antonia, Liss & Co. @ Shakesville, Beijing York, Renee @ Womanist Musings, Anti-Choice is Anti-Awesome and the rest of the winners and nominees for representin’ the f-word in ’09.
(D’ya think it’s too early for celebratory drinks?)
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 2009 F-Word Blog Awards, A Creative Revolution, blog!blog!blog!, Canada, Feminism, feminists, friends, fuck yeah!
by matttbastard
Oh, SNAP!
h/t Impolitical (by way of Shakesville, which also has the transcript).
Update: Antonia FTW:
This is what happens when women get some power. The world becomes a better place.
This.
by matttbastard
Re: revelations in the newly released Senate Armed Services Committee report on US torture that the Bush admin began planning the program in 2001 and that torture was utilized to gin up a link between Iraq and al-Qaida, what Radley Balko said:
So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.
And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.
These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.
The headline to a recent op-ed by Simon Jenkins (h/t Sarah) bottom-lines things perfectly:
‘Cheney and the apologists of torture distrust democracy.’
Related: Hilzoy on the ‘”perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm” that helped put the CIA torture program into action (although ‘ignorance’ seems to be a bullshit excuse):
This is what happens when we stop demanding minimal competence in our Presidents; when we start caring more about who we would rather have a beer with than, oh, who would be most likely to seek out the best advice and listen to all sides of an argument before making an important decision, or whose judgment we can trust. We end up with people who toss aside our most fundamental values because someone who has never conducted an interrogation before thinks it might be a good idea, and no one bothers to do the basic background research on what he proposes.
Of course, keep in mind what Nell points out (and Balko implicitly recognizes) in this must-read post:
One of the most persistent and discouraging themes that crops up in discussions of torture is the question of whether it “works” or not. The people engaging this question make a fatally wrong assumption: that the goal of torturers is the same as that of legitimate interrogators — to get reliable information useful for active, circumscribed military operations or police investigations.
But torture does something else altogether, and is designed to do so: it extracts false confessions. These confessions, along with the agony of the torture itself, serve the goals of limitless, lawless “war”: to humiliate and break opponents, to divide them from supporters, to terrify those not actively in opposition into staying inactive, and, most importantly, to justify the operations of the dirty war within which torture takes place: commando raids, assassinations, spying, kidnaping, secret and/or indefinite (and unreviewable) detention, and further torture.
The mistaken assumption that those in the previous administration who set the torture policy were motivated solely by an urgent need for information has several other bad effects. It reinforces the absurd ticking-bomb hypothetical that allows so many people to justify torture to themselves. It provides a noble-sounding excuse for the officials who promoted torture, making it harder for citizens to muster the will to hold them legally accountable for their crimes: “They were just trying to keep the country safe.”
The euphemism of “enhanced interrogation” for torture was chosen by both the Nazis and the Bush-Cheney regime exactly because of its propaganda value in reinforcing this false picture: It’s just legitimate questioning that goes a little further. An error of enthusiasm, if you will. An understandable mistake, a policy difference that we sure don’t want to criminalize, looking backward with our 20-20 hindsight.
But, as useful as these effects are to the torturing regime, the most important role of the spurious linkage with intelligence-gathering and interrogation is as a screen: It hides the role of torture in creating and expanding the dirty war itself.
Flashback: Via Democracy Now: Mark Benjamin and Katherine Eban on Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the shrinks who transformed SERE into CIA torture (yes, torture).
by matttbastard

Michael Ignatieff on CBC Radio One just a few moments ago:
“I’m a centrist. A pragmatic centrist.”
Come on, be honest, Iggy. You’re a self-absorbed wanker who perpetually preens and postures, melodramatically agonizing over the moral implications of just how prime-ministerial you looked during Question Period (yep–so passionately Canadian he bleeds maple syrup, motherfuckers!) Which, admittedly, is a welcome improvement over the (highly public) moral agony you went through several years ago when you urgently debated the merits of torture, thus helping to legitimize the perverse notion that there even WAS any ‘debate’ over torture and its (dubious) merits.

Yeah, am sure KSM has thanked you for that–at least 183 times.
by matttbastard
Hey, remember the Scott Beauchamp teapot tempest? Well, reality (what with its inherent liberal bias) has provided an ironic (if tragic) coda to the tedious saga of manufactured wingnut outrage:
A senior enlisted Army soldier was convicted on Wednesday of killing four handcuffed and blindfolded Iraqi men with pistol shots to the backs of their heads shortly after arresting them in Baghdad two years ago, The Associated Press reported.
A military jury in Germany, where his unit is deployed, found the soldier, Master Sgt. John E. Hatley, guilty of premeditated murder in the deaths of the men, whom he and several other members of his unit had detained after a firefight with insurgents in Baghdad in spring 2007, according to testimony in the case.
Who is Master Sgt. John E. Hatley? Attaturk has the 411:
If you cannot place the name, Master Sgt. Hatley was the direct superior of Pvt. Scott Beauchamp and the person most used to discredit (along with the gay porn star) the New Republic diary of the life of a soldier in Iraq and the ways they dealt with the pressures of Operation Clusterfuck.
Stars and Stripes gives more details of what the NCO who, in a moment of bold understatement, claimed to be “no angel” did to earn his conviction:
Capt. John Riesenberg, assistant government trial counsel, told the jury that their sentence should be aimed at stopping other first sergeants and soldiers from doing what the Company A soldiers did.
“Send a message to the world that this is an army that recognizes that it is different, that American soldiers just don’t do this. They don’t execute detainees in the middle of the night by shooting them in the back of the head when they are bound and blindfolded and dump their bodies in a canal,” he said.
The killings occurred in March or April of 2007.
It was Hatley’s idea to kill the detainees, Riesenberg said.
“A first sergeant in the U.S. Army came up with the idea to commit a brutal execution-style murder of detainees and he did it with his own men. He failed them, the Army, the Iraqi people and the American war effort,” Riesenberg said.
Except some American soldiers quite obviously do “execute detainees in the middle of the night by shooting them in the back of the head when they are bound and blindfolded and dump their bodies in a canal,” along with many other casual atrocities that get swept into the dustbin of history; such uncomfortable facts may not fit with the illusory narrative of duty, honour and exceptional virtue, but they DO occur, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
Yeah, well, wevs–at least there still isn’t concrete proof that they ran over any dogs.
As John Cole acidly notes, “That isn’t SOP.”
Related: More things that soldiers “just don’t do”: Heather Benedict on how women serving on the frontlines face the threat of sexual violence–from their fellow troops.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atrocities, casualties, civilians, gender, Iraq, John E. Hatley, occupation, rape, Scott Beauchamp, stupid wingnut tricks, US, war, war crimes
by mattbastard
This is probably the most inspiring and heroic thing I’ve read about in ages:
The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.
“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”
The women scattered as the men moved in.
“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”
The women ran to the bus and dove inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.
“Whores!”
But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.
It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.
[...]
The women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrasa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in the drafting of the new law.
“We are here to campaign for our rights,” one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.
The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrasa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.
“Death to the enemies of Islam!” the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. “We want Islamic law!”
The women stared ahead and kept walking.
A phalanx of police officers, some of them women, held the crowds apart.
As Spackerman (h/t) rhetorically asks, “What have you done recently that’s half as brave?”
Related: In an interview with Afghan women’s rights activist Soraya Pakzad, Jean MacKenzie puts the controversy surrounding the Afghan ‘rape law’ in context:
The reality is that no Afghan woman, Shi’ia or Sunni, has the right to object to her husband’s advances. The international outcry, while well meaning, misses the point: It is not a single law that is the problem, it is the overall status of women.
As they say, read the whole damn thing.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged activism, Afghanistan, culture, economics, Feminism, gender, Hamid Karzai, heroism, human rights, Islam, NATO, policy, politics, protests, rape law, religion, Sharia, sheroes, Shi'ia, Soraya Pakzad, women's rights
by matttbastard

Another month, another round of massive job losses in Canada:
Canada is shedding jobs at a rate not seen since the deep recession of the early 1980s, as March saw another 61,300 workers join the ballooning ranks of the unemployed.
The loss brought Canada’s official unemployment rate to eight per cent, the worst in seven years.
Statistics Canada noted that since the peak in October, employment has fallen each month for a total of 357,000, representing 2.1 per cent of the work force. That is the most since 1982.
[...]
Economists had been expecting another poor jobs report with about 55,000 jobs lost.
But the reality was slightly worse, and much worse if the 18,200 jobs increase in part-time work were taken out.
Rising part-time work at a time of falling employment is usually an indicator that Canadians are settling for whatever jobs they can find. Among full-time workers, the contraction in employment was another outsized 79,500 in March.
So. As Uncle Steve and the Harpercons sadly continue to lose their shit, the Canadian job market keeps hemorrhaging. And, waiting in the wings, we have Iggy and the Torie-lites, ready to save us all by doing, er, pretty much the same bullshit Harper and Co. have been doing, only with less asshattery, sweatervests and painfully-forced smiles.
We are so fucked.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 1982, Canada, Canadian politics, economics, economy, Michael Ignatieff, politics, recession, Statistics Canada, Stephen Harper, unemployment
When Charles fucking Johnson is starting to sound like the voice of fucking reason, you need to step back a bit and do a little reflection. Your fucking party–your fucking MOVEMENT–is in complete shambles. And pinning your 2010 (and 2012) hopes on tapping the Jerry Springer wing of the party is, um, well, yeah (although the increasingly-ugly trailer-park feud between the Palins and the Johnstons makes for AWESOME daytime TV viewing–who says the GOP doesn’t give a steaming pile of elephant crap about the needs of unemployed American workers?)
In other words, less teabagging and unhinged black helicopter rhetoric, more rebuilding — y’all are gonna give Patrick Ruffini a fucking aneurysm.
Wait — what am I saying? Please, KEEP doing what you’re doing; me and my socialistcommiemaoistredistributionist fellow travellers can’t help but get off watching movement conservatism self-destruct in such a spectacularly absurd–and highly public–manner (also, fuck Patrick Ruffini). Seriously, who needs The Onion or SNL when you have Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann bringin’ teh schadenfreude-infused lulz?
Of course, it all stops seeming so fucking funny when someone who isn’t in on the joke ends up taking things a bit too far and people end up, y’know, dying. Imagine that–words actually have meaning; actions have consequences. Would that y’all took your responsibility as thought leaders (snicker) seriously.
Yeah, and a dapple-gray pony clad in golden horseshoes.
hugs and handjobs,
matttbastard
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged conspiracy theories, Glenn Beck, GOP, Michele Bachmann, Patrick Ruffini, politics, rebuild, Sarah Palin, tea parties, US, wingnuts
by matttbastard
I believe this is what the kids refer to as ‘EPIC FAIL’:
PA State Senator Mike Folmer (R-48) was featured at an anti- Free Choice rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on March 31, 2009. After the rally, Keystone Progress asked him what he knew about the bill. His answers clearly showed he didn’t understand the bill or he was simply spouting the official talking points. He admitted that he hadn’t read the bill.
Watch it:
Related: In a must-read guest post @ Feministe, Sarah explains why the Employee Free Choice Act–and labour organizing overall–should be recognized as a vital feminist issue.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged AFL-CIO, EFCA, Employee Free Choice Act, Harrisburg, Keystone Progress, labor, labour, Mike Folmer, Pennsylvania, Sen. Folmer, unions, US
by matttbastard
Chapter 6: Saved by a War Thatcherism and its Useful Enemies
(Previous posts here, Sarah’s posts here.)
“Creating a useful crisis is part of what this will be about….[s]o the first bunch of communications that the public might hear might be more negative than I would be inclined to talk about (otherwise). Yeah, we need to invent a crisis and that’s not just an act of courage, there’s some skill involved”
Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady.
She’s presented by many as one of conservatism’s patron saints, a great leader who, through sheer force of will, pushed back against the excesses of the post-WWII British welfare state. Yet her sweeping program of Friedmanite deregulation and rollback of worker’s rights has also been dubbed by many commentators a ‘revolution’. Though seemingly incongruous, the term is fitting; as the National Review famously declared in 1987, Thatcher’s ultimate goal was “nothing less than the reshaping of British political and economic life as that has been understood since 1945, by Labour and Tory alike. [emph. mine]“
Klein outlines in Chapter 6 how Thatcher used the political capital raised via the war in the Falklands to not only unite the nation, but to finance her radical neoliberal economic reform agenda, despite a previously skeptical public. Klein also notes that the controversial yet popular military endeavour coincided with the penning by Friedman of a passage that she says “best summarizes the Shock Doctrine: “Only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”"
The so-called ‘crisis hypothesis’ was utilized to great effect, at least in a political context, by Thatcher, according to Klein:
“Between 1084 and 1988, the [British] government privatized, among others, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Airport Authority and British Steel, while it sold its shares in British Petroleum.
“Much as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, would take an unpopular president and hand him an opportunity to launch a massive privatization initiative (in Bush’s case, the privatization of security, warfare and reconstruction), Thatcher used her war to launch the first mass privatization auction in a Western democracy.”
As Sarah notes, despite their widely-accepted status as heroic conservative icons, pro-market radicals like Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan enacted their policies in direct opposition to conservatism. A so-called ‘conservative’ brazenly utilized a crisis to enact revolutionary change–coopting political theory traditionally the domain of the far left. In a post highlighting the days events at the ongoing G20 summit, Sarah points out that it was conservative leaders Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy who were pushing for stricter regulations of global financial markets, rather than left-of-centre leaders like Barack Obama or Gordon Brown:
For Sarkozy to call for giving capitalism a conscience–well, it underlines the difference between French conservatism and American, but it also points out that state regulation and control over capital markets is not actually a shocking, strange idea, and that the rapid deregulation was actually the revolutionary idea.
Rather than promoting pragmatic, prudent conservative economic platforms, Thatcher (and Reagan) instead grabbed hold of the most extreme of Milton Friedman’s theories and ran with them Jamaican sprinter style. The fact that ‘socialists’ like Tony Blair eagerly took the baton passed to them by purported ideological opponents and carried it over the finish line only serves to further illustrate the fact that adherence to radical free market economic theory transcends the traditional left-right political axis–and, ultimately, that Thatcher’s revolution was indeed sucessful beyond her wildest expectations.
Next–Chapter 7: The New Doctor Shock Economic Warfare Replaces Dictatorship
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Angela Merkel, Argentina, bastard.logic Shock Doctrine, books, capitalism, Chicago School, economics, economy, Falklands War, free market, G20, globalization, laissez-faire, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, neoliberalism, Nicholas Sarkozy, politics, recession, reviews, Sarah J, Thatcherism, The Shock Doctrine, Tony Blair, UK