07 Jul 05 In Memoriam


I wasn’t surprised, but was a bit sad, to see how Boing Boing’s very unprompt response to the London bombings made certain to focus a little bit on me-me-me-me-me-me:
“And, Xeni speaking again here — I’ll be a guest on this evening’s edition of CNN Showbiz Tonight (on CNN Headline News) in a segment examining internet response to the attacks in London. Airs at 7PM and 11PM ET (for West Coast US viewers, 4PM PT and 8PM PT).”
Gotta make sure we pimp our product, right?
My uncle and aunt (my mother’s sister) live about 50 miles north-northeast of London. Despite the roughly one to two hours of travel time, they still do frequent the city quite often.
I woke up this morning and looked through my e-mail. When I read an e-mail from my mom entitled “London” in which she indicated she was trying to contact them (but not containing any wording about the blast), I sleepily thought she was trying to get ahold of them to wish them a happy anniversary of some sort. It wasn’t until I was on the subway that I heard about the bombings.
Fortunately, they weren’t in town today, although my uncle evidently was in London yesterday. Obviously, I’m quite glad that he had no business there today.
I’m not certain what to say about the perpetrators. I think half the reason why I declared myself on a hiatus from political blogging is that my hatred of Bush and his Administration has become so all-encompassing that I don’t trust myself to have logical reactions anymore. My reaction to this is a good case in point: my very first gut reaction was that this was not the work of al Qaeda, but merely the work of some underhanded splinter neocon group.
I mean, it doesn’t seem entirely outside the realm of possibility, to me, given how incredibly far they’ve shown themselves willing to repeatedly bend ethics and civility to get their way. Especially given the context in which the group claimed responsibility - a “new member” posting on a message forum? Anyone could have done that, I think.
I don’t enjoy lugging around this irrational hatred, though, and I refuse to let it catch fire and consume me: that’s why I’ve stopped political blogging for a while (aside from the numerous gripes tossed into my linklog as I discover horrifyingly fascist news stories sprinkled here and there amidst the American landscape).
I do feel, however, that whatever happens in America, it will be temporary. I do feel that we will eventually inherit a more sane Republican party led by people who resent the hijacking of their own beliefs, and the neocon movement will lose its power and collapse back to their rightful place among the fringe radicals.
All of those musings having been shared, let them not obscure this reaction: to all those facing this disaster, fright, injury and death this horrible July day over in Great Britain, I join with the vast majority of Americans who wish them strength and goodwill in dealing with this awful tragedy. Now that I read that, it sounds horribly politician-ish (one of the worst insults I could give my own prose), but I don’t know what else to say.
If you are looking to stay informed on this, I recommend the Wikipedia entry on the attacks, a remarkable achievement of group reporting.
Netflix allows its users to enter in “two cents” mini-reviews for movies you rent.
For The Ring, I attempted to write, “Creepy, but not as good as I had hoped. Still, sound characterization, sensible and yet creepy backstory, scary mood.”
It kicked me back to the entry prompt, telling me, “Words in ‘Two Cents’ must not exceed 16 characters.”
Okay, there’s just so much wrong with this picture.
First, no word in that review exceeds 16 characters. Characterization is 16 exactly. This UI is stupid enough that it thinks a comma is part of the word.
Second, the entire CONCEPT of “let’s make the user count the number of letters in his words” is absolutely idiotic — and incredibly poor design. It’s a staggeringly stupid concept.
Third, any policy in which the word ‘characterization’, with or without a comma, becomes a problem in a frickin’ MOVIE review is also staggeringly stupid.
Finally, I reported this to Netflix before. They’ve apparently done nothing.
Come on, Netflix. Get your act together on this one … ![]()
Wikipedia has many articles on cognitive biases. I found several to be quite interesting:
Pretty cool, huh?
(Clerical note: In one or two cases above, I did a cut-and-paste of a descriptive sentence right from the Wikipedia article without putting quotation marks around. Just put it this way: I don’t claim authorship of any of the above descriptions.)
Found an interesting essay on the Internet, A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope, by Keith Martin, that basically re-interprets actions of characters during the good trilogy (IV-VI) in light of the continuity that the bad trilogy (I-III) introduces. Here’s an example of the material that I found rather unsettling, but still extremely interesting:
Obi-Wan has spent the last 20 years in the Tatooine desert, keeping watch over Luke Skywalker and trying to decide on one of the three available options:
a.) If Luke shows no significant access to the Force, then leave him alone in obscurity.
b.) If Luke shows real Force ability, then consider recruiting him as a Jedi. The rebellion needs Jedi. Now.
But, if Luke shows any signs of turning out like his father, then C) sneak into his house one fine night and chop his head off. With great regret, but it’ll save a lot of trouble later on. Knowing this to be the case, Bail Organa (perhaps at the insistence of his wife) has found excuses not to send Leia to Ben for assessment of Jedi potential, largely for fear of option C.
To be fair to all concerned, Leia has shown no overt signs of a link to the Force. Luke on the other hand has. In his home-built hotrod aircraft, with no formal fighter pilot training and no decent instrumentation, Luke can regularly score centre-hits on 2-metre targets in complicated zero-altitude maneouvres. Until he attends the briefing on Yavin, Luke has no way of knowing that hardened combat pilots would consider that nearly impossible. To him it’s easy. Obi-Wan, who saw Anakin’s performance in the Pod Race, is nervous.
Much of Obi-Wan’s behaviour in this film, and Yoda’s in the next, can best be understood if they are frankly scared to death of what Luke might become. (Ben is also scared that he himself will make all the same mistakes he made with Anakin.)
You’ll find it a very interesting read, I’m sure.
I keep seeing this item in my referrer log:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sluggy.com/stuff/fanart-krishva-anime.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.windycitymike.com/archives/2001/01/&h
Other referral items in there are for this same picture from other Google entities, such as images.google.com, images.google.se, images.google.fr, images.google.de, and images.google.ca.
But, still, it’s always this particular link.
Any idea why it’s so popular, or what’s going on? Are that many people looking for a link to an anime picture of the Sluggy Freelance characters?
Insight greatly appreciated in advance …
I cannot recall exactly how I located this — it was probably by browsing through various ‘conspiracy theories’ located on Wikipedia, and then coming across this documented in an article as a conspiracy that turned out to be true. And yet, we’ve never heard about it.
Yeah, I’m assuming that flabbergasted silence is a ‘no.’
In reaction to Roosevelt’s New Deal program — which escalated the top tax rate from 25% to 63% in order to fund all the new various spending programs — several business leaders saw this as a “redistribution of wealth” accompanying a breakdown of capitalism down to American socialism or American communism.
They wanted to have Gen. Smedley Butler (gotta love that name) be a new Cabinet-level official called a Secretary of General Affairs who would hold most of the power and implement fascist-level measures, reducing Roosevelt into a figurehead.
Gerald MacGuire, one of the plotters, told Butler:
“You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second … “
Did Butler fall for it? Read the article. But think about it: did FDR get overthrown? ![]()
If you think about it, though, it’s understandable, if not forgiveable, in the context of what was happening at the time. America had absolutely hit one of the most rock-bottom moments in its history … this was the time that families were being ripped apart, millions had no jobs, and our normal system of government looked like it might be falling apart. To rescue the entire nation, Roosevelt enacted a series of government spending programs and taxed the fuck out of the rich to pay for them.
We got the closest to outright government socialism that we’ve ever been — I’m not precisely unsurprised to learn that there was a massive counterreaction to his actions by those whose his policies were most damaging to. I’m quite glad they didn’t succeed.
Or … did they? ![]()
I do not consider myself to be an atheist, but I do not consider myself to be a Christian at the moment, either. I honestly cannot say that I believe in Christ’s divinity, although I believe that he had some extremely intelligent and compassionate beliefs, if indeed everything he is quoted as saying in the Bible can be directly attributed to him — a doubtful proposition, I feel.
However, while browsing through del.icio.us links the other day, I came across an entry for a text called Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. I found it a very interesting defense of atheism. I definitely am not yet adopting his beliefs entirely wholesale, but I enjoy well-structured arguments that make me think, and Russell’s essay certainly does that.
I’ll post a few excerpts:
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”
Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others? If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others — the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it — if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver.
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: “Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe.” (This is the logically weakest argument he makes, I think. — M.)
[I]f you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.
Russell then points out a few Scriptures perenially ignored by Christians:
He then speaks to his problem with Christ:
He says, for instance: “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.” Then He says: “There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom”; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count.
There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching — an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell.” That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: “Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come.” That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.
Then Christ says, “The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth”; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.” He continues: “And these shall go away into everlasting fire.” Then He says again, “If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world, and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as his chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.
There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. “He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when he came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: ‘No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever’…. and Peter…. saith unto Him: ‘Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away.’” This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to History. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
Russell certainly gives one food for thought. I am not certain I adopt his statements wholesale, but he’s done a very good job of quantifying in actual logical, backed-up argument some of the problems that I’ve had with Christianity for quite some time.
HBO has begun broadcasting a movie I had forgotten about but really enjoyed when it was in theaters: Identity (IMDB, Netflix).
It’s a murder-mystery thriller in which ten people find themselves stranded in a motel during a monsoon-like storm and find themselves dying one by one.
The thing is, though, that there are two particular twists that happen during the course of the film that I completely did not anticipate. That is extremely strange for me, as I’m usually very good about hearing a little detective voice in the back of my head say, She’s his sister, or It’s the name of his sled. So for a movie to be able to pull the wool over me not once but twice during the course of the film — well, that movie gets my strong respect. I really enjoyed it.
It also has a very diverse and strong ensemble cast that includes John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, John C. McGinley, and Rebecca De Mornay. It is definitely worth a rental.