The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by --k.:

It's getting less and less funny, thinking of Frist as the Surgeon General.

A bunch of '70s thrillers, by which I mean alternating Le Carré (I'm up to Honorable Schoolboy) with Trevanian, with a side dash into Lawrence Sanders' The Tomorrow File. All of which is making me dizzy and paranoid in strange and unexpected ways. Plus ça change all over my déjà vu.

But also: Vince Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard.

While I think there's a lot to the idea of framing, re-framing, and even (gulp) branding when it comes to the Liberal's Dilemma, I'm reminded of the second season of Six Feet Under, which includes a deft satire of the Landmark Forum: a fictional organization whose framing metaphor is one's house, and its remodelling. —It's just as easy, and just as crippling, to be trapped by your own frame as someone else's.

Something in Oliver Willis's Brand Democrat campaign is doing a darned good job of endrunning charges of elitism. At least, so far.

Patrick, I voted for Kerry this time out, rather than sticking to my luxuriously idealistic guns: the first Democratic presidential candidate I've voted for since 1988. I did it mostly in spite of, yes, but I also had some strong brecauses, and one of those has been what you've said, and how you've said it.

For what it's worth, I don't feel defrauded.

I'm sitting here in the office, right now, and right now I'm trying to commiserate with my dayshift manager, and she's saying, for the first time in my life, I feel like the daily grind of living has kept me from what's important. For the first time, I really feel like I need to get out and get involved. It may be little; it may be late; but it's out there.

For what it's worth.

Well, it's been an undercurrent or, heck, an open theme for so many posts hereabouts: at this point it's gone from funny-once to obscure inside joke to maddening shibboleth to inexplicably funny "you hadda be there" to darkly serious and surprisingly deep what-if. Our host would deserve mighty kudos for his perseverence, even if the alternate history weren't so skillfully woven into the fake news posts—and so perversely fascinating. But Messr. Shetterly is right: there's something of a steam-engine time to this particular counterfactual: note how easy it is for those Sidelights links to be spun into this alternate history with just a suggestive word or two in the link text.

I'd also note Patrick Farley's webcomic, Spiders, which is set in an alternate history similar to Patrick Nielsen Hayden's, in which those horrific Iraqi desert spiders are used to shore up the horror we could only imagine, of lives wasted and possibility destroyed, if things had really gone as badly as we sometimes think they might. —It's instructive, I suppose: there but for the grace of God, and all that—and far be it from me to tut-tut the "utility" or "harm" of a fiction or fevre-dream—but I do sometimes wonder how healthy this what-if game we're playing really is. (George W. Bush president? And, after doing such a demonstrably horrible job, standing a good chance of re-election? Please. Could we ever really fall so far, so fast?)

Seeing as how I can just barely remember Wallace getting shot, I was going to have been impressed with my memory. (To say nothing of my perspicacity.) —Ah, well.

You've moved before; you know from books.

My last move with the folks back in 1987, we actually hired professional movers to pick up the stuff in Chicago and drop it off in Rock Hill. The guy who came out to do the estimate was nice enough, and gave a very reasonable price—surprisingly so. Put Dad in a chipper mood. So we packed.

The movers show up, and it turns out the guy who did the estimate had never been confronted with a family who owned, you know, books. Shelf after shelf of them. Library sale after library sale. We even had boxes (and boxes) of old National Geographics Mom couldn't bear to throw away. Said estimator had no clue as to the sheer weight involved, the number of seemingly teeny boxes necessary, the time, the effort...

So the boss of this particular loading job was bound and determined not to do it, since the company would eat a load of red ink on the estimate. Dad was bound and determined they'd be bound, darn it, by the print on the estimate which said they'd honor it, hell or high water. There was a comical bit where a line of guys with handtrucks of book boxes was rolling up to the truck where the boss was telling them hell no, take it back to the house, where they found Dad barring the door, saying hell no, put it back on the truck.

We won. Took a couple of phone calls, but they honored the bone-head estimate. And then when we got to Rock Hill, it turned out they'd snapped the slate for the pool table somewhere along the way.

There's that bit in Foucault's Pendulum as a brainstorm kickstart. —Urban planning for nomads, say.

I've already sent off a nastygram to the editors on that one. (Atrios has it, natch.) --Something to the effect of, while there are some who excuse the torture as "abuse" and note that hey, at least we're better than the despots who used to rule the place, we now have a better standard to which to aspire: we can be better than a political cartoonist who seems to feel that abject fear excuses torture and degradation and murder.

It's truly an appalling cartoon. One of the cheaper 9/11 shots I've ever seen, horrifically tit-for-tat moral relativism, and an instant competitor for most egregious linkage of Iraq with Al Qaeda yet, all in one smarmy ink-stained package.

Myself, I think more than a few folks are starting to feel like William Shatner, hauled gibbering off that plane while the crew stands around looking at the chewed-up engine saying, gee, I wonder what fucked it all up so badly? --Except actually I don't think the plane has landed yet. Not in this analogy. I'm starting to worry about whether it can.

It's the New York Times op-ed page to The Daily Show's Face the Nation. --Satire isn't dead; it joined the chattering classes.

And those ID folks say we've never witnessed evolution in action.

Ah: now I see that the line of defense is this (scroll down to the bottom of the comments thread): none of these attacks ever really happened, and anyway Ms. Cramer herself admits it's only a small number of miscreants, because you can't trust the word of someone who'd delete an intemperate and harmful post once she's come to realize that it's an intemperate and harmful post.

Can I get a new discourse, please?

Hey! I thought I remained the sensible center, and all youse mugs were arrayed to the left and right about me!

If you're thinking of rearranging the political landscape like that, you might want to warn a fellow. You know?

Ooh! Silver! (Or, in dog's years, two diamonds, a gold, and a wood.)

Congratulations. Now. Why don't you head back out for another lap...

Teresa will swoop down like a swoopy thing...

Which makes her the thing with feathers, right?

(The sudden image of a peregrine, stooping on a cluster hapless vowels, conflicts horribly with Emily's hope. More sherry, please—)

I think a good rule of thumb is if the evangelizer in question turns to the rule of law rather than persuasion and genteel conversion. --I don't mind someone trying to hand me a Jack Chick comic on the street corner; I can always say "No thank you." I do mind people who want to write their favorite scripture into civil code. It's foolish; it's not playing the game according to Hoyle, darn it--bringing truncheons to a debate society; and it bespeaks a certain sneaking lack of faith--not only in their own social skills and rhetoric, but in the very Good News we're all supposed to be bettered by.

New Mexico's attorney general just told the clerk to stoppit. "Some Gay Couples Marry," says the AP headline. The governor's Scott McClellan says this:

"The governor has always been a champion for human rights. He supports equal rights and opposes all forms of discrimination. However, he is opposed to same-sex marriage."

Even after they’d edited the piece without a correction notice, then posted the brief notice that they’d edited the piece, the original paragraph with its damnably missed point was left in place “above the fold” to non-subscribers and anyone who hadn’t sat through the ad yet.

They appear to have kicked the piece out from behind the ad shield now, and I can’t remember exactly how the “above the fold” URLs are constructed, so I can’t say for sure that it’s still there. But it was left to stink up the joint long after the correction had been noted.

Morons, indeed. Is Andrew Sullivan still writing for them? If so, given his recent radio contretemps with Atrios re: “anonymity” (these people have such a curious notion of identity; I’d expect Sully to fuck up the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous on the fly, but surely with some time and reflection the rather stark difference ought to be clear)—that would help explain this curiously incurious article, perhaps. Or perhaps I’m wasting tinfoil best hoarded for the hats we’ll need later this wacky election year...

You know, it always made more sense to me as "sticking point," which is the one I seem to remember having heard more often. Not "place." It's the point at which whatever it is you're screwing starts to stick, after all. Place is not the wrong word, per se, for the idea, but it is an odd one. But! A quick comparative google reminds me that the Lady M. said, "We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail," and so we're stuck. Ah, well.

Favorite comment on the Times piece, which I can't remember where I saw it, but: "The Times isn't covering the horse race. They're covering the horse blanket."

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