Month: December 2014

Lessons in media, by Anil Dash

I trolled Anil Dash on Friday after he fretted about journalists calling the New Republic purge a “massacre” and other tropes that suggest “violence.” Here’s what he, uh, learned from the experience:

He must not know the Daily Caller very well.

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How smoking became as cool and subversive as 1960s ad men always said it was

In a bit of news that should be much more outrageous than the Darren Wilson decision, a grand jury has declined to indict the cops who put Eric Garner in a chokehold, during which he died.

This story is less useful to the media and Democratic Party than the one in Ferguson, so it’s likely the protests, if there are any, will be fewer between and less well-covered. There is also the inconvenient fact that Garner was purveying a substance only bad people smoke, tobacco, at the time of his death. Since only bad people smoke, politicians are fine with driving up the price on these largely poor individuals. This regressive tax then creates black markets, which are usually filled by lower-class people like Garner, who are then preyed upon by authorities. The chain of causation here is far too clear to make a vague point about institutional oppression, and focusing on this story risks people reaching the dangerous conclusion that supporters of higher tobacco taxes want to see more Staten Island loosie hucksters strangled to death.

The highest-level authority currently pushing tobacco taxes is the World Health Organization. It met in Moscow this October to confront what it calls an “epidemic” of smoking and hammer out the details for a global tobacco tax, but conducted the meeting in secret, banning the public, then reporters, actions they blamed on “mounting pressure from [the] tobacco industry.”

If a global tobacco tax sounds like a great idea to you, consider that more than 50 percent of cigarettes sold in major Northeastern cities are bootleg. They just don’t raise the money authorities think they will, and a global cigarette tax would obviously exacerbate that problem. What the World Health Organization is really saying is they’d like to see Eric Garners planetwide. To the WHO, smoking must be ended, and that is a small price to pay for a smoke-free world. You know what they say about breaking a few eggs.

This is also an instructive lie from the WHO brought up during the proceedings:

Another milestone in tobacco control was adoption of the decision on electronic nicotine (and non-nicotine) delivery systems, also known as electronic cigarettes. This rather novel product was first launched by independent companies, but many of them are now being controlled by multinational tobacco companies. The decision acknowledges the need for regulations along the lines of policies concerning other tobacco products, including banning or restricting promotion, advertising and sponsorship of ENDS.

We’re supposed to find it reassuring that global health authorities are just as wary of “multinationals” as Adbusters Magazine. But by most estimates, that isn’t true at all. The U.S. market for e-cigarettes is 70 percent small independent manufacturers.

Even if it were the case, regulations and taxes of this kind usually work in favor of big tobacco. For example, Altria boasts on its website that it was alone in supporting Barack Obama’s ban on flavored cigarettes: “Altria Group and its tobacco companies stood alone within the tobacco industry in support of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.” Isn’t that interesting? (more…)

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Denounce Ferguson protesters but remember to forgive

“Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to animals! Christian adults don’t want it!” – Amanda Wingfield

Since the days of Aquinas and Dante, the capacity for reason has been the defining feature of man. The leopard acts by instinct. Man is endowed with better capabilities. Christian theology holds that free will and logic are God’s gift to humanity. Without them, we would be left grazing in a field, not striving for better or to achieve oneness back with our Lord.

If using reason to make sense of the world is man acting at his best, what should we make of the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and the ensuing “protests” across the country? The killing of unarmed black teeanger Michael Brown by a white police officer has predictably aggravated race relations in the U.S. Rather than focus on the clear-cut evidence of the case — which appears to exonerate officer Darren Wilson of wrongdoing — the shooting is being used to prove a point about police discrimination in America. The means of distribution are simple: destruction of private property and interference with commerce. In other words, brute thuggery and ignominious acts of violence.

From a practical standpoint, the disruption of people’s everyday routine doesn’t accomplish anything outside of ratcheting up annoyance. A casual look at social media reveals that most folks are annoyed rather than sympathetic when a few delinquents shut down a major highway. The random acts of disturbance are doing little to support the cause of equitable punishment.

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What we can learn from the anti-lynching movement about curbing police brutality

In the decades immediately preceding and following the turn of the twentieth century, gleeful crowds of white Southerners numbering in the hundreds frequently gathered to watch the lynchings of black Americans, oftentimes for the petty crime of stealing a hog, or none at all. By the 1960s, public lynchings had largely become a thing of the past and today, people react to photographs of this dark time in our nation’s history with shock and disgust. What brought an end to this era of mob violence?

Arguably, it was the actions of one former slave, Ida B. Wells, who collected and reported comprehensive data on lynchings in the South to prove that African Americans were more often victims than criminals when it came to lynchings, thus transforming public opinion and creating the possibility for political reform.

Tragically, disproportionate violence against African Americans continues today, albeit in a more subtle form. In a recent article for The Guardian, Isabel Wilkerson wrote that according to available data, the rate of police killings of African Americans today is roughly equal to the rate of lynchings in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then, every four days a black person was publicly murdered, often simply for stealing 75 cents or for talking back to a white person. While the rate of police killings of African Americans has fallen 70 percent over the last 40 to 50 years, it is still estimated that in today’s day and age an African American is murdered by a white police officer an astounding twice a week for offenses as egregious as walking up a stairwell.

While there are five times more white Americans, black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed when they encounter the police in the U.S., and black teenagers are far likelier to be killed by police than white teenagers. Additionally, the number of innocent people killed and assaulted by the cops is likely even higher than the data suggests considering that local police departments are not required to report police crime.

While white Southern lynchers in the early 1900s claimed that they were filling in where the legal system failed by serving as arbiters of vigilante justice whereas today murderers are more likely to hide behind police badges, in both cases racism was and is shrouded in promises to serve and protect. Then and now, stereotypes of black inferiority obscure systematic oppression and allow murderers to get away without so much as an inquiry. As Wilkerson wrote, “Last century’s beast and savage have become this century’s gangbanger and thug.”

Given the chilling parallels between the lynchings of the post-Reconstruction South and modern-day state-perpetrated violence against the black community, it is worth taking a closer look at the success of the anti-lynching movement for insights on how we might repair today’s political institutions and race relations.

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‘Une bouffée de mitraille’

Isegoria explains:

As a young Brigadier General, Napoleon once dispersed a mob of Royalists with “a whiff of grapeshot” — although it’s not quite clear how to translate that very Anglo-Saxon phrase back into French. Une bouffée de mitraille?

The phrase likely sounds so Anglo-Saxon because it was coined by Scottish essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle, in The French Revolution: A History.

Mitraille is the French word for grapeshot, and it is also the root of the French word for machine gun, mitrailleuse, because the original French proto-machine gun was a multi-barrel affair meant to deliver a volley of rifle rounds, as a new and improved form of grapeshot, and the term stuck, even as true machine guns arrived on the scene.

More on that unusual phrase here. And more from Carlyle here:

`It is false,` says Napoleon, `that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.` Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it, to this hour.–Singular: in old Broglie`s time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then, could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!– …

On the whole, therefore, has it not been fulfilled what was prophesied, ex- postfacto indeed, by the Archquack Cagliostro, or another? He, as he looked in rapt vision and amazement into these things, thus spake: (Diamond Necklace, p. 35.) `Ha! What is this? Angels, Uriel, Anachiel, and the other Five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence; Power that destroyed Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer Limbo, which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE Of IMPOSTURE waver? Burst there, in starry sheen updarting, Light-rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travail-throes, but in death-throes? Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the Heavens,–lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red Hellfire!

`IMPOSTURE is burnt up: one Red-sea of Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue, licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and– ha! what see I?–all the Gigs of Creation; all, all! Wo is me! Never since Pharaoh`s Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of Wheel-vehicles like this in the Sea of Fire. Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind. Higher, higher yet flames the Fire-Sea; crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella. The metal Images are molten; the marble Images become mortar-lime; the stone Mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The World is black ashes; which, ah, when will they grow green? The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead: it is an empty World! Wo to them that shall be born then!–A King, a Queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll. Iscariot Egalite was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastille; whole kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men. For it is the End of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.` This Prophecy, we say, has it not been fulfilled, is it not fulfilling?

The other famous usage is attributed to the Duke of Wellington: “Pour la canaille: Faut la mitraille.” For the mob, use grapeshot.