Smoke and Mirrors

I know the GOP has had a pretty good run of winning over the Inside the Beltway crowd over the last sixteen years through smoke and mirrors in lieu of actual substance, but that doesn’t mean it will always work. Budgets have numbers and you can only hype smoke and mirrors so long. When you show the press that you’ve hyped nothing, you look like the ideologically bankrupt fools that you are.

James Powderly on Tibet & China at SXSW

James Powderly of the Graffiti Research Lab talks about his work with Students for a Free Tibet during the Olympics, as well as his detention and deportation by the Chinese government. James went with the intention of using a laser to project messages in support of Tibet. James said this on the laser he planned to use:

 So this is like a really dangerous thing to only people who are nuts. Like to the rest of the world, this is just a silly toy. You can buy a version of this at the store that literally puts smiley faces and hearts and things like that. But to everybody else, this is just a silly toy.

They are who we thought they were

The International Olympic Committee has announced that they are banning international torch relays of the Olympic flame. This follows the Beijing Olympic torch relay which faced massive protest wherever it went around the world, but most especially in London, Paris, Hong Kong, and San Francisco.

The 2008 relay’s London leg was hit by several incidents and criticism over China’s ‘torch police’ security staff.

Organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have already said they had no plans to take the torch outside Britain.

Instead of representing a symbol of hope and inspiration, the Olympic torch became a magnet for protesters in 2008 en route to Beijing, sparking sometimes violent protests over China’s human rights record.

IOC executive director Gilbert Felli said: “After the (2004) relay in Athens, which was the first international relay, we came to the conclusion it was easier for the torch to stay inside the (host) country.

“There were difficulties with the NOCs (National Olympic Committees), and we also saw the risk with a torch relay going around the world.

“Beijing had planned an international torch relay and we accepted it. We saw in the debrief that the risk was there and the IOC decided not to do it (again).

“I think when the torch relay is inside the host country there is more control.”

They are who we thought they were: anti-democratic cowards who only want an anesthetized view of their host countries, polished to the satisfaction of international sponsors and prime-time TV specials. The problem for the IOC isn’t that they partnered with a brutal Chinese government that used the Olympics to sanitize their ongoing military occupation of Tibet and repression of dissent; no – the IOC’s problem is that protests made the Olympics look bad. It is the protesters that are the problem. You see, the IOC continues to refuse to confront the underlying disease – partnership with bad governments – and instead is focused only on the protests, a symptom of the disease of doing bad business with bad governments.

Keeping a torch relay in the host country ensures that the IOC can partner with whichever government they want to in the future and rely on any internal capacities for stifling protest and dissent to keep the IOC’s nose clean.

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.