Laura Roberts writes: I wish I could tell which bits of your post were delivered with irony.
I wish I could tell too. Some days, my life of quiet desperation brings waves of pessimism that nearly overwhelms my ability to keep up appearances. Lately, the waves have been coming in unusually powerful sets.
I really do regret voting my conscience and indirectly contributing to the reactionary takeover of America. I also resent Democrats for their continuing illiberality and their egregious botch of the tactical game. It stings to have both these facts rubbed in my face on a daily basis by the circumstances of current events. Enduring the sight of Democrats carrying water for Republicans and pushing back against calls to impeach this President, even today after the latest revelations of his criminal malfeasance, stings especially sharp.
There's a good line from Syriana, spoken in Arabic by the character of the Al Qaeda alim. He says [translated], "When a nation with five percent of the people in the world are responsible for over fifty percent of the military spending, that tells me that it has lost the power of persuasion."
I wish I had a better rebuttal to that argument than the one I get from the President, his reactionary supporters, and his conservative enablers among the so-called "opposition" party.
Lenny Bailes writes: I'm not sure, yet, whether I'm compelled to support an impeachment movement that will fail on moral grounds...
Take it from someone who switched to the Green Party in 1996, gave money to the Nader campaign and voted for Nader in 2000— and who has been compelled to regret doing this by Democrats who hold me personally responsible for the failure of their candidate to win a majority of electoral votes— you are not compelled to vote your conscience.
No one will hold you accountable for opposing an impeachment for tactical reasons, especially since impeachment is so certain to fail anyway. Only if it were to succeed would there be any chance someone would care that you opposed it. It can't succeed, so you should just flush your conscience and oppose the impeachment.
Besides removing them from office isn't enough. They should all be serving life terms in prison for crimes against humanity. Really. The tactical difficulty is that large.
It's not your fault these jackholes have taken over. You had nothing to do with it. Nothing whatsoever. It was all those Nader voters in 2000. We're to blame. Hold us responsible for it— there aren't many of us, and no one will miss us when we're gone.
"Fulgsig is Danish."
My apoligies to him for calling him German. That was stupid. I should have listened more closely.
He's still crazy— I saw that Bond villain gleam in his eye. Nobody sane gets that gleam after successfully depriving a hundred million American children of their supply of polyurethane toy balls.
"Oh, and Leavenworth... what famous movie detective lived on that street?"
Tough one. Sam Spade lived on Post Street. If I had to guess, it would be Nick Charles in The Thin Man, but I don't actually remember him living in San Francisco in the movie until he shows up in After The Thin Man, and the swanky place they put him in for that movie was way the heck up on Russian Hill somewhere. Might have been on Leavenworth.
I give up. Which one?
"Definitely not virtual superballs."
There is no way anybody would sit for some crazy German guy pouring real superballs down Kearney onto Broadway for a television commercial. I don't care who he is or how cool it would look. That just isn't done. I think the superballs shown in the final scene were added by blue screen effect.
The ones on Leavenworth and Filbert were real superballs.
Charlie Stross writes: The fact that both these methods have been available for more than a century, but that they are rarely used, should tell us something about the cultural attitudes surrounding the death penalty -- something very unpleasant indeed.
I would point out that— unless I've been misinformed, the bullet in the brain method is taught, used and preferred by professional killers everywhere. It's the executioners who seem to prefer the more painful methods.
On the list of unpleasant things this should tell us about the cultural attitudes surrounding the death penalty, I think, is that people seem not to want executioners to be professional killers.
William Lexner addresses me: There's a self-righteous and indignant logical fallacy. You should ashamed of yourself.
p1. It was certainly indignant, but not particularly self-righteous. I made no claim to moral superiority. In fact— would you mind holding still while I compute a good trajectory?
p2. "You should [be] ashamed of yourself," you said. Yeah, people with a victim complex are always saying that to me.
It would seem that a clear majority of Americans insist the State must be empowered to rape, torture and murder innocent people for no purpose other than to terrorize whole ethnic, religious and political groups.
We all get the government that the majority deserves.
Lucy, Kevin Drum write a piece a couple weeks ago that talks about a related concept. He notes that one outcome of the Minutemen taking their pseudo-fascist freak show to the Mexican border is that it's dramatically reduced the availability of farm laborers to the local ag businesses.
[...]
As a PR exercise it worked great, and although the Minutemen themselves didn't accomplish much, the pressure they've put on the Border Patrol for the past year seems to have paid off: vegetable growers say they're likely to get only 22,000 workers for their fields this year, compared to the 54,000 they need. Tom Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, explains why:
"There are just some jobs people don't want to do," Nassif said. "It's the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal."
Jack Vessey [who runs a vegetable farm near El Centro] said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. "We got one person," he said. "He showed up and said, 'I'm not going to do that.' "
Now that's an odd thing, isn't it? Immigration foes like Gilchrist insist that if we only cut down on the supply of Mexican farm workers, wages and benefits would go up and plenty of Americans would be available for harvesting our leafy greens. And yet, despite this year's severe shortage of Mexican labor, Vessey is apparently offering the same backbreaking work, brutal conditions, low pay, and nonexistent benefits that he always has. Likewise, Ed Curry, a chili farmer who has given up on employing legal workers because the H2A program has "too many snafus," says only that he would be willing to pay legal workers "a bit more" than he does now.
[...]
I think it's telling that farmers are telling reporters that they will let crops go unharvested before they will pay farm laborers a higher wage. It's probably true. They have to compete against farmers south of the border who can ship their products to U.S. markets. There's an upper boundary on the price they can charge for the harvested crop. At the same time, they apparently can't afford to pay the wages for laborers who live year-round in El Norte.
Sounds to me like homer planted the wrong crop, and ought to have to take it in the shorts. I could be persuaded otherwise, though...
Ooops. Wrong product. Apparently, Wal-Mart is selling a book called "Support Our Troops" and the cover is just an image of the damned magnet. I quoted the wrong price. Wal-Mart does not currently sell the magnets through their online store.
Here is someone claiming to sell the "original" Support Our Troops magnets. Their price is $1.50, but I've seen other stores quote prices up to $5.00.
The Wal-Mart web site doesn't appear to list the product, and I am not burning the gas to drive into fscking Daly City to go find out what is the current price on their in-store stock.
Nevertheless, I think the corrected price comes out to around six or seven magnets per man-hour. Still quite an impressive amount of labor, and I would never have guessed it could be such a labor intensive process.
Ayse Sercan has definitely convinced me of something here...
Here is someone claiming to sell the "original" Support Our Troops magnets. Their price is $1.50, but I've seen other stores quote prices up to $5.00.
The Wal-Mart web site doesn't appear to list the product, and I am not burning the gas to drive into fscking Daly City to go find out what is the current price on their in-store stock.
Nevertheless, I think the corrected price comes out to around six or seven magnets per man-hour. Still quite an impressive amount of labor, and I would never have guessed it could be such a labor intensive process.
Ayse Sercan has definitely convinced me of something here...
Ooops. Wrong product. I found a book that looked like the magnets. (Because the cover is just a picture of one of the damned magnets.)
Ayse Sercan writes: My evidence for this is the "Support Our Troops" magnets -- there was a bit of a scandal when some reporters pointed out that they were made in China in sweatshops. Wal-Mart switched to having them made in NMI by slave labour -- sorry, "guest workers" -- with the "Made in USA" sticker, and kept the price the same. If they were really made under US labour laws, the cost would be somewhat more than twice what Wal-Mart charges for them.
Wow. More than twice the retail price for each magnet.
I just went to the Wal-Mart website, and the price they were quoting for those magnets is $9.35. You're telling me that if the workers making those magnets were paid U.S. minimum wages, the price would more than double?
That would imply that the labor involved in making one magnet is a little under two man-hours. I never knew how much skilled craftwork was involved in making those pieces of shit. I have new found respect for their owners— they clearly understand the value of fine workmanship!
Ayse Sercan writes: I think the reason an American minimum wage is so terrifying is that it would raise the cost of the goods made there, and customers (Americans) are unwilling to pay what it takes for everybody to make a living wage.
It's reasonable to ask whether that's really true. By how much would it raise the cost? How much more will customers pay for a label that fairly means "made by workers who get paid a living wage?"
Let me see the numbers, and I'll comment.
Doug M writes:Also, the folks trying to bring the Feds in did not have deep pockets. The folks willing to pay Jack Abramoff did.
Hmmm. Sounds to me like the folks willing to pay Jack Abramoff could have used their "deep pockets" to help bring in the Feds. Let me guess— there were powerful "disincentives" for them to do that. Disincentives that were highly correlated to their having deep pockets, which— as we've noted— the people who wanted to bring in the Feds did not.
Doug M writes:Hilzoy posted an update noting that things had indeed improved in the NMI, and that her outrage was directed at DeLay's defense of sweatshop conditions back in the '90s.
Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen over here.
Well, you know— the thread started with people outraged by Delay's defense of slave labor conditions. We certainly seem to have no shortage of outrage for Tom Delay's nonsense— and why, exactly, should that be a problem? The man's politics are monstrous.
Gee, it's nice to know that life in the NMI is oh-so-much less harsh than in the rest of Micronesia. Given what I know about the region (I've traveled some), I'd say Chuuk is probably a garden spot compared to, say, Easter Island, but I've never been to either place.
Was there anybody here trying to challenge your claim that things have not improved in the NMI, or that the Murkowski bill would not have been an economic disaster for the NMI if it had passed? If there was, I didn't see it.
Is there any reason to believe that the methods Abramoff used to stop the Murkowski bill and dick around with the CNMI were necessary and sufficient to address the economic problems of the NMI? I'm very doubtful about that, but I'm willing to hear you out.
Somehow, I think your expectations of what should happen here after you've made your contribution to the discussion might be in need of readjustment.
Somehow, I managed not to provide a link to that discussion about Disney and the new Winnie The Pooh they have in the works. Here it is: One Hundred Acres Of Darkness.
The synopsis of the story so far: Disney wants to rewrite Christopher Robin as a 6-year-old girl, because...
"We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide," says Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel.Apparently, that was enough to set some imaginations going where they probably shouldn't.
"Christopher Robin is still out there in the woods, playing," she says.
An acquaintance of mine is having a minor emotional crisis over Disney deciding to reïmagine Winnie The Pooh. We're running with it, and I figured some in this crowd might be amused by the ongoing wreckage.
Nancy C, thanks for finding that for me. Now, I can link to the Google archives of the originals and post new versions with the formatting and editorial issues fixed.
Teresa, my thanks for your praise. I've been told they were a little overwrought and too thick with navel-gazing. It was probably the tequila— that's my story, and I'm not ashamed of it. Next time, I'll be a better writer.
They were never properly edited, as should be pretty clear from a cursory reading. (I really did write those on a Powerbook 5300 and posted them immediately to Usenet every night from the motel room over a 28 kbps modem by long-distance telephone to a server in the SF Bay Area.) I really should make the time to scan the photographs to go along with those articles. Mojo made a very nice collage of them for me, and they're hanging in my basement study.
I'd like to do this sort of thing again. I went to DNC 2000 in Los Angeles, but I didn't make the RNC that year. I chickened out on 2004. I suspect I will recover my intestinal fortitude and go to the RNC in 2008— assuming they have one.
One thing I learned from RNC 1996: nothing interesting happens inside the perimeter of the conference. All the interesting stuff happens in the bars and restaurants outside the hall. Or in private hospitality suites in the hotels. You get to see a lot of interesting street theatre, that's for sure. If I go to RNC 2008, I will be absolutely sure to avoid "Blogger Row" at all costs. (Gawd, what a bad idea that was...)
[I'm still trying to integrate Doug M's comment above with what I think about Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff and the NMI story. I'm inclined to commiserate with Patrick in the sentiment from the title of his post: This Is The GOP Plan For You. Oh yes, tender lumplings— yes, they really do have a vision for how capital accounts for the costs of labor. The phrase "Did The Mules Get Out?" is the one that comes to mind when I think about it.]
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|---|---|
| 2005 | 70 |
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