George Lakoff has a good essay pointing out that however fun it is to point out that George Bush is an incompetent, deeply incurious man -- that's not the point. We don't want to replace him and the Republicans because he's incompetent -- but rather because he's achieved the goals of what passes for mainstream conservatism.
Good piece. Go read it.
I ran across a new-to-me blog, Back to the Woom (via Blog Around the Clock, née Circadiana), which pointed at "The Moral Majority Is Watching Your Inner Child Molester", which is an interesting take on some of the batshit insane Republicans running our government.
I've been poking through some of the diaries at Daily Kos, and followed a link to this one, about how Ann Coulter, by being her batshit self, functions in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC) as an outlier to help make the rest of the Republicans look moderate.
That post linked to another (by thereisnospoon of There Is No Blog), a post which introduced me to the concept of the Overton Window, which is explained, out in plain sight, by a member of the VRWC. To save you googling, here are the top two google links when you search for "Overton Window": first and second.
Basically, the Overton window idea says that if you lay out all the possible political policies regarding a particular issue, and order them along some continuum, you'll find that only some set of them is politically possible, and that these cluster in the Overton Windw. If you get a bunch of people to talk about and make noise about some ideas to one side of the existing window, you can shift the window, or at least widen it out. Especially if you have them make noise about ideas that are farther out than the "next step" outside the window, then you legitimize the ideas in between by sounding radical and making them look moderate. (This requires those making noise on the far-out ideas to take some heat and stand their ground.) It's what the Republicans do and the Democrats don't (remember the whole health care "debacle" in 1993-1994?).
In other words: the Democrats are pussies.
But it's not just that. The Democrats seem to think that the way to win an argument is to be reasonable. It reminds me of engineers talking to salespeople. Why do salescritters and marketroids make more money than techies, even in tech companys? Because techies always act reasonable, even though it is they who create the real value in tech companies.
A strange thought just occurred to me: when was the last time liberals/progressives/whoever actually engaged in Overton-window frame dragging? I'd argue that it was in making the overt expression of racism and sexism vulgar and beyond the pale. That was actually working (it didn't "cure" racism and sexism and other isms; it just pushed things underground, but it did shift the discourse; anyone who thinks that nothing's changed in the last 30 years or so hasn't been paying attention, especially to attitudinal shifts toward homosexuality) -- but then the right wing hit upon "Political Correctness" as a pushback mechanism. They don't like it when their tools are used against them!
In watching the latest Republican circus (ring one: gay-bashing; ring two: making sure that obscenely rich people get to keep more of their wealth), I was forcefully reminded of an idea that first occurred to me back in the Clinton years:
Democrats are too sane.
What I mean by this is that the Republicans have some seriously batshit people in Congress, from Rick Santorum to Sam Brownback (can we turn "Brownback" into a verb? "Yeah, the two of them met at the bar last night and spent the night brownbacking"), and some even crazier motherfuckers in the House. They push for crazy shit all the time.
And then the Republican leadership (sic), which is only marginally less bugfuck than their fringe, can settle on something that's only 80% insane, and look "moderate", and willing to "compromise" in doing so.
I don't even know what the left/progressive version of Rick Santorum would be. Someone who supports public group sex -- with animals -- in Central Park or the Boston Common? There simply is no one on the left as crazy as the whacked-out Right Whingers. There is certainly no one as extreme as the extreme Right in any level of government. When John Kerry is your example of a Dangerous Liberal, you clearly didn't look very hard.
And just think of how long it took them to find Ward Churchill after 9/11 -- months to find one lone nutball of an ethnic-studies professor at a mid-size university. That's the best they could come up with?
This goes hand-in-hand with the wingnut "think" tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute (which, credit where credit is due, is not as crazy as the others): these folks give cover to the not-quite-as-pathological "moderate" Right Whingers.
And the Democrats? They're people who have forgotten how to negotiate: they ask for what they want, rather than for what they know they can't get, and then they get 20% of what they want instead of 80% after the haggling is done.
Democrats are a bunch of pussies, basically.
I was reading this post about PSY-OPS (Psychological Operations) over at Daily Kos and it spurred me to wonder....
When (if?) we know what really happened with the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, will we conclude that Iran managed to get the United States to take out their biggest direct enemy, Iraq?
Recently, I finished re-reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light of the Sun, which is quite good (nearly equalling The Lions of Al-Rassan in my estimation). I also recently watched King Arthur (the one with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley). Since this was a few weeks ago, I can't remember if I went to go re-read the Kay book after watching the movie or not. In any case, I tip my hat to Synchronicity here. Between the two of these, I was struck by two things.
Thing the first: What is it about British mythology that so much of it is about preserving order against chaos? The resonances here with T.H. White's Once and Future King are clear and, I'm sure, deliberate on Kay's part. While there's definitely such a thing as Too Much Order (e.g. East Germany pre-1991), most British mythology is contrasting order not so much against license as against rapine and pillaging -- defense against marauding invaders.
Is it simply that much of British history is about just that: defending against invasion? (Or succumbing to it in a number of cases....) Certainly British history's foundational stories often involve repelling invasion -- think of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain -- or successful invasions, like the battle of Hastings.
But certainly there is a long British tradition (one that J.R.R. Tolkien subscribed to, certainly) that sees maintenance of order as a cardinal virtue -- to allow people (well, people with enough money and time and the right set of sex chromosomes) to tend their gardens and drink beer at the pub. (There's an argument to be made that this is Conservatism in its best sense, but you certainly wouldn't recognize that in today's Republicans in the USA.)
What's interesting about this vision of maintaining order is that a significant part of the goal of order is allowing people to learn things and write (and read) books, and forge bonds with each other, instead of fighting with each other. (I sense another rant coming, about the differences between US and British SF and how that might be connected to differing histories and shaping ideas about colonialism. More on that later.)
Mythology, n.
The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
The second thing is more from The Last Light of the Sun than King Arthur, but the latter did touch on it a bit. I don't think it's a huge plot spoiler to reveal that part of The Last Light of the Sun touches on the remnants of mystic power in Britain by including beings from Faery.
Kay's alternate-world Christianity (Jaddism) has declared belief in Faery to be heresy. Kay works this interestingly, because in this alternate world, Faery and its power is in fact real, and several of the characters have to deal with the fact that their Church is pushing something that blatantly contradicts reality.
What I wonder, in a Devil's-Advocate sort of way, is whether the long domination of Europe by the Catholic Church, with its stamping out of all heterodoxy, might have made it easier for the development of modern science in the European Enlightenment.
Imagine the counterfactual setup: a Europe where dozens or hundreds of belief systems ruled. (And by "belief systems" I mean things that include claims about the way the universe works that are actually empirically falsifiable, and mostly -- mostly -- avoided by modern religions in the European-influenced world.) In this counterfactual Europe of the 1500s, the natural philosophers of the day would have had to tackle dozens or hundreds of different cosmologies, instead of one, to convince enough people that what they were saying was right.
To set up a Straw Man for a moment, I would guess that some (naive) Cultural Theory types would argue that this hypothesis is wrong because science is merely a competing worldview that historically supplanted parts of the Church's cultural hegemony. Of course, since this is my Straw Man to knock down, I say hogwash! Science is ultimately about empirical evidence, evidence which can convince other people, even those who don't agree with you or your theories.
I know, I'm lame, I have no content of my own. Deal.
But first, go read Matt Yglesias guest blogging at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html.
(Via Pharyngula.)
I don't care if it's apocryphal, it's funny.
Zacarias Moussaoui gets life in prison instead of the death penalty, and the Right Whingers go apeshit.
Haven't any of these people looked up "martyr" recently?
White House says Bush doesn't speak Spanish all that well.
These guys have some nerve. They tell the truth to gain back ground with the racist "Minutemen" types who are "guarding our borders" ("What? Me? No habla Español..."), which of course flatly contradicts Bush's 1994 and 1998 Texas gubernatorial races and both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, in which he would give carefully rehearsed speeches in Spanish to Spanish-speaking audiences.
The most ironic part of this is that the entire "Bush can't speak Spanish very well" is being deployed to deflect attention from reports that Bush sang the U.S. National Anthem in Spanish with some audiences during the 2000 Presidential Campaign:
McClellan made his remark in response to a report that Bush had sung the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish during the 2000 campaign. Just last week Bush said the national anthem should be sung in English, not Spanish.
"It's absurd," McClellan said of the report, suggesting that Bush couldn't have sung it in Spanish even if he had wanted to.
I am so waiting for that video to surface!
Lucasfilm is finally releasing the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD.
Now if only we could get him to "digitally remaster" the prequel trilogy into something watchable.
So Stephen Colbert gave the address at this year's White House Correspondents' dinner, in character, and was brilliant. (Video via Crooks and Liars; transcript via Daily Kos.)
Of course, if you didn't catch the C-Span broadcast (a rumored rerun hasn't shown up yet and probably won't), you won't have heard about this at all.
I wonder if the Liberal MediaTM's lack of noise about this has something to do with the following line:
But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!
Truth to power. Sigh.
As long as we're talking about Schizophrenic Shamans, hop over to Circadiana and read his post about REM Sleep and Near Death Experiences.
I'm a bit behind on magazines, and I was reading the February 11th (2006) issue of Science News today. Its cover story, Self-Serve Brains, is about research into neurological sources of the sense of self. It's an okay article; it's a survey -- every third paragraph is of the form "People X and Y, of institution Z, did research on Q" -- without a lot of synthesis.
One thing did leap out at me, though:
Frith now suspects that anarchic-hand syndrome and schizophrenia's delusions of being controlled by others share a neural defect that makes it seem like one's movements occur passively. However, people with schizophrenia mistakenly perceive the passive movements as having been intentional.
In support of this possibility, Frith and his colleagues find that when shown scenes of abstract shapes moving across a computer screen, patients with schizophrenia, but not mentally healthy volunteers, attribute good and bad intentions to these shapes. Patients with schizophrenia may monitor their own actions in excruciating detail for signs of external control, Frith suggests.
This seems to me to be an explanation for every sky-god cult in the world -- into which category I place the most useless parts of all religions -- those that try to explain the behavior of the natural world in moral terms.
Ha, ha, April Fool!
But more seriously, why do geeks seem to really delight in April Fool's jokes?
Slashdot today gave themselves an April 1st makeover, and are linking to other 04/01 pages, such as Locus Magazine's announcement of Star Wars "adult-themed" books.
Notably, Google today "launched" Google Romance, which looks real until you look at their press release.
And don't forget all the various April Fools Internet RFCs: RFC 3251, "Electricity over IP", RFC 4042, "UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode", and especially RFC 1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers".
EDITED TO ADD: wikipedia has an April Fools Day 2006 page which is astonishingly large.
I just finished re-reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. This is my favorite of Stephenson's novels (for the record, the surprisingly durable The Big U comes in second).
There are several things that come to mind upon my completion of this endeavor:
But the biggest thing that comes to mind after re-reading Cryptonomicon is this: ye gods, we geeks were naive in the 1990s.
One strand of this naivete of this parallels the evolution of Bruce Schneier's thoughts on security. He started out (in Applied Cryptography) claiming that cryptography was going to save us, but came around to the idea that cryptography is necessary, but hardly enough. In Beyond Fear, he uses the metaphor of a mile-high fence post when the rest of the fence is two feet high, or nonexistent. Human and physical factors are extremely important too. Good crypto does you no good if the Feds (or the Mob, or your company) put a keystroke monitor on your computer.
An overtly political strand of geeky naivete is that back in the Clinton 1990s, we thought that the biggest threat to freedom was going to be people trying to pass laws against cryptography. We had no idea that we'd be faced, within a few years, with a President and Administration that claims it's above the law (and therefore can spy on people at will, violate the Geneva Conventions, and so on), a Congress that would bend over for it or actively abet it, and a corporate news media that would report government press releases as if they were actual news stories.
I miss the 1990s. I already look back on the Clinton Presidency as a lost Golden Age. Okay -- a Silver Age. I wonder how long before we all look back on those eight years of peace and prosperity with nostalgia and sadness?
Cecilia Fire Thunder, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in misogynist South Dakota, is going to open a Planned Parenthood Clinic on tribal (sovereign) land.
Read here for more details on how you can contribute.
I'm trying to come up with something sufficiently caustic to say about South Dakota's governor, but nothing seems to match the magnitude of this guy's sheer shitheadedness.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.It's amazing how true that is, and getting truer every day.
