I'm underemployed, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring severe clinical depression. See here for a major crisis. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. This is a previous update on my situation & this -- and this from December 19th, 2005 update.
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Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 587
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 29 sign-ups; 15 cancellations; Total= 14
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 6 sign-ups; 2 cancellation; Total= 4
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Reed Waller, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
TROY MCCLURE REPORTING: Did you know there are 78 Simpsonsaction figures so far? 78! Imagine the stop motion animation possibilities! Feel the lurve.
We're talking central beloved figures such as 51. Lou, 52. Hans Moleman, 53. Dolph, not to mention variants such as 64. Burns Dracula, 65. Bart as The Fly, not to mention 78. Herb Powell. Who will be 79?
AL GORE MEDIA ATTITUDE WATCH: This is from the "soft" Style section, in a piece on Tipper, so they can get away with this, but tell me again about the "liberal" Washington Post slant towards Democrats and/or Gore:
And while Al Gore is still alive -- though some may have wondered otherwise....
CONSPIRACY THEORY THEORY: Good analysis of why people succumb to conspiracy theories.
The psychological motives that underlie paranoia vary, experts say. But they include a distrust of government, a drive to feel important and in the know, the tendency to blame others for misfortune and a need to make sense out of confusing events.
[...] Americans are no strangers to any of these imperatives. Following the suicide in January of a former Enron executive, J. Clifford Baxter, speculation flourished that he was murdered to cover up his knowledge of the corporate scandal — an echo of the suspicions that arose after the 1993 suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel. There remain those convinced that when Trans World Airlines Flight 800 exploded over Long Island, a missile was to blame. And moving farther toward the fringe, Roswell, N.M., remains in some people's minds as the site of secret alien autopsies.
And nowadays, endless theories in the Islamic world as to how Someone Else was responsible for September 11th: Jews, Mossad, CIA, drug traffickers, American militias, whomever.
On the insane leftist fringe, the idea that Bush and the Administration Knew In Advance. Or, bizarrely, that the thousands of people who saw the plane fly over Washington and hit the Pentagon are all lying and in on the conspiracy to claim they saw it, to cover up that it was a truck bomb. I can't even firgure out the point of that one, beyond sheer crazy paranoia.
[...] There are reasons such ideas do not fade easily. "Conspiracy theories serve a lot of useful functions," said Dr. Robert Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Business School. One of these, he noted, is to provide a powerful common enemy on whom misfortune can be blamed.
"People try to understand why they feel so powerless," Dr. Kramer said, "and one ready explanation is that since we're good people, there must be powerful, evil forces arrayed against us."
[...]
Misunderstanding how government works can turn bureaucratic bumbling into sinister machination in the eyes of Americans. [...] In fact, many experts said, even the wildest conspiracy theories can be built around a kernel of truth, however small. For example, Jennifer Crocker, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, said her research suggests that real events like the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which penicillin was withheld from black men with syphilis, and the surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. by the Federal Bureau of Investigation helped fuel conspiracy theories among African- Americans about the appearance of the AIDS virus.
"People who know about those things are willing to say, well, it could be true," Dr. Crocker said.
This is exactly right. I've seen and read people putting forward the looniest stuff with precisely this rationale, even when the source is a demonstrable literal paranoid schizophrenic and the theory contravenes endless known facts, or is physically impossible. But "well, we've seen other conspiracies so this one could be true." But usually one can judge the likelihood of its potential reality reasonably well if one has some knowledge of the subject.
She found that among study participants, those who said the government had infected African- Americans with AIDS were more likely to blame prejudice for the problems of blacks. Believing that a deadly virus did not strike randomly, Dr. Crocker said, offered "a way to make sense of the world."
Though the differences between America and the Islamic world might loom large, what links them is a desire for the reassurance that certainty provides. "The world is obscure and what is happening is often obscure," Dr. Robins said. "Conspiracy theories make the world seem a lot more rational."
COUNTING DOWN TO ZERO: The end of the excavation is in sight.
But the unforgiving truth is, they are running out of dirt to sift through at the World Trade Center site. The once monstrous task of debris removal and body recovery has come down to little more than a hill or two. [...] "It's not over, but it's definitely winding down," said Firefighter Keith J. Dillon, who has been helping search for human remains. "You've got a great number of people that you want to find, and you've got a certain amount of dirt that's left. And there's a gap. That gap is going to be a sorrowful one.
"But we can't make more dirt."
[...]
A glance upward from the center of the World Trade Center site reveals an empty blue expanse of sky that is unnerving, simply too vast for a spot in the heart of Lower Manhattan. Not only are almost all traces of the trade center towers now nearly gone, but with the removal of 1.4 million tons of debris in 98,000 truckloads, the work has shifted to the bottom of a pit that is 70 feet below the streets.
[...]
A cold fact weighs on the minds of many workers at the site: only 773 of the approximately 2,830 victims of the World Trade Center attack have been recovered and identified, though the remains of many others are still being analyzed. For the firefighters, only 155 of the 343 who died have been found and identified. With only so much debris left to comb, each pile sent off for disposal is one fewer left to look through.
[...]
Searchers for remains are working with an intensity unlike any they have displayed until now.
"I just want to get him home," said John T. Vigiano, a retired Fire Department captain and volunteer at the site, who lost two sons — John, 36, a firefighter, and Joseph, 34, a police detective. Only Joseph's remains have been found. "I am so tired coming down here smelling death, standing on honor guards. What we are looking for are his remains."
It's even more dangerous now, particularly in the PATH tunnel. And how the workers will cope when it's over is another danger.
[...] Police Officer Michael Lopez, working a checkpoint at West and Liberty Streets, said: "It won't be easy to walk away. It will be inside you forever, always."
LOW CULTURE INFILTRATES HIGH REVIEW: It's not unusual any more for a graphic novel to be reviewed in high places, or, hey, a novel about comics, such as Kavalier and Clay to win all sorts of literary praise and acceptance and honors. But has a Marvel X-Men spinoff graphic novel been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review before? Not that I'd noticed. (Positively, too.)
3/16/2002 07:39:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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STEVEN EMERSON was the journalist on the Islamic terrorist story before anyone. He started in December 1992, when he stumbled by accident into a small convention of jihadists in Oklahoma City, and listened with amazement to what they were saying about "death to the Jews" and "death to America" and how to bring it about.
His book, American Jihad is now out. Here's the nice long first chapter, telling how he got into the story, formed the Investigative Project, and had to go into hiding after he was warned by the State Department and FBI that a team had been sent from South Africa to assassinate him. His Project was able to do amazing work, largely because the FBI at the time was forbidden to; thus documents fell into Emerson's hands, as did the investigative baton in this marathon.
He was one of the first to discover that:
Up until that point I had thought militancy was a mind-set of impoverished and ill-educated people whose fervor was driven by their lack of opportunity in life. But this was an audience of privileged young people — future doctors and lawyers — and still they openly supported Hamas.
ODE TO TERROR: Interesting analysis by Judith Shulevitz of the poem bin Laden read in his videotapes, and what it reveals about his theology. Particularly important is to note that he changed the original:
Where the poet wrote ''monuments,'' bin Laden said ''towers''; and where the poet wrote ''swords will not be thrown down,'' bin Laden said ''the raids will not stop.''
BEFORE BLOGS: Ken Goldstein of The Illuminated Donkeytells us:
In my case, one of the steps that led me to blogging wasn’t Usenet, message boards or anything else online, but rather zines, a precursor that I have yet to see anybody discuss.
Cough, wheeze. Um, here, and here, and here, and... well, my shiny new Atomz search engine (thanks, Bill Quick) says in at least nine other posts.
I'm curious to know if other bloggers share my zine background, and if they also see any connection.
An elaborate social system is evolving here between American military guards and their captives from the Afghan war.
The system, controlled by the guards and tested repeatedly by the inmates, is largely based on privileges — given mainly so they can be taken away as a way to maintain discipline and encourage cooperation.
The little extras here at this sweltering, dusty 2.5-acre barbed-wire camp include novels, like love stories and Arab legends, with "1001 Arabian Nights" on order. The inmates regularly drink sweet tea, although though it is warm, not hot, in case they try to throw it on a guard. Curried chicken has been added to the dinner menu.
This week, prisoners who were having trouble reading were given glasses. The detainees are allowed to talk with each other, and officials have grouped them by language. They can call out to reporters to proclaim their innocence without being punished. They apparently receive first-class medical care — a neurologist and a thoracic surgeon were recently flown in.
Some prisoners were seen this week riding in golf carts. Officials said they started using the motorized carts to transport the prisoners to the interrogation huts, several hundred feet away, because it was quicker and because the prisoners' leg shackles were rubbing their ankles raw when they had to walk there.
Brig. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, the marine who commands the task force overseeing the prison camp, said the privileges were useful tools in maintaining discipline because what was given could be taken away.
There's more detail, some of it rather creepy any way you look at it, for all sides. I surely have no sympathy for any guilty prisoners, but:
the deputy camp commander, Lt. Col. Bill Cline, said some were "victims of circumstance" and probably innocent.
Obviously, if so, this should be determined, and they should be released. Meanwhile, the administration needs to figure out what they are going to do with these people in the longer run. Some delay has been entirely understandable, but time has been moving along, and it's getting time to establish clear policy; prolonging that much longer is bad for all concerned in a variety of corrosive ways with foreseeably damaging results.
3/16/2002 01:25:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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DON'T TREAD ON ME: While I'm on freedom of religion, and our government's guarantees of it, I'll address another aspect.
I've noticed a great many conservative blogs explaining the writer's point of view as to why it's fine for governments in, and of, the United States to, in one blogger's words, "proclaim" religion, which is, he maintained, entirely different from the forbidden "establishment" of it.
I thought this the most inane explication on the subject I've ever read, and not worth responding to.
But last week, Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal, whom I respect, spoke to the topic, and while normally I consider this a sufficiently obvious enough issue that it's not worth debating, particularly given how little likely people are to change their minds on it, I optimistically shall assume that reasonable people can at least listen to each other, and I shall disagree, hoping I am not disagreeable.
Christopher, if it is not disrespectful to call him by his first name, began by disagreeing with a Guardianista by pointing out that various early Presidents violated the notion of complete separation of church and state. This is so, and proves nothing, as we consider that many errors were made in the past, just as we consider that errors are made now. Usual citations of Dred Scott, etc.
Christopher then strongly disagreed with the proposition that it would obviously be unconstitutional to display the Ten Commandments on public property.
This notion, that any sort of public display of a religious symbol constitutes an establishment of an official religion, may well be the most patently idiotic liberal argument advanced about anything.
Perhaps, but I must disagree. Of course, the issue is not "public display." People are free to display any symbol they like in public. What is at issue is governmental endorsement of religion by governmental endorsement of specific religious, or anti-religious, symbols.
This is truly not a complex issue: it is a conservative notion to keep government small and to allow us our freedom of conscience and religion, just as at least the latter is also a "liberal" notion.
Government has no place lifting one person's religion or non-religion over another person's. We are all free to display and proclaim our religion or non-religion as we would. We are not free to obtain the endorsement of government for our religion or non-religion, nor to use government to suppress someone's religion or non-religion.
Do the people who believe this seriously think that the mere sight of a Christian cross or other Christian picture or symbol in some "public" setting has the power to make someone Christian?
Of course not. And everyone is free to wear a cross, or carry a cross, or any other religious or anti-religious symbol, in any governmental office or school or public place.
They are not free, however, to have the government endorse such symbols, of any religion or anti-religious belief, by having it appear that the government is displaying them in any way that gives the appearance of official endorsement. Again, this is not complicated, and surely is a freedom that we would all want if we merely consider how we'd feel if a symbol of a religion or non-religion we consider horrible were being so endorsed.
Would we like to live in a majority Scientology community, and have portraits of L. Ron Hubbard beaming down at us in every governmental office and in every public park, as e-meter tests are offered to us when we go to government offices, and copies of "Dianetics" are given to every school child? Would we like this done for Anton LeVey and his Church of Satan? Would Christians like to live with this endorsement for Hinduism? For voodoo? Santeria? Would we like Madolyn Murray O'Hair's work to be mandatorally insisted on as correct in schools? Should Wicca be given official endorsement? Judaism? Catholicism? Protestant Christianity? Christian Science? Mormonism? Shinto? Islam? American Indian beliefs? Etc. There are people, of course, to speak up for each of these, and many more.
Which is why none must be given official endorsement.
Christopher didn't really make any other argument after this, but merely discoursed on the notion that Communist regimes had been atheistic and bad, which didn't seem to lead to any sort of point I could find relevant, I'm afraid, aside from castigating atheists.
Myself, I'm delighted to live and let live, and to let each and all practice their religion or lack of it as they wish. I don't ask that public schools or governments say that anyone's religion or non-religion is wrong, or right; I merely ask that government and public schools keep out of people's personal practice, neutral in every way. Every child is, and should be, free to pray in school as they wish, or to not pray, as is every governmental bureaucrat or politician, but no public school or governmental office or property may officially endorse either prayer or condemnation of prayer.
Asking for the power of government to be used against other citizens in such a way is not my understanding of a conservative or libertarian idea. "Leave us alone" is, however, an idea that I think conservatives, libertarians, and liberals, insofar as these categorizations have any use, should be able to agree upon.
FREEDOM OF RELIGION INCLUDES FREEDOM OF NON-RELIGION: Peter Beinart, writing as TRB of The New Republicpoints to the same Ashcroft speech I did last month, as well as the record of statements by Ashcroft and President Bush, and correctly notes:
Speaking last month in Beijing, President Bush declared: "Freedom of religion is not something to be feared; it's to be welcomed, because faith gives us a moral core." No, freedom of religion is to be welcomed because it allows some people to practice their faith--and, through it, to find a moral core. And it allows others to find a moral core far from churches and synagogues and mosques--secure in the knowledge that their government considers them just as civilized, and just as American, as anyone else.
Disappointingly, though, while standing up for the civilized morality of non-religiosity, he neglects to mention, in responding to such as the following:
Conservatives seemed genuinely puzzled by the outcry over Ashcroft's words. "I think General Ashcroft was quite inclusive," said Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council. "He made reference to Christians, Jews, and Muslims all recognizing the Creator as the origin of freedom."
that along with these three Abrahamic religions, and a lack of belief in religion, that "inclusivity" either includes the rest of the world, such as Hindus, Shintoists, Jains, animists, and so on, or it is, to adopt an old term of John Mitchell's, "limited, modified inclusivity." To insist that only believers in Abrahamic religion are civilized is most uncivilized.
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O'NEILL PUTS HIS HEAD ON THE BLOCK FOR STEEL: Pre-war, betting odds had Rummy as Secretary Most Likely To Go First. SecTreasury O'Neill wasn't far behind as a second, due his lackluster public support for White House policy at times, and general clumsy relations with, well, everyone in sight.
With this pissing on the White House, he seems to be yelping "fire me! fire me!" while repeatedly poking his finger in the eye of 43, Card, Hughes, Rove, Bolton, etc.
Not that I don't agree entirely with him on substance, of course, as would anyone not an American steel executive who knows the slightest about what a bad idea the steel tariffs decision is. But, sheesh, expect either an immediate spanking and recantation, or surely he's begun his engagement to Rhett Butler.
STILL OTAKU ON OTAKU: New Yorker fact piece by Rebecca Mead on, well, need I say more? Some select quotes:
A black hooded sweatshirt bearing an image of Mickey Mouse holding a microphone and striking a rock-star pose, made by a company called Number Nine, sells for a hundred and twenty-eight thousand yen, which is close to a thousand dollars. A T-shirt with the same Mickey Mouse image goes for more than four hundred dollars. Even in a society as affluent as Japan, where there's no poverty to speak of, these prices are enough to make a visitor wonder whether the yen underwent a catastrophic devaluation in the time it took to climb the stairs.
This is a second-hand clothing store.
[...] One young Japanese curator, Koji Yoshida, explained to me that the phenomenon of the free-spending Japanese youth is a product of paternal guilt. "In Japanese families, the ascendance of the father is the usual phenomenon, but after the bubble burst fathers lost their rights and respect," he told me over coffee one afternoon. "Fathers had to appease their children by giving them lots of gifts and money." Whether or not you accept the idea that Japan's youth-oriented consumer culture is sustained by a kind of commercial Oedipal agon, the swarming shopping districts of Tokyo on weekends do resemble a world in which adults have been more or less dispensed with. It's as if the streets had been cleansed of anyone over the age of thirty.
[...]
In Japan, however, all the skill goes into engineering the scarcity: designers produce only limited editions of T-shirts or jackets, items of the sort that can be easily mass-produced. This means that shopping in Tokyo feels a little like a bizarre parody of grocery shopping in Soviet Russia: you might want to buy a bunch of bananas, but the only thing for sale is pickled cabbage.
[...]
At certain popular stores, like Silas & Maria, a British skatewear brand, would-be shoppers are required to wait in orderly file in the street, as if they were on a bread line, before being permitted, twenty or so at a time, to rush in and scour the sparsely stocked shelves for any new merchandise. The next twenty customers aren't allowed in until the last of the previous group has left and meticulous sales assistants have restored the shelves and racks to their unmolested condition. The whole cycle can take half an hour or more. This is what Japanese teen-agers do for fun.
One of the striking things about spending any time among fashion-conscious Japanese kids is how utterly nerdy they can be in their pursuit of cool. In Europe and the United States fashion falls decisively into the category of the frivolous and playful; in Japan the right T-shirt or cap is sought with a kind of dogged intensity, and not just by a fringe group of fanatics. Japanese boys in particular seem to treat fashion in a manner appropriate to stamp collecting or train spotting.
[...]
One designer, Hiroaki Ohya, drew upon the Japanese obsession with technology to produce, in his spring collection, a sporty woman's blouse that was shaped like a computer, with a screen printed on the breast, a keyboard at the waist, and a curved panel on the back which bulged out, like an iMac.
[...]
Because the Japanese are fanatical about fashion in the way that the Brazilians are about soccer or the Germans are about cleanliness, walking around Tokyo can feel like being trapped in an endless Halloween party where everyone but you has come as a member of the Beastie Boys, the Cure, or TLC.
[...]
Another recent trend was wearing boots with twenty-centimeter platform heels. There have been at least five reported shoe-related fatalities, one involving a twenty-five-year-old who died after tumbling off her own footwear, and another who lost control of her car's brake pedal and crashed into a pole, thereby killing her passenger.
Just remember, the right to wear shoes is the right to be free.
[...] ...entire stores are devoted to selling the "gothic Lolita" outfits; and the inspiration for most of their looks comes from what are known as bijuaru-kei rokku bando, "visual-type rock bands": groups like Dir En Grey, five heavily made-up young Japanese men whose music is little more than an excuse for their often changing costumes, which can be ordered from special catalogues. Lately, those costumes have included white doctors' coats spattered with fake bloodstains, worn with bloodstained bandages wrapped around the wrist. As a result, the bridge at Harajuku looks like an emergency medical site staffed by the suicidal, bastard offspring of Boy George.
It's so kwaii! And speaking of....
[...] There's a popular magazine in Japan called Cutie, which offers hints on how to make one's person and environment more cute: a recent feature suggests sticking red heart-shaped cutouts all over your toilet seat, and coating all but the screen of your television set with a layer of white, furry fabric.
For an alternative, the bodikon look:
...where, as well as buying fake dreadlocks, girls can purchase what are known as "B-style" clothes: form-fitting dresses with athletic stripes down the side seams, and jackets bearing the slogan, in English, "Strong Black Woman" or "Black For Life." One day I met Kaori Ohta, a nineteen-year-old high-school student who was shopping at Shoop. She wore a fitted denim jacket, a short denim skirt, and high heels, had bronzed skin, and wore a long auburn wig. She'd been black for about three months, she explained; prior to that she'd been kawaii, but had decided that the bodikon look was a more appropriate expression of her strength and sexiness.
For another quentessentially Japanese look: polite punks:
The Japanese tendency to detach style from content can be perplexing to an outsider: the kids hanging out on the Harajuku bridge might resemble the British punks who loitered on the King's Road twenty-five years ago, but rather than sniffing glue and snarling at passersby the Tokyo punks are polite and accommodating, happily posing for the tourists and doing nothing even as self-destructive as smoking a cigarette.
You can't make up this weirdness:
For the past few years, a mainstay of the Final Home collection has been a long coat made from transparent nylon which looks like a quilted down coat with all the down removed. The coat is designed to serve as a final home in the case of a natural or man-made disaster, Tsumura explained to me when I went to his studio, in a far-flung commercial district of Tokyo. For warmth, you can stuff its many pockets with newspapers, or with the floppy nylon teddy bears which Final Home also sells.
"Each customer customizes the number of bears, according to the weather," Tsumura told me. "In my own coat, I wear maybe ten bears. And if you have children, they can also play with the bears and not be scared of the disaster."
Remember, the right to arm bears is the right to be free.
There's a lot more in this article; this is only a fraction; I've not even touched any of the material attempting to explain the meaning of various trends. I'm just so otaku about it all!
TIPPIN' IN: Tipper Gore may run for the Tennesee Senate seat Fred Thompson is stepping down from. A shame Frank Zappa isn't around to campaign for her, eh?
Though I have to say that I'm entirely for her other main issue in the past, awareness of severe clinical depression, and the need to take it seriously and treat it.
On the other side of the aisle, assuming Lamar Alexander runs, do you think he still has lots of flannel shirts left over from last time?
WE HAVE THE LEADER'S NOSE: Col. Gaddafi's son sucks up to the US. Even when I translate it into German, I can't take seriously references to "The Leader." Associations in my brain range from "Der Furher's Face," to Hulk comics, to the aforementioned Sleeper reference. Still, it has the virtue of being almost as plain a title as "Boss" or "Dictator."
And I wouldn't in the slightest be surprised to read that Gaddafi -- or the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il -- had made a deal with the Raelians to be cloned from their noses after their deaths.
But how interesting it is to see The Leader proclaim and stress America's "right to take military action as reaction to the attack against it...." What a time, when Col. Gaddafi is in solidarity on this, but the London Review of Books thinks it's perfectly frightful. A time for Linda Blair impressions.
Gary, I'm so disappointed you could think such a thing...
I'm sorry. Now I shall, presumably, know better. In retrospect, it would have been more respectful to have first queried you in e-mail as to your meaning. I apologize that your actual meaning didn't even occur to me, until Bill Quick suggested it in e-mail, as a possibility; I didn't spot any possible ambiguity, and that was my error and my responsibility.
I continue to recommend Rantburg as a valuable source of coverage of the Mideast, India/Pakistan, the war, and related topics.
