Vladimir Bukovsky is almost certainly being framed

The New Neo Posted on by

Famous Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky is in big trouble.

It isn’t the first time. But what’s going on now is very disturbing, both in human terms and for what it says about the current Russian government (much of which we already knew):

Vladimir Bukovsky’s name, like that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, is synonymous with almost unimaginable bravery and resilience in the face of Soviet totalitarianism…For his efforts, he was rewarded with twelve years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas ”” political psychiatric hospitals.

…In 1971, Bukovsky succeeded in smuggling to the West more than 150 pages documenting the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatric institutions to silence its opponents. Because of this, the West learned that the KGB routinely declared dissenters mentally ill to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit any regime opposition as the product of a diseased mind. In 1976, after months of negotiation between the Soviet and American governments, Bukovsky was exchanged for Luis Corvalé¡n, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. He has lived in Cambridge, England, ever since.

It didn’t end his opposition to the excesses of the system in Russia; Bukovsky was and is not one to rest on his activist laurels. But now he has run afoul of a combination of Russian government cunning and British law:

On March 17, 2015, Bukovsky offered his sworn testimony at the much-delayed inquiry into the 2006 murder, in London, of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko…

Litvinenko also accused Putin of ordering the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and claimed that he had been ordered to kill the Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky, who had likewise turned sharply critical of Putin’s regime…

[Having later accused Putin of having been a pedophile] Litvinenko was poisoned in November 2006 with a lethal dose of radioactive polonium-210, placed by Russian FSB operatives in his afternoon tea in a London hotel. He died 23 days later…

Bukovsky is gravely ill, and now he’s been charged (in Britain) with “five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image” (in this case, “making” can mean as little as merely downloading onto a computer) [emphasis mine]:

Bukovsky believes that Putin’s operatives planted what he says are some 20,000 indecent images of children on his computer and then tipped off the British police using Europol, the EU’s law-enforcement agency…

Shortly after he was charged, Bukovsky sued the Crown Prosecution Services for libel. His writ accuses the service of “falsely and maliciously” damaging his reputation and abusing its powers. The CPS, he claims, went well beyond its statutory duty by making defamatory claims unsupported by any evidence…

If the images were, as Bukovsky charges, planted by the Kremlin, it is clear that the object of the exercise was not to kill him. Nature was obviously well on the way to taking care of that. It was to prove to anyone tempted to follow Bukovsky’s path that the punishment for challenging the Kremlin is worse than death.

Bukovsky wants his name to be cleared before he dies. He has now gone on a hunger strike in order to get that to happen. He has stated his aims this way:

In August he took the unusual step of suing the Crown Prosecution Service for libel: he is seeking £100,000 in damages and claims the CPS has “falsely and maliciously” hurt his reputation…

Speaking at his home in Cambridge, Bukovsky said: “I’m on hunger strike not because of trying to prove anything to the FSB [Russia’s security agency]. We’ve known each other for half a century. There’s nothing new they can tell me or I can tell them. I’m doing it for the British public.”…

Bukovsky wants his libel action against the CPS to be heard before the criminal case begins. He is due to go on trial in May, with his libel case pencilled in for the summer following three postponements. “I’m denied justice, quite openly and blatantly,” he said.

The sequence will allow Russia’s state media to gleefully repeat the criminal allegations, he said, while ignoring the verdict should he be acquitted…

An online petition has been launched and more than 150 former Soviet political prisoners and their descendants have signed a letter of support, describing Bukovsky as “a man of gigantic moral stature”…

Of death, he said: “I’m not afraid of it. How can you be afraid of something inevitable? It isn’t a senseless death. It’s a purposeful death. I’m an old man anyway.” …

Of Putin, he said: “I think he’s evil.” And asked when a democratic Russia might emerge, he said: “That would be not very soon.”

That’s certainly an understatement. And I’m not at all sure that the rest of the west isn’t going in the Russian direction, too.

Conservatism is a tough sell

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s long puzzled me why it is that so many conservatives seem to think that conservatism’s superiority to liberalism ought to be obvious, and that people would gravitate towards conservatism once they understood what it was and the logic behind it. All the country needed was an articulate, grounded conservative who could explain it in lucid terms and relate conservatism to people’s lives.

As a conservative, I came to think it would certainly be a good idea to give it a try. But I never thought it would be the least bit easy. I believe that conservatism is inherently difficult for people to accept (far more difficult than liberalism), a sort of “tough-love” approach that is counter-intuitive and seems—for want of a better word—cold.

This campaign season has revealed a number of things to me, and one of them is that a lot of people who kept clamoring for that articulate, grounded conservative didn’t really want one when they got him. He wasn’t the right one. Or they had tired of the idea. They wanted something quite different—a populist progressive with a loud mouth who spoke to their anger and frustration rather than to their conservatism.

Thus proving, once again, that conservatism is a tough sell.

In February I wrote this:

It strikes me, and not for the first time, that the Trump candidacy may represent the death knell of conservatism, probably for a long time in this country, maybe forever. Conservatism has long been a hard sell, swimming against the tide of so many cultural influences and against the gimme-ism inherent in human beings. But I don’t count it out yet.

And in April I wrote this:

…[I]t’s not at all easy to combine conservatism with winning on a national level, unfortunately. And although that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it may take someone with conservative principles plus a charismatic personality to do it (Trump lacks the former and IMHO also the latter, and Cruz lacks the latter).

The flaw is in people as a whole, not some special flaw of the Republican establishment. People like politicians who offer them pie-in-the-sky, not tough-love. Liberals and big government people sell the idea of helping and caring to the voters. Conservatives sell liberty, yes, but at what cost? Teach people to fish instead of giving them fish, yada yada yada.

So all elected officials””or people who would like to be elected””will naturally tend to drift in the direction of big government even if they didn’t start out that way. It’s not an evil design to thwart the Republican “base.” The base just hasn’t always been big enough and strong enough to counter it.

Conservatism swims against a powerful tide, the tide of people’s desire to be taken care of, and to think of themselves as compassionate and kindly. It does have one tremendous strength, though, which is to swim with the tide of people’s desire for liberty. But I wonder whether the people who value the former don’t outnumber the people who value the latter.

I’ll leave the rest to Robert Frost, in this excerpt from a talk he gave in 1960:

Naturally there’s a constant natural conflict between justice and mercy. The big joke is that somebody on earth ought to balance them up. Probably God does. It could be assumed. That is the most Godlike thing: to balance them””mercy for justice or a just mercy. But there’s something there that’s almost too hard for a mortal man to get.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are having quite a time about it right now. They both want to sound merciful enough, and they both want to sound just enough. They’re going to outdo each other in getting that right. The nice way is to choose the Democrats for being too merciful. Somebody calculated that the mercies that they promised the world were going to cost us about fifty billion dollars a year””if they did all they had in their program. The Republicans have got to sort of match that somewhere if they don’t get broke.

Human nature hasn’t changed much.

Chopin

The New Neo Posted on by

I do believe that Chopin just might be my favorite composer. I fixed on him when I was still a very young child, because he was the most-played composer to accompany my ballet classes. I didn’t even know his name at the time, but after so much repetition I knew many of his pieces inside out. Much later, I bought a multiple-record set of his entire works. And the other day I discovered that you can get a similar digital collection from Amazon for ninety-nine cents.

Yes, you can. Ninety-nine cents, total.

Chopin’s sound is sui generis. To me, he’s instantly recognizable, never predictable, always beautiful. I hadn’t known till I looked him up that he was also a virtuoso pianist and a child prodigy.

Here’s one of my many many favorite works of Chopin. How old do you think he was when he composed it? (don’t read the blurb at YouTube or scroll down here yet, because it reveals the answer):

The answer: Chopin wrote that little number at the age of seven. It’s not just that it’s beautiful, it’s that it’s remarkably sophisticated. I don’t know about you, but I think that even in the realm of the child prodigy, that achievement is prodigious. And the piece already has that signature Chopin sound.

Here is a performance that, fittingly, is by an eight-year-old. It’s not as good as the one above, but it’s pretty extraordinary. Prodigies are remarkable:

Taking Trump seriously

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a lot of talk lately about how everyone was predicting Trump would go nowhere—except, of course, his fervent supporters, who believed almost from the start that he could win the nomination.

Looking back, my recollection was that at the very beginning of Trump’s candidacy (he declared on June 16, 2015), I didn’t think he’d win, but that very quickly I understood it to be possible and didn’t ridicule the notion at all (for example, if you search for the word “clown” on this blog, you won’t ever find it used in relation to Trump). In fact, I remembered becoming fearful some time during the summer of 2015 about the possibility of a Trump nomination . As time went on, my focus was on hoping/encouraging/urging enough of the remaining candidates to drop out so that the non-Trump voters could solidify support around one or two alternatives and might manage to stop Trump’s momentum.

Unfortunately, that seemed to take forever, and by the time it happened the primaries were practically finished and Trump had amassed a nearly insurmountable lead. A bandwagon effect also seemed to take over at the very end.

Whether the whole thing was a case of the Tragedy of the Commons or a game of Chicken, or some combination of the two, it was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to watch.

I don’t think the candidates themselves took Trump quite seriously enough for a long long time. Certainly not enough to get together and unite behind one or two of the strongest. Self-interest plus denial did them in. And of course some of them (in particular Christie and Carson) now seem perfectly happy to have Trump as the nominee. I also don’t think the GOP leadership took him seriously, either, because they have seemed like a herd of deer in the headlights as the car bore down on them. Their animus toward Cruz didn’t do them much good, either, once he became the main possible alternative.

For a while I’ve been wondering if my memory of my own history about Trump was correct—that is, did I really take him seriously as early as I remember doing? And then I found this, which settled the question. It was published on August 22, 2015, about two months into the Trump campaign:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

So yes, I took Trump seriously, and in August I was already perturbed that his prospects seemed good and getting better. What’s more, I seemed to have been saying back then that I had already thought that way for a long time, and he’d only declared two months earlier.

I’m bringing this up not to blow my own horn (well, maybe a little), but because I’m puzzled about why so few people seemed to take Trump’s prospects seriously early on. After all, it shouldn’t have been hard to see. To perceive it, I wasn’t needing to do something esoteric like casting tea leaves or looking at Tarot cards. I was merely observing and drawing what I think was an obvious conclusion: Trump was a serious threat to win the whole thing.

My current theory about why so many people wrote him off is that they were imagining that whatever they and their buddies were feeling about him was what nearly everyone had to be feeling about him. Turned out not to be true.

The “none of the above” election

The New Neo Posted on by

The Chicago Tribune states an idea I’ve thought about quite a bit lately:

…[T]the odds are very good that the next president will be someone most voters actively dislike or even detest.

I don’t think there’s ever been a situation like that before in this country, and in some ways it’s the saddest and most outrageous thing about this election.

The Trib goes on to add:

The stark reality is that barring a political earthquake, an independent or third-party candidate has almost no chance of becoming president. Ask Ross Perot, who at one point in the 1992 campaign led George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton by double-digit margins. Despite his initial appeal and despite spending $63 million of his own money, the Texas billionaire ended up with just 19 percent of the vote ”” and didn’t carry a single state.

I ordinarily would agree that third parties have no chance. I don’t really think a third candidate has much of a chance this year, either. Except…except…note that phrase “barring a political earthquake.” Have we not already had the equivalent of one?

Now that marijuana looks likely to be legalized in more and more states…

The New Neo Posted on by

…we realize that we have no idea how to set legal limits for driving under the influence:

The study commissioned by AAA’s safety foundation said it’s not possible to set a blood-test threshold for THC, the chemical in marijuana that makes people high, that can reliably determine impairment. Yet the laws in five of the six states automatically presume a driver guilty if that person tests higher than the limit, and not guilty if it’s lower.

As a result, drivers who are unsafe may be going free while others may be wrongly convicted, the foundation said.

The foundation recommends replacing the laws with ones that rely on specially trained police officers to determine if a driver is impaired, backed up by a test for the presence of THC rather than a specific threshold. The officers are supposed to screen for dozens of indicators of drug use, from pupil dilation and tongue color to behavior.

Oh, that will end well, don’t you think?

Gives “Finger lickin’ good!” a whole new meaning

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey, why not?:

If you can’t seem to kick that awful nail-biting habit, you might as well get some flavor out of it with KFC’s new chicken-flavored edible nail polish. It comes in two different flavors ”“ ”˜Original’ (beige), and ”˜Hot & Spicy’ (red), and is quite literally “Finger Lickin’ Good”!

The product was developed by marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather for KFC Hong Kong, in collaboration with the company that provides KFC’s blend of herbs and spices. “Yes, it’s actually a real thing,” confirmed Ogilvy & Mather employee Anna Mugglestone. “It takes like chicken. It’s crazy.”

Each ”˜flavor’ of nail polish comes packaged in a “designer bottle and box” (no bucket, sadly). Customers can paint their nails with the product and proceed to lick their fingertips “again and again and again,” to enjoy the flavors of KFC anytime, anywhere. And if you’re worried about safety, the chain claims that the product is “sourced from natural ingredients”.

Sounds like The Onion, but I guess it’s real. Wouldn’t appeal to me; I had KFC chicken recently and it was dreadful—soggy and tasteless.

The whole thing reminds me, though, of this Mary Poppins story. The finger-lickin tastiness possessed by the character “Mrs. Corry” leaves KFC-flavored nail polish behind in a cloud of dust. It’s a great great story, too, one of my very favorites:

…”What’s all this I hear?” cried the curious high little voice, coming nearer. And presently, round the corner of the glass case the owner of it appeared. She was as small as her voice and as crackly, and to the children she seemed to be older than anything in the world, with her wispy hair and her sticklike legs and her wizened, wrinkled little face. But in spite of this she ran towards them as lightly and as gaily as though she were still a young girl.

“Now, now, now ”” well, I do declare! Bless me if it isn’t Mary Poppins, with John and Barbara Banks. What ”” Jane and Michael, too? Well, isn’t this a nice surprise for me? I assure you I haven’t been so surprised since Christopher Columbus discovered America ”” truly I haven’t!”

She smiled delightedly as she came to greet them, and her feet made little dancing movements inside the tiny elastic-sided boots. She ran to the perambulator and rocked it gently, crooking her thin, twisted, old fingers at John and Barbara until they stopped crying and began to laugh.

“That’s better!” she said, cackling gaily. Then she did a very odd thing. She broke off two of her fingers and gave one each to John and Barbara. And the oddest part of it was that in the space left by the broken-off fingers two new ones grew at once. Jane and Michael clearly saw it happen.

“Only Barley-Sugar ”” can’t possibly hurt ’em,” the old lady said to Mary Poppins.

“Anything you give them, Mrs. Corry, could only do them good,” said Mary Poppins with most surprising courtesy.

“What a pity,” Michael couldn’t help saying, “they weren’t Peppermint Bars.”

“Well, they are, sometimes,” said Mrs. Corry gleefully, “and very good they taste, too. I often nibble ’em myself, if I can’t sleep at night. Splendid for the digestion.”

“What will they be next time?” asked Jane, looking at Mrs. Corry’s fingers with interest.

“Aha!” said Mrs. Corry. “That’s just the question. I never know from day to day what they will be. I take the chance, my dear, as I heard William the Conqueror say to his Mother when she advised him not to go conquering England.”

“You must be very old!” said Jane, sighing enviously, and wondering if she would ever be able to remember what Mrs. Corry remembered.

Mrs. Corry flung back her wispy little head and shrieked with laughter.

“Old!” she said. “Why, I’m quite a chicken compared to my Grandmother. Now, there’s an old woman if you like. Still, I go back a good way. I remember the time when they were making this world, anyway, and I was well out of my teens then. My goodness, that was a to-do, I can tell you…

And note the chicken reference at the beginning of that last paragraph.

Fighting “stupidity”

The New Neo Posted on by

The always-fascinating Richard Fernandez offers some quotes from anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I want to call attention to:

“Against stupidity we are defenseless,” [Bonhoeffer] wrote, because imbeciles never feel a qualm. Against the stupid “neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything … reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict … simply do not need to be believed … and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

I must say I find that quote resonates with my experience of trying to have a discussion with certain true believers, whether they be Obama supporters or Trump supporters or 9/11-truthers or any number of other zealots. By “true believers” I am not including everyone who might support either Obama or Trump, of course. But I think anyone who’s been around the blogosphere for the last couple of election cycles knows exactly the sort of thing—and the sort of arguments—I mean, the kind of worship that ignores or negates anything that might contradict or even challenge their faith in their leader, and a sharp and cutting anger at and/or contempt for anyone who would disagree with them.

The thing is, though, these people are not imbeciles. Nor are they even especially stupid, not in the general sense, and not in most other arenas of their lives. There seems to be something special that for want of a better term I’ll call political stupidity, a sort of willed stubborn refusal to look at the flaws in the candidate of choice, to acknowledge when they go wrong, and to accept that other people who oppose them are not evil but have their reasons, sometimes good reasons.

Bonhoeffer’s use of the term “stupid person” is probably meant in the same way as “idiot” in the well-known political phrase “useful idiot.” It doesn’t mean people who actually have IQs in a well-below-average range, it means people who act stupidly or sound stupid in the specific area of politics, people who are somehow blocked from acknowledging certain truths that threaten to invalidate their beliefs. These people are usually reacting to the painful discomfort (cognitive dissonance) that would almost certainly result if they took an objective look. In some people (many people, actually) this results in the wearing of blinders to protect oneself from even having to consider changing their minds and/or admit to having been wrong about something so important.

Bonhoeffer further said:

In conversation with [the stupid man] one virtually feels that one is not dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. … Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also become capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Bonhoeffer was, of course, writing during the Nazi era, and the evil he saw many previously ordinary-seeming people perpetrate, or help to perpetrate, was extreme and blatant. But evil is not always that obvious. And “diabolical misuse” can easily come about by the mechanism of propaganda, an exceptionally powerful tool to which all of us are somewhat vulnerable. The extent of the vulnerability varies greatly from person to person, and the type of propaganda each person is susceptible too varies, as well. Fear? Rage? In-group feeling? Guilt? Self-righteousness? Need to control? Surrender of control? Rebelliousness?

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The 20th Century saw the growth of propaganda by masters of the art, some of them diabolical masters. The 21st has seen new tools—particularly involving the internet and social media—to further the spread of propaganda and the speed with which it can be propagated. One might think that the internet should have made us smarter—all of that access to information—and in some cases and some ways I suppose it has. But in way too many ways and for way too many people it has helped to make us stupider in the sense that Bonhoeffer used the word.

Happy Mother’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of what has become my annual Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

More on the Ben Rhodes flap

The New Neo Posted on by

On Thursday I wrote a very brief post linking to an article about Obama’s advisor Ben Rhodes and his influence on Obama’s foreign policy, particularly the Iran deal.

The Rhodes article was so disturbing it’s been the talk of the blogosphere for quite a few days (for example, see this, this, this, and this). In the ensuing time, as I’ve read more about it, I find I have a few things to add to the mix.

Here’s the original article that has caused all the fuss, a piece by David Samuels based on an interview with Rhodes. It’s long; I suggest you read the whole thing. But here’s an excerpt that tells you some of the things you need to know:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations ”” like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing ”” is still startling…

…One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”…

Having recently spent time working in Hollywood, I realize during our conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like “The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who create those shows.

If you have noticed that Obama’s “foreign-policy narratives” seem to not be grounded in anything as worldly or mundane as the facts of geopolitical history, you’d be right, and the abysmal ignorance of Ben Rhodes is one of the many reasons. The narrative has been elevated above the facts—they don’t need no steenking facts when they’ve got Ben Rhodes. In this I suppose he exhibits a sort of postmodern genius, because it’s worked, hasn’t it?

The tone of the NY Times piece is hard to characterize. It seems rather neutral and descriptive, and the reader is allowed to come to his or her own conclusions about the tale it chronicles of ignorance, deception, spin, and media complicity, as well as PR brilliance.

The author David Samuels indicates that most of us haven’t heard of Rhodes before, but those of us who follow the news most definitely have. I’ve been alarmed about him for quite some time, and wrote this piece three years ago, as well as this one in 2008, where I mentioned the Rhodes hire (he was then 30 years old) and expressed these reservations:

I understand that youth does not necessarily mean historical ignorance, but it does mean that a candidate should be extra careful to make sure his/her young speechwriters have a very strong grounding in the subject.

Obama may be unable to do this because he himself has a certain lacuna where in-depth historical knowledge ought to be. That should make him especially aware of hiring people who can fill in the gaps, but in order to do this he would have to acknowledge his own weakness, something for which he’s shown little capacity to date.

Well, that certainly panned out. The post also contained an excerpt from an article describing the fact that Obama and his writers seemed more interested in the “narrative” than in anything else. So this was all foreshadowed.

Other strange revelations in the Samuels piece are that the ignorant and inexperienced Rhodes, whose previous resume was limited to “writer” (and not an especially sucessful writer at that), had as one of his first official jobs the writing of the Iraq Study Group’s report, on which he had an enormous influence in terms of its conclusions. Yes, you read that right. He also helped write the 9/11 Commission report, and was absolutely essential to and very active in framing the Iran deal.

Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau was in part responsible for hiring Rhodes, and with no overt sense of irony Samuels has this to say about that:

The idea of someone with a masters in fiction who had also co-authored the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission reports seemed perfect for a candidate who put so much emphasis on storytelling.

Samuels never directly condemns Obama or Rhodes, but he doesn’t seem to be praising them, either. Passages such as this one give you the tone of his article:

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive about the way that the agreement itself was sold.

“The suggestion” of something deceptive must have come from Samuels, I’d imagine, but he doesn’t come out and say that. It’s a curious tightrope-walk of a piece.

So here’s my question to add to the mix: why did Samuels write this, and in particular why did the NY Times publish it? It seems to indict the Obama administration, if only indirectly. Do the Times editors see the story it tells us an admirable one? Have we come that far?

And why did Rhodes so freely give this interview and say things that would seem to the objective observer to be an indictment of himself and the administration? Is he so arrogantly confident that he and they are correct and all the experts wrong, and therefore all this spinning to get the narrative out is perfectly justified and wonderful?

The spam filter has a lot of work to do

The New Neo Posted on by

Just a little inside baseball—I thought you might be curious to know how much spam the filter on a blog like this must block. There’s some variation, but depending on the day the number of spam comments that get caught in that filter in a 24-hour period is usually between 5,000 and 10,000.

Many of them are from the same groups, over and over again. It’s very rare for a spam comment to not get trapped in that filter, and for that I’m very grateful, because you can see how spam could easily overwhelm a blog. The number of spam comments here have increased tremendously over time; I think when I started out it was just a few hundred a day, although I can’t say I remember.

Death by GPS

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a description of how reliance on our GPS sytems can steer us terribly wrong, in the literal sense.

Beware.

The phenomenon of people automatically following their GPS’s directions is something I’ve noticed many times even in myself. We get into a “follow the leader” mode of thoughtlessly obeying orders, orders that seem innocuous enough. When we’re in the car listening to that calm, hypnotic voice, there’s a mild suspension of agency and autonomy. “Simon says,” and we follow.

The GPS works against the creation of a mental map of a geographic area (the article goes into an explanation of that, too). It’s a series of instructions, disconnected from each other and with no overarching picture of the whole. Unlike the process of looking something up on a map, we are passive and uninvolved, except to plug in the destination.

Fortunately, most people don’t end up in the dire straits of the couple in the article. But there is danger even if we’re not on isolated mountain roads. For example, at times I’ve had to restrain myself from making a left turn when stopped at a red light, because the voice of the GPS has ordered me to do so and I’m in that obedient lemming-like mode. Rather frightening.

But I love my GPS nevertheless. It’s gotten me out of many tough spots. And when you’re driving alone, it’s very difficult to read a map, and I often drive alone. So I’ve found my GPS invaluable.

I keep saying “my GPS,” but it’s really my cellphone and Google Maps. I used to have a dedicated GPS, but it finally died and I saw no reason to replace it, since cellphones have taken over that function. I set the destination, put my bluetooth in my ear (or turn up the volume on the phone itself), and wait for that soothing-yet-somehow-annoying voice to guide me through the labyrinth.