Back to the fray - 25-29 November
Nov. 29th, 2010 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood morning, travelers. 24 November was National Opt-Out Day, where people decide they don't want the porno scanners and hopefully also ask to avoid the fondling, as well. After all, this TSA technique is PedoBear approved, not to mention what kind of havoc it plays with "bad touch" instructions. And when attempting to demonstrate how not bad it actually was, it ended up reinforcing the idea that it's pretty bad.
The paranoid culture is spreading - A principal decided that he didn't beleive the account of two male students being sick at his school, so he drove to their house, let himself in, and went to the boys bedrooms to make sure.
Finally, for those interested in upcoming film, the book Bitch Is The New Black, one part finding a good partner and the other part growing up as the child of a lesbian mother, already has its film option and is in production. More LGBT-friendly movies, please? Hopefully not languishing in indie studios with limited releases, as well.
Out in the world today, now that the fake's been outed, General Petraeus says, "Well, of course I suspected he was a fake all along". Because it would be utterly wrong to say, "Yep. We got suckered. Joke's on us." - it might make people think that what we're doing there isn't Vitally Important to National Security and Freedom.
Iran hits the news twice - once with a temporary stoppage of their enrichment program, according to IAEA inspeactors, and once more with a push to oust the President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by the parliament that was quashed by the Supreme Leader.
A senior United States military official says that conventional forces will be sufficient to keep a lid on the spat between North and South Korea. This won't stop calls for the United States to change its approach to the North Koreans, and for them "not to give in to demands", but it probably means those calls will fall on deaf ears.
Kenya's prime minister has ordered a crackdown against gay men and lesbians, making it very difficult to believe the Century of the Fruitbat will be along very swiftly to several parts of Africa.
The United Nations is doing its part to retard growth as well, passing a resolution (again) calling for the banning of speech that religious people find offensive.
The Russian Parliament formally condemned Joseph Stalin for mass executions of Polish people during World War II.
Finally, if you want to know what it's like being in the middle of a peaceful protest when the police appear, and what happens afterward, read this account. The behavior of the police in this scenario is intended to make people fearful, irrational, and submissive. The message is effectively killed because the people who should be hearing it aren't listening, choosing instead to send out the dogs.
Domestically, A Minnesota politician claims he was just checking up on his girlfriend and was unaware of where he was when he was detained for having a loaded gun in the Planned Parenthood parking lot. Police have been unable to verify his claim, mostly because he lacks a lot of contract information for the woman he claims was his girlfriend, having not much more than an on-line contact handle that he doesn't even recall the right site for. As stories go, that one's pretty incredible.
A part-time judge in Tennessee had comments posted for a bit about how the United States military should evict all the gay men but keep all the lesbians in so they can be subjected to corrective rape. Where he chose to air his views out quickly took the remarks down, but not before they spread.
My cynical side says this is part of why corporations were overjoyed at the Citizens United decision - former GOP Senator Tom DeLay was convicted on money laundering charges stemming from his PAC's funneling of corporate donation money to the RNC, who in turn funneled individual donor money to several Texas state office candidates running at the time of the corporate donations. Yeah, that looks pretty much like a laundering to get around the Texas law forbidding direct corporate contributions to candidates in state races.
Several looks at the country as it is - How Bush v. Gore showed the Supreme Court wanted to protect white dudes over anything else, especially considering how the court's makeup and decisions affected the country afterward, a rather pessimistic view of globalized culture in a mere 25 years, backed up by a view that points out that the austerity model is not produci ggood effects for the people, even if it is making the businesses and banks happy, and another that points out how much the government is operating to enrich the richest and ensure the rest of us do more with less.
And then there's the couple who bought a house, and were told it was all fine by the inspector...excepting for the part where it was used as a meth lab. Apparently, testing to make sure that the house is clear of those things isn't on your standard home inspection. Nor is it apparently required to be disclosed on any of the listing paperwork.
Ah, sciences - Virginia Tech scientists have been retained to figure out how certain varieties of snake remain airborne without wings or gliding folds.
There's also the scientists that managed to cool down photons without losing them so as to make a new type of light source.
Medicine is likely to see a boost with new imaging techniques taht can find cancerous cells faster, and an ultrasound device that interfaces directly with cell phone and Wi-Fi networks, which could mean that images captured in more remote places could still be sent, processed, and examined by experts in more urban areas and have a swift turnaround time for results.
And a possible can of worms with a search engine for other torrent sites being seized and shut down, despite the fact that it hosts no infringing content nor any means of getting such from its domain - it strictly uses other sites search functions.
And opinions, where the Slacktivist explains more fully why Mohler's position on evolution and the Bible is unworkable - his way of saying he disbelieves in evolution is to deny its existence and then claim that because he denies it, it ceases to exist. Despite saying elsewhere that if evolution is true, then the Bible is a book of lies, and There Can Only Be One. Slacktivist mentions that someone who is so invested in that Us versus Them narrative would not callously try to avoid the evidence of evolution and just deny it, but would instead be working mightily to disprove evolution so as to retain the inerrancy of the Bible. The callous disregard is what makes the Slacktivist think that Moheler is peddling false maps - in denying something and hoping it goes away on the force of his denial alone, it indicates that he doesn't really believe what he's saying. (Genesis is tough, though, because, strictly speaking, it's a collection of origin stories, not an eyewitness account of the beginning of the universe and the machinations of its Creator.
Mr. Herbert asks us to remember the Kennedy era, and the optimism and spirit that pervaded it, once where we believed the real spirit of "Yes We Can", without the corresponding chorus of "Hell No You Can't". We put a person on Luna and brought them back safely - it certainly seems possible that we can rebuild our institutions and improve them to be pinnacles of achievement. But when we have a need to smack down radio personalities with legions of followers for not knowing what they were talking about with regard to new vehicles, it does seem like we're still spinning our wheels. And we think Lockheed wanting to go to the dark side of Luna isn't ambitious enough. How about dedicating themselves to improving the infrastructure on Terra and toward finding a way to not have to build war machines to fight battles over resources and to fight each other?
Mr. York makes a reasonable point in discussing the cases of civilian trials of alleged enemy combatants, the good point being that a civilian trial seems much like the Star Chamber when it's understood that even if the civilians acquit, there will be other ways to continue detaining the alleged combatants. Without the risk of a real acquittal and freeing, it does seem rather silly to try someone in civilian court instead of shuffling them off to the military tribunals, where the standards of evidence appear to be looser and conviction more likely. The understated second point, that those venues and the facilities that enable them should be used and preferred because of their ability to hold someone until they can be convicted, is a horrible and rotten point, mostly for reasons discussed previously about the legality of indefinite detention and the track record of detainees and intelligence-gathering in American custody over the last decade.
Taking that point, attaching weights and cement shoes to it, and drowning it in the sea of unreasonableness, however, is Mr. Sowell, who has a litany of reasons why we should think the current administration doesn't care one whit about protecting its people, including the regular chestnut of "contempt for ordinary Americans" that applies equally as well to other administrators as this one, based on the criteria. It's the "boot on the neck" comment, the threats given to people about their "misinformation" who are just speaking truth about the health care mandates resulting in increased costs, the refusal to say that all terrorists are Muslims while also saying that terrorists might be hiding in the fanatic wings of anti-choicers, associates of veterans, and "Second Amendment remedies" advocates, the "coward" call-out on race, and the long history of Barack Obama's association with People Who Hate America. That's the contempt part, the "insecurity" part is the capture of the undocumented, who were then released on their own recognizance and disappeared, the civilian court trials of people who, in his opinion, deserve neither Geneva Convention protections nor Constitutaional protections, which results in revealing confidential sources and making them targets for other terrorists, and the continued reluctance to engage in racial and religious profiling that should have been implemented already, but for the altar of political correctness that Obaam bows down before. It all apparently comes home to roost and gets crystalized in the new grope-tastic pornographic TSA and its policies, all entirely the fault of Barack Obama. It's a view that suggests the world came into being in 2008 and the previous administrator wasn't responsible for any of the security theater that was just escalated, didn't put in place the mechanisms of capture and trial-less detention that are now being advocated for, ignores that he was actually also not in favor of religious profiling and declaring that all Muslims are terrorists, and basically lionizes him for Keeping America Safe and exonerating him of all the Bad Stuff that he did.
In the end, it's as Schnier points out - The Terrorists are doing it on the cheap and basically letting our collective panic do most of the destructive work for them. Columns like Sowell's aren't helping us realize what kind of rubes we're being - they're fanning the flames.
Still-unfunny comedian David Limbaugh pleads for us to be saved from the intellectuals...in a column that asks us to be saved from the ideologues. His description of how "liberals think ordianry people, especially conservatives, are stupid" (hey, familiar-looking talking point there) seems more rooted in the difference on how liberals and conservatives see the world differently. Choosing to see the expiration of tax cuts as a tax increase while ignoring the additional reality that continuing those tax cuts would blast additional holes in the deficit, a very inconvenient truth for the party that claims to be fiscally responsible, is one example. The further arguments about how tax cuts are really just letting people keep more of their earned money, and the historical record shows that reductions in tax rates results in economic growth are staples of conservative reality, and they ignore the general failure of trickle-down economics and the very weak stimulative effect of tax cuts on the middle and working classes, which is generally where liberals stake the effectiveness metrics for policies. Finally, his documented evidence of the conteempt intellectuals have for ordinary people requires you to look at it with the assumption that the phrase "people are dumb panicky animals, and you know it" isn't true. That's not necessarily borne out by the historical record, but it's also a staple of conservative reality that Americans are the best and most exceptional at all things, including rational thought and voting. Excepting for those points that have been officially disavowed, and even then, there are still pockets that think that was a mistake.
So, yes, it's accurate to say that intellectuals have some contempt for the average person and the conservative, but it's usually grounded in their reality, the one where there's plenty of evidence that conservatives and people can be goaded, frightened, or otherwise manipulated by their emotions into doing things that their minds would say is wrong, if they were only able to stop having their emotions yanked on. Or that politicians with a gift for gaffes are routinely still being listened to as serious wonks, but that cuts both ways.
Elsewhere, the case that feminism is and should be about freeing women to be sexy on their own terms, when they want to be sexy, fighting both the insistence that women be sexy all the time as part of their expected social role (status quo) and the reactionary perception that feminism is about Serious Business with no traces of sexuality (or at least conventionally-held sexuality). A further case for good feminism is that good relationships are not built on gender roles, but on good communication, resolving difficulties, being clear about expectations, and finding what works for both partners. Finally, looking into what goes into the kinds of images that feed societal expectations and pictures - the auctioning of marked up shots of Playboy centerfolds, directing the image manipulators to do significant work on top of the model's shots.
Out of opinions, a strong case to discontinue the narrative of "a nation of immigrants" when referring to the United States and to replace it with sometime more accurate - a nation of settlers and conquerors. Certainly draws history into a better narrative when you do it that way - it makes more sense.
Last for tonight, a letter talking frankly about Cassius Clay's decision not to be drafted into fighting the Vietnam War, and a letter from one Gene Rodenberry about how his new show should be pitched and what requirements executives and others have to give it a fair chance.
Ah, and a site that dedicates itself to all the offenses against good grammar that the Twilight Saga committed in its tale of Isabella Sue, the girl immune to vampire powers, and her stalker boyfriend-then-husband, Edward.
The paranoid culture is spreading - A principal decided that he didn't beleive the account of two male students being sick at his school, so he drove to their house, let himself in, and went to the boys bedrooms to make sure.
Finally, for those interested in upcoming film, the book Bitch Is The New Black, one part finding a good partner and the other part growing up as the child of a lesbian mother, already has its film option and is in production. More LGBT-friendly movies, please? Hopefully not languishing in indie studios with limited releases, as well.
Out in the world today, now that the fake's been outed, General Petraeus says, "Well, of course I suspected he was a fake all along". Because it would be utterly wrong to say, "Yep. We got suckered. Joke's on us." - it might make people think that what we're doing there isn't Vitally Important to National Security and Freedom.
Iran hits the news twice - once with a temporary stoppage of their enrichment program, according to IAEA inspeactors, and once more with a push to oust the President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by the parliament that was quashed by the Supreme Leader.
A senior United States military official says that conventional forces will be sufficient to keep a lid on the spat between North and South Korea. This won't stop calls for the United States to change its approach to the North Koreans, and for them "not to give in to demands", but it probably means those calls will fall on deaf ears.
Kenya's prime minister has ordered a crackdown against gay men and lesbians, making it very difficult to believe the Century of the Fruitbat will be along very swiftly to several parts of Africa.
The United Nations is doing its part to retard growth as well, passing a resolution (again) calling for the banning of speech that religious people find offensive.
The Russian Parliament formally condemned Joseph Stalin for mass executions of Polish people during World War II.
Finally, if you want to know what it's like being in the middle of a peaceful protest when the police appear, and what happens afterward, read this account. The behavior of the police in this scenario is intended to make people fearful, irrational, and submissive. The message is effectively killed because the people who should be hearing it aren't listening, choosing instead to send out the dogs.
Domestically, A Minnesota politician claims he was just checking up on his girlfriend and was unaware of where he was when he was detained for having a loaded gun in the Planned Parenthood parking lot. Police have been unable to verify his claim, mostly because he lacks a lot of contract information for the woman he claims was his girlfriend, having not much more than an on-line contact handle that he doesn't even recall the right site for. As stories go, that one's pretty incredible.
A part-time judge in Tennessee had comments posted for a bit about how the United States military should evict all the gay men but keep all the lesbians in so they can be subjected to corrective rape. Where he chose to air his views out quickly took the remarks down, but not before they spread.
My cynical side says this is part of why corporations were overjoyed at the Citizens United decision - former GOP Senator Tom DeLay was convicted on money laundering charges stemming from his PAC's funneling of corporate donation money to the RNC, who in turn funneled individual donor money to several Texas state office candidates running at the time of the corporate donations. Yeah, that looks pretty much like a laundering to get around the Texas law forbidding direct corporate contributions to candidates in state races.
Several looks at the country as it is - How Bush v. Gore showed the Supreme Court wanted to protect white dudes over anything else, especially considering how the court's makeup and decisions affected the country afterward, a rather pessimistic view of globalized culture in a mere 25 years, backed up by a view that points out that the austerity model is not produci ggood effects for the people, even if it is making the businesses and banks happy, and another that points out how much the government is operating to enrich the richest and ensure the rest of us do more with less.
And then there's the couple who bought a house, and were told it was all fine by the inspector...excepting for the part where it was used as a meth lab. Apparently, testing to make sure that the house is clear of those things isn't on your standard home inspection. Nor is it apparently required to be disclosed on any of the listing paperwork.
Ah, sciences - Virginia Tech scientists have been retained to figure out how certain varieties of snake remain airborne without wings or gliding folds.
There's also the scientists that managed to cool down photons without losing them so as to make a new type of light source.
Medicine is likely to see a boost with new imaging techniques taht can find cancerous cells faster, and an ultrasound device that interfaces directly with cell phone and Wi-Fi networks, which could mean that images captured in more remote places could still be sent, processed, and examined by experts in more urban areas and have a swift turnaround time for results.
And a possible can of worms with a search engine for other torrent sites being seized and shut down, despite the fact that it hosts no infringing content nor any means of getting such from its domain - it strictly uses other sites search functions.
And opinions, where the Slacktivist explains more fully why Mohler's position on evolution and the Bible is unworkable - his way of saying he disbelieves in evolution is to deny its existence and then claim that because he denies it, it ceases to exist. Despite saying elsewhere that if evolution is true, then the Bible is a book of lies, and There Can Only Be One. Slacktivist mentions that someone who is so invested in that Us versus Them narrative would not callously try to avoid the evidence of evolution and just deny it, but would instead be working mightily to disprove evolution so as to retain the inerrancy of the Bible. The callous disregard is what makes the Slacktivist think that Moheler is peddling false maps - in denying something and hoping it goes away on the force of his denial alone, it indicates that he doesn't really believe what he's saying. (Genesis is tough, though, because, strictly speaking, it's a collection of origin stories, not an eyewitness account of the beginning of the universe and the machinations of its Creator.
Mr. Herbert asks us to remember the Kennedy era, and the optimism and spirit that pervaded it, once where we believed the real spirit of "Yes We Can", without the corresponding chorus of "Hell No You Can't". We put a person on Luna and brought them back safely - it certainly seems possible that we can rebuild our institutions and improve them to be pinnacles of achievement. But when we have a need to smack down radio personalities with legions of followers for not knowing what they were talking about with regard to new vehicles, it does seem like we're still spinning our wheels. And we think Lockheed wanting to go to the dark side of Luna isn't ambitious enough. How about dedicating themselves to improving the infrastructure on Terra and toward finding a way to not have to build war machines to fight battles over resources and to fight each other?
Mr. York makes a reasonable point in discussing the cases of civilian trials of alleged enemy combatants, the good point being that a civilian trial seems much like the Star Chamber when it's understood that even if the civilians acquit, there will be other ways to continue detaining the alleged combatants. Without the risk of a real acquittal and freeing, it does seem rather silly to try someone in civilian court instead of shuffling them off to the military tribunals, where the standards of evidence appear to be looser and conviction more likely. The understated second point, that those venues and the facilities that enable them should be used and preferred because of their ability to hold someone until they can be convicted, is a horrible and rotten point, mostly for reasons discussed previously about the legality of indefinite detention and the track record of detainees and intelligence-gathering in American custody over the last decade.
Taking that point, attaching weights and cement shoes to it, and drowning it in the sea of unreasonableness, however, is Mr. Sowell, who has a litany of reasons why we should think the current administration doesn't care one whit about protecting its people, including the regular chestnut of "contempt for ordinary Americans" that applies equally as well to other administrators as this one, based on the criteria. It's the "boot on the neck" comment, the threats given to people about their "misinformation" who are just speaking truth about the health care mandates resulting in increased costs, the refusal to say that all terrorists are Muslims while also saying that terrorists might be hiding in the fanatic wings of anti-choicers, associates of veterans, and "Second Amendment remedies" advocates, the "coward" call-out on race, and the long history of Barack Obama's association with People Who Hate America. That's the contempt part, the "insecurity" part is the capture of the undocumented, who were then released on their own recognizance and disappeared, the civilian court trials of people who, in his opinion, deserve neither Geneva Convention protections nor Constitutaional protections, which results in revealing confidential sources and making them targets for other terrorists, and the continued reluctance to engage in racial and religious profiling that should have been implemented already, but for the altar of political correctness that Obaam bows down before. It all apparently comes home to roost and gets crystalized in the new grope-tastic pornographic TSA and its policies, all entirely the fault of Barack Obama. It's a view that suggests the world came into being in 2008 and the previous administrator wasn't responsible for any of the security theater that was just escalated, didn't put in place the mechanisms of capture and trial-less detention that are now being advocated for, ignores that he was actually also not in favor of religious profiling and declaring that all Muslims are terrorists, and basically lionizes him for Keeping America Safe and exonerating him of all the Bad Stuff that he did.
In the end, it's as Schnier points out - The Terrorists are doing it on the cheap and basically letting our collective panic do most of the destructive work for them. Columns like Sowell's aren't helping us realize what kind of rubes we're being - they're fanning the flames.
Still-unfunny comedian David Limbaugh pleads for us to be saved from the intellectuals...in a column that asks us to be saved from the ideologues. His description of how "liberals think ordianry people, especially conservatives, are stupid" (hey, familiar-looking talking point there) seems more rooted in the difference on how liberals and conservatives see the world differently. Choosing to see the expiration of tax cuts as a tax increase while ignoring the additional reality that continuing those tax cuts would blast additional holes in the deficit, a very inconvenient truth for the party that claims to be fiscally responsible, is one example. The further arguments about how tax cuts are really just letting people keep more of their earned money, and the historical record shows that reductions in tax rates results in economic growth are staples of conservative reality, and they ignore the general failure of trickle-down economics and the very weak stimulative effect of tax cuts on the middle and working classes, which is generally where liberals stake the effectiveness metrics for policies. Finally, his documented evidence of the conteempt intellectuals have for ordinary people requires you to look at it with the assumption that the phrase "people are dumb panicky animals, and you know it" isn't true. That's not necessarily borne out by the historical record, but it's also a staple of conservative reality that Americans are the best and most exceptional at all things, including rational thought and voting. Excepting for those points that have been officially disavowed, and even then, there are still pockets that think that was a mistake.
So, yes, it's accurate to say that intellectuals have some contempt for the average person and the conservative, but it's usually grounded in their reality, the one where there's plenty of evidence that conservatives and people can be goaded, frightened, or otherwise manipulated by their emotions into doing things that their minds would say is wrong, if they were only able to stop having their emotions yanked on. Or that politicians with a gift for gaffes are routinely still being listened to as serious wonks, but that cuts both ways.
Elsewhere, the case that feminism is and should be about freeing women to be sexy on their own terms, when they want to be sexy, fighting both the insistence that women be sexy all the time as part of their expected social role (status quo) and the reactionary perception that feminism is about Serious Business with no traces of sexuality (or at least conventionally-held sexuality). A further case for good feminism is that good relationships are not built on gender roles, but on good communication, resolving difficulties, being clear about expectations, and finding what works for both partners. Finally, looking into what goes into the kinds of images that feed societal expectations and pictures - the auctioning of marked up shots of Playboy centerfolds, directing the image manipulators to do significant work on top of the model's shots.
Out of opinions, a strong case to discontinue the narrative of "a nation of immigrants" when referring to the United States and to replace it with sometime more accurate - a nation of settlers and conquerors. Certainly draws history into a better narrative when you do it that way - it makes more sense.
Last for tonight, a letter talking frankly about Cassius Clay's decision not to be drafted into fighting the Vietnam War, and a letter from one Gene Rodenberry about how his new show should be pitched and what requirements executives and others have to give it a fair chance.
Ah, and a site that dedicates itself to all the offenses against good grammar that the Twilight Saga committed in its tale of Isabella Sue, the girl immune to vampire powers, and her stalker boyfriend-then-husband, Edward.
