Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Feds announce first list of colleges under investigation for harassment/violence mishandling

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Today, for the first time ever, the Feds have released a complete list of schools under investigation for their (mis)handling of sexual violence and harassment complaints.

Previously the Department of Education’s policy was to wait until someone asked about a specific school to confirm or deny whether there was any investigation, which obviously isn’t very efficient or transparent. The change is part of the ongoing push by the Obama Administration to combat sexual violence against women in college.

A complete list of the 55 schools nationwide currently under investigation, organized by state, is at the bottom of this post.

The Massachusetts schools under investigation (for our many Bay State readers) are: Amherst College, B.U., Emerson, Harvard (undergrad & law school), & UMass Amherst.

While I should note that these investigations may find the complaints without merit, I would also stress much more strongly that, in light of the notorious track record so many schools (including some of those Massachusetts schools I just mentioned) and the sheer volume of inquiries schools launch every year, it is probably far more likely that this is the tip of the problem iceberg rather than some false witch-hunt, for basically all the schools on this list.

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John Oliver interviews NSA’s Keith Alexander

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John Oliver’s first interview on his new show: the head of the NSA. Oliver is already brilliant, just as he was when he guest-hosted The Daily Show last summer. This video is well worth your time.

I really almost choked from laughing when Oliver went off about the deeply misguided “needle in the haystack” metaphor.
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C.A.R. capital evacuations continue

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central-african-republic-mapCentral African Republic peacekeepers have safely evacuated a convoy of over a thousand Muslim civilians out of the capital to the Muslim-dominated north, following thousands of other fleeing Muslims trying to get away from the Christian counter-militias now dominating the capital. The successful convoy operation marks an improvement for an international peacekeeping mission that has been plagued with accusations of inaction and indifference toward the Muslim population specifically.

Separately, members of the country’s disbanded Muslim militia coalition attacked a Doctors Without Borders clinic, killing a couple dozen locals and three foreign aid workers.

Rick Santorum: Rebranded or Receding?

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I’m not a big fan of getting into the endless discussions on distant presidential election fields, and I’m certainly not a fan of Rick Santorum, who I believe to be a horrible person. But I was mildly intrigued by some extensive comments he made to the Associated Press about a possible second presidential run during an interview about his latest book.

He’s still quite obsessed with decrying sex — an obsession that made him famous initially as a U.S Senator — and in the new book blames poor voters for having too much consequence-free sex. But he also seems to be staking a clear position as the “Big Government Republican” wing’s standard-bearer, much in the way that George W. Bush was, and against the Paul/Cruz libertarian wing.

Anxiety among those voters remains high, and Republicans have for too long talked to the top earners and not the workers.

“A rising tide lifts all boats – unless your boat has a hole in it. A lot of Americans, we’ve got holes in our boats,” Santorum said. “Millions and millions of Americans (are) out there who want good lives but have holes in their boats. … They just see the water level going up and their boat sinking.”

That’s why, he argues, candidates need to put forward policies to help those voters.

“I’m looking at 2014 and I’m thinking the Republican Party is heading toward No-ville, which is `we’re against this, we’re against that, we’re against this.’ We’re not painting a positive vision for America,” Santorum said in the interview.

[…]
“There’s a strain within the Republican Party now that smacks of the no-government conservatism,” Santorum said. “That wasn’t Ronald Regan. It wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt. It wasn’t Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t any Republican that I’m aware of. It wasn’t Calvin Coolidge. And yet there seems to be this creation of this strain of conservatism that has no basis in conservatism.”

Santorum said Republicans should respect Reagan, but he doubted the former president would offer the same policies today that he did during the 1970s and 1980s.

 
(N.B. Calvin Coolidge was 100% the embodiment of “no-government conservatism” so I have no idea what he’s talking about there…)

If he decides to run again, this puts him in a bad spot with a lot of Republican primary voters these days, which he seems to know. So, it could be a hail-mary pass to try to rally a lot of unusual primary voters who want an interventionist government (that helps the “right” and “deserving” people, of course) and care about social justice, in the same religious vein he does.

But it’s probably incompatible with “Gospel of Wealth”-style Protestants and the libertarian/tea party-style Republicans who still dominate much of the party’s primary process. It’s also badly incompatible with the Big Business Republicans who kept his 2012 presidential hopes alive despite a mess of a campaign committee.

So, this may not be a rebranding, so much as another way to cash in while there’s still some amount of attention on him, before ultimately opting not to run. Comments like “Yeah, I don’t know if I can do this. It’s just tough,” are not usually associated with people who decide to run after playing coy. (If the campaign is tough, being president is tougher.) And he’s got a reasonably successful private sector career now, making Christian-themed movies. Plus, he’s still (quite reasonably) very concerned about the health of his youngest daughter who has a severe genetic disorder that may not allow him much more time with her.

If I had to guess, I’d say he won’t run again, but it’s always hard to predict these things because circumstances change and people get pressured in or out of the race unexpectedly. But to me it sounds like he’s pretty much pulling the plug on running and just wants to be a “thought leader” in the party (which I don’t expect will work out too well).

Colonial sci-fi

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Very interesting Atlantic article this week: “Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People”

A researcher doing a meta-analysis of science fiction found its initial rise to prominence and formation as a coherent genre is tied directly to the height of imperial Britain and colonial France, both in time and place. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and so on.

(And though it wasn’t mentioned in the piece, American sci-fi like A Princess of Mars/John Carter of Mars, a serialized allegory about the American Civil War, rose to prominence just a little later as America became a global power, between the Spanish-American War and U.S. entry into World War I.)

After its origins in imperial Britain and colonial France, the genre’s allegory has broadly bifurcated into “we’ll get what was coming to us for the horrors of colonial oppression” versus “man, this is awesome — we should keep killing everyone who doesn’t look like us because we’re the best, and if we don’t, we’ll be oppressed, and white people don’t deserve that.”

As for myself, I find my tastes distinctly in the former camp. Box office bomb aside, I refused to watch Disney’s “John Carter” on principle, because the original story is an obvious allegorical paean to the Confederacy and antebellum South through the lens of a race war between aliens on another planet. The antebellum South, of course, being the height of America’s internal white supremacist colonialism.

Also my tastes tend that way just because I’m totally the type of person who would try to surrender the entire planet to an invading alien military, instead of trying to re-enact “Independence Day.” Maybe that makes me the Marshal Philippe Pétain of our planetary future, but I just assume that if a huge landing force of aliens arrives at Earth while we’re still sending people to our dinky “space” station (which is actually still in our atmosphere) on barely-upgraded-from-the-Soviet-era spaceships, we’ve probably already lost that conflict. Better to surrender quickly and wage a guerrilla resistance to wear the occupiers down — what we humans do best — than try to fight off the initial invasion and lose everything. Or, failing that, we’ll just get what’s coming to us.

Illustration: "Martians vs. Thunder Child" from a 1906 printing of "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells.

Illustration: “Martians vs. Thunder Child” from a 1906 printing of “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells.

No shock there: Bundy a raging racist

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So it turns out that Cliven Bundy is a big old racist who believes Blacks were better off enslaved and use too much government assistance.

So to recap: Bundy asserts that he can use government resources and not pay his share of usage fees for two decades because he has a made-up (and poorly researched) ideology allowing him to reject the existence of that government — but something-something-black-people-using-resources?

Yeah that makes a whole lot of sense. “No one could have predicted” that the aging white man (whose religion rejected Black membership as recently as the 1970s) who is a rallying point for all the white supremacist anti-government militias in the country would be a raging racist against Black Americans.

Good thing all those prominent Republicans in office and in the media rallied to his cause without doing their homework, just in time for him to be revealed as a gigantic bigot who misses slavery. Oh wait, they don’t care, because they also did that after the patriarch of “Duck Dynasty” waxed poetic about the good old days before the Civil Rights Movement.

(For our in-depth analysis of Cliven Bundy’s deeply misguided position on the Federal government, listen to Arsenal For Democracy 81 from earlier this week.)

But the real question is this: is it inherently more objectionable that he’s a vicious racist or that he rejects the existence of the Federal government and has brought in heavily armed supporters to resist the government’s attempts to clear his cattle off public lands for refusing to pay a cumulative one million dollars in back fees over two decades?

Did Egypt’s military organize the protests leading to the coup?

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egypt-coat-of-armsOne man is alleging in an in-depth report by Buzzfeed that his much-cited populist organization, Tamarod, which paved the way for the Egyptian military coup in July 2013 and demanded intervention on behalf of millions of protesters, was actually just five guys in an office whose name and social media popularity was co-opted (or at least force-multiplied) by the military and Interior Ministry as a front group to legitimize the coup. The original organization leaders would send talking points to state television and the Army would rewrite them and then put them out over the air under the Tamarod name anyway. But, then again, he also suspects three of his co-founders may actually have been Army plants all along.

By the end of June, he asserts they were effectively no longer in control of the group as Interior staff began using its offices to stage and organize protesters to rally against the president — down to the logistical level of how many little flags and water bottles were needed. In other words, more like a highly choreographed U.S. presidential convention audience with pre-printed signs than a spontaneous mass demonstration of affection for the military and disgust with the president.

The June 2013 protests always seemed way too well organized (or rather, unusually well supplied) to me, but I tend to hesitate to jump on board with suggestions that may prove to be conspiracy theories. These allegations aren’t necessarily true either — the Buzzfeed reporters had trouble finding anyone who could corroborate his account and he sometimes hinted he had been less ignorant of the situation at the time than he lets on — but it would certainly fit with a suspicious pattern that resulted in a very rapid emergence of a mass produced Cult of Personality surrounding (soon-to-be-president) General Sisi within a week or so of the coup.

Then again, maybe I’m just looking for even more reasons to be disgusted with the idea of millions of people rallying enthusiastically for the replacement of transitional democracy with military dictatorship — and with their Western cheerleaders who, to this day (despite all the terrible things the new government has done or endorsed), can’t contain their excitement for military rule, in their haste to quash Islamic participation in government.