I'm deeply disturbed by the polarization of civic discourse into Us vs. Them, as a kind of Western Front with opposing sides dug into metaphorical trenches separated by a ruined no-man's land between them. I am sometimes puzzled by the people who think that the Left is by nature respectful and polite. Have they never heard of Stalin?
I know about the abuse of false equivalence. People on my side of the divide aren't fighting pointless and brutal wars on the other side of the world, nor are they persecuting diversity and difference at home. At the same time, when I look at the comments at the Daily Kos, Eschaton, Political Animal, and, yes, here, I often see the same viciousness and hatred that I see when I can stand to look at Free Republic.
I must oppose the cabal that now controls the American government. But whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process they do not become monsters themselves. I see in the acceptance of the energy that moves us to be more tribal and more intolerant of heterodoxy a tendency towards monstrosity. Shall there be two cities of Little Green Footballs, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness?
What's more, the rule becomes unenforceable the moment someone opens up a Blogspot-clone in the Bahamas (sometimes I wonder why the .bs top-level domain isn't already coveted by bloggers).
I wish Old Hickory (President Andrew Jackson) could have called in to tell her about how his first inaugural was open to all the people and you didn't need no stinkin' ticket to occupy a space on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sure, as long as you were white.
Has it come to this? Is our president so appalling that even a genocidal monster looks good in comparison?
Orwell Night wouldn't be complete without the Students for an Orwellian Society
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Clarke)
The Great Book of Amber (Zelazny) In the course of doing some research on spiritual/magickal properties of labyrinths, I got seduced. Other labyrinthine reading: Walking a Sacred Path (Lauren Artress) and The Labyrinth: Symbol of Fear, Rebirth, and Liberation (Helmut Jaskolski)
The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (Col. Thomas X. Hammes, USMC) A treatise on so-called "fourth-generation warfare".
The Dreambody Toolkit (Joe Goodbread) Psych text for one of my classes.
Kinkorama: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Perversion (Simon Sheppard) Ask me about Romanian dentists....
In the queue to be read:
The Dynamics of Conflict Resolution: A Practitioner's Guide (Bernard Mayer) Another book to read for class.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Friere) more class reading.
TNH: Since this is an open thread, let me just say that that sidelight link about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher makes me want to wash out my mind with soap: ICK! ICK! ICK! ICK! ICK!
Yes, and at the same time, it's THE MOST CRACKTASTIC THING EVAR.
"By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound
But the Bedouin they brought out
The electric camel drum
The local guitar picker
Got his guitar picking thumb
As soon as the shareef
Had cleared the square
They began to wail..."
Al Qaeda's publicity stunt aside, isn't it the case that Europe should be separating itself from the USA, or at least the incompetent, dangerous junta that is currently running it?
A friend left last week on a trip to Europe. Debbie told her it would be a good idea for her to wear or display a peace symbol, to show that not all Americans were behind the Bush gang. I immediately chimed in: "Not a peace symbol; a maple leaf."
Kathryn Cramer is very likely doing the right thing to forward the identity of one of her harassers, a lawyer, to the bar association.
But I would like to remind people to beware of metaphors.
In a poker hand, when an opponent bets into you and you are convinced it's a bluff, do not raise! Merely calling the bet is sufficient – if you have a hand that can beat a bluff.
Here's why: If your opponent is bluffing, she will not call your raise, but if your opponent is bluffing, your hand will prevail in the showdown anyway. You win no more money by raising than you do by flat calling. If, on the other hand, you're wrong, and your opponent is not bluffing, then you stand in danger of losing the amount of your raise as well as the call. Calling wins the same as raising when your opponent is bluffing; and it loses less than raising when your opponent is not bluffing.
There are two times you want to raise a bluff: first, occasionally, when you have a hand that can't beat a bluff. (Use pot odds and game theory to determine how often you should do this.) The other time is when your hand is strong enough that you would raise your opponent if she weren't bluffing.
IMHO, if one defines oneself as a "centrist" then one is doomed to vacillate from position to position as the activists at either extreme gain or lose ground.
One of today's "centrists" would find Richard Nixon to have been a liberal, if not an outright leftist. It isn't that Nixon was actually a liberal; it's that the center to whose right Nixon stood has been pulled well to the right by thirty years of right-wing pressure unmatched by anything remotely as strong from the left.
Costco not good to its shareholders? BUAHAHAHAHA!
I'm hard-put to see how a successful company whose board of directors includes Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett's right-hand man) wouldn't have a strong ethic of responsibility to shareholders.
And get this:
Costco appears to pay a penalty for its largesse to workers. The company's shares trade at about 20 times projected per-share earnings for 2004, compared with about 24 for Wal-Mart. Mr. Dreher says the unusually high wages and benefits contribute to investor concerns that profit margins at Costco aren't as high as they should be.
Let's see if I get this straight: Costco's earnings represent a 5% return on the market price of its shares, whereas Wal-Mart's represents 4.2%. Would someone be so kind as to tell me again how Wal-Mart is supposed to be a better deal for shareholders than Costco?
We're happy to own Costco stock. I wouldn't touch Wal-Mart shares with a ten-foot pole.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the cretin" is cute; but Claude Muncey's "Avignon Presidency" is priceless.
Favorite memory from a quarter-century ago:
Stately plump Bill Patterson saying, at the end of the ceremony, "If there is anyone who objects to this union ... they should have spoken up a long time ago!" At which point Tom Whitmore popped up like a jack-in-the-box and said, "I did!"
When I come out to others about my polyamory, one of the oddest things that generally happens is when I am asked how long I've been with my partners. People are often more astonished at the lengths of my relationships (twenty-two and fifteen years, respectively) than they are by the fact that I'm involved with more than one person.
Oscar Romero's prayer reminds me of nothing so much as Rabbi Tarfon's saying, recorded in the Pirkei Avot:
It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task. Yet, you are not free to desist from it. If you have studied much in the Torah much reward will be given you, for faithful is your employer who shall pay you the reward of your labor. And know that the reward for the righteous shall be in the time to come.
It's a good bet that Romero had this mishna in mind as at least part of the inspiration for his prayer.
A lot of people (myself included) have made the comparison between Gavin Newsom's dramatic policy and the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Chicago's Richard Daley has joined the parade.
Hmmm. In both San Francisco and Chicago, the titular head of a big city's ruthless and uncompromising political machine has found an issue on which it is possible to make a seemingly daring and dramatic stand, a feel-good issue that makes the party boss look good and overshadows the way that machine conducts business as usual.
The historical parallel suddenly looks less like the Wall coming down, and more like the actions of Moscow mayor Boris Yeltsin – a chip off the same block (or perhaps a skim off the same pond) as Newsom and Daley.
Yes, I know, what is happening is an unqualified good thing. But we don't call him "Gavin Noisome" for nothing.
Richard Nixon's name is black and spattered with blood. Secret bombings, the invasion of Cambodia, the overthrow of Allende, signing off on the invasion of East Timor, to say nothing of the plumbers, the Enemies List, dirty tricks and Watergate.
But it says something about the nature of poker that when I think of him in the Pacific Theater, I think, "Dick Nixon. Yeah, I would have loved to have played cards with Dick Nixon."
I'd love to play poker with the Shrub, too, but that's because having a rich kid who isn't to bright playing on Daddy's money is always good for the game.
So she comes by those lips naturally. Debbie had been muttering something about collagen every time Arwen showed up onscreen.
I've been down on Salon for years. Back in the dot.boom (yes! greg costikyan coined that phrase!) I was paid to surf the Web on a fast computer through a T3 connection. And because of the bleeding-edge crashware plugins used by Salon and its advertisers, the salon.com Web site was one of the slowest to load that I regularly encountered.
I never even considered paying for a subscription. Why pay for that kind of abuse?
The episode that PNH describes sounds to me like nothing so much like a verse from an early Bob Dylan song. You know, the kind where in the next verse Albert Einstein is disguised as Robin Hood.
An acquaintance of mine 96 I don't think I'd go so far as to call him a "friend" 96 once claimed that he went to Gamblers Anonymous meetings to recruit for his home poker game. (Poker is predatory; but that's like Dick Cheney shooting pheasants in industrial quanty)
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|---|---|
| 2005 | 5 |
| 2004 | 16 |
| 2003 | 127 |
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