The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Chad Orzel:

A colleague once pointed out that most of these aren't all that taxing, as the words and the tunes live in different parts of the brain. He decided that a real challenge would be to sing the "Gilligan's Island" theme to the tune of the theme from "The Brady Bunch." And vice versa. Those songs, he figured, share the same neurons...

He worked out how to do it, but I can't quite remember how, since just thinking about the concept manages to get both tunes stuck in my head until I can pry them out with the aid of filthy rugby songs.

Timothy Burke wrote, "I still stick by something I wrote in October 2001, that if the first thing one has to say about September 11th is "What did we do to provoke this attack? How are we at fault? What can we do differently?" then one's priorities are out of whack in a way that has very large troubling implications."

The problem is that this attitude is all too easily extended to those for whom "How are we at fault?" was the second thing they had to say, or the fifth, or the twenty-ninth...

While I agree that those questions weren't the first things to leap to mind on September 11th, they are questions that need to be asked sometime. There's nothing unpatriotic in noting that our Middle East policy has not exactly been a shining example of our deep committment to human rights and freedoms, lo these past five decades or so. Indeed, it's counterproductive not to ask "What could we do differently?" at some point in this process.

But there's a small and shrill group of people for whom any attempt to reflect on our role in creating the monstrous clusterfuck that is the modern Middle East is something to be derided as "America-hating." Which gets tiresome rather quickly, and leads me to be leery of any statement like that quoted above.

There's been some interesting things said in the "causes of terrorism" thread of the discussion, that I'll have to think about a little more.

The one factor that nobody's mentioned yet, which is probably important, is the fact that, independent of wealth or poverty, most of the governments in the Middle East are wildly corrupt and brutally repressive. The combination of those two factors tends, I think, to push dissent into more extreme and violent forms

A question that's been thrown out by a couple of rabid right-wingers (of the Den Bestian school of thought that holds that there's something inherently wrong with Islamic culture) is "Where are all the sane and moderate Arab dissidents?" The answer is "In prison or dead, thanks to the current regimes." Moderate, peaceful democratic activists in Egypt are arrested, run through kangaroo courts, and jailed for long periods of time for little more than publicly criticizing the government. This has been going on for years, to the point where hardly anyone bothers to be a moderate, peaceful democratic activist any more, as there's no future in it.

The only people who criticize the government and stay out of prison are the violent religious wing nuts. Which means that, when young middle-class Egyptians look around and find themselves dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, whacko Islamic fundamentalism looks a whole lot more attractive than it otherwise might, if Egypt had a functioning political opposition with a halfway sane platform.

Add in the fact that the governments doing the repressing are getting US foreign aid to do so, and the further fact that the state-run media spend huge amounts of time pushing the line that the international Zionist conspiracy, not rampant political corruption, is responsible for the sorry state of the economy, and, well, you've got an explosive situation.

I find myself somewhere in between "introvert" and "extrovert" in the article's terms. I do sometimes find it exhausting to have to make small talk with large groups of people, but on the other hand, I also inherited a small part of my father's gift for striking up a conversation with absolutely anybody about any topic.

And, as Kate can testify, when confronted with a group of silent introverts, my natural reaction is to babble more or less constantly, in hopes of getting some sort of response. I probably drive you all batshit, for which I apologize.

I can also sort of see both sides of the fear of public speaking thing. The first time I had to give a conference talk, a couple of people commented on the fact that I kept walking around while I was talking-- I was doing that, because I was afraid that my knees would buckle if I tried to stand still...

I don't get quite that nervous any more, but the first day of class always feels like stepping out on a tightrope wearing steel-toed boot. But it's a real kick when a talk or a class goes well, and I've grown to really enjoy public speaking in those settings.

I'm sort of torn on this (and, full disclosure, posted a tepid defense of MWO a while ago).

In general terms, I agree with what Patrick and the guys at Spinsanity are saying-- the sort of shrill ranting that MWO is prone to adds little to political discourse in this country. What I'd like to see is more calm, reasoned discussion of issues, and less ranting and raving.

The problem with this, though, is that the level of discourse has already been lowered, and only on one side. Coulter and Limbaugh and Horowitz and Sullivan feel perfectly free to spew bile all over the place, and hammer away on their opponents with blatant lies, even after they've been called on it.

And the hell of it is, it works. Lies and spittle-flecked ranting make great television, while calm, reasoned discourse makes for television that's about as compelling as public access cable. Splashy stuff makes headlines, and the right-wing ranters have exploited this to great effect.

The question then becomes: what can you do about it? And the simple fact is that in modern electoral politics, when calm and reasoned discourse collides with irrational ranting, the ranting wins. It's the same as the "negative campaigning" issue-- every election cycle, we get one story after another where voters are polled and say that they deplore negative campaigning. And every election cycle, the candidates who dive right into the sewer and swim around flinging crap at their opponents win. Everyone hates negative campaigning, but it works. If it didn't work, they'd stop doing it.

So we're left in a terrible spot. What Spinsanity is asking for-- and, to their credit, what they're doing-- is to meet lies with facts, rants with reason. It's essentially the nonviolent resistence approach, to seize and hold the Moral High Ground of responsible politics, and refuse to be budged no matter how much crap your opponent flings.

This suffers from the "Gandhi vs. the Draka" problem-- nonviolent resistence is a wonderful tactic, provided your opponent cares about his image. Gandhi was able to successfully resist the British, and Martin Luther King had great success here because the British and Americans want very badly for people to think that we're Good Guys. Stalin would've machine-gunned every last Indian before breakfast, and sent the survivors to the North Pole.

Spinsanity's approach isn't successful against the Limbaughs of the world, because they simply don't care. They can debunk every last word in Ann Coulter's ridiculous book, and it won't make an ounce of difference, because she doesn't give a damn. She probably already knows that half of what she's saying is blatantly false, and the other half is badly distorted, but it works, and she's not going to give it up no matter how many times you calmly refute her.

Which leaves you with a choice between behaving responsibly, even admirably, and getting creamed, or sinking to the deplorable level of your opponents to fight them on their own ground. Short of some miraculous transformation in the way the mass media work, or the way the American people think, those are the only choices.

Presented with that choice, I can't say I'd go the MWO route. I'm not averse to the occasional rant, but I don't think I could live with myself if I went in for the endless mud-slinging that you need to do to be effective (and I'm almost positive that Kate wouldn't live with me if I did...). I'll try to stay civil, and do my best to ignore or calmly rebut the lies and smears of the less savory elements of the "blogosphere," and avoid sinking to their level. (I don't always succeed, but I do try...)

But I can't say I'm really unhappy to see somebody else getting in there and fighting dirty. It's vaguely regrettable, but I just don't see a workable alternative.

The link works now, on a different computer, using Internet Exploder instead of Opera. I'm not sure which of those factors made the difference.

For what it's worth, I also saw the "Current Issue" as June 2002 when I tried earlier, and it didn't work. It's now properly showing September 2002.

I'll take my bad computer karma out of your comments section, now.

You might want to check the link-- it 404's on me. Searching their site for "Schneier" turns up a bunch of similar URL's, which also throw a "page not found" error. I don't know if this is a temporary glitch, or a subscriber-only link, or what.

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