Month: March 2009

Woeser on Chinese Brutality

Tibetan blogger Woeser has a post with a great deal of background information connected to a recent video release from the Tibetan Government in Exile of footage from China’s brutal crackdown on Tibetans following the spring 2008 national uprising. Woeser’s original post is here. The China Digital Times has translated it. Woeser gives great detail on the beating, torture, and eventual murder of a young Tibetan named Tendar, who worked for  a mobile phone company in Lhasa.  She closes her post with a plea to the world:

June 19, the day the innocent Tibetan youth Tendar died a cruel death, was the day before the Beijing Olympic Torch arrived in Lhasa.

How many other Tibetans are locked away behind dark curtains, who like Tendar, suffered a cruel, inhumane violent treatment at the hands of the government’s state apparatus? How many more Tibetan tragedies are there that the world doesn’t know about? People of conscience, if they still have a conscience, please speak out about the tragic fate of the Tibetan people!

Waking Up to Deference

I’m not sure why Nick Kristof is surprised that experts on TV tend to get things wrong, often big things that the media is more than happy to repeatedly defer to them on, regardless of past performance. Academic studies of natural deference to experts really don’t prove anything. Expertise is another extension of authority – a “Dr.” in front of someone’s name is powerful, as is someone wearing a white lab coat (as Milgram showed us). The chyron below a pundit’s name on television is powerful, too.

Kristof brings the column to a faux-admirable close with a push towards journalistic accountability, citing that he was right about the Iraq war but wrong about the surge. But the problem with Iraq wasn’t so much that the experts on TV said stupid things about the war being easily winnable and Iraq being a dangerous threat, and thereby duping the public to support the war. While support was strong, there was a vocal and outspoken section of the public that opposed the war in the face of expert statements. The problem was that journalists took “expert” opinion on their own networks and in their own pages and stopped asking critical questions as a result. The statements from people in authority were not questioned by the press and thus any meaningful public discourse on the path to war was stifled. The media was cowed, not the public. And I certainly don’t see Kristof pushing for any real accountability for a lack of skepticism in the press.

HTML Mencken is right. It may be self-satisfying for Kristof to wax poetic about the public holding media figures accountable, but he knows full well that he and his colleagues will never be held accountable. It’s nice for Kristof to recognize in the pages of the New York Times that *gasp* experts get things wrong on a quite regular basis and People generally shouldn’t be so deferential to them, but it’s absurd for him to suggest that outspoken ideologues are almost always wrong, while conservative (small c) centrists who hem and haw and avoid real judgment of the issues are tops.

Or to put it a different way, it’s patently nuts for Kristof to look at the drumbeat to war in Iraq and the breathless reliance on the financial markets to chart the public policy course and conclude that the problem isn’t just experts, but experts with strong opinions regardless of where on the ideological spectrum they lie, that are the problem.

“Infantile Moment of Self-Pity”

Hunter of Daily Kos on the contemporary Republican Party:

Honestly, I would begin to regain a shred — a mere, dismal thread — of respect for the Republicans if they had an ounce of self awareness on this one, or heaven help us showed a moment of sheepishness over it, or even just f–ing recognized the duplicity and dumbassed ignorance they’re chucking out over the airwaves like beads at Mardi Gras. But no: doesn’t enter their heads. Now that they are out of power instead of in power, their clocks have been reset; they have amnesia about anything that happened in America for the last ten years or twenty. They are newborns, discovering every basic concept anew, and only when it brushes up against them.

It’s not even hypocrisy, because that implies an ounce of self awareness on their own contradictions. It’s purely an infantile moment of self-pity. Truly, the only America that exists for a conservative is the one they are living in, inside their own heads, at any particular moment of time. Everyone else, whether past, present and future, two doors down or ten states away, can go rot. What’s that you say? That the definition of “instant obedience” is not patriotism, and dissent is not treason? Well, paint me blue and call me Papa Freakin’ Smurf, but that is exactly the teaching moment we liberals have been trying to drill into your thick and addled skulls for eight long years. Congratulations on finally touching your fingers to the lifeline of the Patently Obvious: climb skyward for such further discoveries as Other People Have Different Values and Ethnic People Have Souls Too.

Yes, dissent is not treason: but if you can only realize that when you think it might happen to you, and only feel outrage over it when you feel it might happen to you, then that makes it even worse, because it indeed declares you to be just as narcissistic, just as incapable of empathy or comprehension, just as plain dumb as we all thought you were on our worst, most mean-spirited post-millennial days. That’s what prompts these growing whinefests muttering about your own patriotism, and your own right to disagree, and all the other things that you didn’t give two Limbaughian farts over just twelve damn months ago.

What a spectacle. But is anyone honestly surprised by it?

Labor Standards

Christy Hardin Smith highlights some very important ways that the transition from a Bush presidency to the Obama presidency will impact workers in America. For the first time in eight years, the Department of Labor will be run by someone who understands working issues and supports the rights of America’s workers. This should mean oversight, investigation, and enforcement of current labor laws…and hopefully an increase in worker protections in the future. From child labor violations, to worker safety violations, to illegal firings and intimidation in the face of union organizing, there’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to giving workers the executive branch they deserve.

Quote of the Day

Via the BBC, in an article about the Chinese government blocking all access to YouTube because the site has videos of Chinese troops and security forces beating peaceful Tibetan monks and protesters:

On Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said that China “is not afraid of the internet”.

Right, the Chinese government is simply afraid of the information that is available on the internet.