Jill Smith: I thought his focus on the existence of the photographs rather than on the torture they depicted and his hair-splitting "I'm not a lawyer... but I believe it is abuse" language clearly bespoke something other than "deep decency."
I thought there was a creepy echo of Clinton's hair-splitting over the meaning of the words "is" and "sex."
Of course, Clinton was being prosecuted for something trivial, whereas Rumsfeld is attempting to escape responsibility from grave failure of national trust.
I noticed ABC World News Tonght used the word "torture" last night. First time I've noticed.
The neocons have also adopted one of the worst traits that used to be attributed to liberals: failing to take personal responsibility, and claiming that it's all somebody else's fault.
One of the main reasons I'm against Bush is his record. Under Clinton, we had eight years of relative peace and prosperity, under Bush we've been under attack and the economy has at best been faltering.
When I broach this subject with conservatives, I get an enormous amount of handwaving attempting to explain why we're (1) actually winning the war in Iraq (2) the economy is actually looking great and (3) it's all the liberals' fault, in particular Clinton.
Of course, liberals have gotten a bum rap on the personal responsibility thing: most of the liberals I know are quite willing to take responsibility for their own actions. They do, however, argue that sometimes other people's faults ought to be forgiven - that a teen-age criminal, for instance, might be better off being rehabilitated that warehoused in a prison. These qualities are known as "charity" and "foregiveness," they are highly thought of in Christianity and Judaism, which the neo-cons are usually so eager to practice.
Say, Robert L., would you tell us about your temp job in AARP's correspondence department?
I see a lot of comments spam that either contains amusing aphorisms, or bland comments - like the one Patrick cites - designed to blend in with the conversation.
I just look at the URLs in the message. If the message does not relate to the previous conversations, and the URLs go to commercial sites, then the message gets zapped.
Here's what I can't figure out: sometimes I'll see a message which is a non-sequitir, completely out of context in the preceding conversation, but which contains no URL, just an e-mail address. What's up with that? Somebody's spam cannon misfiring?
Pondering Patrick's post, I thought of a comment by Vernor Vinge (or one of those guys), which is that much of the interesting action in AI gets overlooked. It's not that computers standing alone will develop intelligence (whatever "intelligence" is), but rather that computers will augment human intelligence.
We're already seeing that, with the wealth of information available on Google. Yesterday, I got into a discussion about the history of the American Civil War, a subject about which I don't know enough, and I Googled a few documents to study up. Twenty years ago I would have had to go to the nearest library - which is to say, I would not have looked that information up at all then, because I would not have been sufficiently motivated.
Of course, all of this is nothing new. It even pre-dates the invention of writing. The very first proto-human to tie a string around his finger to remember something was using technology to augment his intelligence. (Probably he was reminding himself to invent string.)
Still, computers and the Internet enable us to use technology to augment our intelligence in new and exciting ways.
Jeremy Leader is right. The technology behind this is not particularly impressive - it's probably just the same code that pumps out the clumsy, typo-ridden foreignglish that we see in most comments spam. It's just that whoever sent THIS spam took some time to write something more realistic-looking.
But the net result is the same: it's a machine that passes the Turing test. It appears to be human - at least it does if you're not paying close attention.
Eric Walker: I suggest that the golem is profoundly intertwined with the thematic material of the entire novel. This is a book about the Golden Age of comics as Moby Dick is a book about the craft of whaling. The golem is arguably the centerpiece symbol of the whole shootin' match.
Interesting. Expand, please? Also, do you think the golem in the book is an actual supernatural creature, or just a clay statue that people tell a lot of stories about?
Kevin Andrew Murphy: I remember a time in grad school when a professor tried to teach us the difference between "slick fiction" and "quality fiction," and how slick fiction was genre stuff, written for money to be published in magazines with slick paper, and quality fiction was literary, and published in small chapbooks. He then dumped down a pile of chapbooks he'd just ordered, among which were a handful of SF fanzines. I asked if the fan fiction was now "quality fiction," and if things published in The New Yorker were now "slick fiction" because of the slick paper and money paid for them.
Commercial art is when you find out how much they'll pay first, then do it. Fine art is the other way around.
A friend sent me a New York Times essay recently about Robert A. Heinlein's recently rediscovered and published long-lost first novel.
The article was unremarkable, so I didn't bother blogging it. The discussion of the novel was familiar to Heinlein fans or even casual observers.
What strikes me now is how straightforward the article was. There was none of this patronizing review of sf as we see in Christopher Farah's review. The article takes the position that Heinlein is a respectable writer, read by respectable people, and that his books had respectable things to say. The article didn't even say any of this, it was just assumed, same way it would be assumed in an article about Joseph Heller, Ira Levin or J.D. Salinger -- I mean, has anyone ever written an essay pointing out that boarding-school books are just kid stuff but this "Catcher in the Rye" thing, it's literature?
And it struck me as weird that the stuck-in-the-past, obsolete, ink-on-dead-trees Times is taking sf seriously, while the hip, digital Salon is still making cracks about that Buck Rogers stuff.
Patrick: Definitional arguments all wind up focussing on edge cases, to the exclusion of the often more interesting center.
Actually, the edge can be pretty interesting too, in that it helps us determine what are the essential characteristics of sf.
My definition of "slipstream" fiction is fiction that uses the themes and storytelling devices of sf, but is not in itself sf. I realize that's not the standard definition.
So let's look at some candidates for slipstream stories:
- "Apollo 13," the movie. Hellofa space opera. Best science fiction movie ever made. Happens to be based on a true story.
- "Kavalier & Klay." This was referred to as a fantasy novel earlier in this threat. I said to myself, "Why? Just because it's about comic book artists and writers?" And then a voice in my head said, "Not fantasy? How about that freaking golem, ya mook?!"
On further reflection, I still am uncomfortable with the classification of K&K, wonderful a novel as it is, as fantasy. The golem is incidental to the story; it's a McGuffin for getting Kavalier to the U.S. And, furthermore, we don't know that the golem in the novel was actually animated; I think that the narrator carefully sidesteps the issue, any actual walking-around-and-smashing-things that the golem is alleged to have done happens offstage and is reported to us through unreliable channels.
Still, it's definitely a slipstream novel, because it is a novel about superhero comics.
- "1968," by Joe Haldeman. The protagonist, Spider, is an 18-year-old stone sf reader - I don't think he's involved in fandom - who goes to Vietnam and gets busted up. He comes home and tries to work out his psychic damage in many ways, among them by writing endless pastiches of "Starship Troopers." "1968" isn't sf, and I don't even think it's slipstream since it isn't much about the themes of sf - but it is a hellofa Vietnam novel that happens to have some sf in it.
If you want to conclude from this that "hard SF" is actually a label for a notably mannered subdivision of the genre, I won't gainsay you.
This is what I was thinking when I uttered gnomicly elsewere on this blog about how Heinlein's famous "the door dilated" says a lot about how to write hard sf. Hard sf doesn't have to adhere to the laws of science and engineering, but it has to sound like it does.
"'SF's no good,'
The critics say 'till we're deaf.
'But this is good.'
'It's not SF.'"
I'm pretty sure I'm not quoting that right. And I don't remember who said it. But I'm pretty sure it was written something like 35 years ago.
I've told people a couple of times recently that I thought that prejudice against sf was very nearly a thing of the past. Shows you what I know.
How's the comment-spam battle going? I've been getting an average of a half-dozen comment spams per week for the past few weeks, I stay on top of them by trying to delete them as they come in, so long as they come in when they're at my computer.
You guys have taken more draconian spam measures than I have - how's that working out for you?
I dislike the word "meme" myself. What does it communicate that cannot be better communicated by other words and phrases?
Harrumph.
The shorter version of Paul O'Neill's complaint in The Price of Loyalty, after all, is "I thought this would be the Nixon or Ford administration, but it wasn't." What liberals dislike about Bush is the very same thing that O'Neill disliked: reckless incompetence, Karl Rove running policy, nihilism on a grand scale.
The first sentence of that paragraph sums me up pretty well. I didn't think Nixon or Ford - I thought Reagan or Bush Sr. I thought I would deeply oppose much of the ideology, but that I would at least have a president who was competent and looking out for the best interests of the nation.
It's the incompetence that accounts for the depth of my opposition to Bush Jr. - the man simply does not know what he is doing. We suspected that ever since 9/11, in the months following the Iraq war, it's become painfully obvious.
I mean, if the man was at all competent he would have been able to fabricate evidence of causus belli by now. He would have fabricated some WMD programs, or something else that would have made it look, in retrospect, like we were right to go to war with Iraq.
This is one of the things that keeps me from despairing about the future of the nation - the Bush administration will be gone in 2004. They are too incompetent to win an election. They are too incompetent to even fix another election. Like Osama bin Laden, we thought Bush was an evil genius, but instead he's just a guy who got lucky.
We can't afford to relax. Unseating Bush will require hard work by good people. But it's very do-able - and Bush will be right in there helping.
Addiction, Brain Damage and the President: "Dry Drunk" Syndrome and George W. Bush
Ordinarily I would not use this term. But when I came across the article "Dry Drunk" - - Is Bush Making a Cry for Help? in American Politics Journal by Alan Bisbort, I was ready to concede, in the case of George W. Bush, the phrase may be quite apt.
Dry drunk is a slang term used by members and supporters of Alcoholics Anonymous and substance abuse counselors to describe the recovering alcoholic who is no longer drinking, one who is dry, but whose thinking is clouded. Such an individual is said to be dry but not truly sober. Such an individual tends to go to extremes.
The previous article seems to be a load of nonsense as an analysis of W. I'm not qualified to judge whether it's a good treatment of dry drunk syndrome.
For example, the author cites as evidence of Bush's dry drunkenness his statements such as: "We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends." Seems to me Bush's statement is exactly right; my problem is not what he said but rather (among other things) the fact that he's not doing it, instead going after-- aw, heck, you know the rant by now.
Also:
DRY DRUNK: The Culture of Tobacco in 17th- and 18th-century Europe
... those being.... ?
I was thinking that a dry drunk might be someone who was forced by outsiders to stop drinking, such as a prison inmate or a president being watched by armed guards.
Thanks, Patrick!
I can certainly see the temptation of using a plug-in called "SmartyPants."
What's a dry drunk? I've heard the expression before.
I was able to find two examples in a quick scan of the threads. This one is from one of my posts, and this posted by Debra Doyle.
Now that it's come up, I'm finding a peculiar buglet when I try to quote comments into a reply.
If I cut text from a previous comment, and then paste it into a new comment, any em-dashes, apostrophes and quote-marks in the old comment will be rendered as a question-mark in the new. I have to go in and manually change them in order to get them rendered correctly - and sometimes I forget. I'll see if I can find a recent example or two in recent comment threads.
The question of whether Bush?s *handlers* are intelligent is another issue. On that, my impression is that they?re skilled in tactical self-preservation in the short term, using a dynamic that may be injurious to everyone (even them) in the long term.
That's a thing that's keeping me cheerful and keeps me from buying real estate in Canada: the hope that Bush is not just beatable, but may be trounced in the 2004 election.
The punditry seems convinced that he's an extremely popular president, but I keep remembering that this is a man who got fewer votes than the other guy when he ran for office in 2000. He had an extraordinary honeymoon after 9/11, but the polls are trending downward.
And, if online discussions are any gauge - which usually they are not - the libertarian-conservatives who backed Reagan may be turning against him, in the face of skyrocketing spending.
I used to know a guy who could bend his little finger all the way backward until it touched the back of his wrist. Also, a kid I grew up with used to like to turn his eyelids inside-out and walk around like a zombie.
See, I know accomplished people too.
Why is there a * in the V-word in my previous post? Because the anti-spam software in Electrolite would not allow me to post the word as-is.
(signed) Amused,
Mitch wagner
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 49 |
| 2003 | 54 |
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