Anarchy is Hyperbole

Digital Manipulation

2009-12-30T12:20:00.002-05:00

A great technical walk-through of detecting various changes to a certain Victoria's Secret ad, ranging from subtle to obvious.

Up

2009-12-28T07:13:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia:

A Pixar employee flew to the Huntington Beach home with various Up tie-in toys and a DVD copy of the film. The child could not open her eyes, so her mother described the film to her scene by scene. The young girl died approximately seven hours after the screening ended.

Twilight

2009-12-19T09:25:00.000-05:00

The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer is terrible. I read the books recently, and even though I had been expecting a grim experience (I'd already seen the two movies), I was still surprised by how bad this series is. I don't have a lot of experience with young adult fiction, so I don't know if they are par for the course. I hope not.

First of all, the writing is terrible at the most basic level. Most criticisms about writing quality focus on the description or the like, but Meyer's work contains more than the usual purple nastiness. She fails at simple mechanics, as well, and I have to hope that her editors have been fired (doubtful). She misuses words frequently and has terrible grammar. And this is not “bad grammar” in the sense that she has dangling modifiers or similar nitpickery. Instead, she will compose sentences that barely make sense, with ambiguous pronouns and pointless clauses slopped around like a drunk's last beer of the night.

Consider this passage from Twilight:

I read carefully through the descriptions, looking for anything that sounded familiar, let alone plausible. It seemed that most vampire myths centered around beautiful women as demons and children as victims; they also seemed like constructs created to explain away the high mortality rates for young children, and to give men an excuse for infidelity. Many of the stories involved bodiless spirits and warnings against improper burials. There wasn't much that sounded like the movies I'd seen, and only a very few, like the Hebrew Estrie and the Polish Upier, who were even preoccupied with drinking blood.

Only a very few... what? “Movies”? “Spirits and warnings”? No, wait, “few” must mean “stories”!
Naturally those things can be puzzled out, and any reader will solve the problem in a moment. But such poor composition occurs on almost every page, and make the books difficult to read smoothly. An abandonment of technical regularity is certainly not an unforgivable sin in a book if it's for a purpose, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for this devolution in this case. Meyer has poor grammar and her mistakes were not corrected, plain and simple. It's painful.

The poor writing is only the start of the problems, though. It continues with the characters, who are one-dimensional enough to be paper dolls. They are defined simply and immediately, and never grow in any interesting way (with a single exception, addressed later), with their identity and evolution easily expressed in a sentence without any loss. Bella is clumsy and introverted, and in love with Edward. Edward is handsome and good at everything, and in love with Bella. Jake is non-threatening and mildly exotic, and becomes a werewolf.

You'll notice I don't say “spoiler alert” or the like. And that's because no one with two brain cells to rub together could fail to see any of the plot coming. Oh, wow, the boy Jacob, who tells about the legends of his people who become wolves, and then briefly disappears and changes strangely... he's a werewolf?! My goodness! I see now... that wolf in the forest whose eyes reminded Bella of Jacob- that must have been Jacob himself!!!!!exclamationpoint

If we leave aside the writing and the lifeless, puppet-like characters, then we are still left with the worse thing of all: the ethics.

Bella's entire life revolves around her the men in her life. She has only a single aspect to her character other than her all-consuming adoration for Edward: she's clumsy. More text is devoted to how much she worships him than any other subject, with their exchanges always crammed with expressions of how beautiful and perfect he is. And when Edward leaves her, Bella breaks down so fundamentally that the word “catatonic” is thrown around. The totality of her shutdown is expressed by Meyer by having a series of blank chapters, representing passing months of nullity.

This is not, of itself, a terrible thing. Many romances have tried to express the depths with which two people can feel for each other in a similar way, and the devastation that can come from subsequent loss. There's nothing wrong with it.

But what is sad is that she only returns to life when another boy enters her life and fixes her. While trying to reconnect to her vanished man-god, Bella makes friends with the nice Jacob. And soon Jacob's kindness and male presence has restored her back to life. She has a huge hole and woe is her, naturally, but she is a functioning person again.

In other words, Bella needs a man in her life or else she can't function. She may have inherited this from her mother, who on the first page of the novel is depicted as being completely incapable, but who will be okay now that she is remarried to her second husband. In the same way, Bella's life completely revolves around having a man in her life, and she can't exist otherwise.

And what manner of relationship do Bella and Edward have?

Consider that this is a man who is not just older than her, but almost a full century older than her. He is world-traveled, highly skilled at everything, very intelligent, godlike in appearance, and a supernatural mind-reader to boot. Yet he is attracted to Bella, and starts a relationship with her. This is a girl who is a minor and a fraction of his age; he is literally six times older than her and infinitely more sophisticated.

Further, Edwards constantly yearns to hurt Bella – in fact, he wants to eat her and kill her. It is a strain for him not to do so, and he comes close to it quite often. It's not his fault, of course... he just naturally has those impulses and desire.

When they meet, he is cold to her. He's so attractive that she will easily and immediately forgive him her behavior later, but for some time after their introduction he is distant and cruel. We find out later, though, that he has been breaking into her house at night to go through her belongings and watch her sleep. Before they even have a conversation, he is climbing into her room to stare at her and listen to her slumber.

So what do we have? A violent old man who stalks a little girl, and a little girl who can't function without a man in her life. And through her books, Meyer portrays this as entirely normal and reasonable behavior – no, more: it's something to emulate. It's not dangerous or misguided or sick. It's romantic.

Think about if you knew a man of sixty years who wanted to date a seventeen-year-old. You would wonder what was wrong with him. And if he broke into her house to watch her sleep, you would (hopefully) think it was insane and creepy. The excuse of “We're in love!” wouldn't cut it. You would rightfully think that guy was a disgusting monster. It wouldn't matter if he was pretty.

Terrible.

Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" is terrible

2009-12-18T08:15:00.000-05:00

I wrote an essay about why it's terrible. You can read it here.

The press.

2009-12-16T03:59:00.000-05:00

Seldom does a week pass without an article in a newspaper or magazine about the fate of newspapers and magazines. Even beyond the obvious self-interest that partially motivates these stories, there is also a legitimate concern about what the American public needs as the circulations of periodicals continue to drop every year. As bloggers and online news organizations increasingly take over the task of reporting on events and producing commentary – the bread-and-butter of newspapers and magazines – there is worry about the future of the traditional media. No one worries about the fate of American pectorals without Men's Health and Fitness, but without a New York Times who will run the in-depth and powerful investigations into government or corporate misdeeds? Don't we need a press?

A recent article by David Grann in The New Yorker about a condemned man, Cameron Todd Willingham, can tell us why the press is essential. The article not only made America aware of the execution of an innocent man, and not only cast Texas Governor Steve Perry as a merciless fool, but actually changed the national dialog about the death penalty. While Willingham died and Perry survives, the way this masterfully-written article created a new discussion in America illustrates just how valuable the press can be to our society. Without The New Yorker, Willingham would just have been another man who died quietly and without justice.
So when the question is asked about whether we need a press, most people agree that we do. A row of talking heads tells each other about the immense value an independent and powerful press provides for a free society. And indeed, at its best the Fourth Estate holds our leaders and our businesses and our celebrities accountable, and raises and spurs public discussion about our problems. There are certain things that the modern press does that we desperately need.
This is an ideal view, of course. Often the pages of the local paper are filled by concerns of the bottom line; easy articles about unusual people or shallow reporting are far more frequent than shattering exposes of illegal government surveillance. The hard times make this worse and worse. As the major newspapers have had to lay off specialty reporters – such as science reporters or foreign correspondents – their articles have suffered an increasing lack of depth. One can hardly blame them, of course, but it's a bad signal that the greatest strength of the modern press is the aspect most badly hurt by its decline. It's a vicious cycle that suggests that there must be a future fundamental change.
So even though most people agree that some of the functions of the press are essential, few people agree on whether or not that means we should take action to save newspapers and magazines in their current form – or even if there are any actions we could take. The idea of a “newspaper bailout” is thrown around on occasion, usually mockingly, but more realistic are proposals to partially subsidize the press or pass laws of some kind to ensure broadsheet survival – even though such proposals are farcical with a moment's examination with an view of the resulting impartiality of a press that relies on government handouts. But with groups like the Murdoch group of newspapers deciding to retreat into a subscription-based online model to try to minimize the loss, there appears to be little hope for the survival of the media culture that has existed in America for a hundred years. What will replace it? What will we lose?

Before we explore that, it's worthwhile to look into the history of that media culture. Newspapers and magazines haven't always been the pillars of objective reporting and enlightening commentary that we idolize.
When newspapers first came into existence and for a long time afterward, they were the organs of specific groups. It was an established and accepted fact that one newspaper was the voice of the government, another was the voice of the socialists, and so on. While we might be accustomed to a world of “liberal bias” or “conservative bias” in our media, in point of fact this bias is almost nonexistent when compared to the papers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It can be amusing to look at the progress of the Moniteur, for example. This paper served as the newspaper of official record for France for many years. As royalists lost power in a dramatic way and were supplanted by the sans-culottes, the rhetoric of the Moniteur shifted accordingly. The villains of past rebellions were now heroes. And when the republicans were held hostage by the imperial power of Napoleon, the Moniteur changed its tune once more, striking the war drums and celebrating victories like Austerlitz breathlessly.
The newspapers of the same era in America were little different. Local newspapers were owned by bosses who had a certain point of view, and very often this point of view was apparent in every headline. The news reported by a Whig and the news reported by a Tory could be about the same event but with unrecognizable interpretations. It wasn't for decades that a new school of objective journalism and new values of journalistic ethics arose, gradually shamed reporters and editors into seeking an ever-more-stringent neutrality.
In the same way, magazines have evolved remarkably. Prior to the magazine boom of the late twentieth century, many magazines were little affairs, flitting into existence and vanishing in short order. They were not the long-running behemoths of the modern day. While the recent and tragic closing of such institutions as Gourmet and Modern Bride may have shocked a public used to them, they are by far the exception. An examination of the history of literary and commentary magazines will show that the great stories and shattering exposes came from periodicals of short life and no heritage. Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review lasted only a short time and still managed to transform the face of modern literature.

Today, we pay lip service to objective reporting. The common wisdom and schools of journalism propose an idea of reporting where the facts are given with as much information and as little bias as possible. And while there's something to be said for that, it seems as though the common people don't really value the common wisdom. More and more people seek their news from online agencies that have an obvious bias.
The Drudge Report, for example, is a “news aggregator” that collects headlines from around the Web; while it's certainly driven by a profit motive above all, it also tends to promote articles that imply libertarian and conservative conclusions. On Drudge, a story about unusually cold temperatures in a city is almost certain to be adjacent to a story about global warming. A story about inflation worries will be given prominent placement along with a report on the increasing price of gold, while a report on suspected commodities fraud by a politician will probably not be sexy enough to even make the page. When we look at the increasing popularity and dominance of sites like Drudge and its liberal counterparts at The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, we can only conclude that while people say they want objective reporting, they really prefer to have their worldview confirmed.
The confirmation bias has long been known, of course. Scientists discovered long ago that people tend to pay attention to and seek out information that confirms their beliefs, rather than information that will challenge them. It contributes to widespread belief in UFOs and magical events, and it means that we seek out news that will tell us what we already know.
Given our previous history of strong biases in reporting – remember, objective reporting is relatively new – it is perhaps not surprising that the trend has returned in a big way. It shows no signs of relenting, appearing also in our television news as opinion shows become the dominant reporting vehicles on 24-hour news channels. And almost the entire newsradio market consists of conservatives telling conservatives things with which they will agree. By and large, the modern America wants to be agreed with by their newspapers and magazines, not challenged.

So what does this mean for the future of periodicals? While we may agree that there is value in certain things our modern magazines and newspapers do, such as in-depth investigative reporting, doesn't their decline mean that we just don't value them enough? With the current model is dying, will we lose the things we've gained from this century of objective reporting and massive magazines?
As one might guess, my answer is no. I think we will lose other magazines and other local papers, of course. That's unfortunate, but no one can force the public to want something they have proven they aren't interested in after long and repeated trial. Capitalism works best in a scenario like this: if a local newspaper can create a need for itself, then it will.
Existing newspapers and magazines will also shrink and change. As new models for the provision of news come into existence, with bloggers and citizen-journalists providing branded commentary and straight reporting, then newspapers and magazines will have to begin focusing on things that their organizations are best at and can do exclusively, like investigative journalism and access reporting. Some groups are leading the way and breaking this ground, such as the organization ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization that has seen incredible success with sweeping investigative stories.
The world of newspapers and magazines is evolving. As with all evolution, some things will be lost and others will be changed. But the addition of Everyman's voice and boundless new technology is a good thing. For every closure like Gourmet or The Rocky Mountain News, there will be a ProPublica or a Slate to step in and provide news in a way we couldn't have imagined before. A new animal will walk, and all the better.

Vegetarianism

2009-12-04T19:53:00.000-05:00

In the wake of an enlightening and difficult debate about the morality of eating meat, I found myself wanting to explain more clearly my reasons for my vegetarianism and how I did it.

Once upon a time...

I grew up eating a pretty standard American diet, if a little bland. My parents are divorced and my mother worked, so while she made an effort at dinnertime, it was often defrosted or canned foods. Plus, even though I came up in the South, my mother was from the Midwest and the food showed it. The spiciest thing she ever made was a black-bean jambalaya from a box. I used to think it was an interesting change, but in retrospect shifting from one type of Uncle Ben's boil-in-a-bag meal to another one isn't exactly a culinary voyage of discovery.

As I passed through my teens, though, I went out to eat at some different kinds of restaurants. My father would take me to a Chinese place or out for sushi, and I grew to be interested in new types of foods. Again, in retrospect the super-sweet "Chinese" food served in American Chinese restaurants is not actually very new or interesting, but compared to a steady diet of canned sweet corn (with a little salt) and lemon chicken breast, it was exciting.

But eventually I got older and began trying truly interesting food and more exotic fare. By the time I was going through college, I had become a veteran of Thai, (real) Italian, Vietnamese, Korean, Mediterranean, and other new kinds of foods. Moreover, I had learned to cook to some small extent. I generally went to the store every day and tried something new as often as I could. I thought trying a new kind of food was fun. Probably being somewhat of a pretentious jackass also helped, since it was a world that a lot of my contemporaries knew nothing about. When you're twenty, it's a real ego-boost to be the only person in the room who knows what to do with fish sauce. This growth occurred at much the same time my atheism was evolving and I was developing my philosophy, which dovetailed with being a foodie nicely.

Thus it was that I was also one of the most dedicated and adventurous meat-eaters you are likely to meet. My favorite food was beefsteak. I liked it bloody, so I would get it from a decent butcher where it was unadulterated with food coloring, then I'd slap it in a blazing cast-iron pan with a little rub-down of salt and pepper. Thirty seconds or so on each side, and then it went on a plate with a potato. The outside would be crispy and sweet, while the inside was essentially raw.

My penchant for exploration also meant that I tried a plethora of new and unusual meat-based foods. Frogs' legs, goat, alligator, buffalo, and others all vanished into my delighted mouth. After reading The Old Man and the Sea, I immediately went out and got a slab of tuna to eat raw, with only a bit of salt. I made steak tartar and slurped back tray after tray of oysters. I ate a plate of octopus that was still alive, chewing carefully so I wouldn't choke as the tentacles gripped the inside of my mouth and throat. I had a bowl of dog soup, which was boring and tasted like stringy beef. I had veal and foie gras and kidney pie. Flesh was always the centerpiece of every meal, and always the most exciting thing to eat.

I was a meat-eater.

I begin to learn.

Like everyone else I knew, I was aware of vegetarianism and held it in contempt. And like many other meat-eaters, I was needlessly aggressive about it at times. In retrospect, I think I knew something wasn't really right and I wanted to prove it. But at the time, I was just self-righteous. The pain and suffering of animals didn't matter to me and could be ignored. I was okay with leather and dog-fighting and with factory farming. It was early in my philosophy, so I didn't really have any good reasons ''for'' eating meat, but neither was I aware of any good arguments against it. So I would laugh with my friends at vegans, gleefully pointing out that animal glue is the most widely-used adhesive in every building or that "organic" or "cruelty-free" were meaningless terms without any enforcement. I scoffed at animal rights activists. Animals had no rights, I said, and that was only proper. They were not intelligent.

However, like all members of the over-educated intelligentsia, I was an avid reader. And I prided myself on both open-mindedness and a dedication to the truth. I held it as an iron precept that no belief or proposition should be free from scrutiny or thought. A life should be lived on principles, and those principles had to be grounded in the firmest rock, not in the thoughtless sand of ignorance. And so, because I did not know about vegetarianism and animal rights, I had to learn.

I am a child of the technology age, and so it is not surprising that the first place I went was the Internet. And in this modern age, I was aware of PETA as well. So to peta.org I went, looking for answers.

As anyone who has ever been there knows, it's not a terribly helpful website when it comes to philosophy. They go for what's most effective on most people, and that tends to be appeals to emotion or shock value. They describe how a fish feels just as much as your puppy, and how terrible the agony of a factory-farmed cow can be. And while those points are all well and good, they're only meaningful if animal suffering is meaningful. PETA never made a case for that. I was pleased with myself, secretly. It's comforting to be proven right in your lifestyle.

You see, it's not that I was unaware of the suffering of animals. I wasn't stupid. I knew veal calves lived their lives unable to move (to keep their flesh tender) and that many cows were abused and slaughtered in great pain. But I thought that wasn't important. I was consistent, at least.

Eventually, however, I realized that I had to go a little deeper and really make an effort, or I couldn't conscientiously say that I had looked into the arguments for animal rights and found them wanting. Saying that PETA didn't convince you of animal rights is a lot like saying that Stalin didn't convince you about socialism.

Singer

And so it was that I found Peter Singer.

Now, I had already been vaguely aware of Peter Singer. When I turned from the Church to agnosticism, it was just an abandonment of beliefs. But when I found philosophy, I had sought out the thinkers of the past and present. It had been Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, and a dozen others who taught me how to reason. Amongst the great names, there was Peter Singer. I knew him was the modern utilitarian who did not compromise; he was the John Stuart Mill of practicality and consistency. But I now also discovered that he was by a wide margin the most prominent advocate and thinker about animal rights in history.

The essence of Singer's philosophy is that suffering is worthy of consideration in any approach to life, most particularly in utilitarianism. He points out, for instance, that intelligence cannot be the metric for consideration of suffering, or else the profoundly mentally disabled would merit no more consideration that an animal of comparable intelligence. Nor do we accord high intelligence any special consideration. Absent any a priori bias, he says, there is no credible argument for making "being a human" the criterion for having rights. Such arguments tend to amount to "just because," in the end, particularly when the question is asked of the smartest apes.

I do not agree with Singer on most issues. He is a utilitarian, and I believe in ethical reciprocity (if there is a label for me, I am not aware of it). I don't think the retarded should be killed if it's convenient, and don't think great apes should have property rights. But in the end, I was forced to conclude that this subset of his logic was still valid, even if you don't approach the matter as a utilitarian. Animals suffer just as much as humans, as far as can be seen. Even if suffering corresponds with intelligence to some degree, as has been suggested by some thinkers - asserting that animals live in a "perpetual present" unable to appreciate certain depths of feeling - their suffering is still significant. It still matters.

I realized with a terrible shudder that the suffering of animals was important. And I realized that my whole life would have to change, forever.

Making a change.

I read some more and checked out the counter-arguments, but my conclusions didn't move. I really, really wished that they would. Being a vegetarian is terrible and hard, and the prospect was all the worse for someone as zealously adventurous and delightedly carnivorous as myself. But I couldn't convince myself in good faith, and didn't see how I could knowingly do something wrong every day for the rest of my life. Moaning to everyone who would listen, I decided to become a pescatarian.

A pescatarian only eats various fish and shellfish. They don't eat beef or pork or chicken. It seemed the right thing to do, since it wouldn't be as hard but would be a big step in the right direction. Plus, fish must suffer much less than a cow.

I made it about three months. Every day was a struggle.

I would go to the store and see the slabs of beef laid out on crisp paper. If I could have, I would have happily seized one and gulped it raw in big chunks. And pork ribs at a barbecue, glistening with grease and emerging steaming and savory from the smoker. And chicken wing contests when I was out with the boys - I had give that up, too! And I was great at eating the spiciest wings... I was always the only one who could handle Wing Hut's "atomic" wings, delectable little bits of meat that were so spicy I would have reddened contact burns around my mouth the rest of the day. Going out to eat became a pain, and going to dinner parties was a nightmare. It is very awkward to be unable to eat the succulent centerpiece dish at a dinner party. Everyone notices and you have to explain yourself and then defend your beliefs and it's just terrible.

After three months, though, I went to Korea for a teaching position. And I gave myself a pass. "It's just too hard," I told myself. Necessity dictated I eat meat again. For the same reason that a New Guinea tribesman gets to morally eat the meat he catches, I was going to give myself a freebie while I was abroad.

Now, in some sense this is true. It would have been hard not to eat meat in Korea, harder than it is in America. There is a much smaller diversity of foods available in a country where almost everything is locally grown. And it is a lot harder to find alternatives when you have only a smattering of the language.

But I could have done it. I know this, because eventually I did. And I finally managed to find a way to make it easy. Meals became a pleasure again. Cooking became fun. And the agony of constant yearning went away.

At peace.

I stopped eating all meat. No more fish, no more scallops, no more oysters. Nothing that hovered on the line or was questionable or maybe far enough down the scale. No meat of any kind. It was a solid rule, it was an easy standard. It meant that there was little questioning to be done. There was no more need for constant judgment calls.

Everything became easier. And after about a month, I stopped wanting to eat meat. While it's still delicious and I would love to go have a steak even now, the urge - the yearning - faded away.

Dinner parties and restaurants were slightly more difficult at times, but even they became easier to deal with, counter-intuitively. One would expect that it would be even harder to find a veggie item than it would be to only eat fish, and to a certain extent that's right. But almost every restaurant has at least one veggie item. And once it gradually became known I was a vegetarian (as such news spreads), dinner parties also became easier. It's an easy rule to remember and account for when you have a guest, rather than some complicated fish-only thing that people tend to find more confusing than one would think.

But even if social events had become ten times harder, it would have been worth it. The ability to appreciate and love your food is very precious, and it wasn't until I had lost it that I could understand that. I stopped thinking about what I was missing, and began to love what I had. I'd found peace.

A parallel.

It's a lot like my experience with religion. When I was a boy, I was Catholic and an omnivore and things were easy. Adultery was wrong and eating beef was okay. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

As I grew, I became an agnostic. I didn't understand the burden of proof involved (as Russell's teapot would later demonstrate to me) and just stepped away from morality as a whole. Adultery was fine and so was everything else (a realization in part inspired by a relationship with a married woman). And I became an even more dedicated meat-eater, and flaunted that the suffering of animals was meaningless. It was edgy and cool and consistent. Nothing was wrong and everything was okay.

Later, I began to find a philosophy. I thought and reasoned, and worked out what was right and what was wrong. But each step was hard and there seemed to be no easy principles. Adultery was maybe wrong because someone got hurt, but not in every case or something like that. And I stopped eating most meat but not fish, and tried to judge each case on its own. Some things were wrong and some things were right, adultery and meat included, but each decision was a struggle.

Eventually, I found a coherent philosophy that seemed solid down to the bottom and without any of the flaws that riddled its alternatives. I could decide my principles and live by them, and did. Adultery was mildly wrong if you weren't married because you were helping someone else break an oath, and very wrong if you were married because you were breaking your own oath. And I didn't eat meat.

I have lost some elements of my life when I gave up eating meat. I will never know what some kinds of things taste like. I can never try some dishes. Those possibilities aren't ethically open to me anymore. And I have voluntarily given up some more possibilities that might ethically be open to me, because it's just so much easier that way and it makes me happy. But I have gained philosophy and morality, and I sleep very well.

I don't want to make anyone feel bad, although it might be nice if you looked into this yourself. I don't think anyone can make another person's moral decisions for them, and don't judge those who arrive at different conclusions than I did. I don't think a Buddhist is necessarily stupid or immoral for following his religion, any more than I think a meat-eater is necessarily stupid or immoral for eating meat. I found my answers, but that's exactly what they are: my answers.

What I do want to do is to encourage you to think about your own answers. If you think you've looked into the reasoning and philosophy enough, then so be it. But I like to think at least one person will realize he's avoided thinking about it because of the possible consequences. And maybe that person will think about it now. That's all I want: think about it, hard.

Other Reasons.

While not my main reason, a couple of other reasons have since been introduced to me and hardened my resolve:
Environmentalism. This is one point people seldom argue on, but seem to prefer not to think about. Eating factory-farmed meat/fish is the most staggeringly terrible thing you can do to the environment. I am hard-pressed to really believe anyone if they say they care about the environment but still eat factory-farmed meat. Reduction is good, of course, but elimination is best.
Health. Generally speaking, it is much healthier to be a vegetarian. Naturally, you can healthily eat meat as well, but it's a lot easier and more significant when you don't eat any at all. Saturated fat and cholesterol plummet, vitamins and anti-oxidants skyrocket, and you're just overall a lot healthier. Reduction is good too, of course.

"Going Rogue"

2009-11-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it's pretty much exactly what one would expect. It contains most of the features of the modern political memoir:

It begins in media res, generally at a transformative moment in that person's political career; in this case, when Palin was asked to be the vice-presidential candidate.
There's a whole lot of humble ethics-driven confrontation, when the politician comes up against the malevolent forces she had oh-so-surprisingly been too naive to see before and must reluctantly go to battle.
There's at least one "into the lions' den" scene, when the politician walks into a meeting room of wily and corrupt politicians. That scene occurs numerous times in Going Rogue.
Careful message control spins any widely-known scandals. This is pretty understandable and expected, and Palin makes sure to hit all of the big ones.

Aside from the above, there are also specifics on some of the most intriguing aspects of her career.

She explains that she didn't name any books or magazines for Couric because she was just so stunned that she was being asked about it again; Katie Couric is portrayed as some manner of hard-ball journalist combined with a foolish tabloidist, and it's hard to believe they're even talking about the same interviews. I went back and watched them again, and saw once more the softest softballs imaginable.
She lost her race for lieutenant governor because she was just unable to bring herself to go ask people for money, but some unspecified polls of unspecified people on unspecified issues meant that the people really did want her to win anyway.
Everyone on the McCain campaign team stopped her from speaking her mind and speaking to journalists and they are terrible people. One gets the impression that they took turns dousing her with chloroform, from how she spins a tale of being penned away from the press. She describes how, unaccustomed to national races, she acquiesced.

Overall, I think she does a great job of explaining away a lot of the damaging stories that have defined her since her introduction to the world stage, but she generally does it by making herself seem... well, incompetent. She seldom admits fault, but because a lot of things didn't go right in spite of her Perfect Republican Ideology she has to instead ascribe blame to her naivety, inexperience, or the like. This is probably the right move at this time, since she has years more to keep making Facebook posts to keep herself in the national consciousness and acquire the aura of experience. But ultimately, this is not going to do her any favors in the future, when she has lost her excuses. She's quit a lot of jobs and has an appearance of incompetence, and when she runs in 2012 (as she thankfully almost certainly will) she's not going to have done herself many favors with that aspect.

On the other hand, she is earning millions and she has no chance of winning anyway, so maybe preaching to the choir like this is the right move for her.

From Gibson's "History of Napoleon Bonaparte"

2009-11-10T19:39:00.002-05:00

There was, however, one person who appealed to the Emperor on other grounds. His uncle, the Cardinal Fesch, had been greatly afflicted by the treatment of the Pope, and he contemplated this new war with dread, as likely to bring down the vengeance of Heaven on the head of one who had dared to trample on its vicegerent. He besought Napoleon not to provoke at once the wrath of man and the fury of the elements; and expressed his belief that he must one day sink under the weight of that universal hatred with which his actions were surrounding his throne. Buonaparte led the churchman to the window, opened it, and pointing upwards, said, "Do you see yonder star?" "No, sire," replied the Cardinal. "But I see it," answered Napoleon; and abruptly dismissed him.

Ouch

2009-11-02T02:12:00.002-05:00

I took up barefoot running a few weeks ago, and so far it's going well. But my feet are becoming simply gruesome as calluses build up and skin gets torn. And last week I stepped on a piece of glass and had to pry it out of my heel.

It may be easier and more fun to run barefoot, but I'm starting to doubt the assertions that it's safer.

What I Read

2009-10-28T17:36:00.003-04:00

My RSS feedreader (Google Reader) is pretty full these days. I generally read the whole of what's posted on the following, every day. It looks like a huge amount, but most of them are specific topic feeds; rather than all of the Washington Post, for example, I just get the dozen articles about politics on any given day. And of course several items - The New Yorker and the London Review of Books - are issued only monthly. This list has been pretty stable for a while now.

New York Times

Opinionator

Stanley Fish's column

Washington Post (Politics)
Propublica (Articles and Investigations)

Columbia Journalism Review
The Atlantic (Business Channel)
The Economist (Daily News and Views)
London Review of Books
Harper's.
The New Yorker (Reporting and Essays, The Book Bench)

The New Republic (The Vine, The Plank, Articles)
fivethirtyeight.com

Wonkette

Gulliver's Travels

The Volokh Conspiracy

Balkinization

Language Log.

Laws of the Internet

2009-10-28T17:11:00.003-04:00

There are a lot of lists, but most of them are stupid and derivative. These are the only ones that I think are really true:

1. Godwin's Law.

The longer an internet discussion continues, the more likely it is that someone will make a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis.

2. Poe's Law.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly impossible to parody a fundamentalist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

34. If it exists, there is porn of it.

On a Practical Morality

2009-10-12T23:31:00.002-04:00

I have some moral principles worked out pretty well, I think. And really, according to my best judgment, I should be a vegan locavore (eating only locally) who buys free-trade clothing and never downloads television shows, movies, games, books, or music. But really, it's just too much. I confess to being unable to live up to my own moral ideal.

All of my favorite foods are meat (almost without exception), so being a vegetarian is very difficult. It would surpass my strength to be a full vegan. Similarly, I read a great deal. It's just too easy for me to grab books off the net and read them on my PC (or now, my Kindle).

The question, of course, is whether or not I let myself lapse at the current level. Someday, I know, I will have to delete everything and start looking at labels.

Someday. Right?

Mucking about

2009-10-12T17:48:00.002-04:00

After months after absurdly extensive travels involving four continents (even if Africa was only tangential and Asia only as a point of departure), I am back in Tampa until the beginning of February. I have secured a position at EPIK and am getting my documents taken care of now. Lizzie and I will be living together on Jeju-do and teaching for a year, and then it's off to graduate school (deo volente and insha'allah).

I am going to find some sort of temporary work here, as I live with my father and stepmother. I may end up going back to UPARC unless I can find something that pays better. And there's the problem of a car. But everything's going pretty spiffily, so it's hard to complain.

Nobel

2009-10-09T13:01:00.001-04:00

I'm as surprised as anybody.

Who Runs America

2009-10-05T18:47:00.004-04:00

I know it's very cliched for a liberal to rant about big business and pharma running the country. So let's step away from the cliche and look first at the raw numbers. Who are the big spenders when it comes to lobbying - that miraculous political tool that turns money into laws? The data's easy to find on OpenSecrets. Over the past decade:

US Chamber of Commerce $488,458,180
American Medical Assn $208,472,500
General Electric $183,895,000
American Hospital Assn $172,940,431
AARP $164,072,064
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America $154,533,400
AT&T Inc $140,516,229
Northrop Grumman $133,515,253
Edison Electric Institute $128,645,999
Business Roundtable $127,980,000
National Assn of Realtors $127,977,380
Exxon Mobil $124,626,942
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $120,491,385
Verizon Communications $118,344,841
Lockheed Martin $115,567,888
Boeing Co $108,728,310
General Motors $104,774,483
Southern Co $97,670,694
Freddie Mac $96,194,048
Altria Group $88,380,000

US Chamber of Commerce	$488,458,180
American Medical Assn	$208,472,500
General Electric	$183,895,000
American Hospital Assn	$172,940,431
AARP	$164,072,064
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America	$154,533,400
AT&T Inc	$140,516,229
Northrop Grumman	$133,515,253
Edison Electric Institute	$128,645,999
Business Roundtable	$127,980,000
National Assn of Realtors	$127,977,380
Exxon Mobil	$124,626,942
Blue Cross/Blue Shield	$120,491,385
Verizon Communications	$118,344,841
Lockheed Martin	$115,567,888
Boeing Co	$108,728,310
General Motors	$104,774,483
Southern Co	$97,670,694
Freddie Mac	$96,194,048
Altria Group	$88,380,000

Pretty much lays it bare. The statistics are all like this. There are no environmental groups, no parental-constituent education firms, and no civil rights groups up there. Nor will you find them anywhere near the top on any list. You know how many lobbyists Greenpeace has on staff? Two. You know how many Exxon Mobil has? Forty-eight.

This is a problem at the base of our electoral system, along with proportional disenfranchisement, that has only recently come into my view. I don't know if there are any solutions yet, but I damn sure know there are problems.

Greatest Presidents

2009-10-01T02:52:00.002-04:00

1. George Washington. His leadership was remarkable in all ways, and he was rightly called first in war and first in peace. While the immense brunt of American resources would probably have assured independence from a distant oppressor, it was only with Washington's skill at managing the war that it was won in such a short time and with so few losses. Indeed, he lost several times quite badly, scrambling to create an army while still engaging and holding off the enemy, but his management of his losses was magnificent. He turned a war that might have lasted decades into a decisive and short conflict.

Afterwards, he enforced the laws of the land with magnanimity and swiftness, putting down the Whiskey Rebellion. Further conflict, such as the nascent officer's coup, he defused by his nobility alone. His foreign policy was inspired and almost certainly preserved America from meek vassalage. He created the traditions of humility and reticence which made the Presidency such a perfect office (prior to modern extensions of power). His farewell speech was a guide for all time.

Not just the father of the country, but its soul.

2. Thomas Jefferson. If Washington was America's soul, then call Jefferson its mind. His brilliance plucked the ideas of republicanism, limited government, and separation of church and state from their lettered abodes and made them into an effective plan for government. His understanding of the rights of men and the nature of the state found and presented the just cause of revolution. Just as Washington set forth the virtues of the federal government's central hand in such matters as the military and financial, Jefferson demonstrated the benefits of local government and state's rights.

Some of his "defeats" led to fundamental advances. His noble acknowledgment of a court subpoena established that not even the President was above the law, and the exposure of a long-term affair with his slave Sally Hemings showed that an impulse towards equality resided in America's elite from its start.

Jefferson was a master of a thousand crafts, and these thousand masteries helped make the nation.

3. Teddy Roosevelt. He broke the first mega-companies down when they threatened the welfare of the people, he practically created the conservation movement in America, and he was as potent a force as ever sat in the Office. While the Spanish-American War might have been unjust, he served in it as a soldier with astonishing distinction and courage and remains the only President to have the Medal of Honor. He is the only person to have ever gotten that highest aware for bravery as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.

They were flawed, but it's good to know that heroes have lived.

We are In the Penal Colony

2009-09-30T23:43:00.003-04:00

Kafka's story, "In the Penal Colony," is a remarkable parallel to our modern day and the conservative pundits.

This story, like most of Kafka's work, has an underlying theme of futility and despair. A Traveller is visiting a penal colony, and is instructed on the method of execution they use by an impassioned Officer, while an attendant Soldier holds a chained Condemned Man. As is Kafka's modus operandi, the place and people are named generically, to make them facelessly threatening and generic. The Officer raves about the efficacy of the monstrous method of execution and the system of justice, which he learned as an acolyte of the Old Commandant. The Old Commandant, who assumes the aspect of legend in the breathless awes of the Officer, is being superceded by a New Commandant. The Officer considers the New Commandant to be petty and obviously wrong-headed.

How like the Officer are our modern conservative pundits, with Limbaugh and Beck and Savage all yearning for the Old Reagan? And of course, they imagine that everyone is secretly on their side. In the story, the Officer believes that all the other soldiers secretly support the executions and the Old Commandant.

“This process and this execution, which you now have an opportunity to admire, have at present no more open supporters in our colony. I am its single defender and at the same time the single advocate for the legacy of the Old Commandant. I can no longer think about a more extensive organization of the process—I’m using all my powers to maintain what there is at present. When the Old Commandant was alive, the colony was full of his supporters. I have something of the Old Commandant’s persuasiveness, but I completely lack his power, and as a result the supporters have gone into hiding. There are still a lot of them, but no one admits to it."

The same attitude abounds among the pundits. All real Americans are conservatives who oppose health care reform, even if statistics say resoundingly the opposite. They are just in hiding, in fear of the New Commandant. But they really honor Reagan's legacy and all real Americans want to go back to that. No matter the facts.

The Traveller, for his part, listens and watches with what appears to be both intellectual interest and vague disgust. The environment is oppressively hot and bizarre, but he feels bound to listen to the fevered explanations and haranguing of the Officer. He is courteous and tolerant - even to a fault, feeling he has no right to step in even though he admits he is opposed to the entire process. How like a Democrat, unwilling to step in in the clutch!

The Traveller bit his lip and said nothing. For he was aware what would happen, but he had no right to hinder the Officer in any way. If the judicial process to which the Officer clung was really so close to the point of being cancelled—possibly as a result of the intervention of the Traveller, something to which he for his part felt duty-bound—then the Officer was now acting in a completely correct manner. In his place, the Traveller would not have acted any differently.

The part of the story that made me laugh the most when this rough analogy occurred to me was the end. The Traveller wishes to see the grave of the revered Old Commandant.

They pushed one of the tables aside, under which there was a real grave stone. It was a simple stone, low enough for it to remain hidden under a table. It bore an inscription in very small letters. In order to read it the Traveller had to kneel down. It read, “Here rests the Old Commandant. His followers, who are now not permitted to have a name, buried him in this grave and erected this stone. There exists a prophecy that the Commandant will rise again after a certain number of years and from this house will lead his followers to a re-conquest of the colony. Have faith and wait!” When the Traveller had read it and got up, he saw the men standing around him and smiling, as if they had read the inscription with him, found it ridiculous, and were asking him to share their opinion.

They wait for Reagan to return, while others laugh.

Candid

2009-09-26T19:41:00.002-04:00

Mom: "Mrs. Weber just had her first grandchild. She sent me pictures."
Me: "Is it a pretty baby?"
Mom: "What?"
Me: "One of my fears about having kids is that my baby would be ugly. I would obviously think it was beautiful, but it might be ugly. No one would ever tell me, after all."
Mom: *pause* "Oh, I will."

And she will.

Tampa, Seattle, Michigan, Korea, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Tunisia: 188 of my best pictures

2009-09-25T22:25:00.002-04:00

Timeline of life

2009-09-25T22:11:00.002-04:00

As measured in galactic years - one galactic year is the time it takes for our galaxy to make a complete revolution.

0 GY - Our sun is born.
4 GY - Oceans appear on Earth.
5 GY - Life begins in its simplest form.
7 GY - Bacteria appear.
10 GY - Stable continents develop.
16 GY - Multicellular life evolves.
19.999 GY - Homo sapiens sapiens evolves.
20 GY - Now.

"Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote"

2009-09-24T16:35:00.002-04:00

This amusing short story, by Jorge Luis Borges, anticipates and mocks reader response theory in literature - the notion that we should consider the meaning of a text to be changeable depending on the reader's experiences and interpretation. While I think reader response is very valuable (Stanley Fish walks the streets of Olympus) it is nonetheless a damn funny story.

It's written as if it were a literary review, and it highly praises the fictional Pierre Menard, who has "rewritten" Cervantes' Don Quixote. But all he has done was mimic the original text exactly - the only difference is how we supposedly must read the versions differently based on their authorship.

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

Check it out.

Masterpiece of Journalism

2009-09-23T14:55:00.002-04:00

In the current New Yorker, reporter David Grann has one of the best articles I've read in some time, detailing the state's execution of an innocent man.

Obviously the article's content is important - the executed man, Cameron Willingham, appears to have been conclusively innocent. Accused of starting a fire that killed his three children, it has come to light that the original arson investigator was one of the old-school "mystic" types who went with their "instinct," and in the process misinterpreted virtually every clue that pointed to an accidental fire. Texas' clemency process is a joke; there is great pressure for a show of a process but cost-cutting yields nothing more than a facade. The state murdered Willingham, and it's appalling.

But even beyond the content, the article itself is masterful in its structure. It takes us directly into the case, walking us through the arson investigator's conclusions and all of the evidence that led him to conclude Willingham was guilty. At the end of the first part, we know he must be innocent (otherwise why would the article have been written?) but it's hard to see how. He clearly was lying about the fire and must have set it. He's obviously guilty.

The second part of the article introduces questions and doubt, as a woman on the outside begins to take an interest and investigate. The reader is brought along the trail of inquiries, as new problems arise and the pile of questions mounts. By the end of the second part, we doubt.

In the concluding third of the article, Willingham is exonerated. A brilliant expert examines the case and is shocked, and is joined with other experts to conclude Willingham must certainly be innocent. The evidence from the first part is walked through again, this time with a better eye and wiser thoughts. And in the end, the reader is left yearning for someone - anyone - in the appeals process to just pause and look at this. To stop the impending, looming murder.

Willingham dies, of course. It wouldn't be news and it wouldn't be a tragedy otherwise. Almost unquestionably, Texas falsely prosecuted, imprisoned, and executed a man who had just lost his three children in an accidental fire. His wife divorced him and shunned him to the end because she was told he murdered her babies. He died alone and in despair. And innocent. The article hammers home every ounce of the tragedy here.

It's a terrible, wrenching story. I was already firmly opposed to capital punishment (it's impractical and immoral), but if I hadn't been I assuredly would be now.

Read it.

The Making of Beck

2009-09-23T02:16:00.002-04:00

If you've ever read this, you know I hate Glenn Beck. I always thought he was just some whimpering nutjob from Tampa who had been doing his little AM show for years (my stepmother loves him), but it turns out he has a whole long and filthy story.

A Salon series has just been released by Alexander Zaitchik, examining his past. Fifteen years of smoking weed every day and cranking out on whatever else, a brilliant career as a morning DJ in the "zoo" format that crashed and burned, and an adult convert to Mormonism (who the hell does that?) have shown me what led to the eye-bugging fearmonger we know today. And there are some goddamn disgusting stories.

The animosity between Beck and [rival DJ] Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Old Drinking Song

2009-09-21T02:11:00.003-04:00

Chorus
I used to work in Chicago in an old department store
I used to work in Chicago. I don't work there any more.

Oh, a lady came in for a chicken
A chicken from the store.
A chicken she wanted; my cock she got.
I don't work there anymore.

Oh, a lady came in for some cheddar
Some cheddar from the store.
Some cheddar she wanted; blue-vein she got.
I don't work there anymore.

Oh, a lady came in for some dentures.
Some dentures from the store.
Lowers she wanted; up her I got.
I don't work there anymore.

Oh, a lady came in for a camel.
A camel from the store.
A camel she wanted; a hump she got.
I don't work there anymore.

Oh, a lady came in for a carpet.
A carpet from the store.
A carpet she wanted; laid she got.
I don't work there anymore.

Oh, a lady came in for a flag.
A flag from the store.
A flag she wanted; my pole she got.
I don't work there anymore.

Representation

2009-09-17T23:55:00.004-04:00

In 1910, Congress decided they no longer wanted to follow the Constitution.

Well, it's actually arguable when exactly that decision was made, but in 1910, the size of the House of Representatives was frozen at 435. It had steadily increased since the founding, expanding from 65 as it tracked the growth of the population. This was in keeping with the second section of the first article of the Constitution, which says in part:

The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.

This wasn't convenient to them, though, since increases in population with western expansion threatened the east's dominance. So they froze it, and it has stayed that size ever since.

This is why a voter in Delaware has a third again as much representation as I and other Florida voters do; the tiny states of the northeast each get a representative, whereas the rest of the country in the populous states has to divide the same-sized pie among a swelling number of voters.

A recent NYT editorial reminded me of this problem that had been bothering me for some time. But I don't see a solution. The House is already unwieldy and operates as a reflexive mob, so more than doubling or tripling its size to follow the Constitution would need to be accompanied by some kind of reforms to make it an effective body. What could those reforms be? I don't know.

EDIT: No doubt prompted by the same editorial, Nate Silver at 538 weighs in on the topic, sort of, arguing that instead an additional 50 Senate seats should be distributed based on population. It has some merit.

Right idea, wrong chamber.

Indeed, the better idea would be to push for a constitutional amendment not to eliminate the Senate, or even to make it exactly like the House, but to at least move it closer toward more equipopulous representation. For example, if we added another 50 senate seats, to be redistributed based on population above and beyond the guaranteed two each state already receives, that would bring it in somewhat closer proportion. We could even set an upper limit so that no state has, say, more than five as well as none having fewer than two. That would actually go some distance, however partial, toward remedying the grotesque disparities of the Senate--and yet still give smaller states a disproportionate share of the seats relative to their population shares, just not as disproportionate.