glaurung | Entries tagged with politics

One year on, and I am still seeing articles in leftist media focusing on the role the US has had in preventing peace talks and blowing up Russia's pipelines. Articles which then go on to say that, because of the horrible risk of a full scale atomic war breaking out between NATO and Russia, there has to be a peace agreement, if only a trustworthy 3rd party could negotiate one. (tears hair).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/15/hersh-the-us-and-the-sabotage-of-the-nordstream-pipelines/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/16/how-spin-and-lies-fuel-a-bloody-war-of-attrition-in-ukraine/

Yes, of course, the best solution is always to stop the killing and use diplomacy. But sometimes, diplomacy cannot and will not work because one or both sides refuse to negotiate, or are only going to approach negotiations in bad faith. Sometimes you have to have a fucking war and people have to suffer horribly and die needlessly, because the alternative is to let an imperialist dictatorship expand their territory, build up their empire, and create even more suffering and death (and ethnic cleansing and genocide) than any war ever could.

The butcher's bill for World War II is hard to conceive, but the toll that a German empire would have created if it had been allowed to carry out its plans for Lebensraum? Would have been worse. I am not sure what is causing today's leftists to think that negotiating peace with Putin would have a different outcome than it did 80 years ago with a different imperialist power that insisted on conquering its neighbours, but I really wish they would stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time

And yes, America, as the dominant imperialist power in the world, is happily taking advantage of the war to pursue their own aims. But you can't right the wrongs America continues to commit by letting Russia gobble up more parts of Ukraine, which is what a negotiated peace settlement would mean. And, because evidently it needs to be repeated endlessly until the leftist media stop acting like the only actors that matter are America and NATO: Ukraine is an actor in this war, and they have opinions and desires that matter:

https://truthout.org/articles/a-ukrainian-socialist-lays-out-the-aims-and-struggles-of-her-countrys-left/

The only way to make an empire give up the territory it has conquered at the negotiating table is by arm twisting... and the fundamental problem is that, it's impossible to arm twist a country that has enough nuclear weapons to destroy civilisation on Earth. The only other way to get a peace agreement is for enough death and suffering to happen that both warring sides decide they want the war to end. And, unfortunately, that seems to be a long way off.

After going on about a lot of military nuts and bolts stuff, here's the conclusion of the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog's post last week:

https://acoup.blog/2023/02/24/collections-one-year-into-the-war-in-ukraine/

All of which is to say that unfortunately I do not see the war as being likely to end any time soon. Putin’s remains determined to carry the war through to a conclusion and indeed politically he probably cannot do otherwise, having backed himself into a corner with his annexation of Ukrainian territory he doesn’t control. Meanwhile Ukraine isn’t going to bargain away at the peace table territory that they could still win on the battlefield. There’s a psychological aspect to this as well, I suspect: it would be a hard ask for most Ukrainians at this point, after experiencing the cruelty and brutality of Russian attacks against civilians, to let the Russians ‘win.’ Human beings are willing to absorb a lot of hardship and suffering if it allows them to punish the people causing that hardship and suffering.

Consequently, so long as Putin remains in power – and there is little prospect of him being removed – Russia is unlikely to negotiate in good faith to end the war on terms that would be acceptable to Ukraine (as Ukraine is not going to give up towns and cities they’ve held or recaptured just to end the fighting). Meanwhile, as long as Ukrainians believe they can make gains on the battlefield both to secure territory (and protect the people in that territory from Russian atrocities) and to avenge the damage they’ve already sustained, they are unlikely to be willing to negotiate for anything short of a full Russian withdrawal, which would be politically fatal to Putin and thus unacceptable to him. So while I hope everyone is thinking about potential war termination scenarios, in practice the preconditions for an end to the conflict are likely far off.

And unfortunately that is where we stand a year in to the fighting. Russian forces have largely failed on the battlefield, losing territory consistently since April (but still a net gain compared to the January 2022 lines). Given the severity of Russian losses and the geopolitical consequences for Russia, I think it is fair to say that in a sense Russia has already lost. The question that remains, one year on, is if Ukraine can win and how bad the damage will be once the war ends.

New York City's office of Emergency Management has issued a surreal and brainless PSA about what to do if a nuclear bomb goes off in the city. Let's try a youtube embed:

Watch on YouTube

Set aside the chirpy presenter and the outlandish assumption that there will still be broadcasts/phone service or internet for people to stay tuned to after a bomb goes off.

If there was an actual nuclear war, either NYC would not be targeted at all (because Russia would instead be using its nukes against naval bases, air bases, missile silos, and military command centres), or it would get one bomb, which would destroy essentially the entire city, and there wouldn't be much of anyone left alive to worry about how they were supposed to tune in (Check out the map halfway down this page, showing the area of a firestorm after a standards size Russian nuke going off above Manhattan).

The PSA seems to instead be contemplating a terrorist nuclear attack using a regular A-bomb instead of an H-bomb. Fearmongers ^H^H^H security "experts" have been beating the drum about how terrorists would love to obtain a nuke and set it off in a major american city for 20 years now. My library card let me look at this paper from 2009, written by one of those "experts," which cites 2007 congressional testimony by Richard Garwin, a "true genius" who thought there was a "20 percent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included," and also cites Matthew Bunn, who estimated in 2006 "the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent." That means over 10 years, the first expert thinks there is a 90% probability that terrorists will blow up a city, and in the two decades since 2001, the second guy thinks the odds of a city being nuked are around 50% (see formula note below). Something seems wrong with their figures. Could it be that they don't actually have any idea of the risk and are making up high numbers in order to make things sound more scary so they can continue to make money beating the drum over nuclear terrorism? Nah, couldn't be.

Regardless, I got some maps for the destruction from a very basic nuclear bomb - the Little Boy a-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which shot a chunk of purified U235 into a cavity in another chunk of U235. The simplicity of the design was such that the Manhattan project scientists never bothered to test it - they were certain it would work. It's possible to make a much smaller bomb (eg, the minimum yield on dial-a-yield H-bomb used in most American nukes), but that involves using more advanced techniques. For a bomb built in a garage by people without decades of expertise in bomb making to draw on, we can expect your basic Hiroshima or Nagasaki H-bomb of 15 or 20 kilotons. Here's the area destroyed by fire at Hiroshima. And here's a nukemap projection of the result of setting off the same bomb at the ground level of the Empire State Building. The 50% chance of 3rd degree burns circle there (1.8 km) is the same radius as the "2000 yard" circle in the Hiroshima map.

Basically, assuming the same size firestorm, a terrorist nuke set off in the street outside the Empire State Building would cause the entire width of Manhattan Island from 5th to 55th street to be destroyed by fire. And the staggering scale of that - from the most basic bomb that could plausibly be made in a garage by terrorists - is why all those "experts" have been so wrong for so many years. Because despite what American terrorism "experts" think, terrorists are not monsters intent on killing as many people as possible. They are politically savvy people using acts of violence to create a political effect. Terrorism is, basically, propaganda through violence. And even if they could get their hands on some plutonium or pure U235 (which would not be an easy or cheap undertaking), they know better than to do so. They know that the propaganda effect of setting off a nuke in a city would not help their cause. So they haven't tried.

But, the fearmongers continue to beat their drums, the Biden administration has not reversed course on Trump's baseless scapegoating if Iran, and the NYC office of emergency management has turned out a tone deaf and ludicrous PSA.

(Footnote: to calculate the odds of something with a per year chance happening over several years, this page says for the probability p, (1-p) to the N = the chance of it not happening at all over N years. The chance of it happening at least once is the inverse (subtract that result from 1 again). So, convert annual percent chance to decimal, subtract that decimal from 1, then raise that to the power of the number of years, then subtract from 1 to get the chance of it happening over the longer time interval.

Susan Faludi's "The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America" is a brilliant book with an annoying flaw.

Faludi opens by noting that even as late as 2007 when she finished the book, "Virtually no film, television drama, play, or novel on 9/11 had begun to plumb what the trauma meant for our national psyche. Slavishly literal reenactments of the physical attack... or unrepresentative tales of triumphal rescue at ground zero seemed all the national imagination could handle." She talks a great deal about "we" in following pages of her preface: "Nothing like this had ever happened before, so we didn't know how to assimilate the experience. And yet, in the weeks and months to follow, we kept rummaging through the past to make sense of the disaster, as if the trauma of 9/11 had stirred some distant memory, reminded us of something disturbingly familiar." And further: "allusions to Pearl Harbour provided no traction, and we soon turned our attention to another chapter in U.S. history," the Cold War, where, in the fall of 2001, with pundits invoking John Wayne and TV airing re-runs of all of Wayne's western films, "we reacted to our trauma, in other words, not by interrogating it but by cocooning it in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood."

Obviously, of course, Faludi suffers from the typical American problem of forgetting that Americans are not the only "we" in the world. But that's not really the problem here. The problem, and the flaw, is that despite her preface, Faludi isn't really writing about "we Americans" but rather, and only, about "we journalists, pundits, politicians, and other members of the Establishment." Which is the typical, self-centred and arrogant stance of most journalists, of course, but is an astonishing lapse from a feminist left-wing writer who has shown in the past that she knows better (more about why I think Faludi falls into making this mistake later). The result is a fascinating and revealing book about the mythical fantasy that the U.S. media and the U.S. establishment tried to impose on the nation's social fabric in the aftermath of 9/11, but it isn't a book about what Americans thought of 9/11 or how they reacted to it. Nor, aside from a few early and brief mentions of statistics that refute the so-called trends being claimed by various journalists, is it even a book that tries to compare the establishment's response to the attacks to the responses of ordinary people.

Many's the time since September 2001 when I have read something in the news about the U.S. and said to

morgan_dhu, "they've all gone barking mad down there." And I know many of my e-friends in the U.S., and many of the U.S.-based bloggers that I read, were having very similar responses to the parade of craziness that the establishment media and political leaders were putting on. Faludi would have written a much better book, I think, if she had gone beyond the mainstream and establishment media and looked at opinion surveys, at left-wing blogs, at all the various non-establishment voices out there, and what they had to say about 9/11 and about the establishment's campaign of myth-making.

Despite this flaw, I still found the book utterly fascinating. It's a damn good book, if you accept the limits of what it tries to do. ( Read more... )

morgan_dhu's GP ordered some blood tests, so we had a visit from a phlebotomist this morning. As usual, the GP made a mistake and the test order did not include the cholesterol test we had asked for, nor did it include any fasting tests despite

morgan_dhu's being told to fast before the test. We are not happy with our GP, and this is just the latest in a series of reasons why we really wish we could find someone else... but there's a shortage of physicians in Toronto, and it's rare to find someone who is accepting new patients. And every election season, the provincial government includes promises in its platform to Do Something to increase the supply of physicians in the province, ditto the same promises at the federal level every time there's a federal election, but somehow despite all the promises, Something is not Being Done, because there are still never enough doctors to go around.

We were very impressed by the phlebotomist, (Annia) though, as she took the initiative, calling her boss, waiting on hold for five minutes, and then getting approval to put the missing tests back on the order form.

morgan_dhu also said that Annia was very good with her needle, as it didn't hurt nearly as much as it usually does.

Which turns out to be no mystery, as Annia was a GP for 15 years back in Cuba before coming here. Cuba, of course, has been exporting doctors around the world for decades, and Cuban doctors are among the top tier worldwide in terms of their training and education... but Annia cannot be a doctor here in Toronto, where there is a serious shortage of physicians, because the (white) medical establishment here seen to it that doctors trained in foreign countries are not allowed to transfer their credentials when they immigrate here.

Of course, there are exceptions for American and British and Western European trained doctors, who can get recertified in Canada without a great deal of trouble, but Annia is basically supporting herself with phlebotomy in order to go back to school to take courses in things she already knows so she can re-earn a professional certificate she already has, but this time without the taint of it being issued by a university in the third world.

Isn't racism wonderful?

11 AM on election day in the US, and already the news is full of stories of people waiting in line for hours on end to vote. And various people from other countries, like "mirrormirror" from England (in the comments), confusedly asking Americans why it is that they have to wait in line so long, to which the Americans patiently explain that they have much longer ballots than do people in other countries, so it takes longer.

Much has been said about how Americans vote for everyone from President and representative to mayor and dog catcher, and how this creates baroque ballots that take a long time to count by hand, which in turn requires the use of complex and expensive voting machines created by companies owned by Republican supporters, that may or may not have "bugs" that cause them to preferentially lose votes for Democratic candidates.

Very, very few people are talking about the fact that Florida (to take one, possibly atypical example out of 50), with 18 million people, has 900 polling stations if I read this article correctly. Assuming 70% of the Florida populace are eligible to vote (probably higher considering the ratio of retirees to children there), that's still 14,000 voters per polling station, or, with 60% turnout (higher than in any of the last three or four elections in the US), 8,400 voters per precinct, minimum. If polls there are open for 12 hours on election day, that's 700 voters per hour.

In contrast, most Canadian provinces set the maximum number of eligible voters per polling station (table E1) to between 275 and 450. So in an entire day of voting, even with 100% turnout, a typical Canadian polling station would have to handle less than half the voters that a typical Florida polling station would have to handle in one hour with 60% turnout.

And this is the invisible elephant in the room whenever there is discussion of how to fix the broken US election system. I'm sure there are states which have adequate numbers of polling stations, but there are also many states which absolutely do not. And for those states, all this talk of how voting machines are vitally necessary, of how "chaos," long lines, polling stations running out of ballots and people getting discouraged and going home because they didn't want to wait 8 hours in line to vote is just normal, business as usual, nothing to see here, all that is just TOTAL BULLSHIT.

If Florida had 25,000 polling stations, then there wouldn't be any lineups, and there wouldn't be much of a need to spend money on expensive voting systems that don't work and aren't accurate or unbiased, because, with half a dozen poll workers (and a dozen party representatives to look over their shoulders) you could count each ballot by hand, even with votes for 30 different elected officials to count, and still get done in just a few hours.

Well, yes, 25,000 polling stations would cost a bit more than 900. But guess what? Democracy isn't free. And if you're trying to do democracy on the cheap, then you're doing it wrong.

[Edited to account for variability from state to state, and to refine estimate of eligible voters in Florida]

[eta:] Rhode Island, with a population of ~1 million (by the national average, that gives 700,000 voting age citizens) has 177 polling places this year, or 3,950 eligible voters per polling place.

In Town of Castle Rock, Colorado vs Gonzales, the US supreme court ruled 7-2 today that local police are not constitutionally required to protect someone from a person they have a restraining order against.

From the summary of the opinion:

Respondent filed this suit under 42 U.S.C.§1983 alleging that petitioner violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause when its police officers, acting pursuant to official policy or custom, failed to respond to her repeated reports over several hours that her estranged husband had taken their three children in violation of her restraining order against him. Ultimately, the husband murdered the children. The District Court granted the town's motion to dismiss, but an en banc majority of the Tenth Circuit reversed, finding that respondent had alleged a cognizable procedural due process claim because a Colorado statute established the state legislature's clear intent to require police to enforce retraining orders, and thus its intent that the order's recipient have an entitlement to its enforcement. The court therefore ruled, among other things, that respondent had a protected property interest in the enforcement of her restraining order.

Held:Respondent did not, for Due Process Clause purposes, have a property interest in police enforcement of the restraining order against her husband.

This despite the fact that the language of Colorado's restraining order law clearly stated that police were required to enforce restraining orders.

In short: the US supreme court has told battered women that they don't have any recourse if their abusers persist in stalking, beating, or killing them and their children. The fact that this was a 7-2 opinion says many sad things about the state of the US legal system.

Current Mood: appalled

Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Rants From the Dragon

Dear fellow leftists: sometimes there has to be a war.

Thoughts on that nuclear attack PSA put out by New York City.

Book Review: Susan Faludi's "The Terror Dream"

Vampires and doctors and racism, oh my

Not everyone in the world lines up to vote

The US supreme court has gone barking mad

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