VauxhallVelcraux

This is funny. A Chinese car manufacturer called Geely ("JEE-lee") is cranking out pieces of shit. Hmmm--what Bennifer vehicle (no pun intended) from 2003 does that name sound like?
Maybe this will give GM, Ford and the city of Detroit, whose evolutionary futures are near-extinction, a few more years to limp along.

The NYT's replacement for the venerable William Safire was John Tierney, an idiotic, glorified metro-desk hack. On the occasion of the 300 millionth American (which was this morning, supposedly) he had this to say:

'Overpopulation' is history's oldest environmental crisis, and it's the most instructive for making sense of today's debates about energy and climate change. It's a case study of intellectual arrogance, and of the perils of putting too much faith in a 'scientific consensus' of experts infatuated with their own forecasts...China is facing a new problem: a severe shortage of young workers to support an aging population. The one-child rule has turned out to be both an assault on personal liberty and a public policy mistake. The parents made short-term sacrifices that left them worse off in the long run--the same risk we run with poplicies designed to curb global warming decades from now...The chief plagues and disasters afflicting future generations will be different from the ones forecast by Al Gore or any other popular prophet. The best insurance policy is to build free, prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people.

Whoa. You are stupid. The most annoying thing about conservative swipes at the science-based version of their scary liberal establishment is how they cherrypick the most dated, top-down midcentury bureaucratic methods, as if the left hasn't evolved way beyond that. (Let's not even expose the cognitive dissonance involved in the media and general public's hostility towards "people power" or "activists" or "protesters" or whatever bottom-up attempts at social reform; for the purposes of scaring you with unpleasant scientific facts, every liberal wears a white lab coat and stands next to ENIAC, but when they burn flags they grow their hair long.)

So naturally anyone who mentions that 6.3 billion people is about five times what the earth can support and 300 million Americans unfaily consume an ever-greater share of a finite world's resources is an inflexible Maoist.

Tierney basically says that barbaric 'medical' solutions to overpopulation (such as forced sterilizations, which were in vogue about the same time as lobotomies and a general denial that women could have orgasms) are what anti-growth critics currently propose. And since those ideas suck, growth is best. The "free and prosperous societies of smart, adaptable people" (contentless boilerplate alert) don't exactly emerge where women are condemned to have four children each. The correlation between wealth and low birth rates is pretty much and iron law of reality by now. Check it out. All the richest countries are down by the bottom--as are the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, and let's not mention what economic system those countries painfully transitioned to fairly recently. Even within the US, slow-growth regions like the Northeast enjoy the higest standards of living, and most of the fastest-growing places are full of crime, divorce and other 'social pathologies' that conservatives cite as evidence of our decadence and decline. Tumult and dynamism are simply not conducive to happy people, and although they might generate more aggregate wealth, we have a pretty good idea what direction the money's flowing to under the stewardship of the party allied with right-to-lifers and the Club for Growth.

I especially love (as in hate) Tierney's self-incriminating attack on China for its one-child policy, which may have been draconian, but it was implemented in 1979, and China's economic growth (which he would certainly approve of) basically started around then, too. (It's self-incriminating because he favors privatizing social security, but now he wants to criticize inequality-by-age in a country that lacks its equivalent). China simply would not be China if there were 2.4 billion Chinese. If they are anything close to a technologically advanced country, it is owing at least in part to campaigns against having more than one child. And the worst problem China faces isn't a shortage of young workers; it's a giant migration of 400 million peasants to urban areas and attendant pollution/unemployment/civil unrest as the frighteningly abridged transition to a free-market occurs without much popular participation in the decisions. In other words, top-down and pro-growth policies.

The fact remains that the United States is the developed nation with the highest rate of growth. Economists generally praise this, as endless growth is always necessary to prevent a capitalist polity from crisis. Christians like growth because it proves our 'natural' virility, and how we are uniquely blessed by God to the exclusion of everybody else even though there's no mention of the Western Hemisphere in the Bible. (In our race against the equally rapidly reproducing Muslims, it's literally a deathmatch, according to Left Behind). It can also be cited as another stat proving how we're a third-world nation in disguise. Whatevs. Our rate of growth owes itself almost entirely to immigration. New York State literally exports young people by the tens of thousands every year, because the city and suburbs are unaffordable and upstate lacks jobs, and the state's population continues to grow only because of New York City's resilience as a gateway for immigrants. Without them, we would enjoy negative growth. (Not that I advocate restricting immigration, necessarily).

Presumably in my lifetime there will be 450 million Americans, most of them living in Nevada. I'm skeptical of the possiblity of maintaining our standard of living at that level, but I'm on the fence as to whether our current standard of living is sustainable even today--and it's certainly a thumb in the eye of about 4 billion seriously impoverished people. There need to be way fewer humans, very soon. One way or another, there probably will be.

Ewww.

This is the last bit of dialogue, from the page:
well i better go finish my hw…i just found out from a friend that i have to finish reading and notating a book for AP english

After desultorily mocking his computer-illiterate mother as a way of changing the subject from a stale sexual thread, he signed off with that excuse, which was either made up entirely or else came about as he decided to switch priorities, because chatting it up with your congressman about his hard-on is a total bore.

Seriously. This completely blows away the 'save the innocent children' idea. This is a teenager with a short attention span whose tone in the IM conversation is one of indifference. I'm sure that section of the public that considers oral sex to be freakishly deviant will be horrified, but while still kind of gross, this reveals Foley to be pathetic: baiting an uninterested jock into measuring his penis only to have the reply be "I've already told you that."

And that's the climax of the narrative. Foley doesn't say whether or not he's masturbating; he just mentions, again and again, that he's hard, and the page doesn't seem to be uncomfortable--or unfamiliar with cybersex. If anything, he's rolling his eyes at Foley's repetitiveness, disappointed at how tame this hour-long chat really was. Of course, the dynamics of this situation are ripe with the potential for exploitation, and maybe this teenager is utterly confused, but he's sexually active, he's over the age of consent and he's not not flirting. This is simply not the same thing as coercing an eight-year old into having sex with you.

Mostly because they didn't have sex, they didn't have cybersex, this is as salacious as the fucking thing has gotten in almost a week, we're indoctrinated to be completely horrified over it even though it made the 'child' in question yawn and sign off, and it's so goddamn infuriating how everyone isn't focusing on the continuing pattern of abuse of power!

So the Republicans now distancing themselves from Mark Foley are now being claimed as 'principled conservatives.' I guess that's what being an opportunistic homophobe gets you labeled as in the media. Again, this is not just the repetition of the mainstream's unswerving allegiance to its paleocon overlords; you can find this shit on DailyKos.

Bay Buchanan--Pat Buchanan's sister and campaign manager--is cited for condemning Foley's behavior. At what point did she become a model for laudable conduct? The Buchanans are racist assholes who represent the position furthest to the right in the American political spectrum, just before you fall off the cliff into paranoid conspiracy theorists who would never get air time on CNN or even Fox. Bay's own words on yesterday's Situation Room demonstrate her lack of credibility as a standard-bearer for principle:

This is a known homosexual who is writing e-mails to the home of a 16-year-old boy, asking for pictures. That's all you need to know. ... We need an investigation. Bring in the FBI. Stop this guy. Make certain that, if indeed he was the predator he could be, he was stopped that day. They failed that. You cannot spin this. And I don't know that I would call it a cover-up"

'This is a known homosexual.' Meaning, 'Wake up, tolerant America, and realize these mincy faggots are after your children.' And she doesn't even believe in the cover-up(!), which is actually the only cause for scandal. The House leadership prefers anything which could contribute to its everlasting deathgrip on power over doing the right thing, and they most certainly swept this under the rug, for years. How could it be anything but a textbook cover-up? But Bay Buchanan sees it as a function of liberal-homosexual infiltration of the highest ranks of the GOP.

Incidentally, this is what amazes me the most about social conservatives. They are the most fickle constituency, that I don't know how anyone could stand to deal with them. If one is truly of the opinion that the homosexual agenda, flag-burning and prayer are the most pressing issues of the day, and that their state in our culture reveals a singularly dangerous threat to our souls, why would you ever bolt the GOP? How could you be anything but satisfied? The far-right seems to regard anything short of Getting Everything We Want to be high treason. James Dobson has hinted that he might not urge his sheep to vote in '06. Is that really supposed to earn him respect as a power broker? His commitment to the party boils down to periodic threats over whether or not to blackmail them into re-orienting the entire business of Congress to handle his pet (non-)issues. Yes, the Democrats are basically as disciplined as the Muppets, but at least the dreaded bloggers (who are roughly analogous to social conservatives or evangelicals) are committed to working within their chosen party, and don't petulantly bitch and moan every time they don't get exactly what they want. Hopefully at some point critical mass will be reached and evangelical beliefs will lose some credibility with the general population at the same time that the corporate-minded GOP bosses grow weary of the impossibility of placating them.

Anyway, the point is that again, this is not a scandal about gay sex. Nor is it even about a 'child predator.' The kid(s) in question are teenagers, old enough to be pages in Congress, for Christ's sake. They're old enough to know about sex and to enjoy it, too--and in any case, sex was not had. This scandal is about abuse of power (a boss intimidating his subordinates through sexual harassment), hypocrisy (a homophobic Republican closet-case sitting on a committee charged with designing punitive legislation against largely-fictitious sexual predators) and corruption (the secretive party leadership closing ranks around one of its own rather than doing the right thing). It's a cover-up.

And finally, when NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey resigned after appointing his boyfriend to an antiterrorism post for which he was totally unqualified, that too was about abuse of power rather than the salacious nature of sodomy. I thought the way that that played out was responsible and enlightened. So let's have the left behave now as the right did then. We can start by no longer quoting Bay Buchanan as a model of righteousness.

After Tom DeLay, Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham, we have another one. In a sense, this is good; anything that extricates Congress from the grip of evangelical warmongers is a good thing (and Foley will remain on the ballot, so maybe the district is suddenly competitive).

However, there's a lot of bad things about this story, in its particulars, in its coverage, and the way that Democrats will almost certainly milk it. Specifically, this really shouldn't be about the sex. Because there wasn't any. Foley is a hypocrite, an embarrassment, a creep and an asshole, but we don't know for sure if he has actually fucked any teenage boys. So while in terms of getting the average dingbat voter to pay attention to the monstrous, secretive Ineptocracy that passes for the American federal government, the more sensational, the better, moral panics emanating from the left do nothing good.

It's already starting. On DailyKos, there are numerous references to how this damages "families." Great, another GOP talking point unconsciously repeated by the supposed scourge of GOP talking points. What the fuck do families have to do with it? A couple of rich-bitch Republican teenagers get gross emails from their boss and suddenly the nucleus of civilization is imperiled. Now the Democrats can rush in and triangulate themselves into the forefront of 'protecting families from child molesters,' which along with being 'hard on terror' (or pro-blank check for Bush, or pro-electrocuted genitals in our colonial prison outpost that we stole from Cuba, or whatever they want to be called), we may now smile with self-satisfaction that we've outgunned the GOP...to their right.

First, 'child molesters' are generally bogeymen devised by conservatives and propagated by a compliant media eager to peddle salacious untruths, all to truncate social services and heap responsibilities on the nuclear family that it was never meant to handle. That way we don't get creeping socialism in the form of subsidized child care, and maybe a few women will tire of the glass ceiling AND a double career and get back home where they belong.

Second, 'the family' already gets pretty much everything. Especially when you mean middle-class white families (as opposed to dysfunctional families, from the working class to the frightening specter of single black mothers). American society is utterly oriented around catering to the family, be it television scheduling or the geography of the country itself or tourist-friendly enterprise zones where red-light districts and culture used to be. So quit whining on behalf of the haves.

This has also produced some fantastically ridiculous journalism. Such as this from the NY Times's blog "The Caucus":
While congressmen caught in a sex scandal is nothing new, the way the story broke shows the power of Web technology to influence politics. Few people may have even been aware that instant messages can be saved and copied, but they have turned out to be a powerful weapon. Before the Internet, a story like Foley’s might have kicked around for months, with conflicting accounts, and possibly never surfaced. Once the existence of the e-mails became known, Foley was swept away within hours.

Gosh, wow! Computers exist! The news cycle has been condensed! Meta-chatter is all we do!

Really, this scandal should highlight the corruption that has come with radical expansions of power in a one-party state, which the Republicans have cultivated with lightning speed. The Speaker of the House knew that this was going on, as did nine other Republican congressmen, but they elected to keep it from Foley's Democratic committee co-members and from everyone else, because Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment about never criticizing thy fellow Republican is paramount, even if it requires yet another cover-up in an election year when you're already smarting from scandals and this time it might lead to the cover-uppee committing rape. Who do you trust, values voters?

And even then, I just don't see why intergenerational sex is the world's biggest catastrophe. Granted it's not the norm and I don't specifically endorse it either, but really, what's the big? The fact that it's same-sex attraction certainly fuels some of the outrage, and I'd like to think that liberals might at least recognize that and not fuel it further. What's really outrageous about Foley's conduct is the abuse of power, the coercion and the terror-about-my-future-in-this-business it must have inspired in the teenage page. And this connects perfectly with the overall Republican attitude vis-a-vis everything: cloak governance in inordinate secrecy, push the panic button on terrorism and sex offenders and prayer in school, undermine the rule of law and the separation of church and state, rewrite the tax code to redistribute all resources upward, intimidate the media, and then do whatever the fuck pleases you because you've made it, baby.

If Foley broke any laws in 'transmitting harmful material to a minor' under Florida law, can someone with more patience than myself please consult the books to see if that moral transgression was a violation of a law written by a paranoid, antisex Christian Florida Republican? Because if so, this requires a bit more perspective. This scandal is occurring as thousands of children are starving or being massacred in the Sudan, as the US government continues a superlatively self-defeating war in Iraq that has killed who-knows how many people, and the like. Protecting the children is way too warped if it starts here.

Furthermore, the extraordinary lengths lawmakers go to to 'protect' children (but certainly not from poverty or bombs) probably contributes to an overall culture that will never get over its prurient fascination with the spectacle of the sexualized child. The more discourse there is on this subject, the more citizens get roped into this tantalizing cycles as they play out and the more dark, lascivious desires become energized. JonBenet Ramsey captures the public's attention because she was seriously hot, fifty million men kind of wanted to fuck her, and the repulsion/attraction her image inspired created a cottage industry. Mark Foley's pet pages--with whom he might have been simply exchanging naughty emails and getting off on them--threatens nothing of that scale, except a regurgiation of the same right-wing hysteria, only this time from a left eager to maximize its electoral gains by exploiting the alarmism inculcated in us by the right itself. Hurray for the terrorism circus that is the media.