Joshua Micah Marshall: Deception, Denial, and Relativism: what the Bush administration learned from the French:

“George W. Bush has a forthright speaking style which convinces many people that he’s telling the truth even when he’s lying. But in under three years, Bush has told at least as many impressive untruths as each of his three predecessors. His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn’t trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn’t have sex with ‘that woman,’ the falsity of the claims was readily provable–by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion.” Washington Monthly

Marshall argues that the Bush team has both a need and a propensity for deception, analyzes why that might be and how it plays itself out. Readers of FmH have heard me both puzzle and despair over and over here about the American public’s obliviousness to and complacency about Bush’s truthlessness. This piece helps us understand how he gets away with it. Of course, it won’t be read by the people who need a wake-up call from their stupor.

Since the election campaign, I have been writing here that Bush’s appeal taps into a deepseated anti-intellectualism in the lumpenproletariat, that Bush is the self-styled stupider-than-thou President. Although it is disputed, I contend this is partially because of his own intellectual limitations. FmH’ers may recall discussion here about the evidence that he is dyslexic (although that isn’t necessarily an intellectual limitation), and an item about what a lacklustre student he was in business school. Listen to his discourse (when it is not scripted by his speechwriter handlers); his assertions have the vague generality and noncommittal vagueness of someone with unsophisticated conceptual ability who does not believe in his own analytic power. His word use is non-nuanced. He is clearly not intellectually curious. Early in the Presidential race in 2000, I was incredulous that the public could not see how limited he is. Later I realized that not only did they not care, but they found it appealing.

Recently, in discussing the administration’s contention that auto exhaust emissions are not air pollution, I refered to Bush (and by extension the people around him) as an ‘airhead’. I was trying to be ironic (since we were discussing air quality at the time) but I fully intended the derogatory connotations. In a comment, a reader took me to task for mistaking crafty malevolent manipulativeness for stupidity. My own impression is that Bush is dull and his handlers crafty, and the common confusion of messenger with message makes this difficult to recognize. His lieutenants clearly know how to exploit his stupidity, both in terms of molding him to their agenda and using it (rebranded as “folksy” or “down-home”) as the basis of his public appeal. (I felt similarly about the Reagan administration, particularly during his second term when a trained observer could already see signs of his encroaching Alzheimer’s impairments.) Marshall, to my reading, is careful to place the mendacity more in the administration as a whole than the person of GWB. To him, the administration’s tack is essentially a “war on expertise”:

In any White House, there is usually a tension between the political agenda and disinterested experts who might question it. But what’s remarkable about this White House is how little tension there seems to be. Expert analysis that isn’t politically helpful simply gets ignored.

Bush, intellectually intimidated, will not acknowledge or does not recognize expertise; his Machiavellian team does, and deliberately marginalizes politically dissonant or threatening input. And we can expect it to get alot worse, since his people never expected him to be going into reelection season with a half-trillion-dollar deficit and a utter failure of a foreign expeditionary morass on his hands. Look for a massive escalation of the lies in direct proportion to the magnitude of his administration’s failures and the informed political commentary on them in the election season.

Monks Incensed by Cancer Claims. The Citizen (Gloucestershire)

A pretty damning indictment of concerns from the left over depleted uranium weapons, if you can believe the science cited here, well-documented and footnoted.

Best I can make out, the depleted-uranium agitation by the antiwar left is more than just exaggeration, it’s pretty much invented whole cloth — garbage, in other words. You recall the naive old saying, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”? From what I’ve seen of propaganda mills blasting away full bore (full of lies), I’m much more taken by the comeback, attributed to John F. Kennedy, I believe: “Where there’s smoke, you’ll usually find somebody running a smoke-making machine!” — Michael E. McNeil, Impearls

Elsewhere on his site, McNeil also scoffs at the idea that a nuclear holocaust would mean doomsday for the human race, with a much more selective appraisal of the evidence, clearly in the service of his ideological biases.

Although “the name is not the thing” (Frege) and “the map is not the territory” (Bell), Geoff Cohen thinks ‘real maps’, embodying the simple concept of labelling a country with what its own people call it rather than anglicizing it, make sense, and so do I. He has tried his hand at a Real Map for Europe.

The Kuro5hin Introduction to the Cthulhu Mythos

Rumsfeld, Army leaders in discord: “‘You look at Rumsfeld, and beyond all the rationale, spoken and unspoken, he just dislikes the Army. It’s just palpable. . . . You always have to wonder if when Rumsfeld was a Navy lieutenant junior grade whether an Army officer stole his girlfriend,’ said Ralph Peters, a former Army intelligence officer who writes on national security issues.” Boston Globe

Bruce Sterling: “Having just put those 200 notes in order, I am now in a position to email the lot of them to anybody who wants them (Contact bruces@well.org). Why not decorate your own website with a free ton of Viridian propaganda?” The mechanics of this mailing list sound wonderful, to wit:

Internet mailing lists, such as this Viridian list,

are a form of publishing in which no money changes hands.

Nevertheless, there are two important forms of para-

economics involved. The first is “reputation economics.”

People tend to contribute to Internet exchanges because

there are useful personal benefits in spreading one’s

ideas, establishing one’s public expertise, and making

one’s name known to other interested parties. This

practice has a long and honorable history, and is well

known in the sciences and in academia generally. These

groups were the original source of the Internet and its

publication practices — along with the military.

The second para-economic aspect is “attention

economics.” This one is more problematic, because this is

where the cruelest forms of exploitation take place in the

Internet’s noncommercial world. It is easy to cut-and-

paste huge archives of found text and images, and to bomb

one’s hapless correspondents with them. The time and

attention of recipients suffers badly, since the work of

distribution can be accomplished in seconds, while parsing

all that text, and finally deciding that it is useless,

can take seemingly forever.

Our first formal innovation is an attempt to steal as

little of your attention as we can. We don’t fondly

imagine that every reader will find all posts in this list

to be equally fascinating. We are going to be covering a

lot of ground here, and much of our content will be not

only novel, but frankly weird. Therefore, we will begin

each Viridian Note with a useful set of its key concepts.

With some practice, we hope that you will be able to

reject a Viridian Note, confidently and without a pang,

within two or three seconds.

This effort, however, may not be enough. You may

still find yourself painfully tempted to actually *read*

the Note. We therefore offer a backup safety system, our

unique “Attention Conservation Notice.” This will begin

each Note by explaining to you, in some brief detail, why

you should NOT read it.

This has never been done before in print-based

publishing, but in the text-glutted electronic context, we

feel this practice makes a lot of sense. By saving your

attention, we are offering you a considerable value-added

service, which makes our Viridian list considerably

“cheaper” in attention-terms than the other, more

primitive lists you may be reading. They cynically

imagine that you are reading everything they spew; we,

however, know much better, and we are on your side…

We will follow the useful design edict to “Look at

the Underside First.” We’ll start each Note by explaining

the areas in which its design and intention fails,

rather than act as attention-hucksters, trumpeting the

work’s supposed benefits and demanding that you

concentrate.

With time, we hope to develop a standard set of

“Attention Conservation” disclaimers that will save you

much mental processing time. In future, the following

warnings may see considerable use in this list:

• “Highly speculative;”
• “Beautifully phrased but offers no
  
  evidence to support its claims;”
• “Of interest mostly to
  
  technical specialists,”
• “Written in postmodernese;”
  
• “Infested with subcultural jargon,”
• “Grimly accurate
  
  assessment, can cause feelings of despair,”
• “Contains violent
  
  partisan attacks,”
• “Writer’s original language not
  
  English,”

and so forth. (At least, those disclaimers

would be of huge benefit in most of the lists that we’re

reading right now.)…

Read more about the Viridian movement here.

…(W)e’re green, but there’s something electrical and unnatural about our tinge of green. We’re an art movement that looks like a mailing list, an ad campaign, a design team, an oppo research organization, a laboratory, and, perhaps most of all, we resemble a small feudal theocracy ruled with an iron hand by a Pope- Emperor. We have our own logo — or we will. We have our own font and our own typography. And we have an entire list of favorite Viridian-approved tie-in products: T-shirts, chrome stickers, socks, solar panels, ultrasonic sterilizers, and so on…. We’re going to be spending a lot of time picking bits and pieces out of the background clutter, and assembling them, and placing our stamp of ideological approval upon them. The future is already here. It just hasn’t been assembled as a cultural ensemble.

Starvation?

The reason I was taking another look at the Viridian site was that an FmH’er [thanks, Miguel] forwarded Viridian Note 00381 to me. Read it and scare yourself. “[Attention Conservation Notice: Nothing new about environmental activists hand-wringing over prospects of mass starvation. Kinda new to wonder if this might go from the unthinkable to a real-life truism in such short order, though.]” At its inception at the threshold of the new century, Sterling conceptualized the Viridian movement as an aesthetic response to impending global catastrophe (“… it’s a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that’s why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide…. What a cramp of our style. It’s all very foul and aesthetically regrettable…”) on a rather short timeframe — the little more than a decade until the Kyoto accords were supposed to have made a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions. Well, we’re a third of the way there and any vestiges of cooperation in keeping the world habitable have been dashed to pieces, largely due to the Bush junta’s explicit anti-environmentalism and its broader dismantling of the fragile framework of multilateral international cooperation and mutual respect as we turned from victim to bully after 9-11-01. This is the fourth year in succession that the world is not producing enough grain to feed itself; the summer heatwave in Europe is devastating crop production figures; its full impact is not even yet know; and it is but a foretaste of things to come as global warming accelerates. “The Viridian Movement is supposed to have an expiration date of 2012. Will we make it that far?” My questions for Sterling and others, then: Is this (and other Viridiana) a wakeup call or a dirge? Upon what does it depend? Can an aesthetic shift make a difference? fast enough to make a difference?

Theodore Dalrymple: “Both Althusser and Cantat illustrate the new moral law for modern man: that moral concern rightly increases as the square of the distance from the person expressing the concern. Only thus can a man be utterly selfish and egotistical on the one hand and a moral exemplar on the other;” reflections on the murder of French actress Marie Trintignant by rockstar boyfriend Bertrand Cantat in a drunken, jealous fit. Although the inimitable Dr. Dalrymple tilts at the windmill of moral hypocrisy, he has a knack for being sanctimonious only about leftist hypocrites (especially when he thinks that extracting the lessons from their hypocrisy will be a major maturing influence on his readers and his students). Dalrymple is, however, full of compassion, making an interesting point in the process:

When I look at the pictures of Cantat after his arrest, head bowed and misery patent for all to see, I am reminded of the many murderers I have met shortly after they have killed their lovers from motives of jealousy. Most of them have also tried, as did Cantat, to kill themselves afterwards (a third of British murders were once followed by suicide). Of course, jealousy is nothing new—where humans, their weakness and wickedness are concerned, there really is nothing new under the sun. Othello is more than sufficient to prove it. But this is not to say that some ways of life favor some human responses, while others do not. When the sexual revolution is lived as if it were possible to do so without consequences, the result is a huge increase in sexual violence…

Perhaps because I work in a prison and not a morgue—that is to say, I see the murderer rather than the murdered, lying bruised and battered on the slab—I feel an anguish for my murderers, at least of the jealous kind. Their suffering is intense, and their efforts to be reunited with their loved ones (religion is dead, but not the belief in a hereafter), so that they can undo what they have done, apologize and fall at their feet, genuinely move me. Cantat devoted his life to anti-art posing as art; he did not know himself as he should have done; but I still say, priez pour lui, as well as for Marie Trintignant of course. The New Criterion [as always, props to walker for keeping me informed of the juiciest of Dr. Dalrymple’s literary exploits]