Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they
will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
--Edmund Burke
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have
great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have
both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or
"The Shrub," chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same
applies if you refer to a group of people by disparaging terms such as
"the Donks" or "the pals."
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political
"team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea,
the less interested I am in what you're saying.
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog; if you
comment on someone's writing, drop them an e-mail of notice.
People
I knew and miss include Isaac Asimov, Charles Burbee, Terry Carr, A.
Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch
Harris, Mike Hinge, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Elmer
Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry
Stubbs, Harry Warner, Jr., Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, and Roger
Zelazny. It's just a start.
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian
fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this
tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and
thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary
appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer
columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together,
reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get
something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest
commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the
mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all
the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be
thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I
read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It
also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you
ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is
wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first
reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala,
one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I
happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs
column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job,
Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of
course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want
as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you
can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the
edit page - it’s all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt,
and a dozen other worthies, with Justin “I am smoking in such a
provocative fashion” Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn’t buy that paper? Who wouldn’t want to read it? Who wouldn’t climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he
comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he
manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many
bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary
Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast
with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which
clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
MichaelMooreWatch.org: Maybe that’s what Gary Farber should rename his site, instead of arpagandalf or whatever.
-- Matt Welch
THAT WACKY CONSTITUTION. Rush Limbaugh, ladies and gentlemen, on December 23rd, 2003:
Here's the statement. Now, this is odd for me because it's got my name
in it and I don't like reading about myself, but there's some quotes in
here. So even though I never talk in this third-person business, please
permit me in this case because it's a written statement that I'm going
to read.
"Judge Jeffrey Winikoff today denied a request by Rush Limbaugh's
attorneys (my attorneys) to quash the search warrants issued for the
seizure of my confidential medical records. Roy Black, my attorney,
said, quote, "We respectfully disagree with the court's decision and
will be filing an appeal today. These records will show that there was
no doctor shopping. But the larger issue is that the seizure of Mr.
Limbaugh's private medical records without going through the process
outlined by the state legislature is clearly an invasion of Mr.
Limbaugh's constitutional right to privacy.
I warned you about this ever-broadening interpretation of the so-called
right to privacy. It's not a "right" specifically enumerated in the
Constitution or Bill of Rights. It's simply grown out of the Fourth
Amendment against illegal search and seizure. The whole Texas sodomy
case was predicated on "the right to privacy and consent." Well, are we
going to have cops knocking on doors to find consensual sex among
14-year-old hetero- or homosexual kids? That's basically the question
asked about sodomy laws.
By overturning that law - whether you agreed with it or not, you must
leave sex out of it - on these legal grounds, the Supremes opened the
door to legalizing all sorts of behavior based on the privacy notion.
"Well, Mr. Limbaugh, uh...common sense would tell you that these are
minors and they can't have a right to privacy that trumps parental
control." Oh, really? Let your little girl get pregnant in some states.
You won't have a right to know whether she's going to get an abortion.
She has a "right to privacy" based on the feminist notion that fathers
are a bunch of beasts and predators who will beat up their daughters.
So you have no rights as a parent if the state thinks your kids should
be engaged in certain behavior. Forget the emotion of the issues, and
focus on how the government encroaches on our rights to decide what
laws we live under and how we enforce them.
You can add a Constitutional amendment, to make sure there's no
question over the "right of privacy" guaranteeing certain behavior. If
the Constitution can be bent and shaped to accommodate the wishes or
desires of every little group, why bother having it? The beauty of the
Constitution isn't that it's "living." It's that it stays faithful to
original intent, and that it limits what the federal government can do.
[...]
But there is a larger issue here: the Constitution. You can't say the
so-called right to privacy trumps everything the states do.
You can be for the overturning of conviction on some legal grounds but
not on others. In this case, the idea is not to overturn it on the
basis of a "right to privacy" which could then be used to legalize all
sorts of other behaviors done "in the privacy of ones home."
[...]
The so-called "right to privacy" wasn't established until the 1965
Griswold v. Connecticut birth control case. A ruling on this law under
the privacy statute could push us down one of those "slippery slopes"
liberals always talk about for behavior that people of all races, sexes
and creeds agree is damaging to society.
"A lot of people in our grade, the grade that elected me, do not know
my name," wrote Mr. Ironside, 18. "They just know me as that blond kid
with the freaky eyes."
Mr. Ironside, who had his own page in the yearbook, had been elected
valedictorian in a vote carefully orchestrated by his peers and
designed to embarrass him.
But when graduation night arrived, he gave a speech that transformed a
malicious high school joke into an ad libbed sequel to Revenge of the
Nerds.
[...]
One of the rumours principal Tom Adams had heard was that the honour student had been elected valedictorian as a joke.
"It was a joke," confirmed teacher Heddy Wright, "nobody thought he would go through with it."
The principal met with Mr. Ironside after he was nominated to make sure
he understood the responsibilities of the position, and later to
discuss the content of his address.
"But once's he got the microphone," said Mr. Adams. "It doesn't matter what he told me he was going to say."
[...]
Under the glaring spotlights and constant flash of his father's camera,
he was finding his prepared speech difficult to read as he told the
audience of students, parents and school board officials that his class
had "arrived at school strangers and now leave as friends."
With that, Mr. Ironside -- dressed at his mother's insistence in a
crisp white dress shirt and black tie -- paused and crumpled up the
paper that held his carefully typed string of cliches.
"A lot of you were jerks," he informed the rows of 18-year-olds, dressed in oversized suits and undersized skirts.
"I wasn't thinking of a specific person, just people in general," he
remembers of the following indictment he issued against a high school
atmosphere of snobbery and exclusion.
"How people just rip on other people."
The intelligent and socially conscious teen knew his reputation and
valedictory victory was a joke, but did not think his legacy had to be
one.
"Valedictorians always go up there and talk about how we have all these
great memories -- the best memories of our lives," he said from Brock
University in St. Catharines, where he is now studying biochemistry. "I
didn't want to talk like that. I wanted to maybe help the people who
didn't have the greatest time in high school."
In his speech, Mr. Ironside said that at first he "thought it would be
funny if someone like me was up here talking instead of an exceedingly
popular person."
It was impossible for him to pretend high school had been an endless
stream of fond memories, he said, and added that it was the cliques and
attitudes of his classmates that ultimately defined their legacy.
He concluded his speech by telling his classmates he would "probably
never see any of you again," and saw rows of steely-eyed parents behind
his laughing classmates. "I knew some people wouldn't like it," he
said. "I was kind of a nerd type. Nothing I could say would convince
them I should be up there."
SHOULD WE SUPPORT THE RIGHT OF CHINESE COMMUNIST BOSSES to be libertarian,
and join in supporting their banning of legitimate unions, opposing a
minimum wage, and having no worker safety laws? Is that freedom to be
poisoned truly the greatest good? Would we like such freedom in the US?
Read The Whole Series as listed on that page: 5 out of 5. Hi, Andrew!
ADDENDUM:
In his 17 days of molding tool boxes, Wang Chenghua learned to work
like a metronome. He slipped strips of metal under a mechanical hammer
with his right hand, then swept molded parts into a pile with his left.
He did this once a second for a 10-hour shift, minus a half-hour lunch.
Just before lunch on the 18th day, he lost the beat. The hammer, backed
by 4,000 pounds of pressure, ripped through the middle and ring fingers
of his right hand, reducing them to pulp.
Mr. Wang, 26, now spends his days in the orthopedic ward of the
Yongkang First People's Hospital, where wall posters advertise
reattachment surgery for molders, millers, pressers and lathe operators
who, unlike Mr. Wang, salvaged their digits and limbs.
SARTE AND WHEDON. Julian Sanchez explains the existenialist motifs in an episode of Firefly, and provides an excuse for philosophy professors and students to pick up the DVD.
RULE, BRITTANIA. This debate
-- exchange, really -- between David Aaronovitch and Mary Riddell on
the Iraq war is far too civilized and sensible to satisfy any of the
extremist partisans on either side whose crystal ball reveals to them
-- has always revealed to them -- whether or not in five years Iraqis
and us will rightfully believe the war was a terrible mistake or a
rewarded and justified gamble.
Time to celebrate? No way. Instead, some keepers of the nation's
nuclear arsenal worry that maybe, just maybe, the Iranians and Libyans
believe that terrorists could have a nuclear device made of plutonium
and wanted to bare their clandestine uranium labors to rule out the
possibility of retaliatory strikes in the event of an attack on the
United States.
"Why would he be that close and give it up?" a senior weapons official
said of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. "Maybe he knows
something is afoot. Maybe it's the same with the Iranians."
Worry little, citizens. It's actually just a Scary Example used in this
generalized thumbsucker on How Worried Should We Be?
L'OBSESSION ANTI-AMERICAINE. Rather interesting look at French anti-Americanism by Stephen Sartarelli, from France, from a perspective you'd expect from The Nation.
One can filter this either uncritically, or from a skeptical
perspective, stripping away most of the questioning of whether a given
example is "truly" anti-American, or mere anti-Bushism, or instead
"raises a question" (a much repeated phrase), but given the reader's
ability, and tendency, to apply said own filters, it's a worthwhile
piece making clear that, however you debate the "true" level, there's a
true history of French anti-Americanism, indeed.
THE CHARMS OF NEIL BUSH are considerable. We last visited Neil last month.
Now comes this comprehensive retrospective. You probably know some of it, but I bet you don't know all of it.
A favorite lesser-known bit on the Ignite! software package he currently sells:
But at Whitney reviews were less laudatory. "The kids felt pretty
strongly that what this was about was lowering the bar," says Humes.
Humes wasn't impressed, either. "There was a lot of rhyming and games,"
he says. "It reminded me of what my son uses -- but he's in
kindergarten."
When Bush spoke at Whitney, several students began arguing with him.
"He was very surprised," Humes recalls. "You had to see the look on his
face when one young woman got up and said she liked calculus. He said
it was useless. This is the branch of mathematics that makes space
travel possible, and he said it was useless."
You have to read this to learn just how incredibly powerful Neil's
charm has to be. People keep throwing money at him, as he continually
fails! What else could account for that besides charm?
THOMAS NEPHEW IS BACK at least temporarily. Encourage him to stick around with Newsrack,
one of the calmer, saner, and more perceptive blogs out there. (I'm
about eleven days late on this; sorry about that, Thomas.)
12/28/2003 12:04:23 AM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107259506357454198')1 intriguing comment!
Saturday, December 27, 2003
TWO VIEWS ON BOB HERBERT'S economic opinions here and here.
FORGOT TO GREASE HIMSELF. Uncle Hugo's bookstore in Minneapolis
is one of the more venerable, and best, sf bookstores in the world
(it's also combined with "Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore"); the owners
have largely been friends or friends or friends of mine for many years.
This is a tad unexpected.
Talk about Bad Santas.
A Minneapolis man's imitation of old St. Nick on Christmas Eve brought
cheer only to police and fire rescuers, who had to stifle chuckles
while rescuing him from the narrow chimney of a bookstore in the city's
Phillips neighborhood.
Joseph Hubbert also earned himself a lump of coal: burglary charges.
The stranger-than-fiction events began when Don Blyly arrived Thursday
morning at his Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction/Uncle Edgar's Mystery
bookstore at 2864 Chicago Ave. S.
Around 9:15 a.m., Blyly heard a strange sound. It seemed to come from the ceiling, near the chimney.
Mind you, this was Christmas morning.
But the sound wasn't a jolly fat man in a red suit — it turned out to
be a half-naked 34-year-old ex-con, squished for hours in the cold,
narrow passage, calling out for help.
"The guy's voice was coming from the suspended ceiling, yelling out
'Help! If anyone can hear me, call the police, I'm stuck in the chimney
in the bookstore,' " Blyly said.
Blyly reported the would-be intruder to an emergency operator who
"could barely contain her laughter," and police and fire rescue squads
arrived to solve a mystery worthy of Blyly's bookstore.
A police officer and Blyly climbed a ladder to the roof and found
bricks knocked away from two chimneys. They peered down into the second
damaged chimney space, about 12 inches square, and saw a man.
"The cop yelled down, 'What are you doing down there?' " Blyly
recalled. "And the guy said, 'I dropped my keys and I'm looking for
them.' "
There's more, about difficulties extracting the gentleman, his history
of burglaries, and such; if Don hadn't chosen to come in on Christmas,
the guy likely would have died of exposure.
THE mound lies just beyond the oasis town of Sheberghan in northern
Afghanistan, on the plain that slips south to the Hindu Kush and north
to the banks of the Amu Darya, or Oxus. This was once Bactria, where
the Hellenic world briefly touched and intertwined with the worlds of
the Indus and the Siberian steppe. Greeks prospered here for a century
or so after the death of Alexander the Great, in 323BC, and then were
driven off. The mound is anonymous now, barely noticeable from the
road. It stands three metres (ten feet) high, 100 metres in diameter,
lopped square like a Celtic barrow, the whole of it overgrown with pale
weeds. Locals named it Tillya Tepe, or Hill of Gold, long before the
Soviet archaeologists came and revealed its treasures.
That was in the winter of 1978-79, just before Afghanistan descended
into 23 years of war, leaving 1.7m dead. In the last days before the
beginning of that nightmare, a Soviet archaeological team led by a
Greek-Russian, Victor Sariyannidis, unearthed 21,000 pieces of gold in
six burial chambers within Tillya Tepe. The hoard had belonged to the
rich Kushan nomads buried there around the time of Christ. It had lain
undisturbed for two millennia.
[...]
The Kushan nomads had a weakness for all that was flash or gaudy. They
had no higher ambition than to dazzle from afar as they dashed across
the steppe. Semi-spherical gold plaquettes stitched to the burial robes
and kilts were taken by the bucketload from vertebrae and femurs. The
cloth itself had largely decayed—except for the weft, which had been of
gold thread, indestructible even to the burrowing rodents that had
tried to tug it away. The sandals too were of gold.
The other
treasures in the mound were no less glittering. A model tree fashioned
of gold and hung with fruit of pearls. A salver grooved in tangerine
segments and inscribed in Greek. A griffin cut into milk-white
chalcedony. Pendants of agate, garnet, turquoise and cornelian.
Sharpened boar tusks set in gold. A representation of Aphrodite
according to Bactrian tastes: stern and plump with small, thrust-out
breasts. A man riding a dolphin upon a belt buckle. A gold crown that
could be taken apart and packed in a saddlebag. A Chinese mirror.
Dragons with wings of turquoise mauling leopards down the length of a
gold scabbard. Coins from Rome, Parthia and India. Bits and bridles in
Siberian style and studded with gems, the better to show off the flight
of the horses that wore them.
Then came the modern drama of what later happened, and recently happened, to the Bactrian gold.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5 for a tale straight out of the pulps.
H. Rider Haggard, I think. With a bit of Kipling. And a bit of Geraldo.
NOT SO SECRET SOCIETY. Four current Prezzie candidates went to Yale, and so has every President since 1988.
Long story, made annoying by an apparent inability to load it all on
one page. A couple of interesting details I'd missed, though. Joe
Lieberman was tapped for Skull and Bones, but unlike Kerry and Bush, turned them down.
...in 1965, his second year at law school, Lieberman sat on a Yale
panel that opposed draft resistance and included an earnest undergrad
named John Kerry.
Here's one that Karl Rove has on a big easel:
A college transcript obtained by U.S. News shows Dean took classes on
international communism, Chinese politics, Soviet history, and Marxist
existentialism.
TEA IN AMERICA. Apparently Helen Gustafson gets lots of credit.
Ms. Gustafson was tea's ambassador at a time when diners sipped French
roast and other strong coffees but thought tea was limited to Lipton.
Two decades ago "it was quite impossible to find a good cup of tea
anywhere in America," James Norwood Pratt, the international tea
authority and author, said last week. "Now, it is only highly unlikely.
The difference is Helen Gustafson."
[...]
"People who a decade before were chanting `Two-four-six-eight, organize
and smash the state!' would get dressed up and go to Helen's," said
Kate Coleman, a journalist who was a leader in the Free Speech Movement
of 1964.
DAMN. Oh, man, I missed KarlRove's bed-time reading of "Santa's New Reindeer." Here's a summary:
When Santa's famous reindeer fall ill on Christmas Eve, his friend, Lee
Atwater, rustles up some unusual replacements from the North Pole Zoo.
A donkey, three camels, two cows and two sheep are reluctant to leave
their warm shelter until Santa's political aide shames them into
service by planting stories that the animals had had cross-breed
offspring with each other out of wedlock, some of them black,
that the donkey had had a mental breakdown during his years of
servitude. and one of the cows had committed treason to the Zoo.
And then they saved Jesus! And Jesus said "Holy Ghost, you're never working in this business again! You're dead!"
When British drug regulators told doctors recently to stop writing
prescriptions for six antidepressants for children under 18, the drugs
in question sounded like a "Star Wars" cast list: Paxil, Effexor,
Celexa, Lexapro, Luvox and Zoloft. (A seventh, Prozac, was approved.)
It has often been noted that drug makers have favorite letters, and
that they run the gamut from X to Z. Think Nexium, Clarinex, Celebrex,
Xanax, Zyban and Zithromax. But why are these letters so popular?
"Some letters look better in print, make sounds people like saying and
are associated with innovation," said Steve Manning, the managing
director of Igor, a San Francisco branding company. "X is associated
with science fiction, high tech, computers, automobiles and drugs." As
in "The X Files" and "The Matrix," Xerox, the Lexus and the Microsoft
X-box.
James L. Dettore, president of the Brand Institute, a branding company
based in Miami that has tested 8,400 drug names in the last seven years
(its successes include Lipitor, Clarinex, Sarafem and Allegra), said
the letters X, Z, C and D, according to what he called "phonologics,"
subliminally indicate that a drug is powerful. "The harder the tonality
of the name, the more efficacious the product in the mind of the
physician and the end user," he said.
I'm trying to decide: do I change the name of this blog to "Amygdex" or
"Amygdalz"? (Given the number of people who illiterately continue to
believe the name is "Amygdalagf," which isn't even a word for crissake, he said sourly.)
There's more silliness in the article. Who didn't want to know this?
In India, his version of Viagra is called Silagra, from its generic
name, sildenafil citrate. Indians were already so familiar with Viagra
that it made sense to echo Pfizer's name, he said.
But in Latin America, he sells it as Eviva. It sounds like "revive,"
but also has an echo of the female Eve. He said he almost named it
Tarzia "because it makes you feel like Tarzan."
In the Middle East, he forgoes all subtlety. There, it's Erecto.
SAMMY DAVIS, JR. GOT A BUM WRAPsays Gary Giddins, eminent jazz critic. He makes a good case.
Reviewing two biographies, Giddins hates Wil Haygood's.
Haygood (whose narrative is festooned with factual errors, mind reading
and flamboyantly bad writing) finds Davis irresponsible and clueless
about race. ''Sammy was happy. He had broken nightclub records. It
mattered little to him that he had to slip through back doors and side
doors as he was playing those first-class clubs.'' How could it not
have mattered? One has only to open Davis's autobiography ''Yes I Can''
(1965) to almost any page or read Davis's interviews to see how deeply
it did matter. Haygood, a writer at The Washington Post and the
author of a biography of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., argues repeatedly
that Davis wanted to be white; he quotes a Davis employee who says,
''He thought he was white.'' He apparently did think that he could live
his life as though he had the same rights as anyone else, which meant
that he could emulate white entertainers as well as black ones, and
pursue women of any color. Prince Spencer of the Four Step Brothers
tells Haygood that he saw ''Sammy 'Uncle Tomming' with white people,
and I resented it. The Step Brothers, well, we knew our place was not
to be in white people's company.'' Which is the more courageous
attitude, knowing one's place or refusing placement?
I don't know if the context for this is fair, but as presented, it's a no-brainer.
SO I HAVE THE TODAY SHOW ON, because I felt like some noise while I read, and the anchor gasps (mildly) about an upcoming guest who loves books so much she read a book a week! Incredible! (And wrote a book about the "experience," which is why she's on.)
Jeez, if I had a penny for every person I know who commonly reads at
least one book a week -- well, craparapparoo, an awfully high
percentage of folks I know reads at least one book a week.
This is up there with people who enter your apartment/house, stare at
all the books on the shelves, and, inevitably, always, ask "have you
read all those?"
(No, of course not; one needs books to look forward to, but, yeah, most.)
LATER: Here's
the book; big advice from the author (an editor), in her interview:
always carry a book with you. Again, like pretty much everyone I know
doesn't?
WE, US, MOST. A list
of allegedly over-rated and under-rated ideas of the year. Most strike
me as mildly to damn stupid. This part of one bugged me:
We are tethered to our e-mail, day and night. We are rarely out of cell
phone range. Long working hours extend into evenings and weekends. Most
of us feel lucky to love our work, but we put few limits on it. Less
fortunate Americans labor long days to compensate for laid-off
co-workers or simply to pay the bills.
Get why? Who is the author talking to? Not the "less fortunate."
YOU SHOULD BE CONSCIOUS OF this because Oliver Sacks on neurology and consciousness is always a consciousness-changing experience.
William James himself always insisted that consciousness was not a
"thing" but a "process." The neural basis of these processes, for
Edelman, is one of dynamic interaction between neuronal groups in
different areas of the cortex (and between the cortex and the thalamus,
and other parts of the brain). He speaks here of "re-entrant" (i.e.,
reciprocal) interactions, and sees consciousness as arising from the
enormous number of such interactions between memory systems in the
anterior parts of the brain and systems concerned with perceptual
categorization in the posterior parts of the brain.
[...]
While a particular motion, for example, may be represented by neurons
firing at a particular rate in the motion centers of the visual cortex,
this is only the beginning of an elaborate process. To reach
consciousness, this neuronal firing, or some higher representation of
it, must cross a certain threshold of intensity and be maintained above
it—consciousness, for Crick and Koch, is a threshold phenomenon. To do
that, this group of neurons must engage other parts of the brain
(usually in the frontal lobes) and ally itself with millions of other
neurons to form a "coalition." Such coalitions, they conceive, can form
and dissolve in a fraction of a second, and involve reciprocal
connections between the visual cortex and many other areas of the
brain. These neural coalitions in different parts of the brain "talk"
to one another in a continuous back-and-forth interaction. A single
conscious visual percept may thus entail the parallel and mutually
influencing activities of billions of nerve cells.
Finally, the activity of a coalition, or coalition of coalitions, if it
is to reach consciousness, must not only cross a threshold of
intensity, but must be held there for a certain time—roughly a hundred
milliseconds. This is the duration of a "perceptual moment."[6]
DIXVILLE WHAT?Status report
on Wesley Clark in New Hampshire. Much of it is quietly mocking Clark's
earlier days on the trail demonstrating his lack of retail political
experience, but it also, towards the end, talks about his learning that
on the job.
I dunno, though, the name "Dixville Notch" was famous to me when I was ten years old. Of course, I was a very political child.
I don't know if Tim Judah penned the title of this piece, "The Fog of Justice," or, as is probably more likely, someone at the NY Review
did, but it's all too apt. It seems almost impossible to draw pithy
conclusions from this powerful look, which may mean that Judah,
unfortunately, has a firmer grasp of the truth than is often reached.
Is the tribunal laying the groundwork for reconciliation, or further
hatred and conspiracy theorizing? Destabilizing the politics of the
Balkans, or building a foundation?
I don't know, but I recommend reading this piece, and thinking about it
(and also consider why, exactly, so many Americans refer to justice at
the Hague with a reflexive, ungrounded in this record, sneer).
KENNEDY, JOHNSON, AND ISRAEL. Amos Elon looks back, including reviewing Avner Cohen's essential Israel and the Bomb.
A classic Johnsonism:
In Jerusalem in 1971, I heard the foreign minister, Abba Eban,
entertain his guests with the story of his visit to the White House
during the Johnson administration. "Mister Eeeban," Johnson said, "aa'm
sure glad to see you! Just the other day ah was sittin' in the Oval
Room scratchin' my balls thinkin' about Israel!"
I was just observing the other day, at Roger Simon's comments, that it
would be wise for those presently prone to waxing wroth on French
anti-semitism, without excusing any of the present day's grievances,
which I've hardly been laxing in writing about, to recall the long
decades of post-1948 US arms embargo and chill upon Israel, days when
the massive supplier of planes, tanks, and arms, were those
non-perfidious French.
France, too, it was, who supplied the Dimona reactor that gave Israel
its nuclear weapons (along with Israeli scientists, of course).
It's commonly been considered that it wasn't until LBJ's days that US
policy towards Israel began to soften somewhat; this article attempts
to make a case that Kennedy laid the roots for that, but it's a mixed
case, at best.
The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of
the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two
stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the
interior minister. Relations between these two leaders are visibly
tense. In the United States, Abdullah cuts a higher profile. But at
home in Saudi Arabia, Nayef, who controls the secret police, casts a
longer and darker shadow. Ever since King Fahd's stroke in 1995, the
question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but
neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne.
[...]
Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement
with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes
direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares
many goals with al Qaeda.
The two camps divide over a single question: whether the state should
reduce the power of the religious establishment. On the right side of
the political spectrum, the clerics and Nayef take their stand on the
principle of Tawhid, or "monotheism," as defined by Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism. In their view, many
people who claim to be monotheists are actually polytheists and
idolaters. For the most radical Saudi clerics, these enemies include
Christians, Jews, Shi`ites, and even insufficiently devout Sunni
Muslims. From the perspective of Tawhid, these groups constitute a
grand conspiracy to destroy true Islam. The United States, the "Idol of
the Age," leads the cabal. It attacked Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan and
Iraq, both times making common cause with Shi`ites; it supports the
Jews against the Sunni Muslim Palestinians; it promotes Shi`ite
interests in Iraq; and it presses the Saudi government to de-Wahhabize
its educational curriculum. Cable television and the Internet,
meanwhile, have released a torrent of idolatry. With its permissive
attitude toward sex, its pervasive Christian undertones, and its
support for unfettered female freedom, U.S. culture corrodes Saudi
society from within.
Tawhid is closely connected to jihad, the struggle -- sometimes by
force of arms, sometimes by stern persuasion -- against idolatry. In
the minds of the clerics, stomping out pagan cultural and political
practices at home and supporting war against Americans in Afghanistan
and Iraq are two sides of the same coin. Jihad against idolatry, the
clerics never tire of repeating, is eternal, "lasting until Judgment
Day," when true monotheism will destroy polytheism once and for all.
[...]
If Tawhid is the right pole of the Saudi political spectrum, then the
doctrine of Taqarub -- rapprochement between Muslims and non-Muslims --
marks the left. Taqarub promotes the notion of peaceful coexistence
with nonbelievers. It also seeks to expand the political community by
legitimizing the political involvement of groups that the Wahhabis
consider non-Muslim -- Shi`ites, secularists, feminists, and so on. In
foreign policy, Taqarub downplays the importance of jihad, allowing
Saudis to live in peace with Christian Americans, Jewish Israelis, and
even Shi`ite Iranians. In short, Taqarub stands in opposition to the
siege mentality fostered by Tawhid.
Abdullah clearly associates himself with Taqarub. He has advocated
relaxing restrictions on public debate, promoted democratic reform, and
supported a reduction in the power of the clerics. Between January and
May 2003, he presided over an unusually open "national dialogue" with
prominent Saudi liberals. Two separate petitions established the
essential character of the discussion: the National Reform Document,
which offered a road map for Saudi democracy, and Partners in the
Homeland, a call by the oppressed Shi`ite community for greater
freedoms. The first endorsed direct elections, the establishment of an
independent judiciary, and an increased public role for women. Its
drafters also took pains to express respect for Islamic law. The
clerics were not mollified, but this affront to their sensibilities was
as nothing compared to the Shi`ite petition, which, in their eyes,
issued straight from the bowels of hell.
The Saudi religious establishment is viscerally and vocally hostile to
Shi`ism. Although Shi`ites constitute between 10 and 15 percent of the
population, they do not enjoy even the most basic rights of religious
freedom. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented move, the crown prince met
with their leaders and accepted their petition. The controlled Saudi
press did not publish the petition or even report on it, but Abdullah's
move sent ripples of discontent through the Saudi religious classes.
By floating the "Saudi Plan" for Arab-Israeli peace -- traveling to
Crawford, Texas, to debate the measure with President George W. Bush in
April 2003 -- and accepting the notorious Shi`ite petition, the crown
prince has sided resolutely with the backers of Taqarub against the
hard-line clerics. To a Western eye there is no inherent connection
between Abdullah's domestic political reform agenda and his
rapprochement policies toward non-Muslim states and Shi`ite "heretics."
In a political culture policed by Wahhabis, however, they are seen to
be cut from the same cloth.
While Abdullah has signaled friendship with the West, Nayef has
encouraged jihad -- to the point of offering tacit support for al
Qaeda. In November 2002, for example, he absolved the Saudi hijackers
of responsibility for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an
interview published openly in Saudi Arabia, he stated that al Qaeda
could not possibly have planned an operation of such magnitude. Nayef
perceived an Israeli plot instead, arguing that the attacks aroused so
much hostility to Muslims they must have been planned by the enemies of
Islam. This statement not only endorsed the clerics' paranoid
conspiracy theory, but, more important, sent a message that the secret
police saw no justification for tracking down al Qaeda.
The case of the Saudi cleric Ali bin al-Khudayr helps explain Nayef's
stance. A close associate of al Qaeda, al-Khudayr is known as a leader
of the takfiri-jihadi stream of Islamic radicalism -- that is, as
someone quick to engage in takfir, the practice of proclaiming fellow
Sunnis guilty of apostasy (a crime punishable by death).* After
September 11, he issued a fatwa advising his followers to rejoice at
the attacks. Depicting the United States as one of the greatest enemies
that Islam has ever faced, he chided those who had misgivings about the
deaths of so many innocent civilians, listing a number of American
"crimes" that justified the attacks: "killing and displacing Muslims,
aiding the Muslims' enemies against them, spreading secularism,
forcefully imposing blasphemy on peoples and states, and persecuting
the mujahideen."
Al-Khudayr was eventually arrested by Nayef's security services, but
only after the May 2003 suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed 34
people -- when the cleric's brand of extremism began to threaten the
political status quo. Until then, he had been allowed to operate freely
and spread his violent anti-Americanism without constraint. Why?
Because along the way he helped terrorize critics of the religious
establishment. For Nayef, Wahhabi vigilantism is useful in keeping
reformers in check.
[...]
To better understand how al Qaeda reads Saudi Arabia's political map,
one can turn to the work of Yusuf al-Ayyiri, a prolific al Qaeda
propagandist who died last June in a skirmish with the Saudi security
services. Just before his death he wrote a revealing book, The Future
of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, which
gives a good picture of how al Qaeda activists perceive the world
around them.
According to al-Ayyiri, the United States and Israel are the leaders of
a global anti-Islamic movement -- "Zio-Crusaderism" -- that seeks the
destruction of true Islam and dominion over the Middle East.
Zio-Crusaderism's most effective weapon is democracy, because popular
sovereignty separates religion from the state and thereby disembowels
Islam, a holistic religion that has a strong political dimension. In
its plot to denature Islam, al-Ayyiri claims, Zio-Crusaderism embraces
three local allies: secularists, Shi`ites, and lax Sunnis (that is,
those who sympathize with the idea of separating religion from state).
Al Qaeda's "near enemy," in other words, is the cluster of forces
supporting Taqarub.
The chief difference between the ways al Qaeda and the Saudi religious
establishment define their primary foes is that the former includes the
Saudi royal family as part of the problem whereas the latter does not.
This divergence is not insignificant, but it does not preclude limited
or tacit cooperation on some issues. Although some in the Saudi regime
are indeed bin Laden's enemies, others are his de facto allies. Al
Qaeda activists sense, moreover, that U.S. plans to separate mosque and
state constitute the greatest immediate threat to their designs and
know that the time is not yet ripe for a broad revolution. So al
Qaeda's short-term goal is not to topple the regime but to shift Saudi
Arabia's domestic balance of power to the right and punish supporters
of Taqarub.
The politics surrounding the suicide bombings in Riyadh last May show
how the interests of al Qaeda and the Saudi religious establishment
overlap. Working together, they managed to turn a terrorist attack on
Americans into a political coup against Americanizers. Right after the
attack, the Saudi authorities called for public assistance in capturing
19 suspects, whose names and pictures were published in the press. In
response, al-Khudayr and two like-minded clerics issued a statement
claiming that the accused were not terrorists but "pious and devout"
men and "the flower of the mujahideen." The statement claimed that the
Saudi authorities, acting on U.S. orders, were using the suicide
bombings as a pretext for persecuting fighters who had "participated in
the jihad against the malevolent Crusaders in Afghanistan" and
"distinguished themselves with courage and heroism in the battles in
the Tora Bora mountains." The clerics called on the population to
disobey the regime's request for help and pronounced that any
assistance to the police would constitute aid to the United States in
its war against Islam. The statement urged other Saudi clerics to step
forward and support the beleaguered mujahideen.
Responding to this call, 33 activist clerics who had already formed a
group called the Internal Front Facing the Current Challenges lobbied
the government on the basis of a statement that reads like a contract
for a new alliance between the Saudi dynasty and the Wahhabi religious
establishment. The statement worked with al-Khudayr's basic premise --
that the Saudis, in deference to their foreign masters, had grown
hostile to jihad. But it changed the tone of the discussion. Whereas
al-Khudayr had focused on the need to wage jihad against the Americans,
the clerics emphasized the need to wage jihad against the Americanizers
-- a reference to the enemy at home.
The statement drew a causal link between the movement for liberal
reform and religious extremism. On the one hand, it admitted that
religious extremism exists in Saudi Arabia and called for it to be
restrained. Yet it also blamed extremism on the creep of "reprehensible
practices" -- a euphemism for the growing public legitimacy of the
Taqarub reform agenda. The Internal Front essentially offered Abdullah
a tradeoff: if he would curtail the reformers' activities, then the
clerics would provide Islamic legitimacy for a government crackdown on
the takfiri-jihadis, al Qaeda and its fellow travelers.
To make these demands more explicit, the Internal Front's leader,
Salman al-Awda, posted an additional statement on his Web site
attacking the aggressively reformist newspaper al-Watan. (The
newspaper's name means "the homeland," but religious conservatives
refer to it as "al-Wathan," meaning "the idol.") According to the
statement, the publication's staff was little better than agents of the
Americans working against Islam -- "Thomas Friedmans in Saudi garb."
[...]
It is often claimed that the recent growth of anti-Americanism in the
Middle East has been due to U.S. policies themselves. The fact that the
suicide bombing of an American compound in Riyadh turned into a
crackdown on Saudi reformers and that the bombings continued (even
after the announcement of a U.S. troop withdrawal), however, should
give us pause. These events strongly suggest that the jihad against the
United States is actually a continuation of domestic politics by other
means. The Saudi religious classes and al-Qaeda use it to discredit
their indigenous enemies, who, given half a chance, would topple the
clerics from power.
If Saudi clerics do indeed preach a murderous anti-Americanism because
they fear their domestic rivals, then certain implications follow for
U.S. foreign policy. Washington cannot afford to ignore what Saudis say
about each other, because sooner or later the hatreds generated at home
will be directed toward the United States.
This is particularly true of the Shi`ite question in Saudi politics.
Radical Sunni Islamists hate Shi`ites more than any other group,
including Jews and Christians. Al-Qaeda's basic credo minces no words
on the subject: "We believe that the Shi`ite heretics are a sect of
idolatry and apostasy, and that they are the most evil creatures under
the heavens." For its part, the Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment
expresses similar views. The fatwas, sermons, and statements of
established Saudi clerics uniformly denounce Shi`ite belief and
practice. A recent fatwa by Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a respected
professor at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University (which
trains official clerics), is a case in point. Asked whether it was
permissible for Sunnis to launch a jihad against Shi`ites, al-Barrak
answered that if the Shi`ites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on
practicing their religion openly, then yes, the Sunni state had no
choice but to wage war on them. Al-Barrak's answer, it is worth noting,
assumes that the Shi`ites are not Muslims at all.
This sectarian hatred that the clerics preach bears directly on the
United States. Projecting their domestic struggle onto the external
world, Saudi hard-liners are now arguing that the Shi`ite minority in
Saudi Arabia is conspiring with the United States in its war to destroy
Islam. Thus al-Ayyiri, the al-Qaeda propagandist, argued that the
Shi`ites have hatched a long-term plot to control the countries of the
Persian Gulf. As part of this conspiracy, the Shi`ite minorities in
Sunni countries are insinuating themselves into positions of
responsibility so as to function as a fifth column for the enemies of
true Islam. "The danger of the Shi`ite heretics to the region," he
states, "is not less than the danger of the Jews and the Christians."
Many other clerics warn of a Shi`ite-U.S. conspiracy. Safar al-Hawali,
for example, a prominent cleric and member of the Internal Front, wrote
a long and vituperative response to the Shi`ite petition Abdullah
accepted. Al-Hawali characterized the petition as an attempt by the
Shi`ite minority to tyrannize the Sunni majority. Throughout history,
al-Hawali wrote, the Shi`ites have conspired with the foreign enemies
of the Sunnis: in the thirteenth century they aligned with the Mongol
invaders; today they conspire with the Americans. If the Saudi
authorities meet the demands of the Shi`ite petitioners, al-Hawali
continued, one of two outcomes would result: Shi`ite government or a
secular state.
All this might sound like the product of an addled brain, but it is not
as detached from political reality as it seems. The Saudi clerics and
al Qaeda base their political analysis of the Shi`ites on two
assumptions: that Wahhabism is true Islam and that it must have a
monopoly over state policy. From this perspective, the various forces
promoting Taqarub, both domestic and foreign, are indeed in cahoots to
upend the status quo. The Shi`ites offer an alternative notion of
Islamic community and history, they tend to cluster in strategically
key regions, they share bonds with co-religionists beyond the borders
of their country, and they have political interests that coincide with
those of Sunni reformers. These attributes would allow the Shi`ites to
form a powerful political bloc should a participatory political system
ever emerge. And offering them even minor political concessions now
would be dangerous, the clerics say, since other sects and other
regional identities would clamor for political representation and soon
overwhelm the system.
Beneath the conspiracy theory, therefore, lurks a very sober struggle
over real political and economic interests. The clerics hope to place
the Shi`ites in a kind of political quarantine, making it all but
unthinkable for Sunni reformers in Saudi Arabia to form alliances with
them. The reams of anti-Shi`ite material on Saudi religious Web sites
are marked by three persistent charges: that the Shi`ites are agents of
Iran, allies of the United States, and close associates of the Jews.
The last accusation merits particular attention.
Isaac Hasson, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has
identified what he calls a "neo-Wahhabi campaign against the Shi`ites,
which aims to demonize them by comparing them to the Jews." Traditional
Wahhabi teachings, for example, include the medieval Sunni myth that it
was actually a Jewish convert to Islam, Abdullah bin Saba, who invented
Shi`ism. This means Shi`ism has a kind of Jewish dna flowing through
it. New attributes borrowed from modern antisemitism, such as the
notion of a Jewish plot for world domination, have been grafted onto
this charge. In the neo-Wahhabi campaign that Hasson has identified,
therefore, Shi`ism is simultaneously an offshoot of Judaism, the
natural ally of Zio-Crusaderism, and an inveterate generator of grand
plots to destroy Sunni Islam.
The clerics' anti-Shi`ite campaign traces, on a communal scale, the
same pattern as the threats that al-Khudayr directed against
al-Nuqaydan. Just as the radical clerics pass death sentences on
individual reformers, so the Saudi religious establishment periodically
threatens the Shi`ites with genocide. In his refutation of the Shi`ite
petition, for example, the cleric Safar al-Hawali warned the Shi`ites
about the dangers of overreaching. If they were actually to succeed in
establishing a secular state, he argued, the result would be a civil
war, and "if the [Sunni] majority gets riled, it will act -- a matter
that could lead to the complete annihilation of the [Shi`ite]
minority." This thinly veiled threat carried even greater significance
for having been published on the Web site of another cleric and
anti-Shi`ite firebrand, Nasir al-Umar, who has urged the government to
fire Shi`ites from all positions of responsibility in the country.
Al-Umar has also insisted that the government must find "a quick
solution" to the Shi`ites' demographic domination of the eastern
province, a proposal that can only be described as an incitement to
ethnic cleansing.
Rather than shutting such inflammatory voices down, Prince Nayef finds
it convenient to keep them on the streets: al-Umar runs a mosque as a
government employee and operates an attractive Web site. By giving
clerics such as al-Umar privileged platforms from which to spread their
doctrines, Nayef gets the best of both worlds. To foreign critics, he
can distance himself from al-Umar's extremism, claiming that the cleric
speaks only for himself; at home, meanwhile, he can reap the benefit of
al-Umar's threats, which strike terror into Shi`ite hearts.
A crucial part of the conclusion:
The Saudi religious establishment's views regarding the
American-Shi`ite conspiracy are not simply an internal Saudi matter.
They legitimize the daily attacks on American soldiers in Iraq's "Sunni
Triangle," as well attacks such as the anti-Shi`ite suicide bombing in
Najaf last August. The dazed onlookers who crowded around the rubble in
Najaf immediately asked themselves one question: Who did it?
"Wahhabis," cried one group. "Baathists," cried another. If Washington
maintains business as usual with Riyadh, it will not be long before the
Iraqi Shi`ites will conclude that the United States covertly supports
the Wahhabi bombers who blow up their mosques -- just as they
concluded, after the events of 1991, that the United States supported
Saddam Hussein against them.
We must force change in Saudi Arabia, for the sake of our selves, for the entire Middle East, and for the world.
CROSSOVERS. Stephen Hunter is one of my favorite movie critics:
Is it me, or is Robert S. McNamara actually turning into Gollum?
[...]
He looks like a reptilian cave dweller, full of seductive rhythms in a singsongy voice, his body language weirdly compelling.
For many, it'll be easy to impart on the current wizened wizard's sullied flesh a metaphor for contagion.
What emerges from the picture, however, is something unlikely: It's not
an essay in how different the man is from the rest of us, but how much
the same. He's old, he's vain, he's a blend of ego and humility, pride
and passion, optimism and pessimism. There's a word for this: human.
But as he and these other historians are also quick to note, one of the
keys to understanding the real Battle of the Crater is the heavy
involvement of African American troops there and the bungling of their
deployment by the Union high command.
And if you go looking for this story line, either in Frazier's book or
in the hellish orange haze the filmmakers throw over their
painstakingly re-created battlefield, you will look in vain.
[...]
That said, there were problems they couldn't fix.
Take the guard towers that loom ominously over the Confederate lines
like relics from the "Schindler's List" set. "If I had one cannon, my
first shot is to knock that down," Kraus says. "I don't know where they
got those." Apparently, the production designer felt the need for
something on that scale to fill out the frame.
Or take the enormous siege guns the Confederates are shown manhandling
into position. Couldn't happen, unless you were dealing with
lightweight fiberglass reproductions, and besides, guns of that size
would have been far behind the lines. "We said: 'Why?' They said, 'The
little ones look like toys,' " Bert explains.
Some inauthenticities were corrected by the filmmakers themselves. Jay
Tavare, who plays a Cherokee character in Inman's regiment, "wanted to
fight Ninja style," Kraus says. "I heard Anthony say, 'Jay, you're not
an action figure.' " But other flaws inevitably crept in. The time
between the explosion and the Union attack, for example, was radically
condensed for dramatic reasons. The Crater itself seemed to the
consultants to be a little too deep and steep-walled.
There were those missing persons, too, of course.
Yes, you could see a black face or two in the swirl of fighting. But
Pohanka says he'd have liked to see many more black troops involved.
[...]
Next question: What about the way women are portrayed in "Cold Mountain"?
Let's deal with the frivolous part first. The one thing period experts
seem to agree on is that even when Ada, Nicole Kidman's character, is
leading a hardscrabble life, she looks far too good to be true --
especially when it comes to her distinctly non-period hair. Zellweger
wins Most Believable Actress, hands down. Jude Law gets high marks for
scruffiness as well.
A more serious topic is the movie's seeming determination to turn the
"Gone With the Wind" stereotype of pro-war, pro-slavery Southern
womanhood on its head. "When you watch this film you have a sense that
there are no white women in the Confederacy who support the Confederate
war effort," Gallagher says, but this is "a grotesque distortion." Ada
is supposed to be a transplanted Charleston belle, raised in the heart
of the slaveholding South, yet she's skeptical about the war from the
beginning, and practically the first words out of her mouth establish
her anti-slavery sentiments. "What's wrong with that picture?" the historian asks.
This brings the discussion around to what Ayers calls "the great
central problem of all of American history -- race and slavery."
And how did the filmmakers do on that one?
"They ducked," he says.
Yes, they ducked. They made slavery virtually invisible in the
mountains of North Carolina, which it was not. They made all their
major Southern characters sympathetic, or at the very least silent, on
the issue. They put unlikely anti-slavery speeches into the mouths of
minor Southern characters, such as the doctor in the hospital where
Inman recovers, outside of which you see a tableau of cotton-picking
slaves for, oh, 30 seconds or so.
But Gary Gallagher, for one, doesn't think any of this should come as a surprise.
"Americans are so uncomfortable with slavery," he says. "Slavery and
race are the great bugaboos for us in terms of really coming to terms
with our past. It's just so raw still." And to expect a
commercial fiction film to confront raw truths that American culture as
a whole prefers to avoid would be, well -- unrealistic.
The article also praises a lot of things the film-makers got right. But
I find it infuriating they would attempt to side-step around a minor
issue like, uh, slavery, in a movie about the Civil War. (Don't try to sell me the idea that slavery wasn't crucial to the Civil War; I know better.)
In
some ways, what Sifaoui finds is underwhelming. Bourti's militants do
provide funds and moral support to imprisoned terrorists and logistical
help to would-be militants. More often, however, they peddle their
dogma like salesmen, distributing free dinners spiced with jihadist
messages to the needy or delivering a dose of comfort and militant
Islam to the sick in public hospitals. Petty cadres in a vast community
of immigrants, they scheme to get a cut of their fellows' wages.
Sifaoui follows them as they collect the zakat, a religious tax, in
front of a Parisian mosque at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. One
man's two-hour take: ?1,000.
[...]
The militants' anger seems to have no deeper eschatological root. The
ideological chatter exchanged in Sifaoui's meetings with his "brothers"
consists of little more than gossip about Osama bin Laden and sound
bites from Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, radical Muslim
theologians from ages past. The militants care less about doctrinal
depth than they do about Islamist symbolism -- a jihadist pop of sorts.
They are obsessed with matters of style: the beard, a distinctive
slang, open disdain for women, wearing one's watch on the right wrist
rather than the left, an aversion to all jewelry, and an irritation
with Sifaoui's beret (which they think makes him look Jewish).
Bourti's recruits are born-again Muslims and converts from non-Muslim
societies. Some heard the call while jailed for crimes of delinquency;
others were once students in France's secular universities who broke
with their comrades and liberal middle-class families. Bourti himself
admits that his men are so Westernized that when duty calls, they will
have no trouble shaving their beards "and passing for preppies."
DUMB BOTS. Here is a WashPo
story about the ease of generating maps to people's homes via the
Interent, and the problems that can cause. I'm not recommending the
story; I'm using it to illustrate a point.
The story quotes an essentially random person, Sonjia Kenya.
The Post has a practice of putting up sidebars of stories related to
certain topics. What do we get in this case? That's right, a list of
"Stories From Kenya."
LAMPLIGHTING. The British Intelligence hand behind certain British newspaper links. How MI6 has done it, including leaks to your friend and mine, Con Coughlin
The Justice Department has added a fourth prosecutor to the team
investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity, while
the FBI has said a grand jury may be called to take testimony from
administration officials, sources close to the case said.
Administration and CIA officials said they have seen signs in the past
few weeks that the investigation continues intensively behind closed
doors, even though little about the investigation has been publicly
said or seen for months.
[...]
But sources said the CIA believes that people in the administration
continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the
center of the controversy, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and
his wife, Valerie Plame, who was exposed as a CIA officer by
unidentified senior administration officials for a July 14 column by
Robert D. Novak.
[...]
Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a
still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame
had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The
document, written by a State Department official who works for its
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the
CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior
administration official who has seen it.
CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the
official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about
Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended
the meeting.
It still remains to be seen if this will lead to any indictments or
other results, or if it will peter out the way most leak investigations
do.
Meanwhile, it's been an interesting Rorshach blot for people's
prejudices. I'm still baffled at what logic is used by those who have
said that, somehow, whether or not a crime was committed became
irrelevant because Wilson and Plame posed for a magazine picture. Or
that because they posed for the picture, that proved.... I don't know;
something bad, though, apparently.
IT'S NOT FOURTH OF JULY? I always get holidays wrong.
Born down in a dead man's town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground You end up like a dog that's been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam So they put a rifle in my hand Sent me off to a foreign land To go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me" Went down to see my V.A. man He said "Son, don't you understand"
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong They're still there, he's all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary Out by the gas fires of the refinery I'm ten years burning down the road Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A. I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A. Born in the U.S.A. I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.
DID YOU KNOW that in, um, I forget if it was third or fourth grade, I played Tiny Tim in our P.S. 99 production of A Christmas Carol?
As I was the shortest one in the class, as I often was in elementary
school, I played the role of Tiny Tim. I wore an aluminum foil and
cardboard leg brace.
On Tuesday night, another shift in American tactics seemed to be taking
place with the eruption of what sounded like heavy artillery and cannon
fire in a wide area of southern and southwestern Baghdad. The fire
continued far into the night, loud enough that it echoed deeply against
the walls of the Palestine Hotel in the city center, at least 10 miles
away.
REGARDLESS OF THE POINT, Major Robbins has not just dignity, but a point.
And it's not political. And damn everyone who is going to assume I'm
making a political point. Because I'm not. Many things are not,
actually, political.
12/24/2003 02:59:05 PM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107230314589791476')What, no comments?
Is it actually possible for words to be "dirty"? What the
fuckingshithell out of your motherfuckingcrap up your father's
dick-ladenuphismother'sasshole cock-sucking breastfucking
nipplessuckingshit does that mean, anyway? Is it possible for a word to
be "bad"? Bad how? Should it be, well, spanked?
12/24/2003 06:15:56 AM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107227175640560386')More great comments!
Read The Rest if you're into LOTR computer animation and motivation
things. I'm ever so grateful there are people more into Asperger's than
I am.
12/24/2003 05:55:05 AM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107227050523256723')What, no comments?
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
I'VE MODIFIED Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging, as
published on the left sidebar. Life is too short to engage in
conversation with people uninterested in civil discourse. Respect is
given to those who show respect and who earn respect.
12/23/2003 06:18:56 PM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107222873638751080')More great comments!
THE GONG SHOW. Does this mean I shall never receive the honour that is my proper due?
Suggestions for new categories and terms are hereby solicited.
What's wrong with politics today is that there isn't enough loathing in
it. What's wrong with the Democratic Establishment that it isn't more
full of loathing and hate? Why do they lack the self-confidence of a
George W. Bush to get behind the virtues of slime and viciousness?
Losers.
REPUBLICANS WILL SCREAM whenever Democrats get back into power in Congress, should they take up acting like Republicans.
Just as we see some simply lie outright about how rather mild
Democratic behavior regarding judicial nominees is "without precedent!"
I generally try to avoid partisan food fights, but sometimes one party
is simply acting in an unprecedentedly worse way than the other, and to
look away would be dishonest and unhelpful.
THE THREE REPRESENTS. China is amending their constitution to semi-guarantee private property rights.
"Semi" because while it will say that "private property obtained
legally shall not be violated," it carries that catch of "obtained
legally," which use remains to be determined.
Important news, nonetheless. I think an interesting test will be regarding this:
Reflecting that contribution as well as his continuing influence over
party affairs, the legislature on Monday also moved to enshrine Mr.
Jiang's theory of the "Three Represents" alongside "Marxism, Mao Zedong
Thought and the Theories of Deng Xiaoping" as the guiding ideologies of
the state as written in the Constitution.
The Three Represents maintains that the ruling party should represent
advanced production forces, advanced cultural forces and the
"overwhelming majority of Chinese people."
It is a recognition, although a convoluted and vaguely worded one, that
China is no longer primarily an egalitarian state and that it
recognizes that capitalist-style development is essential to the
survival of the Communist Party.
I want to see if Jiang has the power to get his actual name stuck into
the constitution, along with Marx, Mao, and Deng. If he does, his hold
on power clearly remains undiminished, and he remains the true ruling
force.
Unless, of course, that would turn out to be a sop to cover the fact
that he's actually losing power to Hu. Hard to say with Chinese
top-level politics. But, what the hell, one has to have one good puzzle
left in international politics now that Kremlin-watching is a long-dead
sport.
MASTERING THEIR DOMAIN. If I were an integral part of creating
such a huge money machine, I'd want a percentage of profits before
contributing my further time to making Seinfeld DVDs, too.
Residuals from reruns aren't going to live forever. And Julia
Louis-Drefuss' and Michael Richards' careers haven't been meteoric
since that show, either.
It was supposed to be simple, breaking into a small boatyard near here
and stealing a marine radio to monitor police frequencies.
But when the two intruders, Patrick V., 14, and his accomplice,
Christopher Conley, 19, spotted what they thought were video
surveillance cameras, they panicked and set fire to the building,
burning it down along with several boats and engines. Unknown to them,
one of the boat engines belonged to former President George Bush, whose
summer house is seven miles away.
Within days of the July 2002 fire, Secret Service and other federal
agents were at Patrick's house here. His mother, Denise Collier, said
they told her that the young men had "blown up the president's boat" in
what might have been "a terrorist act." One federal firearms agent told
her, Ms. Collier recalled, that the incident had raised "national
security concerns."
Patrick then found himself in a highly unusual predicament. Instead of
being tried in local juvenile court, he was turned over to the United
States attorney's office in Portland, tried in Federal District Court
and found guilty. He was given the maximum sentence allowed: 30 months
incarceration, followed by 27 months of probation. He was then sent to
a maximum security juvenile facility in Pennsylvania on the order of
the federal Bureau of Prisons.
One can't know for sure, but reading the rest of the story, it's
difficult to escape the conclusion that what has gone on here is that
the Secret Service decided to Send A Message that no one messes with an
ex-President's property, even unknowingly, without having the wrath of
Almighty God and the entire Federal government crash down on you.
While I entirely support protecting our ex-Presidents, and even their
property, there are distinct limits on how far we should go. If, for
instance, the kids had been caught during the break-in, shooting them
on the spot would be a wee over-the-top.
Similarly, being tossed in federal maximum security for a crime that
under any other circumstances would get you tried in juvenile court and
put in a state juvenile facility, seems a clear abuse of power.
LIFE'S A SHOW. Britain's Channel 4 is holding a vote for "Best Musical of All Time."
An all singing episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is in the running to
be named the greatest musical of all time. It will battle it out with
productions such as Chicago, Cabaret and The Sound Of Music for a
Channel 4 special.
I SEE YOU. No press release here about their Analyst's Notebook
software being the product that allegedly led to finding Saddam
Hussein, and is being used to track Osama bin Laden, according to this story.
HOW CAN I GET YOUR ATTENTION? Long account
of one of America's most successful assets in the Soviet Union, A. G.
Tolkachev, until he was betrayed by CIA traitor (note: this is what an actual traitor looks and acts like) Edward Lee Howard; Tolkachev was subsequently executed.
In January 1977, on a typically depressing winter evening in Moscow,
the local CIA chief left his office and drove to a nearby gas station
used by diplomats. While waiting for gas, he was surprised when a
middle-aged Russian approached him and asked him in English if he was
an American. When the CIA chief answered affirmatively, the Russian
placed a folded piece of paper on the car seat and departed. The CIA
chief later noted that his was the only American-plated car at the gas
station, and it appeared obvious that the man was waiting for an
American to appear. The man was calm and clearly had thought out his
approach.
The note, written in Russian, was short and to the point. The writer
said that he wanted to “discuss matters” on a “strictly confidential”
basis with an “appropriate American official.” He then suggested a
discreet meeting at a given time and place in the car of an American
official or at a Metro station entrance. The writer also suggested a
signal—a parked car at a certain place and time, facing either one
direction or the other—to indicate which meeting arrangement was
preferred. The note contained sketches of the exact locations of the
two optional sites and where the car should be parked to trigger a
meeting.
[...]
The point in time when Tolkachev chose to try to establish contact with
the CIA in Moscow was a particularly sensitive one. CIA personnel in
Moscow had several operational activities scheduled to take place over
the next several months that they and CIA headquarters were loath to
complicate by the possibility of getting caught in a KGB dangle
operation. In addition, Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State-designate
in the administration of newly elected President Jimmy Carter, was
scheduled to visit the USSR soon to lay the basis for bilateral
relations, and it was clear that the new US administration did not want
anything untoward to roil the waters between the two countries. As a
result, given the absence of any identifying data on this prospective
volunteer, the lack of any indication of his access to sensitive
information, and the difficult counterintelligence (CI) environment,
CIA headquarters decided against replying to the note.
[...]
On 3 February 1977, the volunteer again approached the local CIA chief,
this time as he got into his car. (Although the chief’s car was parked
near the US Embassy, it was blocked from the view of the Soviet
militiamen guarding the Embassy by high snow banks, a fact that
Tolkachev later said he had taken into account.) He again spoke
briefly, dropped a short note into the car, and departed. The note
reiterated the writer’s desire to establish contact with an American
official. Based on the previous CIA headquarters decision, no action
was taken to respond to the note.
Two weeks later, the CIA chief
was approached after work by the same individual, who dropped another
note into the car. This note said that the writer understood the
concern about a possible provocation. He claimed that he was an
engineer who worked in a “closed enterprise” and was not knowledgeable
about “secret matters,” so he might not be going about this the right
way. He said that he had not included specific information about
himself because he worried about how his letters would be handled. He
repeated his request that he be contacted, and he provided new
instructions for establishing contact.
By now, the CIA chief was impressed with the man’s tenacity and asked
headquarters for permission to respond positively by parking his car in
a spot that had been indicated in the note, so that the writer could
pass him a letter with more details about who he was and what
information he wanted to share. Headquarters, however, continued to
demur, citing overriding CI concerns, and forbade any positive
response.
In May, the volunteer approached the CIA chief for the fourth time,
banging on his car to get his attention. The chief ignored him.
More than six months passed before the volunteer appeared again. In
December 1977, he spotted an individual who had gotten out of an
American-plated car and was shopping in a local market. The volunteer
gave a letter to this individual and pleaded that the letter be hand
delivered to a responsible US official. The letter was passed unopened
to the US Embassy’s assistant security officer, who in turn gave it to
the local CIA chief.
This went on and on. It's an amazing tale, as is the rest of Tolkachev's tragic and heroic career.
Read The Rest if you're interested in intelligence stories and tradecraft.
AFTER-THOUGHT: Although Tolkachev was only caught by the Soviets due to
being turned over by Howard, it seems to me that the tradecraft CIA set
him up with was inherently flawed:
For example, Tolkachev could be called at home once a month, on the
date that corresponded to the number of the month, that is, 1 January,
2 February, 3 March, and so forth. Tolkachev would cover the phone
between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. on those dates to await a “wrong-number”
call. Depending upon the name asked for by the caller, Tolkachev would
be directed to one of three prearranged deaddrop sites: “Olga,” “Anna,”
or “Nina.” The caller also had the option of asking for “Valeriy,”
which would trigger a personal meeting at a prearranged site one hour
from the time of the call.
Once a month, on the date that corresponded to the number of the month
plus 15 days—18 March, 19 April, 20 May, etc.—Tolkachev was directed to
appear at one of several prearranged sites, at a specified time
according to the month, and to wait for five minutes—a password and
recognition signal were incorporated into the plan in case someone
other than the regular case officer should make the meeting.
Once every three months, on the last weekend of the month, Tolkachev
would have the opportunity to pass materials via deaddrop.
I'm just a guy who sits around, reads a lot, and mouths off. But it seems idiotic to me to set up any
regular routine for passing off messages, let alone dead drops.
Patterns are the enemy of successful spying. Routine is how one is
caught. Patterns can be analyzed and spotted. Why do I know this and
the CIA didn't care? Am I wrong?
JULY 17TH, 1968. This was the date that Maj-Gen Abd-al-Rahman
Muhamad Arif was overthrown as President of Iraq by Baathists (having
overthrown the previous Baathist government on Nov. 18, 1963,
Abd-al-Karim Qassim and Col Abd-al-Salam Muhammad Arif's previous
government having been briefly overthrown by a Baathist coup on Feb. 8,
1963). Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr became president. Saddam Hussein rose to
vice president.
Since Joe Katzman here promised that I "offered more background on the coup" here, when I really didn't, much, I feel compelled to actually provide a bit more on these coups.
Here is a version that says the US was closely involved, even the mastermind of, the 1963 coup. Here is kind of an anthology of accusations of rather unverifiable veracity.
If you go here
and scroll to "THE EMERGENCE OF SADDAM HUSAYN, 1968-79" and click,
you'll find useful information on that subject. Clicking first on
"COUPS, COUP ATTEMPTS, AND FOREIGN POLICY" and "REPUBLICAN IRAQ" will
give more detailed useful background.
Tangentially, here is a semi-official look at the UK and US view of the Iraqi threat to Kuwait in the 1960's.
Ultimately, whatever level of involvement the CIA did or did not have in the 1963 coup -- and it's acknowledged by Bobby Kennedy that there was some -- it is clear that the Baath regime was in no way a puppet regime of the US. Their policies make that indisputable.
On April 9, 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of
friendship. The two countries agreed to cooperate in political,
economic, and military affairs. The Soviet Union also agreed to supply
Iraq with arms.
To strengthen the Ba'th regime, two important steps were taken: the
conflict with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which had arisen after
the revolution of 1958, was reconciled; and the National Progressive
Front was established to provide legitimacy to the regime by enlisting
the support of other political parties. Since the March Manifesto had
established a basis for settlement of the Kurdish problem, Kurdish
political parties were willing to participate in the National
Progressive Front. The ICP had also shown interest. A Charter for
National Action, prepared by the Ba'th Party, was published in the
press for public discussion. It became the basis for cooperation with
the ICP and other parties.
In March 1972, Ba'thist and ICP leaders met to discuss the content of
the charter and express their views about basic principles such as
socialism, democracy, and economic development. A statute was drawn up
expressing the principles agreed upon as the basis for cooperation
among the parties of the front. It also provided for a 16-member
central executive committee, called the High Committee, and a
secretariat. The front officially came into existence in 1973.
And, of course, Iraq didn't exactly reconcile with Israel. Some US
tool. But however much the coup in Iraq in 1963 was very much an Iraqi
coup, it would also be false to declare that the US had no involvement,
just as it would be false to declare that the US bore ultimate, or
anything resembling full, responsibly for it. More to the point, Saddam
Hussein didn't come into serious power in government until the
subsequent Baath coup of 1968, of which no one has accused the US of
involvement.
12/22/2003 03:29:59 AM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107208899918492258')More great comments!
Standing before a packed auditorium at Phillips Exeter Academy here
earlier this month, retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark suddenly turned away
from the lectern and grabbed hold of a U.S. flag hanging from a pole at
the back of the stage.
"You know, the American flag doesn't belong to the Republican Party,"
he said. After asking the veterans in the audience to stand, he
continued, still clutching the fabric. "That's our flag. We saluted
that flag. We served under it. We fought for it. We watched brave men
and women buried under it. And no Tom DeLay or John Ashcroft or George
W. Bush is going to take this flag away from us."
There are plenty of stupid leftists to be found who make false and
scurrilous accusations about the Administration and/or Republicans or
conservatives in general. I am not kind to that where and when I see
it.
But one of the most offensive things in current political discourse is the casual slurring, by many loud voices, of all Democrats, or "liberals," or "leftists," as outright traitors. Members of the "Terrorcrat Party." Etc., bloody etc.
This is no way to engage in civil debate. This is no way to engage in
respectful political discourse. This is no way to seek any common
ground whatsoever.
This is a refusal to admit to any possibility of legitimate, honorable,
reasonable disagreement. This is a refusal to allow debate.
This is a refusal to engage in democracy.
This is wrong. This is something respectable Republicans and conservatives should not, by their own honor, let stand.
GEEK DVDS. Nice piece about both the Firefly
official DVD, and an unofficial one plugged on Slashdot, and the
growing phenomenon of cutting together your own versions of tv shows
and movies (such as Buffy vids).
For Joss Whedon fans:
Mr. Whedon himself seems bemused by the project, recognizing that he's
the strangest possible viewer for such a disc. "I find it kind of
fascinating," he said. "It starts out with bunches of praise, which,
you know, works for me." Mr. Whedon can imagine the appeal of such
commentaries to fans, although he wonders how consumers would sort out
thoughtful options from mere chatter. And he's aware of the potential
for harsh commentary: "It's because of the feeling of intimacy and
privilege of being in this community; people feel as though they're
almost friends with the creator, and they can say such personal stuff."
(Not that Mr. Whedon is immune to such fantasies himself: he considered
creating his own angry commentary track for the film "Alien
Resurrection" — which he helped write, only to have his work mangled in
production — but declined, for fear of being sued.)
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for insight into contemporary pop
culture hinting at the near future, along with, miraculously for the Times, some actual live links.
12/21/2003 07:57:56 PM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107206187612884671')What, no comments?
The elusive piece of this phenomenon is cultural: the Internet. Rather
than compare Dr. Dean to McGovern or Goldwater, it may make more sense
to recall Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. It was not until
F.D.R.'s fireside chats on radio in 1933 that a medium in mass use for
years became a political force. J.F.K. did the same for television, not
only by vanquishing the camera-challenged Richard Nixon during the 1960
debates but by replacing the Eisenhower White House's prerecorded TV
news conferences (which could be cleaned up with editing) with live
broadcasts. Until Kennedy proved otherwise, most of Washington's wise
men thought, as The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in
1961, that a spontaneous televised press conference was "the goofiest
idea since the Hula Hoop."
Such has been much of the reaction to the Dean campaign's breakthrough
use of its chosen medium. In Washington, the Internet is still seen
mainly as a high-velocity disseminator of gossip (Drudge) and rabidly
partisan sharpshooting by self-publishing excoriators of the left and
right. When used by campaigns, the Internet becomes a synonym for "the
young," "geeks," "small contributors" and "upper middle class," as if
it were an eccentric electronic cousin to direct-mail fund-raising run
by the acne-prone members of a suburban high school's computer club. In
other words, the political establishment has been blindsided by the
Internet's growing sophistication as a political tool — and therefore
blindsided by the Dean campaign — much as the music industry
establishment was by file sharing and the major movie studios were by
"The Blair Witch Project," the amateurish under-$100,000 movie that
turned viral marketing on the Web into a financial mother lode.
[...]
To say that the competing campaigns don't get it is an understatement.
A tough new anti-Dean attack ad has been put up on the campaign's own
site, where it's a magnet for hundreds of thousands of dollars in new
contributions. The twice-divorced Dennis Kucinich's most effective use
of the Web thus far has been to have a public date with the winner of a
"Who Wants to Be a First Lady?" Internet contest. Though others have
caught up with meetup.com, only the Wesley Clark campaign is racing to
mirror Dr. Dean's in most particulars. The other Democratic Web sites
are very 2000, despite all their blogs and other gizmos.
"The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it," says the
author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book "Emergence" is
essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On
some candidates' sites, he observes, "there is no difference between a
blog and a chronological list of press releases." And the presence of a
poll on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying
principles of the Dean Internet campaign "are the opposite of a poll,"
Mr. Johnson says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the
Linux operating system's code through open collaboration, so Dean
online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign,
their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed
from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle
up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr.
Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as
opposed to a person.
THE PURPOSE OF SEX. Avedon Carol has the best rant in blogdom in response to the ne plus ultra silliness in the National Review.
Another thing I wish is that complete strangers would not try to tell
us how our motivations differ from what they believe their own are.
This is a kind of expertise from ignorance: I assume that my reasons
are better than your reasons, even though I don't even know you, and I
therefore make up the reasons you do the things I think you do, from
what I imagine to be bad reasons, and therefore I am morally superior
to you. I have sex for reasons of "sociability and community building", but you are just using a consumer good. I am connected by bonds of love to my sexual partner(s), but you look at your partners as "an object that satisfies [you] more or less well."
THE VALUE OF BEING DEVALUED. A three-screen story in the Times tut-tutting that getting a standing ovation no longer means anything because it's de rigeur
at all major performances now, and the world isn't what it used to be,
children contradict their parents, gobble their food and tyrannise
their teachers, soon cats and dogs will be living together.
Or words to that effect. But the closing wisdom on standing ovations comes at the end:
"Maybe it's become rather common, but I can't say it feels any worse,"
Mr. Fierstein said. "It's kind of like sex. Just because the guy down
the street got it doesn't mean it doesn't feel good."
The same week that President Bush signed an act regulating junk e-mail,
the makers of the original Spam endured more bad publicity as networks
replayed images of their canned meat in Saddam Hussein's grubby hideout
— the product placement from hell. How do you respond to an unsolicited
endorsement from the Butcher of Baghdad? "It's not the most positive
association," conceded Julie Craven, a spokeswoman for Hormel Foods.
But she pointed to the upside, "It's further evidence of the worldwide
appeal of Spam."
Eric Idle should solicit them to be a sponsor for Spamalot, don't you think? And wouldn't they be smart to take him up on it?
If Hussein had stuck to butchering Spam, we would all have been better off; makes you stop and think, doesn't it? Just not for very long.
NO GET OUT OF JAIL CARD. Whatever your politics are, can you say this doesn't strike you in the least bit as creepy, or cause you to wonder a tad about the ultimate justice rendered?
A thorough, near-scholarly, but funny, collection and summary of
Tolkien's writings on the matter. (References to "LACE" is to Tolkien's
"Lore And Customs of The Eldar.")
The good news is that elves like sex. “The union of love is indeed to
them great delight and joy.” (LACE) The bad news is that elves tend to
lose interest in sex after they’ve had kids. “With the exercise of the
power (of generation), the desire soon ceases, and the mind turns to
other things…they have many other urges of body and of mind which their
nature urges them to fulfil.” They do look back happily on the
sexually-active time in their lives, though, a period of one to several
hundred years. (LACE) Also, “they are seldom swayed by the desires of
the body only, but are by nature continent and steadfast.” (LACE)
Sorry.
Picard makes a far less-popular assertion - that computers should be
designed from the outset to take into account, express, and influence
users' feelings. From scheduling an appointment to picking a spouse,
humans routinely listen to what their gut is telling them. Without the
ability to understand emotion, says Picard, computers are like the
autistic pizza delivery guy who says, "I remember you! You're the lady
who gave me a bad tip."
Not a new subject, but a quite interesting exposition.
YOUNG JOE MCCARTHY. An excellent potted history which told me a great many details about his pre-Senate life I hadn't known.
One, consistent with his personality and record, bit:
The interview took place just before Pearl Harbor. According to the
notes of John Wyngaard, who was present, McCarthy delivered an
isolationist tirade against the war. “My contact with the would-be
greats has merely confirmed and crystallized the thoughts which I have
long held,” he told Imlay. “I was appalled at the rapidly increasing
momentum of our march toward war. . . . One of our Wisconsin
congressmen said 'my voters know how I feel, so why should I worry?’ If
we get into war, the fault will lie with the administration and it will
perhaps mean the end of the Democratic party.” McCarthy also disparaged
the arguments of the Wisconsin congressmen, which he said were based on
their opinions of Hitler and Hirohito and their political theories.
Only once had he heard “a careful weighing of the advantage of a
British victory against the cost in human lives and political and
social upheaval. One of course does not feel that our representatives
are evil or dishonest men, but merely weak men . . . who lack either
the force of character or the intelligence to assume even a semblance
of leadership—men who are weather-cocks swaying in the breeze of public
opinion.” McCarthy was playing to the isolationist sentiments of
Wisconsin’s German population, but the interview, which ran on December
6 in The Shawano Evening News, The Appleton Press-Gazette, and The Green Bay Press-Gazette,
could not have come at a worse time. On the heels of his antiwar
diatribe came Pearl Harbor, and America was at war. In addition, he had
smeared the Wisconsin congressmen who had befriended him in Washington,
and his remarks were published in their districts.
Instead of accepting the responsibility for his fatuous remarks,
McCarthy blamed the messenger for the message. He complained to
Virginia Imlay that “what was given as a general observation of
official Washington was distorted into a vicious condemnation of our
Wisconsin representatives. For the life of me . . . I can’t understand
why you . . . dressed up my statement. Mr. Murray informs me that I
have credited him with some brainless statement in regard to war. . . .
The only comment I made about Mr. Murray was that I was rather amazed
at the way he had made himself into an authority on agricultural
questions during the short time he was in Washington.” But Wyngaard’s
notes, which he kept and which can now be found in the Marquette
archives, show that Imlay’s article was substantially accurate.
THE LIFE OF BEING A PROFESSIONAL PLACE-HOLDER in line at Congress.
Hey, you can earn $10-15/hr as a paid employee, and the two main
companies that have 80% of the business charge their clients $32 to $40
per hour.
Of course, you have to wait outside, whether it's raining or snowing,
and mostly you can't sit down, even if you are waiting for several
days. Still, it's a better job than McDonalds.
AN HOUR LATER THEY WERE HUNGRY AGAIN. Interesting details
on how Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig turned over to Mao Tse-tung a
complete set of US intelligence information on Soviet military forces
arrayed against China.
After some discussion of the Shanghai Communiqué and the importance of
secrecy for the briefing, Kissinger gave a run-down of Soviet forces
deployed along the Sino-Soviet border, including ground forces,
tactical aircraft and missiles, strategic air defenses, and strategic
attack forces. The briefing was detailed, with specific numbers of on
Soviet divisions, aircraft, missiles, etc. Kissinger gave special
attention to nuclear forces, providing considerable detail on four
types of tactical missiles, including the explosive yield of their
nuclear warheads.
[...]
When Kissinger concluded his presentation, he emphasized that except
for Nixon and those Americans present, "nobody in our government" knew
about it, even the "intelligence people" who had prepared the
information. While Kissinger, through Nixon's approval, had the
authority to disclose the information to the Chinese, undoubtedly
Deputy of Central Intelligence Richard Helms would have wanted to vet
the briefing in the name of protecting sources and methods. (Note 17)
In any event, Marshall Ye expressed his gratitude to Kissinger, saying
that not only was the information "very useful" but that it also was an
"important indication" of the U.S.'s "willingness to improve our
relations." This would not be the last of such presentations; they were
regular features of Kissinger's visits to China until October 1975,
when relations had soured and the Chinese rejected his offer of a
"special briefing." (Note 18)
Only Nixon, eh? Imagine that a Democratic administration had done that. After all, Bill Clinton and Al Gore are traitors for what happened on their watch with the Chinese.
HOW WASTED ARE YOU? Use this EPA site to plug in your zip code and find out just what toxic chemicals have been dumped or exhausted into the air near you.
Hey, 920 pounds of barium compounds in the air; 29,000 pounds of
hydrochloric acid; 140,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride. I'm sure it
only makes the mountain air tastier.
The two versions of this document provide one of hundreds of examples -
in this instance an amusing one - of the divergent results sometimes
produced by separate declassification decisions on the same document.
The CIA produced "Weekly Situation Reports on International Terrorism"
for the Cabinet committee on terrorism established by the Nixon
administration in the wake of the Black September attacks on Israeli
athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and a spate of aircraft
highjackings. In this instance, two CIA reviewers came out with rather
different results when they scrutinized the classified version of the
same document. The last page of the version released at the Ford
Library in 1997 includes, on page B-VI-1, a droll item about a report
of a plan to sabotage the "annual courier flight of the Government of
the North Pole" (GONP). Interestingly, the version released by the CIA
in 1999 through its CREST database of scanned images withheld the item
about "Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus." (Note 14)
Apparently, the CIA staffer who made the 1997 decision about the Ford
Library document rightly believed that it would do no harm to disclose
that an anonymous Agency intelligence officer had a sense of humor. Why
the 1999 reviewer reached the opposite conclusion is a mystery.
Even now the terrorist threat to the GONP exists. Shoulder-launched
missiles are a particularly deadly danger. And terrorists are
particularly desirous of taking out the one entity who knows when they've been naughty.
12/20/2003 02:24:38 PM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107195547836405050')What, no comments?
THE COUP THAT BROUGHT HUSSEIN TO POWER. It's not unheard of to
see the US being accused of being responsible for Saddam Hussein coming
to power. This is largely silly, insofar as there were US/CIA
connections to the 1963 coup, but it was essentially an Iraqi affair,
and Saddam Hussein didn't come to significant power until the 1968
coup.
Without attempting to write a detailed history of events, here
is an interesting clue. An invaluable paper by John Prados on the Diem
coup -- which the US bore intimate, though certainly not full,
responsibility for, though there was no thought given on the US side to
the possibility that Diem would be killed, rather than simply removed
from power -- which contains this statement from Bobby Kennedy from a
taped White House discussion in 1963:
The Kennedy tape from October 29, 1963 captures the highest-level White
House meeting immediately prior to the coup, including the President's
brother voicing doubts about the policy of support for a coup against
Diem: "I mean, it's different from a coup in the Iraq or South American
country; we are so intimately involved in this…."
Bobby weren't lying there.
Read The Rest: the National Security Archive is as invaluable as ever,
even if it doesn't fulfill your preconceptions. More useful information
on Hussein and the West here.
PEOPLE OF ELF-NESS! YOU ARE BEINGdiscriminated against! That's what this is. Simple and clear anti-elfishness!
HELSINKI, Finland - Santa's workshop may not be the joyous place it was
in years past for the tens of thousands of tourists expected to visit
northern Finland this winter. Facing a blizzard of debt, Saint Nick
laid off many of the elves who work at the SantaPark attraction near
the Arctic Circle.
"I feel really dejected, because being an elf is part of my identity,"
said Milja Vilmila, who was told her job as an elf helping Santa no
longer existed. "Something will definitely be missing this Christmas."
X MARKS THE SPOT. Burt Rutan took another step towards the X-Prize as SS1 went supersonic this week.
In 1986, as a junior editorial employee for Avon Books, I was given the
mandate by our new editorial director, who had come from Bantam, to
start finding books to begin a new program of popular science and
technology books, as Avon had no such program, and Bantam had done very
well by one. When Rutan's Voyager craft made the headlines, I
spent days working phones around the world, trying to reach Rutan to
work a deal for a book on the flight and him.
Alas, despite endless work for the next year on this science books
program, it never came to fruition (as neither did some other projects,
of course, such as a book on Iran-Contra done by Walter Pincus and
other WashPo reporters; naturally, hundreds of other books I worked on did come out). The man's had an admirablecareer.
REPUBLICANS: you can count on them for fiscal responsibility. Sure is a good thing we have them in power, protecting tax-payers, and keeping the budget balanced, eh?
DAN DREZNER GETS MAIL. I particularly liked this one:
"We're shooting through an uncharted, terrorist-filled galaxy at light
speed, and the spinners like you are all playing the role of Mr. Scott,
shouting over the intercom to James T. Kirk that "..she can't take much
more!" Bush, like Kirk, is facing something nobody ever wants to face:
The unknown. He's boldly going where no man has gone before, and I
think it's high time he gets some credit for doing a pretty damn good
job at it."
Apparently George W. Bush is eventually going to steal the ship of
state to go rescue the katra of his dead friend, Rummy, after which he
will be reduced in rank.
The amusing part is that Professor Drezner is a Republican supporter of
the war, here being denounced as a crazed Commie. (In response to this.) Damnit, Jim, he's a Republican blogger, not a commie doctor!
Mr. Sulu, raise anti-terrorist deflectors!
(My story, by the way, is that I'm not violating what I wrote here
about the War On Straw because a) feebly, I did not go searching for
dumb remarks, but b) substantially, because I am not using this to make
a general case that Ha, Ha, Right-Wingers Are Stoopid.
IMAGINE a touch screen on which the elements of the image displayed can
be moved around with a fingertip. Now imagine the same scene without
the screen: the image can still be moved with a fingertip, but it
floats unsupported above a quietly whirring gray box that is connected
to a laptop computer.
That describes what took place here when the prototype of a new device
called the Heliodisplay was shown publicly for the first time.
The Heliodisplay is an interactive technology that projects into the
air above the machine still or moving images that can be manipulated
with a fingertip. The images are two-dimensional, and they are not
holograms. The Heliodisplay's inventor, Chad Dyner, says the technology
could one day replace conventional cathode-ray tubes, liquid crystal
displays and plasma screens.
[...]
A prototype shown to a reporter (and later to an audience attracted by
a notice on IO2's Web site) looked like a bulky breadbox. It displayed
images over a field measuring 15 inches diagonally, including streaming
video scenes of brightly colored tropical fish and soaring jet planes.
Other images, including illustrations of a strand of DNA and a human
skeleton, could be moved from one part of the display to another using
one's finger, while four colored circles expanded or contracted at a
touch.
Very interesting. It would be nice if this turns out to be for real.
THE BEAGLE HAS SEPARATED. May she make it okay all the way to Mars.
To cheers from scientists in Britain and Germany, a European spacecraft
the size of a large washing machine detached a package the size of a
home barbecue yesterday and sent it spinning gently on a five-day
journey towards Mars at 12,500mph.
On board were a parachute, a set of airbags, a heatshield, a camera, a
drill, a torch, a Damien Hirst painting, music by Blur, a set of solar
panels and an oven capable of heating rock to 1,000 C - powered by a
source just big enough to light up a 60 watt bulb.
Beagle 2, Britain's first emissary to another planet, had begun the
last leg of its 250m mile journey. After tense minutes, Mars Express
mission control at Darmstadt in Germany confirmed at 11.12 GMT that the
separation mechanism had worked perfectly.
Better hope the Martians don't shoot this one down like the others.
Especially since they've been sent a Damien Hirst painting.
SADDAM TODAY, GONE TOMORROW. Details of the Rumsfeld-Hussein meeting in 1984.
Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was
urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement
on chemical weapons, or CW, "was made strictly out of our strong
opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it
occurs," according to a cable to Rumsfeld from then-Secretary of State
George P. Shultz.
The statement, the cable said, was not intended to imply a shift in
policy, and the U.S. desire "to improve bilateral relations, at a pace
of Iraq's choosing," remained "undiminished." "This message bears
reinforcing during your discussions."
The smart observation:
Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archives, a
Washington-based research center, said the secret support for Hussein
offers a lesson for U.S. foreign relations in the post-Sept. 11 world.
"The dark corners of diplomacy deserve some scrutiny, and people
working in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Uzbekistan
deserve this kind of scrutiny, too, because the relations we're having
with dictators today will produce Saddams tomorrow."
Shouts, props, and praises be to Eru the One (who in Arda is called
Iluvatar), to our Moms, to all the elf girls, to Radagast the Brown,
Fingolfin the Valiant, Curufin the Crafty, Morgoth the Suck Lord...
CON COUGHLIN, WINNER OF THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD. That Telgraph story so conveniently both claiming that Mohammed Atta had support from Saddam Hussein and that al Queda had arranged a shipment from Niger to Iraq has, in a completely shocking and unforseen way, fallen apart. Who could have predicted this?
THAT LIBERAL MEDIA. This is quite the blunt and brutal attack on Howard Dean, particularly given that it is presented as a news story, not an op-ed.
I'd have no serious problems with it -- that is, I might and could
argue with details, but would have no problems with its approach of
challenging Dean -- if I had ever seen the WashPo approach
George W. Bush in one-quarter as blunt a fashion. Has the paper ever
published lines about "George Bush's... penchant for false
statements?," say? Flatly stated that Bush "has a... history of making
statements that are mean-spirited or misleading"?
Can one argue with such claims? Obviously many would. But so would many
argue with these declarations about Dean. Why the double standard? It's
quite outrageous.
I really regret the way we toss the term "democracy" around in our
foreign policy rhetoric. It gives people the idea that the most
important thing in politics is voting. But the most important thing in
politics is freedom. The American model is not "democracy," it's
constitutionally-limited government with a democratic component (even
still). Far, far more important than the fact that Americans get to
vote is the large category of things on which Americans don't get to
vote. Locking up people who write bad things, jailing people for
worshipping the wrong gods, compelling self-incriminating testimony in
criminal cases, issuing bills of attainder and other items on an
admittedly shrinking list. Even here, it's shameful that people can
vote to prohibit behaviors that a sane country would call "making an
honest living." But we had the idea right. Then we go an screw up
explaining it to everyone else.
"Democracy," circumscribed, appears to be an indispensible component of
the free society package. But it is not itself freedom and our
evangelists could make that clearer. If they believe it. If they don't
they should tell us, so we can better use our circumscribed votes next
time they come up for election.
Charlie Young: My supervisor? Well, I'm personal aide to the President,
so right now my supervisor is kinda busy looking for a back door to
throw you out of. But I'll let him know.
OUR AMYGDALA PROMISE: whenever our crack editorial team
leaves the office, for however long or short, we're not going to bring
in some dumbass crackhead, who is too cowardly to give a name, to
substitute for us. We won't even bring in any dumbasses, or crackheads,
or other folks with real names!
Amygdala: accept no substitutes because you can't! We won't let you. And we don't fake it.
(Geez, if a blog can bring in a pinch hitter, what's the frigging point in the first place?)
Our alternative slogan: Amygdala: Not a team player!
PEOPLE WHO WEAR TIN-FOIL HATS was what my friend Kathryn Cramer wrote about, and now she's attracted messages from people who wear tin-foil hats.
Oh, dear. Man, I've got to start writing more about smart beautiful
women interested in meeting single male bloggers, and nifty well-paying
jobs involving writing, editing, or research.
A Texas housewife is in big trouble with the law for selling a vibrator
to a pair of undercover cops, and the Brisbane vibrator company she
works for says Texas is an "antiquated place'' with more than its share
of "prudes.''
Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a
county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges
for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a
dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid.
Webb, a saleswoman for Passion Parties of Brisbane, faces a year in jail and a $4,000 fine if convicted.
COMMENTS. I'd noticed a few days ago that my comments were
occasionally not being listed properly, meaning there might be two
comments, but the little thingie (is there a technical name for it?)
would only say "one comment," say. Actually, this has on and off
happened before, but it was happening a lot lately. I've checked and
suddenly confirmed that it's presently all bonkers, and there's no way
to tell if comments have been left without opening them. And, of
course, Enetation is frequently hard to reach anyway.
You get what you pay for, so I can't complain, but I'm letting you know. Feel free to comment! I hope I'll find them!
THE WAR ON STRAW® is what Andrew Northrupcalled it, with typically apt precision.
I've been meaning to write about it for quite some time, but have kept
waiting for some diamond-like brilliant prose to come to me. Or
something. As usual, it hasn't, so I'm just going to say it.
There are, I think we can all agree without resort to snobbishness, 50%
of the people who are below average in intelligence, or sense, or wit,
or perceptiveness, or any measure we wish to take.
Another way of putting that is that there are, without getting into
particular definitions, or digressions into the 47 kinds of
intelligence, a fair number of stupid people out there to balance all
you saintly and brilliant people who are so kind as to put up with my
gibberings and annoying lapses.
So we can take it as given that for any political position, or
political set, we can find a bunch of idiot supporters for that set,
just as we can also find at least a few brilliant explicators who can
make clear why that seemingly loony position is actually quite
defensible, when you look at it the right way.
So I have to say that the ever-increasing recent trend of many
political bloggers -- some from each side of the column as they
perceive it, though I'm seeing more from the right guilty of this of
late (but that might be sample error on my part) -- to react to any
news event they perceive as likely to be politically polarizing by
going to a site known to be full of what H. L. Mencken called "the
booboisie," mouthing off with sub-simian mewlings admidst the mouth
breathings, is not a pretty sight. It would seem to be a masochistic
endeavor, but no! It has a purpose! Because then said blogger can pull
up this eagerly sought handful of soiled straw and proclaim: this is what The Other Side believes! That Other Side! They're so stupid! Ha ha ha, stupid other side! Me not stupid like them! Me smart. Stupid other side!
As it turns out, many scientific studies on this blogging practice have
been done, and the research clearly indicates that this is, in fact, a
completely ridiculous technique that only makes the highly intelligent
blogger engaging in it look like a self-serving hypocritical (since the
technique can universally be applied back to Your Side) nitwit.
A suggestion therefore: stop looking like a self-serving hypocritical
nit-wit. I'll turn this car right around if I have to! Don't make me
come back there!
Let's just say that many of the Biggest Name bloggers, as well as the
most hysterically enraged, have been rilly getting into this kewl
technique of late. Y'all might want to rethink that one.
See, it's arguing against straw because random people you've never
heard of who are foaming at the mouth, scientific studies reveal, turn
out not to be spokespeople for a given Party or position.
Fair game, on the other hand, are actual respected bloggers, reputable
professional columnists, or actual politicans. They can actually be
mocked as representing some respected segment of a population holding
an opinion for a given Party or position.
They can be held to the standard of being expected to generate a defensible, intelligent, position.
Are we all clear on this now? Okay. Have a good shift, and let's be careful out there.
ADDENDUM: Roy Edroso asks,
at some length, where do we draw the line on who is legitimate to
respond to? This came up in e-mail with another blogger who was
unnecessarily apologetic about taking on a prominent blogger. Here's my
(slightly edited) response:
As I said, I think linking to a "reputable" blogger -- which I didn't
define, but all I meant is someone who has some noticeable number of
either readers or links from other bloggers -- is fine. If people are
actually granting someone some status, by methods such as those, taking
them down is utterly legitimate.
It's the technique of going trolling for unknown loonies at sites
guaranteed to supply them -- be that the comments section of LGF, or
Democratic Underground, or wherever you can find lots of heavy
breathing and ranting, and then holding said ranter up as evidence of
what "The Left" or "The Right" believe, that I'd like to see
mercilessly mocked until it's regarded as illegitimate throughout the
blogosphere. It's a nonsensical use of a straw man, and although I
didn't name names, I'm extremely disappointed to see otherwise
respectable bloggers using it as a crutch. People including [X], [Y],
and many lesser-known lights, such as [Z] and on and on.
To paraphrase Andrew Northrup -- who is a must-read, in my opinion --
people need to argue with actual representatives of the positions they
disagree with, not with representatives of the voices in their head.
If you'd like to help push forward this meme, I'd be delighted.
And so I would be. So, yes, Roy Edroso, take on NRO's The Corner all you want. Just don't go fishing at Free Republic, which is a prime example of the sort of luncheon buffet I had in mind. And:
Oh, yeah, the other problem with this program -- it just wouldn't be as much fun.
Sorry, not good enough. Of course, if that's the sort of writing you want to do, you're free to do so. But if you do, the terrorists will have won. Just so you know.
When I was 13, I went to my first science fiction convention. How long
ago was that? So long ago that everyone wore sports jackets, except for
Mike Moorcock.
Most science fiction writers were once fans. There's a habit they have,
not of paying back, but of paying forward; I know of no other branch of
literature where the established "names" so keenly encourage wannabe
writers to become their competitors. I came back from that event
determined to be a writer. After all, I'd shaken hands with Arthur C
Clarke, so now it was just a matter of hard work...
And goes on to explain how he writes. Me, I was 14 when I went to my
first conventions, but I'd already been involved in fanzines since I
was 12. I started working professionally in the field when I was 15.
Come to think of it, I was also 14 when I shook hands with Arthur C.
Clarke, too.
FOR US, THE LECTURING. Details on the unpublished first novel by Robert Heinlein that he felt was so awful he burned what he thought were all the copies.
In Heinlein's America of 2086, the country did not enter the Second
World War, remaining isolated. (Hitler commits suicide after the
collapse of the German economy, Mussolini just retires and the Duke of
Windsor becomes king of a united Europe).
In the novel, in the 1950s, Fiorella LaGuardia (mayor of New York when
Heinlein was writing) begins a series of economic reforms, starting
with a banking system based on the Social Credit theories of Socred
thinker Clifford Hugh Douglas. In the novel, the U.S. Supreme Court
upholds these changes. In reality, in Canada, the Supreme Court
rejected them.
In For Us, the Living,
later presidents complete the reforms. These reforms then give people a
basic income that bridges the gap between production and consumption,
which then allows the Americans of 2086 to do what they really want,
free of economic fear.
[...]
For Us, the Living
also includes one chilling incident, a surprise attack on the island of
Manhattan by two giant helicopters that flood the island with poison
gas, killing 80 per cent of the population. The helicopters are based
on aircraft carriers and the attack comes when the United States is at
war with Argentina, Brazil and Chile in December 2003.
Given my growing up as a Heinlein reader, deep involvement with science
fiction society at such an early age, and later passing contacts with
Heinlein, naturally I'll read it when I get a chance. I can't help but
find it of historical interest, but rather strongly doubt I'll find it
any more enthralling than his later, bloated, rambling, lecturing,
novels, which did I mention I don't feel were entirely successful? (Friday being a part exception.)
Here's a really stupid, extraneous, line, by the way:
He supported Senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 (some
political analysts consider Goldwater the first neo-conservative).
Hello? Strike the "neo." Migod, we have to explain to people now that Goldwater was a conservative? I don't remember him writing The Conscience Of A Neo-Conservative, do you? Nitwit.
12/16/2003 05:47:14 AM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107157883445899748')What, no comments?
The other main contender going into Saturday night was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which won 135,000 votes.
Philip Pullman's metaphysical trilogy of children's books, His Dark
Materials, came third with 63,000; Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy was fourth with 57,000; and JK Rowling's Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire was fifth with 55,000.
The boss looked like a pig, his secretary was a brainless blonde, the
computer geek was a sexual pervert and the senior broker was a chronic
drunk.
The tension they supposedly created in an insurance company was so
distressing that Bruno Perara, 46, turned to violent fantasy and wiped
them all out in a novel called Little Murders Among Partners.
The book, inspired by his workmates' characters, cost him his job after
selling only 858 copies - half of them bought by the company's 450
staff. But the author, an administrator, has ended up £50,000 richer.
The money was awarded by a mediation court in Brittany for unfair
dismissal, after it ruled that the unique case of literary office rage
could not be blamed for internal conflicts at the French Defence and
Protection Company.
When the book was published last year several employees, including the
chairman, began legal action, claiming to have recognised themselves
behind the invented names for staff who were supposedly sleeping
together, putting their hands in the till or taking too many sickies.
"The workers were portrayed with violence and nastiness," the company's
lawyer, Myriam Adjerad, said. "No one wanted to work with Mr Perara any
more. The caricatures were insulting and amounted to virulent personal
attacks."
But Mr Perara told the mediators that he had issued a disclaimer at the
front of the book, saying the story was pure fiction, and "there had
never been any murders in the company".
The mediators said the company had not suffered any loss, because sales
had risen after the book was published, and Mr Perara had not committed
a serious enough fault to be sacked without proper notice.
Mr Perara is preparing a second book, inspired by the obscure world of the French mediation system.
Speaking of whom, last night at the 137th anniversary dinner for the
Nation—watching a moving, poetic and deeply patriotic speech by Robert
Byrd followed by a belligerently moronic one by Aaron McGruder--I....
I CAN'T HEAR YOU! My fingers are in my ears. I generally quite like Johann Hari's writing, so I'm studiously ignoring this classic piece of anti-Tolkien
stupidity. It hauls out all the traditional cliches and condescension,
including the classic "Middle-Earth is racist" trope. Eye-roll.
12/15/2003 08:24:51 PM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('10715450918410874')More great comments!
FUN MATH PROBLEMS. Brad deLong has 23 listed
and wants one hundred total to help his kids get why math can be fun. I
have trouble with that one, myself. Give generously to this man. He
needs only, uh, 56, no, 173, uh, 12 more! Send them now!
EVERYONE LOVES NEW ZEALAND, especially after it became Middle-Earth. But. Oopsie.
But the complexion of a sitting government should not always be taken
to represent that of the country as a whole, and there are cracks in
New Zealand's tolerant self-image.
The most worrying of them at the moment is spreading around the figure
of Ahmed Zaoui, a member of Algeria's Islamist FIS party which was
deposed after winning the country's 1992 elections.
He sought asylum in New Zealand just over a year ago, and since then he
has been held in detention, accused by the spy agency SIS of being a
threat to national security and threatened with deportation back to
Algeria, where he faces a death sentence.
Were it not for his situation, it would be easy to regard the whole
thing as Kafkaesque farce; certainly, there has been a touch of the
keystone cops in his treatment.
When Zaoui arrived at Auckland airport last December, a translation
error resulted in officials believing he had owned up to being a member
of the GIA, a brutally militant Algerian Islamist group. Before the
mistake could be corrected, it was flashed to Interpol offices on five
continents.
Seven months later, a communications breakdown within the immigration
department led to a senior official denying any knowledge of Zaoui
while his colleagues were simultaneously owning up to it. Worse still,
a memo was then leaked in which the official lambasted his staff for
failing to "lie in unison".
In August, the government's refugee appeals body rejected the SIS's
threat assessment, saying it was based on questionable sources gleaned
from the internet and news reports. The SIS responded in the
traditional manner of spy agencies caught with their pants down: by
announcing that it had other, more damning evidence, that was
unfortunately too sensitive to release.
What little credibility the original threat assessment retained was
demolished in September, when it turned out that the decision had been
based on material taken from the website of an American conspiracy
theorist who believes the IMF created Aids and the Queen is a drug
dealer.
I guess Lyndon LaRouche's fame hasn't spread to New Zealand. Until now.
The people with the best claim are the Iraqis. We have a certain
interest, as well, of course. Then there's the fact that Iraq doesn't
currently have a functioning justice system, and also that under
present circumstances, any Iraq-only trial will be seen in many
quarters of the world as being the work of American puppets; thus the
suggestion of international involvement (the current trial of Milosovic
isn't being complained about by anyone but pro-fascists). Mention has also been made of a minor Kuwait grievance.
No one mentions that a country called "Iran" has a pretty good claim. Hey, hey, Saddam Hussein, how many Iranians did you kill in those days?
The Iraqis suffered an estimated 375,000 casualties, the equivalent of
5.6 million for a population the size of the United States. Another
60,000 were taken prisoner by the Iranians. Iran's losses may have
included more than 1 million people killed or maimed. The war claimed
at least 300,000 Iranian lives and injured more than 500,000, out of a
total population which by the war's end was nearly 60 million.
No, I'm, of course, not proposing he be turned over to the Iranians.
I'm just always interesting in Big Honking Obvious Things that just,
well, slip people's minds.
I do wonder at the assumption many Americans seem to have that the US should -- of course, it's not even a question
-- decide what to do with Saddam, rather than the Iraqis. Yes,
possession is nine-tenths of the law, it is said, but I've looked into
this, and it turns out we don't actually hold that up as a principle of
justice or law.
12/15/2003 06:55:13 PM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107153971301568531')What, no comments?
Customized paperback editions of classic novels starring YOU! We offer
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Prejudice and The Mark of Zorro and a new line of personalized
children's books.
Ya gotta pay for the service, though. Romeo and Juliet has a happy ending version.
Romeo What the heck was that big scene all about? Juliet Who knows? I just passed out for a second and everybody's losing it. Luckily the dagger wasn't sharp. Romeo And the apothecary screwed up big-time! What do you say we head home? Juliet Sounds like a plan, my medieval man! [Exeunt Romeo and Juliet hand in hand]
Indeed, Dean suggested that on some issues, the difference between Bush
and himself was more of tone and temperament. He said, for instance, he
would not have warned Taiwan not to hold a referendum on Chinese
missiles if the Chinese premier was at his side, as Bush did last week.
"The president's policy is right, but the president's public slap [at
Taiwan] wasn't necessary," Dean said.
This is exactly wrong. One can take several levels of stand as to how
we should approach the Taiwan question, which at present is largely a
question of how we deal with the ruling party's movement towards
declaring Taiwan to be a separate state from China, and their use of
that issue as a campaign issue to ensure re-election (and re-election).
Standing up for their democratic choice to be free and independent is,
of course, the morally correct, pure, and right thing to do. Especially
given the still ruthless and authoritarian, not to mention corrupt,
nature of the mainland regime.
Small problem, of course, is that China keeps loudly announcing that
any steps towards Taiwanese independence means war. And they mean it.
They're utterly fixated on keeping Taiwan as part of China, however
loosely and in name only for the semi-indefinite furture. They are not going to compromise for any reason in the forseeable future.
And, of course, in the real world, this means that if Taiwan takes even
further significant rhetorical steps -- such as the proposed referendum
on an intent of eventual independence -- a rain of missiles will pour
down on Taiwan.
That would be bad. All around.
Now, Bush, seeking to preserve the peace of the status quo, has
recently publically rebuked the Taiwanese leadership. Dean has now
criticized this. Problem is, all reports from Taiwan make utterly clear
that the Taiwanese leadership is in complete denial that they won't
have full military and diplomatic support from the US in defense of
their independence, or, at the very least, their right to declare their
feelings on the matter. Reports make clear that what Bush needs to do
to have any effect is make louder declarations and rebukes of
the Taiwanese leadership, if he is to penetrate their state of denial,
and cause them to pull back from their dangerous, if completely
understandable and sympathetic, course.
Now, you can take any number of stands as to how much or little we
should oppose or counter Taiwanese independence, or, again at least,
their free speech right to state their aspirations.
But to say, as Dean just has, that we should support Bush's policy
(which is to maintain the status quo, and thus prevent the Taiwanese
from holding their referendum and causing war), but not publically
rebuke the Taiwanese, well, that's simply insane. We can't secretly
speak to the majority of Taiwanese (a land that is now, thankfully, a
democracy at long last). If they're not publically disabused of their
confusion as to how far the US will support them, they will walk into
war, and possibly take us with them.
That's not the foreign policy, nor the foreign policy smarts, I want to
see from Howard Dean. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
MUSINGS ON A PLOT DEVICE. Zoe Bartlett spent a season dating
Charlie, and being a source of plot tension as threatening letters were
received against inter-racial dating, culminating in a season finale
with the shooting of the President, the deputy White House chief of
staff (Josh Lyman), and others.
Zoe Bartlett spent another season having broken up with Charlie, dating
Jean-Paul, the French dandy, culminating in a season finale in which
she is dosed with Ecstasy, and kidnapped, and the President temporarily
steps down as the Republican Speaker of the House becomes Temporary
President.
I very much like the actress who plays Zoe (Elisabeth Moss,
I had to look it up), and the character they've given her, but if she's
seen taking one step near a mountain lion, I'm outa there.
12/15/2003 11:36:17 AM |permanent link|
LinktoComments('107151337751961417')What, no comments?
WHY DEMOCRATS SHOULDN'T GET THEIR KNICKERS IN A TWIST over the horrors of the anti-Dean ad with, gasp, outrage, Osama bin Laden in it is explained by Andrew Northrup.
ALWAYS KNEW SADDAM WAS INTO B&D AND NOT THE FUN KIND. See:
After his capture, Saddam was taken to a holding cell at the Baghdad
Airport. He didn’t answer any of the initial questions directly, the
official said, and at times seemed less than fully coherent. The
transcript was full of “Saddam rhetoric type stuff,” said the official
who paraphrased Saddam’s answers to some of the questions. When asked
“How are you?” said the official, Saddam responded, “I am sad because
my people are in bondage.” When offered a glass of water by his
interrogators, Saddam replied, “If I drink water I will have to go to
the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in
bondage?”
