Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Here, op-ed about how the U.S. customs and TSA folks look to travelers from abroad. Seriously, the folks employed by TSA at airports are the same stupid, brutal, hicks that authoritarian regimes the world over have recruited to do their dirty work.

Folks from abroad have to fill out something online called ESTA, Electronic System for Travel Authorization, in order to be able to get into the U.S. when they get here:

"ESTA asks for basic personal data, like your name and birth date. It also asks whether you are guilty of “moral turpitude,” whether you’re planning crimes or “immoral activities” and whether you suffer from “lymphogranuloma venereum” (don’t ask). If you’re involved in terrorism or genocide — and for some reason you’ve decided to take this opportunity to inform the United States government — there’s a box for that. And if you’re a spy — a particularly artless one — please let us know.

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Aesthetically, ESTA’s Web site — America’s digital front porch — is a disaster: uninviting and embarrassingly inconsistent with America’s information technology pre-eminence. Ten dollars of ESTA’s fee is earmarked for “visit America” ad campaigns. Tourism promotion is common sense. But we might reconsider the wisdom of requiring travelers to subsidize it in exchange for a grilling about their sexual health and genocidal activities.

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Finally, when travelers actually disembark, they are too often subjected to inaccurate lessons in American manners and common sense. Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime. They rated America’s borders by far the least welcoming in the world. Two-thirds feared being detained for “minor mistakes or misstatements.”

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This security mind-set occasionally veers into the absurd. Recently, two young European tourists were detained at Los Angeles International Airport for tweeting loose banter about plans to “destroy” America (an apparent reference to partying) and to disinter Marilyn Monroe. Vigilant border personnel reportedly searched their luggage for shovels, then deported them. Overseas commentators reacted with eye-rolling weariness but little surprise."

Here, about the country's expelling of 1/6 of its citizens 20 years ago, yet having pleasant things in the present like the Gross National Happiness measure:

"Bhutan is a beautiful place. High-end tourists love it. Here is my revealed prejudice: I have lived in Nepal for the past four years. In contrast with Bhutan, nothing works in Kathmandu. The electricity is off as much as eighteen hours a day in the winter months. The streets are jammed with unimaginable traffic. The Bagmati River is clogged with plastic bags and other refuse. The drinking water is sickly. But in 2006 there was a people’s uprising that threw out a truly decadent and inefficient royal family. The royal palace is now a national museum. The newspapers are filled with scurrilous attacks on anything and everybody. Anyone can say anything he or she wants. The politicians dawdle irresponsibly, and the Brahmin elite shamelessly does everything it can to perpetuate a Hindu caste culture that holds the country back. Every month or so one of the twenty-four political parties declares a bandh—a strike—and the city comes to a screeching halt. Chaos reigns in Kathmandu. But I like it. It smells of freedom. And I dare say, someday the Bhutanese will get a whiff of it."

Which is Here. I like Ted Rall, and have been following him for years, however, I disagree with his point here.

"Not his words. Nor his publicly-stated political opinions (which, I have excellent reason to believe, are purely for marketing purposes).

Calls for economic censorship are dangerous. Whether they’re from the Right against the Left (as when various right-wing pundits called for me to be fired, jailed or shot after 9/11), or from the Left against the Right (as in the current calls for Limbaugh to be fired for calling a Georgetown Law student a “slut” and a “prostitute”).

You know where I stand on Limbaugh. And where he stands on me. We despise one another. And I doubt he would defend my right to speak, or even live. But whatever.

When you call for censorship you open up your own partisans to similar calls in the future. Hard as this might be to fathom, my politics are just as objectionable to right-wingers as Limbaugh’s remarks are to those of us on the Left. Call for Limbaugh to be canned and you make it more likely that I’ll be canned for saying or drawing something that pisses them off. You just don’t want to go there.

Don’t like Limbaugh? Ignore him. Or declaim him as the fucked-up sexist shithead blowhard that he is. Calling for his sponsors to drop him is just a lazy substitute for a powerful counterargument.

P.S. Spare me the idiotic comments that only governments can censor. The dictionary says otherwise."

I think that with Limbaugh a lot of the arguments for sponsors to drop him are about parity in response, not about censorship in general. If anyone else but these ideologically subsidized blow hards on the right were to say the things they do, they'd lose their sponsors and be off the air. It takes loads and loads of misconduct by them, for instance the trail of dead left by Glenn Beck in his wake, to actually make them lose enough sponsors to create change, in that case to lose his job. If other journalists or commentators have to live up to those standards, with the fair skinned and fair minded folks at NPR, for example, having to quiver about appearing to favor liberalism, why shouldn't conservatives?

The difference between Ted Rall, who (like myself) says outrageous things from a left wing perspective, and Rush Limbaugh is that Rall has problems even getting through the door in order to get his stuff published, while Limbaugh gets air time on station after station after station. People always apply double standards to alternative and left wing material, but if they're going to do it to us, the least we can do is to ask for some consistency in treatment.

"I'm dark-skinned, wearing a baseball cap—that does not mean I'm a thug. You were obviously enjoying a drunken night out with friends, crossed my path, got in my face and decided to yell, "YO! YO! YO!" waving your hands around like they were guns.

...

I've seen a very ugly side of you, Seattle. Sometimes, White women literally run across the street in order to avoid walking down the same sidewalk as me. I'm a queer, Latino university student and human-rights student activist—and you're afraid of me? "

Reminds me of the essay by Brent Staples entitled Black Men and Public Space, where he talks about white women being irrationally scared of him just because he's walking around at night while black.

That's one thing that, unfortunately, the feminist movement hasn't really reckoned with publicly--the fact that racialized stereotypes about who is a potential rapist still percolate throughout the culture, although they're not as explicitly framed as they once were. Early advocates for women, and women/feminists themselves, in the early 20th century talked about the necessity of protecting white womanhood from sex crazed dark skinned men. I mean, that was what "Birth of a Nation" was in part about, the necessity of protecting white woman southerners.

Because a while ago, there was an accusation that I hadn't actually read her work. Even a stopped clock is right two times a day. The thing is, the positive points she makes have little to do with socialism as it actually exists, or as it rhetorically existed, but with liberal culture in the United States and England. What Rand's really talking about is liberalism, particularly what would be called welfare state liberalism, and not Soviet Communism, even though she imputes the same sorts of ideas to it.

Basically, it comes down to this: there are quite a few liberal folks in the US and elsewhere who make large, emotional, appeals to people in order to get them to do things out of a concern with and interest in humanity, out of some sort of general sense of moral concern, without much thought behind it, and without much substance. Save the Children, with the spokeswoman being skewered on South Park for being fat while advocating for helping people, is a prime example. Rock stars group charity songs in the '80s is another one. The folks who do these things expect you to just go along with their program because of the intensity of their emotional appeal, which is stupid, quite frankly. Rand criticizes this, and in so far as these people and their attitudes actually exist she's right on. Some people really are just a bundle of emotional preferences without any real thought behind them. However, the truth of the matter is that the better liberals in the U.S. rise above that sort of thing and actually provide reasons for what they do and for what they want to happen in the world above and beyond making emotional appeals. They provide justifications for why people in general should fund it, as well, that are compelling and go beyond guilt tripping.

Conservatives, particularly followers of Rand, tend to act like these reasons and justifications don't actually exist, and that only emotional appeals rule the day with liberals, which provides a cheap excuse not to actually look at the evidence to the contrary.

As for the strength of emotional appeals versus Reason regarding conservatism and liberalism, we now have over ten years of prime evidence regarding conservative group think that employs heavy emotional appeals to justify war, spying, the squashing of dissent, invasion of privacy, and torture. All of those things also involve monetary sacrifices as well as sacrifices of individual liberty. Although some libertarian groups have consistently opposed all of it, the greater right wing, the same people, like Glenn Beck, who cheer on Ayn Rand, have been the perpetrators of it. They haven't checked it as being not rational, they've implemented it. To me, that sort of skewers the idea that it's only liberals who engage in emotional group think.

Regarding the Left itself, and if the Left, particularly that of Soviet Russia where Rand got her street cred from, ever resembled the caricature that she portrays, let's just say that the ethos of Stalin was far only being believed in by Old Joe alone. Although Stalin took it to murderous extremes, most hard line Soviet socialists, were far from indulgent to people who Rand would consider to be social parasites. Stalin left a trail of human misery in his wake, but it wasn't because he was indulgent and soft, it was because he was strict and unsympathetic to humanitarian ideas, being content to let people starve to death rather than help them. In a much, much, less perverse and extreme fashion, the general ethos of supporting hard work, productivity, and value, was shared by much of Bolshevik and worker culture.