The link of the day is HollaDaddy, which features some delicious (albeit malicious) baiting of the less-refined individuals on MySpace. For example:
Ouch… and the whole site features these zingers. So go check it out. Or not.
[tags]holladaddy, myspace, fucking with myspace people, baiting, ebonics, messing online with people, holladaddy.com[/tags]
See Also: Mr Block: He So Clever, the anti-Semitic accusation as throw-away,
Obama Intelligence Nominee Withdraws, The Israel of the Three Likudniks, Give Me A Break, “Bad Things”, Karma (and Charles Freeman) on the Bus, The Fallout from Freeman, The Israel Lobby And Iran, Freeman story makes ‘Al Jazeera’, Aipac and the Lying Liars of the Israel Lobby, and Five comments on Chas Freeman.
[tags]debate on israel, palestine, america, united states of america, anti-semite, the lobby, pro-israeli views, bias, american media, flowchart, image, aipac, israeli lobby, likud, corruption, infiltration, dual loyality[/tags]
The Article: How to stop the drug wars, leading editorial for this weeks Economist.
The Text: A hundred years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commissionâjust a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a âdrug-free worldâ and to âeliminating or significantly reducingâ the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.
That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.
Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.
âLeast badâ does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.
The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has âstabilisedâ, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the worldâs adult population, still take illegal drugsâroughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.
This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden countryâGuinea Bissauâwas assassinated.
Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.
Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the Westâs efforts to defeat the Taliban.
Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UNâs perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with âblowâ). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to âcrackâ or âmethâ are outside the law, with only their pushers to âtreatâ them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a ânarco stateâ as their neighbour.
The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and âharm reductionâ (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of âsoftâ drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.
Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.
That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.
There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the stateâs job to stop them from doing so.
What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.
By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addictsâa way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago. Reviewing the evidence again, prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.
See Also: Pomegranates for poppies, Want to save Mexico? Rethink drug policy, Cartels’ Overwhelming Force, Intimidating Implications, If The War on Drugs Is a Success, What Does Failure Look Like?, Pot Bust Flip-Flop in LA; Obama & Holder Must Clarify RxPot Policy Now, The Economist: legalization “least bad” way to deal with failed drug prohibition, Pat Buchanan on the Drug War, and As Drug War Rages, AZ AG Talks Gun Control and the Benefits of Legalization.
[tags]drug wars, economist, legalization, legalisation, cocaine, marijuana, opium, production, developing nations, drug battles, legalize drugs, america, united states, DEA, drug enforcement, drug policy, decriminalize[/tags]
If you’re like me, you are too busy being a big-time Internet blogger to go to every party that you are invited to. I mean I’m a popular dude, I get invited to lots of parties, not all of them LAN related. Sometimes they are so exciting I liveblog them. Luckily, now there is a blog for me. Katie of SIMYP scours flickr for the best parties, so I don’t have to. I mean, check this out:
Thanks Katie!
The Article: Matt Taibbi’s review of Thomas Friedmans latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded.
The Text: When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedmanâs new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.
Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in Americaâs ability to fall for absolutely anythingâjust when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnutsâ along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.
Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a âGreen Revolutionâ? Well, heâll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.
Iâve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care aboutâin particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldnât make them up even if you were tryingâand when you tried to actually picture the âillustrativeâ figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.
Remember Friedmanâs take on Bushâs Iraq policy? âItâs OK to throw out your steering wheel,â he wrote, âas long as you remember youâre driving without one.â Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedmanâs analysis of Americaâs foreign policy outlook last May:
The first rule of holes is when youâre in one, stop digging.When youâre in three, bring a lot of shovels.â
First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If youâre supposed to stop digging when youâre in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? Itâs stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.
Even better was this gem from one of Friedmanâs latest columns: âThe fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But itâs all too familiar. Itâs the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: âWho owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldnât we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?â There are many serious questions one could ask about this passage, but the one that leaped out at me was this: In the âtitleâ of that long-running play, is it supposed to be the same person asking all three of those questions? If so, does that person suffer from multiple personality disorder? Because in the first question, he is a neutral/ignorant observer of the Mideast drama; in the second he sympathizes with the Jews; in the third heâs a radical Muslim. Moreover, after you blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque, is the surrounding hotel still there? Why would anyone build a mosque in a half-blown-up hotel? Perhaps Friedman should have written the passage like this: âItâs the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: âWho owns this hotel? And why did a person suffering from multiple personality disorder build a mosque inside it after blowing up the bar and asking if there was a room for the Jews? Why? Because his editorâs been drinking rubbing alcohol!â OK, so maybe all of this is unfair.There are a lot of people out there who think Friedman has not been treated fairly by critics like me, that focusing on his literary struggles is a snobbish, below-the-belt tacticâa cheap shot that belies the strength of his overall âarguments.â Who cares, these people say, if Friedmanâs book The World is Flat should probably have been titled Theif he had wanted the bookâs title to match its âpointâ about living in an age of increased global interconnectedness? And who cares if it doesnât quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a âvase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?âWho cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? Youâre missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedmanâs highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economyâif you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, youâd see that, and maybe youâd even learn something.
My initial answer to that is that Friedmanâs language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesnât actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind itâs highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.
But whatever, letâs concede the point, forget about the crazy metaphors for a moment, and look at the actual content of Hot, Flat and Crowded. Many people have rightly seen this new greenish pseudo-progressive tract as an ideological departure from Friedmanâs previous works, which were all virtually identical exercises in bald greed-worship and capitalist tent-pitching. Approach-and-rhetoric wise, however, itâs the same old Friedman, a tireless social scientist whose research methods mainly include lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes.
Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedmanâs stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:âI will still take advantage of itâbut I no longer think of it as something I got for freeâ), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a ânightmarish neon blurâ of KFC, BK and McDonaldâs signs in Texas, he realizes: âWeâre on a foolâs errandâ), and reads bumper stickers (the âOsama Loves your SUVâ sticker he read turns into the thesis of his âFill âer up with Dictatorsâ chapter). This is Friedmanâs life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebeeâs signs.
Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: âI was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, âWe need better headlights for our tri-plane.ââ And off he goes.You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you donât notice that tri-planes donât have headlights.And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks. And you give up. Thereâs so much shit flying around the bookâs atmosphere that you donât notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.
In The World is Flat, the key action scene of the book comes when Friedman experiences his pseudo-epiphany about the Flat world while talking with himself in front of InfoSys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with MoisĂ©s NaĂm, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out:
I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years.
Friedman then draws his napkin-graph, and much to the punditâs surprise, it turns out that there is almost an exact correlation between high oil prices and âunfreedomâ! The graph contains two lines, one showing a rising and then descending slope of âfreedom,â and one showing a descending and then rising course of oil prices.
Friedman plots exactly four points on the graph over the course of those 30 years. In 1989, as oil prices are falling, Friedman writes, âBerlin Wall Torn Down.â In 1993, again as oil prices are low, he writes, âNigeria Privatizes First Oil Field.â 1997, oil prices still low, âIran Calls for Dialogue of Civilizations.â Then, finally, 2005, a year of high oil prices: âIran calls for Israelâs destruction.âTake a look for yourself: I looked at this and thought: âGosh, what a neat trick!â Then I sat down and drew up my own graph, called SIZE OF VALERIE BERTINELLIâS ASS, 1985-2008, vs. HAP- PINESS. It turns out that there is an almost exact correlation! Note the four points on the graph:
1990: Release of Millerâs Crossing
1996-97: Crabs
2001: Ate bad tuna fish sandwich at Times Square Blimpie; felt sick 2008: Barack Obama elected
That was so much fun, I drew another one! This one is called AMERICAN PORK BELLY PRICES vs. WHAT MIDGETS THINK ABOUT AUSTRALIA 1972-2002.
Or how about this one, called NUMBER OF ONE- EYED RETARDED FLIES IN THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA vs. LIKELIHOOD OF NUCLEAR COM- BAT ON INDIAN SUBCONTINENT.
Obviously this sounds like a flippant analysis, but thatâs more or less exactly what Friedman is up to here. If youâre going to draw a line that measures the level of âfreedomâ across the entire world and on that line plot just four randomly-selected points in time over the course of 30 yearsâand one of your top four âfreedom pointsâ in a 30-year period of human history is the privatization of a Nigerian oil fieldâwell, what the fuck? What canât you argue, if thatâs how youâre going to make your point? He could have graphed a line in the opposite direction by replacing Berlin with Tiananmen Square, substituting Iraqi elections for Iranâs call for Israelâs destruction (incidentally, when in the last half-century or so have Islamic extremists not called for Israelâs destruction?), junking Iranâs 1997 call for dialogue for the U.S. sanctions against Iran in â95, and so on. Itâs crazy, a game of Scrabble where the words donât have to connect on the board, or a mathematician coming up with the equation A B -3X = Swedish girls like chocolate.
Getting to the âideasâ in the book: Its basic premise is that Americaâs decades-long habit of gluttonous energy consumption has adversely affected humanity because a) while the earth could support Americaâs indulgence, it canât sustain two billion endlessly-copulating Chinese should they all choose to live in American-style excess, and b) the exploding global demand for oil artificially subsidizes repressive Middle Eastern dictatorships that would otherwise have to rely on tax revenue (read: listen to their people) in order to survive, and this subsidy leads to terrorism and a spread of âunfreedom.â
Regarding the first point, Friedman writes:
Because if the spread of freedom and free markets is not accompanied by a new approach to how we produce energy and treat the environment⊠then Mother Nature and planet earth will impose their own constraints and limits on our way of lifeâconstraints that will be worse than communism.
Three observations about this touching and seemingly remarkable development, i.e. onetime unrepentant free-market icon Thomas Friedman suddenly coming out huge for the environment and against the evils of gross consumerism:
1. The need for massive investment in green energy is an idea so obvious and inoffensive that even presidential candidates from both parties could be seen fighting over whoâs for it more in nationally televised debates last fall;
2. I wish I had the balls to first spend six long years madly cheering on an Iraq war that not only reintroduced Sharia law to the streets of Baghdad, but radicalized the entire Islamic world against American influenceâand then write a book blaming the spread of fundamentalist Islam on the ignorant consumers of the middle American heartland, who bought too many Hummers and spent too much time shopping for iPods in my wifeâs giganto-malls.
3. To review quickly, the âLong Bombâ Iraq war plan Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone elseâs face; the âElectronic Herdâ of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didnât pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved âGolden Straitjacketâ of American-style global development (forced on the world by the âhidden fistâ of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the âFlat Worldâ consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wifeâs once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.
So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.
What the fuck else is he going to be? All the other ideas he spent the last ten years humping have been blown to hell. Color me unimpressed that he scrounged one more thing to sell out of the smoldering, discredited wreck that should be his career; that he had the good sense to quickly reinvent himself before angry Gods remembered to dash his brains out with a lightning bolt. But better late than never, I suppose. Or as Friedman might say, âBetter two cell phones than a fish in your zipper.â
See Also: Matt Taibbi: Someone Take Away Thomas Friedman’s Computer Before He Types Another Sentence, Thomas Friedman is a buncombe dealer, More Friedman follies, Clipping the Mustache, and The trouble with Friedman.
[tags]matt taibbi, matt taibi, review of hot flat and crowded, thomas friedman, tom friedman, review, book review, hot flat and crowded, the world is flat, economics, globalization, thomas friedman is a fucking idiot, new york times[/tags]
