Are You Sure WONKETTE Started This Way? - Correspondence suggests that you can't even write about blowing sailors on your blog without being banned as "mature content" by the wifi networks at places like Panera Bread. This saddens me greatly. How are we to fully debate the policy ramifications of blowing sailors if whole swaths of the citizenry are unable to take part because of a bunch of net-nannies? Take part in the debate, I mean. Not in the blowing of sailors. Necessarily. Particularly in a time when we all need to be thinking about how best to "support the troops," I can only decry such filtering as unpatriotic.
Unless it was the erotic toner cartridges item.
Teach Me to do Morning Websurfing without my Glasses - For a moment, I could have sworn I had referrer spam from erotictonercartridges.com.
The Useful Distraction of Sex - Over in Olmstedville, Andrew, Avedon Carol and I have been in a bit of a discussion about the "Jeff Gannon" matter, about which I've written nothing here because of a towering lack of interest. But the notion in Republican/right circles that the real scandal is that the Administration's opponents dug into Gannon's private life does interest me. It seems untrue. Blowing sailors is "private life." Hiring sailors out to to get blown is a business. Whatever starting a website to pimp servicemembers is, it ain't "private." You'd never get any customers if it were.
Let's say a crusading journalist from an anti-drug paper had business interests in a urinalysis company or a smuggling ring. We'd consider that pretty relevant. Anyway, in comments over on Andrew's site I argue that the response to the "Gannon" scandal and the Bill Clinton impeachment process show certain parallels.
Culture Corner - Brett Peters offers a passel of Old English links. Scroll up for more. On his site, I mean. Not this one.
Homer Nods? - Some quibbles with tonight's BSG, maybe. Or maybe not. My first thought was that, while Adama was undoubtedly correct that the tribunal would become a witch hunt, I didn't think that the action we actually saw had demonstrated its witch-huntness dramatically. Then I wondered if the story's point wasn't subtler: the tribunal may or may not become a witch hunt, but as soon as it stepped on Commander Adama's toes, he shut it down. The ambiguities of power! Then I wondered if the story hadn't sufficiently demonstrated that the inquiry was going astray - the Sergeant and the tribunal get within sniffing distance of the real story but aren't good enough to get the rest of the way. Their zeal leads them off the scent entirely. Then I wondered if the show had shown us enough of the Sergeant's transformation onscreen to make her hubris convincing. The Sarge puts herself in the role of sitting in political judgment of Adama's command decisions. That's some serious hubris! I could see such an inquest coming to that point, but so quickly? Would it have been a better episode if the Caprica action have been ignored for a week, leaving more time to flesh out the shipboard inquisition? I realize they were playing with parallels and divergences between the shipboard Boomer and planetside Boomer's use of love to coopt a human ally, but that lovely architecture came at some dramatic cost.
Not to say the show was bad, just that it has raised my expectations high enough that it can fall short.
One More Time - It's simple. Never, ever ever blog about your job. The only exceptions I can think of are if you're a tenured academic or you own the place. Even in the latter case you have endless opportunities to piss off clients, vendors and essential employees, so think twice.
Speaking of the Farm Dole Virginia Postrel has a couple of useful items. First, she longs for the sort of anti-subsidy coalition we were never somehow able to put together against torture - maybe we'll have better luck this time. It helps that, since the Bush administration is nominally behind it, people like Glenn Reynolds won't dissipate their energies worrying that speaking out on the issue might, somehow some way, constitute opposing the President or, god forbid "hating" him. Her second item despairs at the LAT's press coverage, and points to Fritz Schrank's analysis of the available subsidy data for Delaware. ("The Environmental Working Group's subsidy pages for Delaware show that in 2003, over $17 million in USDA payments went to over 1500 recipients, and that about 26% of all Delaware farms received some kind of federal payment." That's an average of 11.3K per recipient, with at least one entity getting over $250,000.)
A couple of days ago, Matthew Yglesias worried about anti-farm dole advocacy in light of "general detachment of the left-of-center intelligentsia from rural life." Because nothing cures detachment from someone or a group of someones quite like giving them money you took from a different set of someones entirely. He also seems to think we don't already pay farmers not to grow crops - in some cases we do. He wants to pay farmers "contingent on managing the land in an environmentally responsible way." Right now, environmental law disincents farmers from letting more land go fallow: there's a risk that regulators will declare land that has gone wild enough "wilderness," preventing the farmer from reclaiming it should he decide he needs to. Just as we pay Big Sugar to destroy the Everglades and then pay to restore them, this seems like about twice as much as the government needs to be doing, if sound outcomes are your goal. But it's TV time, so I gotta stop now.
Blogging is Just a Way to Pass the Time Between Episodes of Battlestar Galactica but it's nice to sit here listening to the latest Coverville show in the meantime. Let's run some Battlestar Galactica mail, eh?
Eric McErlain writes
I don't know about you, but I've watched Enterprise from the beginning, and didn't think it was so bad. Now, I usually watch both it and BSG back to back late on Friday nights on my TiVo, and ST:E can't help but suffer by comparison. BSG is so much better it isn't even close. So much of the backstory that once made Star Trek seem rich, now just feels like a dramatic straightjacket.Can you imagine what it must be like to be a writer on that show? You probably spend half your time worrying about violating series canon . . .
If the folks at Paramount are smart, they'll let the franchise rest for about a decade, and then bring it back with a re-imagining just like BSG.
Hm. "Ultimate Star Trek" doesn't sound like a bad idea, really. For the record, I didn't watch Enterprise. I saw the first half dozen episodes of Voyager, which meant I saw the polarity reversed five times. At that point I figured I was being cheated and tuned out. This means I never got in on the whole Jeri Ryan thing. But when you've got Tricia Helfer that doesn't really matter. Friends of mine did sell a script to ST: Next Generation once - the well-regarded "Tin Man" episode. Their names got squished together to comply with the show's no more than two names on a script rule, but they threw a big party for the broadcast premiere and we had a good time. I watched that season and the next, partly out of loyalty and partly because the fourth season was pretty good, the show's best year if you ask me. Never got into Deep Space Nine because I couldn't figure out why the Ferengi wasn't the good guy. And speaking of Ferengi, may we take the occasion of his retirement to commend Reggie Miller for his decades of basketball excellence.
Hm. That appears to be ALL of my extant BSG mail. So let's move on to 24 mail. Charles from Magnifisyncopathological finds yet another reason to hope the show is a dreamworks rather than a subcreation. I'm torn between thinking he's being a bit . . . well, anal with this one, and accepting his point as one more reason why I prefer my thrillers smaller-scale rather than large. If there's a Season Four, what are they going to come up with for a threat, terrorists who want to extinguish the Sun? That's what happens when you feel compelled to up the danger scale with each new story.
digamma is nonplussed:
Uh, you can't possibly thing "the woman who orders the torment", i.e. CTU director Erin Driscoll, is a sympathetic character. She fired Kiefer because he used heroin to infiltrate a drug gang with terrorist ties. As bad as she is, she's not even on her game, because of her crazy daughter.
I would say that Driscoll has been presented more sympathetically as the show has gone on, largely because she's paid more heed to Our Hero. And the schizophrenic daughter subplot is clearly intended to tug our heartstrings on her behalf. But even if she's not someone we're supposed to love unreservedly, that's not the same thing as the show portraying her decision to torture her employee on momentary evidence as blameworthy.
Mind you, I've calmed down a bit on that since the other day, as I suspected I would. Ben Nunn-Miller writes
Regarding your post about 24 from Feb. 9th, I saw the torture incident from that episode differently than you did.I don't think anyone is going to think that this is a normal activity, partly because 24 is unrealistic as a whole (I say this with 24 being my favorite show on TV right now), and also because it seemed to me like the others involved in it didn't really want to go along with it like Driscoll did.
I also disagree with your assesment that they are making the blame fall on the black woman or that they are trivializing or endorsing torture. I felt the show conveyed the incident as an advertisement for why torture is wrong and doesn't work (wrong woman, didn't examine the evidence, torture did not gain any pertinent information, etc.) Perhaps I am being naive, but I could see Driscoll being reprimanded for ordering the torture after the events of the day are over.
Ben and digamma may be right. I do wonder who will reprimand Driscoll, though, when Secretary Heller is standing right next to her watching Sarah get shocked insensate. And I don't think it helps that Sarah is, let's face it, a bitch. The danger with 24, and Battlestar Galactica too, even though it's a much better show, is that the diegesis encourages the viewer to identify with those who do unto others, not those unto whom it is done. But I'll cop to hypersensitivity on this point.
Rounding out our television coverage, Miniver Cheevy responded to my thoughts on the most recent Justice League Unlimited cartoon:
Since Henley is a libertarian, he doesn't see the obvious implication of this thinking, that people with super-powers should be pensioned off by the government, like farm subsidies.
Snarf, I say! Snarf indeed! And it would simplify Eve Tushnet's life, since her comics-blogging and "farm dole" opposition could collapse into a single, efficient preoccupation.
The Biggest Bully Around - Radley Balko has a lengthy excerpt from a drug bust in Tennessee, one that is likely unremarkable except for the fact that the wife of the victim (the only word that does justice, though "survivor" is oddly appropriate too, as in illness advocacy) left a tape recorder running before the assault (also the only appropriate word, though "torture" will do in a pinch) began. Radley reprints an account of the transcript.
Read the whole goddam thing. I mean it. You voted for this shit. I'm offering just the tiniest excerpt here:
Amid the threats, Siler is again beaten, but he still refuses to sign. Siler pleads with the officers as Franklin threatens to burn him with a lighter after giving him a cigarette.
From the Knoxville News Sentinel.
A Fanboy's Links - Steven at Peiratikos has a terrific consideration of how the panel layouts in Grant Morrison's recently concluded We3 miniseries ("Disney with claws," as writer Grant Morrison puts it) contribute to the story. I'm a sucker for good writing on how the art in a comic book works. Excerpt:
When I try to read the overlay panels and the big image at the same time—an activity the layout actively encourages—I get three different temporal representations of the same narrative sequence, and the way the conflict between them disjoints my reading only enhances the other perceptual representations I’ve mentioned.
Comes complete with page reproductions to guide reading. He also links to a half-dozen other blog items about the miniseries.
Welcome Welcome - I should formally welcome the latest New Crew links, since they've been up for a week now. We wish the previous New Crew members much enjoyment of their new permanent homes somewhere on the blogroll. We pat ourselves on the back for actually rotating our links in not too much more than the month we intend any New Crew edition to last. We further resolve to stop referring to ourselves in the plural. At some point. And lastly, we remind Loyal Readers that the New Crew is our attempt to make linkage worth something. Blogrolls have gotten huge - even this one - and links can easily get lost. Thus Unqualified Offerings adds exactly twelve links at a time - no more, no less - to better present them to their new audience.
So what do we have for you this time? Very few comics bloggers (more next month), a hawk, a diarist and a whole bunch of libertarians.
Thomas L. Knapp - Easily the most exciting blog discovery for me since Justin Logan's blog, Knappster is the home of libertarian Democrat and FreeMarket News Network columnist Thomas L. Knapp. Writing style falls on the good side of Gonzo. Subject matter ranges from war to economics.
Mutualist Blog - "Free-market anti-capitalist" Kevin Carson's Mutualist site has long been one of the web's great repositories of materal and linkage on anarchism in the tradition of Proudhon. His blog is usefully provocative for more orthodox libertarians like me.
John and Belle Have a Blog - I admit it. When John Holbo and Belle Waring joined Crooked Timber, I figured they must be mirroring content between their joint blog and the group site. Not true! J&BHAB is still full of interesting material you can't find elsewhere. Culture-blogging from a liberal perspective is what you get.
Drug War Rant is where Pete Guither does the job I should be doing: chronicling the endless depredations against liberty that constitute our viciously stupid attempts at drug prohibition. Easily one of the most important blogs out there.
Clark Stooksbury is a longtime libertarian journalist. I knew him mostly for his contributions to Liberty Magazine.
Unfogged is run by heterodox liberal Ogged, though he has gone the group-blog route. More equipose than you'll find among big-name partisan bloggers.
Bob Barr - Ex-Congressman and right-wing civil libertarian. Barr holds views on social issues that chagrin me, but he's one of the few people to come out the other side of public service at least as dedicated to preserving ordinary citizens from official snoopery as he went in.
War and Piece - Top-notch journalism by liberal reporter Laura Rozen. Excellent coverage of national security issues. Softer on "humanitarian interventionism" than I'd like, but good reporting and generally shrewd analysis.
Mimi Smartypants - Favorite diarist of teh internets. Funny as hell. The more or less weekly epistles of a Mom with a free-ranging and incidentally dirty mind. Drop six political blogs and add this.
Steven Vincent - barking-mad neocon author, but does great reporting, and actually tries to provide the "full story" the happy-talk blogs only say they'd like to see.
X-Ray Spex - One of only two comics blogs on the list this time, X-Ray Spex is the home of Will Pfeifer, whose recently concluded H-E-R-O series for DC I enjoyed.
Comic Book Commentary - group comics blog with a multicultural slant. Impresario LeCharles Gonzalez orchestrates an intriguing mixture of reviews, interviews and musings.
And there you have it. Read them all. I do. Next month: More comics blogs and fewer libertarians.
Note: Also added Bookslut to the Not Blogs section.
Cane the Wogs AGAIN! - Kicking Michael Totten while he's down (your lips can't reach Christopher Hitchens' ass when you're up), Josh Buermann and Kieran Healy have a go. Buermann picks up Totten's remark that "we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past" and suggests that that "is why they put that 'neo' in front of it:"
Meanwhile Kieran Healy sets me wondering when he writes
Read the whole thing if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is.
In itself it's delicious phrasing. But hey, what is the opposite of an epiphany? We're looking at Definition 3 in the American Heritage: "3a. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. b. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization[.]" Roget is unhelpful.
How opposite is opposite? Is it a sudden failure of comprehension; a sustained opacity in the face of opportunities for clarity; or, most grandly, an instance of thrilling, comprehensive and utter misprision, a misunderstanding that feels like understanding, like when your hands are so cold they seem to burn when you clap them? Crooked Timber commenter pm offers
de-piphany. n1. The ironically revelatory disappearance of a divine being.
2. A sudden manifestation of the wrong idea about the essence or meaning of something.
3. Incomprehension or misperception of reality by means of what seems to be a sudden intuitive realization.
I like it. Depiphany. Use it three times and it's yours. Maybe it is, anyway. I looked for a Creative Commons identifier on Crooked Timber and didn't see one. You might owe dm money.
Moneyball - "Any truthful way you cut it -- pun intended -- the FY2006 budget proposal is bigger than the FY2005 budget. So, when a Republican begins to brag, or a Democrat starts to whine, about the 'budget cuts,' don't believe'em." Thomas Knapp casts a skeptical eye on the FY2006 budget. Upshot:
When it's all said and done, George W. Bush will receive from Congress, and sign into law, a FY2006 budget of at least $2.65 trillion, and more likely $2.7 trillion. With supplementals, it will likely approach $3 trillion. He'll tearfully inform the American public that those mean old Congressional Democrats just wouldn't let him be fiscally responsible.
So what about the "mean-sprited cuts" in a handful of social programs that have prominent Democrats sputtering with outrage? They certainly don't represent any kind of sea-change in what the federal government actually does, nor will they significantly steer that three trillion dollar supertanker toward Balance. I think they're in the budget so that prominent Democrats will sputter with outrage, less to enrage Dems than to cheer Republicans. Listen! the White House is saying, It's your favorite song! The White House isn't going to give conservatives genuine spending or deficit reduction or governmental streamlining. But a chorus of liberal angst may serve to keep their spirits up.
More 24 - The Post has the latest on personnel policy at CTU. Excerpt:
Discipline hearings/appeals: Disciplinary actions will continue mostly as they have in the past -- swift, secretive, and involving some kind of employee-on-employee torture -- in the auxiliary conference room next to the snack machines.
Today our bipolar attitude toward the show has swung to contemptuous and disgusted from yesterday's condescending and amused. I just can't get away from thinking that the show is habituating viewers to the idea that ordering a subordinate to taser the living shit out of another subordinate on the basis of a half-hour investigation is a perfectly normal thing for an American government official to do. Any harm that accrues to the subordinate being deliberately and repeatedly electrocuted is entirely the responsibility of the scheming black chick who set her up, not the woman who orders the torment or the man who inflicts it. Repulsive.
Perhaps tomorrow my attitude will soften.
Cane the Wogs! - Michael Totten and Christopher Hitchens give a few friendly Iraqis what-for. Note that in Totten's gloss of the discussion there is no hint whatsoever that he and Hitchens themselves stood to learn anything from their "dialog." It's all about setting their Iraqi friends straight, in a calm, kindly and patient way, of course. The closest he comes to the notion that his Iraqi interlocutors might have a little wisdom to impart is
And surely there is more to it than that, things I might never be in a position to understand.
The great thing about deciding you "might never be in a position to understand" is that it lets you completely off the hook for failing to understand, or even failing to try to understand.
Maybe they really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.
For one thing, I don't think colonialists and imperialists of the past so thoroughly kidded themselves. But maybe they did. I doubt they were one whit more or less condescending than Totten's account of his dinner.
(Via Obsidian Wings.)
A Libertarian Watches TV - 24. Okay, they've now tortured the wrong person twice (though I suspect we'll find out that Secretary Heller's son was a "right person" before the show is over). Maybe this ticking bomb scenario isn't all it's cracked up to be. On the other hand, they haven't really paid for it, because they're able to realize much more quickly than they would in real life that they've got the wrong person, so they don't pursue blind alleys past the point of no return.
I just reread Holbo's damned long comics-related essay of last summer where he distinguishes between subcreations and dreamworks. Am mulling the possibility that 24 is a dreamwork dressed up as a subcreation. The disguise is why the show ticked me off so much to start; the actual essence (dreamwork) is why I stick with it.
Battlestar Galactica - Had to work Friday night so just caught the latest episode, with Starbuck stranded on an alien moon, tonight. The meat spaceship was great. Now, if one cocks one's head, this show is all about the romance of purging oneself of one's humanity in the name of one's duty - characters go wrong by betraying their professional obligations to their hearts. Starbuck, Apollo and Adama have all done this in the last two episodes; the Chief is likely to do it in the next few weeks. When in the season opener the President gives the order to destroy a ship that, as of the last information, held 1300 civilians, because it is probably being tracked by the Cylons, we are supposed to consider the magnitude of the loss, yes, but primarily as an emblem of Madame President's pain. How agonizing are the "tough choices" we make with others' lives, exquisitely so! (See "Joe Schmoe" in a recent Political Animal comment thread for more of this kind of "tough choice." This is your Warblog Fanboy Rampage item for the day.)
And yet, I have to say: BSG is the most exciting thing I've seen on television in years. Okay, all I watch is football, but even that is the point - it's the first show I've felt compelled to follow on a weekly basis for a decade. It's not just a space opera. It's got some serious weirdness around the edges. Tuesday will apparently be a good jumping-on point, since they're rerunning the first five episodes at once.
Justice League Unlimited - Offering Boy and I took in the latest episode Saturday night. Aging Leaguer Wildcat has secretly begun participating in Metabrawl, an illegal cage-match series among (mostly) "supervillains," sponsored by the entrepreneurial Roulette. Black Canary recruits Green Arrow (they aren't dating yet in this continuity) to try to spring Wildcat on the QT, since he's flouting League rules and could get kicked out if caught.
There was some nice byplay among the characters, and Dennis Farina was good as the voice of Wildcat. I gotta say, as a libertarian, I was rooting for Roulette. In this incarnation of Metabrawl, everything is consensual. No one's been kidnapped; fighting is to "last man standing," meaning submission is an option. (In Roulette's comics appearances, she gets contestants by drugging and kidnapping superheroes. The TV Roulette apparently has a better idea of the labor situation in the DC Comics universe.) Wildcat himself "has always been a fighter," as he says; he likes the chance to whale on people he thinks have it coming; and he feels like the League is shoving him aside because of his age. As for the real villains, let's consider: in Metabrawl they're making money by beating up other villains who have chosen to be there. Other ways supervillains might make money: robbing; killing; blackmail. Yeah, I think Metabrawl is a nobler career path.
Canary's concern for Wildcat is well-drawn, but the script's intelligence cries uncle by the third round. It's hard to see what in either Canary's or GA's actions constituted a "plan," meaning, a proposed course of action leading causally to a desired result. Canary's "Plan B" is "let's use violence! in a situation where we're overmatched!" Her Plan C, "Let's you and me fight," might have worked at the cost of destroying Wildcat's last shred of dignity - not something I'D want to do to someone who is "like a father to me." And I thought the gimmick of Arrow's metabolic stasis doohickey ducked the opportunity for a better story, where Wildcat clobbers Arrow legitimately and then decides he doesn't like what he's becoming, AND ALSO has the dignity of knowing he beat a fellow Leaguer.
Lastly, what's up with J'onn J'onnz and the Big Scary Chair at the end? Canary supposedly wanted to pry Wildcat from Metabrawl without letting the rest of the League in on his secret. Sticking him in front of the telepath achieves this goal how?
Yes, let's use this as an excuse to link David Plotz's classic apologia for submission fighting, shall we? (TVTome link via Progressive Ruin.)
Labor Theory of Value - Among the many reasons to prefer football to baseball is that football inspires less in the way of labored, turgid chin-pullers be writers trying to inflate the game into a statement about Life or America or other Important Things - Halberstamism, if you will. TNR's Lee Siegel is not helping.