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politics, anime, fandom and whatever
Friday, October 31, 2003
| Grand nit-picking article from one Mike O'Sullivan of CorpLogBlog, in which he complains, rightly, about the near-universal abuse of "among" to mean "between" in contracts between more than two parties. Apparently the delusion that "between" can be only used between two individual parties is extensive, widespread, and entrenched. I have a very, hrm, nonrational grasp of grammar. That is to say, I've absorbed most of my grammatical notions through casual reading rather than intensive or systemic study. Thus, my use of language is far more habitual and instinctive than it is conscious or deliberate. Even so, when the writer brought up the use of "among" and "between", my immediate response was, "'among' when dealing within a group, 'between' when dealing with individual entities, regardless of number". Who the hell teaches otherwise? Apparently law schools, if the general content of business contracts are taken as evidence.
Via Professor Bainbridge, who is looking more and more like an excellent daily read. Duly blogrolled. |
Steve Den Beste has a long post about why he thinks space elevators are impossible. Essentially, his argument can be summed up as "any carried load will induce destructive oscillations in the elevator shaft". Now, I know only slightly less than shit about orbital mechanics, but my impression of the way people develop ideas is that if such a thing was true, there wouldn't be serious talk about elevators in the next fifteen years. Oscillations *must* have been considered by people working on the idea. And it seems as if it has:
One oscillation that Pearson investigated was that of transverse waves induced by climbers. The bottom line on this oscillation is that large oscillations can be induced when the climber transverses the length of the cable in one period of the cable's characteristic frequency. (Pearson assumed no counterweight so had the climber traveling twice the length of the cable during one period.) Since we just calculated our cable's characteristic period to be 7.1 hours we will only need to worry about this particular affect when we plan to have climbers traveling at close to 10,000 km/hr. A little more googling pulls up a set of presentation slides demonstrating (I think) how oscillations from "climber" loads would be damped by modulation of "tension". I just had another discussion with an officemate who is dubious of the idea of a 120,000 km object being in "geosynchronous orbit", and says that you can't have a gravitational force diagram, treated as a single point, of something that extends over planetary scales. Eh, I figure that if it works for planets, why not something much smaller, if considerably longer? I don't claim to understand this stuff, or that any of the above is right. I'm just wondering if there isn't a certain class of problem in which you can know just enough to make a fool of yourself in. If there is, Den Beste is definitely a specialist in that field. Me? I'm just an idiot with a Google taskbar. |
| OK, this post from the Evangelical Outpost is self-involved, self-referential, and so goddamn meta it bleeds critical analysis instead of blood, but it made me laugh. (Rhetorically Notational) God bless the New Blog Showcase. |
| Speaking of not knowing shit when it comes to economics, there's an interesting post entered in this week's New Blog Showcase from Professor Bainbridge. He discusses the "10,000 Ceiling" of the Dow Jones as an example of markets adjusting to irrational biases. In this case, investors have learned to sell on reaching numerical plateaus due to the perception that the rest of the invester herd is inclined to do so. He offers counter-examples to demonstrate that markets can learn to reward investors that recognize persistent pricing errors due to irrational behavior, and thus smooth out those irrational behaviors over time. He made me understand that. This is the sign of a good writer - the ability to make a technical and difficult point understandable to someone who is not trained in the field. The rest of his blog contains similarly lucid posts. I'm still working my way through his recent work, but this post about "precommittment strategy" is particularly striking. I'm thinking about blogrolling this guy. He may be a keeper. |
| That toad who tried to hijack Riverbend's blog with one called "Riversbend" turns out to be a longtime internet shit-stirrer named "Troy", some sort of obnoxious dittohead active with the NRA. Now, I have no particular use for Riverbend, myself - I think she's a sniveling lightweight - but impersonating someone online is a vile and stupid act, and should be roundly denounced.
Via Ilaria of Into the Woods. |
| Scott Talkington of Demosophia examines the Sy Hersh "Stovepipe" article in the New Yorker on CIA/Neocon conflicts over intelligence evaluation.
His continued points about alpha method/beta method judgment - roughly, "presumed innocent" vs. "presumed guilty" - are interesting. I fear that his approach is somewhat theoretical, and his argument that administration Neocons were attempting to impose a "beta method" intelligence evaluation method strikes me as, itself, demonstrating the limits of an "alpha method" approach. That is, I think he's giving them too much credit, and presuming their intellectual innocence. The second half of the article examines Hersh's wild conspiracy story about ex-CIA forgers, and I think Talkington is absolutely right that the utterly dysfunctional and borderline treasonous attitude of the CIA reported by Hersh is far more alarming than the typical, tired story of overly pessimistic Neocons looking for threats under every Eurasian rock. Is Hersh's reporting *accurate*? At this point, I feel I have to approach Hersh with a "beta method" - he's been the source of too many misleading stories in the last decade for it to be safe to presume his work "innocent". |
| I haven't known what to think of the third quarter economic news. I'm not exactly a tower of economic wisdom. My judgments about economic reports tend to be sadly ad hominem. Thus with some trepidation, I thrust one toe into the subject...
Slate has easily the most schizophrenic take on the news. Gross's actual article is moderately optimistic, if skeptical. The various headlines that point to the actual article are wildly erratic: "Bush's Bogus Boom" "Has the Bush Economic Boom Started" "The Bush Boomlet" It would make sense if these are headlines in different papers or for different articles. They're links or headlines on the same "paper" (Slate) for the same article! Dan Dresner has a useful post summing up the news. I hadn't noticed that inventories are still down. That's a pretty good sign that it isn't an isolated quarter, isn't it? I mean, it suggests that there's plenty of slack for industrial expansion if it isn't just consumer demand eating through inventory overstock. Only complaint I have is his post-title. I've got that damn song playing on auto-rewind in my head... Even Krugman can't find anything nasty to say about the news. I'd call that a fair sweep, wouldn't you? |
Thursday, October 30, 2003
| Speaking of 101-280, he links to a dissertation of his which, in the course of dissecting a literary critic's claim that chaos theory and postmodern literary analysis are synonymous or interconnected, has some interesting comments touching on knowability. Specifically, he notes that postmodernism postulates nonexistence, while chaos theory is simply another method considering unknowability. The two are not at all the same thing, as anyone dealing with data ought to be damn well familiar. Essentially, this transitive point of his is that the scientific methods known as "chaos theory" have more relevance in a Kantian system than in a postmodern system.
I don't claim to understand his paper entirely - I have the sneaking suspicion that you can't understand nonsense. Not to cast aspersions on the writer of the paper, he does as good a job as possible in laying out the claims for the inner-relation of Derrida and chaos theory, but Derrida's theories are, I am beginning to suspect, inherently incoherent. Furthermore, there's some reference to two distinct "entropies", one statistical and the other thermodynamic. That kind of went over my head, and obviously that's due to my limitation, and not any on the part of the writer. The later part of the paper goes through a number of examples of literary analysis whose authors use "chaos theory" mainly as a source for strained metaphor and analogy. |
| My main reason for preferring John Edwards, prior to his Iraq Reconstruction meltdown this month, was my sense that he was hot to do something about institutionalized corporate corruption. Well, this issue still doesn't outweigh foreign policy for me, but Joe Lieberman has made an interesting and forceful mutual fund reform proposal that definitely raises my interest in his campaign. As I understand it, he's proposing an end to aftermarket resolution of mutual fund trades, making market timing explicitly illegal, a requirement for greater mutual fund management transparency, independent compliance officers that report directly to boards of directors instead of through mutual fund managers, and a tightening of the requirements for mutual fund board of directors with an eye towards greater independence from management.
Via the TNR Primary. |
| Hah! The Sims Online is an open-architecture MMORPG. Apparently it's now suffering from an in-game mafia issue that arose out of "griefers" running amuck, and other gamers ganging together in mutual protection societies. Those mutual protection societies then morphed into mobs or mafias. I hope some sociologists are keeping close tabs on this sort of thing. It strikes me as great material for "harder" social science work, along the same lines as those minimalist social-engineering computer models that the computational sociologists have been playing with.
Via 101-280. |
| Hey! Allah is no longer in this house! He's moved off Blogspot, and is now Allah Pundit. I think the sound you just heard was Blogspot's "struck down by lightning or jihadi DDoS attack" premiums dropping through the floor. Congrats on the upgrade to the Infinite, the Glorious, the Merciful Allah. |
| Porphyrogenitus continues to flail away at straw men. I think I'll leave it at that. I'll look in now and then to see how his civic seminary project is coming. |
| The big boys of warbloggerdom have noticed the Gender Genie. Andrew Sullivan is amused to score male, despite being "a big fag", as he puts it. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, on the other hand, is amused by his high "female" score, and wonders if he's a metrosexual. I don't think he quite gets the Gender Genie - you'd be more "metrosexual" if you can actually get a majority-opposite score on a couple of pieces. I've found that my scores are almost exclusively majority-male, regardless of what I feed the Genie.
Anyways, it's amusing that this particular meme took this long to sweep the warblogger end of the 'net. It made the rounds of the more techie-geek oriented blogs last month. Jessica, did you point it out to us then? Could we please put this "metrosexual" meme to sleep? It's a deeply dopy neologism. |
Hey, kids: it's that time of the month again. Fred Ramsey emailed to remind us:
First Sunday Poetry Slam I'll be there as usual, the token conservative. ^_^ |
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
| Donald Sensing has a counterfactual arguing that all of the 20th century's bloody woes can be traced to the actions of a couple hundred Paris taxicabs in September of 1914. It's an interesting setup, and it does what counterfactuals are supposed to do - demonstrates an argument about the interplay of causation in a particular sequence of events. His argument - that the excision of all of those bad political effects would have resulted in a much less bloody century - isn't one I find particularly convincing, but that's because he doesn't extend the line of causation in any direction. A short World War (really, more of a brief, oversize repeat of the Franco-Prussian War) wouldn't have caused the exact chain of events, of course. I find his short-term series of events convincing.
But I have to wonder if our hypothetical survivors of the 1914 war mightn't have come back for a second try a few years later. Additionally, one has to wonder if a second French defeat mightn't have brought on the proletarian revolution in France. The Ottoman Empire had been rotting for the better part of a century. The first half of the century wouldn't have closed without a fall of some sort. Fascism was a pre-war heresy of the left; it wouldn't have enjoyed the overwhelming advantages of the great cataclysm, but what happens in an unstable Europe of limited, long, brutal wars? The Liberal order was due for a collapse - the "Peace of Dives" was a tinderbox. Even if the initial brushfire had been contained in 1914, I have to wonder if later, now-obscure lightning strikes might not have lit the remaining brush unburnt by our hypothetical. In the end, my hypotheticals reflect my personal prejudices. Historical momentum tends to be conserved. Actions have chaotic, but converging consequences. "Everything that rises...must converge." |
| Hey, remember that troops-molest-fig-orchards piece I went off on a while back? Sgt. Stryker has a photo and excerpt from an Iraqi daily about a weapons cache the 1st Armored found under a fruit grove near Tikrit. Think we'll hear horror stories of American economic terrorism about this one? |
| In the midst of the Cedar fire, Adam Sullivan's house was spared, by grace of the 1401st Strike Team and a floating pool fire pump. I'd been worried about him. |
| Nelson Ascher has a fascinating autobiographical post up, or at least the first half of it. He talks about Brazil, Hungary, and some of his experiences during the collapse of the Wall. I don't actually know that much about Hungary, other than the stories my Latin teacher told. |
| John Moore at Useful Fools went out and did some photographic fisking of an "environmental racisim" objection to an Arizona refinery construction project that was apparently based on the fact that the nearest town was founded by black sharecroppers. It can be insanely easy to lie with photographs, but he does do a full 360 spin to demonstrate just how empty the area is, and has census data showing 33 people, majority white, anywhere near the affected location.
Via this week's Carnival of the Vanities, hosted by Who Censored Blogger Rabbit |
Porphryogenitus is a wee bit ticked off about my misunderstandings of yesterday. However, his extension of remarks sparked a few ideas. My apologies if I'm misunderstanding him again.
So lets go back to attitudes about the Humanities and how this applies. Some seem to have the mindset that because of the difficulty of reaching definitive conclusions in the Humanities, this means they should be scorned. That their study is somewhat pointless and people will not only reach different conclusions but those with axes to grind will, as one letter writer put it "obfuscate in fields where one man's opinion screeched loudly and repetitively can be fobbed off as 'fact'"?. I hold though that the situation is more akin to that of complex scientific questions: you are much better off, then, having the deepest and widest range of knowledge on these matters than not, especially since (again as is common in science) knowledge remains incomplete even while advancing. That sounds like "scientific methods should be used in the humanities". Am I mistaking the point? Yes, that means things are somewhat fuzzy and indistinct and people will have different interpretations of the same "data" and thus are more likely to reach different conclusions than they are when it comes to the answer of what 2 + 2 equals. This makes sound judgement all the more important, and fostering it all the more vital. It also makes knowing as much as you can more important, assisting in reaching sound judgements and conclusions. That definitely sounds like it. I have some thoughts on judgment. I don't think judgment a characteristic of the scientific method. A theorem that rests on judgment is by definition unfalsifiable - it relies on an element of opinion. Judgment is, itself, a creature of opinion. You can educate opinion - school it with bodies of facts and sharpen it against the strongly-held opinions of others. Opinions that have done their tour through the hot and clangorous smithy might be properly called judgment, and held worthy in the thrust-and-parry of argument. Judgments might be built of facts and theories and logical constructs. But they're still, in the end, opinions. At this point, I should note that I don't think that the intellectual world is a simple black-and-white world of Humanities and Sciences, of judgment and the scientific method. Between the Humanities and the Ultimate Hard Science lie a swale of "social sciences" and "soft sciences". As the experts work, the soft sciences have "hardened" as ways have been found to better quantify disciplines like biology, and falsifiable physiologies crowd out the dogmas of psychiatry. Even the hardest of sciences rest on a bed of shrinking assumptions, axioms. Most of the swale will eventually be filled with mountain, if gravity is allowed to have its way. The scientific method will dominate all disciplines in which it is suited. My concern is that the scientific method is not suited to all disciplines equally. Of what use is a scientific method in comparative literature? How about history? A vital element of the scientific method is repeatability. How do you prove that a result is valid, and not a false positive? You have others repeat the experiment or study, and see if they get a similar result. This is necessary to isolate biases, including, most importantly, observer bias. History suffers, intrinsically, from the mother of all observer biases. How do we know what we know about the American Revolution, for instance? Documentary sources. Testimony. Accounts of battles, letters, records of political meetings, death records, legal records, publications, memoirs. These are given facts, each genesis steeped in its own, unavoidable, individual observer bias. Then? Hundreds or thousands of secondary sources, articles, dissertations, books, historical novels - the considered opinions of all who have studied the series of events, clashing and shattering and reforming until bodies of accepted opinion, judgments are formed. But you can't disprove a historical judgment - you can only discredit it. We can't re-enact the Brandywine campaign to see what might have happened if the British had advanced overland, or landed in the Delaware instead of the Chesapeake. Some folks use counterfactual history or wargaming as a fictional substitute for experimentation, but it's all gameplaying. It's simply an elaborate form of argumentation. (Now I have a mental image of a panel of English professors leaning over a cluttered table, gaming out a first-person servant's narrative version of Pride and Prejudice, or a poetry class being instructed to re-write "the Second Coming" with Islamic imagery replacing Yeat's Christian eschatology. This might actually be kind of entertaining.) My point is that the more humanistic of the Humanities aren't especially fruitful grounds for the use of scientific methods. I rather think that too many practitioners in the Humanities have chosen a pseudo-scientific approach to their subjects, in which they force their material into the unsupported confines of airy theoretical constructs, aping the language and habits of rigour while reaching for a substance that isn't there to be grasped. The end result is an ideology of theoretical rigour, which makes sense to no-one but the practitioners themselves, which is often indistinguishable from the wholesale application of political bias by ideological imposition. I'm concerned that a confusion of judgment with knowledge is at the heart of the rotting of the Humanities. This is not a call, nor an endorsement, of the intellectual abandonment of judgment. I am quite fond of judgment. I am, in fact, excessively addicted to judgment, even in the absence of proper understandings. I am simply unwilling to elevate judgment above knowledge, to allow that judgment has a right to the command of knowledge. The irresponsible abuse of judgment can quite easily be used to destroy knowledge - to suppress facts or information, to discourage investigation. Both Orwell and Huxley confront that. Huxley, in my opinion, illustrates how bad judgment, under the Ford-worship pretense of "science", can suppress or distort historical fact. It's this Humanities-as-(Pseudo)Science that concerns me. Perverted judgment is, itself, a threat to knowledge. Look at what happened when Marxists got the whip-hand over agronomy and biology in the Soviet Union - Lysenko and Lamarckian genetics gave both a pretty rough handling when "scientific" political judgments decided which experiments and studies were valid, and which were reactionary mistakes. Update: Porphyrogenitus reacts poorly to my comments. After wading through a lot of rhetoric, I think what it comes down to is that he wants the "truths" of the Humanities respected. I thought we were talking about "ideas". As far as I'm concerned, "Truth" is a religious property, and while I love religious metaphors, I'm leery of people who ask that their judgments, however well-crafted, grounded, elegant, or clever, be taken for "truth". "Truth" is the end of conversation, and the beginning of a sermon. Is that the purpose of this discussion? Sermonizing? I fear that this line of reasoning ends with Liberal Arts colleges transformed into seminaries for civics students. Not a grand prospect of the New Academy, is it? |
| This is bizarre. A British paper is claiming that the French defense military has changed its nuclear deterrence strategy, and that "rogue states" will be targeted with France's nuclear weapons. Oddly enough, China is explicitly included as being "potentially" on this list of "rogue states". At first I thought this had to be one of those sterling examples of Fleet Street excitability - the reported rumor of a rumor of a covert change in policy. Upon actually examining the article, I find that it has Chirac quotes! How utterly, utterly odd. According to other sources, China is crawling with French "tourists" apparently looking to strengthen bilateral ties, both military and economic.
Via Little Green Footballs, which continues to prove to be of use. |
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Porphyrogenitus had a correspondent respond to his recent "clean out the Academy" posts with a suggestion that universities pull all humanities requirements, and let people just take technical courses. The following are parts of one of his replies, and my responses to them.
Cutting through the exposition (already), here is a better and more pithy response to Terrey Cobb's proposal and why I recoil from it: I think one of the weaknesses of the autodidactic or self-educative approach to learning is a certain disregard for the authority of the academy -“ the need for teachers. On the other hand, one of the strengths of autodidacticism is the recognition that the Academy is not Civilization, and neither is the Humanities. Intellectual life cannot be encompassed by the walls of the University. To wildly misquote William Jennings Bryan, "Burn down your universities and leave our libraries and your universities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our libraries and grass will grow in the streets of every university in this country!" It might be my state-college disregard for tradition and authority, but I can't help but think that the mighty Academy of Humanities is an efflorescence, a flowering. Flowers die, but the species survives in the seed. As for the humanist contempt for techne, I have to object that it is exactly that -- a contempt, a Laputaesque disregard for the practicalities in favor of more noble pursuits. techne is the product of successful theory. To study only history, and neglect mathematics, is as intellectually destructive as is a course of study in computer science without history. I strongly object to the notion that philosophy stands on a higher plane, that it is somehow more noble than those elements of study that find traction in the things of the world. There is not, and should not be, a hierarchy of study. Agronomy is as worthwhile a pursuit as philosophy or computer science. Philosophy will not grow a single grain of wheat; agronomy cannot establish the laws of the state. A body of laws is as much techne, as much a product of civilization, as is the glyphosate family of herbicides, or the latest Linux distribution. I see no functional moral distinction between the three. Each has great potential, for good or ill. Each should be treated with the same respect and an equal degree of caution. But technical aptitude does not sustain, much less create, Civilization or its advances. It is fostered by the the Civilizational backdrop. This is a insight that many of us all too readily acknowledge when it comes to analysis of What Went Wrong in relation to why Islamic Civilization began to lag behind Western Civilization and does not foster much scientific or technological innovation. The advantages of the Civilization to which Porphyrogenitus refers is not a creature of the Humanities, or even the University. It is a characteristic of Western intellectual life. We could take the great universities of history and plop them down in the centre of Cairo, endowed with every advantage and a bottomless fund of wealth, and a single generation would leave those universities a blasted expanse, intellectual ruins housing hordes of religious scholars and warring tribes of pseudo-Marxist ignoramuses. Without a general societal interest in the sciences, without a culture-wide embrace of the idea of progress, of the future, Western civilization would wither and die. I suppose the distinction here is that I consider the entire society to be the civilization backdrop, and the University and the Humanities to be equal parts civilization backdrop and techne. Techne, advancements in method (a concept that includes but is broader than technology or even "hard sciences"), are fostered in a situation where people have the best (humanly) possible access to reliable data on results of past experiments (to use a less "soft, humanities" oriented description) - and, again, this is, when humans are concerned, not limited to the results of "hard science" experiments. It is, indeed, very Hayekian to say that it extends to all human experience. "Look, see, over here and over there and in this other place they tested Rousseau's theorem of forcing people to be free, and the result was a nightmare each time" (to take one of the more obvious examples). But this Hayekian insight is itself a technification of the Humanities. I don't accept that political economics is strictly falsifiable in the fashion Porphyrogenitus suggests. Any claim to know that an exact input will inevitably result in a specific societal output is, I think, as essentially fantastical as the most doctrinaire Marxism. But I do admit the political utility of such theorizing, and there are certain limited, general cases in which a known class of inputs can be practically described as prone to produce a known class of outputs. At least when I was at Uni, one of the things that was all the faddish rage among "Progressive" academics (both faculty and "Progressive" students) was that, well, the Western concept of time is linear but "Native Peoples"/"Traditional Peoples"/{fill in favored term of the moment} have a cyclical sense of time and, gosh, isn't that just the bee's knees? Wouldn't we be better off if we understood that things are cyclical? Not to be a smartass, but cyclism was quite fashionable a couple generations back among historians. Remember Toynbee? I'm not fond of this postmodernist fad for cyclism, but then, it's the primitivism that I object to, and not the cyclism itself. I believe in the future. The past is past. Cyclism is, essentially, a form of reactionary ideology. I can't understand why its modern adherents can't see that. ...There is no real way of passing along knowledge or even forming the sort of decentralized knowledge that Hayek talks about as informing society and which no centralized elite can duplicate unless society is vastly simplified. . . Well, no, it's called the publishing industry. Quite large, quite prolific, fairly independent of the Academy. If the Hottentots or a Pol Pot suddenly descended upon every Ivy League college in the country and murdered every academic in the country in a sudden orgy of intellectual genocide, the publishing industry would, the next day, go through its back-catalog for the next publishing cycle. Autodidactical professors appointed by shell-shocked boards of trustees would reconstruct the Academy. It would be a rough ten years or so, but it would, indeed, be only that long. Those "annoying electives" that Computer Science majors are forced to take simply are requirements of a University education (as is at least a basic knowledge of sciences that us Humanities majors are compelled to take). Not necessarily in the form they're taught now. But spreading the meme that "the Humanities are Bunk" is not really a means of passing the torch of this Civilization forward or even keeping its flame lit. Oh, I quite agree. I've a degree in history, after all. But propagating the "Humanities are Greater than Mere Techne" meme is not a particularly fruitful way to counter the wilful ignorance of the ill-educated. Update: I've apparently run wild with a misunderstanding, and ended up arguing his point for him. Lesson learned: never try to be clever in the middle of the harvest. A combination of long hours and hyperactivity isn't conductive to critical thought.... |
Monday, October 27, 2003
| Cosmos 1 is on track to be the first attempt at a solar sail deployment next year. Why is this a private-US-Russian project instead of a NASA project? The article suggests "risk", but how much risk is there in a $4 million investment? In aerospace terms, that's pocket change - worse, pocketlint. I don't quite understand how it could possibly be $4 million - I thought orbital insertion was more expensive than that. This less-than-authorative-sounding site claims that Soyuz launches have a base cost of $15 million, which makes me suspect that the $4 million is for the package itself, and not the delivery fee. Even then, $4 million is insanely cheap.
It might just be that this Cosmos 1 isn't NASA because it isn't going to work. Possibly something to do with trying to deploy a solar sail in Earth orbit will result in more atmospheric braking than the lift from the expected solar wind? The article indicates that they're going to try to deploy at 800km. I suppose somebody with a proper science background could try and do the calculations... Via The Daily Blatt. |
Bwah!
| Since I've been seeing Riverbend's name a lot recently - Ilaria blogrolls her, and is very impressed - Maj. Sean Bannion's irate fisking of one of Riverbend's recent postings would seem to be in order. He's mostly right, as far as I can tell. I'd add that she's exceedingly fond of rumors and airy assertion, and her predominant tone is one of envy. She loves bagging on ministers and Governing Council members and ranting about how high on the hog they live. Zeyad, on the other hand, offers a lot of first-person information and interesting nuance. If you're going to follow an Iraqi blogger, try Zeyad instead.
Fisking link via Sgt. Stryker. |
| Alright, this fucking blows. It's this sort of local-politics Republican bullshit that made me change my registration to Democratic. Don't goddamn whine about the other side's get-out-the-vote efforts - get your own damn vote out!
Pricks. Well, I suppose there is some justification for Josh Marshall in the general scheme of things. Now, if he'd only concentrate on these sorts of posts instead of sucking on the beltway scandal teat... |
| OK, this freaks me out. Dan Drezner pointed out Ilaria, a blog with nearly the same layout as mine, who is apparently reading the same goddamn books I'm reading. She also hails from Television Without Pity land, and uses Bujold quotes like hippies use the I Ching, and is fond of Buffy fanfic.
Dude! Her post on Joan of Arcadia reminded me of just how annoyed I was at myself for forgetting that there was an episode on last Friday night. Admittedly, I was busy working at the time, but I could have, oh, I don't know, gone and taped the damn thing. Maybe I can talk Dave into d/ling last week's episode. I see she blogrolls Anna S. I haven't been over there in over a year. Wonder what Anna's up to? |
Syngenta/Ecorisk Atrazine Dispute?
| Erin O'Connor points out a "creeping corporatism" scare story about a Berkeley researcher who ran afoul of a no-independent-publishing clause in a contract with Ecorisk, Inc., a research company doing work on the effects of atrazine (popular American herbicide) on amphibians. An examination of their projects page shows that this extensive survey is Ecorisk's only current project of note, and that they've been working on it for several years.
This article gives some idea of the controversy. Here is a press release that Syngenta released last year. My feeling is that the Berkeley member of this particular research project decided to bail on the project when it became clear that the rest of the panel showed little inclination to run with the most alarming interpretation of their collective data. He apparently pulled out of the project in 2000. It's hard to tell who has their thumb on the scales in the scientific dispute - I've been involved in similar situations in which the activists were the malefactors. The contractual dispute, on the other hand, stinks. Hayes's publications seem to be several years after his 2000 resignation from the Ecorisk project. Exercising contractual restraint upon a research scientist who has resigned from your project is a damned ugly way to run a business. It's as bad as AccuWeather's noncompetition clauses, in its own way. |
| Fascinating article in the Guardian about the decline of the Israeli Left. It points out a number of things I was sort-of-aware-of but hadn't really thought through. The writer explicitly notes that the Left in Israel is a creature of the European (or "Ashkenazim") elite, while the working class are mostly Likudniks or further to the right. This is baffling to a British leftist-journalist, because there is a sizable portion of the British working-classes which are honestly left-wing. It makes more sense to an American, because the labor unions were purged of communists and leftist ideologues in the late 40s; the American Left is an urban-elite coalition. Still, all the same, Israeli leftism is not American leftism, despite the current superficial similarities. Israel is itself a Leftist Project - Zionism an explicitly non-religious creature of socialist ideology. The Likud, on the other hand, is a product of Sephardic (or Middle Eastern) pragmatism, nationalism, and religiosity. Interesting.
Via the handy Winds of Change wrapup. |
Why I Hate Protests II
| Pacifists waving effigy heads on sticks, and anti-war activists agitating for the destruction of the United States. You can't make this shit up. Apparently the protests were much smaller than the claims I heard earlier today of 100,000. More like 10,000, and all the on-the-ground anecdotal reports made it sound (and look!) positively sparse.
Via the ever-helpful Winds of Change wrapup. Karmic Inquisition has some comments on the D.C. protests: "So the anti-war movement has now transformed 'not in my name' into 'not on my dime.' " |
| Article on why Tarantino-the-director is essentially bulletproof, and why Kill Bill, a simultaneously great and terrible movie, is impossible to criticize. I find myself sympathizing with Tarantino. The world is a smaller place without him and his Fountain of Eternal Cool.
Via Crazy Kimchi. |
| I went walking north of town around the old limestone quarries. The foothills of Bald Eagle Mountain are riddled with abandoned quarries that are more-or-less wide open. Some of the ones up past Zion are fenced in, but the land owners haven't bothered with the ones closer to town. Go figure. I had forgotten just how much of the old buildings were still intact. Free-standing concrete pillars stand everywhere in pretty minimal brush. I don't know just when these quarries went out of business, but it was long enough ago that a full-scale climax forest has grown over what must have been the parking lots, and compounds. The quarry floors themselves are mostly open, with medium-light scrub, except for the one closest to town, which is a near-impenetrable tangle of sumac and so on. That particular quarry is also the one with the fewest ruins - I'm not sure what to make of that. Possibly it's been abandoned for a much longer period of time, and the scrub is finally breaking the quarry floor down into useful topsoil? We're talking limestone, here. It isn't the most resilient of bedrocks.
The ruins that stand between the second, third and fourth quarries (in a more-or-less sequence from Water Street trending northeast towards the interstate) are clustered around a healthy little stream that's fed from the pond in the fourth quarry, although the stream doesn't originate entirely from the quarry complex. It must have preceded the flooding of the fourth quarry, because there's an intact concrete bridge over it that's clearly part of the older ruins. Half-standing two-story buildings, towers, and gutted windows loom out of the forest dark like the shattered remnants of ancient fortresses. The construction is all much more sturdy than today's industrial complexes, unless they were doing some sort of on-site processing that I haven't heard of. Maybe the gravel plant used to be in that complex? There isn't nearly enough ironmongery laying about for that, I don't think. There's plenty of rubbish back there, but it's all consumer-trash - entire wrecked cars, mufflers, busted-up consumer electronics, mattresses, that sort of thing. I ran into a group of about ten rock-climbers in and around the fourth quarry, including one guy halfway up the eastern rockface, with two guys belaying him below. The rest of them were packed up and making their way out of the quarry area. The sheer bulk of ropes, pinions, and so on is mildly staggering. Every one of them was carrying a full backpack, stuffed as full as if they were on a two-week trek through the backwoods. It left me wondering how rockclimbers got around before the days of nylon, alloys and other light-weight materials. I suppose I ought to throw in some sort of warning about how old quarries are dangerous, notably lacking in fences, full of rusty rubbish, uncertain footing, and unexpected sudden drops. But from what I've been told these quarries are a part of any Bellefonte childhood, and if you survived a childhood here, you know about them. As I was walking back through town in the twilight, I passed two ten-year-olds racing their skateboards, body-surfing them head-first down a steep suburban street. Kids can find a way to risk their necks anywhere, I suppose. |
Saturday, October 25, 2003
| Zimbabwean Scots refugees from Mugabe's land-reforms have, according to this article, begun turning neighboring Zambia's agricultural economy into a boom sector. The details provided in the article seem to suggest that the refugees took their credit ratings with them, and have been using European capital to finance bumper crop harvests. This seems to illustrate just how stupid confiscatory "land reform" is - it wasn't the land that provided the white farmers of Zimbabwe their competitive advantage, it was their solid credit with world financial markets. The seized farms have mostly disappeared, with over 200,000 acres in cultivation declining to a little more than 20,000 this year.
After some googling, I've come across some background that is missing from the article. Zambia has been suffering from starvation conditions due to several years of drought and a stiff-necked refusal on the part of its dirt-ignorant president to accept genetically-modified grain from American donors. Of course, GM crops aren't necessary for improving on typical south African crop yields - chemical fertilizers and pesticides are more than enough to improve on the declining agricultural standards of the area. Further investigation seems to show that this year's Zambian maize harvest was more than twice the April projection. The Scotsman report seemed to indicate that the white farmers were just getting started in Zambia, and only represented around 2% of the harvest. Thus, it's hard to tell whether the bumper crop was mostly due to a feast year coming after two famine seasons, or whether the white refugees have been spreading the credit around, thus bootstrapping the Zambian agricultural sector with imported capital resources. Original link via Joe Katzman at Winds of Change. |
| Wonderful. It seems as if the New Blog Showcase's newest sponsoring organization, the League of Liberals, is full of people who believe firmly in linkwhoring - using repeated redundant links to scam page-ranking schemes like the voting apparatus at the New Blog Showcase and Truth Laid Bear's Ecosystem. They've spammed this week's showcase in this manner such that a blogger clique with 27 members produced, for a worthless we-hate-Halliburton agitprop site, 41 votes as of yesterday, and 71 this morning. The various right-center cliques have responded in kind, such that the second-place contestant, a decent blog-entry to which I had already linked earlier as my contribution to this week's contest, which had 30 more-or-less unique votes yesterday, now has over two hundred "votes", mostly from hotheads physics geek and Susie. In Susie's defense, she might just be overly enthusiastic. Physics geek outright states that he's trying to blow the contest out of the water by making the results so outrageously fraudulent that Truth Laid Bear will have to adjust the rules.
This here is why I haven't joined any cliques yet. Stupid blog tricks. Clowning around is fine and dandy, people, but linkwhoring is... dishonourable. It's a cheat. Please don't do it. Update: Pixy Misa of Ambient Irony gets in on the game with a bit of over-the-top quotage. OK, OK, I give. Once you get to this point, it's hard to be all Methodist scold about it. Especially after it degenerates into an exchange of whipped-cream pies. Update II: Hrm, it looks like The Bear has noticed the whipped-cream-pie fight, and slapped a filter on the proceedings. Good! Update III: Suzie points out in comments that I gave the League of Liberals too much credit - there's 15 of them, not 27. I stand corrected. |
Friday, October 24, 2003
"Fanfare for the Common Crackhead"
| I had not been made aware that Gehry's new "democratic" concert hall has over a thousand less seats than the previous concert hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Per-seat prices have tripled, as well. Yeah, that's embracing "the people". Hypocrites! |
Department of I Needed a Good Laugh
| Ah! I hadn't heard of the Bonfire of the Vanities before. Well, I've heard of the Tom Wolfe novel. Read it, too. But this weekly compilation of bad and/or silly posts? New to me.
Jim of Snooze Button Dreams revels in providing too much information. |
| Sgt. Stryker & Sparkey of the military groupblog Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing have spun off a new groupblog called "Iraq: the Good, the Bad and the Fugly" as part of an attempt to collate a balanced summary of news from Iraq. Originally, Sgt. Stryker was going to report bad news, and Sparkey was going to concentrate on good news; I'm not sure if this division of labor will be continued on the new groupblog.
Sparkey notes reports that the 101st Airborne is starting to ramp down deployments in Mosul and other areas in the North as the new Iraqi police take over day-to-day policing duties; it's suggested that smaller units will be garrisoning the North when the rotation takes the 101st out of Iraq. Meanwhile, crime rates have plummeted in the last two weeks as the police start to hit the streets in earnest. Sgt. Stryker, on the other hand, passes along a series of rumors, presumably from personal sources in Iraq, as he gives no links. He also notes an article on how tribal chauvinism is complicating reconstruction in some Iraqi localities, as feuding tribes and sheikhs squabble over Coalition improvements in what should be public, common areas like the construction of water pumping stations. |
| Nelson Ascher of Europundits has posted an excellent essay on why Zionism isn't a classic nationalist movement, but rather a late-period reaction to exclusionary nationalisms - specifically, in Herzl's case, the Dreyfuss Affair.
Personally, I wonder at his assertion that there may not be any such thing as a "Palestinian people". The hostile pseudo-Judaizing fashion in which non-Palestinian Arabs treat Palestinian Arabs seems to me to demonstrate a sufficient proof that the rest of the Arab world perceives the Palestinians as "Other", to steal a Saidism. Furthermore, the irrational anti-Semitism of the Palestinian Arabs are no bar against the concept of a Palestinian nationalism; such xenophobias have, historically, been vital elements of the creation of nationalism in a population. The combination of an inability of Palestinians to assimilate in ethnically identical Arab populations, and the adoption of a "Palestinian" identity seems to put the existence of a "Palestinian" people well beyond the realm of reasonable argument. Update: Porphyrogenitus has, as usual, more to say about the subject. I suppose I ought to extend my remarks by noting that the existence of a "Palestinian" people doesn't dictate the need for a Palestinian nation-state, nor does it require the forced Czechoslovakization of Israel into a Judean chimera. The Czechs and the Slovaks didn't even get along that badly - you never heard of Slovaks gunning down Czechs in cafes, or Czech aircraft bombing Slovakian terror cells. Given the recognition of a distinct "Palestinian" people and a working Israeli nation, what fool would voluntarily shove both cats into the same sack? Not that I'm enthused about the current prospects for a two-state solution; the "Palestinian" people are caught between abominable popular political instincts and reprehensible political leaders. A recognition that all possible Palestinian leaders are, to varying degrees, worthless, does not remove the problem itself. Meanwhile, the Israeli insistence on pushing settlement just makes the problem worse. An imposition of a "one-state" solution will result, inevitably, in Israeli democide and another Islamist tyranny. The current situation will, one day, peter out in a slow-motion Palestinian expulsion. I don't find myself cheering either prospect. Do you? |
| George Galloway has been expelled from the Labour Party. Excellent. |
| Zeyad is arguing in favor of a reinstitution of the death penalty in Iraq. When did Bremer get rid of the death penalty? And why, for god's sake? |
Thursday, October 23, 2003
| It seems I was correct in seeing the hand of Berman in Demosophia's Totalitarian 3.0 essay. He's got an essay on Berman's Terror and Liberalism that demonstrates the passion and fire of the new-converted. It's an interesting, if highly charged, discussion of the book, from a political-philosophy point of view. It's definitely a better-thought-out review than Josh Marshall's narrow, blinkered whinging.
Update: on further inquiry, Demosophia is an accredited political research scientist. Interesting. I'm somewhat annoyed that I discovered him via the New Blog Showcase. His blog operates at a fairly high level; I would have expected to have seen links to him before this. Further investigation shows that he started briefly at a Blogspot site last month. |
| While taking a look at this week's New Blog Showcase, I noted Irreconcilable Musings. Hrm, that's a pretty toxic blogtitle, there - "Musings" is a major cliche no-no. The subtitle "Examining cognitive dissonance one paradox at a time..." isn't a cliche, but it ought to be. I was surprised to see that the blogger is a member of that silly anti-Reynolds "alliance" ("Instapundo delenda est!"), but upon consulting his backlog, his blog is actually younger than mine, so - it's definitely a new blog!. His sample post is an article about the recent DDoS attacks on Internet Haganah and, indirectly, everybody on Hosting Matters. His take on the obvious "Internet Front of the War on Terror!" meme is somewhat different - he feels that supporting Internet Haganah (which tracks and exposes online al Queda resources to the public and the authorities) is a way for a philosophical pacifist to participate in the War on Terror without all that ooky killing and wounding and arresting and throwing of terrorists into Cuban oubliettes.
Demosophia definitely gets cool points for an excellent neologism - "Wisdom of the People" - as a blogtitle. The subtitle - "When the statues of Daedalus come to life no men will have masters, nor masters slaves." -- Aristotle - definitely isn't a cliche, but it is a bit opaque. His sample-post - proposing that there is a "Totalitarianism 3.0" that needs to be fought - isn't particularly earth-shattering, but it demonstrates a solid, full-winded grasp of the historical essay-blog that shows promise. It's essentially a summation of the arguments of Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Den Beste. It's a very good summation. It just isn't anything else, yet. He also needs to be careful with his terms - he seems to demonstrate a certain sloppiness with his constructions that could lead to misunderstanding by those unfamiliar with the subject matter. For instance, he uses "liberal democracy" in a fashion that might lead an unwary reader to think that he meant to say that Athenian democracy was a "liberal democracy". In the full context of the article, I'm fairly sure that he is aware that "liberal democracy" refers to the modern, post-Enlightenment construct, but the opportunity for confusion is definitely there. He isn't alone in this flaw, however: Den Beste himself is prone to commit this kind of error at least once a week, on average. Further study of his later posts seem to indicate that he's definitely got things to say. I'm adding him to my list of blogs to watch for now. Interesting. |
Iraqi Newspaper Describes Pre-Sept. 11th al-Queda Training at Salman Pak
| What infuriates me about this is that if you ask members of the mainstream media about Salman Pak, they'll give you the same tired Ba'athist cant that it was a "counterterrorist" training facility, and go on to repeat the same tired bullshit about how Saddam Hussein and al-Queda didn't co-operate.
There was an unbearably smug poll by PIPA/Knowledge Networks a few weeks ago. This poll's press release claimed that Fox News viewers were suffering from "misperceptions" of the war, and one of these key misperceptions was the idea that Iraq had something to do with al Queda. All right-thinking people know, of course, that there's no such thing as a postwar link between the Ba'athists and al Queda. At the time the poll was making the rounds of the self-righteous left, I couldn't find clean links to defend the common right-wing notion of Ba'athist-al Queda linkage. They do exist, and quite extensively, due to a Weekly Standard article by Stephen Hayes and a James Lileks column using that article. However, I couldn't find authoritative non-partisan links that didn't descend eventually to those two articles at the time, and I dropped the subject. But this Salman Pak story qualifies, I think, as definite evidence. Pardon me while I cover my left flank on this: Some are worried that the Al-Yawm Al-Aakher article might be bogus - what is the Al-Yawm Al-Aakher and who publishes it? MEMRI, the proximate source of the article (it's an Israeli site that monitors and translates Arabic-language publications across the Middle East - it's generally balanced, unlike say, DEBKA) identifies the publisher of Al-Yawm Al-Aakher in this wrapup as "Al-Munajjed Publications", elsewhere as "Al-Munajjed Publishing", which had previously produced pro-Saddam material, and here as "Al-Munnajed Publishing House". From a scan of the editorials and quotes provided by MEMRI in the above links and elsewhere, I conclude that Al-Yawm Al-Aakher is, indeed, a cranky, nationalist, independent publication, prone to hectoring Bremer, Iraq's neighbors, Jews, and Chalabi in fairly equal terms of scorn and disrespect. This Salman Pak article might still be a fraud, but it doesn't sound as if it could possibly be an American or American conservative fraud. At any rate, it does indeed qualify as evidence from an utterly independent source. Maybe not proof, but definitely evidence. ANYways, this diversion was made to illustrate the point I had wanted to make about the PIPA/Knowledge Networks polling - that it was badly polluted by a classic case of confirmation bias. They were looking for people with opinions formed by stories like the Weekly Standard article and the Lileks column. They found them. And they discovered that, sure enough, those people's opinions differed from those of people more likely to listen to NPR or read John Pilger stories. Quelle surprise. What offends me, in the end is that the conductors of the poll decided to take their institutional biases, and project them as proper perceptions, and the targeted audience's as "misperceptions". At the time, they were both simple perceptions. I had been waiting for something like the Al-Yawm Al-Aakher Salman Pak story to break the Schrodingerian suspension of the two sets of perception, and make my argument something other than a conflict of opinions. All thanks to Winds of Change's Iraq War Wrapup and MEMRI for giving me that opportunity. |
| Porphyrogenitus offers a multiple-choice question that proports to show what kind of foreign-policy type you are by how you deal with anti-American Frenchmen yelling at you during a visit to that fine nation. What if your response is to ask him to kindly fuck off, as you're on vacation and uninterested in pissing contests with locals? To be strictly honest, I suspect I belong in the "evil NeoCon cabal" category, as I wouldn't be likely to visit France.
As an alternate, here's a multiple-choice quiz that made the rounds a month or so ago. I seem to remember that I came out as a neocon in that one, too. Update: Porphy subjects me to a well-deserved mocking. |
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
| Fred at the Daily Blatt has pointed out a number of fascinating Scottish articles. Particularly interesting is this article on the role of Glasgow in the American colonial tobacco trade. My knowledge of colonial economic history is as shallow as the Missouri before the Army Corps of Engineers overdredged it, and it's always cool to get a little depth in a previously shallow channel. Except, I suppose, for wildlife.
The article basically argues that the 1707 Union Treaty led to the rise of Scotland and Glasgow in particular as a great commercial entrepot, as Glasgow came to dominate the tobacco trade in the 18th century. It also notes that the Scottish domination of the tobacco trade came about during a shift from a haphazard system of commissions and chartered shipping to a heavily-capitalized direct-purchase system featuring owned, dedicated shipping. The Sunday Herald is apparently pushing the author, Tom Devine, and his new book, Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815 . There's also an article in which he makes the quite reasonable argument that Scottish identity, in the Highlander sense of kilts, sporrans, claymores and so on, is a product of Great Britain's first imperial project, in the late 18th century and first half of the 19th. It certainly jibes with what I've always heard, at least. Fred also points out an account of Devine's feuds with a Scottish nationalist/revisionist historian named Fry. |
| I was reading this Instapundit-linked NYT article on declining TV ratings among men, especially the 18-24 demographic. I thought over my immediate circle of friends, and realized that I'm the only one who actually has cable TV. Of course, they're older than the demographic the article is talking about, but this realization was disquieting. There really is a drift away from broadcast television in my social circle. To tell the truth, I rarely watch TV except when I'm playing ancient wargames on my equally ancient home computer, and even then, it's more of a radio-with-pictures than the type of engrossed viewing that one thinks of when saying "I'm watching TV!". |
| It occurs to me that I'm a terrible mountain man. I don't actually live in the woods, I've never started a fire without matches, I don't even rake leaves any more - I mean, I could if I wanted to, but I suspect the locals would start classifying me with the semi-homeless guy who spends his days pulling weeds on public and semi-public property around Bellefonte. I suppose I could tell a sumac tree from another... tree, but I found that I couldn't even tell you what kind of trees were cut down in Bellefonte's courthouse square. Elms? Probably not, for the same reason they were probably not chestnuts - neither do too well these days, what with the various tree disease affecting them. They were probably maples, but I can't remember exactly. It's not as if I could tell an elm from a maple from... whatever else we have around here. They're all deciduous trees to me.
Well, at least I have the beard. |
| Josh Marshall talks about his recent jury duty, and how they convicted a man of distributing PCP, but acquitted him of "possession with intent to distribute". Take a moment to savor that pair of jury decisions. He didn't have the PCP, but he did distribute it. Right. This is the sort of "thinking" that passes for logic among newly-minted history PhDs. That's as boneheaded as the clowns on that Cain-and-Abel murder trial where they acquitted Cain of murder, but convicted him of manslaughter for killing and hiding Abel in a pile of leaves behind his hunting lodge. Some days I am sorely tempted by the French legal system. |
| Interesting debate between the Centre County commissioner candidates in today's CDT. I'm not seeing anything that's likely to make me change my mind - Conklin and Dershem it is. Exarchos is a fury of anti-tax hysteria, and Goreham seems to be a typical boneheaded Democrat. Both Dershem and Conklin were cautious about matters, and inclined to keep their eyes on future needs due to demographic expansion - the need to finance a fourth district judgeship, expansion out of the overstuffed Willowbank offices, the long-overdue courthouse renovation, etc. I don't know what to make of that preposterous baseball stadium boondoggle, but Conklin voted against it.
About that courthouse renovation - it seems like a bit of overkill, to my mind. The Bellefonte courthouse itself could stand with a bit of cleaning up - the lightning rod on the tower has been leaning drunkenly for as long as I've been in town, and the building had been getting a bit dingy. That being said, I don't understand why they felt the need to tear up the entire town square, and cut down all the trees. They were at least a hundred years old, and the town feels hollowed out without them dominating High and Allegheny Streets any more. They ripped up the fountain, the stone walls, and everything else, until Governor Curtin and his hulking war memorial stood above a muddy hole where the square used to be. At least they aren't tearing down the monument. I can't imagine what they're planning to put in there that would compensate for tearing out those magnificent trees, though. |
| I've been checking on the voting record of my representative, one John Peterson (R-PA). I caught him voting "yea" on yesterday's non-binding instruction in favor of that verkakte grant-to-loan business. What the hell was he thinking? For any readers in the Pennsylvania Fifth Congressional District, here's where you can contact him and give him a little hell. It indicates that he's going to ignore anyone without a Fifth District mail address.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003
| Wheeee! Office 2003 has been set loose on mankind like a flight of furies upon a sinful world! Any bets on how long it takes some half-trained sociopath to figure out a half-dozen new ways to exploit security holes in this innovative, massively integrated mess of spaghetti-software?
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| According to Newsweek, the FBI's Middle Eastern languages translation section is hopelessly backlogged. One of the more alarming points made was that dozens of volunteer American Sephardim from Brooklyn were rejected by the FBI screeners because they refused to renounce their joint Israeli citizenship. The Sephardim (Arabic-speaking Jews, roughly) are Israel's best front-line weapon in the intelligence business. The FBI is so worried about another Jonathan Pollard that they're jeopardizing our homeland security by refusing to use Israeli or Israeli-American translators. Jesus Christ, people - who cares if they're spying for the Israelis on the side!
Via Little Green Footballs. |
| There's an article in Slate lauding Frank Gehry's latest monstrosity, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. I cannot understand the appeal of Gehry's cancerous growths. They're hideous hypermodernist abstract abominations so unbalanced and erratic that they'd make an Elder God seasick. The architectural critics love to call his designs "organic" and "natural" when in point of fact, they're the exact opposite of organic and natural. The natural world is intrinsically biased towards a certain smooth symmetry - balance even in the breaking of balance. Gehry's designs are intentionally lopsided, ill-proportioned, and forced. His imbalances leaves me distressed, fretful, and inclined to set cars and incompetent architects on fire.
However. The hall interior itself is beautiful despite itself - elegant in a severe, undecorated fashion. I'm loathe to give Gehry the credit for this: he's been forced to implement elements of balance, proportion, and symmetry by the requirements of modern acoustic science. His trademark imbalances and broken symmetries are forbidden by the inexorable laws of acoustics. They would render concerts as dissonant and distorted as Gehry's design sense itself. Thus, what I can see of the Walt Disney Concert Hall is the mirror opposite of democratic intent - a building that is offensive in its exterior affect, while beautiful and embracing to those held in its privileged heart. |
"Fascists did with their eyes open what Communists did with their eyes shut."
| Robert Dean at Samizdata links to an interesting article from the Libertarian Alliance on Italian Fascism and Mussolini. The author, David Ramsay Steele, makes the argument that Fascism is misunderstood due to the Marxist-Leninist prism through which most analysis has been conducted, that the "Mystery of Fascism" is a perceptual artifact. It also dances around the question of "is Fascism a form of Marxist apostatacy?" without ever really saying so - letting quotes from other writers carry the weight. This all sounds a lot like what I've heard from Paul Berman, and though the article has the occasional nasty swipe (calling Fascism a "third way" for inter-war intellectuals) at the enemies of libertarianism, it is generally restrained in its rhetoric and argumentation. I found the section on "the Crisis of Marxism" in the 1890s particularly illuminating, as what I've read of Marxist history tends to be an inpenetrable slog of misleading triumphalism and petty politicking. |
Monday, October 20, 2003
| I stopped at the local Barnes & Nobles on Saturday, nominally on the way to visiting a friend in State College. I bought Tsouras' Gettysburg: an Alternate History based on a reference someone had made on one of the Civil War groups. I'm afraid to say that I never actually made it to that friend's apartment. Instead, I spent the rest of the day walking around the grounds of the Nittany Mall and the rest of the Benner/Rt. 26 strip, reading the book straight through. The fit occasionally takes me in this fashion; it really freaks some people out to see someone walking around in broad daylight reading a book. I don't know what they're getting excited about: this is what God invented peripheral vision for! Well, that or hiding from large predators - aggressive drivers in SUVs, for instance.
Anyways, Tsouras. He was writing for a specialist press that apparently does hard-facts counterfactual fiction - there isn't supposed to be anything utterly impossible in the course of these books. Confederate AK-47s, for instance. For those of you who are big on carnography - history books on war - it's a pretty neat read. It's written as if it was the five-billionth history of the Gettysburg campaign; it's full of footnotes, two-thirds of which seem to be valid citations of various sources and secondary-source analysis like Coddington's book and Douglas Southall Freeman's various multivolume apologetics. Tsouras also quotes a lot of utterly fictional sources and books of analysis, which he usually marks out with asterisks to separate them from the valid ones. I think I caught him dropping asterisks a few times, but I'll give it a pass. I'm a sucker for counterfactual history; I think most history majors are in one fashion or another, though some mask it with violent denunciations and rants against the very notion. American Civil War counterfactuals are by far and away the most popular examples of this genre, composing a subgenre all their own, in a certain sense. Partially, this is because American Civil War history is a major publishing category in and of itself - entire counties of clear-cut timber have given their all in the service of Civil War publishing. I'll even still buy Harry Turtledove novels on the residual strength of my fascination with counterfactual history; it overwhelms my disdain for his feeble and declining capacity for minor literary trifles such as character, pacing, flow, prose, or style. This is the second alternate history I've read this season on Gettysburg alone. A local named Douglas Lee Gibboney wrote an interesting alternate history of the Gettysburg campaign in the war-memoir style entitled Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg. Gettysburg: an Alternate History, Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg and a third book entitled Lee at Chattanooga all share a quirk that is becoming more and more common in alternate-history - a might-have-been which results in either the same result in the end, or else an unexpected intensification of the historical result. Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg gives those that bewailed Jackson's death after Chancellorsville, who thought that his presence would have won the battle at Gettysburg, exactly what they wished for. Jackson is present at the battle, which in this alternate series of events, becomes a disastrous but limited defeat, as Jackson's troops push a portion of the unprepared Army of the Potomac off of the heights to the southeast of the town. Then follows a week of hard campaigning as Meade falls back to his prepared Pipe Creek lines, re-enacting Sickles' and Longstreet's battles and "Allegheny" Johnson's disastrous frontal assault in northern Maryland. Finally, Jackson leads a wild ride around the deep Union left, wins one small battle and loses a larger one, echoing his punch-drunk ineptitude during the Seven Days. In the end, the Army of Northern Virginia is driven back in disorder on the Williamsport crossings, with the same exact result. Gibboney's most excellent conceit is the way he preserves a certain conservation of historical event, by fatally wounding A.P. Hill in the same friendly-fire incident at Chancellorsville that would have eventually killed Jackson in this world. At the end of the war, Jackson is killed in the exact same fashion as Hill was - shot down by Union skirmishers within the lines of a collapsing Petersburg defense in the last two weeks of the war. Lee at Chattanooga, by one Dennis P. McIntire is a minor work that supposes that somebody could have talked Lee into leaving his Virginia theatre to relieve the hopeless Bragg just before the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. McIntire doesn't do nearly as good a job as Gibboney or Tsouras - Lee does everything right, and yet inexplicable disaster unhinges everything at the end, leading to a devastating defeat. McIntire no doubt intends to demonstrate the same bewilderment as the Confederates of the Army of Tennessee displayed over the historical result - a wild, unplanned assault up the sheer mountain-face of Missionary Ridge - but instead it simply reads like deus ex machina. Gettysburg, an Alternate History differs from the above two works in that the end result is quite different from the historical result; it is, however, in the opposite direction from the usual Confederate-victory supposings of a different Gettysburg. Tsouras allows the vagaries of fate to bring Stuart orders from Lee to meet him at Cashtown earlier than the historical event; thus, Stuart appears on July 1st instead of late on the 2nd. This gives Lee back his eyes, which leaves him ambitious enough to allow Longstreet his wide flanking move behind the Round Tops. It also hurries Ewell & Early to make disastrous night attacks that end up replicating the historical result on that field in a fashion I've only seen in indifferently-coded historical wargames. Longstreet's flanking move causes a very silly series of flankings and outflankings that requires Lee to personally intervene to preserve Hill's flank at one point (thus setting up his full-scale heart attack later in the book), and a lot of wild, bloody battles. The eventual, mortifying failure of the flanking move causes Longstreet to swing fully behind the Pickett assault, and inspires him to make it a full six-division assault rather than the three-division attack of history. This results in a much closer battle on the 3rd, with much higher Confederate casualties, the wounding of Meade instead of Hancock, and a Waterlooesque counterattack that captures a large fragment of the attacking column, their cannon, and Longstreet, effectively destroying the Army of Northern Virginia. The war ends a year later, and Hancock eventually becomes President in place of Grant. As I said, the events start out in a historically reasonable fashion, but things become more and more unlikely as the book wears on. Additionally, Tsouras cheats. Good counterfactual history should be based on single-fault causation - one change from which all additional differences descend in proper butterfly-wing fashion. For want of a nail, and all that. Instead, Tsouras enhances his initial Stuart-arrives-early with the arbitrary and pointless addition of two brigades to Pickett's division, which had been detached for other theatres. This isn't really necessary for the flow of events which Tsouras is devising - it just gives Longstreet more forces to throw into the July 3rd assault. Additional events occur without any apparent causation - such as Sedgwick talking Buford into returning to the field with his division on the 2nd. In the end, Tsouras' book is lacking in that very virtue for which his publisher is most proud of - rigour. |
Friday, October 17, 2003
| You know, this sort of thing is how artists disappear into their own self-importance. "Oooh! Oooh! People who want to work for a living don't have any dreams!" It's a particularly smug species of elitist contempt, and the fact that I used to encounter it far too often in independant and small press comics contributed heavily to my current disinterest in the whole scene.
Bite me, McCloud. |
| For those of you unacquainted with frequent commenter Jessica Gothie (no relation to the Jessica of Jessica's Well, below), she has been working, on and off, on a chapter-by-chapter gloss on Moby Dick. So what? you inquire. There has to be five billion dissertations on Moby Dick weighing down the dusty unvisited stacks of the university libraries of the West. Jessica is reading Moby Dick as if it were yaoi doujinshi, or slash fanfic. More fun than literary analysis really ought to be, y'know? |
| Jessica at Jessica's Well has dug up a Life article from 1946, after the end of the war but before the Marshall Plan. It's written by John Dos Passos, a leftist novelist (he was well-known in his time, but his books haven't really aged well - unless you're a reader of the New York Times Review of Books, you've probably never heard of him). People have been making up satirical versions of this article for a couple of months now; this blogger has found the thing itself. After reading the article, I have to say I'm surprised. It's a remarkably and accurate report of what was going on in postwar Europe. Of course, we're talking about a leftist writing for Henry Luce - I imagine that the clash between socialist sensibility and Lucian conservatism was bound to produce something trembling on the balance.
Don't misunderstand: this is not one of Robert Fisk's or John Pilger's marvels of misdirection and mendacity. Europe really was wrecked, sacked, and on the edge of starvation. It was articles like this that shamed a nation and built a consensus in favor of the Marshall Plan. Note, mind you, what the Marshall Plan was. It wasn't an accountant's construct of loans, guarantees, and mortgages on Europe's future. It was a set of carefully administered grants. GRANTS. Grants at a time when the United States was groaning under the burden of an enormous wartime debt beside which our current debts stand like the tailings of a child's excavation project beside Pike's Peak. Imagine what might have happened if the Lodges and Tafts of their day chose to burden the Marshall Plan with entailments upon the future economic potential of Europe. For god's sake, compare the EU's economic aggregate to today's America. They exceed us in size! And yet some Senators today dare make mouth about oil revenue potential. Via Instapundit |
| A Fall's Night
The harvest moon hangs fat and orange from a wasting vine Over ripe and drying fields dreaming under autumn frost's rime Time to seal away the days to age with the new-casked wine These nights stretch out forever under the skies of God's own mind This is the fruit for which the year was spent, filled to the outermost rind Now is the time to pull in casts, and back to the reel all catches wind. Here is the season to reap what was sown Here is the reason the high grass was mown Soon shall a cold sun collect on a summer's loan Now comes the road's son, stumbling, home. 10/17/03 |
| I never thought I would be blessing the conservatism, wisdom and restraint of a Republican House of Representatives, but here I am today, thanking them for refusing to be stampeded over the same penny-pinching cliff as the cowardly, sailtrimming U.S. Senate.
Let me read you a list of Republican Senators who chose to present a bill to the Iraqi people for a "gift" we promised to give them: Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Colo.) John Ensign (Nev.) Lindsey Graham (SC) Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) Sam Brownback (Kans.) Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) Susan Collins (Maine) Collins and Snowe are from what once was my wing of the Republican Party, when I was still a Republican. For that, I am remorseful. But I will point out that Voinovich, Chafee, and Specter are all missing from this list. At least some fragments of the Republican moderate wing came through. But look who's up there. Lindsey Graham. Saxby Chambliss. SAXBY FUCKING CHAMBLISS! The man who stomped all over a three-time amputee WAR VETERAN to prove that he was STRONGER ON DEFENSE! Back when I was wavering on whether we should invade Iraq (oh, yes, it happened - I had to be convinced, and I never relished the idea of war), I noted in a moment of new-minted Democratic fury that chickenhawks like Saxby Chambliss ought to have been crucified across the front glacis plate of the first Bradley across the Iraqi international border. Graham is easily in the same class as Chambliss, but he was blessed by fortune and fate with an opponent who wasn't a VIETNAM WAR VET! So, our friends the new-minted Southern chickenhawks show they're capable of turning into backstabbing, cheese-paring neoisolationists at the drop of a gimmie cap. What a surprise. Let me take this moment to tell you all I told you so! Meanwhile, m'man John McCain has been out there talking to half the papers in the world about his vote against the amendment. Knew we could count on John. Update: I don't know what to make of Lieberman not voting. On the one hand, his and Byrd's nonvotes would have cancelled each other out, unless I've misread Byrd's stance on the matter. On the other hand, it looks a hell of a lot like sailtrimming, or at least dodging a hard call. It's not a betrayal, but he isn't impressing me with his fortitude. |
Thursday, October 16, 2003
| For chromal, who was worrying over deficits over lunch today, here's Tom McGuire on the medium-longterm economic question. Mostly, it's a roundup over the latest Krugman squawk of "the sky is falling!". I don't really have the chops for this sort of analysis, I can only gaze back at Krugman's historically sub-Galbraithian record, which seems to exceed the usual economist preformative standard of "he's predicted five of the last two recessions". |
| The Good People of the World and their tactics. Cry "censorship", and silence witnesses. Scream "oppression", and threaten others. Hide. Conceal. Attack. Intimidate. Scurry when unexpectedly exposed.
Christ, do I hate "protests". Via Instapundit. |
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Fuck Edwards
| I supported Edwards in the past because I liked his take on domestic issues, he was pro-war, and he wasn't burdened with Lieberman's distasteful social conservativism.
He is voting against the $87 billion reconstruction bill. He voted in favor of the UN authorization back in the day. He's willing to play the hawk when it's safe to do so, but is too much of a coward to pay the cost when it's required. This decision convinces me that he has no backbone, and that I can't trust him to do the right thing for the right reasons. It's an abominable act, and it convinces me that the man is unworthy of the White House. Gephardt, on the other hand, has his heart in the right place. He's done his share of rhetorical tacking on the war, but when it comes to a head, he's a standup guy. Such a shame that Gephardt's an economic disaster. I guess I'm stuck with Lieberman. Via the TNR Primary |
Erin O'Connor links to, and excerpts, a screed by a poet named Tom Henihan against the evils of teaching poetry. O'Connor's agenda is the exposure of the faults of academia, and of course she concentrates on his criticism of academic instruction in creative writing, specifically poetry. I should point out that I have never taken a college course in poetry writing or appreciation. My college English experience was largely in literature, comparative religion, history, and Shakespeare. Maybe that's why I still like poetry, I don't know. O'Connor has her point, and she makes it well. I hold no brief in favor of the academy. But there are other ideas, dominating ideas, that make Henihan's essay... distinct:
Some years ago a guy I knew in Vancouver lost his job at an art gallery. Due to idleness and a lack of direction he fell in with the poetry crowd and of course started writing. His stuff was sloppy and obviously derivative but no one seemed to mind. One night sitting over a beer I cautiously asked him about his creative process. Without batting an eyelid, he told me that he typed other poets work on his computer, moved the verses around and substituted words until he had something that looked like his own. He then enthusiastically added, "This poetry thing is a blast." What would you say if someone said this to you? Would you laugh and enjoy the joke? Or would you go off to a corner to rail against the barbarians at the gate, the barbarians within the gate, the snickering barbarians burning the shattered splinters of the gate in bonfires between their squalid yurts? I beg you, stop and marvel at the peerless shallows of a mind that is incapable of grasping the humor of that anecdote. When student poets get up to read they almost always thank their teacher for making poetry fun. Poetry should be protected from fun. There is so much fun in the world it isn’t funny anymore. Poetry is essentially a solemn and devotional form. Funny poetry is a contradiction in terms…it’s the equivalent of kneeling in a church and saying funny prayers or chanting at a funny ritual. I am not saying that there is no room for humour in poetry but I am saying that there is very little room. The above quote isn't selective. It is representative of the tone of the essay. There is no room for fun in poetry. Poetry is a devotional form. These sentiments makes me want to shout, makes me want to scream, makes me want to write bad haiku about my genitals and scrawl them on the sides of bathroom toilet stalls. No room for fun. What a monstrous, abominable notion. |
| "I am going with her tomorrow to take pictures of tough women holding big guns. " Salam Pax's first Guardian column since returning to Baghdad. I like what I'm hearing from Salam these days. It sounds... hopeful. |
| Mickey Kaus comments on a suicide at NYU from the 10th floor balcony of one of those horrible deep-vertical atriums that sadistic architects love to inflict on college campuses. I'm mildly acrophobic, and the University of Pittsburgh's plethora of buildings with vertiginous low-barrier balconies led me to reject that university in favor of Penn State's mostly-horizontal campus. Edges with low barriers over deep drops exert a horrible attraction for me - I find myself leaning backwards from them, as if I'm braced against a wind blowing towards the drop. Unsettling.
George RR Martin's A Clash of Kings has a great passage about this compulsion, featuring a "sky cell" - a jail cell where the wall on the side of a horrible precipice is missing, and the floor slightly sloped towards that side of the cell. The cell had a message scrawled on one wall: "The blue is calling me!". I can't figure out how to defeat Slate's eccentric formatting of Kaus's pseudoblog - just scroll down to "A second NYU student has died after..." |
| I finished watching the first Witch Hunter Robin DVD last night. The transfer is supernaturally crisp and clean, considering the dark shadowy palette that WHR uses. If you compare this disc to MediaBlaster's DVD of Weathering Continent or ADV's Devil Lady DVDs, there's just no doubt about it. Both of those counterexamples are full of colorblocking and digital noise in the dark areas and shadows. I don't think I saw a single glitch on my copy of the WHR DVD. Phenomenal job.
One has to wonder if they put the effort into that brilliant encode that they skimped on things like translating credits. Bandai is a Japanese-owned company; what's so hard about stripping the Japanese credits out and replacing them with professional English credits? I don't know, maybe there's an alternate angle for the English dub with English credits; if so, that's pretty damn lame, people. If they just didn't bother - for God's sake, it's 2003! The masters have got to be digital; it's not as if it's some grand chore to remove the credits layer from the opening and ending and swap them out! The DVD encode really brings out the subtle charms of this show. There's heavy use of computer graphics for background work, especially in the character's office space. The DVD looks better than the digisubs, which is really saying a hell of a lot - I hadn't expected them to exceed what had been a very high level of quality work on the part of the amateurs for WHR. For those of you hiding under a rock, Witch Hunter Robin is an occult police-procedural show featuring the Japanese branch of a secretive witch-control organization, who take out witches who go wild and use their powers. Our protagonist, Robin Sena, is STN-J's newest member. She's quiet, convent-raised, stone-faced and affects a very stark and anachronistic mode of dress. She's a "craft user", which in the show is a euphemism for a witch who is tolerated by the authorities. She doesn't start out the series as a particularly adept "hunter", as she has virtually no control over her pyrokinetic talent, and blows a number of traps by setting fire to everything but the actual targets. The show is lacking sex, fanservice, humor, flamboyant villains, hyperviolence, trippy editing, giant robots, and transformation sequences. It's slow-moving, dark, and somber. As such, I can't imagine it becoming much of a breakout hit. It isn't one for the kids. But it is a great show. |
| James of Infinite Monkeys is calling for the recall of Jesse Jackson as Black Leader. He plans to fund the recall effort by selling "honorary brotherhoods". Via this week's Carnival of the Vanities. |
| The Carnival of the Vanities is in town. Mike Finley has a story about his fifteen reunion and a meeting with an old school bully. It's brilliant, and scalding. Go read it.
I was at war with the world at that age, but I don't remember any particular bullies. I mean, I was bullied, and I was harsh to weaker kids, but it wasn't a matter of one outstanding bully or anything. The world hated me, and I wasn't too fond of the world, either. I was a weird, mean kid who was too smart for his own good but not smart enough in the ways that matter. I don't have a bully story, I don't have a name I can blame my childhood miseries on. There must have been individual kids, but in retrospect it's all a blur of denim and mullets. But I remember the kids I picked on. Mark – the rabbity son of the local Lutheran pastor, who was small and the sort of intelligent that is indistinguishable from dim in everyday affairs. [David - got the guy's name wrong initially], who was one of my friends, who carried an air of saintly passivity which was far too easy to take advantage of when I was in a savage mood. Christ, was I a bully? I don't think so, not in the classic sense of the word. I didn't go searching for victims or anything. But I could be vicious to the stupid and foolish. I missed my tenth reunion. It was too early, I guess. Fifteen sounds about right - I wonder if they do that back at North Hills? |
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
| Damn straight.
I can't express my agreement more forcefully. The UN is weak, and giving it attention and leverage by feeding it ever-more-diluted resolutions and compromises is only going to weaken the prosecution of the war. The UN and those that use it as a proxy have nothing that is worth compromise. |
| Looking in on the New Blog Showcase, I come across Barnga!, a liberal Texan who's blogging about the Texas Redistricting Catfight. He's fairly terse, but prolific. I haven't read many of his entries yet, but he's blogging off the beaten political path, which is interesting. |
| There are 120 North Korean-funded Korean schools in Japan. One hundred twenty, with 20,000 students. In Japan. They're "funded" by the North Korean government, by which I take it that they once were funded by the North Korean government, and now float on a part of the massive remittances by Koreans back to the North Korean government. Imagine if there was a large system of Mexican-funded private schools in the US - be pretty damn freaky, wouldn't it? North Korea is nine times as poor in comparison to Japan as Mexico is in comparison to the US (1:28 vs 9:37.6, according to the CIA Factbook, which is the coolest online resource, like, ever). Throw on top of that the idea that these hypothetical Mexican private schools taught la Voz de Aztlan ideology, and you get some idea of the sheer weirdness of this situation in Japan.
This is what you get when you run a racial-identity nation, where you force ethnic minorities into eternal group-identity ghettos. Those ghettos invariably slide downwards into a lowest-common-ideology threat to your polity. Foolishness. Of course, that article is more upbeat - it's largely about how Korean parents' groups are de-ideologizing the NK schools, which makes sense when you consider that they now, effectively, fund these schools themselves. So my point about ghettoization is, perhaps, overdrawn. But the sheer fact of their existence freaks me out. Via the Marmot Hole's Winds of Change Korea Wrapup. |
"The Stateless Utopia of Toll-Booths"
| Matt Welsh has taken Michael Totten up on a mountaintop to show him the libertarian kingdoms of the earth, and he is sore tempted. Michael is wavering, but I'm pretty firm, and Michael's phrase sums it up for me in a few pithy words. I can't imagine a good country without government, a good life without regulation, a good humanity without the nonexistent grace of God. That is to say, libertarian legalities cannot impose a peace; libertarian economics cannot address the commons, and libertarian moralities cannot reconcile individual interests.
Arbitration without coercion is, in the end, arbitrary. Not all economic interests are atomized. "An it harm none, do what thou will" will always be read as "Do what thou will" in the absence of coercion. |
Monday, October 13, 2003
| Greg Easterbrook is a tedious bore when it comes to movies, it seems. I have to wonder if there's something in the water at The New Republic that makes all of its house writers love pointless, ugly European film-making?
We went to see Kill Bill this weekend, Dave and chromal and I. It was a lot of fun, despite what the inevitable "violence bad!" scolds have to say. I'm not going to say it's a particularly good film, but it was one hell of a movie. The only real problem I had with the movie is that Tarantino is batshit crazy, and simply refuses to ever give up the cheap joke. It could have lost about a third of the script and still held together. Even in his flash-and-violence-only film, he still talks too much. At least he managed to resist the temptation to cast himself. Again. Update: It seems as if it's Joyless Scold Week over at The New Republic. Whee! |
A friend emails me this:
While discussing an article on students' use of 'inapproprate'slang or There's something about wading through this sort of pig-latin gibberishification that makes the language come alive for me - by forcing a limited sort of decoding, it removes the passage from the parts of the mind that read reflexively, and compels one to read the text closely, directly, as if encountered for the first time. Update: he tells me that it was from this Fark article comments section. |
| Pixy Misa was blogging from Sydney, Australia's yearly anime convention, Animania. Sounds like they had a good old-fashioned traditional fire alarm, with the whole con out in the parking lot of the hotel, waiting for the all-clear. Apparently Aussie yaoi fans pronounce it "yowie", which is a pretty good bilingual pun if you know that yaoi is originally an acronym, one gag reading of which is "yamete, atashi oshiri ittei!", or "stop it, my ass hurts!" Pixy's going to be posting photos later on. For now, a brief update. |
| Phil Carter reiterates his arguments (from a military law point of view) for why the Gitmo camp ought to be brought within Geneva Convention compliance. He's got a point (and I don't want to hear word one about death camps. Not one!) in the general scheme of affairs. It weakens our hands to be perceived as not in compliance.
On the other hand, the current series of debacles in the US as the legal system attempts to deal with terrorists doesn't exactly fill me with optimism as to what might be the result of bringing the Gitmo camp into Geneva Convention compliance. I don't want to hear about released internees in the news after the fact. Via Andrew Olmstead's Winds of War roundup |
| Slate has a useful article for those of us on the left end of the religious scale. It's a list of seven myths about the "religious right", one of which being the notion of a "religious right". One of the most interesting is the myth that a politician's religious identity isn't important to voters. He pulls out a Pew study that shows that atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and *evangelicals* are at a disadvantage among the average American voter. I took a closer look at that study, and found that Hispanics were equally unlikely to vote for all of the above, at about the same percentage. The numbers more-or-less agree with his conclusion, however: voters prefer people with professed mainstream beliefs like Judaism, Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism, than secularists or Bible-Belters. |
| I started watching that Witch Hunter Robin disc, and it turns out that the confusing variance in cover art is just a reversible cover with the other side turned out. Oops.
The His and Her Circumstances boxset (which I will be referring to as Karekano until the day I die) showed up this weekend. It's a very ugly boxset, but I suppose I don't really care. I've never been a packaging-nazi. My backlog of DVDs is starting to pile up a bit - I'm still slowly working my way through that Sailor Moon R set. The Robin episodes look beautiful, by the way. Sharp, clear; good sound. |
| Salam is back from London, and mildly pissed at the Jordanians, border guards, and the foreigners who insist on tipping on top of the bribes. He sounds a bit like a park ranger complaining about tourists feeding bears. Good to have him back. |
| This article was brought to my attention this morning. It seems our wicked, wicked government is raizing the palm groves of poor innocent Iraqis in Dhuluaya.
Patrick Cockburn says so, and Patrick Cockburn is a respectable reporter. His other articles are full of references to the "Iraqi resistance". Half his articles are datelined "Baiji", or "Baghdad" just after scurrying back from Baiji, one of the most violent and Ba'athist towns in Iraq, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, and notable mostly for oil fires and roadside bombs. But he writes his articles as if it's representative of the whole of Iraq. Patrick Cockburn says so, and Patrick Cockburn is a respectable reporter. Well, let's see what Patrick Cockburn is saying as of this weekend. US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, "Jazz". What's the chance of Americans playing jazz in this Year of Our Lord 2003? For that matter, have you ever stood nearby a bulldozer in full roar? How much can you hear over the engine noise? Right. have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. Ooo. Evil. This is phrased officially. Must be coalition policy. Horrible stuff. Except I don't see any sourcing here. Maybe later. Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons." Well, that's sourcing. But it isn't exactly official, is it? Not to mention hearsay. Oh, lookie. There's that "resistance" word again. So much sweeter than "terror bombers and saboteurs", isn't it? "They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added. Ahah! Sourcing! And its a... sheikh. In the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Well-informed one, too, who knows about Israeli occupation policies. Hrm. The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along a kilometre-long stretch of road just after it passes over a bridge. Wanna bet that road was a favored ambush site? Any takers? Didn't think so. So it wasn't just an arbitrary act. They were clearing an ambush site. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us." Hey! We've got official sourcing! But Cockburn didn't do it - he cribbed it from a local Iraqi paper - not a particularly pro-US one, but not voice-of-the-resistance to-the-barricades stuff, either. Let's go look for that article... blast, Iraq Today doesn't seem to have much in the way of archives. Still, see the ambiguity? He doesn't explicitly make the connection - "punishment=bulldozing". In fact, it definitely seems to leave open the alternate explanation, that the locals weren't keeping bombers and ambushers from hiding in those groves, and they were leveled to reduce the threat to that road. Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops. That sucks, having to face either bankruptcy or the hatred of evil men. Even more so if it's your cousins. Or yourself. Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth." Yeah, not exactly an answer, is it? Look, it's sad that economically valuable grove land had to be bulldozed under to provide security on a road. It would be even more sad if they had to destroy the villages they thought were hiding the bombers and saboteurs and ambushers. It would be absolutely horrific if they resorted to hangings and assassinations and murders and all the horrors of really dirty COIN war. Destroying a couple of acres of trees is a small price to pay. There are much higher prices to be paid in insurgency war, if it goes on too long or too far. |
| Sigh. I had one of my little "incidents" on Friday. One of these things where I say something awful, but I can't apologize for it, because it was what I truly thought. Then I get disappointed in myself for being one of those people that thinks that sort of thing, then I get busy trying to fight off a depressive fit, and then I've wasted away half a beautiful weekend because I told a pair of loudmouthed political bigots what I thought of them. I should never play at being a loudmouth; I'm too morose to get away with it.
Which logically means I ought to shut this down. What's a blog but a megaphone? Meh. I'm mostly talking to myself, and Jessica over there. Who was witness to my act of obnoxiousness, and thus probably isn't listening right now anyways. Which I guess, in the end, is to say I wish I could apologize, but I won't, for the same reason I wish I could belong to a church and pretend that there's something more than wishful thinking and social lies at the bottom of it all. Because social lies make for a more comfortable life, and my pride never lets me tell them. Days like today, I understand why the religious hold pride to be a sin. |
Friday, October 10, 2003
| For Mathew Shepard
Oh you fearful wyrms! Who, stalking in the night With bat and barbedwire seductions Prove your manhood with hate And hunt your peculiar prey. I wish upon you an inverti March That the lamb you stalk Turn on you a lion Rend you to your bigoted bones And sow from your teeth A nation of Georges Your brethren to reap. 3/26/02 |
| Teacher Magazine (a foundation-baby wonkproduct of the People's Republic of Maryland) has an article that made a minor splash (or at best, a ripple) in the conservative end of the blogsphere, mostly for an offhand comment by a malevolent unnamed teacher at a conference. Go to Porphryogenitus or Best of the Web for the punchline. I initially skimmed the article in spinal-reflexive disgust.
When I went back and read it through without the rage, an interesting thing happened. The article ceased to be a apocalyptically repulsive peacenik propaganda piece and... shifted. Once I calmed down, the peacenik-radical schoolteacher, Colman McCarthy, came into focus. And the best I could muster, was pity. Viewed with dispassion, he's a sad little man, whose high-school students can argue rings around, who's incapable of the most basic sort of logic that even the dimmest high-school-jock possesses. He's an intellectual vacuum, behind which his students swirl in confused vortexes of argument. McCarthy is so weak a presence that his class appears to be a spare study hall. Once you get into the article, it's clear that a lot of lefty administrators in Maryland have let him take up a spare classroom here or there as an act of leftist charity. The man portrayed in this article isn't the vanguard of bad ideology - he's a sad little laughingstock. At worst, he's a peculiar side-effect of some greater evil, a spinning, directionless eddy of a greater wave. At best, he's a strange aberration and waste of local school taxes. Some of the internal evidence of the article leads me to suspect that most of his "classes" are after-school affairs and community-college irrelevancies. At least two of the schools cited seem to be ones in which his own children were enrolled; I strongly suspect that they gave him a class to make him happy. The McCarthys of the world aren't a threat to anybody - they're so totally lacking in common sense or capacity that any seventh-grade wallflower could drive them like a herd of sheep. I had someone like McCarthy as a seventh-grade history teacher. He wasn't nearly so lovable as McCarthy was - the class ate him alive. We forced him into a nervous breakdown and retirement. The article waves at the "peace love and understanding" cliches, but the actual character portrayed undermines the meme being sold. There's nothing to fear from gentle idiots like McCarthy. Radical pacifists aren't a danger. Watch out for the pseudo-pacifists - they're the ones that are dangerous, because they've got the drive to cause trouble. Like the cockroach that Porphyrogenitus and Taranto caught scurrying out from under the lamp at the end, there. |
| I came across this commentary on Kipling's "Peace of Dives". I hadn't read the poem before, and it's decent, typical Kipling. It also sums up the capitalist-libertarian ideal pretty well. What's dispiriting (and the blogger in question didn't make the catch) was that Kipling was talking about, and writing during, the great Edward peace that came before the Great War. Kipling's argument in the poem is "don't worry about selling all the tools of Satan; the trade itself will keep those tools from ever being used", and that, indeed, describes the British attitude towards munition sales in that period. The world was blanketed with British and German and French munitions salesmen. But Kipling's "wager of Dives" turned out to be a sucker's bet, and the iron chains of trade turned to smoke the second the mobilizations orders were issued. Nationalist fervor was more than enough to overwhelm economic self-interest in Kipling's own time, and "There was never squadron loosed" was shown to be an empty boast. He'd go on to write brave words about "the Minesweepers" and "the Destroyers".
Thanks to Michael Totten for bringing Christopher Luebcke to my attention. |
| And then I vow to go read Marshall again, and I remember why I thought he was a tool in the first place. No, your examples do *not* prove what you're arguing, you fool. Of the six examples provided of "[CIA] operative", half were ambiguous in nature. That is, unless you're reading with expectations.
1)The Spann example goes against the argument - Mike Spann wasn't a secret agent, he was a paramilitary interrogator. 2)The Haq example is deliberately ambiguous - you can't tell from that if Novak's talking about on-the-ground agents, their handlers, or the analysts somewhere up the tree who would actually *talk* to a pundit like Novak. My guess? This was a direct quote from the Langley hacks Novak cultivates. 3)The Turner example is similarly ambiguous - the operatives referred to as "Central American" seems, from the context, to represent the entire structure - agent to handler to station to section analysts - accused of relying on "unsavory local agents". The other three are more to the point. Of those, two are from the same subject, and one refers to a review of a spy novel. In contradiction, Marshall offers three examples of "analyst" being used. Hrm. Novak is twice as likely to use "operative" as "analyst". I call "bullshit" from Marshall's own testimony. |
| Porphyogenitus is starting to pull out of his PLW-induced rage, which is a good thing - when he's not infuriated, he can come up with some pretty interesting ideas. This article is one of them. He's floating a variant on the "echo chamber" idea - that partisans of a certain stripe who only listen to partisans of that same stripe will become less and less comprehensible to the greater polity, let alone their political opponents. It's Porphyrogenitus's contention that the "liberal bias" (whether such a bias exists or not is beyond the scope of the discussion - let me just note that whether there's a bias or not depends on where you're standing) of the media is a *liberal* problem, not a conservative one. A liberal media is a corrective to a conservative - a valuable, contentious feedback mechanism. Similarly, a conservative media would be a corrective to liberals in the same fashion.
An overwhelmingly liberal media means, in this context, that liberals are going to be poorly served with their own biases. They're being lovingly blinded and deafened. In this sense, the most dangerous threat to conservative America is Fox News. If Joe Conservative lets Fox totally displace the rest of the majors in his viewing habits, he's going to be fitted with a different set of blinkers and earmuffs, but he'll still be just as blinded and deafened as his NPR-listening neighbor Eliza Progressive. Now that I think on the subject, I'd say that this benefit is only usable by nonpartisan individuals. Partisans can easily get into a defensive mode where the evil biased media is not to be trusted in *any* particular, and go crawling off into their Indymedia or FreeRepublic holes. I'm as prone to this sort of thing as anyone else - I once accused Josh Marshall of building himself an echo chamber, but I have to admit that by refusing to listen to him, I was doing something similar, if not the exact same thing. I suppose what I'm getting at is that rage is a self-limiter in political discourse. It deafens you. And it's this concern that makes me nervous whenever a blogger I read starts down the demonizing road. Whether it's Josh Marshall ranting intemperately about how horrible Sen. Roberts is, or Kim du Toit's streetlamps, these outbursts serve only to narrow the range of feedback in political exchanges. |
Time is reporting that Arafat has stomach cancer. How absolutely biblical:
21: And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. See also Josephus on the death of the first Herod, and the death of the second, called Agrippa. The news via Jeff Jarvis. |
| Fred Ramsey has moved his email newsletter to blogspot. Welcome to the blogsphere, Fred! I look forward to your commentary. For those of you from out of town or not familiar with Fred, he's one of the owners of Webster's Bookstore Cafe in downtown State College, which once was Seven Mountain Books, and originally was the Book Swap of myth and legend. Fred helped found the Penn State Science Fiction Society in 1968, and helped run Paracon back when it ran as a yearly SF con in State College. Fred's running Spring Creek Slammers with Dora McClade these days.
He's way the hell to the left of me in most ways, being an authentic red diaper baby; he tells me that his ancestors were Wobblies back in the day. (Wobblies were union activists with the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a far-left organization that largely went under due to harsh competition from the Stalinist CIO and mainstream AFL.) On the other hand, Fred surprised the hell out of me on Wednesday by telling me he had been disappointed by Connie Lucas's failure to get renominated for the County commissioner race. Lucas is a local theocon Republican and one of the current commissioners; I really was not impressed by what I saw of her in the last election, but Fred insists that she was good in the limited role of a county commissioner. Anyways! Welcome, Fred, and remember: he who dies with the most links, wins. |
Thursday, October 09, 2003
| Slate is getting into the bad-poetry game, on the occasion of a reprint of a nasty Modernist collection of bad 19th-century formalist poetry called the Stuffed Owl. I am so deficient a student of verse, so inept at autodidactic poetic instruction, that I honestly don't recognize half the names thrown about in this review. I mean, I've heard of Lowell and Pound and Elliot and such, but who the hell is Marianne Moore, or Elizabeth Bishop, or John Ashbery, or John Merrill? What titan of Modernist verse could "Stevens" be, that he, god-like, stands first-nameless with Frost or Crane? Crane? Stephen Crane? Red-Badge-of-Courage and ripe, wacky gothic verse Crane? I always thought of him as more of an Edwardian poet than "Modernist". Or is there some other Modernist Byron whom I should know by his family name alone? |
| Saw a bumper sticker while I was out getting lunch: "We learn Arabic so you don't have to." |
| As you can see, I found it a productive night. There was a big turnout at the Slam, and it was an actual slam, with judges and eliminations and the apparatus in whole. I've never actually seen that up to now - I've only been to the damp squibs so far - never one in which the powder, well-dried, burst with a proper detonation. The political angle definitely worked for 'em - they ought to find a cause for every event. Of course, that's a damned cynical approach to the matter (which you'll see if you look below), but it's also an honest truth. Politics worked.
I make for a terrible audience when the rage has me in its claws. I sat and wrote and paid far too little attention to the poets. Amy M. was excellent, although I was confused at first by her slight stature - she looks a lot like a middle school student. David was full of passionate intensity, if a little too full of his gendered identity for my tastes. Bob had a deft and humorous touch with his verse, and they were the only ones to really stay with me. The slam reminded me, all in all, of the church of my youth, of readings of scripture, homilies, hymns, a benediction, and myself distracted with evolutions of counterargument against the subject of the sermon through the remainder of the service. Well, except for David. My mother's church was never Pentecostal or Gospel enough for me to ever get accustomed to that sort of full-throated testifying in tongues of devotion. |
| the Book of cummings
Dora read from the book of cummings And the word was feeling And feeling was the grace of God And thinking and believing And knowing are common and Caught from the crowd. Bullshit. Feeling is the weft That weaves together the mob Every mind is itself But the heart is the commonwealth of man. The fascist sails the homogenous mob The populist surfs the heart of the throng And it is one heart as it is one crowd And it was feeling that hung Salem And it was feeling that fired the ovens And it is FEELING that fouls the soul With the will of the world ...but it is feeling That finds messiahs That founds nations That frees the slaves Feeling is angels and devils and demons and all selves as one. Feeling is a weapon And it is salvation Feeling is a stick of dynamite in a World of candles. Be careful with your matches. 10/8/03 |
| Contrary
Be an apostle to the atheists Be a humanist to the Baptists Be a poet to the boor Be a thug to the Slam Be righteous for the vile Be a pig for the prudes Be in all things contradictory And be beholden to every Breath of air You goddamn weathervane, you! 10/8/03 |
| Activist
Don't just stand there Do something Don't just believe Feel Don't stop to think Shout Don't work it out Fight Don't try to understand Stand up Don't wait to listen Shout 'em down Don't doubt or fret Act out Don't give the benefit Seize the day Don't empathize Demonize Don't come together Confront Don't look for causes Lash out Don't be a Poet Activist! 10/8/03 |
| Party Politics
Neocon, paleocon What do you care? Theocon, homocon What's it matter, man? Green man, commie man Don't really matter Theory wonk, activist You don't need to care Cause you gonna Vote the straight ticket You don't need to understand Just vote the straight ticket Don't worry your little head Vote the straight ticket The Party gonna set you Straight, man. No need to pay attention Shepard gonna Straighten out his crook Crooks and cops Freaks and saints Belief don't matter Ideas don't matter Issues? Trust the ticket Character? Trust the ticket Promises? Trust the ticket The straight ticket will set you right (Just don't ask what's left) 10/8/03 |
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
| Becalmed
Internet down, and life drags to a halt Whimper and cry, and groan "not our fault!" "I'm so sorry" and "We strive to delight" What good excuses, in creeping half-light? Pither and pother and stuttering slobber Drooling and foolish, a momentary delusion Titter and totter and failure's a bother Dithering and brutish, efficiency's illusion. Protestant ethic, an ethnic allusion Drawn by bias and stir-fried collusion Possible, curious: hard work's conclusion Mothered or birthed by short days' occlusion? Merit and blame sometimes will fail Circumstance will out, though reason bewail Justice and faith denied in the tale This race not to the fast, but always the hale. 12/17/01 I think I like this version more than previous versions of the same bit of doggrel. I've re-written the last section five or six times over the last year and a half, and never been quite satisfied. I imagine tomorrow I'll look at this and be disappointed all over again. Well, that's another day. |
| Story
The mist crawls in darkness Hugging the hidden glens Curling through secret stillness Hiding among the hummock'd fens Where once vast forest Held silence in rest Small holes in a dry mire Hides quiet's small nest Silent corners that know no hands Crawling vines choking the easy way Ageless, not old or young or anything of man Nothing and none and not known by day This pen rips and shreds the facade Inked sins tell their own story Focus frames, tames, renders macabre Still life stripped, lost, laid in glory Quiet lies in forgotten gleanings Blackened hills of slag and steaming Remnants of broken earth Rent from ancient hills Torn and tugged, blasted and burned Crushed, melted, made and undone. Bent to some unknown devising Left to memory, or puzzled surmising The coal that fired process The fury that some call progress Light that lifted the heavy blackness Might that stirred the sounding swiftness Ancient days not long ago Doomed and damned and drawn skintight Ancestors made to forgo Born and bred and bleeding in the night Locked in lives of little light Horded hopes of muddled heads Fought hunger in the face of blight Brief prayers over the muddied dead Sandy strand, salted lands Murdered crops by hailstorm slain Trembling stand, with shaking hands As flooding rivers reap your grain Weep and rail 'til floods recoil Starve with the huddled folk Now famine's cold coil Wrapt round life's spoke. Hunger like a wheel Crushing all flat A thief come to steal What once was fat. Punish the living and purge the mighty Strangle summer and steal the riper Brighter fruit, bind them tightly Tie up the bough Save it from the low Sweep of some solitary reaper. And with every failure, seed the soil Stories like spores awaiting new toil Though sown with weakened hand Leave hope to reclaim ceded land The curling crest climbs, climaxing, collapses Falling foam marks the failing front Receding waters leaving trough or sand What human wave once washed Remembers man Recalls the rushing wetness Whirls in memory of the water's unrest What scope for nothing, when something has past? The order of motion The chaos at rest Dreams that build mountains And silence's ill rest. Death flees before the living Quietness imprisoned Life drives all before its beginning Creation becoming Caught The quiet melts Taught The lesson fades Brought And story braids Man makes himself in every nook Mocked and mauled and made and meant Everything in its place, and every place in a book Seen and strained and salted and saved Skies of darkness robbed of their fire Promethean mountains burning with light Enthroned in brightness, livid bright pyres Starry hills shining, stolen fury and might What solace for the formless Barred by form Place's great vastness And burial its home Locked in light's prison Held in life's cell Nothing dies by division Reduced by a shell Life lives in the moment It comes and it goes Story is a monument Built to withstand throes An end to all stories At climax's behest Nothing and narrative At each others breast Story rides man Like a jockey rides a horse Whipping and kicking Over a known racecourse What quiet for stillness What end to rest When dreams like an illness Creep into the nest? 6/2/01 This is the first serious poem I wrote, and you can still sort of tell. I keep editing around the edges of it, but I haven't yet succeeded in purging all of the melodrama, ye-olde-englande archaic language, and sentimentalism that bugs me about it. It has some good imagery and a conceit that I like, but the connective tissue is still lacking. If anyone has any constructive criticism, I'd be greatly appreciative. I have stuff like this in mind when I talk about my "bad poetry". There's nothing quite so silly as a poem that takes itself too damn seriously. |
| The Lewistown Narrows
The mountains roll from Allegheny's wild breast To the rich orchards beyond the last sharp crest And some ridges sweet Like a baby's new bottom And some mountains solemn Wooded sloping forgotten But the mountain over that road Stands an ill-tempered beast Deep-wounded and dying The crows impatient to feast Draining high meadows And pine-barren wastes The sly Juniata Cuts seaward at last Onwards to conjunction With her beau Susquehanna In a maidenly hurry She knifes her way east The mountain in distress Round his wound to press Rumbles and shifts A crumbling moan This ruin has left A long small passage Seven miles run From Lewistown valley Onward in darkness To lowland finale Seven miles wander Close by the river Seven miles darker Closer still to the victim A ruinous wound Walked in deep twilight Between river and riven A treacherous path. The mountain is bitter And the mountain is blind And the mountain flings boulders At its foe in the night This ambush is ancient Many ages old But to the mountain and river Instants still known We briefly mayfly in the space in between Sudden and swift but not easily seen We cut the road, we cut a clear path But to the mountain it seems one more goad to wrath. The river yet higher To be responded in kind Rocks and stone showers From stubbornness mined. People will build In all sorts of places Garages and shacks And homes by the road But mountain is hard And mountain is fierce And mountain will fling Boulders without cease Like a cruel child dropping Clods on a nest The blind killing mountain Will smash in your rest They put up their fences They built up these walls The threw up high nets To parry the falls But the mountain is old And the mountain's hot rage And the mountain won't notice Trifles to cage The garages are crushed The windows smashed by debris The doorsteps buried under By the tidal scree Decades spend in a Tumultuous battle Dwellings buried under The mountain's death rattle Some men With more stubborn than sense Dig out again Mended their fence The ruins still stand Excavated and proud And every night's rubble Cleared in morning's first light For the narrows are deep And the mountain too steep And precious little light In this passage twilight And the cars rush by And the trucks creep slow Between the rushing river And the mountain's death throe For even the travelers And the wanderers know That the narrows are danger And death to take slow For the passage is narrow And the road even so And the boulders will come When the hard winds blow The narrows were decked Through seven slow miles With white cross reminders Of the murdering wilds A hundred of wrecks Along the narrows hold A hundred some lives Lost to a murdering road The narrows are hungry And the narrows are dark And some few who enter Will never depart And the slow-motion death of a murdered massif Still claims new victims in vehicular flight In this long darkness of the narrows twilight. 1/13/03 OK, before anyone points this out, this poem is wildly exaggerated, mostly for dramatic effect. The Lewistown Narrows are not nearly as apocalyptic as I paint it, here. The buildings are now boarded up and damaged, but mostly due to eminent domain seizure, trespassing, and arson. Your chances of getting through the Narrows unscathed are about as high as, say, getting through the Surekill on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, it is one of the bloodiest stretches of state road in the commonwealth, so it isn't by any means a particularly *safe* road. The white crosses are a fact of history, also – there used to be dozens of them scattered along the roadside until someone at PennDOT decided they were distracting on a road with more than it share of legitimate hazards. You can still see one or two on the Lewistown end of the Narrows. My contacts at PennDOT assure me that they're working on a replacement highway through the Narrows – thus the eminent domain seizures – but they're talking about staying on the same, narrow, dangerous side of the river as the current road is on. I have no idea how they're going to deal with the rockslopes – unless they're planning on doing some truly monumental dynamiting in an attempt to get the critical slope going in their favor. |
| Chromal and I went up to the Garman Opera House to catch Lost in Translation while it's in town. The movie is a nice but shambling, shaggy dog of a film. I liked the ambiguous nature of the relationship - it read mostly as "substitute father/child" to me, but there was a bit of confusion to give it bite. Not Murray's greatest movie, but I'm a big Quick Change and Groundhog Day fan, so take it well-salted, yes?
The Garman is a great local theatre. It's about a block from where I live, in the centre of Bellefonte. It faces out on the courthouse square, just up the hill on the High Street extension, so that you can see what's playing when you're walking down Allegheny Street by the Brockerhoff or towards Bishop Street. It's a single-screen theatre, but they get a nice mix of movies, art and action and family fare. They aren't chain-owned, so the ticket price is low - $5 matinee/$6 evening showing. The building is literally an old opera house; it dates back to the Victorian era that Bellefonte's historical preservation society is so proud of. The theatre has a governor's box, from the days when Bellefonte regularly produced governors like Curtin, Sterling, or Beaver. These days they use it to store extra benches and chairs, and it's firmly locked up. The building is in good shape, having been recently renovated. The owners had intended to have it do double duty as both a playhouse and a movie theatre; I didn't get the whole story, but supposedly some government or pseudo-government industry association told them they couldn't do that for some sort of safety/certification reason. Bellefonte can generally support a single movie theatre, so it can run full-out in that single capacity. Some of their art films probably can't support an entire week of showings, but the State College Aht crowd keeps it above water on those weeks. I'm told that it's financially solvent, and doing pretty good for the owners. It's nice to be able to just walk across town and catch a movie on a whim. It definitely adds to the charm of Bellefonte. |
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
| Colin Powell on the Kay report: "Told you so."
Via Porphyrogenitus, who's in kind of a cranky mood recently... |
| Since local elections *are* my problem, I've started looking into the county commissioners' race. Not done yet, but I came across this over-the-top libertarian site, which was greatly wroth over a member of a State College planning commission's characterization of a church on College Heights as a cancer upon the neighborhood. An examination of the provided CDT article shows that said planning commission member is a member of that congregation, and had been complaining that the church's expansion of its parking lots was doing damage to his neighborhood's character. So, take Nittany News with a fairly massive grain of salt.
As for the commissioners, Dersham is some sort of distant neighbor of mine, being the owner of Dersham's Sport Center over towards Bishop Street, across from the Catholic church, sort of. I've never actually caught that place open, so I can't report to you how good of a shopowner he is (or isn't, as the case may be). He seems to think that the "barn" his shop is in is "historic", so take off points for goofiness. Exarchos, on the other hand, is a rock-ribbed fiscal conservative. So much so, in fact, that he seems to think that any increase in local spending or debt is verboten. Given that Centre County is in the midst of a decades-long demographic upswing, and that the perpetual motion machine that is the University is continually pumping new people into the county, this sort of blinkered objection to proper local financing strikes me as ill-advised, at best. Goreham has an ugly, amateurish site. She seems to be selling herself as the farmers' candidate; this strikes me as a losing bet in a county that's quickly sliding into University-oriented suburbia. Conklin is the only surviving incumbent in the race. As such, he gets the credit and the bile that the last term has earned. So, he gets credit for the successful push to get rid of the deeply regressive occupation assessment tax; he also gets a lot of brickbats over a continuing tussle over the county prison that I haven't been following particularly closely, nor caring much about, either. He doesn't seem to have his own campaign site - that's a subpage on the local Democratic Party's site, not his own. I'm currently inclined towards Conklin and Dersham, but that's a pretty "soft" inclination as of now. |
| Some folks have asked me what I think of the Californian recall situation. I would reply that it isn't my problem, but that I would vote no on recall and then for Schwarzenegger. In general terms, I think that the Californians would do best to hold a constitutional convention and purge the recall, referendum, and initiative elements from their constitution. Adam Sullivan has a radical, counterintuitive, and interesting counter-proposal:
He wants to get rid of the state primaries. He points out that the open recall election managed to do what the primary system hasn't in several years: produce a viable centrist choice. He further opines that the "play to the base, then run to the centre" structure of the primary-general system *inherently produces skilled liars* as electoral choices. The one who can successfully say one set of things to the committed partisans in the spring and another set of things to the vast pragmatic centre will win the general election. No wonder the system produces sociopaths like Gray Davis. It's a thought, at any rate. And if California is willing to experiment with it before I subject my own state to such an idea, even better. That's what California is for, isn't it? Our political mine-canary. |
Monday, October 06, 2003
I just wanted to pass along this note from Fred Ramsey about a benefit thing they've got going down at Websters this Wednesday:
Amnesty International Slam |
| The Anchor
A distant Lawrenceville summer Weeks in the hands of psychiatry My dark drear disturbing One person too many On a church-group retreat In the many-churched Many-steepled hill-held Paradise of Warren. Came to a miserable Self-despising standstill As I sometimes do Sudden flares of minor Fires burn down to Self-rage ashes of Immobile sullen stolidity The only difference that day – An unexpected audience. I don't remember The trip back to Pittsburgh Just the interview: "How often do you feel 'down'?" Often. "Have you considered suicide?" Yes. "Have you tried to kill yourself?" Not yet. And more questions and answers Not to the point and None of your business anyways. I was a hell of a kid Any way you parse it. They did good by me Don't anyone tell you different I wasn't headed anywhere good That's by damn sure. The truth was - And it's what I told them - My depression protects me From my rages and furies. I was always so full Spite and judgment Hate and bile It burns It flares But I'm the one that Lashes out. Rage can fountain upwards In a glittering-red arc But gravity brings the stream back to The fountainhead again. Judgment begets self-judgment And small outside things Grow vast turned within. Yeah, I was angry, alright. But those internal scorpion-whips Left me drained, immobile A rock of rage Much too heavy for an arm too weak To pick up or throw. This bundle of Inert fury Was delivered to the Frontstep Of St. Francis Juvenile Psychiatric Unit. I tell people that I was Institutionalized And they look at me in pity. But I got what I needed there. I'm not a good man But I'm not that ticking Bomb, self-winding Mechanism turning Inward and inward and inward Ever tighter, ever-silent Until some future outward Detonation. The tools for self-defusion Are small, practical And very portable. I won't say that the Rages don't come But they do go. And the knowledge makes All the difference. They tell me that St Francis Is gone That the high anchor Holding up that hillside of Slowly-decaying half-slums Has been cut loose; That one day that slipping Neighborhood will drop Into the short-lived Allegheny River's last mile. But in my mind the anchor Holds me still Above the sliding slopes Of my sudden silences. 10/6/03 |
| A Penn State instructor and poet at the Sunday get-together at Zeno's related a bizarre argument going on in the Penn State English faculty about whether or not Slam counts as "poetry", based on the peculiar notion that poetry once spoken loses its privileged status as such. She said that when she argued against this, her fellow poet-instructor dismissed her to her face as a "niche poet". I asked her what his name was; upon being so informed, I instructed her to tell this bag of suet that I had never heard of him, so clearly he also must be a "niche poet".
My point here, I suppose, is that there are, at best, four living poets which a reasonably well-educated American is likely to have heard of; unless you're a poet laureate, the flavor-of-the-year, or a lunatic anti-Semitic troublemaker, nobody is ever going to hear of you. This is not the Regency, when poets strode the earth like mighty heroes of verse, claymore in hand and laudanum in their veins, bound to conquer or die. Modern-day poets write for themselves; if they're lucky, they might find a handful of fellow-poets to listen, while waiting for their turn at the microphone. The Zeno Sundays continue to be bull sessions rather than performances. I don't mind, myself - they're good bull sessions. We had a rollicking discussion of local religious affairs and real estate gossip. But I suppose some actual poetry might not be out of order, one of these days. I did get a couple pieces written out while I was at the table. I'll try to get one of them hammered into shape for later today. |
| My copy of the first volume of Witch Hunter Robin just showed up. Ought to be a good alternative to Sailor Moon R's giggly pastel-palette taffy. If you haven't seen the digisubs, it's a cool, dark anime with a lot of common elements with the X Files. The cover on the DVD I was sent does not look like the one advertised there on Best Prices. I'm not sure if this has something to do with the CD/DVD bundled version that they were offering - I'm a cheap bastard, and went for the single DVD. The DVDs offered on Bandai's Robin-specific site are labeled "Platinum Edition", whatever that means. The one I'm holding isn't; perhaps this has something to do with it? According to Anime on DVD, the only DVD to have been released this week was the "limited edition", the one with the CD. This is definitely not that. I guess Best Prices accidentally broke street?
This make less sense the more I look at it. I suppose Bandai is just Being Bandai, and did something inexplicable and eccentric. They're known for that, in the industry. |
| New Scientist reports that local Marsh Arabs have begun breaking dams and re-flooding drained marshes destroyed by the Ba'athists in the 90s. This has some NGOs worried that it will backfire in areas where salinization and heavy-metals poisoning of the soil will result in toxic wetlands. If you read the whole article, however, you'll find that the NGOs have evacuated, and that they're carping at a distance. There has been no unrest or violence in the areas we're talking about - the lower Tigris and Euphrates above Basra and along the Iranian border - which means that the NGOs chicken-littled along with the rest of the flock up in Baghdad, and have totally blown their good-neo-colonial-imperialist credentials, if you ask me. The locals know their land, and even the NGO carpers admit that the breaches were in more-or-less the areas they would have prescribed. In the end, I come down on the side of the locals in this one.
Via Norm Geras and Crumb Trail. |
| Tacitus is on a tour through Africa, and has left his asylum in the hands of the inmates. I don't know, his commenters aren't scary like the Lizardoids of Little Green Footballs, but they're a bit cacophonous for my poor aching ears... |
| Justin Alexander is the guy running Jubilee Iraq. He's in Baghdad right now, blogging his campaign among the various Iraqi political parties. He's not particularly fond of the American occupation forces, and seems to be your typical middle-left boho. In short, he seems to be coming into this particular issue from the direction of Third-World debt forgiveness, rather than pro-war conviction. His entries make for interesting snapshot glimpses of the various major factions and parties. For instance, I had not been aware that some of the monarchists were hostile to the Governing Council, and still pushing the idea of a Jordan-like Hashimite or pseudo-Hashimite monarchy. The same guy from Voices in the Wilderness that Steve Mumford mentions meeting in the Baghdad Journal piece appears again in this Alexander entry. Interesting.
Via an update to Joe Katzman's Winds of Change article on Jubilee Iraq. |
| Steve Mumford's third installation of his Baghdad Journal. He's one of the few remaining "embedded reporters", with the 2nd Cavalry in Sadr City in Baghdad. I haven't seen any reports from Sadr City proper since that incident with the flag and the helicopter. It sounds pretty calm from Mumford's point of view, although, as Andrew Olmstead points out in the Winds of War wrapup, it doesn't make the new Iraqi police appear very good - police are portrayed stealing, breaking under fire, and are used as argument-ending bogiemen by the troopers of the 2nd Cav - none of which argues well for the state of Iraqi police in Sadr City.
Note how the Palestine Hotel and downtown Baghdad NGO employees figure strongly in Mumford's moment of doubt. The problems in Iraq are largely (if not exclusively) to be found in Baghdad proper and the Sunni Triangle to the north and west. Late-summer Shi'ite problems in Sadr City and Najaf seem to have receded. This is good news. |
| The Instapundit is feeling dubious and uncertain about the potential for garage-shop illegal manufacture of firearms. He thinks that it's an argument "too clever to succeed". My neighbors back in the day made their own hand-made single-shot zipgun and a couple single-shot shotguns made out of pipe and the like. But they were also the kids that were missing peripheral bits and pieces of themselves from various accidents, industrial or otherwise. I would expect that this sort of thing would be as accident-prone and dangerous as, say, stills or back-alley abortion shops. Which is itself an argument as valid against total gun control as against prohibition or a ban on abortion, yes?
The more I think about it, the more all three issues are alike in their subconstitutional characteristics. The only real distinctions here is that they enacted a bad amendment against alcohol, invoked extraconstitutional judicial activism in favor of abortion, and are rangling over an old militia establishment for and against gun control. "From my cold dead hands" seems against the spirit of "'A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State...", but so does a totalizing gun control. The three issues are all, at their core, moral issues of control - alcohol against the self, guns against others, abortion against the biological future. Who should have control? |
| Steven Den Beste continues on the subject of the Tragedy of the Commons, specifically, the inadequacy of property rights in dealing with the tragedy, and why it's as big of an issue for doctrinaire libertarians as evolution is for Christian fundamentalists. |
Friday, October 03, 2003
| Excellent Den Beste article about the Tragedy of the Commons, using as examples worldwide fisheries, the Sahara, third-world graft, and European social policy. Den Beste can be prone to silly exaggerations or errors - England can be said to have conquered Scotland only if you're standing on your head and mis-categorizing the '45 and '15 as "conquests" rather than the civil wars they were, to take one recent example - but his general lines of argument are fairly sound. |
| There's been a heavy dose of sniggering and/or chestbeating in the blogsphere about France's declining influence and inflating pretense; this is only the latest in a series, mostly concentrating on the publishing of three pessimistic French books in recent days. I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but: get a grip. France may not be a first-rate superpower or even power, but it is a truly excellent third-rate player on the world scene. They have aircraft carriers, a large and relatively well-trained army, and the logistical muscle to make themselves heard in other parts of the world.
In a situation where Germany is scaling back their army, and NATO is busting a gut trying to expand its footprint in Afghanistan, France *is* a power that needs to be recognized. You can be sure that China (to name another permanent member of the Security Council) is not capable of intervention beyond its immediate neighbors, or indeed, across something as negligible as the Taiwan Straits. Russia is terminally bogged down in the Caucasus region, and is doing its best to stand its ground in central Asia in the face of increasing American and Chinese influence. India is likewise pinned by its commitments within its own borders and among its neighbors. Brazil is due for one of its periodic disastrous-socialism-driven declines. Japan's pacifism and decade-long economic deflation has punctured its pretense of world-striding influence. We should not be lulled into the sense that France is a pygmy. It is not. Its economy is bigger than Great Britain's, and it has the bomb. It has diplomatic leverage, some military power, and economic weight. Simply because a power is in *decline* does not mean that it is not *dangerous*. Via, of course, Instapundit. |
Regime change is a risk that every bank should be forced to evaluate when considering a loan to a tyrant or dictator
| Jubilee Iraq is an online resource for those that believe that outstanding loans owed to Hussein's creditors are "odious debts" that the Iraqi people should not be compelled to repay. Please be sure to stop by and sign their petition. I firmly believe that the capitalization of tyrants should be a highly dangerous investment for individuals, banks, and sovereignties intent on profiting from dictatorship.
via Winds of Change |
Why the UN High Commission for Refugees Is Monstrous
| Remember the "Sudanese Lost Boys" resettlement, where do-gooders relocated a couple of thousand orphans from the Sudanese civil war to the United States? What happened to the girls? According to this Slatearticle, the UNHCR - a reprehensible collection of ideologues, incompetents, and shitheels if I've ever seen one - thought it was a good idea to treat the male orphans differently from the female orphans. They put the boys in group barracks under direct supervision, and farmed out the girls to local Kenyan foster homes. The boys stayed in the system, and eventually got shipped to new lives in the States. The girls, left to the mercy of Kenyan fosters, have largely been drafted into varying states of de facto slavery - the lucky ones, servants; the unlucky ones got sold as sex-slaves.
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| An Instapundit link to Ian Murray's blog brought to my notice the World Climate Change Conference in Moscow, and the big catfight that apparently have broken out there between Russian skeptics and EU true believers in man-driven climate change.
Note how all of these articles don't actually say what was the substance of the controversy between the skeptics and true believers? A number of them are so phrased as to make it sound like an entirely realpolitik conflict without any real dispute. The list of presentations doesn't give many clues, either. Articles that actually mention the dispute touch only lightly on the substance before flitting off to concentrate on cabinet-level discussion from the Russian government. Not helpful. If anyone spots some actual journalism on the subject, please give out a yell, yes? |
| In a counter-example of the attractiveness of someone singing your suspicions back to you, here's Howard Fineman belting out a grand old number about how the Plame affair is a covert, decades-long fight between the neocons in the White House and the realists in the CIA gone messily public in the most overt of ways. Note also that this is a variant of what I was talking about yesterday - the beltway habit of thought that looks for clues to occulted power-struggles in hidden places.
Which is another way of saying, it sounds like a grand story, but I can't help but think it's just that - a constructed narrative built on god knows what evidence. |
| Kay's interim report to Congress. NPR was effectively lying by omission this morning as I drove in to work. They definitely left me with the impression that Kay had been reporting failure, that there was no evidence of WMD programs, etc. What the actual text of the report clearly states is that no weapons were found. This is not at all the same thing as the total failure that NPR (and I presume the left-wing of the blogosphere - haven't had time to go out looking yet this morning) was reporting.
1) They've discovered a network of BW facilities that Iraq never reported to the UN, and the UN inspection teams never found. 2) Copious documentary evidence that Hussein fully intended to resume a nuclear program as soon as sanctions & inspections were lifted, and partial, uncertain evidence that he may have lost patience and ordered some sort of limited, piecemeal, largely theoretical resumption in 2000. 3) Evidence and testimony that work in Bt research was intentionally constructed to allow rapid conversion to anthrax production at short notice. 4) Extensive evidence and testimony that there were programs to develop UAVs, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles with ranges far beyond UN limits and WMD capacity. This includes the two "anti-ship" missiles fired at Kuwait during the war, which were cruise missiles representing the completed run of one of two operational cruise missile programs, the other being an up-sized and much more potent variant. 5) Evidence that Iraq was discussing purchase of long-range ballistic missiles from North Korea (probably the No Dong). Combine all of this with the "bioweapons lab trailers", and this is a significant fraction of what Powell went to the UN with in February. Don't believe the people yelling about "imminent threats". This was what the administration sold us on last winter: dangerous intents and capacities; not "imminent threats". It is alarming that they haven't found the unaccounted-for chemical weapons yet; that is a separate issue. The prospect that those unaccounted-for chemical weapons are being dug up by mercenaries or fanatics is alarming; the "Bush lied! Bush lied!" nonsense-argument is a dangerous distraction from the worry that the missing stocks are in the hands of fanatics or terrorists. Via Andrew Sullivan. |
| For those of you living under rocks, Neal Stephenson's new novel is Quicksilver, subtitled "Volume 1 of the Baroque Cycle". This is a fair warning - this is not a complete novel, but rather the first volume in a projected three-volume serial. It is a historical novel, covering events of the late 17th century and early 18th in Europe and the colonies, and so a further warning - don't expect protection from spoilers such as the eventual success of the Glorious Revolution, or the fates of people you bloody well ought to know about, such as Charles II, Isaac Newton, or Samuel Pepys. This all is important because Stephenson's last historical novel, the sprawling and brilliant Cryptonomicon, was vastly popular among the technocrati, which makes the publication of Quicksilver something of a literary event.
Quicksilver is something of a let-down after Cryptonomicon. It almost had to be; much the same way that Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky couldn't possibly measure up to A Fire Upon the Deep. An author rarely produces two free-standing instant classics in succession; most are lucky to produce two in their career lifetimes. So, a third and final warning: don't expect unalloyed brilliance and life-changing relevance. All that aside, it is a damn good read. Stephenson is incapable of dull writing, and can be entertaining, clever, and illuminating even when he isn't being particularly brilliant. The book is historical fiction, indeed, but Stephenson has as much respect for history as he has for cryptography, math, environmental chemistry, computer programming, and most any other subject: he's more interested in tone, flavor and general outlines than getting the details right. Not that he doesn't know the details - his online Annotations to this book clearly show he's done his research - he just isn't inclined to let a Phanatiqual adherence to dead detail weigh down his story. And so, I strongly recommend that the reader *not* take his or her history from the pages of this historical novel - much of it is not exactly wrong, as it is hrm, in harmonic resonance with actual history. A quick read through the Annotations will show Stephenson admitting that many of his characters are amalgams of various historical personages; he gets away with it by claiming in the annotation that he's writing "slightly alternate history". That strikes me as something of a copout, but I'm willing to let it slide in the interest of entertainment. And it is an entertaining book - in parts irreverent, solemn, sublime, and hilarious, it is distinctly a book of parts. Stephenson doesn't stay within one style, but slips from present-tense third-person limited narrative to past-tense third-person limited, to various exotic and esoteric styles such as epistolary, cyphertext epistolary, musical libretto, and play scripts. He doesn't do this as a Don Passos or John Brunner would - fragmented and frantic, alienating or alarming - but rather in the spirit of the age - renaissance men feeling out new ways of being, new tempos against new-made clocks. The frantic pace of modernism is yet to come for the players in this book. Once again, though, I must repeat: a book of parts. It does not work particularly well as a whole - the themes rise and fall - the name of the book, "Quicksilver", is a thematic reference to the new flows of ideas, information, and capital that are beginning to define a new, modern world. But the individual threads are perforce new-woven and don't really make much of a picture, although the attentive reader can see the eventual outlines forming on the tapestry. Mad as it might sound, I can't help but think that it would have been better if they had held off on publication and waited until the further volumes were finished and published; although that would have made a 2700 or 3000-page novel instead of the current 900-page fragment, it would still have been a complete work, and thus something fully digested. Still, don't let my critical comments keep you from it; it is full of action, humor, and observation for the educated reader; Stephenson has never been one of those writers who neglected entertainment for heavier subjects. But it is not a book for the young or unprepared; much of the humor is inside-baseball for folks who have done their homework. And in the end, Stephenson writes for the glorification of those that have done their homework - the Robert Hookes of the world who, given the faculties of average men, yet manage to accomplish things far beyond the scope of the average, by dint of application and perception. |
Thursday, October 02, 2003
| I just finished reading Josh Marshall's interview with Wesley Clark. Why is it that Clark have a reputation for scintillating intelligence? This transcript clearly shows a third-rate intellect coasting on a first-class education. Yet I remember him being clear and lucid on CNN during the war. Presentation really is forty percent of evaluation, isn't it?
I don't read Marshall as much as I should. He is a fine reporter, once you discard his abhorrent personality and partisan bias. Update: And then I read this and remember why I don't read him that much. Because Marshall is totally blinkered by his own biases, and is one of that common breed, to whom nothing sounds so sweet as their own songs sung back to them in a minor key. He clearly demonstrates that any random string of incoherent rambling will sound brilliant to him if it contains a swipe at the Project for the New Century and neocons in general. It also betrays just how similar Clark and Marshall are in their common inside-the-Beltway biases - that reality doesn't really exist, except as shadows cast upon a cave wall, by which we can discern the struggles of cabals within the blinding corridors of power. |
| An article for those folks who believe that our presence in Iraq is the only reason there's al Queda in Iraq. The initial sweeps in April and May picked up dozens of actual al Queda prisoners in western Iraq, as well as hundreds of jihadis and "mercenaries", according to Bremer & the occupation authority. |
| Angel premiere last night. Surprisingly laid-back for a Whedon script, but I guess they're a little tired of ye olde End of The World at Mutant Enemy these days. It was a fun episode - but how could it not, with the reintroduction of Harmony the Carpenter is gone from the credits, and Marsters is top-billed. That's a little disorienting - what, is Marsters Carpenter's shadow, that he always ends up taking her slot on Mutant Enemy shows in their fourth season? They shifted from the cavernous mall of last year's season wrap-up at Wolfram & Hart to an executive suite that looks exactly like somebody redecorated one of the old arts buildings on Penn State's University Park campus (Chambers, for those of you who've spent any time in "Happy Valley"). I understand the logistical reasons for doing it (filming in somebody's mall on a weekly basis would cost *you* through the nose, and drive the property owners up a wall), but it is kind of deflating. They're working the theme of catastrophic, unearned success this year. I wonder how long they're going to play it befuddled and conflicted? It'll be amusing for a few episodes, but it isn't a sustainable conceit, I don't think. Oh, well. I suppose a couple hours of "how exactly did I end up selling out, man?" won't be too unpleasant a way to spend Wednesday nights. |
| BlogSpeak sounds like it has its malicious-code issue resolved, so I'm putting my comments back up. Welcome back to the desert of the unreal. |
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
| Was looking back through my referral logs, when I came across this monstrosity. It's a stalkerblog, a blogspot blog set up specifically to abuse a rather obscure academic blogger I follow, Professor Erin O'Connor. This "Allen" is livid that O'Connor demonstrates the characteristics of both a leftist and a conservative, and deeply offended at the notion that O'Connor admits to having crafted her academic message to further her career. To my mind, this is a spectacular and monumental example of "missing the point". Her entire blog-career has been a mea culpa over that very issue, which she brings up herself.
Anyone who can be so outraged by the existence of a thinker that defies classification is, to my mind, merely demonstrating his clear intellectual and political shortcomings. In short, this "Allen" proves himself to be a partisan, a fanatic, and a fool of the lowest order. Please, don't take this as an endorsement of O'Connor. I find her too eager to defend alleged instances of conservative or libertarian "academic freedom under attack", and prone to ignore the political-hack nature of too many of her compatriots on the (sparsely populated) academic "right". But this sort of mean-spiritedness is out of bounds, and downright creepy. |
| Very French moment just now. The secretary called me up front to yell at me for not taking my vacation days. I said "I just took two last week for jury duty!" She said that that was covered separately, and that vacation days stop accruing once you've maxed out, as I have.
Eh, I don't have kids, I don't have a house to take care of, I don't go on expensive vacations, I don't get sick often. What do I need 19 days a year for? |
| Word is that the upcoming film version of Cold Mountain will feature an extra-textual recreation of the Battle of the Crater. The promise is of a "Saving Private Ryan"-type sequence, rather than the bloodless reenactments of Gettysburg or the execrable Gods and Generals. The news is a little peculiar, due to Cold Mountain's "deserter going home" plot, but welcome if accurate. Glory is the only ACW film I've seen that actually felt like a war, rather than a pageant with blanks. |
"They may be destroying their own infrastructure, but they show incredible determination and inventiveness while doing so."
| Samizdata's Man in Basra has some thoughts on the Idealist and Realist approach to Iraqi governance, and notes that the Idealists are generally Americans who don't deal day-to-day with actual Iraqis, while Realism is intrinsically, if unintentionally racist. I'd further extend that by noting that active racism is often found in folks that have direct, abrasive contact with the subjects of said racism. Racism is a type of prejudice, and prejudice is often stronger and more assertive when it's been fed a steady diet of anecdote and selective, albeit real, experience. |
