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How can I laugh at your misfortunes if I can't laugh at my own?

3 April 2007
Yahoo! linked to this guy Joe Turner who had some interesting advice re: job interviews:
Skeletons in the closet
Learning from that "pop idol" show

4 March 2006
Responding to this SDMB thread got me thinking.

I posted this: "Your problem is that you're absolutist in all your freeking definitions. "All-or-nothing-ism" is a syndrome afflicting many adolescents. I've gone through it myself."

Then I kept going, & realised I was getting way off topic, so I just shunted the rest over here.

One thing I'm trying belatedly to do is accept that the so-called "other" is not actually far more stupid & evil than I am, but actually understand the same things I do.

I don't know why any given other person has so much trouble with it, but for me the core problem was a highly alienated childhood where I was in the wrong grade, came from a alienation-preaching religion, & I tripped into a superiority/inferiority complex & some kind of tribalist instinct. At the end, I trusted almost no one. And other people kept telling me I was nuts. Well, I thought they meant other things I believed were nuts. More alienation.

For example, I have been recently shocked to find out that many career military men don't follow a savage worship of Mars, but have much the same concerns & conscience that I do. I suppose people tried to tell me this for years, but I just extrapolated from the gung-ho adolescents I knew, & figured that was the culture.

27 December 2005
I found this sort of amusing & interesting:
"5 guys every girl’s gotta date" & "5 women every guy's gotta date"

8 August 2005
So I was reading the April issue of Harper's. They published a bit by John Lukacs called "When Democracy goes wrong." Some neat points, but one I want to take issue with:

"... [Our predecessors] believed that the (relatively) best forms of government combined monarchical, aristocratic, & democratic elements.
"... the American Constitution originally encompassed the ideals of mixed government: the monarchical element represented by a president, the aristocratic element represented by the electoral college and the Senate ..., and the democratic element represented by the House of Representatives. ... the aristocratic elements have gradually disappeared ..., while the monarchic powers of the presidency and the democratic extent of majority rule have become more and more overwhelming." He goes on to bemoan the conquest of this country by an "unlimited, untrammeled, universal" democracy/populism, while totally ignoring the concentration of executive power in monarchic (& bureaucratic) forms. (In fact, in the interest of his simplistic argument, he never once mentions the idea of bureaucracy. At all. Sad really.) He mopes about aristocracy a little bit before giving it up for dead.

(Let me point out here that the American Constitution, far from being the huge theoretical application of Aristotelian philosophy Lukacs makes it out to be, is pretty much the system of government in the United Kingdom of the time, rewritten enough to have fixed terms in office & popular, republican elections. Anyway....)

Aristocracy. Yeah, right. Well, I don't think that aristocrats are so much better by nature than the common man at putting aside selfish interests. Now, the fact that an aristocrat might be aware of a concept of noblesse oblige puts him ahead of the doctrinaire populist, in the sense that a populist might have no conception of any good but that of "the people," singular. But aristocracies often simply decide that they are "the real people," & govern as elites in elite interests. Abusive populism is the abusive, self-interested aristocracy of the masses, after all. "Every man a king," a kind of royalist statement. There's not that much difference. Usually.

Now, I can understand the appeal of a meritocratic elite. But how do you define who has merit? Is it those properly educated? Watch that degenerate in short order to guys who went to "the right schools." And the successful ones, in our society, will be those that went to "the right schools," then turn around & demagogue the masses with the lies the common man is uneducated enough to fall for, & sway their fellow "ruling class" mates with the lie that they really are better than everyone else.

In any case, characterizing the old form of the US Senate as aristocratic in some sense that gives us an alternative to democracy/populism is problematic. Senators elected by state legislators, themselves elected by the people--ultimately, everything goes back to the people. If you want an alternative source of authority putting these people in power, you need to put a system based on that source of authority in the constitution.

This might mean a line of elites choosing their own successors without outside influence. And still, you're likely back to a ruling class determined by membership in a chosen group. No thanks.

There is, however, one important & interesting innovation in the US Constitution, & that is in the structure of the Senate. Not its "aristocraticity"; but its recognition that distinct groups deserve representation as groups, not tied to their current population numbers. That is, every state has two Senators, & will continue to have two Senators, however large or small its population gets. Thus there is at least one house of Congress where people of a distinct background are supposed to be represented no matter what.

Now, I would propose that the reason we don't realize anymore the potential of this is that the states are not monolithic internally, & the Senate tends to be made up of one or two classes of person (who sometimes represent states they aren't really from!) rather than of a cross-section of society as a whole.

If we want a good balance against populism, rather than create an aristocracy & a ruling class from which certain offices must be filled, let us create a more representative Senate, with equal representation for each distinct kind of American that clearly needs it. A Lani Guinier senate, if you will.

Now the question becomes, where do you draw the lines? Indeed, since the lines would have to change over time, who draws these lines? I don't know. But in theory, if one wants a non-populist body to play the "aristocratic" role, having a "Senator" to speak for each ethnic group, or political movement, makes a certain idealistic sense. It is not that membership in a single class should qualify one for the aristocracy; but that the "aristocracy" is made up of men of each class, in equal numbers.

20 May 2005
WHO ELSE IS QUALIFIED TO CARRY THE BAD MOTHAFUCKA WALLET? is pretty cool, even if he did pick Alan Moore as #1.

For Dead Sea, a Slow and Seemingly Inexorable Death
Much buck-passing ensues.
There is a sort of person who, when presented with this huge water-use problem, thinks, & not for the stereotypical cockamamie reason of anti-Semitism, "There's a reason to bomb Tel Aviv."   I am such a person.

13 May 2005
http://www.samcci.comics.org/reviews/review016.htm
This is really intellectual, considering it's about a Jack Kirby work....

10 March 2005
Today the rants move back to the front page.  Livejournal is hardly available right now, & I have stuff to say.

Yahoo! news has a neat piece on Wal-Mart's clever exploitation of black markets—er, I mean African-American communities—as customers/employees. Dig this quote:

Most destructively, Thindwa says--and other Chicago activists agree--"Wal-Mart played the race card." The company told the city's black leaders that the unions fighting the retailer were racist, effectively exploiting existing racial tensions in the city. As elsewhere, the building trades unions in Chicago have historically discriminated against blacks. But it is service unions like the Service Employees International that are speaking out the most against Wal-Mart, and in cities, their membership is mostly people of color. "[Wal-Mart] knew what buttons to push," Redmond acknowledges, but he's outraged that so many black leaders bought the simplistic line that all unions are racist. "I've never seen so much ignorance. They had no sense at all of the history of African-Americans in unions. A. Philip Randolph, ever heard of him? So they're going to side with the corporate enslaver, like, 'Wal-Mart will save us Negroes!'"

A federal judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit by some 4 million Vietnamese claiming that U.S. chemical companies committed war crimes by making Agent Orange for use during the Vietnam War.
U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein disagreed that allegedly toxic defoliant and similar U.S. herbicides should be considered poisons banned under international rules of war, even though they may have had comparable effects on people and land.  The Brooklyn judge also found that the plaintiffs could not prove that Agent Orange had caused their illnesses, largely because of a lack of large-scale research.
Sigh.

Lawyers for Monsanto, Dow Chemical and more than a dozen other companies had said they should not be punished for following what they believed to be the legal orders of the nation's commander in chief.  They also argued that international law generally exempts corporations, as opposed to individuals, from liability for alleged war crimes.
One thing is wrong with this argument: The President is not the nation's Commander-in-Chief. The nation is not the Army.
But yeah, the US Gov't probably has the chief culpability here.

In other news:
Your eczema medicine could cause cancer.
Lots of Muslims think Osama bin Laden's campaign against non-Muslim states is wrong; finally someone has issued a fatwa against him.
And apparently a lot of Scandinavians & Slavs are HIV-resistant.  That's compensation for being fair-skinned, eh?

7 March 2005
When I saw the name of the artist on Penny and Aggie, I thought, "Is that the same artist as did Cool Cat Studio?"
Yep.

23 August 2004

1 July 2004
I've been posting on LiveJournal—not that it's usually anything about me anyway, just my responses to the news.
Three years ago, I posted on here that maybe I should be a comic-book colorist. Well, during the last month, I've been doing something new: coloring line art I downloaded from websites & printed out—coloring by hand, with colored pencil.  Is it the time of year?  I don't know.  But if I'm still doing this after five weeks, maybe it's something.
Really, though, I think my calling has always been political.  I just have been too ignorant & stupid to know where to go with it.

22 September 2003
LiveJournal seems to be getting too crowded.  Maybe my default journalling page should be this again.  Oh, well.

I'm feeling a little better about the Schwarzenegger campaign, due to Arnie's advocacy of legislative districting reform. From his campaign site:

Fair Redistricting – To get politicians out of the process of drawing legislative district boundaries, Schwarzenegger’s proposal includes a constitutional amendment that would direct the Judicial Council – the administrative arm of California’s court system – to select three retired judges by lottery to serve as “Special Masters” who would draw district boundaries.
“Reapportionment of state Assembly and state Senate seats should be done fairly, so that no political party uses the process to distort democracy,” Schwarzenegger said. “Electoral districts should be drawn for the benefit of voters, not political intrigue and advantage.”
A policy briefing with further details on Schwarzenegger’s political reform proposal is attached.

This isn't perfect, but it's an attempt at reform, which the legislature wouldn't undertake on its own.
I like the Sunshine & Fundraising Blackout planks, too. Sunshine laws are nothing new, but a definite good thing. The Blackout is radical, surprising, but not inappropriate. It's sad that we find this surprising in America, because if you think about it, it doesn't go as far as it ideally should. But it's a good idea.

28 July 2003
A Slate intern named Avi Zenilman wrote this:
Summer Lovin':  A teenager's guide to the steamiest—and easiest—summer jobs.
Makes me wistful for all the missed opportunities of my youth.  Ah well.

7 June 2003
I love June in my part of the country. Cool June nights, where the air is just heavy enough with humidity & the smell of the trees. I was coming back from Wyoming about this time of year seven years ago, and when I stopped in Junction City, it smelled like home again.
The cool beginning of summer, but I guess some think of it as late spring?
I find it amusing that people in the US say that the Summer Solstice is "the first day of summer." It's Midsummer! Do you really think that the relatively dark middle of September is more "summer" than early June, with the long days & the humid nights & the daylilies blooming?
Yes, June is cool, compared to August, but it's still more summer than is September.
I guess if you're going to divide the year into four roughly equal "seasons", there's some subjectivity in what you lump together. Is early June or the end of February more "spring"?
I think the Jacobins had a shadow of a point, dividing the world into 12 "seasons" (more like "months") with names like Pluviose (rainy) and Thermidor (heat). Then again, there was still a four-season pattern in the names, and they started on the Autumnal Equinox, so maybe they're part of the problem.
In any case, I was born on Midsummer Day, like John the Baptist & Jack Dempsey, & it's in late June!

6 June 2003
Not more than a few weeks ago, I was walking by this spot where a building had been razed to put in a parking lot. A chat parking lot at that; they didn't care enough to pave it.
I saw a couple sitting on the steps of the house next door, and said, "That's Joplin for you, tear down a house and put in a gravel parking lot!" They said, "Yeah."

Today I happened to be going that way again. The couple's house was gone. The little white building by the street that didn't seem to be used anymore, gone. The mulberry tree, which was bearing fruit last I looked, next to the little white building--gone. Further on, the south end of the block has been (unpaved) parking for years, so the whole block is now bare--except for a catalpa tree between the street and the newish parking lot at the north end. Everything was being tossed in a giant dumpster.
The foundation of the little white building was still good. I saw all that concrete, chipped away with difficulty, and imagined what fragile abominations, built out of plywood and covered with styrofoam (!), the local construction industry puts up. People hereabouts are better at demolition than construction. Rome, we're not.

And it hit me. American "civilization" has learned nothing from the great civilizations of history. Nothing from Rome, which built structures to last for centuries. Nothing from China, and its civil religion of self-sufficiency. No, just a bunch of monkeys playing with the world as if it were Jenga blocks.
It comes as no surprise that the biotech industries, the nanotech researchers, are of this culture and sensibility. To them, the world is just a toy to be broken and rebuilt. And no matter what "wonders" they create, they will be discarded, or at least unwanted, in short order, because that mindset despises old news. They are men who wish to be as the Creator, but without the responsibility of governing their creations.

It's a sick joke that the party that rules much of this country calls itself "conservative", but knows nothing of conservation. They talk about patriotism, but only think it means loyalty to the government, or really their party. They abuse a word that once meant loyalty to one's country, by which is meant a land, a place--an ecology.
Where is the patriotism in seeking a "global economy"? The Confucians built a society that simply didn't need foreign trade. Today's big business is trying to abolish self-sufficiency, and it's only a continuation of the old colonialism. But they sell it as a new sci-fi paradise, "the global village."
(And loyalty, it should be said, cuts both ways. A good ruler is concerned for the good of that which he rules. And not just those that might remove him from power, that's just self-interest, ultimately.)
I heard once that Europeans laughed to hear any American described as "conservative." I've never known exactly why. But I know why I think it's a joke.

8 March 2003
The address for Bizarro changed a while back & I didn't follow it.  I could have, but I just stopped reading it, so I've missed quite a few installments.  But I've changed the link on my Online Comix Links page, so maybe I'll start keeping up with it again.

23 January 2003
I was viscerally against the draft from childhood to when I was draft age.  I simply refused to sign up for Selective Service at 18.  I got into it with my father, the Vietnam vet, once.  He made this case for "a citizen soldiery," not unlike what Charlie Rangel is selling.  I've been thinking about it recently, & I still think that the government has no right to demand that I kill in its name, or that I otherwise aid in the destructive whims of despotic régimes.
What I didn't know is that American tradition is solidly on my side, not my father's.  There's a new article on Slate about it: Rough Draft:  The revive-conscription movement has history against it.

25 November 2002
My jaw drops: Suing for compensation for your own fear.

22 November 2002
Muslims have been protesting the Miss World pageant, to be held in Abuja this year.  Some sarcastic newspaperman had his own take on it:
“What would (the prophet) Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from among them (the contestants),” Isioma Daniel wrote in Saturday’s article.
Riots ensued.
Say what you will, I prefer his attitude to the rioters' chant of "Down with beauty."

15 November 2002
Pages from the Books of Hell:
"So you feel... you owe something."
"No.  Nothing is owned & nothing is owed.  these concepts are delusions inculcated within you by your society. I do what I do because it is right; because it needs to be done.  It has nothing to do with me."

31 October 2002
Well, between this & my LiveJournal page, I—really don't post much at all.

MSNBC article on eco-friendly graves; Eternal Reefs website.  Just a couple of relatively inexpensive & intelligent ways to dispose of your corpse.
I've thought for a long time that burying an embalmed body in a steel box is silly when you're never going to dig it up again.  What superstition drives our society to do this?  I've seen death; held it in my hands.  I would hold no comfort from artificially preserving my loved ones' corpses—unseen—instead of letting their flesh return to the earth.  A simply buried, unembalmed body is reduced to nice clean bones in a few years.  What could be wrong with that?

Morbid?  Me?  Nah, I just hate to see pointless environmental waste.  Now this, on the other hand, is disturbing:  Sex slaves in Europe.  Apparently there's a thriving slavery trade among Slavic crimelords.  Sort of fits in a sad way....

13 August 2002
'Early warning' on Asia’s toxic haze.
We have to remember that everything is connected: that the smoke you send into the atmosphere has to go somewhere, that the rain that falls on you comes from somewhere--somewhere on this Earth, & you could travel there.

25 July 2002
Found this scribbled on the back of an envelope; I wonder if I wrote it in response to my college philosophy teacher's apparent advocacy of "soft determinism":
It is one thing to believe that you have an intended destiny; quite another to believe in predestination.  We make choices all the time, or have opportunity to do so.  But making choices is hard work.  Some of us simply coast on through, deciding nothing—thinking too painful or unaccustomed—and then have the temerity to scoff at free will.
This I wrote today:
You are, pace Tyler Durden, a beautiful snowflake.  You're probably not unique, of course.  Snowflakes aren't as unique as we're often told, & we can't all be as unique as Tyler.  And like the snowflake, you are transient.  Beautiful, possibly uncommon but probably not unique, & ephemeral.
And here are some Slate links:
Iacocca & the Myth of the Super CEO
Dahlia Lithwick on John Walker Lindh's plea & Moussaoui

17 July 2002
The past no longer exists.  The future never has existed.  The present will cease to exist shortly.  But the things around us transcend moments.

11 July 2002
Yet another ostensibly useful link: Remember that a resume is a marketing document, not a career obituary.

7 July 2002
Not really ranting anymore, am I?  Oh, look, another link: Can you turn a hobby into a job?

12 June 2002
More Slate:
Not in Everybody's Backyard:  A new way to think about the transportation of nuclear waste.  By Timothy Noah
and a link from the article: Nuclear Waste Route Maps on mapscience.org

10 June 2002
On MSN Money:  Haggling with health care providers.
"'It's much more compelling when a consumer speaks on his or her own behalf directly to the provider and explains the situation,' says [patient advocate Larry] Gelb. It's also harder for the provider to turn you down in person."

Ah, the lost art of haggling.  Gotta love it.

10 May 2002
I'm reading Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.  The following is from March 14:
"Two mains areas of the law apply to dead people: 1) disposal of bodies; and 2) crimes committed against dead bodies. In both cases, the laws are a tangle of competing rights, often pitting the wishes of the deceased against the wishes of their survivors against the police powers of the state. The disputes range from battles over the harvesting of sperm from a corpse to whether sex with a dead body is rape. (In most states it isn't, unless you thought the body was alive while you did it.) (The law's like that.)"

7 March 2002
Just sent this to Daniel Quinn:
I've been thinking about how when I got to the end of Providence, I found it very depressing. You say we are in the hands of the gods; that life continues to evolve & adapt through extinction & cataclysm. And you find hope in this. But don't you realize that this idea is the same old Darwinist justification for allowing man to do what he will? To "evolve" into something else?
Of course, I attribute the fact that I've had "environmentalist" assumptions from childhood in part to my fundamentalist Christian creationist upbringing. If God created deer ticks & guinea worms, I certainly don't have the authority to declare them evil & worthy of extinction. An eco-centrist argument grounded in non-directed evolution is more subtle. People just say (in their ignorance), "Well, we'll evolve into a world without those things! Them's the breaks!"
A friend of mine used to say that "natural" (at least as commonly understood) was a meaningless term. If a thing is natural because it arises from natural processes, then, well, everything does. Human beings arise from natural processes, & natural human beings build breeder-reactors, which are therefore "natural," & pretty soon you've got natural plutonium!
There has to be a better way to explain this idea: There are things & actions that belong, that work, that fit. And there are things, and actions, and policies, that don't.
But to say that all history is in the hands of the gods is a meaningless attempt at reassurance. And reading that in Providence left me hollow and struck with despair.
The truth, I think, is this: We are not in the hands of the gods. There is neither destiny nor control. We are in our own hands, in the hands of each other, and in the hands of other creatures. We are responsible for what happens. We are free. There is hope in this, but also something frightening. And we need the honesty that admits that some things have already been broken. That some of what we know now is assuredly not of the divine.
While I admire you greatly, you seem too loath to call anything truly evil. Pity.

14 February 2002
Valentine's Day Candy Heart Generator at http://www.bobarmadillo.com/sluggyv-day/

in association with Sluggy Freelance

29 January 2002
There's a discussion on Slate I find interesting: The Do's and Don'ts of War by Scott Shuger & Dahlia Lithwick
text of the Geneva Convention

8 January 2002
Read this Slate article!
Man in the Arab Street by Robert Wright
"The question isn't just . . . whether war makes millions of anti-American Muslims pretty mad—mad enough to attend a street demonstration. The question is whether it makes hundreds of anti-American Muslims really mad—mad enough to blow themselves up. I don't know the answer to that question—and maybe my conjectured answers are too gloomy. But the question is definitely important, and the hawk triumphalists, by and large, show no awareness of it. They may be right that military victory cowed the average Islamic America-hater into silence, but it isn't the average Islamic America-hater that flies an airplane into a building."

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