Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington’s hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf’s oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance. Mother Jones. No news, by now.

Weblogger Jeremy Zawodny’s much-blinked list seems to be putting the fear of God into many other webloggers in a frenzied rush to comply with what for some puzzling reason is being seen as the Received Wisdom. (It’s actually amazing he didn’t phrase these ten items as “thou shalt” ‘s and “shalt not” ‘s!) Zawodny is profoundly (I use the term advisedly) thrilled at his influence, declaring, “Blogs rock!” Unfortunately, he forgets the eleventh habit of annoying bloggers — pontificating on how it should be done, although his #3 is a complaint about bloggers who “spend more time blogging about blogging than anything else.”

(Not to mention his commission of the admittedly more minor twelfth annoying habit — overuse of “blog” and “blogger”. Lawdy, I’m surprised he doesn’t indulge in the even more annoying “blogosphere.” [Shoot me and put me out of my misery if I ever use that word without quotation marks around it, please. — FmH]

My overall reaction to his list is that he doesn’t seem to understand (especially in his #2 and #8, which he concedes are alike but, he asserts enigmatically and without further elaboration for readers as dense as myself, “not quite the same”) the self-referential, organic nature of hyperlinked reality if he thinks there’s an absolute difference between “original content” and “aggregating links to other blogs”, or between “acting” and “reacting”… and that he is the arbiter of such difference. Wake up, Jeremy, it’s a postmodern world. Authenticity and derivativeness are not, in a simple sense, dichotomous anymore, if they ever were. He also does not appear to appreciate that weblogging arose from the practice of cataloguing the author’s interesting websurfing discoveries (often with little or no commentary), which in a semiotic sense (upon which I will enigmatically not elaborate much) does build a sort of original content from the aggregation and juxtaposition. Hint: start with Claude Levi-Strauss’ use of the term ‘bricolage’. Indeed, it is a postmodern tenet that the “originality” will lie not in the writer so much as in the reader’s synthesis of meaning for herself from the work. Making it all too explicit is another annoying habit of webloggers. I hope the people who read FmH (all three of them) do it because they know I esteem their astuteness more than they should mine. Now, if they found me a highly annoying blogger…

“At last we know why girls fall for older men…” Observer/UK

Brain protein influences response to extreme stress:

A hungry soldier is left sitting alone for four hours. Hostile figures interrogate him for the next 50 minutes. The soldier is not hurt physically, but he doesn’t know when or how the ordeal will end.

Later, he’s permitted to sleep — for 19 minutes total during the course of three days.

In this mock captivity exercise that’s part of survival training, American soldiers respond in sharply different ways.

One man feels constantly that he’s watching himself from outside his body. Colors fade. His tormenters look motionless. Another man, just as sleepy and hungry, also loses focus at times, but mostly stays alert and calm.

Why the difference? Sac Bee

Why is there a philosophical problem about self-deception?

Self-deception is a common human enterprise. Our capacity for it seems no more exotic a part of our nature than our capacity to spell. We attribute the state freely to others (“you’re kidding yourself”), and come to realise we were in the state ourselves (“I was kidding myself when I said that”). However, when we step back from those confident judgements and try making sense of self-deception, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to do so. The Philosophers’ Magazine

Considerations of self-deception go right to the heart of what exactly is the self that is being deceived, and the nature of consciousness. As a psychiatrist, I’m equally, if not more, preoccupied with self-deception than the philosophers who are just coming to the conclusion that it drives one more nail into the coffin of the notion of the unitary self. Enlisting a patient in the study of his or her self-deception is the daily bread and butter of thoughtful psychotherapists. For example, the proposal in this essay that, perhaps, self-deception is “not one singular psychobehavioural phenomenon, reducing to issues of belief and knowledge” seems a truism to psychotherapists who generate taxonomies of self-deception with their clientele. “Self-deception is perhaps quite eclectic, and is not always easily distinguishable from germane phenomena such as compartmentalisation, repressed conflicts, submerged aggressions, false consciousness, and wishful thinking.” Indeed.

Related: A highly inflated version of reality: …(N)ew research suggests that people lie chronically for a wide variety of reasons, some serious, others relatively benign. In a recent article reviewing 100 years of literature on the subject, as well as several cases in the news, doctors at Yale University find that some chronic liars are capable, successful, even disciplined people who embellish their life stories needlessly. They don’t suffer from an established mental illness, as many habitual fabricators do. They’re just, well, liars. LA Times

Mickey Kaus wonders: [scroll down]: Why did we find out about the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed almost immediately after the event? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep the arrest secret while the U.S. and its allies rolled up those al Qaeda operatives whose whereabouts could be traced through Mohammeds’ cell phone and computer, etc.? Why send out a worldwide alert, through CNN, to his co-conspirators, telling them it was time to scatter? Did the need for good publicity trump sound anti-terror techniques?… Slate

One way to make sense of this is suggested by Robert Fisk. Was Mohammed really arrested at all. Where’s the proof? Common Dreams [thanks, Miguel] The US has a knack for crowing about victories in the War-on-Terror® at the most politically convenient times. (As Fisk puts it, “In the theatre of the absurd into which America’s hunt for al Qa’ida so often descends, the ‘arrest’ — the quotation markes are all too necessary — of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end of the repertory.”) If the significance of this announcement lies in its propaganda value rather than any operational benefits, nothing would be served by not splashing it all over the front pages as soon as it “happened.”

[scroll down]: Mickey Kaus edges toward the antiwar stance he calls the proceduralist position, after reading Michael Kinsley’s latest column (“…only if it’s multilateral…”), although he mischaracterizes France as the sole international obstacle to the Security Council’s blessings. “(I)f the war’s a good thing to do, they argue, are you really going to let France stop it?” Yes, he says, and agrees with Kinsley’s observation that “the general regime of international law depends on a willingness to sacrifice short-term goals that may even be admirable for the long-term goal of establishing some civilized norms of global behavior.” Kaus neatly dismisses the self-defense arguments of the dysadministration: “If self-defense justifies an attack on any nation that might pose a grave threat a few years down the road, the result could be just as destabilizing as if there were no general rule against trans-border attacks.”

He then goes on to share my consternation at a point made in antiwar polemics:

“The seemingly sophisticated focus, among antiwar types, on the difficulty of administering postwar Iraq actually undermines the anti-war case… because it suggests that without those difficulties a war outside the U.N. would be justifiable. In fact, those difficulties are largely irrelevant to the initial question of procedural legitimacy.”

It not only demeans the antiwar position to lump arguments of convenience and expense together with questions of inherent legitimacy and legality of the war; it also doesn’t keep company well with any of the other antiwar arguments with which it travels:

• the destabilizing precedent of preemptive strikes;
  
• the dismantling of the alliance of ‘civilized’ nations by US unilateralism;
  
• the humanitarian catastrophe awaiting Iraqi civilians;
  
• the abandonment of the principle that war is a last resort only with the failure of diplomatic engagement;
  
• the precipitation of anti-American terrorist blowback this will cause.
  

None of this, of course, is to mention at all the more absolutist antiwar position which rejects any complicity with the morally bankrupt killing machine perpetuating violent non-solutions. But Kaus is welcome nonetheless in the antiwar camp, even if he shows what a strange bedfellow he is in this contorted ‘P.S.’:

“Democracy, which we hope to bring to the Middle East, is basically a bunch of formal procedural rules too, no? We don’t ignore them when we don’t like the outcome. [Insert cheap shot about Bush actually losing the election?–ed. No! He won by the rules, with the Supreme Court playing the role of France.]” Slate

(Confidential to Mickey Kaus: As far as “not rushing” into your decision goes — if not now, when? You’re long past the point where taking the time to make up your mind is a virtue.)

Related: Time for a new antiwar message: ‘The peace movement’s call to “Let the Inspections Work” is becoming about

as effective as duct tape against biological weapons.’ — Karin Rosman, AlterNet

Hoax Photo Gallery

And, somewhat related: a neat idea! a weblog consisting of examples of fallacious reasoning from the world at large. I wonder if the author knows about General Semantics?

about context: “a new planetary culture emerges in the context of the digital information and connections. one culture that overcomes the old cultural dimensions clashes (science-art, universal-national, public-private, work-leissure, entertainment-education…).

context project is devoted to a net driven research and development on this new cultural context. the project’s initiatives aims to appropriate and disseminate the emerging culture as a new ‘art de vivre’…”

Visually appealing and (this is always my highest compliment on the net, it seems) thoughtful.

The Laws of War, US-Style:

After decades of massive defence spending, the US is today assured of victory in any war it chooses to fight. High-tech weaponry has reduced the dangers to US personnel, making it easier to sell war to domestic constituencies. As a result, some US politicians have begun to think of war, not as the high-risk recourse of last resort, but as an attractive foreign policy option in times of domestic scandal or economic decline. This change in thinking has already led to a more cavalier approach to the jus ad bellum, as exemplified by the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence. It is beginning to have a similar effect with regard to the jus in bello. When war is seen as an ordinary tool of foreign policy – ‘politics by other means’ – political and financial considerations impinge on the balance between military necessity and humanitarian concerns. Soldiers are buried alive because the folks back home don’t like body bags.

In Washington, it has become accepted wisdom that future opponents are themselves unlikely to abide by international humanitarian law. During the Gulf War, captured American pilots were brutalised in several ways – some, for example, were gang-raped. The September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers were ‘crimes against humanity’ – in technical terms, they were acts of violence committed as part of a systematic attack on a civilian population. If your enemy is going to cheat, why bother playing by the rules? — Michael Byers (who teaches international law at Duke), London Review of Books

My purpose here will be to consider the current criticisms of the Bush Administration articulated within mainstream opinion, and the responses of the Administration to them: in effect, the structure of intellectual justification on each side of the argument, what divides them and what they have common. I will end with a few remarks on how this debate looks from a perspective with a different set of premises. — UCLA historian Perry Anderson, London Review of Books

Escalating the war against the war: “The Pentagon is busy trying to persuade Iraqis not to cooperate with their

own government. It’s time American citizens did the same.”

What will today’s conscientious objectors and military deserters look like? Well, all week in Italy, activists have been blocking dozens of trains carrying U.S. weapons and personnel on their way to a military base near Pisa, while Italian dockworkers are refusing to load arms shipments. Last weekend, two U.S. military bases were blockaded in Germany, as was the U.S. consulate in Montreal, and the air base at RAF Fairford in Gloucester, England. This coming Saturday, thousands of Irish activists are expected to show up at Shannon airport, which, despite Irish claims of neutrality, is being used by the U.S. military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq.

In Chicago last week, more than 100 high-school students demonstrated outside the headquarters of Leo Burnett, the advertising firm that designed the U.S. military’s hip, youth-targeted Army of One campaign. The students claim that in underfunded Latino and African-American high schools, the army recruiters far outnumber the college scouts.

The most ambitious plan has come from San Francisco, where a coalition of antiwar groups is calling for an emergency non-violent “counterstrike” the day after the war starts: “Don’t go to work or school. Call in sick, walk out: We will impose real economic, social and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops.”

— Naomi Klein, AlterNet