Iceland -- The Government Falls

A salacious tale of corruption is breaking in Iceland. This twitter thread offers a synopsis.

Yesterday, Iceland's government convened for the first time after the summer break.

At midnight the next day, the government has fallen.

— Mis∀ndri (@AndriErlingsson) September 15, 2017

This link to The Grapevine has more details. I never 

heard of this source but it appears to be in Iceland. 

Update and follow-up, September 18, 2017

I am surprised that at this writing over two-thousand visitors have been to this link. I never imagined a scandal in Iceland would trigger so much interest. 

While you're here, newcomers, feel free to drill around in my little web-scrapbook. 

My bio is in the sidebar and this is my post-retirement playground and journal.

President Announces Icelandic Elections For 28 October

More at the link...

2008 New Year's Day Notes

From my old blog in 2008, the year Barack Obama first ran for president. 

~~~

Retrospective bits for New Year's Day...
Jacques Barzun turned 100 a few weeks ago. It is unlikely that casual readers of this blog will have any knowledge of this name, but he was part of my education by way of his Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, written in 1941, which I came across about eighteen years later in a quest to de-provincialize myself in the stacks of a public library. Giving a kid a twenty-dollar bill and sending him off to the mall is one form of neglect, but it can be far more risky to let him loose in a library where alien ideas can infect pliable young minds. Little did my parents suspect that their child's tight, safe little Southern world was being assaulted by cultural seducers like Barzun. It was strong medicine for a teen, but I drank it all the same. I almost forgot, but my memory was refreshed by tributes to Barzun on the occasion of his passing the century mark.

No need to relive that part of the past, but Gerald J. Russello's tribute in First Things is worth a look.

...what appears to be stagnation in one era may appear to be something else to another. Religious belief, in particular, was not afflicted by boredom; indeed, “fundamentalisms are vocal everywhere; religious issues and personalities occupy the media as never before.” Islam “is again fighting the West, and where it conquers it is much more intolerable than it was in the sixteenth century.” In light of these contradictions, Barzun explores what it may mean to live at the close of a cultural epoch and what may be worth fighting for. The result is a nuanced and innovative look at Western culture. Contra the left, Barzun does not believe that all cultures are equal, and contra the right, a culture of Birkenstocks may still better than one of burqas. What is needed is an understanding of what it means when a society adopts, say, athletes and pop stars as role models and how we can distinguish those models of legitimacy and authority from those of other times and places. Further, Barzun’s analysis can help tell us whether, in the face of our new threat, decadence can be halted.

Later he comments...
...American style was defined by the large expanse of country that softened the edges of the Old World, giving everyone a place to settle. Moreover, Barzun writes, our mad dash of industrialization forced everyone to get along, so that “[i]n Europe a thousand years of war, pogroms and massacres settle nothing. Here two generations of common schooling, intermarriage, ward politics, and labor unions create social peace.” This process has been messy, and with some serious failings, but nonetheless it represented a new type of social order – unplanned, but ultimately wildly successful.

Reading these observations, I wonder if we have not lost some of that creative energy and imagination. The current crop of political wannabes to a man (er, uh...person, I should say) are pussy-footing through a minefield of cultural/ethnic bias that continues to reinfect our national persona. Simply saying the word immigration out loud is enough to trigger a discussion in which polite people first palpate one anther's attitudes before revealing in many cases nothing more than old-fashioned racism in modern patriotic, legalistic, isolationist clothing.

As Barzun noted, two generations in North America can be the equivalent of centuries of ferment in Old Europe. Just yesterday I heard someone commenting on classical music, mentioning how images of the East, particularly Turkey, became stylish among the Eighteenth Century elite. Mozart and others nakedly played to this trend in music, appealing to the romantic images of the day. But up close and personal the shimmering beauty of fantasy reveals warts and scars not seen at a distance. Sure enough, the visceral cultural hatred dividing Greeks and Turks is every bit as savage at that between Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese, Tutsis and Hutus...or Anglos and Latinos. Or even, I dare add, Christians and Muslims. That cute reference to Birkenstocks and burqas is enough to animate a prickly debate.

Nouri Lumendifi is a brilliant youngster whose blog I have been following since he was in high school. He is now off at college, on the way to becoming a Jacques Barzun in his own right. With penetrating insights and the disciplined concentration of a good scholar he looks at conflicts and contradictions in the Arab world with the same detachment that Barzun looked at what we now quaintly call Western Culture (even though it is not strictly Western nor particularly cultural any more).

Nouri looks at the Levant and Mahgreb and sees a hodge-podge of ethnic/tribal/cultural communities at odds with one another and the world beyond. Commenting on an Al Jezeera poll showing over half their viewers to be in basic sympathy with the activities and/or views of Al Qaeda, he notes....

As most of the poll's participants were most likely not Algerians, but Arabs from across the Arab region, with the bulk of them probably being in Levantine countries, the Gulf and Egypt, I would say that it also reveals a popular lack of information and sympathy about and for the Maghreb in the Arab east. Whereas North African newspapers and television stations were quick to denounce the attacks, eastern Arabs often cheered or blamed the attacks on the US. While Algerians had their own conspiracy theories, the other Arabs either looked at the attacks in the context of some Western conspiracy to control the Muslim world, rather than a power struggle within Algeria itself. Major Arab news outlets tend to ignore political happenings in the Maghreb, contributing to a dearth of information and a flourishing ignorance of Maghreb affairs in the Gulf and the Levant.

Culturally and politically, the Arab world is ignorant of its brotherly west. A common stereotype in eastern Arab regions is that Algerians do not speak Arabic, but French. More pernicious stereotypes paint North Africans as ignorant of language, religion, and history. A Mauritanian colleague once told me that on meeting a Levantine woman in Boston, she remarked to him "You speak Arabic so well! Where did you learn to speak it?" Little did she know that of all Arabic dialects, Hassaniya, the dialect spoken through most of the southern and western Sahara (including Mauritania), is closest to classical Arabic. At al-Azhar University, Mauritanians were known for being exceptional students above others when it came to grammar and religion.

But one cannot ascribe such ignorance to eastern Arabs alone; Maghrebines tend to be almost as ignorant of the internal workings of say, Lebanese or Palestinian political life. They also follow the same pattern of turning somewhat of a blind eye to terrorist atrocities, particularly in Iraq. But because the Arab media is so dominated by Mashreqi personalities and happenings, they tend to have a firmer grasp on things eastern than their cousins in the Mashreq have on things western. A superficial sense of solidarity creates an "any means necessary" attitude that leads a nihilistic and cold world view in which even fellow Arab and Muslims are expendable if their deaths aid in the march against the enemy. The same bizarre thinking that causes some Arabs to question the identity of the 9/11 hijackers cause the same ones to condone acts of mass violence against themselves. While the results of the Aljazeera poll are not indicative of the opinions of the vast majority of any Arab polity, they do highlight a continuing problem within a specific sector of the Arab population; the minority that cheers on terrorists and other fanatics and straps bombs to their bellies and head into "battle" against children. Sadly, poll's results are neither surprising nor heartening, but they do not represent scientific data and are taken from anyone who passed through website. My question is this: if the same bombings took place in Qatar, would Aljazeera have run the same poll?

I know from personal acquaintance that what he says about the speaking of Arabic is true. I have had the privilege to meet and know an Oxford-educated man from Egypt who assures me that the Arabic spoken in Egypt is to the rest of the Arabic-speaking world what British English is to our own mother tongue world-wide. It is considered the gold standard. This little personal insight makes the whole essay ring true to me.

One final note before I start my day, also related to cultural changes. With a great sigh of relief I see that the Brits have taken a step in the right direction by cutting loose from the inflammatory language of "war on terror."

The words "war on terror" will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country's chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless "death cult."
The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language."

London is not a battlefield, he said.

"The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers," Macdonald said. "They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way."

[H/T TimN at YAR who found it a Boing Boing]


It has taken several years and thousands of lives lost for real steps to be taken in what can correctly be called counter-insurgency. Ever since I read Abu Khaleel's sketch about Nihad Had to Die I have known without further elaboration that for every innocent victim killed there are extended families and networks of acquaintances more alienated from those responsible and ripe for conversion by those we call insurgents.

All along, there have been voices calling for a different approach. Thomas Ricks was among the most persuasive, and General Petraeus himself, who literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency, was brought to the front in a last-ditch effort to make things better. Unfortunately, anything he has done (and it has been noteworthy as recent stats from Iraq show) has been too little, too late. And even now, as we flounder about in Afghanistan and Pakistan like a bull in a china shop, his type of approach can find no purchase.


So I start the new year with a renewed commitment to hope. Seems like that is some one's buzzword these days. I watched him on C-SPAN giving a speech in Iowa Sunday afternoon and among other things he admitted to being a "hope-monger." The Iowa caucus is not for a few more days, and I have little expectation that he will prevail, mostly because he is "too nice." Guilty as charged, it seems. But still, we cling to hope.

Cheryl Rofer Comments DPRK tests

Cheryl Rofer speaks about the Iran nuclear deal at Ripon College in Wisconsin on September 30, 2015. (Photo credit: Becky Bajt/RiponCollege)

Cheryl Rofer, a chemist, retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2001 after a 35-year career in which she worked on projects dealing with environmental cleanup at Los Alamos and in Estonia and Kazakhstan, disassembly and decommissioning of nuclear weapons, and chemical weapons destruction, along with many other issues. Nowadays she spends a good part of her time writing for the blog Nuclear Diner, which she and two fellow Los Alamos alumnae, Molly Cernicek and Susan Voss, founded in 2011.
-- Arms Control Association, 2016

The following screencaps are from this thread.

This delightful excerpt from Nuclear Diner, April 27 is a taste of the Rofer wit & insight. Do take time to read the whole post, and take a look at the complete image above. 

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has explained much conservative thinking, including support for President Donald Trump, through a “strict father” model. It’s easy for us to think of the nation as a family and the leaders as parents. For conservatives, the strict father knows best and makes sure his children and his spouse do what he says. Progressives, in contrast, tend toward a nurturant parent model of leadership, which de-emphasizes gender while providing protection and valuing empathy and mutual responsibility. The bluster toward North Korea is that of the strict father, a model of domestic stability imposed on the realm of foreign relations.

In dealing with North Korea and China, the urge to resort to the paternal model is compounded by a long-standing stereotype of Asians as irresponsible children. Colonial propaganda depicted them as small, childlike, and in need of guidance from the adults of the West. Rudyard Kipling famously referred to America’s new Philippine subjects as “half-devil and half-child.” That went double for Asian men, whose features were caricatured as soft and childlike; it got another boost with America’s role in post-war Japan, lifting the infant Japanese into democracy. The boyish features of the young Kim Jong Un don’t help. Although the North Korean physically resembles his grandfather, the father of his country, Westerners are inclined to see him as a toddler in the pram. Kim-as-baby is a regular resort of cartoonists, as in last year’s New Yorker cover depicting Kim at play with missiles in a sandbox (at top).

Meanwhile, millions in South Korea are going about their business as usual. Terry Moran, Chief Foreign Correspondent, ABC News, posts this Tweet.

Facebook Community Standards Twitter Thread

Self-explanatory screencaps underscore the Wild West lawlessness of social media. "Community standards" test the margins of libel, slander, threats, bullying and harassment.

Just got a message from FB: "We've reviewed your report, and found that the conversation did not go against our Community Standards." https://t.co/EZwp64HMaT

— Paige Lavender (@paigelav) August 30, 2017

Who is Mark Lilla?

Ignorance is like cancer. It lies quietly, sometimes for years, growing and spreading until it is discovered, hopefully in time to ameliorate the damage done and corrected in time to avert further problems. That's where I have been since the presidential election. Like everyone else shocked to see the results of that election, I have spent many hours trying to discover what the heck happened. What went wrong? And in the words of David Remnick "Why is it now possible to drive across the country for thousands of miles without hitting a blue state or county?"

I never heard of Mark Lilla until a couple days ago. He's younger than I (b.1956 when I was 12) and a product of the academic world of professional intellectuals, a card-carrying member of the cognoscenti. When I was drafted as a conscientious objector in 1965 he was still in elementary school and about the time he was finishing high school I was getting married, abandoning academia and embarking on several decades rearing a family, joining a Sandwich Generation taking care of a geriatric population and what has come to be called Generation X. Until now our paths never crossed.

A Facebook link to the New Yorker, A Conversation with Mark Lilla on His Critique of Identity Politics, is what brings Lilla to my attention. I spent the better part of a day plowing through the transcript of an interview set me to doing homework. I learned that

• Mark Lilla is a very smart, well-read man, quick on his feet and good at threading rhetorical needles,
• is regarded by today's progressives as someone not to be trusted, perhaps a "Richard Spencer lite" and
• like many other people these days has yet another book to sell. 

Here are a few Facebook remarks and comments I want to keep for future reference...

~~~~~

As an old guy who missed most of the last three or four decades supporting a family and staying employed, I have the advantage of latter-day ignorance, despite having once been an activist who became and remained a life-long liberal. I never heard of Mark Lilla prior to this, but after reading this interview, and listening to another at Slate (in which he seemed to employ many of the same phrases and arguments verbatim) I think he's on to something important -- elusive, for sure, but more than rhetorical trickery.

Before tossing aside this link, I suggest listening to the Slate interview. Be warned that the transcript starts out pretty close, but toward the end long parts, both questions and responses, have been omitted. It may have been to save time or space, but I couldn't help thinking it may also be to dilute Lilla's points.

This is the link.
http://www.slate.com/.../mark_lilla_thinks_identity...

At 25:52 the transcript skips a huge swath of the interview, much of which is compelling, both questions and responses.

Transcript misses much after this: "Liberal elites in this country—and not just in the party but also in media, in the legal profession—are produced by the university now. Democratic Party elites used to be mayors, governors, county commissioners, union officials—people and farmers who are shaped by those experiences out in the world after the ’72 election that changes the rules. Those people were pushed out of power, and now it’s the college-educated who run the party and are the leading figures in American progressivism and liberalism. They come out of this university, and this way of looking at politics rubs off on them."

=> All content from that point for the next ten minutes is left out for some reason. It resumes about 34:05 with "I write in the book about the websites of the Republican Party the Democratic Party. You look at the website of the Republican Party and smack in the middle of it is a list of 11 principles, 11 sentences of what we stand for. That’s the product of thought, and that’s the product of a lot of debates that happen in the conservative movement."

Sorry to be nit-picking, but for someone like me, trying to ingest ideas that are new, and in this case both elusive and controversial, leaving out that much material, though it may have been "inadvertent" makes me wonder if it might have been intentional.

I'm open to arguments against what Lilla says, but I find what he says both persuasive and well-said. This snip from Remnick hits the mark, especially that line that "citizens are not roadkill."

My long-time web buddy Tom Watson commented "What bothers me is that an academic can make so many obvious errors. Most egregious? Stating that Clinton lost women - she won! But of course, the really offensive stuff is the class trumps all business. So upsetting."

And he's right. 

And this was how I replied...

You're right. Another interview at Slate pointed that out in the transcript. (I got a screencap of that -- but it was not mentioned in their interview.)
I never heard of this guy before yesterday, but only because I lost the better part of four decades of academic/intellectual discussion while keeping a job, supporting a family and leaving my youthful activist impulses on the shelf.
Before (and after) linking this discussion, I had to catch up finding out who the heck this guy Lilla is and where he falls in the political ecosystem.
Turns out he's something of a not-so-closeted conservative, part of the academic cognoscenti, whom most contemporary progressives consider something of a "Richard Spencer lite". So anything he says is subject to the filter of suspicion and countered with adroit arguments.

Time permitting, check out that interview, but don't just read the transcript. A whole chunk of their conversation is omitted, beginning at about 26 minutes and doesn't pick up until ten minutes later. During that time I heard a commercial for ZIP Recruiter (which reminded me of Cambridge Analytica, but that's off topic) and Lilla laid out a taxonomy of academic programs that conservatives put in place years ago aimed at coaching, grooming and shaping lawyers and others in the ideological mold from which Gorsuch and others were hatched. The thrust of his points about the Federalist Society and others strike me as repellent -- brought back my old college days disgust with YAF (Young Americans for Freedom). But his general argument is spot on.
Here is the Slate link.
http://www.slate.com/.../mark_lilla_thinks_identity...

~~~~~

I just looked up YAF and notice that the acronym now stands for Young America's Foundation. But a separate Wikipedia article for "Young Americans for Freedom" indicated it was absorbed by a more reactionary outfit with the same acronym.
"On March 16, 2011, Young Americans for Freedom passed National Board Resolution #001, unifying the Young America's Foundation with Young Americans for Freedom on April 1, 2011."
(Reminds me of how the old SSOC was absorbed by SDS and subsequently disbanded. Organizational morphing never seems to end, with big fish eating the little ones even in that part of the woods.)
In any case the "Young Americans for Freedom" article has a fascinating list of "Conservative or libertarian organizations" that doesn't appear at the other YAF article.
But I digress...
It's the middle of the night and I need to go back to bed. Hope you get a chance to hear this other interview.

Later I added this...

Looking more closely at the Wikipedia article on Young Americans for Freedom (YAF, not to be confused with Young America's Foundation) I notice a list of current and former elected representatives who matriculated through that now extinct organization. This is an impressive list that shows a depth of thought and influence that I, as a former activist with the political/philosophical Left, did not experience.

Perhaps the old Liberal world view was just that, a "world" view -- not looking through the lens of nationalism. That may be what resulted in today's conservative heirs to those roots having the power we saw surfacing during the Obama years, and becoming manifest in this last presidential election. Many of us respected the intellect of Buckley and courage of "Rockefeller Republicans". Their "Sharon Statement" is pretty thin gruel beside the Port Huron Statement, but it was the start of a movement in those ranks that grew slowly but provided deep roots for what was to become the libertarian-tainted hybrid that gave us Paul Ryan.

Sad to say, all these years conservatives have been toiling away, working the grass roots, while we on the Left have micromanaged with the best of good intentions a multitude of allied groups -- neglecting the need for a strong bond lacing them together into an effective national political force.
We love Occupy and take pride in that old Will Rogers line about "I'm not a member of any organized political party -- I'm a Democrat." But Occupy turned out to be a one night stand and the Democrat Party today lies in shambles. 

I wish I could advance a good remedy, but the best I can come up with is the hope that all who claim leadership, fellow-travelers and all, can somehow stop the infighting, join forces and get serious (as Lilla clearly suggested) to come against the MRSA infection now spreading in American politics.

I see the "old" YAF article now has one of those Wikipedia flags indicating it is apt to be altered from it's present form, and considering how swiftly the new YAF is able to move, it may even vanish from the site or be amended with enough material to make it even more marginal than it has become. 

Tom responded "I wouldn't overplay the shambles aspect. Compared to, say, Labour in UK, we're very effective opposition."
Again, he's right. But this was how I responded...

Of course. The parliamentary system consists of coalitions as a matter of design, and our two-party system is obliged to be better organized and open to compromise. That Will Rogers quote is a way to brag about the "big tent" Democrats have always had. But I'm coming to the conclusion that while advertising a "come one, come all" invitation we have inadvertently overlooked too many ordinary people -- people for whom the world of politics consists of slogans, sound bites and tag lines. This is a segment of the population that never darkens the door of a voting place unless something is twisting their tails or they feel threatened by something.
Unlike many I consider low voter turnout as a sign that stuff is mostly pretty good for a lot of people. But when groups get pissed or feel threatened they become more prone to become involved.

In the case of the presidential election, the outfit that got my attention was Cambridge Analytica, widely used by business and industry to target market opportunities and convert the results of focus groups into revenue streams for whatever is being sold (both goods and services -- that commercial message at Slate for ZIP Recruiters is a good example). In the case of Bannon and company (Mercers, etc) the impact on targeted political pay dirt, together with gerrymandering and the Teaparty vanguard, has put a creature into the oval office that none of us ever imagined had a chance.

I'm haunted by those questions Remnick raised, "Why is it now possible to drive across the country for thousands of miles without hitting a blue state or county? How did the Democrats lose a decisive number of Obama voters to someone like Donald Trump?"

~~~~

Addendum Sept 7
Ta-Nehisi Coates mentions Lilla in an Atlantic tour-de-force, The First White President.

Mark Lilla’s New York Times essay “The End of Identity Liberalism,” published not long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era—flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics—the possibility of the first black president—that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections—but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics—except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.

Lilla (at least through this lens) is another cog in the machine we dare not name, a perpetual motion white supremacy contraption. Coates is spot-on. I now need to find Lilla's place in the taxonomy of that universe. I dare say he never thought of himself in that way.