#27 ::: Lizzy L -- Blackwater would presumably be doing the job that the National Guard was meant to handle. One thinks of Katrina. This is a genuinely bad idea.
One does think of Katrina. It happened. This from Chapter 18 of Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater:
The men from Blackwater USA arrived in New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. The company beat the federal government and most aid organizations to the scene as 150 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear spread out into the chaos of New Orleans . . . As the federal, state, and local government abandoned hundreds of thousands of hurricane victims, the images that dominated the television coverage of the hruricane were of looting, lawlessness, and chaos. These reports were exaggerated and, without question, racist and inflammatory. If you were watching from, say, Kennebunkport, Maine, you might imagine New Orleans as one big riot--a festival of criminals whose glory day had finally come. In reality, it was a city of internally displaced and abandoned people desperate for food, water, transportation, rescue, and help. What was desperately needed was food, water, and housing. Instead what poured in fastest were guns. Lots of guns.
(Full disclosure: I own the book. I haven't read the book. Just checked the glossary to find a quote. I did go to a lecture by Scahill; he quoted a few Blackwater guys describing their Katrina assignment as "fighting criminals" and "looters" rather than providing any humanitarian aid whatsoever. Lethal force was apparently authorized.)
Just checking in. I was about two exits south at the time, headed further south and away while entirely oblivious.
Run faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it's never enough. You must also run. - Leto Atreides II
#93 ::: mayakda When you were growing up, was there any generic message you got from society as a whole on what you were? Some kind of consensus from all the messages thrown at you?
Yes. Machismo. A flawed, reductive ethic whose ostensible goal is to stoically deal with crap (heroic crap, like getting rid of spiders or protecting the family from ninjas, or something--the annoying and mundane crap is for everyone else).
This is bad, but at least it isn't a paradox. Playing the machismo game is much easier than trying to simultaneously avoid the labels "prude" and "whore."
Jenny @90: Fun! Maybe. So long as it isn't filmed by idiots. The story does have a few dramatic, icy landscapes, and it could be fun to share Genly's visual misreading of gender cues.
Googles . . . okay, wiki claims that "a feature film is being developed for release in 2008," hopefully not by idiots.
#75 ::: Peter Erwin: Fiddling with minor bits of language like possessive pronouns sounds like an appealingly easy solution to society's ills, but I suspect it's like treating a minor symptom instead of the underlying disease.
#77 ::: Lila: (I'm not suggesting here that language doesn't inform thought, but rather that monkeying with pronouns is unlikely to produce gender equality.)
Agreed. But reading Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness is a very different experience from reading her short story 'Coming of Age in Karhide,' in large part because of her conscientious use of pronouns. These pronouns didn't change the world. They did, however, change my world a little bit.
Alan Dundes (freudian folklorist) interpreted the myth of Adam's rib as womb envy. If the first woman is born from the first man's abdomen, then men get preemptive credit for the birthing process.
Not much of a freudian m'self, but I'd buy that.
Oh who is that short sinner with the pudgy little face?
And what has he been after, that his end is in disgrace?
And wherefore is eternity, to which he'll relocate?
Oh, they're taking him to Hades for the fervor of his hate.
'Tis a shame to christianity, such awful hate as his,
Hating gays and civil liberties and women who use 'Ms.,'
Blaming victims for September, thinking schools should segregate.
Oh the fascist and abominable vigor of his hate.
Quite a deal of pains he'd taken to keep folk from getting laid,
Finding Tinky Winky suspect for his purple-colored shade,
Thinking AIDS the wrathful vengeance of a god always irate.
Maybe now he'll face some justice for the violence of his hate.
I do wonder what awaits him, buried under several feet.
Could be demons will torment him in the cold and in the heat.
Maybe nothingness surrounds him, and with time to ruminate
He can curse the god he dreamed up in the passions of his hate.
Beautiful and terrible as the dawn. Elvis serves her. All dispair.
Beautiful and terrible as the dawn. Elvis serves her. All dispair.
#27 abi: As I said, I'm still young, and not dead yet. There is still time to turn to the Dark Side.
#28 Serge: No effing way. Never.
Serge, don't tempt fate! The better you are, the worse you get once your eyeballs change to a sinister color. Dark Abi's not a force I want to face.
If this sort of story-logic applied out in the world, then Falwell must have been a very, very good person sometime before he turned. Perhaps as a toddler.
A man takes his torn pants to the tailor.
"Euripides?" the tailor asks.
"Yeah. Eumenides for me?"
chris y @96: Doh. If "freedom" is taken, I call dibs on "evil." Sloppy, ill-defined usage will be met with punishments worthy of the word.
#36 And if they're up to integers, words can't be far behind.
Freedom(tm) is on the march.
If God created the integers, who gets the blame for the words?
In the beginning were the numbers, and the numbers were the Elohim, and the Elohim were plural and multiplied throughout the multiverse without trademark. All numbers were equal to themselves and nothing else, and apart from numbers there was nothing. The 'verse was without metaphor, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Then some trickster said the Word.
There's a great wisdom-tooth-extraction story in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Various surgeons explain to the character why they won't operate by showing x-rays of how close to his brain the tooth-roots extend. "And this is the nerve cluster which distinguishes you from a marmoset. And this one allows you to suspend disbelief during bad movies." (quoted from memory, apologies for paraphrasing)
I remember being perfectly lucid when the tooth-removing doctor leaned over and said, with Bad Tourist volume and enunciation, "Can. . .You . . . Understand . . .Me?"
In my head I told him "Yes, of course I can." My mouth said "Uuuughhra" instead. I thought Huh. The gas must be working after all. Then I passed out.
Glad Patrick made the appointment. I guess it's too late to refrain from telling horror stories, or describing instruments of torture, until after he actually goes.
Mmmm, pretty.
I like that the list of facts and numbers on Amazon includes the book's weight. It's only there for practical shipping purposes, but it helps me imagine the heft of the thing in my hands as I settle into a bookstore's comfy chair.
Graydon @ 154 (in response to Ursula L). No, necessary violence shouldn't be regarded as shameful, because that way the person who has already had to do the job gets the added burden of being declared morally repugnant.
I gotta disagree. I'm with Ursula (though not necessarily with that specific choice of masculine ideal. I find Mister Rogers kinda creepy).
The seven foot tall kenpo black-belt who taught me everything I know about violence (I'd love to say this took place on a distant mountaintop in Japan rather than a dojo in a pennsylvania shopping mall, but so it goes) made it perfectly clear to us students, even as we spent every weekend enjoying the manly activity of punching and kicking each other, that the actual use of violence would signify our failure to defuse a situation. This sense of shame was absolutely necessary, and makes it easier to judge situations when violence may be the lesser evil. Doing damage of your own can be "the right thing to do" but this does not make the price (the toll, the nasty results of twisting someone else's arm until it snaps, the whedonesque understanding that power and its uses have serious consequences for all concerned) magically vanish.
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| 2006 | 10 |
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