Their Glory Is Their Shame

I imagine you've heard about the statues of Donald Trump in the nude, with miniscule genitalia, that appeared in several US cities this week.  Rawstory ran a story headed "NYC Parks & Rec pulls down naked Donald Trump statue - then brilliantly mocks him in a statement."  The statement in question was "“NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small."

I don't see any mockery of Trump in that NYC P&R statement. Y'all are getting desperate, I think, and it's not like you really need to be.  The schoolyard aspect of the Trump hate is not attractive: We keep making fun of him, and he still won't go away!  What is wrong with the guy?  It mainly serves to show that certain segments of the anti-Trump population are not very different from the pro-Trump population, in this respect at least.

That being said, I'm not displeased by this action; Trump is eminently and deservedly mockable, and it's far better to do it this way than to try to slut-shame his wife. Any halfway feminist person should recognize that attacking a woman to get at her husband is a no-no, but I've been surprised at how many feminists are ready to jettison their principles in the cause of Democratic supremacy.  (Not to mention the glorious project of putting a woman in the Oval Office!) And while, again, mocking Trump is a good thing, I see again how many people after a century and more of feminism and anti-sexist activism still haven't figured out that having testicles (or not, or having small ones or big ones) is not a moral trait. To say nothing of fat-shaming anybody.  Yeah, I'm sure Trump thinks so, but he's not the authority around here -- let alone a role model.

Oh, and PS: "The Emperor Has No Balls." Trump isn't the Emperor. Barack Obama is. Shall we talk about his balls?  If you want to play on that level, let's discuss the kind of huevos it takes to joke on TV about killing some pop singers with predator drones if they look upon his daughters to lust upon them.

And PPS: I fully expect to be accused of "political correctness" for pointing out these issues.  Well, go for it, bitchez!  We all know that Political Correctness is destroying this country ...

Running the Government Like a Business

This is what it looks like (via):

Western militaries are experimenting with having future drone pilots command up to four aircraft at once, adding new potential challenges even as a top-secret U.S. drone’s crash in Iran exposed the risks of flying unmanned aircraft thousands of miles away.

And why?

To save money and make unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) less reliant on massive ground support crews, weapons manufacturers are working with military officials to develop more autonomous control systems and improve networking among planes.

At the moment, it can take hundreds of support staff on the ground to run a single drone for 24 hours, adding cost and complications at a time when budget-cutters are looking for billions of dollars of program cuts.

As emptywheel writes, what could possibly go wrong? Especially now that drones are going to be used in the US.

[Another post that had been languishing in the drafts folder for longer than I want to admit.  But it's still relevant, I think.]

When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Swing to the Right

Much as I enjoy his blog, I do have the occasional disagreement with Whatever It Is I'm Against It, as when he posted this note to liberals

... who support Guantanamo and killing people with drones: you are not liberals. That is all.

It's probably not worth going into this again, but when has that ever stopped me before? What we have here is a good example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, or, if you like, of linguistic prescriptivism:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that’s all.”

But I'm a descriptivist, so I look at what liberals actually do. "Liberal" and "liberalism" mean many different things, even limited to an American context. American liberals supported the US entrance into World War I, and managed the propaganda campaign that justified it. They supported the Korean War, and though many eventually fell away from the anticommunist faith, it was Kennedy liberals who escalated the US invasion of Vietnam. The supposedly liberal corporate media backed the war until at least the Tet Offensive of 1968 made it clear that the war was going to be harder to win than America had thought, but even there what opposition arose was tactical (the war was "unwinnable"), not principled, and the US couldn't withdraw without looking like a pitiful helpless giant. The same applied to both invasions of Iraq and to the War on Terror.

American liberals have a long and troubled record, thanks to their perennial readiness to sell out their avowed values when the going gets tough. As Langston Hughes had one of his characters say in the 1940s,

"Well, as nearly as I can tell, a liberal is a nice man who acts decently toward people, talks democratically, and often is democratic in his personal life, but does not stand up very well in action when some social issue like Jim Crow comes up."

(True to form, a good many American liberals were alienated by Martin Luther King's opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam and his growing concern with labor and class issues.) Christopher Hitchens wrote something similar in The Nation in 1985, before he became "unpredictable" himself, a textbook example of what he criticized:

[I]n the charmed circle of neoliberal and neoconservative journalism, however, "unpredictability" is the special emblem and certificate of self-congratulation. To be able to bray that "as a liberal, I say bomb the hell out of them" is to have achieved the eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a lifelong socialist, I say don't let's bomb the hell out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow. Predictable as hell.

Dennis Perrin wrote a concise and entertaining account of liberal Democratic perfidy in Savage Mules (Verso, 2008). Richard Seymour did a fuller, more detailed job in The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008), extending the shameful tale to progressives and leftists, in England and Europe as well as the US.

So, given the history of American liberalism and progressivism in action, I don't see a good reason to deny that liberal supporters of predator drones and Guantanamo are liberals; at best it's a waste of time and energy, like arguing whether someone is a true Christian or not. I could only justify doing it, I think, if someone tried to defend his or her support for predator drones and Guantanamo by pointing to his or her liberal credentials, and even then, who cares? The party label is unimportant compared to what the party is doing.