Brad,
The people I know who tithe these days tithe to the church--their particular church--rather than to the poor. That's a very effective way to build a church--especially one with a gymnasium.
I've come to the conclusion the left (by which I mean myself) should loudly and publicly adopt a secular version of tithing. It doesn't have to be ten percent, but it needs to go explicitly to some form of public service.
Lawrence Lessig suggests (I believe I heard him do so in
One of many hopeful things about Barack Obama's election was that a good chunk of his victory is due to Alan Keyes saying out loud what most hard-right radicals only say in code.
If we can get people to hear what the 'publicans mean instead of what they say, we can beat them.
Patrick, when you say:
I have much the same take on Josh's comments "if we do nothing and give up now, then we truly deserve to get screwed." As with Bob Stein's comment, I can only conclude that this proceeds from a definition of the verb "to deserve" with which I am unfamiliar. Do the people who "deserve to get screwed" include the lame and the halt, the dim and the grief-stricken, those consumed in penitence for their own mistakes and sins?
you're misreading "we".
Of course the larger "we" doesn't deserve what it's going to get, but the smaller "we" of activists who give up is the "we" to which the poster Josh was referring.
I don't think anyone deserves the shitstorm Bush is now capable of bringing down, but if anyone does deserve it, people who oppose him yet give up are right on the top of my list.
Geez, Xopher, what do you have against white stockings? At least you can tell whether the white ones have been peed on, which (given some of the other links up there) is important information.
Clark,
There are lots of infinite sequences with only positive terms which sum up to a finite result--that's absolute convergence, right?--so if futures are countably infinite, they can all have non-zero probabilities. If futures are uncountably infinite, that's a different story--I think measure theory says you can only have a countably infinite number of such points.
Which is more reasonable--countably or uncountably infinite futures? You're asking about reason in a thread in which George W. Bush becomes President? Of the United States? Come on!
If you want a book on poetry, the one to get is Sound and Sense, by Lawrence Perrine. That was used in undergrad poetry surveys and workshops where I went to school, and I recommend it.
The advice to write poetry by others down by hand is great advice. So is memorizing poetry.
Perhaps this new book can shed some light on the subject:
HORNSWAGGLED!!! How the Me of Now was Tricked by the Me of Yesterday into Going to War, by President George W. Bush
Excerpt:"Powtuckett, where do you stand on this issue, because frankly Colliflower, I am enhanced to head right into Iraq full bore, right now."
Colin hesitated, still tasting the nickname in the mouth of his brain. Then, with a grimace like a person who accidentally ate some of that sushi mustard, he carried on, "Sir, uh, I think you mean me, so, I would say, in regards to Iraq, remember the Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you bought it."
I've been thinking about this--not about NASA, but about Hollywood. How did they take a Robert Heinlein title, put it on a John Barnes story, and end up with a Jerry Bruckheimer movie?
Avram replies:
Do we really need another verse of the more-oppressed-than-thou song? Look, the Celebrity Atheists List (C'mon, you knew there hadda be one!) lists Janeane Garofalo as an atheist, and she co-hosts their evening show. There are probably more. Happy?
Sigh. I suppose it'd help if I had some idea who she is. An actress, right? That much I know.
So what does she have to say about religion on her segments? Is it any more to people's taste? If the answer to the first question is "Not much", is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Xopher, I'm pretty sure (from listening to the learned discussions of people who read--and quote!--a lot of Marx) that the "opiate of the people" remark was not perjorative.
I hear about putting the right kind of Christian on Air America. What about the right kind of secular humanist? Where is the place for secular liberals to explain our beliefs, and why we don't find religion useful for us when it comes to political decision-making? Are we supposed to shut up until we're in the voting booth? Or do we get to discuss our beliefs, as the religious do?
Well, there are French Candadians in the northeast--Kerouac was one--but I guess a community of francophone is not the same thing as a community of French descent.
Close, though.
Let me make sure we're talking about the same NPR: This is the place where Haley Barbour was a commentator for quite some time.
Really, the liberal fetish for NPR continually astounds me. Unlike most of the other national broadcast news outlets, it doesn't universally suck, but that's setting the bar low.
If I never hear Cokie Roberts or Scott Simon again in my life (I say this as someone who liked Simon in the eighties and early nineties, when NPR aspired to be the American BBC), I'll be very happy. Well, no, that's not quite true--I do tune in every Saturday morning to hear Daniel Schorr, and Scott Simon is good when he has Schorr, a man worth listening to, there as an example.
Really, now--did anyone else hear Ketzel Levine with Laura Bush on Morning Edition this week? Yuck! All Things Considered isn't so bad compared to Morning Edition, but again, that's a low bar.
Elric, if you haven't noticed by now the ass-licking tendencies of NPR, then listen to Juan Williams' interviews of administration officials on Morning Edition, which can be summed up in two words:
Kissy butt.
Mary Kay answers a question much like I was going to answer it: "I sometimes subverted the dominant paradigm by placing certain books in both literature and a genre category (either sf or mystery usually) but that carries its own problems."
I did exactly the same thing, which I suppose still begs the triggering question from Mark: "Specifically, what transcendental qualities does a novel need to have to get placed in the vaunted Mainstream Fiction section, as opposed to getting shuffled off into the Scifi/Fantasy ghetto?"
What I did was decide whether I thought a book, were I to successfully recommend it to a mainstream reader, that reader might enjoy reading it, or at least not feel cheated having bought it.
Some calls were easy. If there's any reason Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler aren't acceptable mainstream fiction, I don't know what it is. I also found it easy to shelve Orwell and Vonnegut on both genre and mainstream shelves. (I believe--but wouldn't be shocked to discover this was a false memory--I kept a copy of The Handmaid's Tale in the SF section, too.)
I only picked a small number of some author's works to double-shelve. There's no point in trying to sell Rocket Ship Galileo to a general fiction reader--there is a lot of sense in selling some of those people Job. And there's the key word--selling. If the works wouldn't sell pretty well, I couldn't justify keeping two copies on the shelves. One copy, even, sometimes.
That was my procedure--it worked pretty well. Trade books were a small section of the store, I did most of the maintenance, and I had a good clientele. I'm sure it's different in chains.
(By the way, while I agree that most SF readers do read more than SF, I'd have to also agree that the ones I know mostly aren't big readers of current mainstream/general/literary fiction. These are well-read people, readers of the classics [often in their original languages] and of a lot of fiction up to about a century ago, but they seem to start slipping away around 1900.)
Stefan asks:
What would the Right-Wing alternative of the Girl Scouts be like?
The Boy Scouts Girl's Auxilary.
Luckily for me, my boss has kids in both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. I think I make up for not buying Boy Scout popcorn by my generosity when it's Girl Scout cookie time.
No better place to put this, I suppose--I'm blogging up a storm at today's O'Reilly Digital Democracy Conference--the interested can see for themselves.
Viagra! Tequila!
Maquiladora viva!
Argiva! Sonora!
A dose of cryptospora!
Go team!
I had a fun day today at the dentist's office. I'll spare you the details. If, however, back in 1995, I hadn't walked in the door where a guy totally unsuited to be a hiring manager took one look at the busted bridge in the front of my mouth, shrugged, and hired me anyway, I wouldn't've been at the dentist's office today. I wouldn't have any teeth, or much of anything else, either.
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