Quote of the Day comes from Jesse Taylor, who writes:

Honestly, I wouldn't mind it if there was one triumphalist visionary who was actually a self-promoting asshole. Maybe a few. But a group of several thousand self-flagellating triumphalists no longer make up a visionaries' club - it's a big, messy-ass circle jerk.

Jesse writes this a propos of—well, some National Review hack I've never heard of—but you're free to mentally adapt this reference to your own favorite self-promoting blog triumphalist, as I already have mine.

Meanwhile, in a happy synchronicity, Jon Garfunkel emails to point me in the direction of this bit of deep thinking from Rebecca MacKinnon, who's been getting busy in Madrid, at the just concluded International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security:

Here in Madrid ... there are a lot of people who study terrorism and try to figure out how best to counter-act it: government officials, law enforcement people, technologists, psychologists, sociologists, and academics. Many of them are honorable, hard-working, ethical, and admirable people.

However I've also encountered a number of people - mainly academics as well as people from government agencies and even non-governmental organizations - who are using the terrorism phenom to advance their careers and get grant money. This is disgusting. It reminds me of journalists who are gleeful about covering wars because it advances their careers. Sick.

MacKinnon's reflexive anti-intellectualism (academics are "mainly" at fault, though with no reason given, and she's got a special disgust available for journalists, as well) along with her apolitical naivete make her a perfect tool for such stuff as the Eason Jordan bloghunt, as I've noted elsewhere. Really: MacKinnon's shocked that careerism might raise its head at a great big international terrorism wankfest? At a conference of academics, politicians and government/NGO bureaucrats? How the hell old is she, eighteen?

Perhaps it's uncharitable of me to point out that MacKinnon is getting all pious about careerism in a venue where she herself is aggressively plying her new career as a public intellectual of the Blog Millennium. But I hardly even need to point it out. Just go to her immediately prior post, where she flogs a document she helped draft called "The Infrastructure of Democracy: Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World," a document which claims the internet as "a foundation of 21st Century democracy, and a critical tool in the fight against terrorism." Hitch your wagon to a star much, Becks?

If you're going to be a full-on blog triumphalist, I guess it's best if you're not afflicted with an excess of self-knowledge. But in future, Rebecca, maybe you should think about having somebody vet your posts before you embarrass yourself like this again.

posted by michael  9:38:56 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

He's a bit late to the party, but Barack Obama has a nice reaction reported today to the Bush gambit for black support for Social Security privatization: gambit being, that the existing system is a raw deal for African-Americans because they don't live as long as whites.

He criticized what he said was the cynical use of disparities as a reason to dismantle Social Security. Instead, people should be talking "about how are we going to close the health disparities gap that exists, and make sure that African-American life expectancy is as long as the rest of this nation."

"The notion that we would not be talking about lack of health insurance, and reducing diabetes, and reducing incidents of AIDS, and making sure that African Americans have the wealth and the income to save into retirement and supplement Social Security is stunning to me." ...

Said Obama, "This is as if the president is arguing for privatization of fire protection because our houses aren't worth as much as houses in rich neighborhoods. Or maybe we could privatize police protection because if we get robbed, our stuff is not as nice. It defies logic.''

On a side note, while doing some quick Googling on the topic I ran across this Josh Marshall post from all the way back in 2002, in which we find GOPAC making a really egregious version of the "bad-for-blacks" argument against Social Security. (The phrase is "reverse reparations.") It also contains a note about an earlier attempt to enforce the ban on the use of the word "privatization" in the discussion. Plus ça change ...

posted by michael  9:38:42 AM  
tell me about it []