The Subjunctive

Karmic Inversion

2006-08-13T15:47:00.000-05:00

Reading Herr Goldstein, I came across a link to this post at Alarming News, which in turn links to this Hindustan Times article. I'll excerpt the same section Karol chose:

Money sent to Pakistan for quake rehabilitation was used to fund the Heathrow bomb attack plot that was foiled by British authorities, says an investigation by a leading Pakistani daily.

According to the Daily Times, the Muslim Charity of UK remitted a huge amount of money to three individuals in three different bank accounts in Mirpur, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) in December 2005 as earthquake relief.

But the money in the three accounts in Saudi Pak Bank, Standard Chartered and Habib Bank Ltd was solely for the purpose of financing the foiled bomb plot, the paper said.

I cannot see how to improve upon Karol's summation:

Just to recap: Brits, as well as other westerners I presume, donated money to earthquake relief in Pakistan. That money was then used to try and murder them.

It reminds me of the story about the kid with the prosthetic leg who was attacked by teens who took the leg and beat him with it.

First Katrina, Now This

2006-08-12T21:11:00.000-05:00

Bush not only hates blacks, he apparently hates Chinese as well.

"Nobody has told us anything. Nobody has been round to help clear up. It seems we've been left on our own," he says through metal-capped teeth in uncertain-sounding Mandarin.

He can be certain of this much: Bush's project to manipulate global weather (cleverly disguised as 'global warming',) with help from fantastically powerful beings from another dimension, has claimed more victims.

WHEN WILL WE STAND UP TO THIS MAN?

The Anglo (Semite) Street

2006-02-07T11:13:00.000-06:00

Jews and WWII vets have taken to the streets in violent protests, including a firebombing of the Iranian embassy in Washington D.C., in response to a blasphemous cartoon contest depicting denials of the Holocaust run in Tehran’s Hamshahri newspaper.

I have encountered no shortage of voices on the left complaining of late about the ostensible conflation of Islamism and Islam. Alternatively, they’re arguing that Islamism is no greater danger than Christian Fundamentalism. They do this right out in the open with no compunction whatsoever. Procrustean lot, these equivocators.

Anti-Affirmative Action Redaction

2005-10-23T23:09:00.000-05:00

Jeff, whilst continuing his ongoing explication of the Miers debate, links to this post at “The Trigger” excoriating Hugh Hewitt, which in turn links to this post by Stanley Kurtz re: Hewitt/Miers, which makes reference to an op-ed Mr. Kurtz penned back in February of 2001 entitled Academic Postmodernity & the SATs, which is the impetus for my current post. Follow all that?

Perhaps it is a pursuant to mine own narcissism that I would outline the path I took to that piece. Regardless, I would dub the op-ed in question as mostly spot on. Read it post haste. Here’s a juicy bit:

No one wants to think of themselves as a temporary exception to proper academic standards. So the beneficiaries of liberal condescension quickly became the carriers of a new ideology. The rise of academic postmodernism, with its assumption that classic democratic principles are just a cover for white, male, heterosexist, first-world power, is directly attributable to affirmative action. The only way to preserve self-respect as an exception to standards of academic excellence and democratic principle was to mount an attack on those very principles and standards.

My parents are of the generation comprising those “who entered our colleges and universities with the avowed goal of "subverting" them” and who “are now at the apogee of their influence”. For this and other reasons, I feel I have some familiarity with the genesis of their weltanschauung, and I can’t simply buy, in its entirety, the tidy package Herr Kurtz wraps up for us. I accept and endorse the thesis that affirmative action and its philosophical antecedents really do pose a threat to meritocracy and individual freedom, but it strikes me as at best an oversimplification to suggest that postmodernism rose primarily as a beard for an affirmative action’d studentry.

I submit that postmodernism was a (admittedly poor) response to the very real shortcomings of the enlightenment paradigm. I’m a big fan of the enlightenment paradigm incidentally, but it clearly and fully fails to explain a great deal of the human experience, and where it is useful (which is to say in a lot of places) it still leaves one wanting. Philosophical Materialism, for example, is a wonderful context within which to make useful predictions about phenomena, but who but the most dogmatic materialist can accept that love is merely a product of neurotransmission and nothing more? What is the more? I don’t pretend to know, but if the historically steady evolution of human knowledge is any guide, how can one be content to consider the enlightenment paradigm the apotheosis thereof?

I will not aver postmodernism as the new paradigm; I think it amounts to essentially a devolution. However, much in the same way that businesses which refuse to respond to market trends die, the old-guard of the enlightenment write their own death notices when they stubbornly refuse to recognize that postmodernism is not merely epiphenomenal to youthful rebellion. Something will supplant the reigning paradigm, and while it won’t be “postmodern,” the avatars of enlightenment orthodoxy can provide us little clue as to what will be its countenance.

Intellect Disposer

2005-09-29T16:53:00.000-05:00

You may remember Stephen Pearcy (no, not the lead singer of Ratt) as the person of inestimable profundity who employed his house in Southern California as a gallery of adolescent angst. Then again, maybe you were not made aware of his fifteen minutes.

Obviously, I don’t think his rather sophomoric antics have any bearing upon the cogency of those arguments made for or against the war. Clearly, his “art” speaks to his own grasp of the issue much more than it speaks to the issue itself. However, I would be remiss as an observer of human affairs if I didn’t mention that the sheer abject idiocy quotient among those protesting the war (or at least those who get all the media attention) seems quite staggering. Cindy Sheehan, anyone?

I must say that the lionizing media attention that Mr. Pearcy received struck me as quite dubious. Essentially, the media raised a marginal voice (I think I’m being generous here) to include it in the national debate as if it had offered something of great worth. While this reflects incredibly poorly on the ability of the media to parse out the debate, I thought I might turn my attention directly to Pearcy. I admit, he’s a very easy target – but given the status he’s been afforded, he deserves some scrutiny.

I started reading his blog first in an effort to understand his arguments. His arguments struck me as little more than self-congratulating puffery and faux-outrage. Such arguments cannot be met, only ignored. However, in a moment of unabashed journalistic heroics, Mr. Pearcy decides to pen an entry “exposing” the ostensible barbarity of the U.S. military, ostentatiously titled, “The Real Cost of War in Iraq”. It contains the following:

In the night of 14 July, young Yassin was sleeping on the land in his garden because it was hot and there was still no electricity to cool the home. At 3 in the morning, an American armoured vehicle ran right over an exterior fence surrounding the garden and then ran right over Yassin. Some of Yassin's neighbors tried to help Yassin as he lay there, but the U.S. soldiers would not let them near. U.S. soldiers then immediately shot him dead. The armoured vehicle continued on and then broke through the house where Yassin had lived and destroyed it and then his family's car.

It is hard to believe on the face and especially so when one considers that it reads like an Al Jazeera piece. I was not ready to summarily dismiss it however, until I knew its source. So, I clicked on the comments for the blog entry and noticed that someone named “bart” had already requested sourcing:

Can you tell me your source on this particular story?

That’s straightforward enough. No baiting or histrionics, just a request for a source. Pearcy responds with:

A much more reliable one than the source you rely upon to believe that Bush didn't lie.

Hmm, so maybe he’s just in a bad mood and he intends to eventually reveal the source. Bart, it seems, decides to be charitable and largely ignore the bait and reiterate the question:

All right, I understand your need to reiterate your view that Bush lied, but instead of pussyfooting around my question, maybe you can answer it.

Pearcy replies:

Bart,
First let me ask: Do you think that news reports from Iraq that are first reviewed and approved by the US military are credible?

I’ll resist the urge to quote the entire comments section even though I’d like to because as the debate developed there, Pearcy first deleted the entire post, then when taken to task for it, he put it back up and when further taken to task for avoiding offering a source he finally disabled commenting altogether. Fortunately, Google cached it (though I’m sure it won’t stay for long.)

Anyway, I joined the fray and pushed for the source. So, okay, I’m gonna quote the damn thing after all because who knows how long Google’s cache of it will last. Here’s the back and forth between Pearcy and yours truly:

Malaclypse:
"First let me ask: Do you think that news reports from Iraq that are first reviewed and approved by the US military are credible?"

Typical. Let me ask: What fucking difference does it make what some eponymous righty thinks about reports vetted by the US military vis-a-vis your claim? Wave your arms much?

Pearcy:
Mal,

How do you miss these points all the time?

It would certainly matter to Bart if my source was an official military one and he regarded such a source as credible. That was the reason I asked HIM the question. Maybe YOU would have a different standard for credibility than he would.

Malaclypse:
Brain Trust,

Notice the part where I say, "vis-a-vis your claim"? See that? What I meant by that, which should be fairly obvious, is that it is generally considered responsible (I know - how passe!) to cite one's sources. This standard obtains irrespective of the audience. See? Not complicated.

In other words, why not just come out and cite the source? Why needle bart? It matters, in the empirical sense, not one wit what bart thinks of the source - the citation serves ALL audiences, not just the ones who would agree with your sentiments.

Pearcy:
Mal,

Your comments are irrelevant to my question to Bart. Regardless of whether it's responsible to cite the source, I still asked Bart a legitimate question. Bart was afraid to answer my question because he realized that answering it might commit himself to accept the legitimacy of my source once I disclosed it. See? Not complicated.

Malaclypse:
Self-appointed “Exposer”: "Your comments are irrelevant to my question to Bart."

You're quite a dancer aren't you. Actually, no: your ploy is quite transparent. A more accurate description of the situation would be to say,

"Your question to Bart is irrelevant to the issue of citing sources for inflammatory and dubious claims. In fact, it is likely a diversion from the fact that you either don’t have a source or are unwilling to share it because it will be dismissed by all but your sycophants.”

I’m also impressed by your willingness to delete posts/comments in which you get a drubbing. Quite sporting! Is it with that same devotion to integrity that you practice law?

Pearcy:
Mal, if you thought that this original post had "inflammatory and dubious claims," then you should have been pleased when I saved as a draft (which removed it from the blog). But then you complained and accused me of "deleting" it.

Why don't you make up your mind? Apparently, you'll complain whether it's up or whether it's down!

Some posts simply become dated. And sometimes I save old ones, for example, that got very few comments, or none at all, as drafts.

In any event, if I deleted posts just because someone criticized me, then almost all of them would be gone. So that's never my motive.

Malaclypse:
Uh huh. Keep on dancin'. Meanwhile, more than a month has gone by during which you have yet to reveal the source for your story.

When I left comments (in another post) to the effect that this post had been "poofed" out of existence and left a link to Google's cached image of it, you promptly deleted my comment and voile - the post reappears. Couple this with the fact that you've dithered and dissembled for a month while two people have asked for a source on this story, and most sane people would have difficultly concluding that you are being anything other than perfidious. (Never mind that another post – in the comments section of which I provide a thorough and hermetic case for the probability that you are actually an AI construct created by Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal – also disappeared.)

See here, Pearcy: I don’t give a good god damn what you do with your blog. Display as much or as little intellectual honesty and rigor as you wish. Craft flimsy stories about how you “save as drafts” those posts in which you are demonstrated to be fast and loose with ethics. I care not. I am simply pointing out, as any ombudsman would do with any journo at any paper in the country, that without sourcing, your claims can be considered little more than spurious.

Anyway, it was a few days later that comments were disabled on his blog. Way to “advance the debate” Pearcy. While you’re wasting your time with my exposé of the exposer, check out Google’s cache of this other exchange.

Friggin' Giuliani!

2005-09-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

Just a link (because I like Giuliani) to Patrick Ruffini's latest online GOP straw poll.

Jane's Defense

2005-07-25T10:30:00.000-05:00

You know, in spite of the high-minded political journals and blogs and news anchors feigning disgust at the death of so many U.S. soldiers and Justin Raimondo and the luminous Pearl Jam and Harry Belafonte and many other voices, I still feel there are more bumper sticker platitudes to be written! Which is why, you know, THANK GOD!

Irshad Manji

2005-07-17T23:27:00.000-05:00

Not everyone reads instapundit (surprisingly), so you may not know that Glenn recently linked to this story in the times about one Irshad Manji. To wit:

Irshad Manji has already been dubbed ‘Osama’s worst nightmare’ for her criticisms of Islam. Now she wants Britain’s Muslims to stand more firmly on the side of freedom

More, as always, can be found here.

The Paternal States

2005-06-18T21:01:00.000-05:00

What a bunch of simpering ninnies the British are where guns are concerned.

Flying Over the Afflicted and Afflicting the Conversation

2005-06-06T01:14:00.000-05:00

Glenn links to what to my mind is an incredible essay by Jay Rosen on the clergy of journalism and Watergate. I admit to a smallish amount of glee in one intereting bit:

Meanwhile, "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" is handed down not as a slogan too clever by half, but as a public service philosophy. Find 100 journalists who know the slogan, perhaps five can tell you the origin. And they don't know that the author (Finley Peter Dunne) was being sarcastic, either. Is this education?

Jay sends us on to the backstory.

Rape (and not the metaphorical, post-modern, eco-feminist kind - the real deal)

2005-06-06T00:47:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Kristof reminds all of the horrific nature of what is going in the Sudan (registration required - although I use login: tester, password: tester or some such).

Seriously, where is the outrage? Is it really that this stuff is being perpetrated by Muslims which allows it to go whitewashed in the name of multiculturalism?

A Rush Of Thud To The Head

2005-05-18T21:06:00.000-05:00

Coldplay's Chris Martin recently chose to expose his extensive and punctilious knowledge of the theory and study of both Ethics and Economics*. We learn that:

Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin today launched an attack on his record label EMI and the company's shareholders.

It came after EMI, the world's third-largest music company, warned that profits would be lower because the band took longer than expected to finish their first studio album in three years.

But as Coldplay prepared for a concert in New York to promote their new album, called X&Y, Martin said: "I don't really care about EMI. I'm not really concerned about that.

Is this some kind of publicity stunt? He goes on:

"I think shareholders are the great evil of this modern world."

He criticised what he called "the slavery that we are all under to shareholders".

Really, I can't believe he said that. This must be an elaborate hoax. Chris and Charles Murray are somewhere having a pint and laughing about this.

Blog Maverick

2005-05-17T20:20:00.000-05:00

I just discovered (well, by discovered I mean "started reading") the blog of Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. I'm not much of a basketball fan I must say, but I enjoyed his blog. This post regarding the RIAA and Yahoo's new music service was particularly enjoyable.

The Great White North

2005-05-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

Tip to ¡No Pasarán! on this story, titled, "Caught on tape: Paul Martin's photo-op from Human Tragedy". I'll poorly summarize to wit: The Canadian PM and his wife and entourage arrive in then only very recently tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka. They act badly. Take this quote from the story:

See for yourself how the film footage shows the padre being pushed aside and how overzealous members of the Martin entourage physically knock a Sri Lankan mourner to the ground–without apology.

The footage mentioned is courtesy of one Garth Pritchard, who as it turns out, is an award-winning Canadian documentary journalist.

When you're done with that, check this out.

Canaduh

2005-04-29T13:18:00.000-05:00

Tip to the ubiquitous instapundit on this story about the potential that the Canadian state may fail to persist by Austin Bay. In a scene that could have been written by David Foster Wallace, a combination of a money laundering scandal and Quebec seperatist aspiration is producing a dangerous scenario. It's a whimsical treatment, but interesting nonetheless.

Leftist Schadenfreude

2005-04-19T20:54:00.000-05:00

Legion are the examples in which an anti-war activist (often US citizens) presents to a protest with a banner, sign or tee-shirt proclaiming their desire that the US fail in its mission in Iraq. That someone can simultaneously endorse both pacifism and the cause of the terrorists is clearly fraught with incongruity, but as they say, "Never try to teach a pig to sing..."

Now it seems the MSM have gotten into the game of at least tacitly supporting the propaganda of the opponent. Couple that with the MSM's propensity to ignore stories which would seem to support the US mission and one begins to see a picture of Machiavellian perfidy. To what recent media innovation do I owe this opportunity to whinge about the MSM? It is this post by Oz Blogger Arthur Chrenkoff in which he discusses a poll run by "the Iraqi Arabic newspaper 'Almidhar'."

778 Baghdadis were asked:

Do you support the pull out of foreign troops?

At once - 12.56%
According to a future timetable - 81.80%
Do not know - 5.64%

Has the security situation improved since the start of the new government?

Yes - 55%
No - 35%
No change - 10%

Read the whole post, he goes on to discuss the way in which the US media spun the April 9th demonstrations in Baghdad. Which is to say the coverage suggested that the protest was aimed squarely at the US when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the signs (in Arabic) being carried called for Saddam's trial and hanging, or spoke to the disgust the Iraqis are coming to feel for the insurgents.

Bias? Try "Manipulation".

2005-04-07T11:04:00.000-05:00

Editorial masquerading as article (what's new?).

Update: I screwed up the link - it was to an AP story regarding the "Minuteman" project and their ostensible holding of a suspected illegal. The article was more about trashing the "Minutemen" than any sort of factual report, but alas, I can't find the damn thing. It does turn out, however, that the illegal wasn't held against his will. But hey, the "Minuteman" project is still wrong - even if it doesn't do anything wrong, right?

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

2005-02-08T13:48:00.000-06:00

This is unfortunate. If you'll read the article, you'll see its about a study that found an ostensible inverse correlation between multiple daily toothbrushings and obesity. In other words, they found that fat folks brush their teeth less often.

What's so unfortunate about that, you ask? While the merit of undertaking such a study (one wonders what it cost) is debatable, the more pernicious issue to my mind is the way in which the article seems to imply that there is a causative relationship between the two activities. Witness the opening line of the article:

If you want to keep trim, forget the diet books and gym membership -- you may be better off just brushing your teeth more often, according to a Japanese study.

Uh, no. While I haven't read the study, I can say with great confidence that it was not designed to test a causative relationship between obesity and dental hygene. The most likely explaination is obvious: people who care about their physical health will tend to care about their dentition. We needed a study for that?

Of course, the usual suspect in this kind of situation is the journalist. Many journalists, in my experience, have little compunction about writing on topics about which they know little, because hey, they're journalists - they've got their university degrees, eh? It stands to reason, that a less than scientifically fluent journalist might miss the subtle difference between correlation and causation, but egad - here we have a direct quote from the study:

"It's a sign that these people are careful about their health -- they want to maintain the appearance of their teeth and prevent bad breath," the paper said. "We think actively encouraging the habit of toothbrushing would play a role in maintaining health and would help prevent obesity."

It is this same slight of hand that is responsible for other canards such as ETS, the "gateway drug" hypothesis (scroll to middle of page), Erin Brockovich, etc.

More On The eUNuchs

2005-01-07T20:39:00.000-06:00

The Diplomad is a blog

...by career US Foreign Service officers. They are Republican (most of the time) in an institution (State Department) in which being a Republican can be bad for your career -- even with a Republican President!

They're also in the field as it were. It seems the "Chief Diplomad" is in Aceh, or thereabouts, because he has been blogging about his experience with the tsunami recovery and his dealings with the UN in a post entitled The "Turd" World And The High Priest Vulture Elite*. What caught my eye was this telling bit:

That work, unfortunately, has brought ever-increasing contact with the growing UN presence in this capital; in fact, we've found that to avoid running into the UN, we must go out to where the quake and tsunami actually hit.

Steve, I know you think I should be all freakin' Hemingway with this blog, cranking out miniature Men at War, but I trust some might enjoy the insight provided by such an unique blog.

*h/t The Belmont Club

de Tocqueville Be Damned

2005-01-03T01:35:00.000-06:00

After painting the Western industrialized nations (and likely the US in particular) as "stingy," the United Nations Undersecretary for Humanitarian blah blah, Jan Egeland and his whole putrified beadledom has left me on tenterhooks as it were. The voluble Wretchard has several excellent posts on the topic which puts as fine a point on the issue as the substrate can maintain - read them and be edified.

For some pith on the issue, consider the words of Dr. Charles Krauthammer:

"We are six percent or less of the world's population, yet we give almost half. We are a very small number of people, relatively speaking, and we carry the weight of a dozen countries. Secondly, we maintain a military structure that keeps the peace of the world...Who is in the Indian Ocean with the aircraft carriers, helicopters, skilled personal? No one has the infrastructure in the world, we spend almost half a trillion dollars a year on our military structure, which is essentially the fire department of the planet and is it always at the disposal of people hit in a national disaster...Incidentally on food aid, we five 60% of all the food aid in the world. It is simply irresponsible to talk about the U.S. as anything other than the most generous nation on the planet."

Fnord.

A Watched Pot

2004-12-23T11:52:00.000-06:00

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful."
- Benjamin Britten

For all a blog lays bare, those perturbations whose orbit is most acute to our souls escape exposure.

No Blood for Coca

2004-12-03T13:32:00.000-06:00

I've been vewy vewy busy. Accordingly, no blog posts for some time. Really, I don't even have the time to post this one, which is why I'll just say, "Damn Skippy," and direct y'all to this link.

One Need Only Read Jeff

2004-11-11T21:39:00.000-06:00

I was preparing to launch into a snarky diatribe against Former President Jimmy Carter concerning his decision to lionize and eulogize Yasser Arafat as "a powerful human symbol" and not include "of evil," but as is often the case, Jeff Goldstein beat me to it and did so with more wit than I could possibly muster. To wit:

Reached for comment, pieces of dead Israeli school children blown to bits by Arafat-directed suicide bombers over the years asked if former President Carter "wouldn't mind fucking right off." Only they said it in Hebrew.

Oh, and in the interest of piling on, Drudge has linked to a story about the unctious Suha Arafat's deal to receive $22m a year from the Palestinian Authority. Has this woman no shame? With this kind of leadership, it is no surprise that the Palestinians are living in squalor - they need not look to Israel to explicate their lot.

The Arizona Debate

2004-10-14T01:22:00.000-05:00

Nutshell: The Cards rule.

Update (10/27/04): Ugh.

Zen and the Art of the Rant

2004-10-10T14:40:00.000-05:00

I've been made aware of two blogs about which I was previously unaware.

One of them is brand spankin' new and belongs to the august personage of one Abram Siemsen. This dude is smart, multi-talented and snarky which make him, in my mind, a blogstar potentate. I'm guessing his blog will be consistently provocative and his position vis-a-vis political philosophy will be hard to pin down, all of which make for a great read. I was vexed by his very first (well second) post.

The other and rather excellent blog is The Ranting Haze. A colleague of mine directed me to this blog ("Haze" is a friend of his.) I have yet to determine much in the way of details about the guy responsible for this blog other than that he's damn well-spoken and seems to be neck-deep in the study of medicine (or related.) He seems to be either a partisan Republican or Libertarian, but in either case, his blog is informative and witty.

Perhaps I shall get motivated and update my blogroll someday...

Wash U Debate

2004-10-09T01:06:00.000-05:00

Nutshell: Bush was articulate. This man is clearly not the simpleton the media would have us believe him to be. Kerry is likewise articulate, perhaps moreso, but this debate reinforced the image I have of him as a Seth Pecksniff, "a direction-post which is always telling the way... , and never gets there."

Anyway, having read a truly ridiculous number of debate blognalyses, I have to quote an amusing bit from this summation by Daisy Cutter.

My 11-year-old interjects this: "I bet if the audience could talk, they would ask what his plan is."

Indeed, the audience is skeptical. A voter asks, "Will you look into the camera and tell us you won't raise taxes?" Then ... Lerch-Munster approaches the camera and it looks like he's coming into my living room. Get out of here!! Hide the children. Is he taking a head count to charge us per person?! Scary.

Heh.

Hippocrates, Gorgias of Leontini, a 3-inch-nail, and Thou

2004-09-21T01:11:00.000-05:00

Disconcerting.

An Aberdeenshire joiner has hit out after waiting nearly 24 hours to have a 3in nail removed from one of his fingers.

John Milne went to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary's accident and emergency department to have the nail removed but, after becoming increasingly frustrated, he left 22 hours later with it still in his finger.

There are few things which demonstrate, to my mind, the sophistry of collectivists more clearly than socialized medicine. Governments can no more 'poof' a private good into abundance that it can 'poof' a system for innovating said good into existence that could trump simple competition. In the attempt to do so, one encounters Mr. Law of Unintended Consequences in the form of a digitally suffused 3-inch-nail, or worse. So the proposition for the collectivist here (and elsewhere) is, “am I willing to sacrifice fundamental questions of quality assurance along with the hope of innovation and without even any guarantee of quantity, in return for the attribution of 'free-to-all'?” A faustian gamble.

Whatever else one might say about him, Dan Smoot offers a poly-sci angle on the question:

Whenever government enters a field of private activity, that field becomes a political battleground. Whenever you mix politics with medicine, doctoring becomes a political instead of a medical activity.

As well as becomming a bureaucratic instead of medical activity.

These considerations are outside the field of vision for these would-be Protagorases as they have diefied the “narrative” and thus fallen captive to it's charm. To wit, Gorgias tells us:

“The spoken word is a mighty lord, and for all that it is insubstantial and imperceptible it has superhuman effects. It can put an end to fear do away with distress, generate happiness, and increase pity…When the power of the incantation meets the beliefs of a person’s mind, it beguiles, persuades, alters by its sorcery…techniques which cause the mind to err and deceive beliefs…For if everyone could remember everything that had happened in the past, could understand everything that was happening in the present, and could foresee everything that would happen in the future, the spoken word would not have the power that it has.”

But it cannot invent magnetic resonance imaging.

Sometimes a Cigar is...

2004-09-20T01:59:00.000-05:00

Virginia Postrel asks:

Watching news reports of John Kerry's latest campaign appearance, a pressing question occurs to me: Why don't politicians use lavalier microphones when they speak without a podium? Do media consultants tell them it's more effective to talk loudly by carrying a big stick?

Better yet, why not a headset mic so they can execute the complicated choreography?

A Spade is a Spade

2004-09-06T01:41:00.000-05:00

Item 1 is an Op-Ed by Ralph Peters which includes the following:

If Muslim religious leaders around the world will not publicly condemn the taking of children as hostages and their subsequent slaughter ? if those "men of faith" will not issue a condemnation without reservations or caveats ? then no one need pretend any longer that all religions are equally sound and moral.

My feelings on religion notwithstanding, I think it's time we get honest and let everyone know that the single largest — indeed the defining — component of the War on Terror is a war against radical Islam. Inasmuch as there are actually some few "Moderate Muslims" (ie. Muslims who believe in the separation of church and state,) this is not a war against all Islam, but certainly most of it.

Item 2 is this post at Chicago-Boyz entitled, "The Ideology of Total War: The Wars on Civilians" and it includes this quote from Item 2a, Jane Novak's post, "The Path to School #1" attributed to Imam Al-Sudayyis of the Grand Mosque in Mecca:

You have revived the hopes of this nation through your blessed Jihad. By Allah, be patient until, with Allah's help, one of two good things will be awarded you: either victory or martyrdom. Our hearts are with you; our prayers are dedicated to you. The Islamic nation will not spare money or effort in support of your cause.

The piece goes on to make a rational case for what the overwhelming majority of westerners know through cultural conditioning, namely that killing children in the name of politics, Allah or any damn thing else, is BARBARISM — you know, an act committed by the product of a primitive culture.

Though I don't recall the source, not long after September 11, some bureaucrat or other from Italy (I believe) dared to suggest that western culture was indeed superior to Muslim culture. He was characterized by the ephebish European press as a Neanderthal, but I'll stand squarely in his court until such time as the Imams and Mullahs show as much concern for innocent children as they do for French journalism.

Evolutionary Civil Development and Terror

2004-09-02T23:15:00.000-05:00

John Kerry wants to fight a "more sensitive" war on terror. It seems strange that it must be said so often and with so little impact, but I’m all for pissin’ in the ocean, so here goes: The level of consciousness (vis-à-vis one’s social context) necessary to be able to frame conflict in terms of sensitivity is simply not something to which fully two-thirds of the population of the planet are availed. Let me try that again: Kerry’s position requires all negotiators can agree to certain philosophical ground rules. I am suggesting that the environmental requirements by which such a philosophy becomes possible in the mind of any given person are plainly not present in most of the world.

I’m frustrated that it is so difficult to find coverage of the siege at School #1. I’m just not open-minded enough to think that a dead sea’s worth of sensitivity would have any effect other than emboldening more – and more horrific examples – of this.

As an aside, it is one of many examples of which I am made conscious, of the power of distributed systems that Stan of Logic and Sanity is livetranslatiblogging the Russian wire reports about the siege.

The Zeitgeist of the Last Fifteen Minutes

2004-08-31T23:38:00.000-05:00

Watching the RNC, I wonder whether there might not be a lot of Americans for whom, having grown nauseated in digesting an inexorable flood of yank-bashing, this convention is something of a balm. The progenitor of this self-flagellation is my parent's generation - the sanctimonious "Boomers." Deciding in their adolescence that they should "speak truth to power," the boomer media managerial hierarchy, continue to hold forth thusly, callow in their anopsia to the fact that they have become the power. In their sophomoric identification with Orwell, they fail to realize that the "nuanced" dialectic of Europe and the American post-modern left has calcified into it's own mental authoritarianism. The most frightening and elucidating manifestation of this is the way in which the indictments leveled by the fortunate recipients of their parents' sacrifice in WWII, have been appropriated by the Muslim fascists.

I foresee the precipitous rise of the South Park Republican.

Object Permanence and the Postmodern Milieu

2004-07-30T01:07:00.000-05:00

It is amusing, no? Rational analysis, unwittingly employed by the wooly-headed, ironic, effete chatterers, for whom the "new age" is not a laughing matter, in the attempt to "deconstruct" those institutions for which rational analysis is fundamental. It is an intellectual bootstrapping that, in its smug crusade against modernity, cannot avoid its own blade. In its wake is left a humanity which was promised the opportunity for real self-determination as assured in the form of an empiricism which the priests of narcissism have now turned against itself. As these autists hold forth that George Bush would surreptitiously have us in the 19th Century, they predicate this sort of prevarication with the kind of philosophical underpinnings that rather overtly embrace a return to the 40th Century - B.C.E. It should come as little surprise that Democrats respond with ~~ennui~~ elation to the unctuous principles of Ol' Weather-Vain Kerry.

The French, arbiters of all things sophisticated, are the paragon of postmodernity and as such, be warned that warmongering James Lileks should not be trusted in his completely unwarranted criticism of this great counterweight to U.S. hegemony. /sarcasm

Seriously, IMO, Lileks is one of the unmitigated stars blogdom and a brilliant writer. That I don't have the bleat in my blogroll is a problem soon to be remedied.

Northwestern US Secedes, Joins China

2004-07-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
- Frederic Bastiat

Coming to a hubristic legislature near you: Repealing Private Property. It seems that King County, Washington eco-tards are attempting to arrogate to themselves the decision about what land-owners can or cannot do with their land. From the article:

Known as the 65-10 Rule, it calls for landowners to set aside 65 percent of their property and keep it in its natural, vegetative state. According to the rule, nothing can be built on this land, and if a tree is cut down, for example, it must be replanted. Building anything is out of the question.

The pressure group responsible for this abdication of sanity is known as 1000 Friends of Washington. Quite frankly, fuck them.

When I was a raffish youthful pop-musician, I was company to pollyannas who were enamored of yelling, "You'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!" While I doubt they had the balls to turn such posturing into action, I am much more confident in the resolve that land-owners will demonstrate in their response to attempts at expropriation of said land.

2004-05-28T14:26:00.000-05:00

Super Sized Asshat

The Blogfather has today a link to this great little piece by Doug Kern over at TCS about the interminably idiotic Morgan Spurlock. I doubt I could add to this article, but I shan't be shy about quoting my favorite bit:

He has inaugurated a new genre of documentary: the "Freak Does Something Disgusting And Gets Sick" movie. Such documentaries can only advance our understanding of human endurance, not to mention abnormal psychology. Perhaps we can look forward to such titles as:

"Make That a Double," wherein our intrepid filmmaker resolves to drink alcohol as his beverage of choice for all three meals. If asked to "make that a double?" he must say yes. And he must eventually try every liquor on the premises. Result? His liver looks like a Brillo pad and his brain looks like Spongebob Squarepants. Moral: fight Big Alcohol by outlawing demon rum. (It's been tried? Shut up, history boy. That was before the Internet, so it doesn't count.)

"Unlimited Trips To The Pasta Bar? Sure!" It's the same as Super Size Me!, but at Golden Corral. Result: Spurlock explodes on day five. Moral: Hurray for Golden Corral!

"I'll Have a Venti!" wherein our intrepid director takes all his drinks at Starbucks, paying the extra twenty cents for a super-grande mega-trough of energy-packed java when asked if he'd like to do so. Result: jittery, paranoid, and voluble, Spurlock becomes a freelance writer. Moral: caffeine is the backbone of a free and literate society.

Had Spurlock managed to do himself in by way of Big Macs, he would have certainly qualified for a Darwin Award.

2004-04-30T18:17:00.000-05:00

Charter Cable Sodomy

After having been a long-time customer of Charter's Cable services, and having never missed a payment, I recently forgot to mail my check. Honest mistake. Now, I've been getting a lot of pressure from my wife to trash Charter and go Dish because of the price point and Charter's abysmal customer service. She's even gone so far as to make an installation appointment with Dish without telling me. So I sent in the check to Charter a couple days ago and called them today to see if they would be so kind as to turn in back on - no dice. I told them I would give them the check number - no dice. I told them I had an appointment to have Dish installed that I was planning to cancel because I wanted to keep Charter services and would they please recognize that I've been a good customer for several years - no dice.

So, I tried to cancel my services - they wouldn't do it until they receive payment. WTF??? So, If I were to suddenly go into some kind of financial trouble and couldn't make my payment, Charter would just keep billing me for a service I'm not even receiving until I pay them? WTF?!?

Suffice to say, I didn't cancel my Dish installation appointment.

UPDATE: As I've been googling on such niceties as "charter sucks" and "f*ck charter," I've discovered what appears to be a groundswell of disgust with the company. Can you say government-facilitated monopoly?

2004-02-20T12:31:00.000-06:00

'Breathalyzer in every car' bill demonstrates hubris of New Mexico Legislature

What has become of our great democracy?

Some state lawmakers are convinced they have the answer to solve the D.W.I. epidemic and want to require everyone on the road to take a breathalyzer test before they can start the engine of any vehicle.

It will be most unfortunate the first time that someone trying to escape a violent criminal can't start their car because they had one too many. I can think of several other such scenarios without any difficulty, but they are irrelevant because the issue is that this kind of legislation is simply not in keeping with the spirit upon which this country was founded.

2004-01-23T23:08:00.000-06:00

Libertarian v. Conservative

The damn perspicacious Tyler Cowen has recently authored a post at Volokh regarding the difference between Libertarianism and Conservatism, which was itself a reference to an interview on 2blowhards with traditionalist conservative, Jim Kalb. It was my intention to post the second part of the little essay I was constructing on logic before anything else, but Dr. Cowen’s post was of such great interest to be an irresistible force as it were.

Right, so read the above and chew. I did so myself, and I was drawn to two particular items. Firstly, Dr. Cowen comments:

We also can (and should) use positive arguments to determine whether implementing the conservative value-laden vision, or the libertarian competing lifestyles vision, will do more for human welfare.

…and then Dr. Kalb suggests:

…welfare state liberalism and ideological libertarianism are variations of the same thing. Both are basically concerned with satisfying individual preferences and both take all preferences as equal in worth.

I think Dr. Kalb is suggesting that “liberalism” and “libertarianism” are both cut from the same enlightenment cloth. In other words, both systems are axiomatic, deterministic and reductionistic. His point becomes more clear when he contrasts both positions with “conservatism”

They [liberals/libertarians] contrast with conservatism because conservatism says the human good is more complicated than everyone getting what he wants.

In the paper you mention here the emphasis is on methods more than goals. I say there that a "leftist" is someone who favors bureaucracy, a "libertarian" is someone who favors markets, and a "conservative" is someone favors tradition -- that is, who favors accepting institutions that have grown up more or less on their own terms. Leftists and libertarians in their different ways want to make everything completely rational and systematic, and conservatives reject that idea.

I consider myself a libertarian, but I emphatically disagree with the suggestion that libertarianism is of necessity only compatible with some kind of objectivism. My libertarianism is only axiomatic in as much as its one axiom is that I am fundamentally ignorant of everything around me. I am a casualty of the knowledge problem and therefore I cannot simply be beholden to mores and traditions, because I strongly suspect the purveyors of them are just as ignorant as myself. That having been said, I have found myself slowly gravitating to traditional methods and modes of thought despite my skepticism. I consider the “competing lifestyles vision” which Dr. Cowen associates with libertarianism to be an inescapable fact – there can be no alternative save complete totalitarianism. Likewise, I consider the “value-laden vision” to be just as inescapable – even the most confused post-modernist demonstrates a “value system in practice” (if through no other action than just being alive) even if they won’t or can’t admit it – hell, can’t “rationality” or “objectivism” be or become a “value” or “tradition”?

Incidentally, I observe that while “conservatism” is ostensibly concerned with “conserving” the status quo and its attendant traditions, how does it confront the fact that “conservatives” today in this country are attempting to conserve modes of thought and behavior that may or may not be commensurate with the modes of thought and behavior that were being maintained by the “conservatives” of Mesopotamia circa 2,004 BC – which conservatives were maintaining the “correct” values? Additionally, inasmuch as conservatives cling to a particular value even in light of countervailing evidence, are they not demonstrating a rationalism or reductionism in the dogmatic adherence to said value? In that scenario, conservatism itself becomes an axiom from which the dogmatic posture is derived.

So let me attempt to sum up: Drs. Cowen and Kalb seem to be asserting that there are fundamental philosophical/epistemological differences between libertarianism and conservatism. Dr. Kalb seems to be suggesting that conservatism is in fact superior, while Dr. Cowen seems to be cautiously extending an invitation to consider the subject more deeply. My own assertion is that neither is superior nor expendable – in fact I assert that the two are nearly perfectly analogous to yin and yang. It seems to me that constructionism or libertarianism (or whatever other appellation by which it might be recognized) is the manifestation of the undeniable human compulsion to make things happen – while conservatism seems to me the primary way by which new ideas become practical, usable orthodoxy. How can we have one without the other?

One parting thought: my Music Theory professor Stephen Heinemann once said, “Music Theory is not a prescription for music; it is a description of music.” I think the same should be said about political philosophy.

Oh, and once again, I'm generally sorry that you had to read this inscrutable pap.

2003-12-20T22:10:00.000-06:00

Toward a New Logic, Part I

Disclaimer: I have nary an honorific, nor diploma, nor other authority save my own gumption, upon which to gird the following exegesis. I read a lot and perhaps had I been less contemptuous of the politics and protocol of the university — well, who knows, but at any rate, I'll not prevent myself from waxing idiotic here; it's my blog, damn it.

With that out of the way, my goal here is to argue that logic, as formalized by the majority of western academia, is on the threshold of some sort of profound change. I intend to argue this in a rather boorish, unsophisticated and casual manner, so neener. Having been, as a high school student, an avid exponent of the study of Math, Logic and Western History, I first encountered any kind of serious criticism of my budding Positivism in the form of Existentialism, and other new-age-y stuff, like Pirsig and Wilbur. I came to discern two general branches of this criticism: those who wish to undo Western culture in favor of some kind of ostensible pre-industrial Mecca, and those who have some notion that the reigning paradigm should yield to some new approach.

"So wait," you ask, "what is the problem with the reigning paradigm, and what the hell is the reigning paradigm anyway, you pedantic bastard?"

Good questions. By "reigning paradigm," I refer to the pragmatic, if not philosophical embrace of some form of Positivism or Objectivism or Materialism on the part of the majority of academics (esp. in the hard sciences.) I would even suggest that many urban and suburban middle-class people in general hold a kind of either atheistic or deistic materialism that is reinforced by much of mainstream media as well as these folk's everyday interaction with technologies that get more sophisticated and undeniably useful all the time. Indeed, it seems every citizen of a western nation has a personal philosophy that has been shaped, at least in part, by science and technology. It must be clear by now, to even the most superstitious among us, that the telephone works, not because too few virgins have been sacrificed recently, but by merit of empirically testable principles (even if they don't have the language to clearly communicate such a sentiment.). Hopefully that clears up what I mean by "reigning paradigm," because if you're reading this, the chances are that you have played a video game, or operated a complicated machine like an automobile, or watched cable television, or operated a personal computer, etc — you know what I'm talking about: technology may have its problems, but in the majority of applications, it works, and that informs much of our collective philosophy in the west vis-á-vis the primacy of scientific thinking.

"Okay, enough blah, blah, blah. What's wrong with this paradigm?"

Right. The problem is that these mental progeny of the Enlightenment relegate the sort of thinking that humans have always associated with creativity and novelty to a sort of philosophical purgatory. What I mean is that these philosophies are not equipped with any means by which to, for example, ascribe relative value to Mozart and Pachelbel, nor can they provide anything other than the most didactic instruction to would-be creative thinkers on how to become greater in their art. Similarly, these philosophies are wont to describe what motivates the sacrificing soldier, or the laboring prenatal mother, or even the entrepreneur. It seems that for most, the conscious awareness of this disparity is limited to a dim cognitive dissonance that manifests as confusion when examining those parts of themselves that are subject to the mismatch.

Imagine it thusly: you are male (just go with it) and you are arguing with your significant other regarding your suggestion that the pants she just purchased "make her posterior appear larger than normal." She likely informs you that she is less than amused by your comments. You note that she still has the receipt, and you were only telling her in order to afford her the option of taking them back so that she doesn't appear to be less attractive than she really is. She is still unhappy. You feel you are being completely rational. It seems that in fact, navigating the exigencies of social interaction is often frustratingly irrational.

"You said something about two branches of criticism; WTF kind of presumptuous shite is that? Just who the hell do you think you are anyway?"

Calm down, it's my blog and I'm free to look like a fool if I wish. Let me reiterate and explicate the two branches of criticism thing. It seems to me that some criticize the west and the Enlightenment because they believe that the philosophical course taken by the west is somehow fundamentally evil. These people have multifarious reasons for their dislike, (I would suggest that many of these criticisms of the west are simply regurgitations of the wooly-headed hippydom of an idealistic yet largely idle U.S. baby boom generation,) but they are united by the desire to "undo" western civilization in deference to some kind of theocracy — be it Islam or Deep Ecology.

On the other hand, there appear to be those that wish to see the reigning paradigm challenged by merit of their desire to see it improved. They point to the aforementioned problems and conclude that this paradigm must not be the conclusion to our ongoing search for truth. They ask, "How can whole realms of human experience go unaccounted for inside a paradigm that seeks to have itself be counted as the ultimate model of existence?"

To be continued…

2003-12-10T19:08:00.000-06:00

Harrison Bergeron

My father, my high-school sophomore English teacher, my music theory professor, an advertising copywriter with whom I work: all people who have suggested I read Kurt Vonnegut.

I still hadn't read any, until today.

Today I stumbled, completely by accident, across Harrison Bergeron, a lesson on the dangers of mistaking rights and outcomes. Wow, good stuff. Now I want to read more.

2003-12-08T00:16:00.000-06:00

Church of Pop Ecology

So I just thought Michael Crichton was a decent sci-fi writter. I have discovered through the speeches he's delivered (and transcribed on his site) that he's quite a thinker. In particular, I found his September 15, 2003 speech to the Commonwealth Club quite a read. From the speech:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Go read it and his other stuff now.

Hey, I said "now"!

2003-11-21T22:52:00.000-06:00

Yay, the web

To quote debunkers poster, setnahkt, "This guy appears to be serious." For instance, wow, eep.

2003-10-21T09:43:00.000-05:00

THS

It is time for the leaders of this great country to do something about the scourge upon our society that is third hand smoke.

2003-10-18T19:36:00.000-05:00

Ethanot

Lynne at The Knowledge Problem made note of forthcoming energy legislation in which ethanol again is foisted upon an unsuspecting populace. The more I learn about it, the more I realize that ethanol is neither efficient nor environmentally superior to petroleum. The knowledgeable llamas offers quite a bit of valuable insight in this debunkers.org thread.

2003-10-18T11:12:00.000-05:00

Congress shall make NO LAWS...

Say what you will about Arnold, but IMHO, this kind of thing should be covered by the First Amendment.

2003-10-03T16:11:00.000-05:00

Senate Sikh

Suman Palit's blog, The Kolkata Libertarian introduced me today, to the only Sikh-American politician I've ever encountered: Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria. What is even more interesting is his Republican affiliation. He's seeking the GOP nomination to fill the seat to be vacated by U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald. Suman even set up a blog supporting his candidacy. I'd really like to see him nominated and elected, but I'm sure Harry Belafonte will just come along and call him a "House Sikh."

2003-10-01T18:01:00.000-05:00

Today's Tom Sawyer

Rush Limbaugh is at it again, and now he's got sports writers all in a tizzy. I can't say I support Mr. Limbaugh's general tenor — in fact I'm tired of attempts (by what would seem to me to be almost everyone) to obfuscate the genuine philosophical differences that exist in today's political discourse by constantly portraying the opposition as fundamentally evil. In that vein, I think Rush had it coming to him as it were, but I still think it sucks.

McNabb’s knee-jerk offense seems to me no more merited than Limbaugh’s constant knee-jerk suggestions that social engineering lurks in every corner – but come on, neither position is evil. I can’t see how Rush’s commentary can be construed as anything other than a snarky comment directed at the media for being ostensibly “racist” (by merit of Rush’s contention that any sort of preferential treatment based upon race is “racist” regardless of the motive.) This seems to me a position that can be argued for or against, but hardly a bit of pure malice, nor does it seem to me to be saying, as some have suggested, that QBs should only be caucasian.

Here’s my take: We cannot look into people’s souls, and as such, we are under what I believe to be a considerable obligation to seek a better understanding of our political opponent’s views and their philosophical antecedents. The attempt to lead the populace by attaching purely emotional labels to any views that differ with our own, is to my mind, the greatest single challenge to an increased and improved political dialogue.

2003-09-12T01:57:00.000-05:00

RoxyLondon

My sister-in-law and recent high school graduate, Rachel, is heading to London to study Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins. I helped her get a blog started and designed a template for her. It should be interesting to hear the young Yank's musings on all things English.

2003-08-26T03:02:00.000-05:00

The Prime Directive

While perusing multifarious leftist memes, I often encounter someone whinging about American support of horrific governments around the globe. To wit:

…this article fails to mention how some of the allies our right wing buddy in the white house is paying (TAX DOLLARS) to be on our "coalition of the willing", violate human and civil rights. Let's see a report from the State Department:

"Uzbekistan routinely tortures detainees and some have died in custody. Eritrea has ended freedom of the press and restricts religious freedom. Azerbaijan arbitrarily detains dissidents and rigs elections. Significant violations are noted in such other coalition members as Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Macedonia, Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. In all seven, the overall human rights situation was rated as poor."

The whole argument seems Pollyannaish to me for a couple reasons:

First, it seems these pundits would have us believe that it is U.S. influence that perpetuates the existence of governmental evil and civilian hardship in the world community. I consider this a chicanery at best. Come on! We have been in the muck for the better part of what, one or two million years? Civilization is a blip in time by comparison and the kind of information exchange we’ve got going now is so new that the umbilical cord is still attached. The evolutionary mix of technology and philosophy and culture that has produced this situation is by no means a mere exercise in political fiat. It lives on a knife edge, and that we should expect it to exist everywhere in the world – right now dammit! – is an eye-roller.

Which brings me to my second reason: What is the best we can hope to accomplish? I submit that the best we can hope to do is to attempt to place incentives here and there, leading less developed nations to discover, by their own volition, the incredibly sophisticated, iterative evolution of systems and ideas that have produced our wealth and prosperity. Were the U.S. a socialist Mecca, I imagine the call to liberate the nations of the world would be legion. Look at the left’s support of Kosivo or their recent pressure to go into Liberia. “Socialists are often pacifists,” you say? Tell Anastasia Romanov or the 23 children on the 13 de Marzo. My point is, the exigencies of geopolitics are too vast and convoluted to control short of world empire, so our incentives and attempts to curry favor or provide balance are often the best we can do and we do it with the knowledge that it will sometimes fail. It is a non-invasive approach.

2003-08-21T23:38:00.000-05:00

Environmental Misanthropy

The French are demonstrating nicely, the fundamental misanthropy girding much of what calls itself environmentalism. The Independent is suggesting that “some 10,000 people - mostly over the age of 75” have been killed in the recent heat wave. While the French government points innocently at the thermometer, they belie what amounts to, in the words of one debunkers.org poster, their citizens being “taxed to death – literally.” The debunkers thread links to this nice summation of the issue.

2003-08-08T23:08:00.000-05:00

I think I may be on to something

...although in these situations, it often turns out that I am, in fact, not. I shall not, however, allow that to deter me in the least.

You see, I got to wondering tonight about the motion of people in a large group. Consider, for example, the flow of foot traffic in the corridor of Busch Stadium during a Cardinals game. How, if at all, does the ostensible free will of the individuals moving through/with/against the throng effect their movement? Does the human consciousness have any sort of mathematically discernable impact on an individual’s behavior in a situation like this? Or upon the pattern of the entire motion taken as a whole?

In particular I wonder, if one could describe the motion of both water molecules in flowing water and people in a flowing crowd with some success mathematically, would it then be possible to make some comparisons? Would these comparisons provide any insight into the nature of free will?

2003-07-03T11:17:00.000-05:00

Gray Corporation

It occurred to me recently that I could post the results of my labor here while simultaneously lending something concrete to the explanation of why I don’t post as often as I would like. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I am a multimedia developer/designer. My most recent project, which occupied so much of my time as to make posting to the blog difficult, is now complete and live. It is a web site for the Gray Corporation - a design-build construction firm in Lexington, Kentucky.

There you go: shameless self-promotion.

2003-06-24T13:02:00.000-05:00

AdBluster

Steve has the DU to lampoon (fish in a barrel) and I have AdBusters. Having a career in advertising, I feel inclined to respond to and elucidate their intellectual bankruptcy. As their rhetoric (what little of it is explicitly stated) appears to be a mishmash of multifarious anti-capitalist, anti-industrialism dogmas, it has already been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, so I'm sure I'll cover some well-tread ground. Furthermore, I can’t imagine being able to paint a complete picture of their pusillanimity and perfidy in one blog post, so this will be an ongoing project.

What struck me as specious enough to start writing about AdBusters and “creative resistance” in general, is the notion that artists are marginalized or exploited by capitalism. I’m dumbfounded even typing that. Where else but in a market full of eccentric capitalists can an artist find funding for even the most bizarre projects? Even the evil Enron was the single largest source of funding for artistic endeavors in Houston. What opportunities are available to the artist in China aside from propaganda?

As social critics, AdBusters remind me of a favorite quotation of mine:

”What every artist knows: No matter how great my contemporaries, they are only human.
What every critic knows: One need not create anything in order to lift one’s leg and piss on those who do.”
-Sigismundo Celine

Alas, work calls and I get to go be creative in the service of the “evil” corporate hegemon, because of whom I have indoor plumbing, air conditioning, a means of transportation, a nice computer and a lengthy life-expectancy among other things. Obviously I’m a shill and should go live in the trees.

”All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

What indeed.

2003-06-15T00:25:00.000-05:00

Socialism is the Opiate of the Masses

This is but one of the reasons I consider myself fortunate to be an citizen of the U.S. I cannot imagine exactly how the EU intends to continue to fund their massive welfare systems – but one thing is certain: the European populace (read: dependents) won’t stand for any curtailing, regardless of the consequences.

I can’t help but think that the knee-jerk appeal to socialism is the product of a profound misunderstanding of the importance and fundamental pre-eminence of individualism. I found what I believe to be an apt illustration of this in the above article. To wit:

The controversy also goes to the heart of the debate on what kind of society "Europe" is building. In an essay published in Frankfurt and Paris last week Jürgen Habermas in Germany and Jacques Derrida in France hailed the birth of a "European public" which should be matched by strengthening the European polity.

European welfarism should be central to that project, they argued, setting Europe apart from the Anglo-Saxon model of pension funds, private provision, and stock markets as the cushions in old age.

It seems to me that the above gives the distinct impression that the author (and indeed the European mainstream) feels that “private provision” is just as much a top-down model foisted upon a people as is a welfare system! I think this is indicative of a general disposition toward mental masturbation in Europe — great expenditures of thought (and money) yielding grand plans and analysis for and of Europe; as if the demise of the Sun Kings was merely a logistical nicety. In contrast, I would argue that the U.S. is taken at its very core, by the notion that it is every individual’s actions and interests that are paramount — and as such, pronouncements from on high are generally treated with a good deal of skepticism, if not hostility, (Gore Vidal, be warned.)

Taking pot-shots at Europe aside, the issue I’m trying to shine some light upon is the Taxis/Kosmos dichotomy. Taxis and Kosmos are appellations given by Friedrich Hayek, Economist and Nobel Laureate, to encapsulate the concepts of made order and grown or spontaneous order, respectively. Made order seems to be the most intuitive kind of order — it is order imposed by fiat. Accordingly, when something in society is distasteful to a segment of the population, the call is made to fix it — and what is meant by this is the imposition of taxis. Because this approach seems so obvious, it is ubiquitous — the particular form of the taxis may change, but it is still taxis that is easily understood and therefore applied over and over.

Kosmos is Hayek’s name for spontaneous order. Spontaneous order is the order of nature. There is no fiat in nature. Take a simple plant as an example: there is no central governor that controls the process by which a plant should grow and manifest. Rather, it will grow toward its light source — if that source should be to the north, it will grow to the north, etc. It is the exigencies of the context in which a grown order appears that dictate the nature of the order and NOT fiat. This is a sophisticated concept. It is not easily understood or assimilated, and because of this, it took many thousands of years before a system of human governance that exemplified Kosmos was developed (embodied in the Constitution of the United States.)

I suppose a pissed-off 50-year-old post office worker can’t be expected to keep such subtleties of knowledge in hand while considering their pension.

2003-06-04T16:58:00.000-05:00

Standards Imposed by Asshatocrats

I've been neglecting the blog in response to crazy project deadlines. In particular, I'm developing a web site and I'm trying to get it to conform to W3C specifications. This seemed like a good idea when I started, but now I'm beginning to question certain choices made by this not-so-august body. There are many things I could complain about, but just as an example, HTML 4 supports the ability to open a link in a new window by simply adding an attribute to the the link's tag - as of XHTML1.0 Strict, the use of this attribute has been deprecated. Why? Because the ivory tower bureaucrats at the W3C deem it so. They would like to see the complete reductionistic separation of the semantic nature of HTML from the language that controls the styling of the content.

These fools don't know thing one about art to begin with, but their philosophy notwithstanding, what bothers me most is my feeling that market should create the standards implicitly. If the preponderance of the market uses MSIE as their browser, they are effectively speaking to their preferences and I'd personally like to see the W3C bitch-slapped for their audacity in second guessing us. I don't give a good god damn about what some red-faced Jakob Nielsen has to say about the usability of some design approach I want to take - if I want to take it badly enough, no one should attempt to save me from my "folly." The W3C is like the lifestyle nannies who upbraid oreo consumers and smokers. Get off your high horses and actually get a job making web sites if you want to make a difference, but stop demanding that we out here in the trenches should wait with bated breath for your imperial pronouncements.

2003-05-23T23:17:00.000-05:00

Two Things

1. Steve Verdon has a new site and the Movable Type look is more suited to his brand in my humble opinion.

2. This one will only be useful to web developers and designers: There is a tool called DHTML Menu Builder, written by one Xavier Flix, that for under $100, will give you the ability to create a wide array of completely customizable (font, background images, borders, etc) hierarchical menus that will work in almost any browser. This is a significant value. What makes this software even more incredible is the support that the author provides. I have never waited more than 24 hours to hear directly from the author on implementation questions — in fact, there have been occasions where he has posted a new build of the software containing new functionality that I had asked about on the previous day. Did I mention free upgrades? I don't often promote products, but this guy deserves all the business he can handle.

2003-05-17T19:09:00.000-05:00

The Banal Terrorists

In my humble opinion, these folks are terrorists. They are targeting Huntingdon Life Sciences for their use of animal testing, and the methods they employ are quite abhorrent. Here’s a particularly nasty specimen:

Activists paid a Mother's Day visit to the homes of Chiron employees late Sunday night to serve as a warning of things to come if they do not sever al times to Huntingdon Life Sciences immediately. The company's chairman of the board (address removed) was awoken by a personal alarm screaming in the night and a putrid stench rising up from the floor of his home.

This is not a cosmetics firm; they develop diagnostics for HIV among other things. In fact, if you are interested in a sober evaluation of the situation, check out their pages concerning ethical issues. On the other hand, if its hand waving and bluster in which you’re interested, check out SHAC’s vitriol. The intellectual bankruptcy of SHAC’s rhetoric should be immediately obvious.

2003-05-13T23:46:00.000-05:00

Intemperate Temperance

This sort of thing is complete crap.

”Temperate temperance is best. Intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance, while temperate temperance helps it in its fight against intemperate intemperance. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky.”

- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1896

People should be allowed to hurt themselves. While I was studying voice in college, it was explained to me by one Dr. John Jost that one cannot sing without damaging one's vocal apparatus — in fact, singing may be one of the worst things you can do to it. Hearing this was a bit of an epiphany for me, as it seems to extrapolate well to the general proposition that every activity has a cost, no matter how innocuous the activity may seem. If this proposition is valid, one could argue that the compulsion to “protect” the ostensibly feckless masses from risk would have no end.

2003-05-09T15:21:00.000-05:00

It's a Small Blogosphere

I've only really been conscious of the blogging phenomenon for about about six months, so I'm still amazed at it's success. I was astonished, for example, to find that I'd been blogrolled by Michael over at Discount Blogger.

Thanks Michael.

2003-05-09T01:53:00.000-05:00

Missing the Trash

Because the Trash Talk forums have been down, I haven't been able to ask the assembled brains therein about this thing.

How's that for a short post, Skye?

2003-04-30T01:05:00.000-05:00

Design as a (partially) Stochastic Process

In my 4/23 post called Dogma and Design, I kvetched about dogmatic usability gurus and their tendency to use a rhetorical style that alienates the audience they most need to reach: designers. I suggested off-handedly at the end of the post that perhaps their rhetoric is a function of their general philosophical persuasion, which I further postulated to be some form of positivism or objectivism. While I hold these philosophies in some esteem, I have some profound issues with them as well. All I will say on that subject for the moment is that I don’t think the enlightenment was the end of the process — but I definitely don’t think we need to do away with it, in fact I consider the enlightenment to be one of the most important things to have ever happened in human history. I digress.

Because I have some esteem for the “scientific worldview,” I feel compelled to try to elucidate my opinion about design using at least an empirical, if perhaps not quantitative, argument. The crux of the argument is an experiment I read in something by Robert Anton Wilson (the particular source of which eludes me,) which, if I remember correctly, was co-opted in turn from Buckminster Fuller. So this is something of a multiparty plagiarism at this point. Here’s the experiment you can try at home:

Ask a friend to fetch a newspaper you haven’t seen. Instruct said friend to stand a distance just far enough from you that you cannot read a headline of a certain size. If the paper has been close enough to you during this process to have read the given headline, request that your friend find another headline of the same size and show it to you at the distance already described. While looking at the headline that is barely too distant to read, ask your friend to read the headline aloud. If the paper is not too far away to discern the headline from other elements on the page, you should see the words as your friend reads them aloud.

This experiment has worked for me every time — I encourage you (all three of you that read this stuff) to try it. This experiment leads me to something more like the position of Aleister Crowley when he suggests:

Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, colour, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese. All 'material things,' all impressions, are phantoms.
In reality the cheese is nothing but a series of electric charges. Even the most fundamental quality of all, mass, has been found not to exist. The same is true of the matter in our brains which is partly responsible for these perceptions. What then are these qualities of which we are all so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and the seen, of subject and object in consciousness as the philosophical phrase goes. They have no material existence; they are only names given to the ecstatic results of this particular form of Yoga.

I have digressed from my digression.

Let me try to bring this back around to commercial art. Part of the responsibility of an ad, or a web site or any other marketing vehicle is to communicate the brand. The experiment above seems to suggest that some part of what has meaning to us as humans is perceptual. There seems to be an intersection here.

Add one more element to the equation: Our world is full of art and design. It permeates our existence. Because of this, we all have a quite nuanced and subconscious network of associations between a matrix of artistic concepts, paradigms and elements and a matrix of emotions, memories and contexts. In other words, we all respond to the language of art, in part, on a visceral level that gets in “beneath the radar” as it were. Furthermore, the stream of artistic thought and action is fluid, so that concepts, paradigms and elements are constantly engendered, revised or revisited. This fluidity seems to reinforce the “beneath the radar” effect by keeping the audience somewhat off-guard.

Taking the quote from the 4/23 post:

"Web design is not about art, it's about making money."

I’ve already said I have no problem with the second clause; it is the first clause to which I object. How does a brand like Nike, competing in a crowded market, get and keep market share? It seems to me a big part of how they do it is through the intuition of the commercial artist whose keen awareness of the shifting tides of artistic value helps shape the perceptions of the market. The artist is your friend holding the newspaper, with the brand as the headline and he’s telling you what that brand means, using the archetypes of art.

The web is an excellent marketing vehicle. It certainly seems to entail more vis-à-vis usability than, for example, a magazine ad, but it still does a great job conveying brand messages through art. In rare cases, I even think the value of this trumps a usability rule here and there.

When considering the preceding commentary, one should take into account the incredibly convoluted nature and the fact that the author was drunk (not really.) At least he spell-chevked.

2003-04-26T02:11:00.000-05:00

Snopes.com

Perusing Dave Barry’s blog, I ran across a link to this item. Needless to say, I was feeling dubious about this whole story and after a google on the name “Andrew Carlssin” returned some 400+ links (many of which were from multifarious international blogs,) I was certain it must be a hoax.

I suddenly remembered the place to check: Snopes.com. Despite the apparently young life of this story – they had the answer. Good show, indeed. Now they need to hire me to redesign their site.

2003-04-23T00:27:00.000-05:00

Dogma and Design

Because I enjoy it immensely, and because it pays my mortgage, I am an interactive designer/developer. I say designer/developer because I really labor intensively to do both well – which is not at all easy. One thing that makes it particularly difficult (aside from the clients) is the tremendously different attitudes and philosophies of designers and developers. Most of the designers I know consider themselves, for the most part, artists. Most of the developers I know consider themselves engineers of sorts. Perhaps one can begin to see my point.

Personally, I think that no interactive project will serve the client well if it is either unusable or ugly. In other words, an integration of these two disparate perspectives seems to me necessary. It is my experience with the medium, however, that this integration is very rarely achieved. As to why this is, I suspect dogmatism.

One dogmatist in particular raised my ire today: Vincent Flanders. Vince, it seems, is a cohort of the egregious Jacob Nielsen. I’ve got to give some props to Dr. Nielsen for the light he has helped to shed on usability concerns in software. That usability is a matter of great concern, there can be no doubt, but the cheerleading for usability is not what troubles me. What troubles me is the dogmatic assertion that usability is not only important, but paramount.

It is my contention that in some instances, usability is the most important concern, but in others, aesthetics is the most important and still others where they should be on roughly equal footing (this would seem to be the most common). It seems this is lost on these gents, and as I indicated above, I would submit that the kind of rhetoric they employ exacerbates the difficulties that naturally occur between designers and developers. So, rather than helping to produce an environment in which great work gets done, they’re despoiling the waters with comments like this (source):

"Web design is not about art, it's about making money."

Incidentally, this is the comment which raised my ire — he even has it in bold type. I have no problem with the notion that web design is about making money, I just don’t consider profit and art to be mutually exclusive. My experience with designers suggests to me that comments like the above do more to turn them off to usability, heuristics, et al. in toto. Perhaps Vince should consider employing E-Prime.

I suspect the distance between Jakob or Vinny and say, Eric Jordan may actually be posterior to a deeper philosophical distance. In particular, I wonder how many of Nielsen’s ilk would fancy themselves objectivists or positivists. It would explain much, as the perspective of the designer/artist is often poorly or nearly impossibly parleyed into the language of slide-rules and t-squares.

2003-04-17T09:41:00.000-05:00

Steve Verdon was quite kind to post something about my blog - as well as blogrolling me! I have him blogrolled, but if you haven't been there, go read his blog: Deinonychus Antirropus. As he notes in his post, he's a regular at the Trash Talk BB, which is an excellent place to be informed about how specious science is used to further various agendas. I’m also adding a link to the “Edification” section of my links to a site I found on Steve’s site: the site of a certain David Friedman, whose online writings on economics, game theory and libertarianism are incredibly interesting.

2003-04-15T23:54:00.000-05:00

My experience with Blogger has been less than stellar so far. Currently, my archive contains a link to a test post I used when I first started the blog. I deleted it some time ago, but there it remains – and even formatted in one of the default templates.

For those few who read this, should you be unfamiliar with Blogger, the blog administrator is provided a way to view archives and there are even buttons that say “delete.” One would naturally assume that clicking such a button would result in the deletion of something. One would be wrong in this case. Clicking said button returns inscrutable error messages, and a consultation of the convoluted “Knowledge Base” seems to suggest that, yes, in fact, you can NOT delete the archives using the captious delete button, or indeed any other method (getting to that). I am not certain that this is what the “Knowledge Base” wants me to know, because the language is unclear at best and contained in a section suggesting that posts may not be deleted even if the site is deleted (?!?)

Well – I rather enjoy it anyway, despite the shortcomings, because I’m publishing my very own rubbish for pennies.

2003-04-10T00:52:00.000-05:00

I have an old friend, with whom I haven’t spoken in some time. The last time I saw her, she was with her significant other, who was decidedly Marxist – well…I don’t presume to offer a label for her own particular nuanced flavor of communism – but I gathered from our long conversation that she was pretty hostile to capitalism. I consider my friend a brilliant artist and while I was only just meeting her girlfriend for the first time, she struck me as possessing a quick, clever wit. My friend, at the time had just received an impressive post-graduate degree from a highly-esteemed art school and her girlfriend was pursuing the like from the same. They are both within five years of my age, I believe. These are smart people.

I think their particular type of intelligence exacerbates the issue I was kvetching about in my 4/6 post. I learned a lot from my discussion that evening, vis-à-vis trying to package very pragmatic concepts in a way that speaks to lateral-thinking minds, but there was much that I felt I communicated, perhaps accurately, but not compellingly. While this was many months ago, these things roll and loll in my cranium and since only Skye reads this thing, I thought I’d try to repackage some of my libertarian yang to her communist yin.

One of the sort-of subcutaneous threads of the discussion was the perceived dichotomy between science and nature. She seemed to suggest that the results of the application of science and empiricism were ugly, dehumanizing and destroying the planet. She is by no means alone in her belief.

Let me really get down to primacy here. Real freedom for all individuals is a product of enlightenment philosophy. In particular, empiricism suggests that you can prevent people from lording over you through appeals to religion or the supernatural, by testing their claims against your own experience. This is practical for everyone provided the issue is a very simple one like, “if you don’t do my bidding, you’ll immediately be struck by lightning” – anyone can test this claim – but empirical knowledge of some things require special tools. For example, your practical knowledge of the moon is dramatically increased through the intercession of a telescope.

One of the dangers she mentioned – and I’ve heard it mentioned many times – is that posed by industrialized farming practices. When examining this issue, the equivalent “telescopes” of agricultural science produce dazzling images like this one. Here are some highlights:

“Stated simply, 1960 yields would require virtually all of the land not yet being used for crops — or taken out of cultivation for habitat and wildlife conservation — to be cultivated.”

“Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer costs money, so farmers attempt to become more efficient in its use. The best measure of this is the ratio of nitrogen in the fertilizer applied to the nitrogen in the crop. This ratio fell for American farmers by 2% per year from 1986 to 1995.”

“…water needs for food per capita halved between 1961 and 2001…”

“…cropland for grain-fed animals to produce meat for Americans shrank 2.2% annually…”

These things are all a result of the technologies employed. Seeing these kind of results is especially noteworthy when you consider that agriculture is probably the oldest human technology – we’ve pretty well sussed it out.

Now what the hell was I talking about?

Sorry about the length of the post, Skye.

Jeez, my one reader makes one request, "keep the posts short like you have been," and I've already blown it.

2003-04-09T00:17:00.000-05:00

It pisses me off.

The majority of the media I encounter on a daily basis, irrespective of political or philosophical identification, strikes me as tendentious and abrasive. For too many and profound reasons to enumerate at this moment, I regard genuine objectivity as functionally impossible – BUT – I see no reason why writers/reporters can’t attempt to present multiple opinions and name the body of thought associated with each opinion. Is the “conventional wisdom” really that empiricism is so ridiculous that people can’t be trusted to make up their own minds?

It’s not just the media – politicians are just as bad…worse. I hear platitude after platitude in the made-for-tv communications of the body politic – but never any attempt to elucidate the philosophical antecedents of the specificities of Senator X’s positions. Would it be so terrible for the left to admit that the right doesn’t want the indigent to rot in the gutter – they just believe the issue should be addressed through different means? Couldn’t the right speak calmly about the possibility that a reasonable person could have a cogent argument in opposition of the war (not that I’ve heard any)?

I want to launch into what I perceive to be the failure of classical academia to effectively market the enlightenment, but I am in pursuit of some capital and idle bloviation will not bring it nearer. Another time…

2003-04-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

As I see it in those around me, I realize that I, too, have been well trained in arguments critical of Western society and philosophy, without having been given a thorough grounding in that which I have sought to criticize. In the spirit of ameliorating what seems to me to be a not insignificant problem with my and my peers’ knowledge, I’m eager to lay some blame on my/our public school education.

As a sophomore in high-school, I was offered a class (taught by the English Department, strangely) in Existentialism – a class misleadingly named “Modern Thought.” It has been about twelve or so years since I took this class, but I remember the first day opened with a critique of Plato. While Plato strikes me as being considerably less important to the enlightenment than Aristotle, I am and was bemused by the fact that I had not received even the most cursory of instruction in Plato or Aristotle (or any other in the Western canon) and yet here I was being taught refutations.

Standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing, but what we were engaged in was something more akin to stomping on the shoulders of the giants upon which we stood.