John: considering that report (of imported thugs) comes from the National Review and promotes their party line, how much confidence do you have in it? It's certainly not impossible; I can't vouch for his statement about Tiananmen Square, but I've read reliable reports that the troops that crushed the Prague Spring were brought in from the far east to avoid local sympathies.
I also wonder if imports would not be obvious (and hence watched for and targeted). Iranis are not Arabs (as some Arabs have been at pains to point out); are the phenotypes mixed enough that (e.g.) Lebanese would not stand out?
I have no more sympathy for the mullahs than I do for anyone else claiming to have a special understanding with/of The Great Wazoo -- but I'm wondering whether the mullahs are really as unsupported as the NR makes them out to be.
The story that Idiot/Savant links to has me puzzled. Over and over again, we're finding out that people offered sentence adjustments in return for testimony do not give reliable testimony. (This is sufficiently known that some current appeals (and IIRC overturnings) rest on a jury not being informed that some testimony they heard was given in exchange for a lighter sentence.) Are the authorities described in this story so blind that they don't know this? Are they willfully ignorant of anything that doesn't fit their worldview? (Or blocking, cf the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: -"that Indian child is contradicting what we know to be true; therefore he couldn't have said it."-) Or are they trying to look like they're making progress to save their own and their party's skins?
I suppose there's some place in information theory that says that given a sufficient number of doubtful stories you can pull out the truth from the overlaps. (Possibly even from the things that nobody says -- I've been told that somebody mapped all the bullet holes on bombers that came back to a base during World War II and argued that the areas with no holes needed more armor, because the holes would have been randomly distributed if hits in these spots weren't fatal.) But the lack of WMD (not to mention the administration's willingness to use palpably false "evidence") suggests how readily such a technique can be bent to "prove" whatever one wants it to -- which says to me that these tactics are stupid as well as wrong.
Adina: fair enough. You've got the facts of the article; I was quoting what I got of the tone (which IIRC included an observation that the law was good for business because of the money it brought in). In either case it's about people who are nowhere near the middle of the bell curve, and IIRC it didn't make that nearly as clear as the raw numbers.
AvW: time for a reality check. The lines you quote were spoken to buck up an entire people, at a time long before proclamations of victory, expensively empty gestures thereto, etc. -- not months afterwards, when the U.S. was an occupying power facing an increasingly hostile population.
Time this week has several articles on Ben Franklin, including a hoax essay he published suggesting that ]Germany[ had colonized and defended England and would come over and take its rightful due, just as England was claiming and trying in America. The U.S. now finds itself in the position of the British: led by corrupt and unelected rulers and facing a population that doesn't accept its rules. (For a moment of black humor, consider Cosby's ancient routine "Toss of the Coin", in which -"the settlers get to wear anything they want and shoot from behind rocks and trees and everything, while the British have to wear red and march in a straight line."-) Current American generals seem more competent than most of the British commanders then, but the biggest difference between the leaderships is that Shrub isn't showing incipient biochemically-induced dementia -- he's already lost in his fantasies.
I wonder how many more body bags it would take for you to admit that the words were stupid rather than heroic? There was an officer quoted on NPR today as saying that all the treasures of the Iraqi national museum weren't worth a single military casualty; I wonder whether he thinks Shrub's standings are worth the deaths to come.
Well, I can point out one fatal objection to Kinsley's idea. If your spouse is hurt, the hospital knows who to talk to about emergency treatment, and who to put at the top of the visiting list if the hurt is serious enough that visits are restricted. Never mind what Kinsley says about "getting ugly"; this is ugly right now. (Yes, you can have an individual contract; how do you get a third party to honor that contract in real time?)
This has happened even in that alleged bastion of radicalism, Massachusetts; there have been committed gay couples where the healthy partner was shut out by family who could never cope with the fact that their beloved child was one of "them". Yes, it can also happen to committed hetero couples who choose not to marry -- but they have the choice. And yes, this is an extreme example; not, I think, nearly as extreme or improbable as reactionary anti-examples.
Desegregation was (is?) ugly -- but necessary. Gay rights may not be seen as so necessary -- a study quoted in the Globe this week claimed that gays in the U.S. had an average higher income than the population as a whole (but they never asked whether this was because of sample skewing from gays as a whole to acknowledged gays) -- but they aren't trivial. I hope to live long enough to see one state in this union legalize honest-to-Ghu gay marriage and watch the other states find out the full-faith-and-credit clause still holds. (Looks like Dubya would have to do some packing to get a Supreme Court that would find an exception.)
I suppose Kinsley is just tossing off a column the way he tosses off the established body of law regarding civil marriage; that's his privilege. And it's ours to snicker at him.
Is there something about political memoires that provokes epigrams?
Yehudit -- why should anyone bother "let[ting] [you] know"? You obviously haven't been paying attention; I listen to the BBC a fair amount because they're relayed by WBUR (local NPR), and I see that they don't take rhetoric and do demand answers from everyone (on all sides) that they put on the air.
You're not the only person not paying attention; WBUR is in financial trouble because various Comittees to Give Israel Everything its Fanatics Want has persuaded some local donors to stop giving, ignoring the fact that the stories WBUR relays aren't necessarily favorable to either side.
MadJayHawk: an obvious ground for Teresa's observation is that the displayed flag has mutated from a statement supporting the ideals that founded this country to a statement supporting the current actions of the country. This isn't just perception; think about what the term "flag-waving" means.
This cuts both ways, of course; the usual reason for flagburning in this country is rage at what the country is doing rather than the feeling that the founding fathers were completely wrong. (Completely, not just in specifics.) As many people have observed (including several in this discussion), it's a pity that the flag has descended to this one-dimensional meaning; it tends to reduce what should be a discussion to "How dare you attack my country" (with which too many people have too close an identification). (It's certainly easy from my left-of-this-country's-center position to blame the parties on the other side of that line for this debasement, especially when the mainline press quotes Republican operatives desiring to make politics "nastier".)
Which leads to your question about the Democrats who voted for this amendment; what they believe is subject to question, but what they know is that this vote would be used against them, with all the force of campaign simplification and distortion, at the next election. The flag amendment is hardly the only such case; here in Massachusetts the legislature has twice used parliamentary maneuvers to shut down consideration of all constitutional amendments rather than vote down the local haters' version of "Defense of Marriage". This ought to sound like paranoia; after the empty idiocy of the Whitewater investigation, and the comic-opera impeachment (that couldn't even hold all the votes of the party pushing it), and the defeat of a Senator who left three limbs in Vietnam on specious claims of lack of patriotism ... it doesn't.
The Ricardo link is interesting, although I think (through a cold) that it falls down if each tribe is best (in its own ranking at the same task -- maybe the explainer missed this, or maybe it's reasonable to assume that in the real world the hierarchies (and the numbers of tribes) are large enough that my case doesn't hold.
wrt the original discussion, I've long been fond of
...I don't believe there are two cultures; there is only culture and non-culture. A person who knows all about the plays of Aristophanes and nothing about the Second Law of Thermodynamics is as uncultured as one who has mastered quantum theory but thinks Von Gogh painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel.
Arthur C. Clarke, in the forward to his anthology Time Probe: The Sciences in Science Fiction.
Which is why I was massively pleased when Harvard reworked its "Core Curriculum" to require much more spread-out study outside one's major, specifically including rudimentary computer programming; too many people I ran into needed to learn that there are some parts of the universe that you can't beg, bribe, threaten, flatter, cajole, or persuade to do what you want unless you do what the universe requires. (Let's not get into the people who confuse what they want with what the universe requires; we don't need another round on "The Cold Equations".)
Unfortunately, "culture" is another of those words that's been (re?)hijacked by the Right and/or the self-distinguishing upper class; but there is some point to well-roundedness(not that I'm convinced schools can teach it...), not to be uniform but to have some substance to hold together the spikes (which I thought I saw mentioned in a previous post and now can't find); "well-rounded" shouldn't mean "perfectly spherical", even if too much of the population is deeply suspicious of the wizards who actually have their hands on the levers of the universe (or at least seem to know where the levers are).
Larry Brennan is significantly right; I worked for a company where engineering overdrove marketing (they provided LISP for customers who wantd to customize the product, which (borrowing a friend's observation) is a little like publishing user manuals in Basque -- you need a different world view to start to make sense of it) and subsequently for a company where marketing overdrove engineering. But often the pure manager or pure engineer is at a disadvantage next to the person who is some of each; the bridge controls the communications, the horizontal, the vertical.... (And bridges can be necessary even within engineering; my first job for a computer company was speaking Chemish to programmers.)
TNR was shifting (or flailing) in the 70s and 80s. IIRC, Peretz was responsible for its shift to "whatever Israel wants, Israel gets" -- which certainly cost much of its liberal street cred. (And would make the quoted stand on Iraq a distinct move to the left.) After a few years of that I gave up on it (except for recent links); do people really feel TNR's last ~20 years are predominantly liberal? (I think I recall that in the 80s they were not taken in by the Reaganista claims about who was and wasn't for freedom in Latin America, but that was well into its anything-for-Israel stage.) I suppose it's nice that they can still recognize manure if the stench is bad enough.
Randolph: I don't know about what "the left", but the radical conservatives are already having trouble keeping control away from the center; cf what the Senate management had to give up to get another tax cut bill (although they managed to get a lot of it back in conference). I suspect that gradual steps will work better to wean voters from the "I'll protect you from the boogeyman" approach of the reactionaries.
zizka: the point about Kerry wasn't that he turned out to be Jewish; it was that he turned out not to be Irish -- which in Massachusetts can get you votes that liberal positions might lose -- and that he might have been deliberately dishonest about it.
I'm very bad at assessing what somebody will do when given enough power to lend force to their decisions, so I sometimes look for traits like revising history for one's advantage. Kerry would certainly be a better President than Shrub, but Trudeau was riffing on his ego problem most of 30 years ago.
A personal opinion: the NYT lost its claim to quality the day it accepted Meese's statement that nothing happened at El Mozote (1982, IIRC). Checking the facts then could have saved some number of the thousands of lives taken by right-wing militaries and paramilitaries between then and the time Congress finally had so much evidence that it had to constrain official spending in Latin America.
It's still worth reading -- the alternatives (that I can get in the U.S. for a reasonable price) tend to be worse -- but it's been declining for some time. The failure to get the facts in this case may have been the cutbacks Avedon discusses, but it smells like a loss of objectivity.
I'm an Easterner by raising and choice, but I understand Patrick's interest in the sparse. One of the most ... varied sparsities is parts of the drive from Albuquerque to Los Alamos:
- dozens of miles of once-flat water-carved in steps -- think of handsful of miniature Grand Canyons in the making;
- pay no attention to the strip mall with the theme park at the end (the Santa Fe city council decided on the 65 legal colors for the town center, all of them variations of adobe);
- less carving and more scrub, as the landscape closes on in the Rio Grande: multi-million-year-old rock on one side, 10,000-year-old volcanic outpouring on the other (and ignore the aluminum-bubble casino in passing);
- raw red rock as you go up the side of the mesa -- it took several somebodies to cut this road but none of them were there on a midweek afternoon;
- at the top, a perfectly ordinary midwestern town (perhaps in somewhat better shape than most of its progenitors) -- with the old school in the middle like a fly in amber plastic.
And that landscape is at least accessible. I once flew from Las Vegas to Denver in the afternoon; the landscape was beautiful if you like so austere and uniformly red-orange that you can't imagine anyone walking through it and coming out the other side with their sanity.
PS: Alison: if you want a tack tour you may have to do Florida as a separate section; Shetterly's Dogland understates the way it used to be, and most of the incredible number of bits that weren't bought out for Disney World are still there.
Thomas Nephew says:
Tell it to Kanan, Avram. I rate his stature as a spokesman for Iraqis slightly higher than yours, Patrick's, or mine. Patrick bet what Iraq would remember, Makiya says what he and those he believes he speaks for will remember. They're probably both right.
That's part of the problem. Many of the Iraqi exiles are not the favorites right now among the vast majority that stayed behind; it's questionable just who the exiles speak for. Worse, too many of the Iraqi exiles have bought into the notion that the USA will use them to form the next government (cf the various conferences of exiles in the past several months). Under the circumstances, anything an exile says that puts the USA in a good light has to be taken with a grain of salt: what is that exile's personal agenda and does he think he'll get further with it if he sucks up to the main power broker?
And now, just to top off his arrogance, Rummy is whining about the media covering the looting instead of sticking to the happy-news photo ops.
Funny, I didn't think he was Greek-American -- but he's certainly acting like Spiro Agnew, serving as the attack dog when the media act like media instead of flacks. At least he isn't stupid enough to have payoffs delivered to his current office (as far as we know).
The pictures do show one feature that is regional rather than local; as in Paris and London, this airport uses something like international yellow as the background for signs. (I've never seen this in the U.S.) The color is a little jarring when everything else in the terminal is muted, but it makes the important stuff easier to find.
Jordin: as of ~2 years ago, Dulles was finally making serious plans to get rid of its elevating busses (and not before time, IMO); they've delayed while figuring out how to do cut-and-cover (much cheaper than deep boring) without disrupting taxiing traffic too much. It also occurs to me that form following function is more important with the increase in hub-and-spoke systems -- more baggage has to be handled more often and more people have to find their way not just between landside and airside but around airside. One interesting change (at Orlando, e.g.): two levels for landside arrivals (one for personal cars, one for commercial); their transport sometimes has a reason to wait, while departures should be kiss-and-go.
We'll know they're really similar when you can flip syrup lids and teleport between them the way you can do at IHOPs.
Xopher -- a good point, but the row in front of the emergency exits is worse; you can't recline and you have noise on three sides instead of two. (In a 727 it would be a tossup -- less people noise in the back and more engine noises.) And just to make matters worse, make it a red-eye, where all the kids are screaming because they really ought to be asleep (and, in one memorable case, weren't even boarded first).
I still haven't forgiven Lloyd Bentsen for not being a little more specific in his "You're no Jack Kennedy" response to Quayle; he didn't even mention that Kennedy served in battle while Quayle got himself a safe sideline seat -- not a deferment but National Guard service (just like Shrub) that ensured he wouldn't be sent to Vietnam. Kerry didn't have the guts to call the bullies draft-dodging scum but he pointed to his own service record; the media that were paying attention noted that two of his critics didn't serve at all and the third had "served" as a lawyer. That's not a lot of progress but at least it's a step.
Graydon provides the theoretical background for a position that I largely agree with. The specific background that I've read is that the Bush administration plans to ]decapitate[ the Ba'ath party but use its bureaucracy to keep Iraq operating (in the way Somalia (e.g.) isn't). This does not augur well.
Besides being smashed flat and occupied long-term, there are also a number of other differences between Germany/Japan and Iraq. The obvious one is that only the most marginalized whackos had a good word for G/J after World War II, while the Arab street is overwhelmingly in favor of Saddam. (This morning's paper even quotes people saying "Saddam is vile but I love the way he's standing up to the U.S.") I'd also suggest (as a gross simplification) that the ethos of both Axis countries involved obedience, which made taking over the reins and reorganizing a lot easier; taking over a regime based on force and making it work without continuing to use similar force will be (another gross simplification) difficult.
Since I don't have military experience, I can't comment directly on the requirements other posters have posited for various positions -- as requirements.
However, I'll pose another stereotype opposite them: that men are more likely to try something alone even when it's beyond their capacity, while women are more likely to ask for help. This is a sound strategy; when I started doing theater I would carry a 4x8 sheet of 3/4" plywood myself until I figured out that 2 people could carry 2-3 sheets and were less likely to hit someone else while doing it. I've read of this specifically coming up in a civilian situation: fire departments required raw weightlifting ability because they said it was the only way to deploy hoses (using this as a "reason" to bar women), until women demonstrated they could be as fast by double-teaming heavy bundles. I can see some cases where this wouldn't carry over to the military -- firefighting teams don't have to split into a group setting up and a group laying down covering fire so the setup group has a chance of finishing -- but how often is that applicable? And when it is, how often does an all-male unit have to hand setup to the brute squad and arms to everyone else?
The comment on endurance is also apposite; there are physiologists who expect that women will dominate ultramarathoning as interest in the sport increases.
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