| Friday, April 29, 2005 |
14:17 - Mood: melancholy
http://darthside.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_darthside_archive.html
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Via Damien: Darth Vader's blog.
...You try to be an effective manager, you weed out the bad apples like the late Admiral Ozzel -- only to find that an insidious culture of incompetence has somehow transformed your deadly pan-galactic armada into a fleet of spaceballs.
It's alternately very silly and very good. Certainly a lot more entertaining than the last couple of movies have been, but maybe that's just because it actually pays attention to extant plot and makes some attempt to tie it all meaningfully together. There's even some perverse wisdom in it.
This'll be one to watch.
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| Wednesday, April 27, 2005 |
16:29 - They do stuff™
http://www.huhcorp.com/index.htm
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I'm totally buying stock in these guys. As soon as they IPO.
Via Cold Fury.
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| Tuesday, April 26, 2005 |
11:57 - NEW POPE IS NAZI LOL WTF!!1!1
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2822
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It's always refreshing when one of the lone voices of sanity on the Internet comes from Something Awful.
I’m going to build a time machine. What I’m going to do is take old Bill here back in time to 1941 Germany. We’re going to sit there and wait for the Nazis to find him and say, “Join us or die.” Bill Berkowitz (Uhm, we’ll have to change that last name for this to work) is going say, “Sorry folks, but I humbly oppose the Nazi regime and I don’t wish to join your organization.” and we’ll see what happens.
George Washington owned slaves during his lifetime. He didn’t want to and in his heart he knew it was wrong but he did anyway. It was the cool thing to do at the time. Slavery was just another fad like pogs or Pokemon. But in 1976 he was posthumously appointed the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, the highest ranking military position the U.S. has to offer. The fact that he owned slaves didn’t seem to bother anyone. The fact that Joseph Ratzinger involuntarily joined the Hitler Youth shouldn’t bother anyone either.
But it will, as long as some people can use it to fuel the storybook image they have of the world in which WWII was that far-off time when good and evil existed, people who committed atrocities were otherworldly beings in man-suits (certainly, anything but human), and the human race was absolved of having to base their decisions in this gray modern world on any sort of moral clarity as long as you say enough things like "How many Nazi salutes did he give? How many times did "Sieg Heil" come out of his mouth?" when you think the right people are listening.
UPDATE: Brummbar has more.
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| Monday, April 25, 2005 |
15:44 - But that's not fair
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CapLion has a few things to say on the subject of socialized medicine. Money quote:
To address this properly, I really need to start off with a fairly macroscopic view of the issue. It's one that many, many Americans understand, and just about all Canadians, Europeans, and Liberals in general do not: It is not okay to be poor.
Perhaps harsh, but as Cap says, read the rest of it before you start smashing things. And I've gotta say, it comes at a pretty opportune time for me to read it. See, here I am pulling in no fewer than four incomes from two full-time jobs and change (as well as a lot of completely self-driven work over the past several years that's now trickling dividends my way), in which number I count this current breakneck writing project on which I'm working harder and faster than I ever have before in my life (including college), with visions of hazard pay and an impeccable Guy Who Gets Things Done aura shining around me when they think of who'll be able to take on future emergency projects. Sleep? Who needs it? Alaska beckons. Or, failing that, the mortgage payment, which plus expenses adds up to within hundreds of my after-taxes take-home pay.
...And then, as I did a few weekends ago, I go to visit some acquaintances on a bright Saturday in San Francisco. Four of them, living in an absolute pit of an apartment in the middle of the city. Oh, it's a beautiful apartment complex—perched on a high hill, full of gorgeous landscaping—but their unit itself was packed from floor to ceiling with books, used food, knickknacks, and piles of cat crap. Of the four renters, not one had a job. One apparently did some kind of contract work once in a great while, but that hadn't happened in a long time; and so one of them, who told me this with great pride, was the "main breadwinner" by virtue of his skulking down to the bus station to pick up garbage every few days, which he smugly said qualified as enough "community service" to make him eligible for General Assistance, which he was able to convince his worried mother was a "job". Meaning one of my incomes—I don't know, pick one—was being diverted to pay his and his friends' rent.
Boy, what a sucker I am, huh? You work harder than the average, you make more money—but you get taxed harder, like the evil rich person you obviously are. Don't wanna work, and don't mind living in a litterbox? We'll find some bozo with an extra income or so he doesn't need and make him sponsor you.
Oh yeah, and then the guy asked me to "lend" him money, or else they'd get kicked out of the apartment. Like I'd done once before, never to see the money again, needless to say. I tell you, it was all I could do to get to my car before I started yelling and hitting things.
And get a load of this little gem from my Correspondent that I read this morning:
There are also circular problems. Let's say I'm having trouble getting work because of my weight (companies don't want to co-pay my high insurance costs). Losing weight is best with the right foods, which cost too much, which I can't afford, because I don't have the job. Or I need the medical assistance to lose this much weight, and I don't have the health insurance because I don't have the job (and the Republicans have made this one of only two industrial countries which has no national health plan). Or, because I don't have a job, I try to survive on government assistance, but I don't qualify because my car is worth too much money, unless I try to sell it in which case I get only a fraction of its value, and then the government doesn't pay enough to live on, and I can't get work because I don't have a car to get there (and I live in a big city whose public transportation system is both too expensive and unreliable), so I get stuck on government assistance, not being able to eat, so I find a local part-time job that I can walk to, and then they cut back the government assistance, and the combination is even less than what I was making before, so...
Where to begin? Perhaps with the thing about how losing weight requires expensive food. Huh? Funny, everyone I've always talked to seemed to be convinced that losing weight involved buying less food. Or jogging around the block once in a while, which is free. Jared became a matinee idol on six-inch Subways, right? "Results not typical", I know, but give me a break. If only there were magical weight-loss pills slipped into every mailbox by the USPS, like in Canada or Cuba, eh? But of course it's the Republicans' fault that this guy is too fat to work. Do I have that right? God, I'm stupid.
I know, I know—part of being one of those people who takes on way too many projects at once and always seems to come through in a way that makes people applaud and throw money my way is also being the kind of person to never complain or even make any public spectacle of how much work it all involves. You can't be an uncomplaining martyr if you complain. I know I don't have any real problems, and being successful insulates me from even being able to empathize properly with people who do. But you know, sometimes you just read or experience too many things in a day that make you so mad you want to wrench your own head off.
And sometimes you're tempted, because you live in a country where the evil capitalist hospitals would probably be able to sew the damn thing back on for you.
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10:57 - A cup of Gatorade
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Four chapters in five days. Whoo.
At this pace, though, I'll come in well under the deadline. I just hope they don't want me to do this again anytime soon.
Anyway, last night as I was taking out the garbage, I heard the whine of what sounded like struggling jet engines directly above; very loud, enough to make normal speech difficult, and changing in pitch suggesting that the pilot was making some pretty significant power adjustments. The next-door neighbor came running out to see what it was, just as the plane passed overhead; there was a choppy cloud cover at about 1000 feet, and the plane was barely above it, or so it seemed. Judging by the way the lights were arranged it looked to have long swept-back wings-- a C-5 or something, aimed in the direction of Moffett.
But there's no way it should have been that low. The neighbor and I stood there watching and listening for a long time[md]we could hear those engines whining after it had been gone over the horizon five minutes. We never did hear a big "boom", but it wouldn't have surprised us at all. Pretty unnerving.
Anyway, that's enough of the outside world.
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| Wednesday, April 20, 2005 |
16:26 - Quoth the editor
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Just now:
How quickly do you think you can write this book?
We have an opportunity to have this on promo this summer at B&N but the book
needs to be ready to ship to the customer on July 7th. To do that we will
need to maintain a very aggressive schedule and would need to have 100% from
you by May 16th.
Uhhhh.... huh. So if there's any doubt as to why blogging shall be light for the coming three weeks...
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| Monday, April 18, 2005 |
15:07 - Sentience is a deadly weapon that must be registered
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J Greely has a good take on the rapidly-becoming-infamous Rattlesnake Anti-Defamation League signs that are just so very symbolic of urban Californian mentality as a whole.
I'd think it all has something to do with a vague little voice in the back of everyone's minds that says, "We're the privileged ones, therefore evil; so whatever happens to us, good. We deserve it."
I should mention, however, that the signs in my San Jose neighborhood warning of mountain lions and coyotes are nothing like this kind of theme-park daffiness. Maybe something about having our cul-de-sacs infiltrated and our cats devoured by such creatures gives us less of a sense of humor about such things.
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| Tuesday, April 12, 2005 |
18:11 - There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...
http://www.zompist.com/predic.htm
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Elections cause people to do a lot of thinking and writing. They certainly seemed to have had an effect on Mark Rosenfelder back in 2000, who penned this long and crunchy essay (via James A.) on the American political landscape while Gore and Bush and McCain were still duking it out on the campaign trail.
It's worth a read. Not because it's totally right—there's a lot of it that's willfully blinkered, I think, or that betrays the author's personal proclivities in a way that would put the lie to any claim he might make to being "unbiased". The whole thing, in fact, is a treatise in defense and promotion of "liberalism" as he defines it. He spends a satisfying amount of time explaining the very rational roots of the philosophy and distancing himself from the "progressives" (whom he holds in as much disdain as he does unreconstructed communists). But it's been five years and a huge tectonic shift in world politics since when this thing was posted, and the most fascinating thing I've seen all week is how well this piece works as a time-capsule as contrasted with today's political landscape—and that's only after five years. Things move fast these days.
Rosenfelder tries gamely to explain the existence of the conservatives in American politics, but he can't resist oversimplifying them or referring to them with dismissive nicknames ("consies" and "fundies"); to read this piece, one gets the impression that anyone to the author's right harbors at least the latent desire to roll back abortion rights and abolish the IRS. As he puts it late in the piece:
[A given political party long in power] also stops explaining itself with any eloquence or passion. Many noisy consies, such as Salon's David Horowitz, were once liberals; their descriptions of what liberalism is are usually unrecognizable, and their reasons for leaving it are adolescent. (E.g. one recent apostate decided that conservativism was more 'sensible'; his example was that the homeless weren't disadvantaged people, but street lunatics. So, it was just 'sensible' to keep blacks from voting or holding good jobs? And the 'sensible' way to treat lunatics is to keep them as filthy, drunken vagrants?)
Riiiight. That's what Middle America wants post-9/11 (or, I suspect, wanted beforehand). Latent racism and authoritarianism.
Most of the big unaddressed political class that Rosenfelder seems to ignore (because I really doubt they were statistically insignificant in 2000) is what we now know as the South Park Republicans. Not a racist bone in their bodies, determinedly secular, anti-authority, libertarian, middle-class, anti-tycoon, entrepreneurial, fiercely defensive of privacy, sexually liberated, and all for equality of all rights that it is sensible for the law to affirm—yet tempered by a knowledge that there are some restrictions on social behaviors we've inherited from our benighted ancestors that actually have some place in building strong communities. These are people who take a moment now and then to wonder whether there might in fact have been some downsides to the empowerment of women or the mainstreaming of homosexuality—not with the intention of rolling them back, notably, but of confronting such faults without the fear imposed on us by an establishment that won't tolerate the questioning of such ideals as multiculturalism or the absolute parity in all objective measures of all races and sexes and religions and lifestyles. This isn't about "discrimination"—it's about understanding how humans work, and finding out whether we're being willfully blind about certain things that might be costing our society in efficiency and elegance.
These days, the people attracted to various segments of the political landscape don't much reflect the way they sifted themselves out in Rosenfelder's long-bygone era, it would seem. This bit stuck out at me as particularly laughable:
A more typical libertarian, I suspect, is one of my recent correspondents, who earnestly explained that prosperity was not based on "brute labor", but on "clever thinking". That's pure Randism; but the guy makes $14,000 a year. What's the story here? Randism seems to be built for billionaires. It's a transparent reponse to socialism: When people are calling for your blood as exploiters, it's mighty comforting to be told that your place at the top of the heap is heroic and even moral.
I suspect Randian rhetoric appeals most to folks like my $14K/year correspondent-- basically, smart whites who have a grudge against the system. They're not doing as well as they'd like, but they're not in enough difficulty that liberals pay them any heed. Rand crystalizes for them their suspicion of socialism and the welfare state, and assures them that their ambition and hard work are the marks of future Nietzschean overlords. There's also a particular pleasure in being contrarian, in not merely opposing but scornfully rejecting the liberal idea that one should resist misery and injustice. It's a miserable and unjust world, baby! We are winners, and damn the losers! Only they're not exactly winning yet. Something must be holding them back. Ah, the government!
"Smart whites who have a grudge against the system"? "$14K/year"? Yeah, that describes a whole lot of libertarians I know. No, this is 2005, and the people who fit this mold today are the hard-core Progressive radicals: the ones who hold such a grudge against the established systems of humanity that they're willing to march in the streets to overthrow them so the world can be more like it is in cyberspace, where everyone has as much sex and alternate reality and hallucinatory escapism as they want and nobody hates anyone ever (except Republicans). The college-age floundering urbanite in this day and age, as I've known him, isn't a Randian; he's a hazy idealist, insulated from the need to work like an assembly-line drone of yesteryear by myriad opportunities and luxuries unthinkable to the poor of earlier ages, and adhering reflexively to any convenient group with a built-in grudge and sad tale of repression to tell. Society at large is at fault for not providing enough welfare to deserving folks like them; much better to define themselves as part of a romantically downtrodden community or subgroup than as a part of the white-bread nation that shuns them. Rosenfelder himself says: "The country is too rich for progressive causes to be understood, much less championed." He's right-on there. Less so when he describes the ACLU as being a champion of the individual and the conservatives as secretly yearning for aristocracy—if there is any group with delusions of elite superiority these days, it's the cranky youths in every suburb who think that knowing how to configure sendmail or run a port scanner makes them Middle America's natural born leaders.
The author of the piece makes several mentions of his above-average familiarity with the role of religion in these proceedings; and while he is quick and thorough in his dismissal of the "fundies", he does say this:
Similarly, many people abandon the Christianity of their childhood without ever achieving an adult understanding of their religion. They think they've left the religion for rational reasons, when all they've defeated is the Sunday-school simplification of it.
Bravo. If there's one thing of which I've grown intensely weary in recent years, it's those people who smugly sniff about having risen above the ridiculous superstitions of religion and embraced a philosophy based on "rationality" and "logic" and "reason". Bull.
A friend recently brought over a DVD of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! series that aired on Showtime; among all its episodes, which debunk and expose the silliness of all manner of conceits of modern society (such as magnet therapy, penile enlargement, alternative medicine, animal liberation, Feng Shui, and so on), the crowning jewel was its hour-long segment on creationism. And while Penn and Teller were quite happy to videotape people lobbying in Atlanta to have creation taught as a theory (alongside evolution) in Georgia public schools, they did an amazing job of failing to acknowledge the very salient points with regard to legal precedent, scientific inquiry, the nature of a theory, legitimate criticisms of evolution, and fear of competing ideas that these people made, instead preferring to point and laugh at the stupid hicks with their stupid hick accents. They (well, Penn) even egregiously misrepresented the First Amendment, as everyone does, when explaining about the "separation of church and state". I had to move upstairs and shut my door about halfway into it, it was so maddeningly intellectually dishonest and unjustifiably condescending.
Any high-school kid can pick up a science textbook and read the explanations of why evolution is the answer to everything; but it takes someone willing to take a leap into unsupported realms of thought—indeed, a leap of faith—to understand that logic cannot sufficiently describe a system in which logic is not a constraint. In fact, logic itself would dictate that one couldn't use logic alone in such a circumstance. Specifically, we are limited enough in our faculties as humans that we cannot distinguish between the world as we know our scientific laws would predict it to appear, and the world as fashioned by some omnipotent force to appear the way our laws would predict it would appear. This might seem too counterintuitive or far-fetched for a mere high-school intellectual (as I once was) to grasp; but the years intervening since I was shocked to discover that there actually existed people on modern planet Earth who believed in God have been chastening, to say the least.
I went to Caltech, perhaps the most hard-science-oriented university on the planet. I specifically went there so that I, as a sure-footed atheist of the kind that nobody with even a shred of spirituality would ever invite to lunch, could be sure of never having to deal with such irrationality ever again. But what should I discover, upon completing the Blacker Hovse roompick in the fall of 1994, but that I had landed in a double... and the occupant of the other side of the room was a guy I'd come to call, behind his back, the Apostle Matt. Deeply, deeply religious. And, I would later find, one of the most agile minds I'd ever met.
We clashed numerous times over the course of that frosh year, with our creationism-vs-evolution diatribes occupying long sheets of paper that we taped up all over the inside of our room's walls, so that we could read each other's rebuttals and write them in silence, never once giving actual voice in conversation to them. Seriously: as furious as we grew on paper, we never once broached the subject in actual speech, and our conversations were never anything but pleasant and happy. But these sheets of densely-written paper covered the walls from floor to ceiling, turned the corner, and spilled out and down the hallway for passersby to read and observe our philosophical fisticuffs. And the most galling thing of all was that at the outset, I assumed—assumed—that just because he was some fundie whose presence on campus was inexplicable (dang, he must have had a lot of extracurricular activities), I'd be able to run rings around him logically. I figured I could even quote the Bible at him and beat him at his own game. Sure, I'd never read it myself, but hey—it's a big book. Surely he can't know it that well. How should he know whether some outrageous verse I made up is actually in there or not?
Suffice it to say that he wiped the floor with me. Not necessarily in the specific wall-covering discussion, but in the long run. See, it turns out that creationist or not, he became a planetary science major, did numerous research projects and theses on the nature of the universe—all while at the same time leading the Campus Christian Fellowship and excelling in everything else he did, which was a lot—and graduated with flying colors, going on to grad school where I believe he's already in charge of some prestigious theoretical research group. Whereas I floundered my way through a mechanical engineering curriculum and graduated only by the skin of my teeth, which is why my teeth bear ugly stretch marks to this day. Had I backed a slow horse? Had I managed to shut myself off to a whole mode of thinking that would have allowed me to excel? I may have had the edge in knowledge of parody materials and smirky pop culture, but intellectually—I know now—he was so far beyond me that I wasn't really a worthy opponent.
After the rigor of academia was behind me, and (shortly afterwards) once 9/11 occurred, I was able to look back on the experience with something of a renewed perspective. It turns out, shockingly, that some huge percentage of Caltech's undergraduate population—larger, even, than the national average among universities, if I remember correctly—were highly religious. If I'd known this as a high-school senior, it'd have turned my world upside down. But I've seen it in action. Religion is no detriment to intelligence or reason. Quite the contrary: it's an enhancement, an augmentation to a mind that might find it all too tempting to limit itself to feeding on logic alone. I've seen too many breathtaking churches and cathedrals and synagogues and mosques, witnessed too many small-town Ladies' Auxiliaries presiding over community funerals, heard too much astonishingly good music created by people my own age, all inspired by that stupid, retrograde thing, religion, to ever again be seduced into the grim austerity of life so limited. I'm still an atheist in practice, mostly just out of habit, but I have to apologize to myself and others for it rather than holding it up as some kind of banner proving my elite superiority over the seething masses as I once did.
(Incidentally, a wise sophomore during that frosh year in Blacker opined that by definition, the only thing a scientist can be is agnostic. This idea is less and more attractive to me depending on the cycle of the moon.)
Religion is one of the only areas in which I think South Park misses the mark in its social commentary. That aside, it as a collected work stands as a pretty good rebuttal (or corollary) to Rosenfelder's treatise. It's possible, in a nutshell, to be friendly to most of what he describes as core "liberal" values (civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, campaign finance reform, freedom of expression, gay rights), and yet not to be so fixated upon them that we mutate into establishment-destroying radicals once the bulk of those issues have been addressed. There's a wide gulf between "You don't have to like gays and lesbians, but that's no reason to jail them, fire them, beat them up, or deny their civil rights" and "Let's all legalize gay marriage". In that gulf rests a huge demographic that Rosenfelder seems to have overlooked, or that has only found its voice in the intervening five years.
The funniest part is the ending, where Rosenfelder issues some predictions for the future:
• The Republicans will find that they like governing; as a result their anti-government rhetoric will fade away, to be revived only on ceremonial occasions (in much the same way that you only hear "these United States" at political conventions).
• Religion is here to stay; but the fundies, frustrated with their inability to impose theocracy, will lose interest for a generation. The next time they pop up, they'll be as likely to ally with the left as with the right (especially because abortion will, I suspect, be largely eliminated by improved methods of contraception).
• Liberalism will disappear-- at least in its incarnations as described above; the new movements and causes that replace it may keep the name. The political fights of 2100 will center largely around ideas that are considered impossibly idealistic or perverse today.
• Conservativism will remain, of course; though it will end up implicitly accepting everything that 20C liberalism stood for.
That was supposed to be a prediction for the next hundred years. Sounds like it's only taken a twentieth of the time.
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| Monday, April 11, 2005 |
20:27 - Stop Stealing My Money, You Thieving Government*
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What wonder should I behold upon opening my online bank statement today but that my federal tax return check, written in the amount of $489 and spelled out in longhand as well and proper, had been cashed by the IRS in the amount of $989.
This coming on top of having to pay no less than $3400 combined federal and state estimated payments on the advance for the current book (from which nothing was withheld, and all of which I received in the first quarter, and they don't allow you to spread it out over the whole year) made for an ugly-looking number in my checking account, with a little horizontal line in front of it. Not pleasing to me was any of this.
Oh, I called up the bank and had them put things right. I acknowledge that my 4's sort of look like 9's. But you'd think the IRS would check the longhand version of numbers like this, to avoid "understandable" errors that somehow always fall in their favor...?
...Oh. Right. What was I thinking?
* Apologies to Frank J.
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14:37 - Can't fight City Hall
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As much as it might be fun to dream about this, much uglier and stupider stories like this make it clear how futile such hopes probably are.
Dang, that's a nice proposal, though, as I've said before.
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11:42 - Still got it
http://www.caltechvsmit.com/
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Wow. Looks like "That Other" Institute of Technology still has that ol' fighting spirit.
We decided that the Academic fair would have the largest concentration of prefrosh, so at 1pm we unloaded 800 shirts reading “MIT” on the front and “…because not everyone can go to Caltech” on the back, and casually walked in through the open loading dock in the back of the building with nine boxes of shirts. Within the first twenty minutes we handed out nearly 400 shirts. No one noticed anything because the shirts were individually wrapped in plastic bags. However, It was only a matter of time before one of the prefrosh opened the bag and decided to put on the shirt. When one of our shirt distributors noticed this happening we picked up the boxes and were gone in a minute. Looking behind us we saw the room filled with campus police all looking for us. A couple of us went to the Athletics fair through the front entrance, nodding to the door monitor who knew us as prefrosh, with a few boxes of shirts. We were able to pass out shirts for ten minutes before the door monitor stormed up to us and asked “Who told you to hand out those T-shirts?” to which we replied, “I think he is somewhere over there,” then picked up the boxes and bolted.
I'm proud of the little whippersnappers.
(I was always pleased that Caltech, by the way, was about one of the most apolitical campuses one could ever hope to find... the way things are going these days, it really is going to be a bastion of sanity in more ways than one.)
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| Saturday, April 9, 2005 |
18:31 - Not Well Thought Out
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This seems like a poorly designed tree.
The seed pods that appear in spring are so heavy and clustered so thickly that the wood of the branches can't support them, and the tree falls over unless it's tied up.
I'm imagining a forest of these in the wild, each one crawling along the ground like some kind of thick and woody creeper vine, or an astronaut on a planet where the gravity is about five times too high...
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| Friday, April 8, 2005 |
00:46 - Discovery of the hour
http://spamusement.com/
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What happens if you take explodingdog, have it be drawn by someone with a lot more artistic skill than he lets on (and a penchant for drawing characters that look like Strong Sad), and have the titles be written by the random software that generates subject lines for spam e-mails?
Spamusement, that's what.
I swear, my throat hurts after going through all these. It starts out silly, then gets promising, then one by one builds itself into an edifice of pure genius. Every one of these is gold. Seriously. Best thing I've seen since the Flame Warriors.
"I sure wish you weren't so silly". Ouch. I hurt.
Via Chris.
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18:41 - I must only use this power to annoy
http://www.mail-archive.com/poclad@efn.org/msg00002.html
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Hey, remember "kything"? That telepathy stuff from the Madeleine L'Engle books?
Now I wish I didn't.
(Did everyone read those books as part of the standard curriculum? Or was that just my school district?)
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13:12 - First disarm the populace
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_national_review-wrong.htm
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I wonder how long it will be before people start jumping up in the middle of these courtroom proceedings and shouting, This is OUR country, we have our OWN customs, and you are GUESTS?
Probably never. You'd get thrown in jail for it these days.
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10:40 - Highway Beautification Project
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You ever notice that when you see a car on the road whose back end is totally, gaudily covered with bumper stickers, you don't even need to get close anymore to know what they're all about?
I even saw a brand-new Porsche 911 Carrera a couple of months ago with a big NO BLOOD FOR OIL sticker on it. Totally aside from the irony of the statement itself, imagine the mindset of someone who would put any bumper sticker on that kind of car. Some people, apparently, feel so strongly about these matters that it overrides all taste.
Which brings up another interesting thing I noticed: In the run-up to the election, we all saw plenty of pro-Kerry and pro-Bush bumper stickers. But while there were also (and continue to be) anti-Bush stickers up the wazoo... did anyone ever see any anti-Kerry stickers? Because, oddly enough, I sure didn't...
If this signifies anything, I'm sure it escapes me.
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| Monday, April 4, 2005 |
11:33 - A holiday we can all enjoy
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April 1st always involves some good clean fun from our favorite companies and content creators. Some of the best ones:
Google Gulp. These guys are way too silly for us to be able to buy their stock.
Steve Jobs Joins IKEA. It was only a matter of time...
Homestar Runner's new Pay Plus Service. With free Seven Second Trial!
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09:15 - DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004225.php
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(Under Penalty of Canadian Law)
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| Friday, April 1, 2005 |
11:09 - Doctor Evil
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My long-time Correspondent—the one who wants to suicide-bomb Republicans—threw me an interesting curveball yesterday:
I was recently sent a news story stating that the state house of Michigan has passed a bill which says that no doctor, nurse, or other caregiver can be held responsibile for any consequences of withholding medical treatment for religious, ethical, or moral reasons. This has to go to the state senate, and then to the governor of course, but since being gay is an offense against God, I don't intend to get myself injured in the state of Michigan... just in case.
I believe the story to which he's referring is this one: Don't Give Doctors a Moral Veto Right.
Under the House legislation, providers can't refuse to provide services based on a person's membership in groups protected under the Elliot-Larsen civil rights act.
That leaves them free to refuse to care for gays, lesbians, the obese, the unwashed, the homeless, prostitutes, intravenous drug abusers or any of the host of other people who are frequently the object of hatred or derision, which is almost always rationalized by a moralizing smokescreen.
I admittedly don't know the details of the Elliot-Larsen Act, nor do I know whether there are other Michigan civil-rights laws that the Michigan legislature could have invoked instead that would have mentioned gays as being among the groups guaranteed medical treatment. However, the "outrage" here that has so many people incensed is apparently that the law invokes that Act out of convenience rather than explicitly listing all possible reasons for which a person can't be refused medical service.
Know what this looks like to me? A bunch of journalists and lawmakers have latched onto an undebated technicality in the law and used it to write a bunch of lurid headlines and paint a picture of a state willing to become the nation's pariah for no immediately obvious reason. Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays! Please. I mean, seriously—can you imagine the outcry if it became understood that Michigan had actually become a state where gays shouldn't expect to get medical treatment? It's unprecedented and way outside the bounds of what's considered basic medical professionalism (to say nothing of decent human behavior) across the country.
At about the same time as the Michigan law's passage, according to this analysis, Mississippi—Mississippi—passed a similar law that explicitly protected gay and lesbian patients, though it happened not to mention "marital status" in its list of characteristics worthy of exemption. Is my correspondent suggesting that Mississippi doctors are about to start refusing to treat single people? Is he saying he'd feel more confident as a gay man trying to get medical treatment in Jackson than in Detroit?
Understanding the original nature of the "refusal rights" laws is crucial to knowing what's going on here. As I understand things, they were originally designed to give individual doctors an "out" if they didn't want to get fired for refusing to perform an abortion; and (critically) the whole idea was so that said doctor could put another doctor in his place, and shuffle the duty shifts around accordingly, without having to worry about getting sued by the patient. There's nothing in there saying that the patient wouldn't get treated by somebody; it's an escape hatch for individual caregivers with personal objections. There will always be doctors and nurses in any hospital—probably a wide majority—with no objection to performing abortions, let alone to treating gays or unwed mothers or whatever; and once the patient is in the hospital's care, the hospital is responsible for his well-being.
I mean, come on—these are doctors we're talking about here. The Hippocratic Oath still holds. And to suggest that this Michigan law is actually intended to give doctors the slim excuses they crave to avoid treating people is to assume that all the state's hospitals and clinics are staffed by slavering evil beasts with no human compassion and a hankering to toss gay guys out into the dumpster behind the radiology wing. Just because it's a Midwestern state is not a good enough reason to believe that's true.
I've long been hesitant to apply the old Rorschach's test of "Are human beings fundamentally good, or fundamentally evil?" to the task of categorizing whether a person falls on the Left or Right side of a given argument. There are just too many contradicting positions one has to believe in. Limited government and capitalism, for example, depend on believing that humans are fundamentally evil (or at least inevitably corrupt); whereas gun freedom and and a lean welfare state and democracy depend on believing that humans are fundamentally good (or at least competent). Allowing oneself to be guided solely by whether one believes humanity is "good" or "evil" at heart leads to a really weird hybrid sort of political platform, so I really can't do it.
And yet the more I read, if this correspondent of mine is any indication, the more I feel that the far Left is driven by an irrational fear and morbid loathing of humanity itself so profound that I have to wonder if people like him have ever met any human beings. Everything they believe in seems to be centered around the enlightened few keeping the troglodytes in line; and for them to support things like communism (which requires complete and voluntary public cooperation and competence to work) suggests that either they haven't thought it out very carefully, or they secretly relish the thought of exiling "troublemakers" to gulags or putting them up against the wall.
Now, I understand that it's foolhardy to deny that a lot of people out there are venal, greedy, corrupt, stupid, incompetent, or (indeed) evil. Everything's not all right in the world, clearly, and human failings (particularly on the part of world leaders and those in positions of power) are usually to blame.
But as I said to the guy: an interesting thought experiment is to list all the people with whom you've come into contact over the course of the day. Can you seriously and fairly describe more than half of them as evil?
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| Tuesday, March 29, 2005 |
16:21 - The fog of blog
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Anything happening out there?
Seriously... it seems things have gotten pretty quiet lately. And perhaps that's only because I got new glasses yesterday, which I'm still getting used to (they're huge amounts sharper than my old ones, but if I look in any direction other than straight ahead, the image both goes out of focus and exhibits extreme chromatic aberration, like looking through a prism), so I'm still getting headaches whenever I try to read anything.
Ah well. Here's something from Sunday.
My camera has better lenses than my glasses.
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| Monday, March 28, 2005 |
09:26 - Why don't cats ever need chiropractors?
http://www.themoggy.com/olympics.htm
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The Silly Sleeping Pose Olympics.
Via Marcus.
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| Tuesday, March 22, 2005 |
19:09 - I do not think it means what you think it means
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15158_Demand_Google_News_Transparency&
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This is very enlightening, and very sad. In this example, starker than any I've yet seen, we get to see how the definitions of concepts like "racism" and "Naziism" and "hate" have changed in our modern discourse—and not, I fear, for the better.
Charles Johnson of LGF, in another installment in what's become an ongoing issue with the headline aggregation policies of Google News, has pointed out that while his own site had been repeatedly denied the voluntary listing by that service, the neo-Nazi site National Vanguard has been granted it. Now, while I can frankly see how this is consistent with Google's stated policy—namely, that any "news site" that sources original material is fair game for listing, and LGF really doesn't produce enough new material to qualify—the storm that has swirled up around the matter has brought a few very ugly things to light.
Read through the comments on Jeff Jarvis' relevant thread to see the two sides of the argument at work: one, positing that Charles is a "racist" and a "Nazi" because his site (which prior to 9/11 was the home of an easygoing but occasionally grumpy long-haired art dude who liked to bicycle around Orange County and poke mild fun at George W. Bush) nowadays has the primary goal of pointing out real, documented instances of outrageous expressions of the virulent ideology that drives the enemies that attacked us three and a half years ago, and that the commenters on his so-called "hate" site (the smirkingly self-described "Lizardoid Minions") are little removed from the "digital brownshirts" that Al Gore spoke of with such fervor. And the other, defending Charles against such claims, challenging the first side to come up with actual evidence for making them.
It's funny, really—or would be, if it weren't so sad. The best that Side A can come up with for Charles himself is to say, essentially, "Well, it's not so much what he says, as how he says it—well, okay, it's not how he says it either;" and for the commenters, to pick out examples of people making injudicious statements that are easy to take out of the context of a real, demonstrated outrage to which they're responding, or to point at a person daring to express that he thinks homosexuality is wrong (for example) because it says so in the Bible, and declare the place a "right-wing" cesspool of "racists" and "bigots" and "Nazis".
Racist/Prejudicial Hatred and Stereotyping of Islam at LGF:
Religion of Savagery
Religion of Market Bombs
Religion of Misogyny
Religion of High Explosives
Religion of Suicide Car Bombs
Religion of Beheadings
Religion of Slaughter
Religion of Car Bombs
Plenty more examples of right wing hatred can be found here
And a response from shortly later:
John:
Plenty more examples of right wing hatred
How is pointing out (well-documented, factual) instances of Islamist savagery an example of right-wing hatred?
Btw, thank you for that post. I don't think I could've made a more effective argument for the importance, validity, and value of LGF if I'd tried.
It's come to this, then: compiling documentation of real, actual outrages, with photos and direct quotes from quite mainstream sources, and pointing at them with a glowering expression—why, that's racism! And never mind the things he's actually pointing at; those are just "the way things are", or "our fault", or (as one self-described gay person explains why he doesn't care that Charles is, from the Islamists' perspective, on his side):
Regarding Islam. I'm an American who does not plan to travel overseas to flaunt my sexuality, so I could give two shits what Islamic countries are doing. I do know, however, that there is an American Taliban that wishes it could do the same to gays here. I'll fight my battles at home first.
Here, in a quite compact space, we've got the purest distillation of the grotesque contortions that concepts like "racism" and "bigotry" and "human rights" have undergone in recent years. Charles, who—though a casual familiarity with his history and motivations makes obvious that it's not even remotely necessary—is careful to never even accidentally make any public statement that could be construed as "racist" (much as these guys try to demonstrate that his sarcasm toward dissembling Islamists amounts to such), and who runs perhaps the only site dedicated to applying the most rigorous standards of volunteer journalism to the cause of staring with a cold and unblinking eye at the threat that made itself plain to us on 9/11/01, is the Left's pariah. He's no better than the neo-Nazi site that Google News has voluntarily listed, in their eyes. Never mind the incalculable service he's done these past years, shining a light on matters that the evening news prefers to keep hushed-up; his daring to do it in the first place makes him the target of death threats, slander, and—perhaps most galling of all in the world of blogdom, where reputation is one's most prized asset—a name one can hardly even speak in mixed company.
And opposed to him is a guy who thinks the boundaries of human rights and civil society should coincide with those of our own country, and outside them—well, it's just the rest of the world. Screw it.
There is simply something wrong with this. I'm not asking that Charles Johnson be made the subject of statuary or hoisted on a cheering throng's shoulders. I'm not denying that the things he points out can easily be construed as bearing exceedingly ill will toward a certain class of people (though that class is hardly, when the discussion comes down to brass tacks, one that I'd be willing to defend, as they're the ones wholeheartedly following the ideology that is LGF's explicit nemesis). All I'm doing is pointing out that if terms like "racist" or "Nazi" or even "right-wing" have come to be construed so broadly that Johnson falls into their orbit, then they've lost all meaning.
It's easy to see, once you've sifted through this whole avalanche of irrational hatred, how the logical progression works: Republicans (for some reason) are associated with racism. LGF points out repeated examples of atrocities committed by a group that looks like a race. Charles Johnson defends Bush and his policies in the War on Terror. Ergo, Johnson is a racist and LGF is a hate site. QED. (Oh, and Bush is Hitler.)
But starting from the thesis that most of the denizens of LGF—if you honestly follow their discussions, as few on the opposite side seem willing to do—are in fact former Lefties themselves, comprising every facet of society from white to black to male to female to gay to Jewish to Chinese to Cuban to even Arab, who have chosen to recognize the Islamofascist threat to all of them for what it is, and refuse to back down from pointing it out wherever it rears up just because it's not politically correct to do so... well, "race" itself becomes the reddest herring that I've ever pushed to the side of the plate. Race is completely irrelevant to me and (I submit) to the vast majority of LGFers. Ask 'em and they'll tell you, in style as much as in substance; you simply won't hear anyone rail on the way the people at Vanguard do, because they're the real deal. And LGF is about as different in spirit and in practice as it can be.
That's the tragedy that's unfolding here. People who frequent LGF aren't just not racists, they hate racists. It's one of the few things they do hate. And if that makes LGF a "hate" site, well... sign me up too, because the term is meaningless anyway.
UPDATE: Hey, welcome, lizardoid minions. Heh—"eloquent"? This is about as embarrassingly leaden as my prose has ever gotten. But still, thanks, and my pleasure.
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13:20 - Everybody knows that
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524904.300
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This New Scientist article (via Brian D) makes the following claim:
THE rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1 per cent of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20 per cent. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?
Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of...
And from there it springboards off into funky applications of gaseous particle physics to determine how the wealthiest gas particles keep the poor gas particles crushed under their jack-booted neutrons. But I have to wonder where the underlying assumption comes from, or how right it is.
As Dean Esmay quizzed a few weeks ago:
1) In the last ten years, has the rate of violent crime gone up or down in the United States?
2) How about the rate of auto fatalities over the last ten years?
3) How about teen pregnancy and STD rates?
4) How about drug and alcohol use and abuse rates?
5) As a percentage of the average American's annual income, or net wealth, has the national debt gone up or down over the last 50 years?
6) Are casualties in Iraq higher than Vietnam, lower than Vietnam, or about the same as Vietnam?
7) Has the air been growing more polluted or less polluted over the last 10 years? How about over the last 50 years? Or the last 100?
8) How about the quality of water in rivers and lakes over the last 10 years, or the last 30 years?
9) Have standards of living for the poor gone up or down over the last 10 years? The last 30 years? The last 50 years? The last 100 years?
10) Compared to, say, 40 years ago, do more people have health insurance today, or less people?
Go see the original post for the answers, but you can probably guess from the tone, huh?
Seems to me that someone, on some side or other, is cherry-picking data to look as heinous (or as rosy) as possible. Which one do you suppose it might be? Which one is it more likely to be?
Of course, whenever something makes the news and is presented to the public as an extant problem, the gut reaction that's all but engineered into the very presentation is "There oughtta be a law". Whether intentional or not, that's surely at the heart of so much perceived media bias, right?
After all, they're just watching out for our best interests.
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| Monday, March 14, 2005 |
15:35 - If you say so
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/349tpijp.asp?pg=1
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Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard:
"Pursue your happiness. We were the first country to do it. And we live for that, the fact that people have personal rights. Go where you want. Do what you want. The fact that I chose Canada is almost a bigger embodiment of the American dream. . . . I still love America."
"So you're saying being unpatriotic is an act of patriotism?" I counter, though my heart is no longer in it.
"I've had too many cocktails for that one," Wright says.
It stops looking like Canada-bashing after the first few paragraphs, I promise. After that it becomes good.
Seriously, for any who care: if I ever come across as being derisive or dismissive of Canada, that's almost certainly not my intent. There are things about the country's politics and social impulses that I don't agree with, and that I find interesting as illustrative measures in understanding how our own government works—a rather important thing, one would think, as we watch a whole part of the world on the brink of inventing new governments of its own after the models it sees in us and other modern democracies. But that doesn't mean I don't find the place fascinating, the people friendly (America-bashing aside), and the country itself a place I'm looking forward to visiting again this summer. Just because I'll be glad to get back home—unlike those profiled in this article—doesn't mean I never wanted to come in the first place.
Via Paul Denton.
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12:13 - Yesteryear
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I always enjoy Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons' updates on SomethingAwful.com; he's more serious and even-handed than the rest of the site's writers, he's a great storyteller, and he's well-read and incisive and deeply, deeply interested in his subject matter to boot. As an obsessive student of World War II, he shows a loving familiarity with the silliest and most awesome technology to come out of Nazi Germany, and with respectable apolitical figures like Rommel; but he never lets that cloud his vision of the larger issues, as with his republishing last week of Julius Streicher's Never Trust a Fox in His Green Meadow and Never Trust the Oath of a Jew—which may in fact be illegal to read if you live in some European countries. (I'm sure we all remember when France tried to sue Yahoo for allowing French citizens to stumble onto auctions where Nazi paraphernalia was being sold.)
Which is a shame, because nothing—nothing—is more important than making sure people are familiar with this sort of thing and what it looks like.
If it's kept under lock and key, we stop being able to recognize things like it—and more alarmingly, we start mistaking everything for it. I'd challenge any of our professional alarmists, the ones who insist that America is a racist state sowing fear and hatred against minorities in our midst and insinuations that every Muslim hides a bomb under his coat, to take a good look at what Parsons is shoving in our faces and forcing us to confront, and then to explain where in modern American society anything like this is allowed to exist. Seriously.
Ours is a world where our "Hitler" figure, rather than commissioning books like this from our "Streichers", gives speeches fawning over our "Jews". And yet, to many, the situations are indistinguishable.
On a related note, I've been re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia, just because it's been so long—and I am finding myself endlessly amused by all the subtext that C.S. Lewis apparently couldn't resist throwing in, increasingly as the books went on. I'm not just talking about the "Aslan is Jesus" stuff; we all know about that (glorifications of Bacchanalian orgies notwithstanding). I'm talking about Lewis' unapologetic disdain for democracy and romanticization of divine monarchy. Everywhere you turn there's more evidence of it. Nothing's ever as it should be except when a Human is king. Nothing made Caspian an inherently better ruler than Miraz except that he was the "rightful" king by birth. Miraz is scornfully referred to as having originally seized power under the title of "Lord Protector", a reference that must have been alarming to Lewis' original British readers—and all the more so today—in its derision obliquely directed toward Cromwell's republican revolution in British government. The tenor rises along these lines throughout Lewis' writing and reaches a head in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Lewis gives himself thoroughly over to the conceit—embodying everything he loathed about modern utilitarian British society in Eustace, as well as in the bureaucratic Governor Gumpas, whom Caspian overthrows and replaces with a Duke ("I think we've had enough of Governors") seemingly for the crime of doggedly administering his province according to the people's expressed needs, though the overt reason (outlawing slavery) is honorable enough. In that same book, Lewis muses that the kids' earlier return to Narnia had been like King Arthur returning to Britain, "as some say he will. And I say the sooner the better."
But all this is just amusement. What I wonder is this: what chance would the Narnia books have of being published today, given Lewis' unflattering and unmistakable portrayal of Calormen, the all-but-undisguised stand-in for the Islamic world—which in its imperialism and militancy and social equivocation is responsible ultimately for the destruction of Aslan's whole universe? None, that's what chance.
And yet compared to Streicher's work, it's nothing.
Some days I think we have to invent these cartoons of old, defeated problems simply to avoid having to face the real problems we legitimately face in the modern world. At least we know we can defeat Naziism, so we'd rather spend our time running the last vestiges of racism and sexism and homophobia and lack of diversity to ground than turn and deal with Islamofascism. We haven't converted that particular storybook into a museum piece yet.
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| Thursday, March 10, 2005 |
11:58 - Something that deserves attention
http://akcomics.com/
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AK Comics: "Middle East Heroes". A comic book company based in Egypt with an aim toward being "educational and a force for moderation". And you know—their site could use an editor, but the art is damn good, as are the stories they appear to be presenting. Quite a breath of fresh air indeed.
Via Dean, who was similarly pleasantly surprised.
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11:30 - Scylla and Charybdis
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15019_IKEA_Dhimmitude_Watch&only=yes
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Poor IKEA. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
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| Wednesday, March 9, 2005 |
17:06 - Oh, Napster. Will you ever learn?
http://marv.kordix.com/archives/000416.html
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Remember how quickly people figured out how to break Napster? Constrained only by the speed of real-time playback and re-encoding from a WinAmp output plugin, any Napster subscriber—or free trial user—could simply download as many songs as he wanted and convert them into DRM-less MP3s, and there was nothing Napster could do to stop him or even to determine that he was doing it.
Well, now even that one saving grace (the real-time playback step) is gone: a program called Virtuosa 5.0 allows users to convert DRM'd WMA files with nary a care as to their purported copy-protection. And now you can simply download all Napster's music for free.
What're ya waiting for?
(Via Bob, whose friend is now 15,000 free songs richer after his 2-week free Napster trial.)
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15:29 - Shooting the messenger
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Either incompetent or lying. This kind of vocabulary sucks to have to use; but it's the only one that works.
I don't see any other way to attempt to explain the people who are trying to minimize or change the terms of discussion regarding the Rathergate memos. Like Tim Goodman of the estimable SF Chronicle, via Tim Blair:
The fetid amusement of killing Dan Rather ends tonight. And what a tired affair it was.
There’s no pride in watching the deconstruction of a man. You can take all your conservative pundits who rode down the warpaths of perceived biased and mute them forever now. You can take your navel-gazing journalists who believe Rather made A Big Mistake He Must Pay For and put them in a room, where their own self importance will choke them all to death. And you can take your CBS backstabbers who found in Rather’s last hours of weakness a chance to rise up and join the chorus of haters—becoming smaller themselves as the time of his career suicide drew near—and give them all a great big prize for bravery.
And yes, that includes Walter Cronkite.
Take them all away. Anybody who found joy in this deserves to rot in their own mean-spiritedness. Bravo, you threw stones at a 74-year-old careerist. You whispered sad stories about a weird man to a press corps all too willing to take him out. Dan Rather, who was by most accounts ambitious, polarizing, determined, a self-promoter, a tireless worker, a man who believed in his own ideals, a square peg in the proverbial round hole, the replacement for a myth, a flawed arbiter of history, a man less smooth than his peers and, lastly, a man complicit in a story that may have been inaccurate but not entirely wrong, is no longer the Dan Rather we knew …
And now his time is over—not merely part of an era ended, as when Brokaw retired, but a tortured anti-hero paying the price for indiscretions few can even remember.
It's times like this that all you can do is stare quizzically at the person spewing words like these, squint a little, see if they're joking... and if it's clear that they're not, flail your arms as wildly as you can and yell, at the top of your lungs, THEY WERE FREAKING FAKE!
Auto-centered address at the top. Times New Roman. Crumpled and smoothed out to look old. Etc, etc, etc.
This is what Dan Rather presented, uncritically and with great fanfare, to a credulous public that trusted him. That's a failure of basic journalism that would disgrace a freshman stringer. And yet Rather, senior anchorman, spiritual heir to the legacy of Cronkite and Murrow, whether because of intent to deceive or inability to detect obvious fraud went ahead and presented it anyway. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him? We're supposed to give him a break?
See LGF for all the rest of the damning analysis including lots of visual aids every bit as good as the one above. Incorrect abbreviations, date discrepancies, unauthentic military usage and style, badly forged signatures, testimonials from the people who knew Killian (including the secretary who would have typed the memos if they'd been real), and on and on.
But really, none of it should be necessary at all; because the docs are bloody WORD PRINTOUTS. They just are. Who seriously cannot tell that? Anyone who has used a computer at all in the last ten years knows a Word document when he or she sees it—there are just certain subtle but obvious elements to the way Word creates default documents, including the font, the margins, the tab stops, the word wrap, and the autocorrected features like the infamous superscript "th" that people are still trying to tell the public was a common feature on 1972-era desk typewriters in general use in Texas Air National Guard offices and used by colonels who hated typing.
You don't need to know the arcane details of typography to see these things for what they are. All you have to do is use Word on occasion. And considering that these are all reporters advancing these defensive stories, how likely is it that none of them have ever used Word? Of those who have, how many have even seen the memos in question and done any thinking on their own about what they rather seem to look like—let alone looked at the LGF/Power Line/INDC Journal images to see the evidence of their own eyes? Any of them?
Either they're ignoring material evidence or they're unable to interpret it in a professional manner. Does that make them incompetent, or outright liars? It's got to be one of the two.
They're trying to shift the discussion onto being some kind of "witch-hunt" where sinister conservative bloggers are given "marching orders" (I love how often that term comes up) by some "Buckhead" guy at The Free Republic (Karl Rove in disguise, perhaps?) to go forth and whip up a media frenzy over pointless little inanities of fonts and kerning and such, gnawing on it tenaciously until we have the precious, precious blood of our lifelong foe Dan Rather.
To me, though, and to LGF's readers and most of the sane sector of the blogosphere, it looks instead like there's a big ugly FACT sitting right here on our front lawn like the biggest dog turd you've ever seen, and Dan Rather's standing there smirking with his huge slobbery Great Dane at his side, and he's pointing innocently at himself and going, "What? Me? You think I did something wrong here?"
Seriously, it does not get much more cut-and-dried than this here. And yet it's apparently a sign of the times that even that isn't enough to generate a case any more conclusive than the O.J. trial. Now we have Rather retiring among accolades and retrospectives and sniffly defense editorials, rather than with the disgraced discretion anyone of his credentials should have the decency to assume after being so closely associated with such a scandal. Either Rather is incompetent or lying—or he's totally surrounded by assistants and deputies who are incompetent or lying, which is hardly any better.
That's what I don't get about this, and why I feel compelled to weigh in for what I hope is one last time (it's okay, Tim Goodman): this should be an open-and-shut case, where not just the evidence itself but plain common sense tells us a more unequivocal story than just about any since Watergate or Monicagate. And yet not only is there no real contrition among the affected parties for what happened, there's not even any consensus. It's like we've got a team of philosopher-poets all crouching around that big steaming pile on the lawn, all rubbing their chins and trying to come up with as many possible explanations as they can, some plausible and some not, for what else but what it looks like it might possibly be.
I'd love to put it behind us. It's a disgrace to all of us for it to have happened in our news media at all. But we can't do so if the way this incident goes into the history books is as a mean-spirited, blown-out-of-proportion smear job by a bunch of paid partisan hacks against an honorable and honest newsman at the end of his career. That's a grave insult to the very concepts of civil rational discourse, honest and well-researched news reporting, and careful scientific analysis, the very things we're supposed to be trying to have more of in this country. ...Right?
UPDATE: And now that Dan's history, it's on to more fertile territory, in which a new and potentially embarrassing account of Saddam's capture is debunked in detail by the technically savvy and first-handedly familiar before the news media even have time to put together their front-page treatments of it. SomethingAwful is mentioned.
UPDATE: Oh yes—and as Steve W. mentions, couldn't Rather have saved himself hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply firing up Word on his own computer (assuming he has such a device) and trying to reproduce the Killian documents on his own? If he has any conversance whatsoever with the basic modern tools of journalism, that little experiment ought to tell him all he ever needed to know.
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| Tuesday, March 8, 2005 |
16:34 - Frabjous Day
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It should be noted that Google Maps works with Safari now.
And there was much rejoicing. (Are we still allowed to say that, like 1990's college freshmen?)
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14:21 - With great power comes great responsibility
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1110304808.shtml
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So, it seems, goes the thinking that underlies actions like the "several dozen European victims of Asia's tsunami disaster" who have decided to sue the Thai government, the French hotel chain Sofitel, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for criminal negligence in not being all-powerful—for not, in effect, preventing the tsunami.
It's not just that "there's money on the table", as with the case of these lawsuits against the iPod and iTunes Music Store for using technologies widely in use across a whole spectrum of devices and services—technically everyone from Microsoft to Creative to Napster should be targets too, but it's just that Apple is the big fish, and so they're the ones getting sued. No, in this case it appears to be something subtly more insidious: it's the belief that now that the U.S. is the world's most conspicuous superpower, it ought to be expected to behave as though it had superpowers. It's like, "Okay, you Americans: you want to act like you own the place? Fine, then—you get to take the blame for anything that goes wrong, even things that aren't remotely your fault. Even things that you do more to remedy after the fact than anyone else on the planet. Because, you see, anything that goes wrong, no matter how well you clean it up afterwards, still went wrong—and thus is your responsibility. You wanted this role, you get everything that comes with it. Including the most unreasonable demands ever made in an acolyte's desperate prayer. You're God now, so you'd better act the part."
To some, I'm sure, it must seem like the height of hubris for a country in the position of the U.S. to have sole superpower status—in other words, to refuse to voluntarily give up power until it's coequal with everyone else, whatever sense that would make—and yet to decline to be held responsible for Acts of God. (After all, we should be in the position to prevent Acts of God, shouldn't we?) If we're the world's policeman, we have to be the world's caretaker too, goes the logic. Seasoned as it is with sour grapes.
I'm reminded of a Star Trek: TNG episode, a particularly tedious one (though probably through no fault of its own) in which Clarke's hoary old "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" witticism is played to the hilt: "The Picard" is charged with the unenviable task of explaining to a preindustrial, hut-dwelling race that his starships and transporters are merely the historical expansion of bows and arrows, not superhuman magic. Of course, he can't get through to them that he doesn't possess the power to defeat death and is not there to pass moral judgment on them; they end up placing both the plaudits due a god, and the demands for favorable weather and restoration of loved ones' lives expected from one, at his feet.
Of course the episode ends with wisdom having been dispensed and understanding sown—but the Prime Directive has to hold sway, and The Picard refuses to be held responsible for bringing either supernatural good or supernatural evil to the planet; the price is that the Federation will keep its distance and not be seen. A god can't be seen, or else he's bound to be held responsible for anything that happens, regardless of how much in his power it is to affect it one way or the other.
So we're being tested, here on post-Cold-War Earth. Can America play a realistic role on the world stage—where we keep order and provide plenty and comfort where it's in our power to do so, and yet where it's acknowledged where our powers and responsibilities end? Or do we have to accept the mantle of omnipotence, with all that implies, through the very decision of refusing to withdraw from world affairs altogether?
As Michael Demmons, who comments on this story, says:
I'm a Canadian who has lived here for nearly 5.5 years. I really don't know how Americans put up with constantly being blamed for, well, everything.
I guess it comes with the territory.
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| Friday, March 4, 2005 |
21:30 - Redundancy of the day
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Seen in the checkout line:
"Gambling for Dummies"
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| Wednesday, March 2, 2005 |
11:54 - Keep the dream alive
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006362
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Via Instapundit and transcribed by James Taranto, a fly-on-the-wall moment where the horror of the realization that maybe there might be some good in the world coming of the Bush Doctrine creeps out, manifested through Jon Stewart's ever-increasing cognitive dissonance at seeing everything he's fought so hard against having such positive consequences for the world.
Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process--they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole--
Stewart: This could be unbelievable!
Soderberg:---series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's--
Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's--
Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.
Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.
Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.
Stewart: [crossing fingers] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it's--it is--I absolutely agree with you, this is--this is the most difficult thing for me to--because, I think, I don't care for the tactics, I don't care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven't seen results like this ever in that region.
Soderberg: Well wait. It hasn't actually gotten very far. I mean, we've had--
Stewart: Oh, I'm shallow! I'm very shallow!
Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work. No, but I think, um, it's--you know, you have changes going on in Egypt; Saudi Arabia finally had a few votes, although women couldn't participate. What's going on here in--you know, Syria's been living in the 1960s since the 1960s--it's, part of this is--
Stewart: You mean free love and that kind of stuff? [audience laughter] Like, free love, drugs?
Soderberg: If you're a terrorist, yeah.
Stewart: They are Baathists, are they--it looks like, I gotta say, it's almost like we're not going to have to invade Iran and Syria. They're gonna invade themselves at a certain point, no? Or is that completely naive?
Soderberg: I think it's moving in the right direction. I'll have to give them credit for that. We'll see.
But there's "always hope that this might not work". Just as some have held that a KFC outlet in Baghdad would be a far worse fate for Iraqis than a lifetime under Saddam, for some people—even aides to President Clinton, such as this Nancy Soderberg—find it far more important to ensure that Bush and the Republicans don't get credit for any positive change in the world than for that change to happen in the first place. Better the Middle East status quo should endure for another eight years than have Iraqis and Lebanese SMS'ing each other "Thank You George W. Bush" messages.
As Soderberg also says: "As a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen." It speaks volumes right there that these two goals, these two identities, should be at odds, doesn't it?
Right now the big thing that MoveOn.org is gearing itself up for is the defense against Bush's Social Security renovation. They're soliciting Flash ads bolstered by talent from John Cusack, Aaron McGruder, and other luminaries, with the goal of preventing Bush's plans for partial Social Security privatization from becoming reality. This is an issue I have no strong opinions on; I stand to be convinced either way. I don't know a whole lot of facts on the subject. But I do know a few bits of trivia that seem to be getting covered up and kept out of the public discourse on the matter:
FDR never intended Social Security to be a mandatory federal program for perpetuity; he explicitly stated that he intended it to be privatized over a gradual process (or maybe he didn't—but there's plenty of debate over what he meant Social Security to be);
Bush's plan is entirely voluntary—you can continue to put your money into Social Security if you'd rather trust it than the stock and bond markets;
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been direly warning us of the imminent doom of Social Security for decades now; I spent my high school years listening to earnest adults telling me solemnly to make sure to save money in private accounts—just stick $1000 in a savings account at age 18, they said, and let the compound interest accrue—because there would be no money to pay for my retirement if all we relied on was Social Security; and as far as I know, nothing has changed to make that less true in recent years;
"Safe until 2038" is not a very reassuring thing for the Democrats to be saying. I don't consider 30 years to be sufficiently long-term for any program that has an effect on my life—it's barely sufficient to hope that UNIX timestamps will be retrofitted by that time.
So given these pieces of information, what exactly is the genesis of this reluctance to make a few changes in the interest of greater flexibility and freedom with our money? The college kids rallying behind Michael Moore must understand that they'll be retiring at just about the date that Social Security is being projected—by their own statistics—to run out its guarantee of solvency. Can't they see that it's in their interests to do something? It must go against their very nature, too: what college-campus mob ever rallied around banners saying EVERYTHING'S OKAY and KEEP THE STATUS QUO? It's ridiculous. It's like a bumper sticker Principal Skinner would have on his car.
What it comes down to, apparently, is simply that it's something Bush is in favor of, so automatically it's something that must be opposed. The worst outcome ever, of course, would be if Bush were to fix Social Security—and then get the credit for it. Better to ride a sinking ship down into the deep than to be rescued by a boat with an elephant printed on the side.
It's all the harder to escape this conclusion when we've got Howard Dean showing his dedication to pluralism by kicking off his stint as head of the DNC saying "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for." Really, Howard? Everything?
I've seen this kind of reactionaryism in several places before, but nowhere so vividly as in Muslim victims of bombs or earthquakes or tsunamis refusing to be rescued by Israelis.
That isn't what the Democrats have become, is it?
UPDATE: Not if people like this are as capable of putting dedication to the greater good above party purity. Guys, nobody's going to laugh at you if you say you were wrong. Here's a little secret: it'll make people respect you more.
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09:41 - Yahoo turns ten
http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo_birthday/
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It's the big one-oh for the oldest websites out there these days; and Yahoo is celebrating by buying everyone ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins.
And look what they used to look like...
And Flash can be used for good, it seems...
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| Monday, February 28, 2005 |
00:10 - Being Jim Henson
http://www.joeytomatoes.com/muppetsovertimeoriginal05.htm
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How French does a French student film get?
About this French.
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16:41 - 9/11 Republicans
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/02/24/cstillwell.DTL
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Via LGF:
Thoroughly disgusted by the behavior of those on the left, I began to look elsewhere for support. To my astonishment, I found that the only voices that seemed to me to be intellectually and morally honest were on the right. Suddenly, I was listening to conservative talk-show hosts on the radio and reading conservative columnists, and they were making sense. When I actually met conservatives, I discovered that they did not at all embody the stereotypes with which I'd been inculcated as a liberal.
Although my initial agreement with voices on the right centered on the war on terrorism, I began to find myself in concurrence with other aspects of conservative political philosophy as well. Smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics and the benefits of living in a meritocracy all became important to me. In truth, it turns out I was already conservative on many of these subjects but had never been willing to admit as much.
In my search for like-minded individuals, I also gravitated toward the religiously observant. This was somewhat revolutionary, considering my former liberal discomfort with religious folk, but I found myself in agreement on a number of issues. When it came to support for Israel, Orthodox Jews and Christian Zionists were natural allies. As the left rained down vicious attacks on Israel, commentators on the right (with the exception of Pat Buchanan and his ilk) became staunch supporters of the nation. The fact that I'm not a particularly religious person myself had little bearing on this political relationship, for it's entirely possible to be secular and not be antireligious. Unlike the secular fundamentalists who make it their mission in life to destroy all vestiges of America's Judeo-Christian heritage, I have come to value this legacy.
So I became what's now commonly known as a "9/11 Republican."
So that's how such a thing might happen!
Oh yeah. I guess I knew that already.
And incidentally, what with events having played out this weekend while I was up playing in the snow, it sure seems like such people have a lot to feel vindicated about these days. Mike Hendrix rounds up reactions from many of those whose voices have played significant roles in bringing us to this point.
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| Sunday, February 27, 2005 |
23:42 - Placerville Nazis. I hate these guys.
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Phew. Just got in from a very satisfying ski weekend. Kirkwood the first day, Sierra-at-Tahoe the second; it was my first time at Kirkwood, and while I don't think I was ever ready before this year for its overwhelming preponderance of expert slopes, this time around I was really able to take full advantage of the whole gnarled mountain, including the steep (and mercifully un-mogully) black-diamond runs that start with a straight-downhill drop from the "Cornice", and I got a ton of photos from the ridgetops over the course of the day as the clouds rolled in and the sun played across the panoramas. The other three guys I was with got pretty well beat-up, and my feet were none too happy with me either (Kirkwood is very much an old-school resort, and much of its gear is rather agéd); and I ended up skiing most of the second day myself, as they recuperated and waited and stuck around the less demanding areas. But it was awesome over in West Bowl, where they'd smoothed out some of the formerly mogully black-diamond runs to get some huge swooshy slopes that were an absolute joy to take at as close to full speed as I can manage. I did Clipper three times in a row. Which was just as well, as they'd converted more runs than ever this year to snowboard terrain parks.
But we left at 2:00, to stay ahead of both the weather and the traffic; turns out the former worked out well, but not the latter, as the traffic snarled up unaccountably near Pollock Pines, and never let up until Sacramento. And one side effect of the bumper-to-bumper through the canyon where Placerville is nestled was that after stopping for some gas, we found ourselves becalmed at a traffic light right across from a fairly large demonstration. Not a nice demonstration, either. One of those kinds of demonstrations. Which they've apparently had a problem with in Placerville for some time now.
I saw the sign pictured in that link-- the HOMOSEXUALITY IS SIN one, on a giant board carried on the back of a pickup truck that had passed close by us as we filled up at the gas station, along with a good number of other charming sentiments, including pictures of lewd acts with circle-strikethroughs and such. The theme was ostensibly a protest against gay marriage; but lest one imagine that this was just some well-meaning religious folks doing this, the demonstration in question, filing through downtown (underneath a forlorn illuminated sign on a rooftop reading OUR COMMUNITY WELCOMES EVERYBODY), consisted of a bunch of yokels carrying Confederate flags, signboards, and those black flags with the plus-like cross in a big circle. Never seen one of those in person before.
These are the guys that the Right is going to have to distance itself from if it wants moderates on its side. Objection to gay marriage on the grounds of what simply makes natural sense? Fine. Objection to gay marriage on the grounds of the Bible? Understandable. But making common cause with white supremacists? That's the line.
Eventually the traffic started moving again, and carried us west out of the Hangtown canyon. And we weren't ten minutes down the road when we ran into the first fringes of a huuuuge rainstorm, pushing inexorably eastward.
HA-ha.
UPDATE: Of course, the best weapon to have on hand at such times as these is usually a camera, which is why I feel like a doofus for not snapping a few as we drove by on the highway, stopped in traffic as we were. It was a clear shot, my camera was right in my pocket—but the experience of seeing those guys in person was just so bizarre that it simply never occurred to me to do anything but stare.
I always feel like I'll be well prepared for the second occurrence of any confrontation. It's that first one that I have trouble being ready for...
UPDATE: Maybe this would have helped. Yeah, thanks, JMH.
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| Thursday, February 24, 2005 |
17:41 - 1000 words, but you only need seven
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"That'd be the short bus," says the caption as forwarded by a friend.
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13:32 - All in one convenient location
http://coldfury.com/?p=5332
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Mike at Cold Fury once again renews his claim to said blog title with an outstanding essay on "supporting the troops":
But tell me, does the arrogance of that approach sound at all familiar? It should by now; we’ve heard plenty of it over the years, and the latest incarnation (besides Will’s, I mean) surfaced just after the ‘04 election, with the phrase “they (meaning red-state Americans) voted against their own best interests.”
Well, thanks a lot for coming down from the mountaintop to render that enlightened judgment, fellas. And I’se sho’ the soldiers would want to thanks you too for not laughing right out loud at they po’ ign’ant selfs, Marse Will. I take that tone advisedly; liberal condescension reminds me of nothing so much as the old slave-owner’s rationalization that the Negro actually needed slavery because without it, he was too darn stupid to be counted on to come in out of the rain. The difference between that attitude and the one these Lefties are taking with soldiers—and anybody notice how often they refer to these mostly in-their-20s men and women as “kids” or “children,” by the way?—is one only of degree.
But the real fun to be had is in the comments—where exactly the same people Mike criticizes drop in to leave some of the most inane, frothingly mad, patently ridiculous posts I've seen, and all of them striking a "Yoo idi0tt!!!1 I AM genious and U are STOOPID evil Nazi facist!!!1" tone that would be cute if there weren't so darned many of these guys. Hell, all they have to have is an editor, and they're qualified to run a radio or TV talk show or make Oscar-winning documentaries.
They're they only ones capable of leaving such a thread thinking the same things they did going in, and as such I think I have to agree with Mike: they're beyond help. Trying only leads to heartbreak.
Hey, I didn't say stop.
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| Wednesday, February 23, 2005 |
21:20 - I can change, I can change
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Reading this piece in Der Spiegel, why is it that I'm reminded inexorably of the end of Rocky IV—the one from 1985 where after beating Dolph Lundgren, the Soviet superman boxer dude, to a bloody pulp, Sylvester Stallone slurs out drunkenly that "I guess what I'm trynna say is.... if I can change.... and you can change... everybody can change"? And after sitting there looking stunned for a moment, the Gorbachev stand-in and all his bemedaled retinue slooowly stand... and slooowly begin clapping... and the Soviet Union sloooowly begins to crumble?
As I think back on it, that must have been one of the most insulting movies ever, if you were a Russian democrat. The idea that all that had to happen to get communism to fall was for some drooly palooka to stumble off the edge of a boxing ring and blurt out some puddle-deep crap about how it's conceivable to do something else with your economic and political system. I mean, imagine you're some political dissident or expatriate, a victim of Khrushchev's or Brezhnev's KGB, with family that had been "disappeared" and five name changes and as many fake passports covering your trail. What goes through your mind: "Wow, you mean we can change? That's all we had to say?"
And yet, somehow, it ended up being on the right side of history—and a better prognosticator of future events than, say, White Nights. Perhaps "stupid but optimistic" simply carries a more lasting and infectious message than "glumly realistic" to the most important audience of all, the body politic.
But anyway, I'm glad to see some people in high places starting to talk like this, even if just because they know this kind of headline is so shocking that it's bound to sell newspapers. The argument this guy makes is pretty simple: no conspiracies, no dire evil. It's just sense. It's self-critical, but it has the ring of reality. Or so it seems to me.
All things considered, I think this would be a better world if more people were to listen to such a perspective with an open mind, and do what the mindset it creates says needs to be done to and for this planet. Maybe believing in stupid fantasies isn't such a bad thing after all.
UPDATE: Sure looks like it's working for Lebanon.
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14:19 - Here Comes the Metric System
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1540&u=/afp/usweathercalifornia&printer=1
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In this AFP story on the Los Angeles flooding, via CapLion:
The winter season is the fourth wettest to hit usually-parched Los Angeles in 115 years, with more than 10.16 centimeters (33.87 inches) falling so far, compared to an annual average of around 4.5 (15 inches).
The wettest winter ever recorded was that of 1883-1884 season, when 38.18 inches fell, meteorologists said.
Uh... come again?
I haven't checked the exchange rates recently, but last I saw, 1 inch = 2.54 cm. Right? So even reversing the units doesn't make sense. What the devil's going on here?
I guess even the weather is too subjective for these guys to get the facts right, anymore.
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08:56 - Based on a true story
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I wonder if anyone in Hollywood has the will to make a movie that goes as follows:
It's about the Iraq war and the campaign against the insurgency. It follows a unit of Marine Infantry through some of the more redoubtable towns as they try to take out the resistance while upholding the insane level of untouchability our military these days applies to certain "noncombatant" structures like hospitals, schools, and mosques and to differentiate between armed enemies and the civilians they were so often disguised as. A segment of the movie, about half an hour long, follows the unit through some particularly tough neighborhood in, say, Fallujah; Black Hawk Down-style, it observes as the men go house to house, breaking down doors, taking sniper fire from rooftops, chasing RPG-bearing insurgents down alleyways, and losing men in the process, not least because of the extreme precautions taken not to engage mosques and schools, even though those buildings are being audaciously used by the insurgents as weapons depots and sniper nests and gathering and staging locations. No matter, they're untouchable.
Finally, at the end of the day, the area is cleaned out and secure, and through superhuman effort (and the sacrifice of a dozen or more soldiers), the local mosques survived with only a few chips in the mortar.
Back at the forward base, the unit tiredly congratulates itself for a job well done, and yet the mood is somber because of the losses they took, the men they lost because they took risks they wouldn't otherwise have taken in order to minimize the impact on the civilian infrastructure which they'd committed to protecting even though the Geneva Conventions no longer applied. But it was worth it, surely.
Then they get a CARE package from home, a shipment of letters from grade school students. Oh good! The mood lightens. The perfect end to a wearying but rewarding day, right?
Pfc. Rob Jacobs of New Jersey said he was initially ecstatic to get a package of letters from sixth-graders at JHS 51 in Park Slope last month at his base 10 miles from the North Korea border.
That changed when he opened the envelope and found missives strewn with politically charged rhetoric, vicious accusations and demoralizing predictions that only a handful of soldiers would leave the Iraq war alive.
“It’s hard enough for soldiers to deal with being away from their families, they don’t need to be getting letters like this,” Jacobs, 20, said in a phone interview from his base at Camp Casey. “If they don’t have anything nice to say, they might as well not say anything at all.”
One Muslim boy wrote: “Even thoe [sic] you are risking your life for our country, have you seen how many civilians you or some other soldier killed?”
His letter, which was stamped with a smiley face, went on: “I know your [sic] trying to save our country and kill the terrorists but you are also destroying holy places like Mosques.”
Makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?
Oh, how I would love to see that scene on the big screen. Any big-time producers in the audience?
UPDATE: Especially if it has this scene in it.
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| Monday, February 21, 2005 |
16:18 - Do not eat Cooper Mini
http://counterfeitmini.org/
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Who says the Brits get all the best tongue-in-cheek advertising campaigns?
True, they have this IKEA series, which is just outstanding. But hey: we've got Counterfeit Minis, with its own website to support the TV campaign.
It's really a hoot. Check out the whole site—it even has an area where you can upload your own "fakes"...
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| Sunday, February 20, 2005 |
16:07 - So you want to destroy the Earth
http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html
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It's harder than you might think.
Have movies lied to me again?!
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15:53 - Some fundamentalist
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14772_NYT_Publishes_Secretly_Recorded_
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I wonder if these seventeen minutes of tape will somehow go missing at some point.
Early on, though, Mr. Bush appeared most worried that Christian conservatives would object to his determination not to criticize gay people. “I think he wants me to attack homosexuals,” Mr. Bush said after meeting James Robison, a prominent evangelical minister in Texas.
But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: “Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”
Later, he read aloud an aide’s report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: “This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It’s hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however.”
“This is an issue I have been trying to downplay,” Mr. Bush said. “I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays.”
Told that one conservative supporter was saying Mr. Bush had pledged not to hire gay people, Mr. Bush said sharply: “No, what I said was, I wouldn’t fire gays.”
As Charles points out, this is "a deeply spiritual man, who nevertheless has misgivings about the Christian far right and distances himself from them".
For gays to reflexively hoist up a rainbow-flag-flying Maginot line against him just because he has an R next to his name and mentions God once in a while only goes to show how poorly most of them understand either of those things.
The gall of reality, not to play to the preapproved script...
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| Saturday, February 19, 2005 |
02:23 - There's no "them" without an "us"
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/2005_02.php#009616
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Power Line has a great summary of that Guckert/Gannon thing that is apparently the big news story everyone's using to wash the bitter taste of the successful Iraqi elections out of their mouths: aahh, a nice fresh swig of seething and bitterness! Now that really hits the spot.
This bit is particularly fascinating, though:
Aravosis is quoted, too, and he makes no sense:
John Aravosis, a gay activist who posted the pictures of Gannon on his Americablog.org, said the issue is not Gannon’s right to be a journalist but his “White House access. . . . The White House wouldn’t let him in the door right now, knowing of his background.”
Aravosis said Gannon is guilty of “what I call family-values hypocrisy. Basically, he’s asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us.”
That is really one of the stupidest things I’ve read in a long time. Just try to parse Aravosis’s logic: The issue is Gannon’s White House access. But why is that an issue? There was nothing special about Gannon’s access, he got it the same way as everyone else. His “access” is an issue, according to Aravosis, because “the White House wouldn’t let him in the door right now, knowing of his background.” Huh? That is one of the most stunning non sequiturs ever. First of all, what is the evidence for the proposition that the White House would deny access to a reporter who was once a gay escort? The proposition is absurd on its face; it wasn’t the White House that drove Gannon out of his job, it was Aravosis and his friends. Second, even if that claim were true, so what?? How on earth would the White House’s attitude twoard gay escorts justify Aravosis in posting nude pictures of Gannon?
Aravosis claims further that Gannon is guilty of “hypocrisy,” an all-purpose charge that generally turns out to mean little or nothing. The “hypocrisy” in this case supposedly arises from “asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us.” This is another stunningly stupid statement. Every word in it is false. Gannon, first of all, never attacked the gay community; the gay community, in the person of Aravosis and others, attacked him. Neither did Gannon ask the gay community to protect him; Aravosis just made that up. On the contrary, the only reason Gannon needed protection is because he came under a vicious, unprovoked, personal attack from low-lifes with web sites, pre-eminently Aravosis, Kos and Atrios.
(Emphasis mine.) What this illustrates, to me, is that for certain segments of the population, it just isn't conceivable that a person would have any loyalty more exalted than to any particular "minority" group to which he might happen to belong. In this case, Aravosis apparently can't comprehend that Gannon wouldn't have sought to play the "gay card"; that his first instinct would not have been to seek refuge among the "gay community". That he apparently hasn't done this is something these guys don't seem to have a handler for; the only thing they can do is pump the idea that it's impossible to be a Republican—thus a "family values"-spouting moralist—and gay at the same time.
I guess it's something to do with cold practicality. When one sees a tribal group to belong to, based on something innate or physical rather than an adherence to some higher, macro-level ideological construct (which, to some, looks uncomfortably like religion), the tribalism wins out. Maybe we're just wired that way. This BBC op-ed staggers around peeing lavishly on Americans' refusal to be daunted by the realities of a grim world—instead, to "hold firm to a principle even when practicalities get in the way"—citing such examples as our treating the tsunami disaster as a potential source of inpiration and spiritual redemption rather than as some sort of apocalyptic pornography:
America is fast becoming a nation of faith not fact. A nation where the unpleasant aspects of human existence are simply airbrushed away.
Television coverage of the Asian Tsunami was a case in point. In Europe it was covered as an unrelenting tragedy, in America, one television network promised "incredible stories of lives saved in near miraculous fashion".
Americans want to believe in miracles, their heads are in the clouds.
While Europeans fret about what they regard as real life, about poverty and social justice and about combating AIDS, Americans find it easier to rally round a vision, however otherworldly it might be.
"Otherworldly" is how this guy describes Americans' coughing up over a billion private dollars to help the victims, rather than just sitting glued to the TV to see how many more bodies have been dug out of the mud and how long it'll be before the resorts reopen. How chastening.
I think some people have carefully trained themselves not to be inspired by anything, perhaps because they feel that that way, they can never be let down by anything. Instead, it's the strength-in-numbers, find-yourself-an-enclave-of-people-who-look-like-you kind of mindset that we're all trained to believe is so shameful. You're gay? Great, you've got a "community" backing you up. You're an ethnic minority? Score. There'll always be a lobby, to help you fight against the real enemy: the idea that we all might be part of some greater dream that transcends such petty hyphenated boundaries.
It's telling that the greatest vengeance these guys think they can visit upon Gannon is excommunication from the "community"... and that he apparently is so little bothered by the prospect.
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| Wednesday, February 16, 2005 |
16:14 - I have the touch
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I was all set to buy a Canon Digital Rebel for the Alaska trip I'm planning. I figure I have six months to get good at using it, or at least to convince myself through lots of muttering and tinkering that it makes more pleasing photographs than I could get with a little pocket-sized point-and-shoot.
I'd read countless reviews, all of which glowed. I'd looked at the product history since its 2003 introduction, during which it's become one of the most popular digital cameras out there. I'd talked to camera geek after camera geek, discussed lenses to buy, accessories to scrounge, beanbags to make (for quickly grabbing shots out the car window, to steady it on the windowsill). I'd gone to pricegrabber.com to find well-rated stores with criminally low prices at about 40% of MSRP. I'd placed the order.
And the day I do so is the day that the Digital Rebel gets discontinued.
How do I do it, huh? The same thing happened with the armoire and TV stand combination I bought last year: after searching for weeks to find the perfect style at the perfect price, I placed the order, only to find that the manufacturer had just killed the entire line, and since all the online furniture retailers just drop-ship from the factory and don't retain any inventory of their own, dozens of stores kept saying they had the units in stock, only to call me back after I placed the order and tell me that the manufacturer had shipped out the last unit the day before I placed my first order (of many, all of which I eventually gave up on).
Maybe I should live in New York, where people don't seem to have these problems.
Anyway, I'm not too worried—the reason for the Digital Rebel/300D's being discontinued is allegedly that it will soon be replaced by a newer, more studly model, presumably at the same price point, with 8 megapixels instead of 6 and the second-generation image processor—in other words, a stripped-down version of the new 20D rather than the (now-discontinued) 10D that the 300D was based on. Makes perfect sense. All I have to do is wait. The guy I talked to at the online camera store told me that his information confirms these rumors (the announcement is supposed to be at PMA this weekend, so this is all the same stuff we all go through right before a Stevenote); I can either get a better camera for the same money, or pick up a clearance-priced 300D for a song.
Gee, I sure hope the actual photography is this much fun.
UPDATE: Whew! Thank you! Boy, I posted this just in time, huh?
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| Saturday, February 12, 2005 |
19:37 - Everything is on the Internet
http://www.planetnintendo.com/thewarpzone/lockarm.html
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Okay, roll call: who remembers Lockarm?
It seems that in 1989, Nintendo Power held a contest for artists, which was to design up their own "Nintendo" games. My brother and I should have entered that contest. I rememeber spending day upon day "making" Mega Man 5, and my brother did the same with a Mario 5. I think we got rid of both of them by now, truely a great shame.
The winner of this contest was Jeffrey Scott Campbell, of Aurora Colorado. His game, Lockarm, had a storyline such as what follows...
Anybody raise their hand?
...Geek!
(Personally, I thought Lockarm won solely because of the pretty drawings, and the potential of the gameplay itself was lame beyond imagining—particularly when I pictured what it would have looked like in 8-bit graphics. I thought the judges were dazzled by the kid's preternatural drawing abilities and were blinded by it to all else in the proposal. ...Or maybe I was just bitter that they didn't choose the pathetic Metroid clone set in Loch Ness that I submitted...)
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| Thursday, February 10, 2005 |
00:49 - Evil Use of Java #871
http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/
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This is pretty cool. A Java-based tracker of baby names throughout history. Very clever interface—a fast machine is recommended. Just as I thought: not too many Mildreds after about 1930, and not many Kaitlyns before 1980... and Brian seems to have been in its heyday right around the mid-70s, oddly enough.
Via Paul Denton, who looks to be my go-to guy for word on the unfolding horror that is American Dad.
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00:45 - Wait a minute
http://esuvee.com/
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This is a government production?
It's pretty damn clever. I never would have guessed.
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| Wednesday, February 9, 2005 |
18:29 - Surely you jest
http://homestarrunner.com/filmstyle.html
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Peasant's Quest: The Movie.
I am speechless.
(Isn't it astonishing how something can start out as a silly side-joke, become a slightly sillier main-sequence joke, then achieve truly mythic stature in silliness, and now finally make the leap to pure distilled high-budget live-action silliness the likes of which I've never before encountered?)
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17:34 - Saw this coming a mile off
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1107983026.shtml
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Who'dathunk? Kim Jong Il is not amused by Team America: World Police.
Parker and Stone could not be reached for comment, but I'm sure they're just mortified at how their innocuous movie was obviously misinterpreted by the North Korean leader, for whom they have the utmost respect. They'll be making a few non-critical but important alterations, it's expected, before the DVD is released.
<snort> Shyeah. Hee hee hee.
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11:29 - Sittin' on top of the world
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Yesterday I made the final booking arrangements on the Alaska Marine Highway, the ferry that takes tourists and cars down the Inside Passage from Anchorage and Skagway back down to civilization. Over $1000, and space is filling up fast, so it's pretty much a done deal.
See, I've decided to drive the Alaska Highway this summer.
In August, a friend and I will start out from San Jose, drive north on I-5 and US97 through Oregon and Washington, over the Canadian border, up through Kelowna, maybe taking in Banff and Jasper, then starting the actual Alaska Highway at Dawson Creek in northern BC. From there it's 1500 miles through tundra and forest and sawtooth mountain ranges, through Whitehorse and Liard Hot Springs and Muncho Lake and Haines Junction and Teslin and Kluane Lake and many other ringing names, into Alaska via Tok and Delta Junction. Then it's up to Fairbanks and to Denali, where my parents spent two summers when they were about my age—about thirty years ago—working at Mt. McKinley, my dad driving a tour bus dozens of miles into the interior and pointing out all the wildlife to awed tourists who would otherwise have been disappointed at the fact that the mountain is obscured by clouds 367 days of the year. This whole trip is something of a recreation of their own odyssey back in 1971 (and again in 1972), which they undertook back when the road was all gravel and they averaged no more than 30 mph in their orange VW squareback wagon with a cat riding in the back. They had three weeks to make it one direction. I've got three weeks planned for the entire round trip.
After Denali, we'll head south through Anchorage, and that's where the really interesting part starts. This map is about bus routes, and doesn't show all the roads, but it gives the general gist: It starts with the Whittier Tunnel, longest highway tunnel in North America, recently refitted to allow a single lane of cars to share the same driving surface as the railroad that has used it for many years (they queue up 240 deep and then meter them through—if there's a fire or an emergency, there are a bunch of safe-rooms dug into the rock that are fireproof and have their own oxygen supplies). At the other end, at Whittier, is the first leg of the ferry: the brand-new M/V Chenega, which takes us across Prince William Sound to Valdez. Thence it's up through Glennallen and Slana to Tok again, and up one of the last major highways still gravel-surfaced: the Top of the World Highway, though such metropoli as Chicken and Eagle, past the trailer serving as the border station and customs office, and on to Dawson City.
(My parents had to rely on The Milepost and hearsay as they went. I can look up all these towns on Mapquest.)
Then down through the heart of Yukon and back to Whitehorse, where we head south across the border again, over the Chilkoot Pass and into Skagway, there to wallow in the Gold Rush nostalgia for a night before picking up the ferry for the leg down to Juneau. It's the M/V Fairweather, which looks like a Star Trek shuttlecraft, and will make the trip in 2.5 hours instead of the 7 it takes other ships. So we spend the evening in Juneau and then catch the M/V Matanuska for the long leg, the one down to Prince Rupert, BC, stopping at places like Ketchikan and Wrangell for an hour each, and landing at 6:15AM after a day and a half of travel. At which point we get up, rub the sleep from our eyes, and drive inland to Prince George, then turn south through Whistler on the way to Vancouver and Seattle. And then a straight shot back down south on I-5.
The dates all seem to work out. Barring any major mechanical breakdowns or reservation mixups, I think it's doable.
It'll be the longest vacation I've taken in... uh, ever. And I think that's just fine; as they say, nobody ever lay on his deathbed muttering, "Boy, I wish I'd spent more time in the office." If I can get this under my belt before I'm 30, I'll feel a whole lot better about my worldly accomplishments to date, and I'll have something I can really, genuinely look back on and brag about.
Especially if I take lots of photos. Now I need to get a new camera. A good one. With lots of expensive lenses and stuff.
Sheesh. So much for saving money. But then, I guess nobody lay on his deathbed thinking, "Boy, I wish I'd saved more money," either...
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| Tuesday, February 8, 2005 |
21:38 - By the way...
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Server's faster now. Anybody notice?
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21:32 - The way is shut
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Some warn of Eurabia. Some suggest that depopulation threatens Europe's native cultures, and that the only factors swelling the census numbers in Amsterdam and Hamburg are immigration from places like Turkey and Morocco, while a multiculturalism-besotted public is too fearful of how it'll look if they change their mind, and fall back on picking on the Jews instead.
But maybe there's some fight left in the Europe of the castles and the cathedrals after all. The Netherlands:
People applying to live in the Netherlands will have to take an examination to prove that they understand the language and culture, the government has proposed.
The test will require 350 hours of study and cost £250.
And now England:
U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to allow only people who speak English and have skills that are in demand to settle in Britain, after polls showed the public considers immigration rules to be too weak.
. . .
[The plan] sets out a four- tier system of points for those applying to work in Britain from outside the European Union. People who speak English and have skills in demand will be able to settle in the U.K., while unskilled workers and students won't be allowed to stay permanently.
It's taken some high-profile murders and arrests to really bring the seriousness of the modern world's stakes home to some people, but they seem to be stirring at last.
Now let's just hope they (and we) get out of this mess more cleanly than we did sixty years ago.
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| Sunday, February 6, 2005 |
21:21 - The Left's Behind (or, This reporter promises to be more trusting and less vigilant in the future)
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009475.php
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Wow. The more stuff like this I read, the more it irks me when people insist in all seriousness that the United States is in the thrall of a bunch of religious dimwits who treat the Left Behind books with more regard than the Constitution.
For Bill Moyers, Grist, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune to allege that James Watt, as Secretary of the Interior, argued that "protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ" is an outrageous libel.
It's revealing, too, to trace the course of the libel over time. The Star Tribune relied on Bill Moyers, and printed a charge by him that, had the editors thought about the matter, they should have realized was ridiculous on its face. Moyers relied on his "favorite online environmental journal," Grist, which in turn relied on (and apparently embellished) a book by Austin Miles, a former circus ringmaster who became disillusioned with Christianity after an encounter with James Bakker. At no stage did any of these worthies think it necessary to do some fact-checking before besmirching the reputation of a former cabinet officer.
. . .
It would be possible, I suppose, for Bill Moyers to distort the truth and mischaracterize the words of others more baldly than he did in his Star Tribune op-ed, but it wouldn't be easy. One can only wonder what made Moyers think he could get away with such blatant misrepresentations. No, wait. It isn't hard to figure out after all. Moyers is just a year or two behind the times; he doesn't know about the blogosphere. Throughout Moyers' career, he was free to slander conservatives with impunity, knowing that there was no forum in thich their responses would ever be heard.
Next time someone in a position similar to James Watt's actually says the kinds of things attributed to him with such airy surety by people like Bill Moyers, then I'll sit up and pay attention. But I've pretty much stopped assuming that any such aspersion is accurate, and now start from the presumption that there's some monkey business going on on the part of whoever's doing the reporting. Recent experience has me presuming a lot more innocence and virtue on the part of Christians than on that of the people determined to denigrate them.
I hope Moyers is proud of himself. From now on I'll have to be convinced to his (or one of his compatriots') side, and he'll have a lot more ground to cover before winning me back.
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| Thursday, February 3, 2005 |
01:23 - Scouring of the Shire
http://iraqilibe.blogspot.com/2005/02/iraqi-citizens-kill-5-terrorists.html
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That's how Chris M. characterizes this account of the citizens of an Iraqi town giving back as good as they'd have gotten from the insurgents bent on "punishing" them for voting on Sunday.
'No!' said Merry. 'It's no good "getting under cover". That is just what people have been doing, and just what these ruffians like. They will simply come down in force, corner us, and then drive us out, or burn us in. No, we have got to do something at once.'
'Do what?' said Pippin.
'Raise the Shire!' said Merry. 'Now! Wake all our people! They hate all this, you can see.... They just want a match, though, and they'll go up in fire.'
Tim Blair likens it more to The Magnificent Seven, following from a different account by a Mark Willacy who conducted an interview on Australian ABC TV in which he was asked questions like, "Do you think that is a one off, Mark, or is it a sign perhaps that some Iraqis are no longer sympathetic to the insurgents' cause?"
Just perhaps. Maybe some.
I don't think anyone's naïve enough to expect Iraq to follow a storybook script of any kind. But these stories do come from somewhere, reflecting some fundamental impulse deep in the human character... and Iraq's now in one of those "building" phases, analogous to the Wild West, where there do appear to be great days ahead: high stakes, a reward that's been earned. People are willing now to fight to ensure it won't be stolen away from them now that they've had a sight of it.
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14:13 - Leonard Cohen, eat your heart out
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=58456&d=3&m=2&y=2005&pix=opinion.j
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Wow. In the Arab News, of all places. Chances are that time and distance will make the impact of Sunday's elections fade behind more doubt and quagmire and "perspective", as with every other positive milestone since 9/11; but for now, at least, it's time to highlight it all so it lasts as long as possible. Here's what Saudi Dr. Mohammed T. Al-Rasheed has to say:
Bravo Iraq! For history, Jan. 30, 2005, is one magnificent day for Iraq and the Arab nation. Regardless of who won and who lost, the day should be a permanent fixture on the Arab calendar forever. I don’t want to talk politics; I simply want to celebrate history.
In spite of everything, the Iraqis voted. They did so with a passion and a seriousness that gives the lie to the cliché that Arabs are not ready for democracy. One myth down, a thousand to go.
Everyone says that this is the first free elections in Iraq for fifty years. That is another lie. There has never been one single free election in the long history of the Arabs ever. This is the first one.
It took the Americans to conduct it and force it down the throats of dictators, terrorists, exploding deranged humans, and odds as big as the distance between the USA and the Middle East.
British guns and soldiers were in the area for so long yet did not care to look at the people.
They waltzed with people Gerty and Lawrence (their colonial spies) baptized and were happy to see the nations slip into slavery.
Likewise, the French could not bring themselves to see that the Arabs were good enough to cast a vote. And even when it happened in Algeria, the French orchestrated a putsch to annul it.
On Sunday America vindicated itself to all doubters, including me. They delivered on the promise of an election, so I am sure they will deliver on the promise of withdrawal.
. . .
Perhaps in the coming weeks we will take issue with America again. But for today, I am celebrating by having a McDonald’s. I hate fast food, but for this day I will make an exception.
Since people like Michael Moore are MIA, Robert Fisk is eating cardboard, Aaron McGruder is off on irrelevant tangents, and Garry Trudeau is entertaining fantasies of visceral racial hatred among soldiers whose primary charge in Iraq is spotting insurgents in a sea of friendly or indifferent Iraqi faces they're sworn to defend, maybe there's a chance that people like Dr. Al-Rasheed might get taken seriously, even if just for a day or two. Maybe that's all it will take for the world to realize that something has changed: even if everything up till the very present day was about imperialism and hegemony, now it's not. The facts on the ground are too obvious to ignore now. It's all been faith and presumption, but now we know.
And knowing is half the battle. (Right, Guardian?)
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| Wednesday, February 2, 2005 |
11:24 - How you know you've lost
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66460,00.html
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Although it's soon to be as ubiquitous as no accessory has been since hats fell out of style, there's one place where the powers-that-be would dearly love for you not to love your iPod so much:
To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft's management, Apple Computer's iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft's workers.
"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."
The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.
So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.
. . .
"These guys are really quite scared," said the source of Microsoft's management. "It shows how their backs are against the wall.... Even though it's Microsoft, no one is interested in what we have to offer, even our own employees."
Heh heh heh.
Er—sorry. I mean, um, how sad for them.
Heh heh heh.
(Via Kris and MacNN.)
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| Tuesday, February 1, 2005 |
21:21 - Implied, Lisa... or implode?
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I guess they're finally starting to say it.
I naïvely expected to hear words like this during the UN hearings on the foundation for the war, in which Powell's evidence (which turned out to be pretty flimsy, if not so transparent as to be disastrous in retrospect to his credibilty) seemed a lot more convincing at the time. But barring that, as grounds for such repudiations dissolved shortly afterwards, I expected to hear these words in the wake of the growing body of testimonials from Iraqis pining for freedom and taking peace activists to task for their "simplistic Nickelodeon diplomacy", and recantations of the Human Shields who cried, "Oh God, what have we done?" But it wasn't to be. Nor was it to be upon hearing freed Iraqis jubilantly call out for "Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy" as they dragged the Saddam statue to its knees. Nor did the Transfer of Sovereignty date evoke so much as a sniff of introspection on the part of those who insisted, not that we were in Iraq to steal the oil and kill brown people for the fun of it at the command of our Zionist masters, but that democracy was something Iraqis just weren't suited for, the poor dear darkies.
In fact, I'd begun to despair of ever hearing anything like this:
By now, you might have even voted against George Bush -- a second time -- to register your disapproval.
But after watching Sunday's election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?
It's hard to swallow, isn't it?
. . .
Obviously, I'm still curious to see if Bush is willing to allow the Iraqis to install a government that is free to kick us out or to oppose our other foreign policy efforts in the region.
So is the rest of the world.
For now, though, I think we have to cut the president some slack about a timetable for his exit strategy.
If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance.
Maybe I'd have to vote Republican in 2008.
Whoa, now, let's not do anything rash.
I'd be happier to see the Democrats remember what the name of their bloody party is, and put a few chips on the idea that maybe democracy is a good thing after all—not just for white people, but for anybody in the world. That's all I would ask.
I saw (rather, heard) the first part of the Daily Show last night, too, before I tore myself away from what I was working on and changed the channel. It seemed Jon Stewart and friends were having a hard time figuring out how to spin jokes from a bunch of images of Iraqis gleefully holding up ink-stained fingers and dancing in banner-waving street mobs. "It was in fact a good day," said Stephen Colbert, "And that makes... what, three they've had. Three good days... the day the statue came down, the day we captured Saddam, and now this. So in the Iraqi Week of Good Days, we're up to... Wednesday! It's Hump Day!"
The nervousness of the audience's laughter was palpable. I kinda wish I'd stuck with it until the end, though—it must have been downright tomblike in there when Stewart said this:
Jon Stewart, late in the Daily Show last night to Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria: "I’ve watched this thing unfold from the start and here’s the great fear that I have: What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may, and again I don’t know if I can physically do this, implode. (Hat tip: David Frum).
That would be awful, I know. But see, democracy is bigger than the details needed to bring it to life. Once you've accepted that the people who say they want it actually represent a popular movement, and are not just a bunch of paid flunkies preening for Western cameras and bags of illicit M&Ms, there is no more arguing against democracy. To argue against democracy is to argue against a country's people, and nobody wants the terminology to get that far, lest it reveal where one's priorities really lie.
Believing the worst about the war all this time, whether or not one agrees with Brown in that "going to war still sent so many terrible messages to the world" (a statement which sends a quite reassuring message to would-be Hitlers), means believing that the Idiot Supergenius Bush deluded America into fighting for the spread and germination of democracy, a concept he was himself patently opposed to, and in whose service he was willing to construct the most elaborate, audacious, and shameless lie in American history. It takes believing that Bush says he likes freedom, but is lying and secretly hates freedom—but he's willing to subvert our entire governmental system to create freedom anyway, because it serves his nefarious goals.
But there's another explanation, one that requires much fewer mental gymnastics.
Being on the side of the war means simply believing Bush meant what he said and said what he meant. That he believed the things he said, that he acted in good faith, that he never knowingly lied, and that the end result—democracy in Iraq—depends not on subterfuge but on honesty. Hard as it might be, one only has to believe that Bush and the pro-war faction of American politics has simply been sincere all along for the sight of grinning, finger-waving Iraqi voters to make sense.
Otherwise one has to layer the assumption of one lie on top of the assumption of another, deception upon conspiracy upon betrayal upon belief in the worst impulses of humanity manifesting themselves constantly in every level from Republican voters and Iraqi citizens up through the President and his cabinet. The only way to explain away positive developments in the face of such expressed evil would be to add yet more presumptions of ill intent on top. Eventually you end up with an edifice so hideously elaborate that it necessarily crashes in under its own weight.
The theorists would call it "elegant" to believe that simply putting our faith in the higher ideals of freedom and democracy, ignoring the popular disdain for such concepts as have been made current by the nightly comedy lineup, and in our elected officials to act according to their own publicly expressed beliefs about the world instead of in direct contradiction to them, is enough to bring about positive change in the world. It requires no cynicism and no resentment. It requires no second-guessing, no overanalysis, no reliance on data that's guaranteed to be faultier than what the administration might be working with. It requires no spiderweb of half-baked beliefs all bolstered by nothing but prejudice and detestation and peer pressure. All it takes is a little bit of trust, the fundamental building block of any modern free society.
The trouble is, when you trust in trust, there's not much comedy to be made from it. When one's mind is at ease, and not tugged in a million directions by a roil of contradicting, incompatible presumptions, there's not a lot left to say.
And we're just not a people accustomed to silence. Because, after all, we're free.
UPDATE: Tim Blair has more sightings of people starting to exit the "reality-based community" and re-enter actual reality.
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20:33 - If I have seen farther, it is by kicking the shins of giants
http://coldfury.com/index.php?p=5260
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Fascinating stuff about Galileo Galilei by John over at Cold Fury today.
Seems the guy was a lot more human than a generation of college kids naming their dorm-room computers after him might suggest—and so were the actors of the Inquisition.
Stop! Stop burning me with nuance!
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15:21 - Oh... my... God.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14549_Holy_Warriors_vs._GI_Joe&only=ye
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This is more laughable even than Rathergate.
Maybe the major journalistic corporations should start instituting a "Take a Blogger to Work Day".
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Brian Tiemann
