A Global Force for Goods

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 8, 2013

Also on the subject of cultural-historically informative television commercials showing during the NBA playoffs:

Somewhat predictably, the US Navy’s recruiting motto “A Global Force for Good” has been criticized not for its imperial presumptions, but for its seeming overemphasis on humanitarian missions and purposes. Similar criticisms have been lodged at recruiting commercials that depict Marines speeding “Toward the Sounds of Chaos” while trucking AID pallets along with their weaponry and each other.

Any notion that the US military exists or can be justified for the purpose of “foreign aid” runs into well-conditioned political reflexes – against wasting lives or resources or money or anything at all on ungrateful foreigners; in favor of a military purposed for, as they say, hurting people and breaking things – but surely there are few supporters of the American military who conceive of it as a “global force for evil,” or as a completely neutral force. Continue reading →

Posted in Neo-Imperialism, TV, War | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Ridiculously Obscene

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 6, 2013

1.

The Chris & Cliff Paul ads for State Farm are unsettling.

I could narrate the nightmarish historical grotesques that flash through my mind when I see these commercials, but the result would inevitably recapitulate the same mixture of the ridiculous and the obscene. Anyone ought to be able to do it themselves. I’ll just ask in what kind of society would it be possible to separate identical twins at birth, and bring them together at some later date just to see how they react to each other? In what kind of society, or social system, would it be possible for such a long-term experiment on two human beings to be carried out?

Continue reading →

Posted in TV | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Ferguson Corollary

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 4, 2013

Though easily turned into a cliché, and an obnoxious one, the notion of the childless and in that sense socially remote thinker or artist who sublimates a defeated bid for mere genetic immortality as greatness, of the individual for whom art or philosophy or science or religion is procreation by other means, and as near to the divine as ever achieved or achievable by human exertion, remains indispensable, in part because the alternative looks something like this: Continue reading →

Posted in Culture & Entertainment, Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Respecting an Establishment of Religion

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 3, 2013

religionThank you for the thoughtful demurrals, Mr. Drew.

I think the crucial question when you say, regarding the idea of “constitutional disobedience,” that “we should account for our use of it,” is the eternal “Whom do you mean by ‘we’?” Since political constitution is constitution of the collective, in debating the constitution we are debating possible answers to that question. For the purposes of this inquiry, if we mean “you, me, and the participants at this blog,” or, more broadly, “interested if mostly powerless people in general,” then the discussion is by definition unimportant. Whether we “should” or not is not a great matter, and these little or lesser “we”‘s are nothing except our freedom to play around with notions too big for us, with any regard for consequences seeming quite pretentious. If, however, we are or imagine ourselves to be in contention with the greater we; if, even if we know ourselves as the lesser we, we presume that we should speak as though we are or might be of relevance to the greater we; or if we at all suspect that we might become of relevance to the greater we; if we think should remain conscious of that risk however small, then there might be problems for little-us to consider. Continue reading →

Posted in Anismism, Philosophy, Politics, US History | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

Dream of a Better Dream

by CK MacLeod Posted on May 1, 2013

The American Dream as Rod Dreher depicts it would be a sham, or the ideological manipulation of the credulous masses, or perhaps a lie we willingly tell ourselves:

The American dream is a lie. This idea that if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything — that’s very individualistic. Who’s that really about? Who is that serving? Who is that for? It’s for me. It’s a pursuit of happiness that doesn’t create happiness. There’s nothing with any substance at the end of that. So, if you work hard enough, are you going to defeat cancer? If you work hard enough, are you going to be happy with your job? If you work hard enough, and get a big bank account, does that create happiness? No!

I will not call Dreher a liar, but he is offering a false or exaggeratedly simplistic definition of the Dream that happens to suit his polemic.

Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Untimely Posts, US History | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Post-Theism

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 28, 2013

For Jaybird, the main reference of “post-theist” seems to be to the individual non-/believer’s state of belief. Jaybird was a believer in God, but now is not: “There’s just something about throwing the mantle off, rather than never having worn it.” That “something” suggests the familiar liberationist affect or frisson, excitement of the newborn modern at or as the death throes of all divines, though we may also see ourselves as too late in the historical day to experience that excitement except as a matter of nostalgia, imitatively. De-divinization may have lost its luster, perhaps never more than the twisted reflection of a phantom, the bare ideational existence of a non-existent. Post-theism, or its possibility, whether or not experienced as an apparently inner state of belief, must also reflect an historical, common, or social-cultural condition or tendency of belief, the sense that, whatever else we know or believe, we also know that there was a god perhaps indistinguishable from or never more than the belief or belief in the belief, so never completely un-believed either, or there was God for us, once for all of us, but that He/She/It has been brought down or that we have brought Him/Her/It down, have assassinated or superseded It, somewhat as in the Nietzschean completion of the possibility anticipated by Luther and Hegel, and, according to a few mystics, gnostics, heretics, and materialists, the Christian myth always and essentially. Continue reading →

Posted in Anismism, Religion | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

What they mean by “neo-isolationist”

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 23, 2013

nicer version of US-centric map of the worldWith support from Robert Golan-Vilella, Daniel Larison returns to a familiar theme, ridiculing Victor Davis Hanson for pushing the idea that President Obama is a “neo-isolationist.” As Larison notes, and has noted many times, applying the label “isolationist” to a mainstream liberal internationalist and multi-lateralist like Obama, or even to much stronger critics of the “Washington Consensus” like Andrew Bacevich, Ron or Rand Paul, or Larison himself, is somewhat absurd, or at minimum a poor use of language. What Hanson really means when he refers to a “Diffidence Doctrine,” but is constrained by traditional American political practice from saying, is that Obama seems unwilling to assert an American imperial interest.

A coherent argument for this interest, and for related actual divisions between nominally left and right internationalisms, remains generally unarticulated. Continue reading →

Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Terror in Concept: Comment on “Panic Stains Tsarnaev’s Apprehension”

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 21, 2013

US 15-04-13 BOSTON MARATHON BOMBThe following is based on another comment at another interesting thread under another useful post by Burt Likko.

Because the idea of “terror” is a definitional and circumscribing topic for our “way of life,” perhaps for ways of life at all, we should not be surprised if it is not merely difficult to define, but ends up seeming to connect everything to everything – if every particular question explodes like a conceptual bomb striking ever other question in the vicinity.

That any bomb is a “WMD” for purposes of the law might merely be a typical instance of a legal designation differing from a popular or political one, but the law may on occasion have the better of such distinctions. The point for the law seems to be that engaging in “mass destruction” is immediately a crime against society, an attack on (the) people as well as an attack on particular persons. The federal terrorism statute just encodes the understanding that in making a bomb a criminal shows a disregard for life: Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, Torture | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Re: Modern American True Civic Religion vs. Pre-Modern Cultish Religion in North Carolina

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 5, 2013

Still intend “light to no posting,” but couldn’t resist extending dialogue at the League on “Playing With Constitutional Fire,” an informative and thoughtful post by lawyer Burt Likko that also inspired some useful discussion. My main comment was approximately as follows (I’ve done some post-”submit” proofing, and added some I hope helpful notes):

@Burt Likko

Well, thanks for indulging me, as I see now I got a little carried away with paradoxes of civic religion on an abstract level. I don’t disagree with you on the practical-political question, but I also don’t presume that my agreement or disagreement matters to anyone practically-politically. I’m more interested in the theoretical questions.

So, on the latter score, we may be able to distinguish between a declaration of “establishment” and an actual or effective establishment.

The 1st Amendment even read as applying to Congress only, in combination with the No Religious Test Clause, would seem to make actual establishment virtually impossible at least for now, since a declared-established religion with no supporting legal or administrative structure would be an empty signifier. President Obama could declare the Navajo Way the official established religion of the United States, and the main effect would be on his political future, possibly involving the 25th Amendment, not on the actual status in law and society of the Navajo Way. Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Religion | Tagged , , , | 34 Comments

Light to no posting…

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 4, 2013

…probably for a couple of weeks at least.

For some time now, I have been feeling increasingly distracted by pressing and unfinished real world business, especially looking toward April 15. I’ll still be monitoring comments, so please feel free to continue any discussions, or start up new ones, or make suggestions for me or the blog, whether on this thread or on recent pieces or on ones from months or years ago.

I’d be happy to hear from lurkers, too. According to site stats, there are more of them, or you, around than I would have thought, even after accounting for web crawling robots and people surfing in semi-randomly on searches for “stalin dead free borsht” or “zombie miguel cervantes.”

Posted in Meta | 1 Comment

Controlled Demolition, not Flypaper (Ten Years After Cont’d) – UPDATED

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 2, 2013

ten-years-after-saddamAgain, Daniel Larison, now with the help of Paul Pillar, insists on a bad argument in support of a what may be a good case.

Here is the incidentally edited comment I left at Larison’s latest post on the Jackson Diehl op-ed we discussed yesterday:

It’s understandable that Diehl is interpreted by Pillar and others to be “repeating the flypaper theory of counterterrorism,” but Diehl’s statement “in Iraq, the United States faced down al-Qaeda and eventually dealt it a decisive defeat” does not make a “flypaper” claim. It merely asserts that an AQ threat did arise in Iraq, and was actively combated and defeated. (How “decisively” it was defeated is another question, however, that Diehl’s own subsequent analysis complicates.) Diehl does not make any claim at all as to the origin of AQ in Iraq, except, perhaps, as implicit in his observation of an AQ affiliate rising in Syria without US military intervention playing a role. In other words, in Iraq and Syria as in any other contemporary Islamic (more precisely “Islamicate”) society, extreme political de-stabilization will tend to be accompanied by the rise of Islamist radical groups. As many Iraq War proponents will likely also acknowledge, this problem was not adequately, or anywhere near adequately, anticipated during Iraq war planning, but the simplistic argument against the simplistic flypaper theory may not be much better than the flypaper theory itself, or anyway may be inadequate to the Syrian situation.

In addition to not making the argument that it is claimed he has made, Diehl does address the questions that the blogger at the end of the post (again) claims he doesn’t address. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, War | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments