Say Uncle is building a dog house. He's impressed by the fancy dog houses he's seen, including one with a patio and an air conditioner. He should come to New York, and meet Brutus, an English mastiff with his own one-bedroom apartment, complete with doorman. When Brutus's owner divorced his wife, he endedup staying on Brutus's couch. Talk about being in the dog house.
I have a friend in Cairo. He's lived in Egypt all his life, leaving only on business and for short vacations, like his recent honeymoon (congrats, Mahmoud!). We chat over IM whenever we can get the time, and our talk often turns to politics.
These days, it's all about Iraq, and I asked him if I could share what we discussed so people could get a first-hand view of how one Egyptian sees current events. I've edited the chat lightly for clarity and flow.
First, some brief background. Mahmoud is in his mid-20's, is middle class, proudly Egyptian and Muslim (although he's not ver religious). He has the heart of a pacifist and the soul of an artist. He is polite but sometimes lapses into mild profanity when heated. He is educated, moderate, and wants to come to America for vacation sometime soon. In short, he's a lot like many of my American friends, except that he comes from an Egyptian point of view.
He started out by complaining about Bush:
In the Arab world everyone is truly pissed off about Bush and America. No other US president has ever gotten the USA image as low as it is right now, especially in Arab countries.
Mahmoud commented several times that while supporting the opposition in Iraq is irrational, many Arabs do so anyway. Arabs are focused on kicking America out first, then figuring out what Iraq should look like:
There is a very huge instability that all Arabs are facing now and not to mention this is the best time for fundamentalists to grow so much stronger making use of the anti-american crowd that is rapidly growing.
. . .
That is what i think, everyone knows the Iraqi invasion is about the Iraqi oil and in Egypt and the Arab world people are very emotional and therefore not happy about the whole thing. and the Iraqi armed opposition is giving most of the people hope and somewhat a sense of joy that there is still some strength. And the sad part of the story is that islamic fundamentaists are using this all the way.
. . .
Everyone wants the US out and then seek a solution, which is not very rational.
What to do in Iraq:
"Establish a strong army and police force, put a good government and install democracy and then withdraw, withdraw, withdraw.
Mahmoud doesn't see a solution in Iraq, but he believes one exists. America can't leave abandon Iraq, but America can't govern Iraq. He said there is no honorable way to stay and no honorable way to leave. And if there is a solution, America might not be the right ocuntry to deliver it:
The situation in iraq needs someone no less than the evil Saddam Hussein to govern with an iron fist.
But America cannot be that fist. Only an Arab can be that fist. Of course, the Arab countries couldn't produce a good outcome either because
Arab countries dont have democracy to actually be able to restore democracy in Iraq but yes Iraqi people would accept Arab armies and fellow Arabs in general better than Americans.
But like I said, he believes "there must be a way out."
Mahmoud alluded several times to a pessimism among Arab people. He said they feel powerless in the face of US tyranny and that makes them irrational. They know, for example, that they shouldn't be happy about insurgents in Iraq, but
when you are too damn weak you would just appeciate anything that would harm the powerful tyrant.
. . .
The younger generation I think are somewhat depressed on permenant basis because of their feeling of total weakness against the American tyrant and this is very bad.
Overall, Muslims throughout the world are happy to see Hussein gone but they can't abide the invastion and are unhappy Hussein was deposed by non-Muslim forces.
No one liked Hussein, and the USA is by all means better in terms of humanity but not in terms of invasion. You must understand that as far as the Muslims faith goes, every Muslim man should be fighting any force that would actually fight (and invade) other Muslims anywhere in the world, and even though this faith may have faded away some now that there are countries and frontiers and nations, yet everyone somehow deep inside is truly sad.
Mahmoud has always decried terrorism. I asked him about the Egyptian reaction to Al Qaeda. He said more and more Egyptians agree with him:
Egyptians are sick of Qaeda and feel so much better that Mubarak got rid of terrorism in Egypt. Egyptians mainly are very kind and peaceful oriented, it's a chracteristic that is quite ancient and has to do with the Egyptian life style. But you can not control desperate people, especially in a country that is suffering from poverty somehow.
We talked about a lot of other things: Israel, his wife, clubbing in London, etc. But that's the gist of his end of our Iraq discussion. He's a moderate Egyptian man hopeful for peace and prosperity throughout the Middle East. I hope he gets what he's wishing for.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
Ted Balaker, writing for Reason thinks seatbelt laws are akin to reducing the murder rate by preventing suicide:
Who's the bigger threat to your safety, a murderer or someone who attempts suicide? The answer is obvious, and we'd certainly jeer any mayor who suggested lowering a city's death toll by cracking down on suicides. Yet something strange happens when death comes to the highway. Politicians lock arms with law enforcement, and come up with campaigns like "Click It or Ticket," which began Monday and aims to reduce highway fatalities through stricter seat belt law enforcement. Suddenly, the murder-suicide distinction vanishes, and it's perfectly acceptable to reduce deaths by punishing those who put only themselves at risk.
What's weird about this is that nobody is making a murder-suicide disctinction except Balaker. The distinction doesn't vanish, it was never there in the first place. Once you leave libertarian fantasyland, people understand that reducing death is valuable, regardless of whether those deaths come from the murder column or the suicide column of the spreadsheet. And reducing the social cost of driving on public roads without seatbelts is a legitimate social function.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
Not being as smart as your average blogger, I didn't feel confident commenting on Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack until I actually read it. I got it out of the library this week and finished it last night. So here are my thoughts, a few months too late.
The most striking thing I take from this book is the way the buildup to war created a situation where we had no choice but to invade. We used a strategy of what Rice calls "coercive diplomacy", which involves using (military) force as a threat to force diplomatic concessions. In this case, we tried to use the threat of invasion to force Hussein to prove his lack of WMD. When Hussein refused to comply, we were left with no option but to invade, whether we at that point wanted to or not.
Bush and others say several times that they reached a point where they couldn't back down, where even if they wanted to let Hussein off the hook they couldn't. Woodward describes the huge amount of logisitical, monetary and political expense incurred in getting to the point where we were applying maximum pressure to Hussein. They mention several times that going that far and not winning regime change would be an unthinkable defeat. And so we invaded, regardless of whether the threat represented by Hussein justified it or not.
In this way, the logic for using military threats to apply diplomatic pressure became the logic for war. A lot of people were able to get behind the threat of military force as a tool of diplomacy even if they weren't going to support actually getting into a shooting war. But once they took the first step, they couldn't turn back, and we invaded whether we should have or not.
Several members of the House and Senate have said they supported the war resolution not because they supported war but because they didn't want to hamstring Bush in the diplomatic process. They claim they didn't vote for war. They claim they only voted for tough diplomacy.
Plan of Attack makes it clear that no matter what they think they voted for, the reality is they voted for war. It is often said that you shouldn't make threats unless you can carry them out. A lesson of the Iraq war is perhaps that we shouldn't make threats lest we are forced to carry them out.
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What is it with the people looking for the promised land? Libertarians have their Free State Project-- they're trying turn New Hampshire into the Porcupine State. Meanwhile, America Blog tells us about Christian Exodus, a movement to get 50,000 Christians to move to Alabama, Mississippi, or South Carolina and then secede from the union. They're so upset about the prospect of ending marriage discrimination that they would start a civil war. Clearly somebody needs to get some therapy for his Moses fantasies.
Regardless of how ridiculous these plans are, I hope they both succeed. Libertarians should have a place where they can go and live as they like. And the crazy Chrsitian bigots, well, I just want them out of the country. Moreover, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina are all racist welfare states, so losing any or all of them wouldn't be so bad either.
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There are a bunch of people who are concerned America is going to reinstate the draft. Some react with pointed humor, some with horror and others with approval.
Everybody seems to agree, though, that we're going to need a draft because, as the CBO says, "The Army does not have enough active-duty component forces to simultaneously maintain the occupation at its current size, limit deployments to one year, and sustain all of its other commitments."
But I see things a little differently. Our choice is not between instituting a draft and abandoning Iraq. We have another option, which is to reduce our forces elsewhere. Nobody should be surprised that we can't indefinitely maintain 100,000 trooops in Iraq on top off our other activities. Surely the Iraq plan allows us to pull some soldiers from, say Europe, where we have over 500,000 service members in a relatively stable, peaceful regime.
The original plan for invading Iraq called for 500,000 soldiers. We eventually went in with around 100,000. Those other 400,000 soldiers didn't dry up and blow away. Common sense says we can staff Iraq without a draft by shifting resources and calling up reserves.
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I think I'm in love.
Unless it's one of this guy's jokes, in which case I'm more disgusted than enamored.
For the gun lovers in the audience: a German website that has stills and slow-mo movies of various guns being fired. It's cool because you can see the flying bullets in some of them.
Via The Morning News.
Mark Kleiman says that officers pleading the fifth during court martial proceedings proves the torture wasn't just seven morons on a frolick of their own. If officers are taking the fifth, then it goes higher than the boots on the ground.
Then Kleiman pulls back, saying it's possible the officers took the fifth "out of an abundance of caution" and perhaps they're not guilty of anything. What he forgets, though, is that you can only take the fifth to avoid incriminating yourself. You can't use it to avoid talking about something you don't like, so presumably these guys know something that incriminating about themselves.
Personally, I want to find out what they know. Perhaps they should be interrogated vigorously until they talk.
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Brooklyn Bridge rounds up right-wing attempts to trivialize the Abu Ghraib torture. It seems the leading lights of conservative thinkers see Abu Ghraib as less outrageous than what happend at Mepham High School.
- Zell Miller likens the torture to the embarrassment of showering in gym class. He sayd, No one ever died from humiliation." If nobody has ever died of humiliation, the CIA investigation into dead Abu Ghraib prisoners might be a clue that Miller's comparison is horribly wrongheaded. If those don't do it, how about these other dead torture victims? (Pandagon has the right reaction)
- Rush Limbaugh thinks this is just "people having a good time". Apparently, soldiers need "to blow off some steam" and get some "emotional release". I hope Rush feels the same way about his treatment when he goes to prison.
- Then there's James Inhoff, who said the prisoners deseved the treatment because they have American blood on their hands. Of course, the Red Cross reports that 70% to 90% of these prisoners are innocent of any wrongdoing.
Where's that moral clarity we hear so much about? Why can't these guys can't get it together to agree that torturing innocent prisoners after invading their country is seriously morally wrong?
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Say Uncle wrote a nostalgic post about 80's sitcoms dealing with touchy political issues, like drugs and guns. It reminds me of the A-Team episode where Mr. T and company are called in to break the backs of labor agitators. The labor organizers were depicted as cruel, violent thugs in a 30-minute call to patriotic union busting. Ah, the 80's...
People that want to end the drug war often talk about drugs as a form of risky entertainment, a dangerous, non-productive pleasurable activity. We believe that drug use is inevitable, regardless of its costs and benefits, and urge policies aimed at harm reduction. What we don't do, though, is make the positive case for drug use. We leave that to pie-eyed hippy stoners and idealistic PLUR kiddies.
But the benefits of drug use shouldn't be so easily dismissed. Sure, we all know some kooky pot and ecstasy evangelists. And serious adults aren't supposed to rave about their mind-expanding experiences. For some reason, ascribing any sort of long-term mental benefit to mind-bending experiences is too touchy-feely for the libertarian types leading the legalization charge.
That attitude is changing a bit, but in an overly clinical way. Recently, the Village Voice wrote about a study of MDMA's use in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's nice that people are examining such things, but it's obvious that the only way they can make MDMA therapy pass a laugh test is by sanitizing it for the consumption of a stuffy medical community. They can't get away from treating MDMA has risky and suspect-- they had a nurse and a doctor constantly present for their patients' over night stays.
The article is pretty complimentary (and so was Brutal Hugs) of the new attitude that attends the study, and I hope it yields good results, but I can't help but feel that doing Ecstasy in a clincal environment short changes the patients.
An essay at maps.org illustrates what I mean. It describes a group of people who provide "psychedelic emergency services" at Burning Man. Basically what that means is they have developed expertise at dealing with people who are having stressful trips. Their method of dealing with the stress isn't medical. It isn't to bring people down or to help them get through the trip, but rather to guide people, to use even their bad trips well.
They do a good job, and quote some of the people they help. One guy said it was like "five years of therapy". A woman raved, "running into you when we did was a godsend". As the essay says, "Each of these people was able, with the help of an experienced guide, to turn a difficult experience into a valuable one."
And that's what we need. Not clinical studies. Not drugs as medicine, but drugs as natural therapeutic experiences.
Of course, the only way to make it possible to use drugs in this way is to remove the legal obstacles and let people do drugs without the ritual presence of superfluous nurses and doctors. As the essay says,
Despite the risks inherent in recreational use, a society with legal psychedelics would develop a body of knowledge and experience among users that would minimize harmful consequences.
Drugs aren't just fun. They can be part of a rich life of contemplation, and they have positive value outside the medical and recreational contexts. It's time for drug reformers to start educating people on that point.
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TNT-sniffing rats are replacing dogs and metal detectors as tools to remove mines from warzones. They're indefatigable, too light to accidentally set off mines, and best of all, they work for peanuts. (Oh, you saw that one coming, didn't you.)
They're also a hell of a lot cuter than Mickey Rat.
(And 10 extra credit points to whoever can name the artist/track/album referenced in the title of this post.)
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OK, so you don't believe meat is murder. But did you know it might be suicide? From today's NYTimes: 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used to treat healthy livestock.
The animals are raised in such squalid, unhealthy conditions, they're constantly pumped full of antibiotics to keep them alive. You really want to eat that diseased burger?
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Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch has announced that under his interpretation of the law, Massachusetts weddings will be respected in Rhode Island.
Unforunately, Lynch's decision isn't final. As the Attorney General, he doesn't get to decide which way Rhode Island goes on this issue, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Expect the first lawsuits to be filed shortly.
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Can I cry at a wedding even if I didn't go? Congratulations to Susan and Marcia.
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If you had to name the most famous virtuous woman in mythic history, you could probably come up with a list that would include 4 or 5 women from cultures spanning both geography and time. If you had to name the most beautiful, you wouldn't need to make a list, for there is only one obvious and indisputable answer: Helen of Troy.
For somebody whose fame rests solely on her looks, we know remarkably little about how she looks. Homer doesn't describes her physical charms directly. Instead, he relies on accounts of men responding to her beauty to convey its force.
And of course describing Helen with any specificity would be impossible. Her beauty is supposed to be of universal appeal. Put her any place any time in front of any person and she will be judged by all to shine the brightest. But tastes vary and change, so the one true Helen is something super human. Her beauty is platonic and can't be described in human terms.
If specific representations of Helen must fail, it is difficult to put Helen in paintings. Artists have dealt with this problem in various ways, but just like nobody wants to paint the face of god, nobody can really paint the unstylized face of Helen. Instead we get glimpses of shrouded figures being adored by dumbstruck men. When they do paint her unabashedly, though, she is the pinnacle of sultry beauty, as the artist sess it.
Moviemakers don't have the luxury of shielding Helen. She is the star of every scene, and the star must shine. So they cast timeless beauties like Elizabeth Taylor and hope for the best. Of course, their notions of timeless beauty are thoroughly rooted in the times.
What all this means is that artistic depictions of Helen don't really tell us anything about Helen. They're hear-say testimony from people that have only heard of Helen charms third-hand. So they fill in the details. And when we look at those details, we learn a lot more about what they think of beauty than what they think of Helen.
And even more than just beauty, Helen represents certain qualities about women. She is not just a pretty face, but a woman to fall in love with (many vied for her hand before Menlaus won it), a woman of such grace that Paris was not her first abductor. And how we describe Helen often tells us much about how we think of love and women. (I guess from this post you could say I think of love, women and beauty as inscrutable and ineffable.) It's no coincidence that views of Helen's character conflict.
Slate has a great slide show discussing and showing different views of Helen from antiquity forward. I will be forever grateful to this slideshow for reminding of the definition of a millihelen-- the beauty required to launch one ship.
So spend some time dallying with Helen and imagine what kind of face could launch your ship.
After the March for Women's Lives, one of my co-bloggers wrote that marches and rallies are too dry. He wished the rallies were dance parties with political messages woven in. He said more people would show and they'd have a better time. It looks like Russell Simmons heard his call.
August 30th, the opening day of the Republican National Convention, in front of Madison Square Garden (where the convention will be held), the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network will be rallying tens of thousands of people to protest the harsh Rockefeller drug laws. They'll be registering voters, especially younr minority voters. They'll be raising some hell to pressure Pataki to ditch the sentencing laws that have resulted in long sentences for petty drug offenders.
Folks will be marching to the beat of the the biggest, most hippitty hoppety names around: P. Diddy, Nas, 50 Cent, and Ludacris will all be there. Mariah Carey and Carly Simon are also going to help out. It's a funkin' bumpin' party.
All of this makes me wish I was headed to New York this summer. I won't be there, though. Instead I'll be at Burning Man.
Via Drug War Rant.
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AlterNet has an article by Village Voice writer Carla Spartos that discusses a new trial to examine the use of ecstasy in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treament.
Patients/subjects/victims are given 125 mg and supervised overnight by an ER doctor and a nurse. According to Erowid (you do know about Erowid, don't you?), 125 mg is enough to really trip. Give these people some blinky lights and a booming bass, and they'd shake booty all night. Give them a quiet room and a sympathetic ear, and they'll talk through some demons.
Erowid also tells us that 125 mg is less than 1% of the LD50 dose, which is "the dose that kills 50 per cent of rats or mice given the drug". If people need to take 100 times the dose administered in the study to poison themselves in the short term, the 24-hour doctor and nurse sound like an overabundance of caution to me.
All across the world, thousands of people do E in doses that high and higher every weekend. They don't need doctors and nurses. Indeed, one reason E is so popular is that it's regarded as so safe. If you take too much, you'll eventually come down and a day or so you'll feel fine.
The article also describes some of the financial concerns that motivate crooked ecstasy research. It focuses on George Ricaurte's faking his data and demonizing MDMA for profit:
NIDA's budget for Ecstasy research has more than quadrupled over the past five years, from $3.4 million to $15.8 million; the agency funds 85 percent of the world's drug-abuse research. . . . [B]oth NIDA and The New York Times have clocked Ricaurte's NIDA grant money at around $10 million, [but] Doblin believes that's a low-ball figure. "Just this one study was $1.3 million, and he has done loads and loads of them."
All of this is heartening. Credible studies into the therapeutic uses of ecstasy and its long-term effects are the first step in examining some of the costs and benefits of social use of ecstasy. The drug war has prevented these kinds of studies for too long, and it makes me happy to see the tide shifting.
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Is Abu Ghraib the only American-run prison in Iraq? If there are others, where are the pictures? If there are no pictures, why not?
How did we manage to (largely) avoid this treatment in Guantanamo? Do you really trust the U.S. government to treat the Guantanamo prisoners properly? Do you believe that the Guantanamo and Iraq prinoners have no need of the protections of the Geneva convention?
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
This Boondocks strip says in 3 panels what this NYTimes article says in 1000 words. They're both right.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
I meant to blog this when it happened, and Say Uncle's triumphant post is the perfect reminder. It seems that Uncle is feuding with Michael Zitz, a writer for Fredericksburg.com, a Virginia newspaper.
The story is pretty simple. Zitz did a column about the assault weapons ban, and Say Uncle wrote him an email pointing out several inaccuracies. Zitz responded with arrogance, vitriol, ad hominem attacks, and precious little grace. They went back and forth a few times, and Uncle was pretty consistent about trying to make his factual points. Zitz consistently avoided these points in favor of belittiling Uncle.
Because Zitz conducted himself so poorly, I'm glad Say Uncle has a higher Google rating for 'Michael Zitz' than Zitz does. Everybody searching for his articles should see how Zitz operates.
Polis | 5 Writebacks | #
Washington Square Park has always had more than its share of pie-eyed loonies. These days, in addition to the students, skaters, punks, dog walkers, drifters and performers, there are the Pac Manhattanites. But perhaps even more unusual than these usual suspects is the gentleman offering free hugs.
It's a wonderful idea, and somehow I'm sure he won't mind if you steal it. Go forth and drop the hugga bomb!
Drug War Rant has a somewhat smarter (as opposed to smart-ass) response to the San Francisco / Amsterdam weed comparison study. Go read it.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Watch this short video about the most crooked, lying group I've ever seen. How do you feel about America now?
Update: more outrage on this topic.
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Last month, I blogged about Massachusett's refusal to extend equal marriage rights to out-of-state couples. Governor Romney has backed down.
Looks like I'll be going to a Boston wedding this summer.
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A new study compares weed use in Amsterdam and San Francisco. They found that drug use patterns are pretty much the same in both places:
[T]here were no differences between the two cities in age at onset of use, age at first regular use, or age at the start of maximum use....We also found consistent similarities in patterns of use.
So let's get this straight. They compared weed use in Amsterdam, where it's technically illegal but tolerated, to San Francisco, where it's technically illegal but tolerated. What a surprise that the cities have similar patterns of weed use.
To them, this is evidence that "drug policies may have less impact on cannabis use than is currently thought." To me, this is evidence they smoked too much while dreaming up this study.
The study I want to see would compare the time from before Giuliani cracked down on pot to after. That might tell us whether criminalization is at all effective. This study, though, sounds like a researcher's way to expense trips to SF and Amsterdam.
Via Hit & Run
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John Kerry panders to gays with an op-ed in Planet Out in which he claims to be "proud to have fought for equal rights for gay Americans". Let's review some of that fight:
Kerry has come out strong for a state constitutional amendment to prevent gays from claiming equal marriage rights in Massachusetts. This is a fight gays have already won in the courts, and Kerry comes down on the side of rolling back the victory. Thanks, John, for your invaluable support.
Thankfully, there is some good news from camp Kerry. He was one of just 15 senators that voted against the Defense of Marriage Act. As you'll recall, DOMA basically said that if you marry your same-sex partner in one state, that marriage doesn't have to be recognized in other states. It was passed to make sure that even if you could get equal treatment in Hawaii you would maintain your second class status elsewhere. And Kerry is against DOMA. Or at least he used to be. He recently changed his mind. So, thanks again, John, for your invaluable support.
If Kerry is awful on marriage, at least he's pretty good on other discrimination issues. He is for equal rights in immigration, the Family Medical Leave Act, adoption, and employment. He would end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and support gays serving openly in the military.
Kerry, then sees the evil of discrimination in every area except the one that is both politically charged and ripe for great change. And that makes his support somewhat suspect because every time a discriminatory policy is close to changing, it becomes controversial. Gays serving openly in the military was controversial and a real possibility in the early 1990's. Kerry didn't have the courage to say gays should serve openly then, when it counted. It's only now that the issue is no longer on the table and no longer a hot topic that he's willing to take a stand against discrimination.
If Kerry supports gays on discrimination issues only when that support doesn't contribute to policy change, then his support is meaningless. Combine that with his willingness to attack gays on the marriage issue for the sake of political convenience, and the best we can say about Kerry is that at least he's not dreaming up new ways to screw gays. At least he's not Bush.
So vote for Kerry. I guess.
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Say Uncle writes about More Media Antigun Hysteria and complains that a reporter points to a gun in assessing blame for the death of a shooting victim. The column tells a story of a college soccer player, Jenna Cooper, who hosted a party to celebrate the end of her season. At the party, some guests quarrelled about some missing shot glasses. The accused theif pulled a gun, shot at the accuser and missed. The bullet hit Cooper, who wasn't involved in the argument.
The columnist writes the "gun was at the wrong place at the wrong time." Say Uncle objects to that and also this: "The gun introduced violence into the dispute. The gun provided the means for murder." He calls the reporter an idiot and says Cooper could just as easily been killed by being pushed out the window. If says this as if her being pushed out the window was a likely outcome of an argument in which she didn't take part.
People get into arguments and sometimes those arguments become violent. People get carried away and hurt each other. When they do, I would rather they not be armed. Who knows how things would have ended if the guest weren't armed? Maybe a broken nose or maybe the aggressor would have been sat on as soon as he lunged at anybody. Maybe they would have beaten the hell out of him. But it's unlikely anybody would have died.
The victim was not a party to the argument. In the absence of a gun, her chances of dying as a result of the shot glass argument was just about nil. Nobody was going to mistakenly push her out the window while aiming at somebody else.
There's a lot of good arguments to keep guns around, but pro-gunners should acknowledge that the presence of guns will result in deaths that would have been avoided in the absence of guns. Even given that gun proliferation might also prevent other deaths and the net effects might be unknown, dreaming up 3 Stooges scenarios where innocent people get pushed out of windows doesn't really address the issue.
Polis | 5 Writebacks | #
Ad Busters has unveiled the Black Spot Sneaker, a Chuck Taylor knockoff intended to
take on Phil [Knight] at his own game - and win. We turn the shoes we wear into a counterbranding game. The swoosh versus the anti-swoosh. Which side are you on?
The Black Spot looks like a decent sneaker. I have several pairs of Chucks and love them dearly. But $65? I bought my last 2 pairs of Chucks for $15 apiece. And what's with the logo pretending it's not a logo?
I've always been down with Ad Busters taking the piss out of branders and logo snobs through parody and satire. I'm not cool with fighting branding and logos by promoting branding and logos. Full page ads in the Times aren't subversive, and subversion has always been the center of popular anticonsumerist appeal.
The questionable desire to launch a marketing campaign aside, Ad Busters's lame ass marketing schtick is another sore point. Their proposed ad tries to sell you their sneaker as a way to harm Phil Knight and Nike. This is surely a losing battle, since Nike is the most popular sneaker and athletic apparel brand around. It's hard to capitalize on ill will toward Nike when that ill will is confined to a small segment of the population. And I say that as a member of that small population.
It's a damn shame. I don't want to shop for the "No Logo" brand, and I don't want Ad Busters to just be a competing shoe company. The only black spot this sneaker will produce will be on Ad Busters's record of success at messing with corporate overreach.
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Because Bush doesn't perform so well on his feet, the Center for American Progress has stepped in to suggest 100 Mistakes he can mention the next time he's asked if he's made any. The list makes no mention of Sammy Sosa.
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The NYTimes reported last week that some Iraqi insurgents are led by Hussein's former secret service members. While this is not surprising (of course people with training in such things are leading some of the resistance), we've learned that this sort of thing was planned even before the fighting on the ground started.
BTW, dictionary.com defines insurgent as "Rising in revolt against established authority, especially a government." The word is clearly misapplied to the rebels in Iraq. There is nothing established about American authority over there. I guess calling it a resistance movement would be too romantic.
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