Calimac, I went to your livejournal to see what you didn't like about Freedom and Necessity... and there learned that you stopped reading it on page 90 of the paperback edition.
Well, there are some authors whose work I might set aside after so slight a sampling, but surely Emma and Steve should not be in that company. They know their craft, and can generally be trusted to be up to something deliberate, so that an odd or jarring detail is in fact not a mistake but rather a clue to the world -- which, let me tell you, is not in the least what you seem to have assumed it to be.
If you decided you weren't going to enjoy the world they appeared to be building up, well, putting the book down is always your right as a reader. But to then imply that you, with your fragmentary experience, were in a position to tell TNH that "you were not able to apply your critical faculties to it...."!
Clearly, since you still live, you are much favored by the gods.
Clark: Yes, but it was one man. As opposed to -- how many hundreds who took part, or pretended not to see, or covered up afterwards? It takes a particular and unfortunately rare kind of heroism to defy the norms of everyone around you. When a culture goes bad, the sad thing is that a lot of people will just go along, into ever worse behavior.
You cannot rely on heroes; it is a fact of human nature that if you want to keep atrocities from happening, you need a system with rules and procedures that will reinforce the better norm and provide strong disincentives for deviation.
Or... in another context:
Accountability. Without it, there is no democracy.
Pardons. Yep.
Presidential pardons can be all-purpose, can't they? No specific charges need be listed? No need to say precisely what a person is being pardoned for, right? Like Nixon, who received a general Get Out Of Jail Free card, good for any and all offenses he might or might not have committed while president:
"Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."
Mind you, I remember how much controversy there was over that, back then. People worried that it would be setting a bad precedent....
In my experience, the most venomous anti-religious zealots tend to be people who were raised by religious zealots and have fought themselves almost free. They aren't arguing with any religious people actually present -- they're re-fighting battles with [often quite toxic] ideas that were dinned into them as young children, before they had any critical defenses. They are still, quite justifiably, angry about having been emotionally abused.
This has nothing to do with political left and right, except that the kind of people who engage in cruelty masquerading as religion have, in the US, attached themselves very visibly to the right wing. So naturally any opposition to the political right (I won't say the left -- you don't really have much of what most other people would call a left wing) is going to attract some walking wounded for whom the single largest issue in their lives is that the "religion" that tried to warp them as children must never, ever be allowed to take over the country.
They're not able to distinguish well between the fanatics they fear, and the (I think) still very substantial numbers of genuinely good, loving, generous people for whom religion is a central part of their lives. Part of the reason for this is that the fanatics, who really are quite scary, have spent a great deal of effort for many years trying to erase any public distinction between themselves and ordinary religious folk.
This is not the fault of the Democratic Party.
Me, I'm thinking that we're not through with surprises from Howard Dean. He came from nowhere to invigorate the Democratic party by telling the truth as he saw it. He hasn't quit. He has money, an engine to raise more money, and no spending limits before the convention. Just because he's no longer saying "pick me as the Democratic candidate," that doesn't mean he has to stop saying what he thinks.
In fact, he has far more freedom to do that than he had before. With no personal axe to grind, he will be able to say things that a candidate might have to think twice about. This is just a first example.
I don't think he's going to fade into irrelevance.
If he had, I suppose that would have to be called having the courage of his convictions.
About Bush: I have been wondering lately if he isn't somewhat dyslexic. If reading has always been very difficult, that would explain why he does as little reading as possible, and depends so much on other people for information. Also, if he grew up in a family environment that constantly belittled him and told him he was stupid, many of his other dismaying characteristics might well have evolved as coping mechanisms.
There are other theories -- he's gay and deep in the closet; he's a dry drunk; he's a textbook case of narcissism; he suffered brain damage from drug use... hey, they could none of them be true, or they could all be true at once, for all I know. What is clear, is that something is not right with the man.
And the handlers who foisted him upon, not just the USA, but the entire suffering world, deserve to rot in hell.
Hey, Chicago fans, I wasn't dissing your favorite city. I hoped I made it clear that I didn't equate this nebulous 'iconic' quality with being a good city to live in, or an interesting one to visit. No, what I'm talking about is an ability to wrap up a distinctive identity and hurl it at... a visitor, or even someone on the other side of the world who just hears about it. Impact. Image.
Texas as a state has it, though none of its cities do. Las Vegas has it. New Orleans has it. New York has it. Newark doesn't.
Chicago... well. Prohibition-era violence, speakeasys, Al Capone, the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Sure, that's a plus, having a past that sparked a TV series, but do people go to Chicago just to relive The Untouchables? Some, I suppose.
The Sears Tower? No. It's tall boxes. Functional. Utilitarian. The Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building aren't icons because they're tall. They're icons because they were built tall when skyscrapers were romantic exciting symbols of optimism about the future.
The Watertower is beautiful, but then... most cities can boast architecturally interesting monuments. The Museum of Science and Industry, now, that's a claim to fame.
Okay, and there's a poet. "Hog butcher to the world." Chicago is still that -- a hub of American commerce. One of the reasons I said "iffy" instead of striking it altogether is a vivid memory of trying to drive past Chicago at 3 in the morning, and being caught in a slow-moving traffic jam on an umpteen-lane superhighway (construction) that felt like it was 100% 18-wheelers for miles in every direction, except for little old us dwarfed in our passenger car. It was awe-inspiring, all those huge trucks, blood pumping through America's heart. But that was a personal, idiosyncratic experience. I don't imagine a lot of people have shared it. Not enough of them to have it count towards iconic, anyway.
Pizza? Nah. Pizza isn't Chicago, it's ubiquitous. Who doesn't have pizza? And jazz? Well, Chicago has some reputation there, but in terms of leveraging that into an image -- whoa, not in the same league with New Orleans.
What's that? The Chicago fire...? Okay, so a lot of people have heard about the cow -- but still, that's reaching. I mean, Rome burned, and it was the symbolic end of an empire. Chicago burned, and... went on to become a huge modern city.
In the end, I think Chicago is like Toronto. Big, very important, but too involved in just living to bother about projecting its image.
NYC, LA, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC, New Orleans... As someone who has spent at least some time in all of these cities proposed for iconic status (huh, and I'm not even American), I'd agree with all of them, except, hmmm... I'm squinting a little at Chicago, there. Maybe... Iffy.
It's not size of population, and it's not having a lot of fine people (or else Minneapolis, still my very favorite American city, would belong on the list -- and it doesn't.) The quality I'm thinking of as "iconic" is first, the sense that as a city you know exactly who you are, and then, the ability to project that sense to even a casual visitor. Snow-globe-worthy architectural monuments are one way of doing this, but some cities manage it without; consider Las Vegas.
When you live in Central Jersey, Philadelphia is only a short drive away. We go there from time to time just for fun. There's a great Convention Center, a real Chinatown, I like the architecture of downtown, and oh yes, the Ben Franklin museum is pretty cool. The place seems gracious, with a sense of history. Like San Francisco, it's a city with a distinct personality -- more than Minneapolis, even, which is another city I like a whole lot. On the side farther from us, there's the memorable Longwood Gardens.
Umm. Are you sure, Zizka, that you aren't just mixing it up with Pittsburgh?
I think you're seeing an instance of a more general truth, Jordin. People (and I include myself) are just no good at judging an unfamiliar risk. The first response seems to be to ignore it altogether, pretend it's not a risk at all. If something pushes the risk over a certain recognition threshold, the automatic reaction is to enormously overestimate the danger.
(It's a rock, it's a rock, it's only a funny-shaped rock, it... ohmigod it MOVED, it's a SABRE-TOOTHED TIGER, GAH, RUNRUNRUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!!) I suppose, amongst early humans, the ones who took the time to go through "Oh, maybe it's a plant blowing in the wind, no, wait, it could be a bunny-rabbit... too big, it might be a deer, no, maybe a sloth... a baby mammoth...?" didn't on average live to reproduce quite as often.
Once it's a familiar risk, especially once people have established some coping strategies, the response level goes back down, and quite high risks are often accepted matter-of-factly. This pattern seems to appear for everything from global warming to auto accidents.
The remarkable thing is that the alarm level generally correlates very poorly with the actual risk.
Jordin, I am the daughter of a nuclear physicist. The word "cyclotron" was an ordinary part of my vocabulary when I was three years old. I handled a lump of pitchblende when I was five. I think nuclear power is a fine idea. I most certainly have not bought into the exaggerated "scare stories" about radioactivity.
I was raised, however, to take reasonable precautions around radioactive substances, and I know that having any radioactive material lodged permanently in your tissues is many times worse, risk-wise, than being in the same room with the stuff.
By and large, it falls to the ground and just stays there.
Doesn't that depend a whole lot on the particle size? I don't suppose a fist-sized chunk of DU is any danger at all. It's probably pretty much okay even if the particles are like beach sand, because uranium is so dense. If the munitions exploding grind the DU to flour, though, that's another story. They have sandstorms in Iraq the way other places have hurricanes or typhoons, storms that can move whole mountains of sand. And it's not like houses in Iraq are generally airtight. A sufficiently fine DU powder... well, it's going to be really hard to avoid breathing some of it in. So, while I'm not pressing any panic buttons, I *am* saying that it is going way, way beyond the evidence to assert confidently that DU weaponry presents no danger to people trying to live in the region after the battle.
My asbestos comment was made to point out that tiny particles of supposedly harmless stuff (which asbestos was thought to be when it was used so extensively as insulation) have a way of getting into everything, once you allow them into the environment. It took decades, and a lot of deaths, to establish that asbestos was carcinogenic. In fact, it turned out that the specific particle size had a lot to do with how dangerous it was. DU is a heavy metal; intimate contact with it is likely to be somewhat bad for you even apart from its radioactivity.
As for the other elements you mention, I assure you that I would be equally opposed to an operation that ground any of them into a fine powder and strewed it about at random. I repeat, I'm not screeching "Horrors, horrors, RADIOACTIVITY!" I'm just saying that it is way premature to go around saying DU rounds are not a hazard. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting they might be, there is a powerful interest group saying very loudly that they are perfectly safe, and I remember that asbestos was once supposed to be inert, too. I want the research to be done, is all.
Anyway, I'm not looking for a fight -- I imagine I must have inadvertently used a keyword or two that set off a prepared rant against a position I do not occupy.
being a heavy metal, aerosolized DU would hardly stay in circulation for very long?
Er, and... so then what happens to the fine powder? It magically dematerializes? ...Or does it fall to the ground, to get on shoes and hands and faces, to be blown about by sandstorms and breathed in, to be tracked into houses, to get into food...
DU is a very weak emitter of radiation, but it effectively stays radioactive forever, in terms of human lifetimes. Once you've distributed copious quantities of finely pulverized DU into an environment, good luck living in that place without getting some of it lodged inside your body in direct contact with living tissue.
Asbestos isn't radioactive at all, it's only a fibrous rock, but there's a reason they don't use it for house insulation any more.
Just a few comments on the prairie provinces:
Saskatchwan's Tommy Douglas and the CCF, the farm-based precursor of the New Democrats, gave Canada the working model for our health care system. (He's on my list of 20th century greats.)
As for Manitoba: it has been a polarized two-party province for longer than I can remember: Conservatives and New Democrats. The Liberals have rarely managed to find a foothold. The left-wing tradition is very strong and deep. Try googling the Winnipeg General Strike. Throughout the McCarthy era, Winnipeg persistently re-elected one Communist alderman to the city council. (Not more than one; they didn't actually want Communists to run things. They just figured it was good for social justice to have that point of view represented.)
There's always been a deeply conservative element in Manitoba, too. The two sides alternately gain the upper hand. When Manitobans figure one side has been in office long enough, they boot them out and elect the other for a while.
Glenn Murray is a great guy. I got to know him a little in my one venture into civic protest activism, when a group of citizens organized to oppose squandering more money than the city could afford on a hockey arena... and it wouldn't have kept the Jets a viable operation anyway. He was a city councillor then. He listened, and articulated our objections in council meetings. Naturally he's a hero to me.
What would my list say about my politics?
(Some of these would be lifetime achievement awards, some based on having done one very big thing right.)
Alan Turing
Alexander Fleming
Marie Curie
Carl Jung
Diana Wynne Jones
Nellie McClung
Fritz Kreisler
Joan Baez
J.R.R. Tolkien
Margery Allingham
Alfred Hitchcock
Groff Conklin
Walt Disney
Winston Churchill
Pierre Trudeau
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mickey Hart
Tommy Douglas
John Maynard Keynes
Robert F. Kennedy
I'd likely make a different list tomorrow, though.
Whoa. Calm down, FS. You must have been watching too much cable news. This is not an (ooh, scary sound effects) *** energy crisis ***. It is a perfectly ordinary power outage. Some big surge briefly overloaded some component of the transmission network, other components shut down in self-protection, it's taking a while to bring things back up. You don't want the surge caused by bringing generators back online to shut down other generators again, so the job has to be done gradually. While the system is coming back online, people affected are, perforce, using a great deal less energy than they would normally. Other than that, nothing is different, energy-wise, from the day before yesterday.
Granted, the effects were way more widespread this time than they ought to have been, but that is a design question, and has precisely zero to do with people sitting in a car with the engine idling, using up gasoline.
Would you have had the same knee-jerk reaction if Patrick had said that they decided to drive off to, oh say, someplace scenic in Pennsylvania with his brother, just for fun? I doubt it. But a pleasure trip would have used more gas.
Re the 1980 election in Canada: Joe Clark was elected PM in 1979 to a minority government on a promise to cut taxes. He discovered that Canada was in a fiscal mess, announced bravely that he was going to govern "as if he had a majority" (ie, he wasn't going to listen to either the NDP or the SoCreds, who held the balance of power), brought forward a budget with a bunch of austerity measures including a sharp increase in federal gasoline taxes, predictably lost the support of both minority parties and was defeated, and went into the election of 1980 committed to implement the defeated budget.
You can't quite call Trudeau evil, or a genius, for taking advantage of all this blundering about to win the election. Of course, once he got into office with a majority government, he promptly raised the gasoline taxes... thereby proving that he was at least 'genius' enough to grasp the basic fact of the parliamentary system: that wishing doesn't make it so, and it's a lot easier to govern like a majority if you've actually got a majority. And he certainly didn't give the impression during the election that he was going to raise the tax... one might characterize that as evil, I suppose.
So you could say both your Canadian friends were right. But the one that put it down to Tory mistakes was closer to the truth.
Hey, I remember the peculiar number cropping up. 18181, I believe it was. It showed up for both Democrats and Republicans, a lot more often than you would intuitively expect. People talked about it, and there are 380 pages in Google, some of them seeming to be official vote tallies.
Looked more like a software bug to me, though, than a thumb on the scales.
Ah, well that's different, then; at least you're self-consistent. Tell you what, Daniel, I'll wander over and read your blog, and stop bothering the nice folks here like Mary Kay.
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