Actually, poking around a little more (especially in the comments on Kos) I find some people who are condemning Yglesias pretty harshly, especially for his attempts to explain why the antiwar movement didn't manage to convince him earlier. The argument being that the rightness of the antiwar side was obvious to any intelligent being from the very beginning, and only a very stupid or dishonest person would claim otherwise, and, when the result is so much death and carnage, such a person deserves no sympathy or forgiveness, regardless of subsequent changes of attitude.
It must be very nice to be right all the time, and without sin.
You know, I half-expected the response to Yglesias's confession to be ferociously negative: "How wonderful of you to change your mind when it was too late; that you weren't right when it counted still makes you a mass murderer by proxy, and to Hell with you; we don't want your kind."
Largely because there's been a voice in my own head saying this to me for the past seven or eight months. I swung later than Yglesias did: after the shooting started, in fact. So I suppose I bear more culpability for all the dead than he does.
(I figure there's a reasonable argument that my possession, and public expression, of wrong opinions about the Iraq war might conceivably cancel out any good I've ever done in the world up to this point, and any good I am likely to do in the future. So that my life is now a net negative to humanity. I'm not planning on ending it, of course, because presumably that wouldn't do any good; I have responsibilities, and I can learn. But I may end up living the rest of my life knowing that I'm in the red morally and all I can really do is grope toward zero. ...And there's another part of my head that says that this is no way to run a moral philosophy: if you attach such significance to having wrong opinions, you might be afraid to have opinions at all, and that probably wouldn't be any good. ...But, says the stern judge, coming from me that sounds pretty self-serving, which is why I've been looking for external reactions... It would all be much easier if I were a Christian, and believed that repentance can wash away one's sins instantly. But I've always been pretty suspicious of that.)
But by and large, the kind of ferocious rejection I've been fearing, the external validation of this stern and self-loathing attitude, hasn't been the response; the anti-war left has been pretty magnanimous to the converts, despite a bit of self-righteous grumbling here and there. And I find this extremely heartening.
It was a bit worse during the presidential primary season, when there was a major question of whether a convert candidate was good enough, or if the guy had to have been right for the right reasons all along. But I think there's a recognition now that we have to hang together, and changing minds is better than demanding absolute purity.
(Which is why I am a bit bothered by all the picking on Mark Kleiman for his "al Qaeda truce" remark. My God, the guy was righter than I was all along; he doesn't deserve this.)
Yeah, I guess Rob Hansen cuts right to the point. Of course this was going to be the reaction. The only reason that anyone could believe otherwise is an overdose on "Old Europe" chest-beating, and it's pretty sad that some people in the US actually need positive evidence. But they do.
We oughtn't be lecturing them. But many on the American right have been lecturing them, and saying dumb things about appeasement, and now we have, at the very least, a clear-cut case to point to: Osama bin Laden offered to let Europeans appease him, and a whole lot of European governments instantly declined. I don't suppose this will convince anyone who regards the EU as a collection of Vichy regimes, but it clears the air.
Why, Marshall asked, is CNN acting as if the public is made up of circus idiots? Well, the public isn't made up of circus idiots, but there are an amazing number of circus idiots who write op-ed columns.
One thing that is worrying me is that the buzz about this will keep people from voting. I'm already hearing statements to the effect that it's pointless. In my more paranoid moments I imagine that the RNC actually planted the Diebold story to sabotage get-out-the-vote efforts, but I suppose that has one more turn of the screw to it than is plausible.
Basically it's like this. When somebody carps about Donald Rumsfeld, it helps terrorists this much:
*
When Donald Rumsfeld creates a situation where terrorists are going around blowing up mosques and UN buildings, it helps terrorists this much:
***********************************
When Donald Rumsfeld carps about the danger of people carping at him, it helps the United States this much:
Back in May, Northrup complained about the stupidity of the DU stories he could find. He was pretty skeptical about the hysterical scare stories, but more importantly stressed that investigations like this one don't say a damn thing either way.
Yeah, my friends list seems to be populated with a decidedly older-than-average population, too. (The service's median age is 20, but the mode is 18.)
LiveJournal blogs also have RSS feeds, though how complete they are depends on whether you paid for your account or not.
My own blog is in the slightly insular, mostly teenage world of LiveJournal (how did I end up in that disreputable place, you ask? My wife pulled me in).
On LiveJournal there's an interesting tool called a "friends page" that effectively allows every user to assemble an ad hoc group blog consisting of people on their "friends list"; there's an intentional blurring of the distinction between group blogs, individual blogs and syndication aggregators. There are also "communities" that are more explicitly group blogs, and you can put a community on your friends page, too.
You mentioned that posts that require extra mousing bother you. On LJ, this is done with the "lj-cut" mechanism, and there's social pressure to put long posts behind the lj-cut because otherwise they'll clutter up the friends pages of other people unnecessarily. (There's more social pressure to do this with things like inline pictures and those stupid personality quizzes, that might actually consume extra bandwidth to a significant degree.)
So I've been very conscientious about lj-cutting everything. But as you point out, there's a usability cost to this as well, and perhaps I should take that into account.
(Or perhaps I should get the hell out of LiveJournal, but I've come to like the blurry-edged little community that I've settled into there, and I even managed to get my blog to validate most of the time, with great effort.)
Well, my own copy of Jaguar still hasn't arrived... probably tomorrow.
My friend, though, says I should be thankful: "Later is probably better in this case, if your system is currently working." Big, big software updates always have a bunch of weird bugs that only get ironed out in the x.y.1 release, as I know from experience on the production side.
But I want it anyway.
By the way, I wrote an article for MacEdition recently about the various vagaries of anti-aliasing in Mac OS X.
As of a couple of hours ago, this article was probably rendered obsolete by Jaguar. But I wouldn't know, since my copy won't arrive until tomorrow; I did play with it briefly on a flat panel iMac in the local Apple Store today but I couldn't see any differences from the various new anti-aliasing settings at all.
The difference I know about with IE on Windows doesn't have anything to do with plus signs; it's that the browser will not let the user resize text with the UI widget if it's been sized with Cascading Style Sheets using px (which are pixels, more or less), or physical size units such as pt, in, cm, etc. It will let the user resize if it's been set using em, percent, or relative font size keywords.
If you think this is confusing, it ain't the half of it.
Anyway, for various technical reasons, some buried in the mists of time and some still operative, many Web designers use px units to get the effects they want. So it's terribly annoying that IE has this basic accessibility problem with px units, even if one might deem it "correct" to forbid resizing px sizes from a very literal reading of the W3C spec.
(Jeffrey Zeldman famously insists that nothing but px really truly works. Personally, I think he overstates his case; his facts are all correct but I find the problems easier to work around than he does. On the other hand, I don't do elaborate designs for money to tight client specifications and he does. And, anyway, I fully agree with him that IE/Win should support resizing any and all text.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 5 |
| 2003 | 5 |
| 2002 | 32 |
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