Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I'm underemployed (historically particularly as an editor in book and magazine publishing), 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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"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
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"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: 606
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 22 cancellations; Total= 8
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
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. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
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, 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
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- 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
ONLINE NEWS SOURCE DOESN'T KNOW ITS OWN STRENGTH: The Grauniadreports on how the South Korean OhMyNews got the sports editor of The Japan Times sacked. (URL here, but it's in Korean.)
DATAPOINT: I belatedly note that Elie Wiesel, noted warmonger -- not, supports war on Iraq.
Is President Bush's policy of intervention the best response to an imperative need? Yes, it is said, and I am reluctant to say anything else. Bush's goal is to prevent the deadliest biological or nuclear conflict in modern history.
If the US, supported by the UN Security Council, is forced to intervene, it will save victims who are already targeted, already menaced. And it will win. The US owes it to us, and owes it to future generations. As the great French writer André Malraux said, victory belongs to those who make war without loving it.
(AP) Parents of more than 100 Danish scouts were outraged over a game of tag at a scout camp in which children acted as Jews wearing yellow Stars of David and tried to escape from adults pretending to be Nazis.
The group of about 160 scouts, aged 11-14, included a dozen teenagers from the Danish-speaking minority in northern Germany. The schoolyard was turned into a concentration camp with swastikas on the windows.
"I was shocked," Johanna Christiansen, a German woman, told the Ekstra Bladet newspaper on Thursday.
"It's wrong to expose children to this," said Christiansen, whose two daughters took part.
The local branch of the Danish Christian FDF scout organization organized the game last weekend at the Kongeaadal school, 260 kilometers (160 miles) southwest of Copenhagen.
Jes Imer of the local FDF chapter told the tabloid B.T. that they "may have crossed the line this time with a night game where Nazis chase Jews."
The schoolyard included a sign with the German words "Arbeit macht frei," or "Work will set you free," the infamous inscription over the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
"I don't know whether I should apologize," Imer told B.T., adding "I didn't want the game to hurt anyone."
None of those involved could be reached for further comment.
It's consistent that this guy doesn't "know whether I should apologize" since he and the others who organized this and acquiesed to it saw nothing wrong with it in the first place. It's not inconsistent with European reporting on Israel/Palestine, either.
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5; that's the whole unspeakable thing.
To be clear: I think just about everything listed is bogus hokum. But it's worth keeping track of what people believe. And, hey, it never hurts to ask questions.
Read The Rest Scale: if you want to know the truth they are keeping from you!
THE HORROR!: Reporting on the much-discussed-in-publishing-circles event:
After five years as president of Random House, Ann Godoff was dismissed on Thursday Jan. 16 by president and chief executive Peter Olson, as part of a major shake-up at the Bertelsmann-owned publisher. Random House -- one of the premier imprints in American publishing, founded by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer in 1925 -- will be merged with Ballantine Books, a mass market imprint that recently published the novelization of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, to form a new entity called Random House Ballantine Group.
It is the snobbism dripping from every word of this paragraph which was the cause of Bertelsmann's move, of course. Heaven forfend that a house/imprint founded in the tawdry paperback book business (whose founders, Ian and Betty Ballantine, invented the paperback book in America with their first company, Pocket Books) make more money, be more successful, and become dominant over Random House, founded in litterachure..
Why, they publish Star Wars novelizations!
Ewwwww!
Now, said sources in the company, the up-market soul of Random House falls squarely to Knopf. Lumping Random Trade with Ballantine, a decidedly downmarket imprint....
Oh, the soullessness of the downmarket. Oh, the humanity!
Read The Rest Scale: 1 out of 5 (the link will rot shortly, anyway).
After 11 September, I was sent by my editor to insinuate myself into the Finsbury Park mosque and -- if possible -- to talk to Abu Hamza. I ended up hanging around for nearly a week. It is a place notoriously unfriendly to "infidel" journalists, but I had a few advantages over the other hacks desperate to find their way in: I have a vaguely Islamic-sounding name (in fact, it's Swiss); I studied Islamic philosophy at university, so I knew more about Muslim politics than most of the people there; and, because I look about 12 years old, it takes a bit more time for people to become suspicious of me.
I HAVE A CODE IN MY NODE: Nice piece on network theory.
Network scientists study networks: collections of people or objects connected to each other in some way. Think of the 1.5 million Manhattan residents or the 30,000 genes inside a human cell. Such networks, scientists argue, behave in ways that can't be understood solely in terms of their component parts. Without knowing what every single person or object within the network is doing, they say, it's nevertheless possible to know something about how the network as a whole behaves.
[...]
Eerier still, in 1999, Mr. Barabasi and a student at Notre Dame found that many of these small-world networks are also what scientists call scale-free. Many natural phenomena, including traits like height and I.Q., tend to cluster around an average (producing the familiar bell curve distribution). By contrast, scale-free networks go in for extremes: a few hubs -- nodes with lots of links -- and many more nodes with hardly any links at all. (Think of Google, the search engine, as a hub, and your personal homepage -- which probably has just a few links -- as an ordinary node.)
The writer, Emily Eakin, doesn't apply these observations to weblogs, Amygdala notes dryly.
[...]
For as Mr. Barabasi and his collaborator were able to show, the structure of scale-free networks has important practical implications. If you remove a few nodes at random, the network can still function normally. But if you remove one of the hubs, the results can be catastrophic.
This is intuitively obvious to anyone in a community who has observed the severe loss the community suffers when a major hub figure dies or ceases to be active.
[...]
Yet just which network model describes human society remains a subject of fierce debate. Mr. Barabasi believes the human social network is scale-free with the expected smattering of richly connected hubs. Mr. Watts disagrees. "If you asked people to list the number of people they recognize, that could be scale-free, everyone recognizes Michael Jordan," he said. "But if you said, `Who would you trust to look after your kids?' That's not scale-free. As you start to ratchet up the requirements for what it means to know someone, connections diminish."
"Duncan assumes the world is a matrix," Ms. Kleinfeld said in a telephone interview. "He wants to know how you get from one point on it to another. But what if the world isn't a matrix? What if people aren't all connected? What if they're islands in space?"
THE FATHER OF THE JACKALOPE, the father of the modern west, has died.
Douglas Herrick, who gets both the credit and the blame for perhaps the tackiest totem of the American West, the jackalope -- half bunny, half antelope and 100 percent tourist trap -- died on Jan. 6 in Casper, Wyo. He was 82.
Read it here, or read it elsewhere later.
His brother's eyes brightened with inspiration.
"Let's mount that thing!" he said.
I have no stock in the postcards! Damn, damn, damn.
NEW YORK (CNN) – Linda McDougal was told she was suffering from an aggressive form of breast cancer. Her breasts, she was told, would have to be removed.
She was told wrong.
A paperwork mistake cost Linda McDougal both her breasts and left her suffering infections, facing more surgeries and trying to rebuild her life.
McDougal underwent the double mastectomy last year. Forty-eight hours after her breasts were surgically removed, McDougal's doctor broke the news to the patient and her husband: The surgery had been unnecessary; she had never had cancer.
THE DEFEAT OR THE LIBERATION?: This question lingers over more than Germans, or over World War II, or over war in general. It lingers over more questions than we might care to contemplate, political and personal, then or now.
JUDGE DECIDES SHE BELONGS IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE by asserting that Marvel mutants are non-human.
Who gave this woman the submitted comics? Talk about missing the point.... (Via Jim Henley, Cory Doctorow, and half of blogdom: what, you're reading it here first?)
I remain thankful for our wise system of jurisprudence, in which the Federal Courts spend god knows how many dollars and people-points on such issues, standing ready in case the issues arise in reality, with precedents ready.
PETE TOWNSEND: Count me in as another who has always respected and enjoyed the hell out of this man's music, and who he generally has seemed to be.
Count me also as someone who is extremely dubious about accusations of involvement with child pornography until they are soundly proven.
Count me also as someone who believes there has been for some years a classic hysterical witchhunt going on in the Anglosphere on the topic, with absurd assertions such as that "children must always be believed" being made.
So count me as someone believing in Pete Townsend's innocence unless or until he is proven guilty, and finally count me, radically, as someone who finds the laws against possession of child pornography, as opposed to laws against abuse of children, also dubious, whatever I may think of such material, or the people who produce it (and, for what it's worth, looking at it, and engaging in the act of producing it, are Not Actually The Same Thing).
But The Smoking Gun, the invaluable Court TV site, has a document they suggest supports Townsend's account that he was engaging in research on the topic related to his own past. Here's the nut quote:
Townshend's paper, which he once posted on his official web site, also notes that the "pathway to 'free' paedophilic imagery is--as it were--laid out like a free line of cocaine at a decadent cocktail party: only the strong willed or terminally uncurious can resist."
I hope Townsend is indeed proven, rightfully, to have only engaged in research, and -- here's where people start storming the gates -- even if he's someone who gets off on pictures I find repulsive in the extreme -- be they of sex with little children or of sex with corpses -- I'm still not remotely convinced that sexual fantasy, whatever it is, so long as it remains only fantasy, should be a criminal act; it remains truly a thought crime.
But the point of my post is that while the Townsend document might be evidence towards support for Townsend's story, to me, it points, slightly, in the opposite direction.
No matter where I stand on free speech and free thought, as opposed to supporting the illegalization of actual child abuse, Townsend's quote reads very oddly to me. Because I don't know about you, but the fact that I can likely find lots of child porn easy as I get spam has never in the slightest tempted me to go look for it, or even look at it when offers arrive -- as they do on a daily basis -- in my inbox.
It takes no "strong will" or "terminal incuriosity" at all. It would take the opposite -- overcoming an overwhelming case of the creeps -- for me to go looking at pictures of young kids engaged in sex.
I'm equally unmoved by "terminal incuriosity" to ever check out, out of "curiosity" (a motive that I've always been driven by, to the point I usually drive other people crazy) to click on any offers to enlarge my penis, or offer me free porn, or give me work beyond my dreams, offer me a fortune in Name That African Country, or offer me pictures of [whatever] engaging in sex with [whoever] with their [whatever], no matter it's size, shape, scope, or age.
I don't say this out of any sense of moral superiority; I really don't care what anyone's sexual fantasies are; I only care how they act on some of them.
But for Townsend to tout the Immense Attraction causes the opposite doubt that the Smoking Gun intended, alas, to be raised in my mind.
Damnit.
Read The Rest Scale: if you don't want to just Move On to the next topic, after washing your hands. (Via the excellent R. Alex Whitlock, who mustn't be allowed to shut down his thoughtful blog.)
He told a Scotland Yard news conference that officers had been advised in the planning of this morning's action by Muslim members of the force. They wore nylon covers on their shoes and avoided going into parts of them mosque used for prayer, he said. "We only entered office space and accommodation areas."
Useful to know. Similarly, Jewish wrong-doers using a shul for some criminal activity should be sure to secrete the Evidence in a Torah scroll.
Read The Rest Scale: either you care to follow along, or you don't.
OF COURSE, THAT MAKES THEM EVEN FATTER: The Telegraphtells us:
More swabs are left in fat patients, By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent, (Filed: 20/01/2003).
Careless surgeons are far more likely to leave forceps, clamps and swabs inside fat patients than thin ones, a study has shown.
The extra layers of fat inside a patient and their bulkier bodies are thought to make it easier to lose track of surgical tools and dressings on the operating table.
The research, carried out at Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, looked at the medical records of 289 patients undergoing operations, including 54 who had objects left inside them.
Thirty-seven of the patients with "retained foreign bodies" needed second operations, and one died.
As a student, I was pretty good at math theory, but tended to make stupid errors of arithmetic. Probably this accounts for my -- wait while I run through the calculations one more time -- noting this means seventeen patients still walking around with the odd added random bit left in.
And that's just the number accounted in this trivial study. Who says surgery doesn't add value?
UNAFFIRMING ACTION: the "affirmative action" issue is a complex one, best discussed in nuanced detail, which is why Amygdala has never made a comprehensive policy statement on the issue, since it would take us a bit short of a gazillion words, and we don't have the time to make it short.
Our typically mealy-mouthed, useless, summary, might be that it has valid pro and con points, and the demonology of it is best studied in the details and timing.
Here's one observation, though. Conservative "black" commentator Armstrong Williams writes in the current Newsweek set of articles on the Michigan argument:
What I think my father meant, but was perhaps too stern to say, was that one should always rely on hard work and personal achievement to carry the day -- every day. Sadly, this rousing point seems lost on the admissions board at the University of Michigan, which wrongly and unapologetically discriminates on the basis of skin color. The university ranks applicants on a scale that awards points for SAT scores, high-school grades and race. For example, a perfect SAT score is worth 12 points. Being black gets you 20 points. Is there anyone who can look at those two numbers and think they are fair?
Supporters maintain that the quota system is essential to creating a diverse student body. And, indeed, there is some validity to this sort of thinking. A shared history of slavery and discrimination has ingrained racial hierarchies into our national identity, divisions that need to be erased. There is, however, a very real danger that we are merely reinforcing the idea that minorities are first and foremost victims. Because of this victim status, the logic goes, they are owed special treatment. But that isn’t progress, it’s inertia.
If the goal of affirmative action is to create a more equitable society, it should be need-based. Instead, affirmative action is defined by its tendency to reduce people to fixed categories: at many universities, it seems, admissions officers look less at who you are than what you are. As a result, affirmative-action programs rarely help the least among us. Instead, they often benefit the children of middle- and upper-class black Americans who have been conditioned to feel they are owed something.
Those are all entirely valid, important, points, frequently, and necessarily made.
Yet, how do they not apply to "legacy" admissions (of largely "white") students specifically given an edge over more academically qualified students solely because of "what they are," not because of their own "hard work and personal achievement"?
Perhaps there are better means to achieve "diversity" than contemporary ad hoc laws and arrangements. Perhaps some or all such contemporary laws and arrangements promote more damage than good (a difficult case to prove, but an argument with at least some valid supporting points). Perhaps soon will come the time to cease to attempt to help people discriminated against on grounds of "race" by means of continuing "racial" categories (inevitably the goal calls for somesuch time to ultimately occur). Perhaps the time is now, as many now argue.
But if so, surely this is an area where we needs must be consistent? Surely if we're now Boldly Moving Ahead Into A Pure World of Recognition Only Of Individual Achievement, we're required to drop all such group categorizations, such as "child of an alumni," and "child of a major donor," and "child of a major politician," and other such violaters of the goal of Individual Achievement?
(*cough* Bush. *cough*)
(Tangentially, what do sports scholarships have to do with academic achievement, and why are colleges running major entertainment endeavors as a major, distorting, part of their "mission," anyway?)
(I sidestep, for now, discussion of how one best judges "individual achievement" given ever-different sets of circumstances, a key kicker, and the multitude of other complexities of the "affirmative action" issue.)
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5, you're familiar with the argument.
SUBVERSIVE SOUTHERNERS: Interesting review by Diane McWhorter of Catherine Fosl's book on minor ("major minor") civil rights figure Anne Braden, which both importantly notes that there actually was such a thing as attempted Soviet subversion of the civil rights movement and the US and that in the 21st century it's necessary to coldly look at that (and how badly it, overall, failed, and why, though that's my point, not McWhorter's), and, more relevantly to today's times:
AAs long as the cold war was on, historians made scant acknowledgment of how many of the ends, means and participants in the civil rights movement came out of the American left of the New Deal era. In the 1930's, mass demonstrations, ''We Shall Overcome'' and even the term ''civil rights'' as a synonym for black equality were hallmarks of an elastic network of liberals, labor unionists and, yes, Communists that was redbaited into oblivion by a familiar cast of subversive-hunters: J. Edgar Hoover, Southern legislators, the Ku Klux Klan.
The Republican Party, with a few exceptions, was not a part of the civil rights movement of the 20th century that led to the integration of the Armed Forces, the attempted desegregation of schools (in practice, many areas remain more segregated in schooling and housing than in the 1960's, a fact not nearly enough attention is paid to), the Voting Rights Acts, the armed intervention of the Federal Government with troops and tanks to enforce judicial civil rights decisions, the Civil Rights acts which made discrimination in public accomodations a violation of law, the long, slow, striking down of Jim Crow, and the eventual overall increase in minority opportunity that today leads to innocent and goodhearted calls for laws and government to be completely "race-blind," in the belief that either today society is so "race-blind" or that if we pretend it is, we'll complete the job of getting there.
All of which gets into complex policy choices I will immediately leap-frog out of the way of, for now, to merely note that it was, flawed and all, the leftists and the liberals who crafted and carried out the civil rights movement that led to today's US, and that they managed this despite being "of their time," the charming excuse ever-offered by apologsits for those who engage in an evil which has the merits of being popular at the time.
It's not an excuse I've ever seen as more than stained gossamer.
Read The Rest Scale; it's a balanced piece: 3 out of 5.
BILL GIBSON: HEARD OF HIM?: I've been around the science fiction and publishing business since I was a child. I was a late starter compared to some in getting my first letters published when I was 12, published my first fanzine by 13, and went to my first sf convention the same year.
Started working reading slush for Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories magazines by 16.
So I've watched an awful lot of people come along over the years, and move from strugging wannabe writer to successful novelist/short story writer. Some detour into screenplays and may even have movies made, or come to work successfully as tv writers.
Most, of course, talk a lot, constantly tell everyone they can find about their latest stories, unendingly refer to themselves as "writers," and never see a word in professional print.
Mostly the latter wander out of my sight.
So I've always been impressed by the arc my old friend Bill Gibson has taken, from kid science fiction fan back in the early 1960's, before I learned cursive handwriting (a technology I still struggle with), to re-activated sf fan in the early Seventies, when mutual friend, sf fan, and professor of English (and sf) SusanWood, brought Bill back into contact with current active fandom, and non-coincidentally taught him what she knew of sf writing, and -- coincidentally or not: you be the judge -- brought Bill into contact with folks such as myself, and Patrick Hayden.
After doing a triumverate fanzine for a bit with Susan, and Allyn Cadogan, and generally being an Active Fan and Cool Guy, Bill suddenly started selling stories, particularly to Gardner Dozois at Asimov's and to Ellen Datlow at Omni.
Von Neumann replicators engaged, and Bill became an international mega-star almost in between blinks of the eye.
Funny world, innit? Unfortunately, since Bill is best known as a "science fiction writer," despite bringing Thomas Pynchon into the first paragraph, the reporter cannot resist the temptation to immediately reach for the most somnambulent metaphors her infintesimal mental thesaurus has available:
Gibson, who must be tired of hearing himself identified as ''coiner of the term 'cyberspace,' '' has gone to worlds not yet reached under Commander Pynchon's rule.
Critics of science fiction grouse that Gibson can't get far while steering the same old postmodern spacecraft, and dismiss his inventiveness as mere bells and whistles. But some die-hard fans lament that he's deserting the mother ship every time he tries something off the flight path of his first novel, ''Neuromancer'' (1984).
I imagine Bill must not be tired of dull-witted reporters using "rocketship" metaphors to discuss his sky-fi career, despite the fact that, well, I've not by any means read all of Bill's ouevre at this point, but off-hand, I can't think of a single story involving rockets, or spaceships, or travel to other worlds, that he's written.
It's enough to make one understand why a few earlier excellent writers in earlier times in which genre writers were held, comparatively, in strait-jackets in maximum security metaphor prisons, lest they be allowed to escape and poison the meme-pool of Pure General Literature, began to rant and rave against the limitations of being known as a "science fiction writer" (now often reduced to that banal lazy coinage coinage "sci-fi"). (No, I didn't mention "Harlan Ellison"; why did you ask?)
Observation: some bad pattern recognition going on; same old story. But: Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5; it's a fair review, otherwise, and a rave. Kudos, Bill.
The editorial board of Amygdala would like to make clear that not only do we love The Leader (whose interview we translated last week), but we also love the Dear Leader (son of the Great Leader) of North Korea, and the Supreme Leader of Iran(coincidentally, two out of three of the Axis of Evil, who are rumored to be in strategic talks with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and possibly even Dr. Evil himself).
We love all governmental dictators with the totalitarian chutzphah to form a great Cult of Personality in this day and age, and style themselves as Leader, with or without modifier.
It's so charmingly old school: who else these days has the pizzaz, the vim, the vigor, of your classic megalomaniac tyrant killers, your Mao, your Hitler, your Stalin? Frankly, upstarts such as your Saddam Hussein can only dream of being in the Old-School Class (as he reportedly literally does dream of Stalin), and pipsqueaks of the scale of Robert Mugabe can't even fantasize of such a dream.
So a piece such as this, on the "makeover" of Muammar el-Qaddafi, whose public relations campaign for positive strokes is in full metal jacket, well, we live to read stuff such as this.
No, no fisking here. Just go read it yourself, and contemplate. It's the latest in blogging technology: it's self-fisking!
I shall accompany you with mental commentary. Just read and imagine it and enjoy.
Read The Rest Scale: I just told you to.
Addendum: William Burton has some advice for the Leaders, from the Dear Leader himself!
MULLAH KREKAR: MYTH OR MENACE?: I wrote about Ansar Al Islam, the Taliban-type Iraqi Kurdish group, a few days ago. Now it seems their leader (real name Najm Faraj Ahmad), who had been being held in Dutch maximum security for four months, has been released after, reportedly, the US failed to supply any substantive information on his terrorist ties, and the FBI took little information in questioning him.
Is this a case of bad reporting, Dutch spin, disinformation while Krekar is used as bait, or is it most likely true on the face: either incompetence, or little actual evidence of Ansar Al Islam/Al Queda active collorobration?
I don't know; it's a story I'll try to keep watching.
