more cognitive dissonance in religion and politics

I do not know how it is possible to be simultaneously Libertarian and Christian. My understanding is that Christian teachings are about acting in such a way as to help the community, about being well socialized and nice to each other and not selfish, while Libertarianism is about self reliance and to hell with the rest of the community if they can't take care of themselves. So what happens when you combine the two? Ran across a weblog a couple months ago that did so, and the outcome was unusual. Never before have I seen heaven described as the place where at long last you get judged on what you can do instead of seeing your efforts diluted and obscured by those pesky halt and lame.

usual disclaimer: I am missing something.

cognitive dissonance and conservatism

Brad DeLong on why American conservatism is not a reliable friend of human liberty

and a short one at MemeMachineGo! on the irony of rich and powerful politicians being Christian

humanitarianism, to go with yesterday's post

Peter Maas in NY Times, via Body and Soul:

...I asked whether [the battalion commander] had talked with Iraqis and perhaps shared a meal to find out their needs. He said his civil affairs unit handles those things. He doesn't have time for kebabs. "I don't like eating goat," he said and smiled...

collage

From interview with former middle east peace envoy Anthony Zinni:

The biggest mistake the United States made in the war, Zinni said, was speaking of "shock and awe." "That was a way to say: 'Your fate is inevitable. We're going to crush you. The might of America will defeat you. Just surrender and throw down your arms.' You don't speak to Arab pride and Arab manhood in this way. That whole psychological business gave them another cause to fight for, more than they would have fought just for Saddam."

and, in BBC news via Shi'a Pundit (via Cobb, the blog, via Timothy Burke):

The townspeople, whose mosque was destroyed years ago, prayed in the privacy of their own homes. But instead of their worship being a secret and dangerous thing, it was freely performed with new joy. The 1st Battalion Royal Irish secured a public address system for the Imam and men from their attached Royal, Electrical and Mechanical Engineers installed it on Thursday night in time for Friday prayers.

and the comparison between British and American contact with civilians

The British soldiers suffered defeat on the dusty streets of Umm Khayyal, when they took on the local football team. A thousand spectators came from all ends of the town to watch the match, with the players wearing full strip, boots and squad numbers. The home side was rallied to a 9-3 victory by throngs of screaming men and children, who marked out the boundaries of the pitch...

Some British officers disparagingly refer to Americans as "Ninja Turtles" because they are covered in body armor, helmets and Ray-Bans. "There's a warrior-wimp syndrome in the U.S. Army," Wilkinson said...

and from Burke:

This is not a war that can be won solely with bombs and guns, though military action has had and will continue to have a major and legitimate role. Nor can it be won only with fabulous prizes and soup kitchens for the poor of the Muslim world.

This is primarily a struggle against an ideology, a way of seeing the world. How do you win such a war? In part, by understanding what makes it powerful and by persuasively countering its appeal with an appeal of your own....

i'm not here

short one tonight. Two inward links and two outward links, you get to decide which are which.

political cartoons from Denver Post via Yubanet, on dissent (a repost) and the media

nevada county as seen by san francisco chronicle this past week, with respect to the county supervisors' pro war resolution and our plethora of bookstores


and let us spare a compassionate thought for poor Richard Somerville, editor of The Union, caught in the crossfire as subscriptions are cancelled right and left. Look at it this way pRS, when the dust clears your readers will all be centrists which will make your job much easier.

Searls, Stephenson, Welles, Orwell

was wandering around in Doc Searls's Reality 2.0, a you-gotta-read-em series of articles on how the web, open source software etc are changing society. ("...The Web obeys new structural and economic laws that seem to have more in common with the mathematics of loaves and fishes than with the traditional economics of scarce resources and diminishing returns...")
In one of them he points to In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, author of (among others) SnowCrash and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (some of the best SF out there). It's a book (ie long, so although it's online you should buy it) - a ~30 year overview/exploration of computers and television and mediated experiences and market forces and societal effects as understood via Orson Welles' Elois and Morelocks, and wonderfully illuminatory. Sample:

...police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence...

He souses even the dry stuff: "...The operating system market is a death-trap, a tar-pit, a slough of despond..." Search for "Reagan" for another good section.

fuse Orson with Welles, chop out some letters, keep the writing quality, you get Orwell ranting on political writing: (via metafilter)

...A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the
outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language
is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared
aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms,
like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
....
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of
orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make
a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political
language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

thugs and fascism

I wonder...

if you get a chance to talk, one on one, with someone who exhibits thuggish behavior, and you point out the difference between a free country and a fascist one, and that what freedom is is freedom to dissent...can they hear it? or is the attempt futile because (via metafilter post)

Human reason and rational discourse evaporate during war as humans begin to think less with their cerebral cortexes: they retreat into an instinctual, feeling-world of fight or flight responses associated with the mid-brain. They devolve into an instinctual tribalism in which it is perfectly obvious that the war is a struggle between Us" and "Them".

later: Apropos cartoon here.

abortive adventures in naive pan-selectionism

Ran across this passage in Deus Irae by Dick & Zelazny:

"Revert. In fact, sleep with Abernathy; a lot of good it'll do you." She made it meaningful; she put over the significance of her words by the wild tone alone. Women had such a great ability at that; they possessed such a range. Men, in contrast, grunted ...they resorted..to an ugly chuckle. That was little enough.

Like Manly Camaraderie short stories about hunting, in which something ineffable is somehow attempting to be effed, with (to my mind) woeful lack of success. And George Clooney in the film Solaris, where it seems his craggy countenance has the power to convey maybe 2 1/2 emotions max.

or maybe it's just me.

but where i am trying to go with this is that it seems that stereotypical ultra-masculinity severely limits the range of emotional expression. (the ones that are successfully conveyed, don't know about the felt ones)

why is this? been trying to think of a reason, am stuck.

the quest for heat

The traditional early april snow came last night, & was hugely photogenic. Picture: a redbud in bloom in the snow (right next to a freeway overpass, but don't picture that); a rustic/ed 50's? 40's? Manly Man pickup truck, with faded multicolored body and jaunty snow top, juxtaposed against historic Victorian shopware; periodic hail knocking the daffodils flat. Unfortunately you have to picture because I didn't; need to get one of these tiny cameras.

So it's winter again. Others would turn up the heat but for us cheapskates there are alternatives. One of them used to be the Hot Water Bottle; alas no more. If you go to the drug store and ask for one you'll be directed to the Douche and Enema Section, which is something of an indignity; however, if you persevere you may be able to find something that looks like a hot water bottle. But if you take the time to read the box (guess who didn't) you will discover that no, it is a "water bottle" and is not designed to hold hot fluids, and if you carelessly take it home with you and wrest it from its coverings you will also discover that it emits vile plasticine fumes.

And it comes with a lifetime guarantee. Such a deal.

Long story short: avoid plastics, save money, take leg of old jeans and sew one end shut, fill to taste with miscellaneous grains that you know you're never going to get around to cooking, knot the top, nuke until hot but not so hot that grains start popping. You will discover that there's an amazing amount of water vapor in so-called dried grains (or maybe in the dried peas which are not recommended, they smell), so you might want to bake the water out before clothing them. The finished product should last for as long as it gets frequent enough heatings to cook anything that might otherwise want to take up residence.

corroboration

...of Josh Marshall's thesis that this is the beginning of the neocons' WWIII:

Our ex cia director says so, and the Israelis wouldn't be restarting this oil pipeline if Syria weren't on the agenda too, or so the author believes.

I just believe whatever I read on the web.

one more war link

also via metafilter, Neal Pollack on how the war is driving everyone insane...

...But there we were, two people against the war, having a bar fight about whether or not Michael Moore is a bad writer.
...We're all angry and afraid, and it's coming out in some very strange ways.

SARS links

Here are the daily WHO updates.

Yahoo, always on top of the news, covers the breaking story of Hong Kong fashion masks. (found on metafilter)

Via medpundit, a graph of SARS mortality can be found at the bottom of this New England Journal of Medicine page.

She also links to this weblog of a doctor from Singapore with an N95 mask and a passion for American Idol.

no comment

From today's San Francisco Chronicle, in D.A. who sued Pacific Lumber faces recall effort:

"We're going out to all the Pacific Lumber subsidiary plants and talking to the guys on their smoke breaks," Arkley said. "We're asking them if their jobs are important to them, and if they feel they are, we ask for $99 donations. I tell them I'll lend them the money if they don't have it. The response has been very positive."

flagellating the deceased equine

via an Agonist comments thread, The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel:

When a government seeks to paint any opposition as unpatriotic and any dissent as treason, when it uses its allies in industry and the media to hound skeptics and blacklist celebrities, when it attempts to paint legitimate questions of policy as either a vote for America or a vote for dictatorship, that's not freedom any more.

That's fascism. Smart people know the difference.

You might also read Tamim Ansary's What Does It Mean to Be a Patriot? (Also here's a copy of his Sept 2001 the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan article)

freedom and fascism

good reading on Doc Searls today, the quotes under the heading 'Northern Lights'.
Also see They Thought They Were Free:

"...What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security..."