For the best commentary I've yet seen on why that happens, read this text from one of the Economist's bloggers.
I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand.
Over the last decade, I've been more and more disturbed by the direction politics is taking on both sides of the Atlantic. All our polities seem to be less and less willing to engage in any debate on real issues, and instead all major political parties and the media seem dedicated to confining political debates to symbolic non-issues. A perfect Finnish example is the current fixation on immigration policies, which, frankly, are the least of our problems right now. But none of the big systemic problems with the Finnish economy are even mentioned in the media, or were the subject of any real discussion during the parliamentary elections. Instead, candidates tilted at windmills of their choosing, which gave an impression of politics without any actual content.
Pretty much the same thing is happening in the US, where Ron Paul seems to be one of the only candidates who even brings up real political issues. And for that, he gets resoundingly ignored by the media.
Our representative democracies are mostly shams. The whole representative political system is a theater, constructed to deceive us into thinking that we have some input into the political decision-making process that goes on in our countries. In the meanwhile, the real political elite, which in Finland consists of the party bosses, senior civil servants and others, make the real political decisions, which includes deciding what non-issues the plebes will be allowed to "debate". Real issues will be kept off the media radar.
It'll be interesting to see what non-issues the coming US presidential election will be fought over. Rest assured that no big questions on America's future will be addressed, because that way lies the kind of treatment Ron Paul gets.
**
As a postscript, I add a word of caution, in the form of a New York Times op-ed, to anyone who thinks the Tea Party is a positive force in US politics.
And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.
So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.
More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.
You know, if the fact that Bachmann seems to be nuts didn't tip you off.
Chances are, you've seen activist Adam Kokesh and his buddies get arrested with unnecessary brutality at the Jefferson Memorial. If not, here's the video:
What you may not know is which channel this show runs on: Russia Today, nowadays known as RT. Described by the Guardian as "the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire", RT is a TV channel funded almost entirely by the Russian government. In that same Guardian story, their then-editor-in-chief explains:
"I don't believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position."
Russia Today, an English language service, was set up in 2005 to present a perspective from Vladimir Putin’s government as a counterbalance to Western global news organisations such as CNN and the BBC. Its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claims that the Russian state “doesn’t at all” interfere with the output of the network’s journalists.
But Shaun Walker, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, disputes this. “It is untrue that the channel’s journalists are able to report on what they want to without editorial influence; while as time has gone on there have been more features on “negative” aspects of Russia, there is still a total absence of any voices criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev,” he says. “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a “New Cold War” headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted “GENOCIDE” across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”
Indeed, one of their reporters resigned during the war in Georgia. Here's the Guardian:
Russians appear to be getting only one side of the story of the conflict in Georgia. According to a Moscow Times article, Russian television is showing the misery left by the Georgian assault in South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia's bombing of Georgia.
After William Dunbar, a correspondent for the English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report on Saturday, his scheduled reports later that day were cancelled by the station. He said: "I felt that I had no choice but to resign."
He added: "I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were cancelled. The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn't conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn't let me report it."
Of course, everyone knows how committed Russia is to the freedom of the press. The first Guardian article I quoted? Its author has since been expelled from Russia for no stated reason.
The idea for founding the channel seems to have come from former minister and Putin aide Mikhail Lesin, who wanted the channel to "polish Russia's international image". And they do, but not only by presenting Russian propaganda: part of their agenda is also to criticize Western countries.
For example, here's an RT reporter waxing lyrical over protests at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh:
The students were cornered, beaten, tear gassed, thrown to the floor and arrested – all for gathering inside a public park to express their political opinions.
This scene did not happen in a Third World country in the midst of a revolution. It occurred in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.
Of course, that very same year, a Gay Pride rally was held in Moscow. The rally was banned, and Moscow police had threatened the activists with "tough measures". When it went on anyway, police immediately arrested everyone present with "needless violence". Of course, that was better than some previous years when the police stood aside and let skinheads beat up the protesters.
You won't find any of this on RT: no reporters bemoaning the plight of the gay rights activists, let alone getting in amongst the demonstrators and writing harrowing first-person exposes of their arrest. No, on RT "Police disperse gay pride parade", without a hint of violence or impropriety. The channel unquestioningly accepts the official explanation for banning the marches, and under the sub-heading "A fight for gay rights or a farce?", goes on to lambast one of the organizers as a bully and a propagandist. Russia's embattled opposition gets similarly short shrift from RT, with no horror stories of police brutality.
Another topic that drew RT's ire is America's prison system. By contrast, read this Wikileaks cable or Amnesty International's report on Russia for some idea of what goes on over there; a topic you won't find any RT coverage on.
Finnish readers may be amused by the fact that notorious Finnish lunatic Johan Backman is a respected source for RT, quoted in stories like this one, which makes some hilariously over-the-top claims, including that in Finland, it's a crime to "criticize a legally operating organization". Their paraphrasing of what both Molari and Backman have said is also somewhat tenuously connected to reality. Molari and Backman are both rather well-known in Finland as extremists, and especially Backman is given fairly wide publicity in Russia because of his willingness to distort and exaggerate events in Finland in accordance with the Kremlin's propaganda line that Finland mistreats its Russian minority. That his views should be uncritically repeated by Russia Today speaks to the channel's ideology.
**
So a TV channel funded by the Russian government isn't exactly delivering objective journalism. Big surprise. It does raise some interesting questions, though, and to introduce them I'll promote a blog called The Agitator, by Radley Balko, a journalist and libertarian. I have great respect for the man as a chronicler of what I consider America's gradual evolution into a police state. His paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I read his blog regularly.
This May, Radley went on vacation and left us with a collection of guest bloggers. Most of them did well, even if it was a little odd when one of them felt that if we only divided ourselves into competing factions that identify themselves by differently colored uniforms, the world would be a better place. I thought we were already doing that. Another guest gleefully insulted a 17-year-old boy and expressed the fond hope that he would be assaulted in prison. These are just a couple of things that rankled me, though, and overall it was fine.
One of his guest bloggers, however, was RT's own Alyona Minkovski. Here's a clip from her show, which runs on RT:
As it happens, Radley's appeared on RT himself. As he explained, he went on RT "because they asked".
Now, I have a problem with this.
**
First of all, let me make absolutely clear that police brutality and the wholesale trampling of civil rights in America is reaching scary levels. Things like this, this and this are appalling, and so is the fact that the police will arrest you for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. The fact that police brutality and abuse is much worse in Russia is no excuse for the Americans or anyone else.
My problem is RT and the nature of their coverage. It's pretty obvious that they use a whole different yardstick for events in the US and in Russia, and much of their reporting consists of regurgitated Kremlin propaganda. They do go to some lengths to disguise this as critical journalism, but it's fairly obvious that when it comes to Russian interests, propaganda takes over. So when someone like Radley Balko attaches themselves to a channel like this, by appearing on it and hosting one of its reporters on his blog, I have a real problem with it, because he's lending his credibility to a Russian state propaganda operation.
I fully understand that there are economic incentives, direct or indirect, as well as the obvious political ones, for publicizing one's cause as widely as possible. In this particular case, though, that publicity comes with giving good press to the Russian state's propaganda machine; in other words, helping the Kremlin project a totally false image of Russia to the world. It also raises troubling questions about Mr. Balko's ethics as a journalist, in that he's willing to attach himself and his name to a government propaganda operation, seemingly without second thoughts.
In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.
To take just one example, Radley linked to the same Huffington Post piece I did above, on their questionable way of reporting an incident of police brutality in Washington, D.C. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it when RT glosses over Russian police brutality, though. In my books, that's hypocrisy.
Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.
It's a funny sort of libertarianism where you co-operate with one of the most repressive regimes in the world. I don't much care for it.
**
Last year, the Economist ran a piece on police brutality in Russia.
THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.
Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.
American police brutality is alarming enough that I can't say it's nothing compared to what they do in Russia. Both countries' police forces at times terrorize their inhabitants like an occupying army. But having been to both countries, I'd still rather get arrested by American cops than Russian ones. Hell, I'd rather be raided by the Pima county SWAT team than by OMON. If American SWAT teams sometimes remind us of storm troopers, their Russian counterparts pretty much are the SS.
And one of the foremost critics of police brutality in America co-operates with their PR department.
Earlier in this blag, I wrote about why I'm not going to read Jared Diamond, and in the same spirit, I thought I'd say a few words about why I'm not going to read China Miéville, either.
There's a lot of things that make me ill-disposed toward him. For starters, this is what Miéville had to say about Tolkien:
Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.
In short, Miéville repeats the tired old Marxist critique of Tolkien, which I've always felt is largely based on not bothering to read him. I would submit that anyone who thinks Tolkien's works can be described as "boys-own-adventure glorying in war" cannot actually have read the Lord of the Rings, let alone the Silmarillion, or certainly not with any other purpose that to find things to vilify in them.
That Miéville should regurgitate a Marxist critique that was inaccurate and fairly pathetic even when it was invented is hardly surprising, as the man describes himself, hilariously, as a Trotskyist. He's even stood for the House of Commons on that platform, and unsurprisingly, has failed.
For all these reasons, I've always suspected there might be something wrong with the man, and a surprising confluence of things has absolutely confirmed my opinion. As it happens, I've posted about seasteading a couple of times on this blag. There's a fairly good article on the topic at wired.com, in case you're unfamiliar with the movement. In brief, it means founding libertarian communities on the high seas, to escape the laws of states á la Sealand.
Mind you, I'm of two minds about seasteading; while I personally like the idea, I'm not at all sure that this is the kind of thing the libertarians of the world should be directing their energies toward. So I'm not approaching this as a die-hard partisan.
What provoked this post was the fact that China Miéville, too, has written about seasteading. He authored an article called Floating Utopias: Freedom and Unfreedom of the Seas, in a sensible and unpartisan-sounding book called Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. The article can be found here. Here's a quote in which Mr. Miéville summarizes both libertarianism and seasteading:
Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.
Libertarianism’s nemesis, “the state,” is no less abstract. This is particularly so for libertarianism’s seasteading wing, for whom the political entity “the state” is bizarrely geographically literalized. Their intent is to slip the surly bonds of earth not up but sideways, beyond littoral borders. It is a lunatic syllogism: “I dislike the state: The state is made of land: Therefore I dislike the land.” Water is a solvent, dissolving “political” (state) power, leaving only “economics” behind.
I should point out that Miéville actually has a Ph.D. in international relations, and his doctoral dissertation was on the subject of international law. So by any rights, he should know perfectly well what the legal basis for seasteading is. He just chooses to ignore this and write the ham-fisted strawman attack of the second quoted paragraph. Instead of a considered legal position based on international law, and in the case of Sealand actually upheld by precedent, Miéville gives us "a lunatic syllogism".
I'm sorry, but if the man thinks this is fair treatment, I can't take anything he writes seriously. The kind of bile he's spewing in this article is just too childish to be taken seriously. Either his Ph.D. is a complete joke, or he could have presented seasteading in an intelligent, critical light, but just chose not to. If what he's written there is a fair representation of libertarianism and seasteading, then I guess Obama really is setting up death panels.
To reinforce this image, all I need to do is repost the picture Wikipedia has of him.
I believe I've found the left-wing Andy Remic. I understand his prose is better, but really, I'm past caring by now. I've never met the man, but based on everything I've read so far, he's a class-A idiot.
The real question, however, is not whether to read his books or not. I'm not going to. The real question is this: how much would you like to see a political debate between him and Andy Remic?
