House politics strikes ones of its savviest players:

House Tables Resolution to Censure Rangel - New York Times

The House of Representatives decided on Thursday afternoon to table, by a vote of 254 to 138, a Republican resolution to censure Representative Charles B. Rangel, the powerful New York Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The resolution said Mr. Rangel “dishonored himself and brought discredit to the House,” citing a report in The New York Times on July 11 that Mr. Rangel occupied four rent-stabilized apartments in a Harlem building, including one that he used as a campaign office.

Rangel, to refresh your memory, is the same toad who thundered against Hugo Chavez (whose generosity fuels his constituents, unlike the lack of compassion of the leader he defends) in favour of the Imperial Presidency:

“You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and criticize my president,” Mr. Rangel, a Democrat, told stunned reporters on Capitol Hill.

I wish to write of three deaths (among a few million) that have occurred thus far, this year.

One was the “just folks”, “son of the soil” celebrity journalist Tim Russert, who made a mockery of aggressive interviewing while peddling provincial platitudes and gossip on CIA operatives, or providing a forum for dissemination of lies in aid of waging wars (Cathie Martin, aide to Cheney: “I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It’s our best format.”). His departure went down as a “national tragedy”.

The second is University of Virginia professor Randy Pausch who died of pancreatic cancer three days ago. Prof. Pausch became a celebrity after his “Last Lecture” speech at Carnegie Mellon University, in which he offered various inspirational words and acts, in the face of his imminent death.

Both these men were listed by Time (in different years) as one of the World’s Top-100 Most Influential People. Pausch appeared on Oprah, had scholarships and bridges named after him, and even had his “childhood dream” fulfilled through an invitation from the Pittsburgh Steelers to practice with them.

My friend and comrade, Carl Remick, died about six months ago. I have made three attempts to write something about it, but stopped on each occasion. Anything I write about such a masterful wordsmith as he was, would be an embarrassment to his memory. It would have been best if Carl had supplied us his own eulogy before departure, but his irreverent and iconoclastic nature would have yielded anything but the endearing and saccharine prose that is expected on such occasions.

Carl wasn’t on any Influential People list, as no “man of the left” (as he called himself on his Amazon Profile) has a chance to influence events in a rhetorical world that has reached its zenith in the person of Barack Obama. Nor did his simple last wish (or rather dream) of making it to Italy in his lifetime come to fruition. Carl did not spend the last few months of his life making money on pulp biography/non-fiction or the Oprah Winfrey show basking in the adulation of cheering fans. As a man of the left, he instead spent those months fighting the insurance companies when not beset by anxiety regarding his finances and future.

WikiQuote offers a few maxims from Randy Pausch (no disprespect to whom is intended in this post) that, to some extent, account for his accidental celebrity:

• Remember brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to acheive their childhood dreams.
• Show gratitude.
• Don’t complain; just work harder.
• Be good at something. It makes you valuable.
• Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say. “Wow, you got tenure early; what’s your secret?” I said, “It’s pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at 10 o’clock and I’ll tell you.

An almost perfect cocktail of Christian and capitalistic values! Carl had something to say on this matter too as in this post from the Marxmail list, with an introductory comment by Louis Proyect who runs the list:

(This afternoon I forwarded an item that Carl Remick had posted to lbo-talk. After doing some googling, I found a more exemplary item–a letter written to the Guardian on March 24, 2003 in response to a Madeleine Bunting article on balancing work and non-work lives. It is Carl at his best.)

Dear Ms Bunting,

Having a (rare!) idle moment, I would like to commend you on your continuing concern with the importance of achieving a work-life balance.

I believe the cult-like devotion to work that swallows whole lives these days is yet another nasty idea of US origin - and I say that as an American.

I am 53 and have spent my most of my working life, as a corporate writer, noting a steady decline in the quality of working conditions. Any number of things have combined to make the workplace the hellish place it is now.

a) The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy

b) The leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s and “outsourcing” of the 1990s that created “lean, mean” companies, permanently wiping out tiers of middle management and corporate staff

c) The globalisation of commerce and advent of the PC/internet/cell phone that cleared the way for 24/7 feats of Stakhanovite excess

d) Above all, the rise of the “winner-take-all” society, where CEOs and suchlike are seen as entitled to live large at everyone else’s expense.

What amazes and depresses me is how readily over the years my colleagues have acceded to their exploitation. [...] Yet, I will admit that - as seems to be the point of your investigations - it is impossible to escape the gravitational pull of today’s work-maddened society, even for someone as inclined toward dolce far niente as I am:

a) Working for a PR firm in New York during the 1990s, I never for a moment imagined I was participating in the creation of a “New Economy”; even at the time the decade seemed no more than a steady succession of harebrained schemes. Nevertheless, I was up at all hours with everyone else, attending to urgent-urgent-urgent (but always nonsensical) document revisions. Of course, a PR firm, like a law firm, imposes its own special tyranny: billable hours. Billing by
the hour - around as much of the clock as inhumanely possible - makes coffee machines as key to office productivity as computer printers.

b) That, however, was the 90s. Now I’m my own boss - meaning: I got chucked out of my job. I foolishly assumed that staying with one employer for 12 years would give me some protection from the inevitable major downturn, but quite the contrary. I was one of the first laid off at my firm, right at the start of the US recession in April 2001. Ever since, what with endless futile chases after a fulltime job combined with fitful periods of freelance work - again, often at crazy hours - I find have less control over my time than ever.

But enough lamentation about the woeful state of the States. May I end simply by wishing you the best with your project. I regret to say that the UK - via the awful example set by Margaret Thatcher in everything - made its own contribution to the decayed condition of American society today; nevertheless, the UK has something the US entirely lacks - a leftist political tradition that amounts to something - that, just possibly, could prove inspirational to the US
in the correct way. I earnestly hope you do find ways to turn Workcamp UK into a more gemutlich place. Here in the US there’s a lot riding on your success.

I write above that Carl was my friend and comrade. I like to believe that Carl was my friend, even though I have never met him in person and our correspondence has not been significant. But my comrade he certainly was in his instinctive support for and understanding of the rightful underdog, an attitude I only aspire to: on mailing lists we have both been members of, we found ourselves arguing on the same side, such as against the majority, and in support of a steadfast critic of US-based criticism of Iran. He was also my comrade in that we stood jointly accused (an honour for me!) on that very list of being against “the great”:

This is a basic conflict of value and I don’t think there is a rational resolution of it. Carl, Ravi, many leftists, really do hate, distrust, despise talent, and if they weren’t nice people they’d urge on use the advice of the counselor in the proverb who showed his prince how to handle the menace of the great by taking him to a wheat field and cutting down to the common level any stalk that rose above the average height.

(The person who wrote this is an intelligent and committed leftist and it would be unfair on the reader’s part to generalise about his overall attitude from this snippet from a heated dialogue.)

This accusation is not new to me and is frequently hurled at me by Randian right-wingers who delusionally identify themselves among the winners! Well, so be it! Carl was my comrade in that neither of us are winners, and now he is gone. But it is only a confusion of talent with success that would blind anyone to Carl’s value — he was great without needing to be above average.

I wrote to him privately, in response to his post detailing his struggle with cancer (and his fear that his post would be found to be “whining”):

I responded on list, but also wanted to write to you off-list to say: your post was anything but “whining” — I abhor that right-wing term, designed to make us not engage in a collective manner to discuss, share and perhaps even solve our difficulties. Your posts to LBO are witty, intelligent and full of knowledge that defies the modern obsession with specialisation.

To which he responded:

Many thanks, Ravi. Well, since having cancer seems to be all the rage right now, I didn’t want to come across as still another cancer “survivor” inflicting his/her tale of heroic woe on the defenseless public. I was particularly reluctant to divulge my backstory, if you will, on a political listserv, since I’d like my postings to be judged on their own merits, without giving readers any possible cause to think, “Uh-oh, this is that cancer guy — better go easy on him even if he is a horse’s ass.”

BTW, I decided years ago that I would finesse the modern obsession with specialization by specializing in generalization. This, too, proved to be a poor decision :)

Carl was indeed a splendid generalist, a man of letters if you will permit the term, and his poor decisions left us richer!

Well, not really, but it’s an interesting new twist in the Science Wars:

Sociologist Harry Collins poses as a physicist
By Jon Lackman - Slate Magazine

In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn’t tell the impostor from one of their own.

There are more details on the reaction from Sokal himself, further down in the article.

[ Link ]

This is the second (and final) part of my response to Berube's characterisation ("pack of lies") of Chomsky's writing on the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. You can read Part 1 by following this link.

Here again is Berube quoting Chomsky (this is the text that Berube calls a pack of lies):

Remember, the Milosevic Tribunal began with Kosovo, right in the middle of the US-British bombing in late '99 . . . Now if you take a look at that indictment, with a single exception, every charge was for crimes after the bombing.

There's a reason for that. The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.

So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans, but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible their troops were there and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick.

My original response dealt with the purely logical/analytical aspect of Berube's response to the above and how this response did not constitute a refutation. Here I want to go a bit further and read into Chomsky (which if done carefully, is not an unfair thing to do, given that we do not communicate in formal languages).

There are two angles from which we can approach Chomsky. One of them is what I recommend based on his voluminous writing and his own words. In this reading, Chomsky concentrates his criticism on the powerful: state and corporate action. He documents historical record, standard sources, and offers fairly straightforward reasoning to derive his conclusions. He has explicitly stated, many times over, the reasons for his concentration on certain things (U.S action, for instance) as opposed to others (say the actions of Cory Smith, the school bully at PS 132). Not only can he say more about his country of residence (for what should be obvious reasons) and effect change, but also it coincidentally happens to be the most powerful one in the world today (and therefore impacts the world in a larger scale for the same bad behaviour). The context, therefore in which to read (the quoted text) is this: if some entity exercises its power, what are the facts, the stated reasons and justifications, the result, and how do these match up. This I will call either the parsimonious or sceptical attitude.

The second angle, employed consistently by the right, and now by these segments of the left, is one which starts with the question of Chomsky's motives. The next step is a shortcut to examine his record and conclude that he is "anti-American". It follows then that what Chomsky writes serves this interest (or some similar ideological commitment) and one has to do no more than wait for his commitment to trip up his reasoning.

With the latter attitude, the quoted text reads so: given we believe that Chomsky thinks America is always wrong, Chomsky is clutching at whatever he can get, even to the extent of defending Milosevic (let us set aside how such reasoning is peppered with all sorts of assumptions of mental states). Chomsky uses this or that evidence to show that Milosevic was guiltless and the U.S and allies had no justification.

The analysis here is at best naive in that it looks for a coincidence between the state of the world (Kosovo) and the U.S-NATO story and once found (in one way or another) derides anyone who questions U.S action. The coincidence, it should be obvious (but isn't!), does not imply any justification. This we can charitably call the naive attitude.

By the parsimonious attitude things look significantly different: the U.S/NATO acted in a particular manner, and justified the action with some claims. The claim was not just that atrocities were afoot in Kosovo, but that they knew (in the sense of having a record) of such atrocities. Chomsky asks the simple question, giving them the benefit of the doubt, after the end of the NATO action: where is that record? One good place to look for that record is the charges filed. So there he looks. And he finds (and is not refuted on that point by Berube) that the evidence/record is events that happened after the event! What is worse, Chomsky rationally suggests, is that it should have been known that these events would occur as a consequence of the attack. Then Chomsky wonders: could this then be one of the reasons for the attack: to produce the necessary data? ("There is a reason for that").

He then points out that the charges against Milosevic reach back into earlier history. Once again, he asks, what of the events implied in these charges? Are they documented? He offers one fairly official source (the Danish government) and finds that they found a different conclusion than what the charges imply.

Chomsky's argument can be posed as a call to judgement of NATO action:

• Can you, at least now (after the invasion), offer evidence of atrocities in Kosovo, your stated reason for attacking Yugoslavia?
• Is such evidence included in the charges against Milosevic? If not, why not?
• In fact, the evidence you offer is mostly from after the attack! What is the reason for this?
• What have your own governments concluded after investigation on the ground?
• Why is there a need for non-Kosovo evidence if you had enough evidence about Kosovo to justify something as extreme as a war?
• Does your non-Kosovo evidence hold up against Milosevic? What do your own governments find about that question?

Let us give all the leeway possible to the naive attitude:

There is one point where Chomsky seems to make a statement:

Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings.

How do we read this? Is Chomsky saying that irrespective of the US/NATO story and their justifications/evidence, there was in his opinion no atrocities committed by Milosevic and Yugoslavia in Kosovo? This would be the harshest reading of Chomsky but even here Chomsky does not wave his hands in the air. He goes back to those he is questioning and their own findings: the British parliamentary report that found most of the crimes to be attributable to the KLA.

Note that in all of this, to call Chomsky incorrect (let alone a liar) one has to show that his reasoning of that time was wrong i.e., his justification for his point is either factually or logically wrong, or there were other facts he had in possession (or could have easily obtained) that should have led him to the opposite conclusion. But this harsh reading doesn't gel with Chomsky's general style (which I think he has stated many times): doesn't matter much what I think, what can we conclude from what we know?

Let us go down that path, nonetheless. What else has Chomsky written on Kosovo? Here is him quoting the WSJ:

A rare exception was the Wall Street Journal, which devoted its lead story on December 31 to an in-depth analysis of what had taken place. The headline reads: War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't.

[...]

Despite the intensive efforts, the results of "the mass-grave obsession," as the WSJ analysts call it, were disappointingly thin. Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect, .. the pattern is of scattered killings," a form of "ethnic cleansing light." "Most killings and burnings [were] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA-UCK] had been active" or could infiltrate, some human-rights researchers reported, an attempt "to clear out areas of KLA support, using selective terror, robberies and sporadic killings." These conclusions gain some support from the detailed OSCE review released in December, which "suggests a kind of military rationale for the expulsions, which were concentrated in areas controlled by the insurgents and along likely invasion routes."

It is clear from this that Chomsky does not suppress the notion that the war in Kosovo was cruel. Rather, the line below makes it clear (as I have stated above) that he is concerned with the NATO justification:

For understanding of NATO’s resort to war, the most important period…

Finally, it is utterly childish to ask that Chomsky speak to every issue and to every aspect of each issue. There is no real "A-Ha" moment in turning on him with the question: what do you say of the poor Albanians? Nothing! Shame!

The title is intentionally polemical and silly — I do not really believe that psycho-analysis is a valid form of argument. I might as well explain it though: among a segment of liberals (and I mean liberal, not "left") there is a virulent anti-Chomsky attitude that is difficult to understand'. Examples are the blogger Duncan Black who calls himself Atrios, Michael Berube, and Siva Vaidyanathan. The psycho-analytical explanation I was offered elsewhere, for this irrational syndrome, is some form of Oedipus complex, triggered in particular by the attack on pomo in the 90s, in which Chomsky played a fringe part. Even that doesn't explain much though, since none of these individuals inherits Chomsky's brand (analytical, detailed, factual, and logically argued) of leftism (though I am sure they are capable of such).

I have posted comments on Siva's blog in response to his one-liners: here, here. I do not believe any response is needed to Atrios.

Berube, writing in his blog, on Chomsky's review of the Milosevic-Kosovo-NATO affair, describes Chomsky's words as a "pack of lies". Below is part 1 of my analysis of Berube's blog post:

Berube writes that Chomsky's words on the attack on Yugoslavia are "a pack of lies". Nowhere in his piece does he offer any significant data or reasoning to explain why. Instead he gets into guilt by association by moving on to Herman and Johnstone and then quoting various others' opinions on those matters.

Now the word "lies" in his post is a link to someone else's page about the link between Milosevic and Srebrenica. Other words link to similar reports on the exodus of Albanians from their region, and on the atrocities against them.

However, here is what he quotes of Chomsky:

"Remember, the Milosevic Tribunal began with Kosovo, right in the middle of the US-British bombing in late '99 . . . Now if you take a look at that indictment, with a single exception, every charge was for crimes after the bombing.

There's a reason for that. The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.

So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans, but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible their troops were there and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick."

Berube does not state anywhere in his article as to where the sites he links to show that the below claims by Chomsky are incorrect:

• Indictment charges were for crimes after the bombing.
• British parliamentary inquiry attributed most crimes comitted in Kosovo to the KLA.
• Dutch government found that Milosevic did not order, nor had any knowledge of Srebrenica.

To show any of these incorrect, Berube (and his links) will have to show:

• Majority of indictment charges included crimes before bombing
• British parliamentary inquiry did not reach stated conclusion
• Dutch government did not reach stated conclusion

But let us go even further and do Berube's work for him i.e., weed through his hints (links) and find relevant sections. The link for the text "lies" points to a report by one organization (Institute for War and Peace Reporting) and their finding + *analysis* (not any determination of fact). Here, interestingly is what the report says:

Under the Serbian constitution, the president of Serbia, a post that Milosevic held at the time, is directly responsible for the actions taken by his republic's police force.

That this is the weak form in which the guilt of Milosevic can be established comes further below (note that I do not disagree that this makes him guilty, but most important to the argument, it does not in any way disprove Chomsky's point, and aids it by suggesting that lack of direct knowledge or involvement by Milosevic, its finding, nonetheless is not enough to save him from prosecution). More:

Whether Milosevic knew that his police were sent to participate in the attack on the town is unclear. If he did, then the document will play a key role in proving genocide charges. If he didn't, it will still provide important evidence of crimes against humanity. For the former, intent has to be established; for the latter responsibility is enough.

The first sentence shows that this page in no way at all refutes Chomsky's statement. More:

A six-year, 6 million US dollar investigation by the Dutch government's Institute for War Documentation concluded in a 7,000-page report last April found no evidence linking the Belgrade government to the Srebrenica massacre.

Wait a second. This is the page that Berube links to under the
melodramatic word "lies"? This exactly substantiates Chomsky's words! Some more:

However, the document IWPR obtained clearly shows that members of Serbia's MUP were operating out of the key Bosnian Serb military stronghold of Trnovo, just outside of Sarajevo, and that they were transferred to Srebrenica and placed under the command of Bosnian Serb police colonel Ljubomir Borovcanin.

So IWPR has a document that leads them to think differently than the Dutch. This makes Chomsky a liar?

Let us in fact give Berube all the rope we have. Let us say he reads Chomsky to be explicitly saying that: there were no large-scale atrocities before the US-led attack and that Milosevic was not involved in and was unaware of Srebrenica.

This does not make Chomsky a Milosevic defender of course. As the cliche goes, context is everything, and the context of Chomsky's general critique of this matter is the motivation, legality and justification of the US-led attack on Yugoslavia. In that context, Chomsky is not examining if Milosevic is pure as milk but whether the US reasoning against him holds.

Now, back to Berube interpretation of Chomsky we have constructed just above: how does Chomsky make such a claim? He provides two pieces of information: the findings of a British parliamentary inquiry (atrocities), and the findings of the Dutch government (Srebrenica). Both fairly official sources which if anything would have a bias towards substantiating the US-NATO story. What is the hole that Berube finds in this? Presenting an alternate view to the British inquiry or the Danish findings does not necessarily negate them, far less make Chomsky a liar.

The thing is: Berube could have stopped at saying Chomsky is incorrect (which Chomsky is not, as Berube's own links demonstrate). The word "lies" is intentional grandstanding, and in this case, quite unsubstantiated, especially since there is one other burden to meet to jump from claiming inaccuracy to calling Chomsky a liar: intentionality (on the part of Chomsky).

[Part 2 coming up shortly]

Update: Read Part 2 here.

The big news of the day is Hugo Chavez’s dramatic speech at the U.N, which the New York Times reports here: Chávez Calls Bush ‘the Devil’ in U.N. Speech. Funny thing though: Chavez started, ended and based his speech on Noam Chomsky’s writing, in particular, his book Hegemony or Survival, though you wouldn’t know that if you only read the NYT article. What is it about Chomsky that scares the elite media? That he refuses to play their pseudo-objectivity game?

Also, I see both on NYT and the BBC (among other outlets) Chavez is referred to as “left-wing”. Would these publications then call George Bush “right-wing”: George Bush, the right-wing president of the USA, has a history of failed enterprises.

[ Link ]

So old right-wing druggie Limbaugh is on the drugs again. You just can't keep this man down, can you?

CNN.com - Viagra threatens Limbaugh plea deal
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) — Rush Limbaugh could see a deal with prosecutors in a long-running prescription fraud case collapse after authorities found a bottle of Viagra in his bag at Palm Beach International Airport. The prescription was not in his name.

[...] 

From AlterNet:

The Anti-Bush Anarchist

By Gabriel Thompson, In These Times
Posted on May 2, 2006, Printed on May 2, 2006

Standing 5' 9" tall, weighing 240 pounds and sporting a shaved head, Jeff "The Snowman" Monson looks like a cartoon ready to pop, a compressed giant of crazy shoulders, massive biceps and meaty forearms. When he sneers, people shudder. When he sweats, they turn away. When he's angry, your best bet is to run.

He's angry right now, even though his combat career in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — an often-bloody tournament that combines martial arts disciplines like Brazilian Jujitsu and Muay Thai Kickboxing — is taking off. [...] So no, it's not his future career prospects that have him pissed. It's the state of the world.

"I'm not some sort of conspiracy theorist," Monson says of his political leanings. "I'm not talking about how the government is trying to hide UFOs. I just want to do away with hierarchy. I'm saying that our economic system, capitalism, is structured so that it only benefits a small percentage of very wealthy people. When I was traveling in Brazil, they had us staying at a really posh hotel. Outside the hotel there was a mom sleeping on the sidewalk with her two kids. That's when reality hits you. What did that woman ever do? Who did she ever hurt?"

Monson wears his politics on his sleeve, as well as the rest of his body. An anarcho-syndicalist star is tattooed on his chest, an anarchy sign on his back and another "A" on his leg. While he loves his sport, he also feels a responsibility to use whatever exposure he receives for a larger purpose. "I don't think I'm more important than anyone else, but since some people are paying attention, then I'm going to use this as a vehicle to express myself," he says. Some fans have labeled him anti-American, but he shrugs off such criticism.

[...]

Monson sees no contradiction between his radical beliefs and his full-time occupation. "What I do is completely different than war, because everyone wants to be there, and it's a competition. There's no victim. We're all entertainers," he explains. "If there is any contradiction, it's that we're part of the capitalist machine, and I'm really just a wage slave. You know, we don't make any money without fighting, and if I win I get more; if I lose I get less. But it's simply a sport. Sure, it's somewhat like a gladiator sport, but it's voluntary."

Monson grew up middle class in Minnesota. His mother still works as a nurse, and his late father worked at a penitentiary. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he wrestled, and then received his Masters in Psychology from the University of Minnesota. During his graduate work, Monson had his political awakening — a course entitled Community Psychology.

"Oh man, that class really opened my eyes," he says.
"Just looking at the way the world is run, the way that the people that might be disabled or have mental issues are left behind. How education and general welfare are not a priority, and how the elite run everything for their own benefit. Then I started reading a bunch of stuff — Animal Farm, the International Socialist Review, Chomsky — and I started thinking in a different way." Monson the Ultimate Fighter uses Plato's allegory of the cave to describe the experience.

After graduating from Minnesota, he moved to Washington State, where from 1997 to 2001 he counseled the mentally ill for Lewis County; his primary responsibility was to determine whether an individual needed to be institutionalized. "I started right when they were pushing through welfare reform, and so we had all of these huge cuts in money for mental health and welfare. It's the same basic idea with No Child Left Behind. The government tells you that you have to cut your programs, cut your money for books, cut the money for teachers, but then you are expected to somehow do better. It's a brilliant strategy, really, from their perspective."

Despite being a world-class competitor, Monson finds time to remain politically engaged. In 2003, he marched against the Iraq War in Seattle, and protested the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami (where the notoriously aggressive cops wisely left Monson alone). He is also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and despite the controversy that surrounds him, continues to engage people within the fighting community about politics.

So what lies ahead for "The Snowman"? At the moment his focus is on his next big fight. "But this is not my whole life," Monson says of fighting. "I've got children and a girlfriend, and I like to be with my family. I try to remain involved in political events. After my next fight, I'll be taking my son to Montreal. They're having an Anarchist Book Fair, and they invited me to come up and do a workshop." The topic: self-defense.

First Pat Tillman, then of all things an ultimate fight type dude. As the immigrant rallies show, perhaps civil/human rights is best advanced by those outside the so-called "left"! ;-)

WaPo (believe it or not!) has a chat with Noam Chomsky online. In the quoted section below, Chomsky, as always, reclaims the use of terms and zeroes in on verbal hoodwinking that should be, but sadly isn't, obvious:

Chat With Chomsky

[...]
Washington, D.C.: Do you believe that Latin America can be successful in developing alternatives to Washington Consensus neoliberal policy and do you believe that Globalization is a real thing as often portrayed by writers like Thomas Friedman?

Noam Chomsky: The term "globalization," like most terms of public discourse, has two meanings: its literal meaning, and a technical sense used for doctrinal purposes. In its literal sense, "globalization" means international integration. Its strongest proponents since its origins have been the workers movements and the left (which is why unions are called "internationals"), and the strongest proponents today are those who meet annually in the World Social Forum and its many regional offshoots. In the technical sense defined by the powerful, they are described as "anti-globalization," which means that they favor globalization directed to the needs and concerns of people, not investors,financial institutions and other sectors of power, with the interests of people incidental. That's "globalization" in the technical doctrinal sense. Latin America is now exploring new and often promising paths in rejecting the doctrinal notions of "globalization," and also in the remarkable growth of popular movements and authentic participation in the political systems. How successful this will be is more a matter for action than for speculation.

 [Via MP]