The critique on WikiLeaks for endangering the lives of Afghan informants by releasing classified military information is growing. In Dutch media as well. On this blog, we responded to this justified criticism a few days ago, which, however, currently seems to be the only point that gets discussed in the whole affair.
As was painfully predictable and predicted, the bulk of political discussion in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures focuses not on our failing, sagging, pointless, civilian-massacring, soon-to-be-decade-old war, but rather on the Treasonous Evil of WikiLeaks for informing the American people about what their war entails. While it’s true that WikiLeaks should have been much more careful in redacting the names of Afghan sources, watching Endless War Supporters prance around with righteous concern for Afghan lives being endangered by the leak is really too absurd to bear. You know what endangers innocent Afghan lives? Ten years of bombings, checkpoint shootings, due-process-free hit squads, air attacks, drones, night raids on homes, etc. etc.
Zoals blijkt uit alle media (NRC, Volkskrant, Telegraaf) naderen de informele gesprekken voor de formatie van een rechts kabinet hun voltooiing. En het ziet er sterk naar uit dat het er gaat komen, waarschijnlijk in de variant van een minderheidskabinet VVD-CDA, met gedoogsteun van de PVV.
Op allerlei manieren is dit de meest naargeestige variant denkbaar. VVD en CDA krijgen met hun tweeën de kans het land te bestieren, terwijl Wilders vrij van enige regeringsverantwoordelijkheid zitting neemt in het parlement. Geen kans op een implosie à la de LPF, het Nederlandse gezicht is gered in het buitenland, en de PVV kan ongehinderd verder groeien in de polls. De enige hoop die er nog rest ligt bij zetel 76, ongeleid projectiel Hero Brinkman, maar met gedoogsteun van de zwartekousengrefo’s van de SGP zit er al een vrij royale meerderheid. Een minderheidskabinet is flexibel, en dus waarschijnlijk zeer stabiel. Als je bedenkt dat in Denemarken een zelfde minderheidsvariant al sinds 2001 regeert, gaan we een leuke tijd tegemoet.
What can we say? Procesmatig gezien valt er wat te zeggen voor de Nederlandse polderaanpak van populisme: betrek ze erbij, laat ze regeren, knuffel ze dood, laat ze vastlopen in het moeras dat besturen in Nederland heet. Vanuit puur democratisch oogpunt is het natuurlijk sowieso gerechtvaardigd dat de derde partij van het land uitgenodigd wordt om mee te regeren (dat ze “de grootste winnaar” zijn doet mijns inziens niet terzake). Maar een democratische rechtsstaat is meer dan alleen een proces. Het gaat ook om het verdedigen van principes; en met de opname van Wilders in het proces worden zijn anti-democratische en anti-rechtsstatelijke standpunten gelegitimeerd, een normaal onderdeel van het politieke discours. Zie de VVD, die vooral problemen had met het sociaal-economische programma van de PVV; alsof dat hun grote makke is. Wilders’ standpunten, zoals die rondom de “kopvoddentaks”, een verbod op de Koran, en een moskeeënstop, zijn niet legitiem, want tegen de rechtsstaat, en het is aan elke democratische partij om dat uit te dragen. Maar dat gebeurt nauwelijks in Nederland (waarbij ik wel wil aantekenen dat ik niet verwacht dat deze punten in beleid zullen worden omgezet; dat zal zelfs VVD en CDA te ver gaan).
Het allerergste is echter nog dat er bijna nergensin de kranten, of waar ook, aandacht wordt besteed aan het concrete beleid dat dit kabinet zal gaan uitvoeren. Alle aandacht gaat naar het proces, naar de poppetjes; er lijkt een opluchting te bestaan dat er, wie het dan ook zijn, vooruitgang is, dat er geformeerd wordt. Over beleid heeft niemand het. Het idee onder sommigen is mogelijk dat de schade beperkt zal zijn, omdat het kabinet wellicht snel valt en (radicaal) beleid niet zo snel doorgevoerd kan worden. Maar vergeet het maar: voor enkele van de meest ingrijpende maatregelen die zo’n kabinet kan nemen is enkel een uitvoerende macht nodig.
Je zou hopen dat wanneer een rechts kabinet tot stand komt, er een rallying point ontstaat voor mensen die het er niet mee eens zijn. Demonstraties, protestmarsen, online activisme, weet ik het; maar zeer waarschijnlijk, zolang iedereen nog in de zon op het terras een biertje kan drinken en lekker kan eten, gebeurt er niets.
Daarom hier, voordat een nieuwe regering er is, een opsomming van beleidspunten die waarschijnlijk onderdeel zullen zijn van het programma. In your face, zodat je je even realiseert waar het ook alweer over gaat. Afgesloten met een aardig filmpje met hoogtepunten uit het parlementaire oeuvre van de tegenwoordig poeslieve Wilders, zodat we weer weten wie dat ook alweer was. Dit is slechts een voorlopige lijst, gaarne meer suggesties in de comments!
Here we go: Nederland in de komende paar jaar.
Het verder opbouwen van de surveillancestaat. VVD, CDA, PVV en SGP zijn zo’n beetje de partijen die zich het minst gelegen laten liggen aan privacy en het meest aan het garanderen van “veiligheid”, dus verwacht een hausse aan bewakingscamera’s, internetcensuur, identificatieverplichtingen, enz.
Een einde aan het gedoogbeleid. Softdrugs worden verboden, alle coffeeshops gesloten.
Kappen in alle vormen van steun en subsidies aan “linkse hobby’s”, zoals natuur en milieu, kunst, cultuur, muziek en multiculturele iniatieven.
Géén kilometerheffing en beperking van de hypotheekrenteaftrek
Wegen aanleggen
Een pro-Israël-buitenlandbeleid
Eenkeihard bezuinigingsbeleid, met grote sociale kosten en mogelijk ten nadele van economische groei
En dit is de man met wie de partijen van VVD’ers en CDA’ers gaan regeren:
It’s American history in pictures day today here at LSD. Presently, Times Square is a tourist attraction, with its neat electronic billboards, NASDAQ display, advertisements, etcetera; a big, clean, hypercapitalistic Disneyland. Up until the 1980s, however, Times Square was kind of a different place… As documented (for the 1940s) in On the Road, for example, it was full of dealers, pimps, hookers, junkies, adult cinemas, head shops, nudie bookstores, grindhouses, etc.
So immerse yourself in the gritty 1980s Times Square with the video below, with voice-over interviews.
- Edit: by the way, also see this blog post about Downtown Calling, a documentary on the artistic and musical scence of New York in the 1970s, a time when the place was economically “depressed” yet thriving culturally
Some people just seem to “get” what someone is saying in a way others don’t, and a new study suggests why: When we connect with others in conversation, our brains, in a manner of speaking, link up as well.
The results show that during successful verbal communication, brain responses of the speaker mirror those of the listener. This “coupling” occurs in more regions than just those used for simply processing sounds — extending into brain areas involved in higher thinking, such as those processing the meaning of language.
The more two people’s brains are “coupled” in conversation, the better the listener comprehends what the speaker is saying, the researchers say.
“That feeling that we all have when we’re interacting with people, I think that what we’re trying to do here is show that that feeling of clicking might actually have real neural basis,” said study researcher Greg Stephens of Princeton University.
While the subjects of the study didn’t actually speak to one another — the speaker told a real-life story, and the listeners heard a recording of it — the study was the first to examine how the brain of a speaker and listener interact during natural communication, the researchers say.
Feet firmly on the ground Ben Eine teamed up with RYCA yesterday to paint these new hoardings in Hackney, East London. With a font comprised entirely of dots with smiley faces it turned into a marathon session with Ben choosing the wording ‘The Strangest Week’ as a fitting comment on 7 days which saw one of his paintings gifted to President Obama and hung in the White House.
This article, by the way, points to voters demanding tougher sentences and politicians, afraid of being tarred as soft on crime, responding, as the main cause of the complexity of laws and regulations that leads to the imprisonment of 1 percent of the entire U.S. adult population. It unfortunately does not point to the existence of a privatized prison-industrial complex with ties to politicians, that financially benefits from having as many prisoners as possible (on this, Eric Schlosser’s 1998 The Atlantic article “The Prison-Industrial Complex” is a great read). Nor does it point out the even more staggering percentage of the black male population that is locked up behind bars: 10,4% of the entire African-American population between 25 and 29 years old.
If it were true that a country’s measure of civilization can be deduced from the way it treats its prisoners, then America is a developmental country.
Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.
The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.
In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100.Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.
Some criminals belong behind bars. When a habitual rapist is locked up, the streets are safer. But the same is not necessarily true of petty drug-dealers, whose incarceration creates a vacancy for someone else to fill, argues Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University. The number of drug offenders in federal and state lock-ups has increased 13-fold since 1980. Some are scary thugs; many are not.
(…)
Severe drug laws have unintended consequences. Less than half of American cancer patients receive adequate painkillers, according to the American Pain Foundation, another pressure-group. One reason is that doctors are terrified of being accused of drug-trafficking if they over-prescribe. In 2004 William Hurwitz, a doctor specialising in the control of pain, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for prescribing pills that a few patients then resold on the black market. Virginia’s board of medicine ruled that he had acted in good faith, but he still served nearly four years.
(…)
Jim Felman, a defence lawyer in Tampa, Florida, says America is conducting “an experiment in imprisoning first-time non-violent offenders for periods of time previously reserved only for those who had killed someone”.
These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.
Recently, I’ve been on a vacation. During this holiday, I made as many pictures as possible, in order to put them on Facebook and show everybody what an interesting life I lead. These pictures are, of course, preferrably as hip as can be.
[I] have been struck each time by the discord between people’s Facebook lives and what they say in private. On Facebook they have been on an amazing vacation to exotic beaches. In person they confess that the vacation was a desperate attempt to save a marraige. On Facebook they have been to gliteratee tech conferences. In person they confess they haven’t been able to sleep for months, and are on anti-anxiety medication from the stress of financial pressures on their company. It is a strange case of schadenfreude for me to hear this, knowing that I had been jealous of their beach time and glamor.
(…)
Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do intereseting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be pschologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.
So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertantly created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.
Not a surprising find, but its good to have it out in the open again: the current Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is the most conservative in decades, possibly ever. And with Obama’s choice for nominations, that is not likely to change. So here see the direction in which the US is headed.
When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his colleagues on the Supreme Court left for their summer break at the end of June, they marked a milestone: the Roberts court had just completed its fifth term.
In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.
And for all the public debate about the confirmation of Elena Kagan or the addition last year of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, there is no reason to think they will make a difference in the court’s ideological balance. Indeed, the data show that only one recent replacement altered its direction, that of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, pulling the court to the right.
There is no similar switch on the horizon. That means that Chief Justice Roberts, 55, is settling in for what is likely to be a very long tenure at the head of a court that seems to be entering a period of stability.
If the Roberts court continues on the course suggested by its first five years, it is likely to allow a greater role for religion in public life, to permit more participation by unions and corporations in elections and to elaborate further on the scope of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Abortion rights are likely to be curtailed, as are affirmative action and protections for people accused of crimes.
The recent shift to the right is modest. And the court’s decisions have hardly been uniformly conservative. The justices have, for instance, limited the use of the death penalty and rejected broad claims of executive power in the government’s efforts to combat terrorism.
But scholars who look at overall trends rather than individual decisions say that widely accepted political science data tell an unmistakable story about a notably conservative court.
Almost all judicial decisions, they say, can be assigned an ideological value. Those favoring, say, prosecutors and employers are said to be conservative, while those favoring criminal defendants and people claiming discrimination are said to be liberal.
Analyses of databases coding Supreme Court decisions and justices’ votes along these lines, one going back to 1953 and another to 1937, show that the Roberts court has staked out territory to the right of the two conservative courts that immediately preceded it by four distinct measures:
In its first five years, the Roberts court issued conservative decisions 58 percent of the time. And in the term ending a year ago, the rate rose to 65 percent, the highest number in any year since at least 1953.
The courts led by Chief Justices Warren E. Burger, from 1969 to 1986, and William H. Rehnquist, from 1986 to 2005, issued conservative decisions at an almost indistinguishable rate — 55 percent of the time.
That was a sharp break from the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, in what liberals consider the Supreme Court’s golden age and conservatives portray as the height of inappropriate judicial meddling. That court issued conservative decisions 34 percent of the time.
Four of the six most conservative justices of the 44 who have sat on the court since 1937 are serving now: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Antonin Scalia and, most conservative of all, Clarence Thomas. (The other two were Chief Justices Burger and Rehnquist.) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the swing justice on the current court, is in the top 10.
The Roberts court is finding laws unconstitutional and reversing precedent — two measures of activism — no more often than earlier courts. But the ideological direction of the court’s activism has undergone a marked change toward conservative results.
What’s going on y’all?? This little guy joins pot plants recently seen in Brooklyn and Union Square. Is this a public art project meant as wry commentary on how New York City is going to pot? You can’t tell me otherwise. Sure beats the Heroin Stamp Project at White Box Gallery last month.
With all the generally happy reactions in newspapers and on blogs to the WikiLeaks publication of classified military documents (and the unhappy reactions of governments), it can’t hurt to hear a critical voice about the possibly negative consquences of the ‘radical transparency’ WikiLeaks is advocating.
Humor me for a moment: if your life was in danger, would you trust Julian Assange to keep your identity a secret? Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has dedicated himself to exposing secrets he feels should not be kept — but how he decides what’s worth staying secret and what isn’t is anyone’s guess. The latest leak from WikiLeaks, which posts 92,000 classified documents to the Internet and dares readers to find something noteworthy inside, puts a huge number of people at risk. And Assange doesn’t seem to care.
(…)
This is a very real worry — despite Assange’s assurances that his organization is withholding 15,000 documents to “redact” or change any names,what assurances can we have that WikiLeaks will do a good job?
Can an organization whose sole purpose is exposing secret information really do a good job safeguarding the lives it endangers through exposure? They really cannot.
(…)
The materials in question mostly consist of immediate incident reports — seemingly downloaded directly from CIDNE, a massive reporting database the military maintains in Afghanistan and Iraq. These reports are about as accurate as first reports from a crime scene: often accurate in atmosphere, but usually wrong on details.
The military is rightly accused of overclassifying material, but in this case we have some idea of why: even with the names removed from these reports, you know where they happened (many still have place names). You know when they happened. And you know an Afghan was speaking to a U.S. soldier or intelligence agent. If you have times, locations and half the participants, you don’t need names to identify who was involved in a conversation — with some very basic detective work, you can find out (and it’s much easier to do in Afghanistan, which loves gossip).
If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks.
Still, I’d say, there’s far too much government secrecy, and governments have a duty to inform the public about what happens in the wars they’re fighting: like how many civilians die, and how well the Taliban fare. If governments refuse to do so for intransparent reasons, it’s absolutely great that there’s an independent grassroots organization like WikiLeaks that somehow manages to make this information public, in the name of transparency.
The point of this author about the danger to Afghan citizens of the WikiLeaks release is well-taken, however. WikiLeaks (as well as the NYT and The Guardian) maintain that these are old military actions, and not even the top-secret ones, so the danger of Taliban retribution may be circumscribed. There remains the issue, however, that it is WikiLeaks (and in the last instance Julian Assange) that decides what information is to be made public, and what not, without any external accountability. Who is going to guard the guardians?
Wat een verschil, nu al, met de formatie van Paars-plus. Deze partijen gaven althans symbolisch nog blijk te hechten aan een transparante regeringsformatie, door te onderhandelen midden in het hart van de nationale politiek, het Binnenhof. Een VVD-PVV-CDA kabinet wordt daarentegen bekokstoofd op een supergeheime locatie, zonder informateur en dus zonder enige vorm van toezicht van parlement of staatshoofd. De selectieve verontwaardiging van Wilders over achterkamertjes kan daarmee ook de deur uit.
VVD-leider Mark Rutte, PVV-leider Geert Wilders en CDA-fractieleider Maxime Verhagen praten dinsdag verder over mogelijke politieke samenwerking. Dat zei Rutte dinsdagochtend op radio 538. Het overleg heeft plaats op een geheime locatie en de drie hebben afgesproken helemaal niets te zeggen over de voortgang. De voorlichters melden zelfs niet of het gesprek is begonnen of geëindigd.
Rutte zei op de radio dat de drie dit zo hebben afgesproken, omdat in de media ,,elk snippertje nieuws wordt”. Achteraf zullen de betrokkenen opheldering geven aan de media. Rutte, Wilders en Verhagen zitten met zijn drieën om tafel, zonder anderen erbij, zei Rutte. Bij het informele gesprek is ook informateur Ruud Lubbers niet aanwezig.
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