War Handwavium

19 December 2009, D.C. cop, Detective Baylor pulled out his gun during a snowball fight, probably because a snowball hit his shiny Hummer.

The immediate police response was to deny it:

Assistant Chief Peter Newsham tells LL: “There was no police pulling guns on snowball people.”

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/12/19/did-d-c-cops-overreact-to-snowball-fight-14th-and-u/

But Erik Wemple from the Washington City Paper has an interesting article about how the Washington Post may have tried to deny a cop would do something wrong here:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/12/22/washington-post-sits-on-eyewitness-account/

Wemple reports that a Washing Post aide, Stephen Lowman, happened to be at the snowball fight when Baylor showed up with gun drawn and that Lowman called the Post around 3 pm to give them a heads up on the story.

No biggie so far.

Around 3:46, the Washington City Paper posted a photo showing Baylor at the snowball fight with gun drawn here:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/12/19/did-d-c-cops-overreact-to-snowball-fight-14th-and-u/

There were also a number of videos of the incident showing up on YouTube.

Wemple then writes:

at 5:40 pm, the inexplicable takes place: The Washington Post files a post by Zapotosky and Martin Weilrefuting the photographic evidence already on the Web and taking the official position of the D.C. Police Department.

You can read the article here:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/police-looking-into-incident-a.html

So, someone who worked at the Post was at the snowball fight and called the Post to report that a cop showed up with his gun drawn. Pictures and video start showing up on the web showing the gun. But the Post decides to report the police version of the story, that the cop acted “appropriately”.

One might dismiss this as the result of a bunch of old crumudeons who don’t know what the internet is writing news reports. But the Washington Post has been shwoing a right wing slant lately (it has steadfastly defended the Iraq war and Glenn Greenwald has noted, in one day it posted 8 op eds from two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America’s largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist.)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/11/06/washington_post/index.html

And one might wonder whether this article faithfully reporting the State-Sanctioned-Force-Should-Not-Be-Questioned approach is really just the result of intentional war handwavium.

Glenn Greenwald talks about Sami al-Hajj:

Sami al-Hajj, … Al Jazeera cameraman … was abducted by the U.S. in late 2001, tortured at Bagram, sent to Guantanamo for seven years — where he was never charged with any crime and was interrogated overwhelmingly about Al Jazeera’s operations, not about Terrorism — and then suddenly released without explanation last year

And then he mentions this little nugget:

a Nexis search of media outlets finds that “Roxana Saberi” — the American journalist detained for three months by Iran and then quickly given a trial and appeal — was mentioned 2,201 times during the first two months of her ordeal alone; by contrast “Sami al-Haj” was mentioned a grand total of 101 times during the first six years of his lawless detention at Guantanamo.

So, an American journalist imprisoned by big, bad Iranian government for three months gets the American news whipped up in a furor over human rights abuses, but a Sudanese cameraman is imprisoned by the United States government for years, and the American news can barely be bothered to report it.

This is nothing but tribalism, the notion that right and wrong is not determined by what you do, but by what tribe you belong to.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/23/objectivity/index.html

From the Department of Public Relations, Nobel Peace Prize winning President Barack Obama ordered a missile strike in Yemen and the strike ended up killing 49 civilians. Al Queda has already issued a statement thanking the US for improving its recruiting drive.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20091220/twl-49-civilians-killed-in-air-strike-lo-3cd7efd.html

from Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/21/terrorism/index.html

Just saw “Avatar” the movie with blue aliens. Here are my initial impressions of its war handwavium score (not the actual score, just a gut check)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It’s hard to tell, but I think the combat scenes show a fairly even mix of good guys (blue aliens) and bad guys (conquering earthlings) getting killed on screen. I’d have to get the DVD and count each one to get the real tally, but just from a gut reaction watching the movie on the big screen, it seems fairly even. There are lots of killing scenes, but I think it’s a balance of black hats and white hats, so the final score would be near zero for that aspect of it.

I believe I am going to have to invent a new item for scoring fiction that Avatar made me aware of: military victory delivered by god.

The main character, Sully, decides to fight the big, bad, fully mechanized invading military. And he decides to fight this military using nothing more than soft, fleshy, twelve-foot tall blue people riding soft fleshy horses and soft fleshy pteradactyls.

Needless to say, Sully and his band of spear-throwing, bow-and-arrow shooting warriors get their asses handed to them by heavily armored vehicles firing projectile weapons with a range of a kilometer and a rate of fire measured in the hundreds of rounds a minute.

But when all seems lost, the cavalry comes in and saves the day. The ending is a deus ex machina. God from the machine. The aliens worship a diety that they describe as the planet itself and all the life that lives on it. And towards the end of teh movie, it is revealed that the planet is actually some sort of biologically networked organism that stores people’s memories and their “souls”.

But, this turns out to be only part of the planet-god’s powers. When Sully and his band of warriors are about to be exterminated, the planet itself decides to send in the cavalry, in the form of wave after wave of animal to fight the heavily armored humans with guns.

Sully had no strategy, and the planet-god appears to have little strategy either, other than “war of attrition”.

But Sully goes to war with no planning, no strategy, no tactics, with not enough manpower, not enough weapons, and not enough armor, and really little more than the gut feeling that his fight is the noble fight and somehow it’ll all work out.

And that doesn’t really comply with the “just war” concept. In a “just war”, you must have a good probability for winning before you start the war. If you can’t win, then you’re just going to kill a lot of people, and end up losing anyway.

Sully, who used to be a member of marine recon, should have had some notion of what his odds of spear chuckers versus machine guns would be. Even an idiot should have some notion of what the odds would be. And the odds would be slim to no chance of victory.

But Sully launches the war anyway, and gets a lot of people killed. And he would have lost the war had it gone by his own planning, but victory was delivered by God, because their fight was the just fight, the noble fight. At one point, the spiritual second-in-command of the tribe said the planet-god doesn’t take sides, only maintains the balance. But apparently, the planet-god decided things were so unbalanced that it took sides and stepped in.

For that, Avatar gets an additional 20 points to whatever other points it may end up accumulating.

Overall, I’d say the movie was worth the full evening price, an A-. But that’s because the story of Sully coming of age in the Na’vi tribe seems to be the main story, and the stupid deus ex machina military victory at the end was sort of a sub-plot I can somewhat overlook.

I think the scene where Sully is doing a voice over talking about how they went around to all the tribes and got the warriors to help them fight would have been a good spot to insert a scene where they show Sully talking with the warriors about strategies. They wouldn’t need dialogue, they could have had Sully continue his voiceover so no dialogue would be needed. And then they could have implemented some tribal strategies. Throw some big boulders off the tops of those flying mountains onto the helicopters below. Some punji sticks for the troops on the ground. Maybe the Na’vi don’t use traps for animals, but I don’t think they would be unaware of how to make animal traps. Anything that resembled a plan could have evened out the fight a little bit rather than have a massacre.

But I think the writer, James Cameron, was going for the big surprise at the end. When all seems lost and so many warriors have died, surprise, the empathic planet will help you if you are fighting the good fight.

Ugh.

The whole issue is that [the Israelis] govern the water accumulated under the hills of the West Bank and prevent the Palestinians from using it, while averting these water supplies to settlements and other Israeli uses.

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/12/2009129115451579920.html

Obama is going to build a new supermax facility in Thompson, Illinois. It will be used to house some of the prisoners who had previously been held at Guantanamo, specifically, it will hold prisoners who aren’t going to get a trial, who are going to be held indefinitely without trial, or who will be put before a military commission.

So, this prison has exactly the same problems as Guantanamo. When Obama pledged to close Gitmo, many assumed that meant he was going to return the US to a nation based on law and due process and rights for the accused. But apparently, Obama just meant that he was going to change its address.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/15/gitmo/index.html

Israel giving 41 million dollars to it’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091213173713432526.html

Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian West Bank have vandalised a mosque, torching its library and spraying hate messages in Hebrew on the building. One message said “We will burn you all.”

The area is home to some of the most hardline settlers who advocate a “price tag” policy under which they target Palestinians in retaliation for any Israeli government measure they see as threatening Jewish settlements.

Many settlers consider they have a God-given right to live in the biblical Land of Israel, which includes the West Bank.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009121116190107591.html

Reformists in Iran have been protesting Ahmadinejad’s election in June. This weekend, the Iranian government released images of what they claim to be “reformists” tearing up, burning, and trampling a picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who came to power after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Khomeini died in 1989, but is widely revered in Iran.

Burning a picture of Khomeini is against the law in Iran. That pictures of reformists burning a picture of Khomeini would be shown by the Iranian government leads one to wonder whether the whole thing was fabricated by the government to taint the reformists and give justification for more arrests.

While it’s possible the images are what the government says they are, that would mean that the reformists in Iran burned pictures of someone who has nothing to do with the presidential election, and is revered by many in Iran.

It’s not entirely equivalent, but it might be about as smart as if Americans protesting and opposing the US invasion of Iraq back in 2003 were to burn a picture of George Washington, revered by Americans as one of its founding fathers.

George Washington has nothing to do with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And Khomeini, who died twenty years ago, has nothing to do with the stolen presidential election in Iran in 2009.

I would not be surprised if the images of “reformists” burning the pictures of Khomeini were fabricated by the government of Iran.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091213131421866166.html

“In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

–Thomas Jefferson

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/08/obama/index.html

Via Glen Greenwald here:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/08/obama/index.html

The article was originally about the blind loyalists of Obama but the above clip shows the blind loyalists of Palin. It seems to be a part of human nature not restricted to one particular political party.