There are always snipers on the roofs of DC for Presidential Inaugurals.
Or Presidential anything, for that matter.
I saw a Reagan campaign stop in Binghamton in 1984 (he opened his speech with "It's great to be here in Bimmington, Bingington, Bennington-- It's great to be here!"), and there were snipers on the roof of pretty much significant building between the airport and the high school where he spoke.
The paranoia of the Secret Service pre-dates the current administration.
I recently finished The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore (which has one of the best dog scenes ever-- he really captures the psychology of the Labrador Retriever), which was good, but shouldn't be the first Moore you read (Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is his best, but if you want to understand the Christmas book, you need to read The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove first).
Since then, I've mostly been reading reviews of other books in Locus, because I've been too brain-fried to contemplate resuming The System of the World.
Woo! I'm number one! That is, I've got the top result for my last name, and all of my published papers appear in the top ten results.
Yeah, fine, I have an uncommon last name. What's your point?
And how long do you think it'll be until we start seeing GoogleScholarWhacks?
"Reducing inequality" is the model that *most* energizes both the conservatives *and* the libertarians *against* the progressives.
What he said. Many if not most people hear "Reduce Inequality," and think "Harrison Bergeron." Well, not literally, given that most people probably haven't read it, but that's the sort of world people imagine when they hear talk of reducing inequality.
The goals are fine, but the package sucks.
I was #116 at about 9am in Niskayuna (*waves to Mike Jones*). I've never voted before in a presidential election in NY, though, so I don't know if that's good. The workers did say it was a little busier.
It slowed down. Close to an hour later, I was #159.
The hardest part of the process was finding a place to park.
I don't think that would tip it over, frankly. In the time I've been here, there's been other similiar discussions. It doesn't explain why 'making light' is blocked as well
I don't really believe that this is the explanation, but it might be that the link to the insanely inappropriate tribute to 9/11 set someone off. It would be exceptionally stupid, but that's nothing new in web filtering.
(My favorite dumb filter problem is the Los Alamos physics preprint server, which for years was available at "xxx.lanl.gov" (I still use that address, and jokingly refer to it as the "porn server") but had to add "arxiv.org" to circumvent web filters.)
Erik, you don't by any chance hang around with Nicholson Baker in your free time, do you?
It's hard to argue with your points, but my overall problem with vaccinations is the steady stream of disinformation that few people question anymore, as well as the real lack of choice about what you can actually choose to give your children.
Could you please be more specific about who, exactly, is disinforming you (other than the people who are telling you that not vaccinating your children is OK), and why it is that you think you're getting bad information? I'm really sort of at a loss as to where this stream of disinformation is coming from, though I'll admit that it's not an issue I normally pay much attention to.
This has at least been a useful reminder that right-wingers aren't the only people holding weird anti-science viewpoints. The last four years have made it easy to forget.
Keep in mind, I don't want to start a flamewar over this. I'm not a scientist and I don't have the hard evidence sitting in front of me from the research I did two years ago, but if someone could point out a study that gave me reasonable, unbiased results proving that vaccinations work, I would be more than happy to read it.
Define "work."
In a country like the US, where the majority of the population is already vaccinated against most of the major diseases, and public health measures over the past several decades have greatly reduced the incidence of such diseases in the general public, not being vaccinated probably won't significantly increase your chance of getting the disease. Provided you don't wander too far afield (say, to a country with a less developed public health system), and run into someone who actually carries the bug in question.
This is what I meant by "free-riding" in the above post. In the US or most of Europe, vacccination probably doesn't make much difference for a particular individual because the chance of running into the disease in question is pretty low. But that chance is very low precisely because so many people have been vaccinated. When most of the population is immune, there aren't many hosts, and you're not likely to run into someone carrying the disease. If significant numbers of people start thinking that the whole thing is just a drug-company scam, though, we risk getting back to the point where there are significant numbers of people harboring these diseases, and that would be Very Bad Indeed.
It's easy to shrug off the chicken pox as something we're "supposed to get" to strengthen the immune system-- it's not that serious for most people, and the vaccine itself is fairly recent, so most people posting here have probably had chicken pox. But most of the diseases we vaccinate against are a whole lot worse than chicken pox. A close friend of my family was one of the last people in the US to get a really severe case of polio (literally months before Salk came up with the vaccine), and believe me when I say that this is one disease you really, really do not want to get. I'm more than happy to have some of my money go to drug companies to help insure that my (hypothetical future) children never have to worry about it.
If you want evidence that vaccination works, you need look no farther than the fact that deadly childhood illnesses are no longer a common occurrance. Take a look at some biographies from a hundred or so years ago, and see how significant a change this is.
I guess if we're discussing political things here, I could add my two cents about vaccinations (and why I haven't vaccinated either of my kids).
I hesitate to get into this (which is why I haven't posted anything about it until now), but as a science type (though not a biologist), I feel vaguely obliged to note that refusing vaccination is a really dreadful idea. At best, you're free-riding off all the people who do get vaccinated, at worst, you're providing a potential host population for some really unpleasant organisms.
I really don't want to start a flamewar over this, but at least based on my limited understanding of biology, I think this is a sufficiently bad idea that I'd rather not have it sitting out there unchallenged in a forum known to be populated by smart people. It may be that there are reasons known to said smart people why this isn't a phenomenally bad idea, and I may get jumped on for saying this, but I'd rather have that than let it pass.
I'll just say that I'd like to know what you think the core of the Harry Potter books is, if it isn't the plot
um, characterization & setting?
It should, of course, be noted that this is a highly idiosyncratic thing. Plenty of people say they like the Potter books for the characters and setting, and I believe them when they say that, Personally, though, I find Harry to be more or less a personality-less blank (like many a YA protagonist, actually, which I think is not entirely accidental), and the world has no feeling of depth or even internal consistency.
I'm not saying that the people who like the characters and setting are wrong, or anything. I just want to throw out another reminder that you are unlikely to get anything close to agreement as to why the books are enjoyable, let alone what genre they belong to.
(Personally, I think that the statement "Harry Potter isn't really fantasy" is a wonderful conversation-starter in the classic mode of "Star Wars really isn't SF," but I don't think that there's much point to drawing genre boundaries that narrowly, however interesting the ensuing conversation may be...)
Cathy is referring to the fact that, while Teresas Heinz Kerry and Nielsen Hayden spell their given name alike, they pronounce it differently.
I was not aware of that (I've been avoiding tv news that isn't The Daily Show for a while now, so I don't think I've ever heard Teresa Heinz Kerry's name said out loud).
And now I'm wondering what the other pronunciation could possibly be... I just don't see a lot of options, there.
The problem isn't that they're being "quiet"--they're making as much noise as anyone could ask. The problem is that the media pretty much ignores them save for an occasional man-bites-dog story, because, you know, everybody knows that "religion" and "right wing" are pretty much synonymous, except in the special case of black people.
I don't really want to keep beating on this, because I'm not especially religious (I retain enough residual Catholicism to get the references in Jim Macdonald's Peter Crossman stories, but I only make it to church a couple of times a year), and thus don't really have any standing to be dictating strategy to religious liberal groups.
I'm a little bothered, though, by an air of.. I hesitate to call it "defeatism" in these comments, but I'm not coming up with a better word. "Fatalism," maybe. Yes, it sucks that we don't have a better press corps, but many of the media-blaming comments on this make it sound like there's absolutely nothing that can be done
The fact is, these groups aren't doing "as much as anyone could ask," in terms of drawing media attention, because they're just not succeeding in drawing any attention. Doing more of what they're doing already may not do the trick, but maybe there's something different that they could be doing. I have a hard time believing that there's absolutely no way to get the media to pay attention to liberal Christian groups.
I don't have any concrete suggestions, as I know nothing about what they've tried, and I'm not a media relations person, but there's just got to be something that would work. The alternative is too depressing to contemplate.
Whether that would turn out to be something the groups in question would be willing to do is another question. Breaking the fundamentalist stranglehold on religion in politics may well require adopting some of the tactics of the right-wing media machine, which sort of goes against the grain of what I know of such groups. (They may come more naturally to the militant atheists, though, which might go a long way toward explaining the origin of this whole argument.)
If breaking the fundamentalist stranglehold on religion in politics is a goal of liberal Christianity-- and you can argue about whether it should be or not-- unpleasant tactics may have to be considered.
But, as I said, it's not really my place, and I'm not particularly up on the groups in question. I'm just trying to explain why I keep coming back to this.
Liberal Christians aren't being quiet, they are simply being ignored. You have seen zilch about what's really going on in the media, because the media barely acknowledges it is there.
While I do agree that the media are part of the problem, I still agree with CHip that it would be a good idea to "turn up the volume" even more. Yes, it's hard to shake the media out of a story rut, but it's got to be done. It may require levels of noise that good and decent Christians find unseemly, but the alternative is worse.
It sucks that the media have locked in on a story, and are ignoring the efforts of liberal Christians who are trying to get their story out. But all that really means is that liberal Christian efforts to this point haven't worked. Maybe it's time to start fighting dirty.
Chad, I've been seeing a number of people apparently deciding whether or not any of the Air America hosts have said anything offensive about religion solely on the basis of the LA Times review.
I've seen some of that, but I've also seen people referring to the LA Times piece in order to note that the manner in which the author expressed his objection was itself fairly objectionable. And also that the attitudes reflected in those comments (specifically that religious == Christian) might be involved in the tension between Christian religion and liberalism.
That, to my mind, is a far more interesting discussion than the argument over whether or not a particular radio host is offensive (you feel offended, that's good enough for me). One of the things that's been really frustrating about this thread is that it seems like every time someone brings up the question of attitudes, we get dragged back to whether or not the radio show was offensive.
Teresa:
Chad Orzel, I have real trouble imagining you getting disemvowelled. I'm startled to hear that you find it imaginable.
That's largely a matter of my knowing that the threat is there, however remote. Some of my first drafts aren't nearly as civil as what I end up posting.
And one general remark: I thought "gratuitous" was a poor choice of words the first time I saw it. It didn't make enough sense. If you assumed that it reflected the writer's exact intent and meaning, it was offensive, but that interpretation didn't match the rest of the article. What I assumed was that the writer was probably reaching for something else, failed to grasp it, came up clutching "gratuitous" instead, and didn't have enough sense to see that it was loaded. Where others saw malign intent, I saw thumbfingered writing. I'm not saying I'm right about that; I'm just explaining why it took me longer than it might have to sort out the objections to it.
"Gratuitously" was the flag that brought it to my attention, but I don't think it was the real problem. I can't think of a word that you could replace "gratuitously" with and end up with something that wasn't problematic.
No adverb will change the fact that "Two of the hosts [...] announced that they're Jewish" has absolutely no place in a list of evidence purporting to show that liberal talk radio is biased against religion. It makes no sense at all unless the list-maker thinks that "religion" and "Christianity" are identically equal, and then we've got a problem.
"Gratuitously" was an aggravating offense, but the fact the he mentioned Jews at all is troubling.
I would like to point out to Chad Orzel that I have never read the LA Times piece, nor did I ever bring it up or comment on it. At least one person out in the blogosphere has claimed that "it [i.e., these discussions, including this Electrolite thread] all started" with that piece, which is certainly not true for me.
Actually, you probably have read it, though you might not have realized so-- the little bit of the piece that's actually about religion is quoted in its entirety in the Kevin Drum post you linked in the original post.
(I'm not trying to be accusatory, by the way-- it wasn't the main focus of your comments, and it's easy for that to not register. I didn't realize that I'd actually read the whole thing until yesterday, when I checked it out to see what was there. I thought there had to be more to it than that, based on the heat the thing was generating. I'm still kind of amazed that it generated that kind of heat.)
I think Chad is on to something when he says that some people have been "stubbornly refusing to address the same topics as their opponents in the debate," but you know, it can be just as easily be observed that some people have been trying to talk about one thing while other people insist on yelling at them about something else which they didn't bring up and didn't express an opinion about.
Absolutely.
That's the primary reason this comment thread has been so frustrating. It's disturbingly reminiscent of Usenet.
I should note that I agree that Rich went way over the line in some of his comments, especially given how scanty the original material was. However, several other people (Jeremy, CHip, Avram to some degree, probably more that I'm forgetting) have raised similar (or at least related) points in a much calmer manner, and those have mostly been lost in the shouting.
I think there's probably more ground for agreement here than many of the participants realize, but it's difficult to see when no two people in the conversation are talking about the same thing.
(I should note that Patrick's comment snuck in while I was writing the above.)
I didn't see what got Rich banned, but this has been bugging me for quite a while now. I will try to phrase it in a way that will avoid disemvowellment:
Lis Carey writes:
Jeremy & CHip--I have heard Marc Maron's comments, and it's his comments I'm reacting to, not the LA Times review. I realize that this cheating, but, hey, what do you expect?
Would you please take a minute, read the LA Times piece, and actually respond to the comments people have made here about it. I've watched three or four rounds here of people in this argument stubbornly refusing to address the same topics as their opponents in the debate, and, really, this is even more depressing than reading the paper.
The people who haven't heard and aren't commenting on the radio show (myself included) aren't exactly perched on the highest point of the Moral High Ground, but given the limited distribution of Air America and the transient nature of radio programming, it's more of an imposition to ask them to figure out what you're discussing. (If you point me to a transcript of the show in question, I'll be happy to read it and comment on it, and I might be able to listen to an audio archive if someone has one, and can steer me to the relevant bits.) Reading an op-ed is relatively easy, even at a registration-required rag like the LA Times.
My (admittedly quick) reading of the original article leads me to think that the people talking about it have a point-- the fact that some of the hosts "gratuitously announced they're Jewish" is used as evidence that the shows are "mocking religion," and were I Jewish, I might well find that sort of "religious == Christian" thinking insulting. I don't agree that failing to condemn the slight against Jews equals agreement with it, but I honestly can't see what purpose is served by refusing to even comment on it.
So, please, consider this a polite request to comment on it.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 27 |
| 2003 | 12 |
Total: 41 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Chad Orzel:
Show all comments by Chad Orzel.