To the contrary, the issuance of such an Order will only serve to protect the public interest in ensuring that such interests pertinent in this matter are protected in the future.
Is it just me, or is this completely circular? I ask because I'm not used to seeing one-sentence instances of circular reasoning. Most practitioners stick a few sentences in between the "Assuming X" part and the "So therefore X" part.
("Putting peanut butter on your kitten will protect him from goblins by insuring that such kitten is protected from goblins in the future.")
John Hawkes-Reed @#71: Can you remember what the program was called? I wasn't exposed to English food before 1995, and though I've been exposed to the "grim filth" meme, I haven't actually seen any of it.
(My first trip to London was with a high school group. We ate mostly in restaurants run by vegetarians and immigrants, and pubs run by people who believed in frying things. Our only mistake was going into a crepe joint that we thought would be French, but turned out not to be. When I asked the waitress kind of cheese they had, she said "Yellow." Those of our party who ordered the seafood crepe were gruesomely sick on the planeride home.)
Lila, Rikibeth, Lee, KeithS, Debbie, any one else I missed: Thank you! *blush*
tykewriter @ #80: I think you're right about the otters.
My mistress' foot is not a marmoset;
There is no otter living on her neck.
If spines were snakes, I'd hate to charm a set.
Her eyes are not dark birds, nor do they peck.
I have seen morels sauteed, wrinkly brown,
But no such morels see I on her tits.
She doesn't wear a cobra helm to town,
And if she did, I'd think she'd lost her wits.
I love to hear her speak, and well I know
An oral ferret no clear language yields.
I grant I've seen no swarms of locusts go:
My mistress' feet quite seldom denude fields.
And yet, I think my love a better deal
Than anything described in Silk and Steel.
I'd made it as far as White Plains
When the virus spread out to my veins.
I formed a decision:
A high-speed collision
But where? Perhaps--
Braaaaaaaaaaaains.
Charlie Stross @ 120: Thanks for the recommendations! I'd think strict philosophers' zombie/zimboe fiction would be much harder to write, since by definition they act just like normal people, to the point of claiming to have mental states like we do. I'll have to check those stories out.
(Also, I'm now looking forward very much to The Fuller Memorandum. Though to be honest, I've enjoyed the rest of the Laundry series so much that I'd still look forward to the next one even if you'd said it had sparkle-vampires and leprechauns teaming up to fight zombie-Gandhi.)
Mike @ 130: Discussing existentialism, zombies, and hell makes me pine for a zombie version of No Exit. ("Hell is other people... eating your brain!")
Mike @ 68: Or maybe zombies are exactly like us, but stripped of our pretense of authentic existence where there truly is none.
Hm! I'd always thought of this trope as more embodied in Lovecraft's stuff than in typical zombie movies: In Lovecraft, it's the idea that anybody would go feral and cannibalistic if only they had an accurate picture of the cosmos. But yeah, the zombies can also be taken as our "Eat" and "Reproduce" biological drives, minus our cultural glosses.
In fact, this interpretation meshes nicely with the Zombie-as-anthropogenic-disaster idea. The threat of the Disaster is that it reduces us from people with cultural and societal aspirations to heedless bipedal engines of survival and reproduction; and the irony of the Disaster is that it comes out of our heedless success at survival and reproduction. We have been as the zombies; and so we are threatened with becoming the zombies?
(Come to think of it, that's the premise of many high-satire zombie films right there. Jackson's Braindead is something else again, though.)
[Warning: the most recent zombie story I have read was World War Z, and it may still be messing with my perspective on the historical place of the zombie story.]
The thing about zombies for me, I think, is that Zombies Aren't Like Us. In fact, Zombies are whatever Isn't Us. Vampires have motivations like ours, and werewolves at least usually like us during the daylight hours (and at least have exciting relevant personal histories). But zombies usually have no motivation but "eat the living," and their personal histories are usually irrelevant to their behavior.
This is why werewolf stories are about the werewolf, and vampire stories are about the vampires, but zombie stories are never really about the zombies so much as they are about the zombie-survivors. From a narrative point of view, there's a kind of economy there: the story never needs to focus on the antagonists' point of view, because the antagonists simply don't have one.
This only applies to the currently popular Romero/Fulci zombies (the walking corpses who try to eat you). There are other zombie narratives that aren't nearly so popular, but somehow the person-drugged-and-enslaved-with-zombie-powder story (I Walked With A Zombie), and the person-who-acts-just-like-us-but-has-no-inner-life-inside story (instrumental to some philosophers' theories of mind[*]) don't seem to have grabbed quite so much of the zeitgeist.
Tyg @ 40: Zombies are disease. Yes, just so! Or rather, they are any impersonal, ongoing, slow disaster. (If only Sontag were still with us, and willing to consider the zombie in light of "Disease as Metaphor"!) Zombies are like a pandemic, or like global warming, or like economic collapse, or like many of the worries of the early 21st century: they are a slow-burning disaster that (in-narrative) requires a collective response. Though we (the reader/viewer) might eventually learn that somebody was initially to blame, it's just as likely that we'll decide that the problem arose because of a confluence of short-sightedness and bad luck. They are a danger against which characters must unify, but in the face of which our selfishness and fear leads us to fragment. Most of all, they give stories a veneer of existential clarity by the virtue of their own lack of agency.
Wesley @ 48: I don't think that in zombie stories, the zombies are the antagonists. If there's an antagonist, it's the rest of us. Or maybe, it's about how we do in harsh conditions, absent antagonists. It's sort of like Camus's The Plague, only less depressing (because everything is less depressing than The Plague).
[*] Are there any good SF stories about philosophers' zombies?
The discussion on the inevitability of pain made me think of the Boston Garden's lovely, neglected Ether Monument. Back in 1866, when the use of ether in surgery was still new and exciting, it seemed worthwhile enough to erect a monument that would quote Revelations in saying
"NEITHER SHALL THERE BE ANY MORE PAIN"
and go on to say
"In gratitude for the relief of human suffering caused by the inhaling of ether, a citizen of Boston has erected this monument."
Whether the monument does us the more good by reminding us that we can in fact alleviate suffering sometimes, or by reminding us of the difference between pain and suffering, I cannot say. It has some neat sculptures, though.
I've also heard the monument described as having been meant as a memorial to Pain itself, on the supposition that to future generations pain would be a thing of hazy memory. Alas, I cannot find any evidence to corroborate this charming notion.
I hesitate to confess this, but...
I am currently Thursday. This comes as as much of a surprise to me as it does to you. Within me, I wish you (insasmuch as you partake of me and/or christmas) a Merry Christmas. Seriously, I don't know what's going on here.
I've been searching for a citation for a quotation for a while now. I think it might be the late much-beloved Robert Anton Wilson. The quotation goes, as well as I can remember it, "The difference between a real theory and a conspiracy theory is that with a real theory there can be evidence for the theory, and evidence against. With conspiracy theory, however, there is only evidence for the theory, and evidence of how powerful and pervasive the cover-up really is."
pericat @#186: It is hard to explain why some things, pictures, phrases, whatever are racist or sexist or ist-ist to them as don't hear the dogwhistle.
Ultimately, many things are offensive simply because they are so well known to be offensive, that anybody who says them is openly advertising their willingness to give offence. All we should really have to say is "a lot of us find that really offensive. You shouldn't say it unless you're okay with folks thinking you don't give a damn about offending us."
Out-group insults may have different origins and denotational content, but they all mean the same thing. They mean: "These are contemptible people, and their good opinion matters nothing to me; these are powerless people, and so I am safe in giving them gratuitous offence; these are outcast people, and I do not expect anyone really important to think the less of me for offending them gladly."
#111:
[More Machiavelli digression.]
From your mouth to God's ear. Machiavelli, judging by his life and writings, was a far more interesting, thoughtful, and decent people than he gets credit for in our public imagination. He deserves better than his reputation, and far better than to have his name used (as in your example) as a generic term for "a political actor who is too organized and clever for my taste."
Reading Machiavelli's Discourses on the Republic along with The Prince it's hard not to get the impression that he greatly preferred republics to principalities. This is borne out by his own public life (councillor and diplomat under the Florentine republic; torture victim and exile under the restored Medici).
Personally, I read The Prince not only as an early (and somewhat cynical) exposition of political realism, but also as an indictment of princedom itself. After all, if somebody wrote a supposed how-to book about being a landlord, and they included the advice that "[a landlord] never lacks legitimate reasons to break a promise" or "[a landlord] cannot observe all those rules of conduct in respect whereof men are accounted good, being often forced, in order to preserve his [property], to act in opposition to good faith, charity, humanity, and religion", and they dedicated the book to a landlord whose family had ruined the writer personally, I think you might reasonably conclude that they didn't like landlords very much.
(Also, don't get me started on Machiavelli references in Shakespeare.)
Oops: one more.
Calling somebody a "Machiavelli" means that they are an unscrupulous and calculating politician, not that they are a writer of scandalously unsentimental political treatises.
re the "literary allusion" defense:
Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin is not actually necessary to understand what calling somebody an "Uncle Tom" means in US culture: most of the US hasn't read it or can't remember it either. The meaning of a literary name ("Big Brother", "Frankenstein", "Judas", "Scrooge", "Lady Macbeth") is its actual current meaning, not the meaning that a naive reader of the original work might deduce that it ought to have.
Similarly, if somebody calls a black guy "Sambo", it's kind of useless of him to claim that all he meant was that the guy was forgetful, or prone to tiger attacks, or say that nobody should be offended because the Sambo character was Indian and not African. Nor do folks who haven't read Helen Bannerman's book need to withhold judgement.
(Parenthetically, I'd give Uncle Tom's Cabin a skip as literature. It's interesting as historical propaganda, but if you want a genuine historical slave narrative, read an autobiography of Fredrick Douglass, all of which should be subtitled "Action Hero and Renaissance Man".)
I liked McCain's concession speech just fine: for me, it evoked the McCain that I liked from 2000, who wasn't willing to buy into the more invidious Republican tactics of the day.
But it wasn't enough to make me like him again. When you let your surrogates call your opponent a socialist terrorist-loving troop-hating middle-class-taxing danger to America in October, and in November you turn around and admit that your opponent is actually a decent guy whom nobody need fear, I am not going to like your November self more simply because I agree with it. Tuesday's McCain didn't make me say "McCain's back" so much as it made me wonder whether the McCain I liked was ever more than the Good-Cop side of the man.
Calluna V #64:
Actually, the "inactive voter" thing in Massachusetts is something different. In Cambridge at least, my understanding is that you get listed as "inactive" if you haven't returned a census form this year, regardless of whether you voted.
Re me@#29:
The Cambridge Politics blog has better coverage of this. It seems that the polls are putting the blame to the state for forgetting to deliver one CD out of 4.
All is not well in my city of Cambridge, MA. Lots of registrations seem to have been lost, or not made it onto the main list. You can see reports here. My name was on the list posted outside the voting place for the last week or so, but hadn't made it on to the official list inside. Fortunately, this mistake had happened to enough people that the workers had received instructions to double-check names against a backup list if they weren't on the new one. (I'm not sure whether the backup list was a copy of the older list, or a new one.) They found my name on the backup list, I was able to cast a vote normally. People who were not on the backup list (or people who were marked as "inactive") were able to fill out some sort of form (looked like a registration, but I didn't get too nosy), show ID, and vote normally, though I see some reports of people having to do provisional ballots elsewhere.
The pollworker told me that she'd heard a problem at the state level (doesn't seem likely, given that I'm not seeing reports of lost names elsewhere in Massachusetts), and that it involved a lost or misplaced CD (entirely possible, given how ineptly people make and operate critical computer systems).
It doesn't seem much like systematic fraud to me: Massachusetts will go blue with or without Cambridge, and there simply aren't enough Republicans in the Commonwealth's election apparatus (much less in Cambridge) to have pulled this off. But I'm pretty angry at the incompetence of whoever screwed this up: anything short of an investigation and a resignation is unacceptable.
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| 2009 | 10 |
| 2008 | 21 |
| 2007 | 9 |
| 2006 | 1 |
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