#42: Justice Clinton welcomes him gleefully.
#48: According to today's New York Times, she has passed along the word that she does NOT want a nomination for the Supreme Court--she'd prefer to take a crack at health care again.
Why assume it was her? Bill's got a law degree, too...
Takei's Wikipedia entry states that he and Brad Altman will actually be married on "September 14th, at the Democracy Forum of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles (George is one of the founders). Walter Koenig will be his best man, and Nichelle Nichols will be the matron of honor."
I no longer remember the source, but somebody on the Internet made the obvious joke that they need to make sure to get married at the same time as a couple of guys in red shirts, who will draw the effects of the inevitable anti-gay backlash, allowing Takei and Altman to escape and remain happily married.
Anyway, congratulations to Takei, Altman, and everybody in California. Here's hoping more states follow suit.
Peter Erwin, #68: I'm going to dissent a little from the glib NYT-bashing and suggest that their science section is -- by the standards of print journalism, let alone broadcast journalism -- pretty good. I don't find everything they publish to be "bullshit" when I actually know the science involved, and the writers at least some of the time make an effort to talk to other scientists, so that you get something more than the standard "regurgitated university press release" that passes for science journalism in many other places.
Me too.
I follow the Times science coverage via their RSS feeds (which has the nice bonus effect of giving me the non-decaying permalink right off), and while they don't cover enough physics for my tastes, I think they generally do a good job. Some of their writers-- Chang, Overbye, Angier-- are reliably excellent, and they're not just doing a cut-and-paste job on stuff from the press office of the institution funding the work.
Seconding the request for good science book recs.
The best science book I read this year was The Theory of Almost Everything by Robert Oerter, which explains and celebrates the Standard Model of particle physics. It's a 2006 book, new in paperback this year.
David Lindley's Uncertainty is an excellent book about the early days of quantum mechanics, and the philosophical, personal, and scientific issues involved.
I liked Natalie Angier's The Canon a lot, but the reception has been rather mixed. A lot of people think she's trying way too hard to be witty, but it worked for me.
Moreover, what kind of change in weblog reading and linking patterns would drop The Whatever from a position 200 places ahead of to one 750 places behind Making Light? The Whatever is a thoroughly established and much-linked-to weblog. More to the point, it gets a lot more traffic than we do.
To be fair to Technorati, John's blog was basically off-line for a couple of weeks there. That's long enough without new content for a lot of links to move off the front pages of blogs, and that's what Technorati really counts (as far as I can tell).
I've also seen a drop from about 9,000 to about 12,000, without a corresponding drop in the "Authority" (which seems to be simply related to the number of blogs linking to a given site in some period of time), so there has been a screwy change to the system. But it's not inconceivable that the Whatever might've fallen farther, faster than Making Light, given the lengthy site outage.
"If you look at the strict dictionary definition of the words I used, ignoring the common connotations that are familiar to any native speaker, I didn't say anything insulting."
See, for example, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss in Scientific American recently.
Wait, Teresa's in Sebastopol?
Would she be willing to support me in an attack on Rumania?
The dog has been aware of this for years. Unfortunately, she's not very good at catching them.
They're very tricksy, the squirrels...
Patrick: (2) The tendentious way she's chosen to frame some of this--for instance, "Does he participate in any fannish forum that doesn't happen to involve networking with other pros?"--makes me very unhappy indeed. In fact 95% of what John or any other pro does at an SF con is exactly the same thing fans do--we hang out, we reconnect with friends and maybe meet new people, and we hope to have some interesting coversations. John does all of these things particularly well; he doesn't put on airs and he seems to be happy to chat with all kinds of people. Suggesting that his convention behavior amounts to nothing more than "networking" seems like a sneaky way to insinuate that something good is, in some hidden way, actually bad.
In fact, John spent a fair amount of time at the most recent Boskone hanging out and chatting with me and Kate, and neither of us is in a position to do his career any good. He's an outgoing guy, and happy to talk to lots of different types of people.
(This came up over in LiveJournal land shortly after Boskone, in somebody's report on a panel where people had complained that a bunch of new-ish authors were hanging out in the bar being pro-centric or something. Which struck us as kind of strange, as Kate and I were both part of the group in the bar, which certainly wasn't excluding anyone from the conversation based on an insufficient number of story sales to qualifying markets...)
I think the active counter is not Democrats don't really hate the Bible that much! or even Democrats really like the Bible, just like Republicans! but Republicans have been lying. I'd just as soon hear that from my Party as from other religious leaders, particularly those outside the party.
Yeah, but you're already going to vote for the Democrats. You're not the people who need to be reached.
The problem with having Democratic officials denounce the Republicans for lying is that you have an authority gap when it comes to religious folks who aren't already partisan Democrats. If Democratic politicians say that Republicans are lying, and right-wing preachers say they're not, well, it doesn't take a great deal of thought to see who's going to win.
The whole point of the exercise is to either get new votes for the Democrats from religious people who don't already vote for them, or at the very least to peel votes away from the Republicans. You're not going to do that with Democratic politicians alone, no matter how many times they mention God. You might do it by having some religious leaders who aren't Democratic party hacks stand up and offer religious counter-arguments.
If the so-called "religious left" think they can counter a movement like that without embracing atheists and other secular progressives, then they're no better than UsefulIdiotsâ„¢ for the other side. I can't imagine them saying anything, for example, as forceful as this: "Jesus despises the overtly righteous, and a vote for an openly religious politician is a vote against God. Vote for liberal Democrats who don't make public displays of their faith, and vote for the kind of government that pleases God: secular progressive representative government."
It's not like it'd be hard to come up with a text:
5"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.
6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.
8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Just for starters...
What I'm talking about has almost nothing to do with the self-identified "religious left," though, who seem to me to be nothing but another group of useless political consultants trying to change the things that candidates say about themselves and each other. What we need is more of a ground-level thing, starting with individual congregations-- it shouldn't really be associated with a specific party, let alone a specific candidate. It's a matter of decent, progressive religious people standing up and making some noise in response to the people who are polluting poltiics and religion with their warped view.
It's a hard thing to ask, because it cuts against the character of the sort of person that really needs to be behind this. Hate makes better spectacle than love, and it's hard to get on tv by being nice. It's a whole lot easier to be Jerry Fallwell than Martin Luther King.
But I think we'd be a whole lot better off if some nice religious folks were a little more willing to play media hardball.
Speaking as self-identified a liberal Christian, I'm a whole lot less concerned about getting right-wing crackhead fundamentalists out of political control than I am about getting them out of control of the religious sector.
These are not mutually exclusive. In fact, weakening the link between "religion" and "crackhead fundamentalists" in the public mind would be a real good step toward prying them out of public office.
But we don't need evidence. Because the Democratic Party believes in separation of church and state, atheists, agnostics and seculars of all kinds are largely found in our Party, which must mean that our Party is a bunch of atheists, and that all cats are black. The fact that Republicans have been selling the line that Democrats hate the Bible for a generation must mean something more than that Republicans have been selling the line that Democrats hate the Bible. It must mean that Democrats really do hate the Bible. Right?
The problem is that it's not just Republican politicians who are pushing that line, it's right-wing religious leaders. What's really missing is an active counter to that from moderate and liberal religious leaders.
It doesn't matter how often Democrats name-check God on the campaign trail if people go to church on Sunday or flip on the tv and see priests and preachers telling them that God wants them to vote Republican. That's going to beat out any amount of God-chatter from politicians themselves, because everybody knows that politicians will say anything to get elected...
If you really want to counter the Republican monopoly (or the appearance of a monopoly) on religion, what you need is not politicians who talk like preachers, but preachers who talk about politics. You need people to go to church on Sunday or flip on the tv, and hear moderate and liberal religious leaders saying that Jesus was a liberal and wants you to vote for the Democrats with all the same force and conviction as their right-leaning colleagues.
It doesn't matter what the candidates say about themselves, it matters what the clergy say about the candidates.
I particularly like the fact that, when Mustache Guys steps away from the keyboard to dance lamely with the cheerleaders, has always has his back to the camera, as if they had to bring in a body double for the oh-so-intricate dance routine...
Wow. Just... wow.
Of course, the really striking thing about it is how much it resembles things that are being made now and put on YouTube. These guys weren't uniquely deficient in musical ability and taste, they were just ahead of their time in having access to video equipment to immortalize their deficiencies in musical ability and taste...
Well, that's a rotten way to start a Monday morning...
Condolences to everyone. This really sucks.
#83: Fragano, Chad: if the Mafia is so fragile how come it's still around?
Pretty much what Fragano said in #84. The phenomenon of organized crime is still with us, but the specific people running things change much more quickly.
Power based on fear and intimidation is fragile, but it's relatively cheap, so there's an endless supply of people using that path to power. As soon as you knock one off, another pops up somewhere else.
Real enduring power is a harder thing to establish, but tends to be based on more positive emotions than fear. I'm thinking here of things like major religions and the US government. Those are insitutions that (the disparaging comments of atheists and anarchists aside) maintain themselves more through the positive feelings of their subjects than through fear and intimidation.
#47: So the love of God is a vegetable love?
OBLyric: No love's as random as God's love.
#38: Chad, I can imagine you asking Tony Soprano that, and living to tell the tale, but only if it was a good day for him. On a bad day, he'd say something like, "Powerful enough to do this," followed by a scene of graphic violence. Then he'd go and agonise about it, in a very circumspect way, with his analyst.
Oh, absolutely.
It doesn't really change the point, though. The really big proponents of revenge as a means of retaining power tend to be, like Fragano Ledgister says in #39, fairly fragile criminal enterprises, or governments that are just hanging on.
I think the Mafia, and similar, would disagree with Orwell about revenge. Revenge is something that you do because you are powerful; you cannot let an insult, or injury, or perceived disrespect go unpunished because that would diminish your status.
But if your hold on power is so tenuous that it can be undermined by perceived disrespect, how powerful are you, really?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2007 | 12 |
| 2006 | 35 |
| 2005 | 59 |
| 2004 | 61 |
| 2003 | 29 |
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