The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by eyelessgame:

No matter how horrible the consequences of comparing as talented a wordsmith as SJB to what I'm going to compare him to, I'm still not prepared to sign on to apocalysm, whether it's Christian or Marxist.

Bush has ridiculed 'managing the peace' and uses that ridicule as a justification for his actions in the Middle East. I think 'managing the peace' is how societies work -- internationally and nationally -- and they are in danger of falling apart whenever they turn their back on it, and don't recover till they get back to doing it again.

I think the liberal, non-revolutionary position has always been a position of managing the peace: managing slow movement between (for example) revolutionary dissatisfaction on one hand and capital/ownership/domination on the other, letting things improve incrementally (because everyone wants them to), accepting setbacks, knowing there's injustice because humans are, some of the time, unjust.

I think it's ironic that the same sort of ridicule Bush has shoveled onto six decades of consistent foreign policy -- i.e. overturn the system because it's irredeemable -- is in this thread coming from, shall we say, completely different quarters.

I've always seen a fair bit of similarity among Christian milennialists, libertarian anarchists, and revolutionary socialists; they each know what's right, and in all three cases it seems to me that they reach this point from an abstruse and complex and scholarly and seductive, but still oversimplified and incomplete, notion of how humans work. And I freely admit it's a logical error to believe that just because a Trotskyite's rhetoric sounds similar to a Christian eschatologist or libertarian anarchist, that he's therefore making the same category of mistake.

So I could be wrong. But I don't find any of the three philosophies compelling -- and I wouldn't want to live in any of their post-eschatological worlds anyway -- and I believe that humans are more complicated than any of those three groups believe they are. I don't think socialism will be less amenable to corruption than capitalism, because people won't stop finding ways to power. And I think societal progress -- people's lives becoming safer, richer, more pleasant -- happens pretty much solely from managing the peace.

Neessary war - whether revolution or defense -- happens only when enough people don't have any better options. Living through a war sucks. Sometimes societies reach that point. I really don't think we will. Too many of us have too much to lose.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Mark, you illustrate exactly what is wrong with political reporting today.

"The liberals say X, the conservatives say Y. What does that say about the truth?" To the lazy reporter, the truth is therefore straight down the middle. But what it really means about the truth is exactly nothing.

The truth is the truth. Sometimes it matches what one side says. If the Beltway press thinks it's okay to report on the state of Hillary Clinton's marriage, but not on the state of Rudy Giuliani's or John McCain's divorces, the press has a rightward tilt on the topic.

It doesn't matter whether or not the source of that data is a liberal Democrat. It's still the truth. It's still the truth even if you can also find a conservative who bleats at you that the press is liberal.

That someone says something does not automatically confer legitimacy on the claim. That there are two points of view does not mean that the truth sits balanced between them. If you do not learn that, you, Mark, have been trained to be part of the problem, not the solution.

I don't think the press has a rightward tilt. From what I can see, the press in general is lazy. The Beltway press in particular has the social dynamics of the movie Heathers. And the Republican party, in particular, has learned that the press will treat any statement, however extreme, as "one point of view", and any opposing statement, no matter how mainstream or correct, as "the opposing point of view", and suggest that the truth lies balanced between. It is therefore to the advantage of the unscrupulous to tell as preposterous a lie as they can get away with.

And they know that the press will provide cover, because no matter how far to the right it moves, the conservatives will never stop saying it's liberal.

Terry - From the inside: Rummy was trying to make the Army into the Marine Corps (a gross oversimplification). A task force based structure meant to win quick battles and leave.

Ok, that makes sense. After all, the Navy has a marines (SEALS). And the Marines have a navy, and the Navy has an air force, and the Coast Guard has a navy and an air force, and the Army has an air force, and the Navy has a coast guard, and the Marines have an army... (does the Air Force have a navy?)

So of course we should make a new set of marines for the Army, since having just two sets of any of our armed forces isn't enough, obviously.

(I never understood why the Navy has its own air force and marines, when we already have an Air Force and a Marines. But I'm a peacenik.)

"Take arms against a sea of troubles" is a mixed metaphor, nobody would actually take arms against the sea.

I call Asimov shout-out...

...their own fault, yadda yadda personal responsibility, yadda yadda I regenerate 5 hp/round, yadda yadda...

Yes, that's nice, Ayn, sit up and beg and you can have a dollar. But now, after the disaster, we have a ruined city of refugees, looking remarkably similar to a city that has undergone a major terrorist disruption, e.g. dirty bomb, chemical or biological attack.

And this is the federal response? Five days later we have tens of thousands without food or water?

Four years after 9/11 our Department of Homeland Fuckup can't do a better job than this? Has no one pointed out the similarities to a response to a terror attack -- what HS was supposed to be ready for?

I nominate Dave Sim for 1 Kings -- I'd like to see his Elijah.

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