Smoking Dutch Cleanser
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 11, 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he’s doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic.

President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage.

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Yes, it’s an oft-heard refrain. But after reading this, you might wonder. And yes, I know its the voice of just one Chinese blogger. But don’t you think there are others like him? I know at least two myself, which leads me to think there are probably millions who are less than delighted with knowing their blogs can be blocked at any moment.

A guest post by Jerome Keating. It does not necessarily reflect my own views but it provides excellent food for thought.
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When you get down to the final analysis, we all live our lives by faith whether we are followers of a particular religious persuasion, agnostics, or atheists.

Recently the world has seen the fanatical hatred of people of one religious persuasion calling for the deaths of those whom they feel have violated their religious taboos.

In the light of the furor over the Danish cartoons, I present words from Eric Hoffer’s work The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Hoffer (1902—1983) was a self-educated stevedore who could tell it like it is. I have always liked his works, and found them a source for self-examination when I get feeling fanatical.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment.

I consider myself a religious person and believe we all have a right to our own faith, but it must also be balanced by a respect for the lives and beliefs of others. I also agree with the Danish editor when he said that no group among us has the right to try to impose the taboos of their faith on the public domain.

I like the idea that every nation of the world that believes in freedom of the press should print the cartoons as a show of solidarity with the Danes and then let the Muslims decide if they want to boycott the world community.

What are your thoughts?

A gas tax? Get real, Tom. Conservation and self-sacrifice are anathema to our boy-president.

Driving Toward Middle East Nukes in Our S.U.V.’s
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 10, 2006

The world stands today at a very dangerous dividing line. It is the dividing line between the post-cold-war world, which we have known since 1989 — one of expanding democracy and free markets — and a post-post-cold-war world, which is unknown but almost certain to be a much less stable, prosperous and benign place.

I believe the questions that will determine whether we enter the post-post-cold-war world will come down to two: how India, China and Russia deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and how the West, particularly America, deals with $60-a-barrel oil.

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Unlinkable. Warning: it’s impossible to read without raising your blood pressure.

The Vanishing Future
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 10, 2006

At this point we’ve had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery. (Yes, six years: George W. Bush’s special mix of blatant dishonesty and gross irresponsibility was fully visible during the 2000 presidential campaign.) What still amazes me, however, is the sheer childishness of the administration’s denials and deceptions.

The story begins in 2001, when President Bush was pushing his first tax cut through Congress. At the time, the administration insisted

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I don’t envy the Beijing bureaucrats responsible for prettying up the city’s image in time for the 2008 Olympics. Cleaning up the pollution and adding sparkle to a city that is famously drab is hard enough. But to get the citizens to behave in a more decorous and proper fashion and to drop age-old habits like spitting and hopping lines – now that’s a challenge.

Communist planners are making China’s dowdy, gray capital beautiful for the 2008 Summer Games. Now comes a bigger challenge: Can they make it polite, too?

That might be one hurdle too many, says the woman whose job is to convince Beijingers that common sights here — spitting, swearing, belching and cutting in line — are no way to welcome the world.

“Building the stadiums is no problem,” sighs Zhang Huigang, director of Beijing’s Capital Ethics Development Office. “But raising people’s quality and civilization is not something we can do in one or two months, or even one or two years.”

As the Miss Manners of the Beijing Games, Zhang is racing against time to help China save face. She and her team use daily TV commercials, newspaper cartoons and other tools to try to change the ingrained habits of the host city and the 15 million people living in and around it.

Some of these tools include:

• Instruction in “civilized spitting” and distribution of millions of paper spit bags.

The government’s response highlights one of many cultural differences between East and West: The problem is not spitting per se, but where to spit. “It is unhealthy to swallow spit,” Zhang says, “so we need to help people spit in a civilized way.”

• Trash boxes about every 300 feet on major streets and other public areas to discourage littering, plus requirements that pet owners carry cardboard or plastic poop collectors when walking their dogs.

• Etiquette handbooks to be sent to 2.8 million households, challenging residents to improve their table habits. Examples: no more slurping of soup, no coughing, belching or passing gas at the table — and a reminder to say “excuse me” if you do.

• Roving lecturers to train students, workers and volunteers in Olympic etiquette. Beijing students, already pressed to complete their studies, must take courses in Olympic knowledge.

Soon, the capital will double its new 1,500-person army of “civilized bus-riding” supervisors, laid-off workers hired to stop the crowding and fighting when a bus pulls in.

Good luck, is all I can say. I remember the campaign to stop spitting from five or so years ago, which landed with a plop. Also the campaign to get Beijing men to stop rolling their shirts up in the summer, creating the world’s biggest display of bellies. It went nowhere. I think what they’re trying to do is correct, but changing behavior takes a long time. The campaign has to be ongoing, probably for many years.

This is one of those articles where it’s hard to pick and choose what to copy and paste. Read it all, and let me know if you think Beijing will be prim and proper by 2008.

If so, it’s not from a lack of effort. As this Howard French article points out, Hu has gone to extraordinary lengths to muzzle pesky reporters, discourage “unharmonious” Internet chatter and persecute regnegade bloggers. Yet the article’s conclusion is that the Internet tidal wave simply can’t be held back, and the government’s elaborate censorship operation is doomed to failure. The trend toward greater freedom of expression appears irreversible.

Newspapers have been closed, reporters and editors jailed — even killed, like Wu Xianghu, a newspaper editor who died last week after being beaten by the police, who reportedly were incensed by an article he published on abuses of power in their ranks. Still, the trend has not been reversed.

Editors, like Li Datong of a recently closed Beijing newspaper supplement, Bing Dian, officially owned by the Communist Party Youth League, have begun to use the courts to challenge government efforts to silence them. But many frustrated reporters have simply moved to blogs, which give them an outlet to write about what they are not permitted to in their day jobs.

“Symbolically, the government may have scored a victory with Google, but Web users are becoming a lot more savvy and sophisticated, and the censors’ life is not getting easier,” said Xiao Qiang, leader of the Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. “The flow of information is getting steadily freer, in fact. If I was in the State Councils information office, I certainly wouldn’t think we had any reason to celebrate.”

In light of this trend, isn’t it time the CCP end its antiquated and failed policy of persecuting and imprisoning cyberdissidents and muckraking reporters? Isn’t it like trying to stop the Yangtze River with a bucket?

My questions are, of course, rhetorical, as we all know they aren’t going to stop the repression anytime soon. Eventually, however, the Party has to face the fact that its critics are here to stay and cannot all be silenced. Eventually. For now, expect more arrests and never-ending crackdowns on self-expression.

Illegal and Inept
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 9, 2006

While testifying about the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked to explain how the program had been damaged by the disclosure of its existence in the press.

Senator Joseph Biden suggested that Al Qaeda operatives have most likely been aware for some time that the government is trying to intercept their phone calls.

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Here we go again. It shouldn’t be that big a deal; the stability-threatening cyberdissident only got an 8-year sentence. Rebecca is on top of this one and will surely be the place to go to learn more.

Update: ESWN offers a different perspective. It certainly sounds like there’s more here than what Reporters Without Borders is telling us.

Update 2: Rebecca MacKinnon weighs in on ESWN’s analysis.

A guest post by Ivan.
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We have quite a few intelligent people in our TPD community, and we have some intellectuals, and sometimes, but not always, they overlap. Are the two always identical? Let’s think about this.

The word “intellectual” was not used as a noun in the English language until late in the 19th century. As late as the the mid-Victorian age, “intellectual” was used only as an adjective, but not as a category of person. It used to refer simply to a tendency to think contemplatively, but it was not used to describe any particular class of people until around the 1880s, the time when the Russians coined the word “intelligentsia,” which was later transliterated into English, as was the very new Russian concept of intellectuals” as a particular class of people.

The very word “intelligentsia” is Russian. The letters “ts” near the end, are transliterations of a Russian letter, “tse”, followed by the Russian suffix “ia” for the category.

And the very concept of an entire social category of people being peculiarly devoted to matters of the “intellect”, originated in Russia in the late 19th century. It is a concept which is essentially concerned with social prestige based on belonging to a
community of shared opinions. And this is something entirely different from what the status of “scholars” used to be. The Russian concept of “intelligentsia”, was based not so much on having scholarly interests, as it was based on having a special (socially advantageous) identity based on sharing a culture of opinion.

The word, and the concept, of “intelligentsia” were imported to America in the late 19th century, mostly by immigrants from Russia. The word and the concept have spread throughout Europe since that time, partly (but not entirely) through the later influence of American academia on Europe. Again, this is not to be confused with other, earlier European concepts of thinkers. The peculiar quality of the Russian (and now American) concept of “the intellectual class”, is its essential aspiration toward social advancement and respectability, and even popularity, AND, perhaps most of all, the aspiration of the “Intelligentsia” to be a specialised class who are equipped, and most of all empowered, to guide the body politic, and the masses. The Russian “intelligentsia”, like those of later America and even later Europe, were a very Populist class of people
whose main aspiration was to be a specialised elite who were authorised to rule the masses. (Lenin was THE Quintessential man of the “Intelligentsia”, but now their name is Legion, both on the nominal “Left” and the “Right”, throughout Europe and America. Neo-conservatives like (the late) Leo Strauss, and titular “liberal” scholars like Noam Chomsky, BOTH come from the legacy of this rather NEW concept of “intelligentsia.” The “intellectuals” of both the Right and the Left in America – and in much of Europe as well – stem from the same Russian roots of Lenin’s time, when the “intelligentsia” aspired to be a new Priesthood of the masses.

Now, I did not write the following lines – and for personal reasons I do not want to give the name of the man who did. (But I do have his permission to quote from his book, here.) On this topic, he wrote:

The modern historian should never – a strong word, this – treat ideas categorically, since such a treatment, with its implicit exaggeration of the directness of the function of certain ideas, will only lead to their divorce from reality in retrospect – which is, too, why too much importance should NOT be attributed to the history of the intelligentsia.

And the same author also wrote, of the American comedian, Groucho Marx, that he was “intelligent without being intellectual”, in contrast to a later, more effete (in that author’s opinion AND mine) comedian, Woody Allen, who is “intellectual without being intelligent.”

And my main point in posing a contrast between Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, here, is to suggest an illustration of the difference between being intelligent for the joy of it (as Groucho Marx was), versus trying to appear intelligent for the sake of appearing so (like Woody Allen, and I would say like Karl Marx too, just to play with a Marx versus Marx metaphor here.)

Query: What is more important: Being “an intellectual”, or being intelligent? And what do the members of our TPD community aspire to most, between those two ways of being? And how and why?