Sunday, October 31, 2004
The new Battlestar Galactica series rules! Snag it off Bittorrent and check it out, but make sure to start with the two-part premier.
Joel M.
Update: Also, while you're getting Battlestar, download Drawn Together, too. It's hilarious.
Joel M.
Update: Also, while you're getting Battlestar, download Drawn Together, too. It's hilarious.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
A movie about the state of W.'s brain here.
It compares W. from ten years ago to W. now, and speculates that he is going into senile dementia. Ten years ago he wasn't the world's greatest speaker, but he was forceful and articulate. Now, though? Wow. I actually hadn't seen any debate footage, but the stuff in this movie had him looking, frankly, like a scared, bewildered old man.
Of course, a scared, bewildered old man supposedly destroyed communism, so I think that there is something to my friend Aaron's claim that the actual intelligence of the president doesn't really matter when you consider the array of advisors and flat-out puppeteers involved in the office. Who knows, maybe the evil geniuses of the Republican party select their boy based on both appeal and malleability, so all future Republican presidents will also be going senile.
Anyhoo, I guess the point I am trying to make is that, like the Swift Boat thing or the National Guard thing, it's a mistake to let partisan mudslinging be the major focus of the debate about who should be president. The Americans should be booting Bush out based on the fact that the majority of his policies have been evil, shortsighted and destructive, not because he looks like a monkey or because he's not the world's greatest public speaker.
I mean, hell, put me under the theoretical scrutiny of 250 million people and I would probably drown in my own flop-sweat before I had a chance to screw up the actual speach and debate portion of the test itself.
Actually, on the topic of Aaron, at the same time he pointed out that it is a little strange to base the selection of the president so heavily on his speech and debate skills. Sure, the job involves speeches, but they're written by other people and half of what comes out of the Office of the POTUS is in the mouths of various departmental flunkies anyway. If anybody expected the president to really be anything other than a cheerleader for a shadowy cohort of inarticulate policy wonks, wouldn't the campaign involve tests of geopolitical knowledge and ability to strategize and put working deals together?
Man, being Canadian pisses me off sometimes. American politics are such a fucking black hole that it's almost impossible for me to come to grips with the horror of my own country, province and city's political scene. It's like trying to worry about a rat infestation in your basement when the next-door neighbour is testing home-made firearms against the side of your house while buggering monkeys.
Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)
It compares W. from ten years ago to W. now, and speculates that he is going into senile dementia. Ten years ago he wasn't the world's greatest speaker, but he was forceful and articulate. Now, though? Wow. I actually hadn't seen any debate footage, but the stuff in this movie had him looking, frankly, like a scared, bewildered old man.
Of course, a scared, bewildered old man supposedly destroyed communism, so I think that there is something to my friend Aaron's claim that the actual intelligence of the president doesn't really matter when you consider the array of advisors and flat-out puppeteers involved in the office. Who knows, maybe the evil geniuses of the Republican party select their boy based on both appeal and malleability, so all future Republican presidents will also be going senile.
Anyhoo, I guess the point I am trying to make is that, like the Swift Boat thing or the National Guard thing, it's a mistake to let partisan mudslinging be the major focus of the debate about who should be president. The Americans should be booting Bush out based on the fact that the majority of his policies have been evil, shortsighted and destructive, not because he looks like a monkey or because he's not the world's greatest public speaker.
I mean, hell, put me under the theoretical scrutiny of 250 million people and I would probably drown in my own flop-sweat before I had a chance to screw up the actual speach and debate portion of the test itself.
Actually, on the topic of Aaron, at the same time he pointed out that it is a little strange to base the selection of the president so heavily on his speech and debate skills. Sure, the job involves speeches, but they're written by other people and half of what comes out of the Office of the POTUS is in the mouths of various departmental flunkies anyway. If anybody expected the president to really be anything other than a cheerleader for a shadowy cohort of inarticulate policy wonks, wouldn't the campaign involve tests of geopolitical knowledge and ability to strategize and put working deals together?
Man, being Canadian pisses me off sometimes. American politics are such a fucking black hole that it's almost impossible for me to come to grips with the horror of my own country, province and city's political scene. It's like trying to worry about a rat infestation in your basement when the next-door neighbour is testing home-made firearms against the side of your house while buggering monkeys.
Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)
Thursday, October 14, 2004
So get this: I rule!
This Sunday I ran, and finished, the Royal Victoria Marathon! That's 26 miles in 4 hours, 15 minutes and 12 seconds!
Boo yeah, baby!
Joel M. (via how much I rule)
Oh, yeah. I'm playing with a thing that is supposed to upload photos onto Blogger, but it seems pretty awkward, so maybe a photo of me crossing the finish line will show up here. Or not.
This Sunday I ran, and finished, the Royal Victoria Marathon! That's 26 miles in 4 hours, 15 minutes and 12 seconds!
Boo yeah, baby!
Joel M. (via how much I rule)
Oh, yeah. I'm playing with a thing that is supposed to upload photos onto Blogger, but it seems pretty awkward, so maybe a photo of me crossing the finish line will show up here. Or not.
Monday, October 04, 2004
Good article on Reason about the debates.
In particular, I liked the argument made for the impact of subtle, or not so subtle, emotions on voters rather than hard numbers.
"(I)n an age when the Argus-eyed media strips candidates bare, emoting drives voting... Certain lines of argument in defense of social programs, for instance, betray a sense that whether or not they're effective is secondary: These programs are... a way of signaling a kind of collective caring about the plight of the badly off. Opposition to them was taken as a sign that Republicans are mean, regardless of whether any particular critique is on point. Similarly, any suggestion that some people are badly off because of bad choices they've made risks "blaming the victim." That position always struck me as a kind of metastasis of a good rule of interpersonal etiquette: If a friend calls to tell you he's lost his job because of poor performance or chronic lateness, your first response (even if you might more gently raise this point later) is not to say, "Well, it serves you right, slacker," but to commiserate.
We now see a surprisingly similar line used against critics of the war in Iraq. The problem with negative appraisals of the situation there isn't that they're wrong, as such, but that it's somehow cruel to the families of soldiers to suggest they've died for an error. And if you point out that the U.S. is bearing the brunt of the war costs in both blood and treasure, you're debasing the contributions of our allies."
In other words, grown-up politics make about as much sense as they did in grade school. Or high school. Or in people's personal lives, even.
Think about cliques in high school. There isn't usually a tactical reason for any of these people to hang around together. Heck, even a little thought would seem to tell a theoretical rational actor that spending all of one's time hanging around with a pack of drunken jocks or vacuous stoners isn't going to be good in the long run, no matter what the tactical advantages are vis a vis not being called a loser or roughed up due to a chronic lack of friends.
And check it: If you know me, you'll see in the previous paragraph that I avoided even an oblique reference to my own ill-defined high school clique, most of whom I still hang out with. Advantages or disadvantages aside, this just serves to illustrate the point that expecting people to act out of nothing but reason is a little unreasonable.
Hmm. Going with the tangent, it might be quite instructive to look at this sort of personal behavior to explain mass behavior such as voting. For example, the aforementioned cliquishness makes for an easy-to-understand example of how the politics of fear and division work: In school, you've got various groups who hang out together, usually predicated on some common interest in sport or music. Each of these groups tends to remain cohesive despite internal conflicts and tensions. Each of these cliques tends to have other cliques which they regard with fear or hatred. It's not a huge leap to speculate that this fear is what causes such groups to stick together.
I think that this can further devolve to the point of tribal behaviors, since that's really all social cliques are. It seems to be programmed into human DNA or something that, whenever circumstances throw a bunch of people together, they spontaneously generate a set of arbitrary and silly (un)spoken rules, a set of costumes, and then start getting all messed up about other nearby groups of people.
It all comes down to the Monkeysphere, people. Take that and add a long, chaotic string of polite evasions and it seems like you can explain a great deal about where politics, culture and society come from.
Joel M. (via www.reason.com)
In particular, I liked the argument made for the impact of subtle, or not so subtle, emotions on voters rather than hard numbers.
"(I)n an age when the Argus-eyed media strips candidates bare, emoting drives voting... Certain lines of argument in defense of social programs, for instance, betray a sense that whether or not they're effective is secondary: These programs are... a way of signaling a kind of collective caring about the plight of the badly off. Opposition to them was taken as a sign that Republicans are mean, regardless of whether any particular critique is on point. Similarly, any suggestion that some people are badly off because of bad choices they've made risks "blaming the victim." That position always struck me as a kind of metastasis of a good rule of interpersonal etiquette: If a friend calls to tell you he's lost his job because of poor performance or chronic lateness, your first response (even if you might more gently raise this point later) is not to say, "Well, it serves you right, slacker," but to commiserate.
We now see a surprisingly similar line used against critics of the war in Iraq. The problem with negative appraisals of the situation there isn't that they're wrong, as such, but that it's somehow cruel to the families of soldiers to suggest they've died for an error. And if you point out that the U.S. is bearing the brunt of the war costs in both blood and treasure, you're debasing the contributions of our allies."
In other words, grown-up politics make about as much sense as they did in grade school. Or high school. Or in people's personal lives, even.
Think about cliques in high school. There isn't usually a tactical reason for any of these people to hang around together. Heck, even a little thought would seem to tell a theoretical rational actor that spending all of one's time hanging around with a pack of drunken jocks or vacuous stoners isn't going to be good in the long run, no matter what the tactical advantages are vis a vis not being called a loser or roughed up due to a chronic lack of friends.
And check it: If you know me, you'll see in the previous paragraph that I avoided even an oblique reference to my own ill-defined high school clique, most of whom I still hang out with. Advantages or disadvantages aside, this just serves to illustrate the point that expecting people to act out of nothing but reason is a little unreasonable.
Hmm. Going with the tangent, it might be quite instructive to look at this sort of personal behavior to explain mass behavior such as voting. For example, the aforementioned cliquishness makes for an easy-to-understand example of how the politics of fear and division work: In school, you've got various groups who hang out together, usually predicated on some common interest in sport or music. Each of these groups tends to remain cohesive despite internal conflicts and tensions. Each of these cliques tends to have other cliques which they regard with fear or hatred. It's not a huge leap to speculate that this fear is what causes such groups to stick together.
I think that this can further devolve to the point of tribal behaviors, since that's really all social cliques are. It seems to be programmed into human DNA or something that, whenever circumstances throw a bunch of people together, they spontaneously generate a set of arbitrary and silly (un)spoken rules, a set of costumes, and then start getting all messed up about other nearby groups of people.
It all comes down to the Monkeysphere, people. Take that and add a long, chaotic string of polite evasions and it seems like you can explain a great deal about where politics, culture and society come from.
Joel M. (via www.reason.com)
