Dear Fanboy's Notes Subscribers - As of right now, I have migrated off of MT to Wordpress. The blog URI is still http://www.highclearing.com. However the XML feed addresses have changed. There are three "everything feeds" available currently:
You can also get the comments feed. I hope to have a new Fanboy's Notes feed just as soon as I can figure out how to make one.
But this is the last new post you'll ever see on the feed you've been using. I'd hate to lose you, so please update.
Dear RSS Users - As of right now, I have migrated off of MT to Wordpress. The blog URI is still http://www.highclearing.com. However the XML feed addresses have changed. Please choose among the new
options. You can also get the comments feed.
But this is the last new post you'll ever see on the feed you've been using. I'd hate to lose you, so please update.
Department of Manual Trackbacks - At Flit, BruceR revises my gloss on the "proves that X is what they fear most" dodge. He adduces a targeting distinction between "high value" and "high payoff." Hey, I'll accept it.
And Radley points out that, while it is true that, as I noted, the extreme-libertarian Bush Administration did not file an amicus brief in Kelo, it almost did - for the Evil Team.
Oh, Ouch! - Radley Balko finds a report of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales promising that "he'll give the same priority to cracking down on obscenity that he'll give to fighting terrorism."
Given that Gonzales believes in fighting terrorism with torture, this could be one painful war on smut.
Marvel Team-Up - Spider-Man's Greatest Bible Stories. Someone's gonna get in trouble for this one!
Another Cliche Past Its Smell Date is surely Action X proves that __________ is what the __________ fear most, most recently on display in this week's Reason Express:
Even the horrific car bomb that killed over 100 in Hilla tells us that the construction of a functioning Iraqi security force is what the insurgents fear the most.
Once you've said it, you haven't said much. The US assault on Afghanistan proves that an al Qaeda-friendly government in the mountains of Central Asia is what the Americans fear most. And? The massacre at the World Trade Center in September 2001 proves that East Coast office workers are what the terrorists fear most. Really? The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand proves that a popular Hapsburg is what the Serbian nationalists fear most. I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
Stripped of morale-building rhetoric, all the formulation really claims is that Combatants operate against targets on which they place high value. But then, the morale-building rhetoric is the point: the word "fear" makes the opponent sound desperate and our side on the cusp of victory; it also tries to buck up the actual targets. Puff your chests out, boys, they're bombing you because they're afraid of you! There's probably a sense that it's true, but it's also true that "an al-Qaeda-friendly government in the mountains of Central Asia" was what we "feared most" in late 2001. Saying that said nothing about whether we were "desperate," or about our prospects for success. Serbian nationalists probably did fear the emotional connection between the mass of Serbs and the Royal Family of Austria-Hungary. Attacking what they feared most worked out pretty well for them.
Truer Words - About Senator Stevens explanation of his preoposal to regulate cable and satellite broadcasts
Most viewers don't differentiate between traditional TV and cable so they don't know when they might be exposed to objectionable programming, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, head of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, told the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington.
Mrs. Offering e-mails
JESUS CHRIST!!!!!!!! THAT'S WHY MOST PEOPLE SUBSCRIBE TO CABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Exclamation points in original.
Dear Libertarian-Leaning Republicans and Republican-leaning libertarians: I notice that the Bush Justice Department did not file an amicus brief on behalf of the landowner in Kelo. Why do you suppose that is? They could've. The DOJ has broad latitude when it comes to amicus curae and has certainly used it. Not this time, though. Hm.
The Issues of the Day - I pretty much endorse what Jane Galt has to say about overreactions one way or the other to news from the Middle East. The depressing side of this view is that, at least in theory, no one need ever change their mind because they can hope that events will eventually bear out their existing opinions. I changed my own mind once in response to subsequent evidence - I was a huge contemporaneous booster of Gulf War Phase I, a New Republic liberal through and through. And I remember feeling pretty triumphal in the immediate aftermath when Nothing Bad Happened like the pessimists said. Then came our decade-long enmeshment in the sanctions and no-fly regimes (Gulf War Phase II), followed by the September 11 atrocities, then Iraq War Phases III (conquest) and IV (occupation), all flowing pretty straightforwardly from the original decision to roll back the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. When you want to start tallying up "positive results of the Gulf War," the cost side of the ledger shows not just the hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives in the last two years, but hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (or more) in the dozen years prior to that.
I should say right out that before the invasion I said what would matter was not how the war looked the next month, but how it looked a year from then, and two years, and five and ten. I have no hesitation in saying that after one year it looked a lot more like my predictions than like those of any hawks. It will clearly look rosier come the second anniversary in a couple of weeks.
And after that? It depends.
Bringing Up Blackboards - Following up on last week's Mommy Trap blogging, Leonard Dickens suggests that Jennifer Warner and her class are prisoners of ideology.
Although it is clear that Warner and her suffering co-affluents do very much want their kids to "get ahead", I think one part of their problem is they don't know why they want this. They see that they are paying a price for it; thus they fear they are irrational. One thing that might help is simply to know that it is natural for them to want to advance their kids. It's an evolved aspect of human nature.It may also help them to know that in general in primates, females are much more social than males. Thus there's a reason why their husbands are not similarly busting their butts molding the kids: hubby just ain't that into it. Knowing this might help these women live more peaceably with their family.
I don't have the aversion to all explanations sociobiological that others have, but as to the second paragraph, there's an alternate explanation that fits the facts, insofar as the facts fit Warner's potted statistics. Warner mentions at one point that the average mother works 41 hours a week, the average father 51. That's ten extra hours in the office, and ten fewer hours available for parenting. Proportionally, the relevant comparison is not "an extra 20% at work" but Remaining waking hours minus (minus net commuting time difference) minus ten. It's to Warner's credit that her article, while free with its condemnations of society, was lighter on the husband-bashing than many works of her genre - apparently she thought through the implications of the numbers.
See, They Never Left in the First Place - The one, the only, the awesome, eminence . . . uh, purple, dean of the comics blogosphere, Neilalien himself, turned Five yesterday (in blog years). My hat's off to you, sir!
See, They Return, One, and by One - Tacitus is at least theoretically restarting today after an intermission, with a minor site redesign. There may well be a lot of changes under the hood too. Apparently the diary system, which I'm old enough to not quite grasp, survives, though the main page will theoretically be All Tacitus, All the Time.
Follow-Ups - Loose ends from yesterday. Anent the torture "reality show" Eve writes, "I mean, people volunteer for sex all the time, and that tells you less than nothing about rape." Also, did I ever get around to saying explicitly that Battlestar Galactica, and the Lear revisit it inspired, helped me understand how much of America's embrace of torture is driven by anger? It did. In college, when someone would come back from what they said was "a good movie," I had a roomate who would ask, "Did it change the way you look at life?" Well there you go. (I've been focused almost exclusively on the country's fear, missing its rage.) Also, Mrs. Offering used to get on me for overusing "anent," but I think I laid off it long enough to get away with this one.
UPDATE: Meant to mention. Andrew Olmsted didn't like Friday's BSG nearly as much as I did. I think he's wrong at just about every turn, but not provably so. I think the show's creators are largely in control of the seeming loose ends; he doubts they are. Time will tell, but it does set one to musing how literary and paraliterary works acquire authority (let's gloss it for now as confidence that the creator knows what he or she is doing). I will say I don't think there's any "telepathy" going on necessarily, though I could be wrong. I do suspect that the Cylons, as artificial intelligences, probably have access to the material in an awful lot of computer databases. Were there background check records somewhere covering Starbuck's horrid upbringing? Seems plausible.
Of course, the other possibility is that God knows all and the Cylons know God.
Oh by the Way - Matt's absolutely right about the distinction between anti-Left and anti-State. And it explains most everything. I meant to get around to writing something about it for awhile, but quick brown foxes jump over lazy dogs, you know? There's a similar schism on the left, BTW, but I've never quite formulated it to my satisfaction. It's between sincerely loving "the little guy" and really despising the rich, I think. But that may not quite be it.
Now, I'm doubt that this specifically is true
Meanwhile, if you look at Jim Henley, very little of his considerable distaste for the administration stems from any specifically libertarian (as opposed to social conservative) views.
but who can say. I'm pro-choice but a pro-life symp; I'm pro-gay marriage and individual rights for gays, but a small-government social conservative who felt the same way would believe that homosexuality was a regrettable, even sinful practice that the State nevertheless had no standing to prohibit. That's how I feel about homophobia, not homosexuality. But I may be missing some subtle distinction Matt intends.
Fear and Vaunting on a Little Screen - Drama, fiction are tricky. The file cabinets of Burbank, California bulge with letters from people complaining that some studio has, by portraying some outrage, endorsed it. But context is all. And context can be . . . tricky. When Cornwall bursts the jellid eyes of Gloucester we should not conclude that Shakespeare is pro-blinding. We should conclude, rather, that Shakespeare wants us to understand something about when impotent rage and absolute power collide.
Which brings us to Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica. Oh, I should have given you a spoiler warning about King Lear: at some point Cornwall blinds Gloucester. There will be more spoilers as we go, and not about King Lear.
Context. When I decry (over and freaking over again) the portrayal of torture in 24, I think it is with an adequate attention to context. The context seems to be that it's simply one more thing the relative good guys do to stop the absolute bad guys, like car chases, shootouts or, most grotesquely from a dramatic standpoint, staging a gas station holdup. The least we can say is that the show offers no comprehensive critique of the practice. The current season is an incomplete work. Perhaps tomorrow's episode, when Jack Bauer is scheduled to torture his girlfriend's estranged husband in front of her, will alter our understanding of the show's stance on torture completely. I hope so, really.
In the meantime, let's talk Battlestar Galactica. In Friday's episode, the government catches a humanoid Cylon and Commander Adama dispatches his surrogate daughter, Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff, to interrogate him. She goes into it knowing that he'll try to get into your head. When he tells her he's secreted a nuclear bomb on one of the ships, she breaks out the truncheons. It starts with "a little smacky-face" and proceeds to submersion in water. Starbuck herself never raises a finger against the subject. She has people for that. The very fact that she has people for that is itself disquieting. The helmeted security guards in black battledress look menacing and, I think, are meant to. They respond with alacrity to Starbuck's direction. There is no moment of refusal or even surprise.
Good science fiction is always building the world of its story, and good drama is always showing us more than the words alone convey. What makes the episode so horrifyingly effective is Sackhoff, the show's best actor. Edward James Olmos has a bigger rep and resume - see his IMDB listing vs. hers - but in terms of contributions to the current series she has realised the most textured character.
And what she gives us in this episode is . . . rage. Fiercely controlled rage. It's in the glint of her eye, the curl of her lip and the sour sigh that replaces the character's trademark giggle. When the Cylon, writhing on the floor and still trying to get into her head, tells Starbuck that she has always wanted to believe that she is a cause of other's harm because that would mean the WORLD was a right place at the cost of herself being a wrong thing in it, we instantly believe him (it?) because we've been watching her live that belief for most of an hour. Seeing Sackhoff's portrayal of Starbuck as torturer opened my eyes retrospectively to hints of the character's self-hatred and anger in previous episodes. I now understand her great guilt, over her responsibility for the death of her lover, Adama's younger son, is an aspect of a prior, larger hurt.
This isn't just another car chase. It is symptom and cause of deep corruption in the perpetrator, as well as unconscionable pain in the victim.
What the show hints is that the corruption extends beyond Starbuck. We know that humans created the Cylons. We know that the Cylons are fervent monotheists and convinced that humanity is irredemably sinful. The Cylons claim to believe that God so came to abominate humankind that He had humans create the Cylons as their more righteous successors. Having seen the Cylons in action, I think they fail to see their own corruption - we see a lot of it in this very episode - but the show certainly hasn't troubled to demonstrate that the Cylons are wrong about humanity.
BSG problematizes torture to a degree far beyond the mild difficulties 24 attributes to the practice. It's an interesting contrast because both shows are, at different levels, about post-9/11 America. BSG is the superior show because 24 merely exemplifies the national mindset (We're the Greatest and Most Powerful Nation Ever! And We're Besieged on All Sides!) while BSG uses it. (We must not say "interrogate.") In Starbuck's tormenting of the Cylon we see bigotry (you're just a toaster), disparity of power (equivocated because of the Cylon's superhuman prowess), and impotent, Cornwallesque rage. We have a ticking bomb scenario with, it turns out, no bomb. On the other hand, we have a Good Cop in President Roslin who breaks a solemn vow and is right to do so. We have, after all, a genuine menace, programmatic religious zealots who really are trying to exterminate mankind (so far as we can tell), and who really may be automatons at a level humans are not. (If Adama is not a Cylon, as the Cylon Loeben claims, then his whispering it to President Roslin at the moment of his deliverance looks uncannily like a software looping error.)
I don't have a grand conclusion for you after all that wind-up. It's entirely possible that, television being television, BSG is writing checks it won't be able to cash. It could get to the point where the money people don't want to harm the salability of their product. By holding a funhouse mirror, as opposed to a makeup compact, to 21st Century America, science fiction can reflect things that might otherwise inspire us to smash the glass. But truth is like an eclipse, dangerous even when viewed indirectly. It has always made TV people in particular nervous. You can put your eye out with that thing.
UPDATE: Franklin Harris corrected my earlier misstatement that Starbuck's sweetie was Adama's elder son. Unqualified Offerings regrets the error. However, as Franklin must understand, he is not eligible for a no-prize because he didn't resolve the continuity error for me by explaining how I could have been right after all.
The Political is Personal for Radley Balko.
I am of course against gun control. But it's never been much of a hot-button issue for me. Until now. I want a gun. Tonight. I should be able to go to Wal-Mart and by a goddamned handgun to defend myself. I doubt the two buffoons who threatened us tonight were serious. But what if they were? Why in the hell should I have to wait five days to be able to defend myself? Anybody think that if they were serious, they'd have any trouble finding a gun in about eight minutes? Who's served by a federal law making me wait five days?
Find out why at the link.
Reality TV - Interesting. Set your (British) TV to Channel 4:
LONDON - A British TV channel is preparing “Guantanamo Guidebook,” a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit “Big Brother,” will film seven British volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.
The techniques are based on information from declassified U.S. government documents, and will be carried out by expert interrogators from the United States, a Channel Four spokesman said, declining to provide additional details.
He said the volunteers were rigorously screened prior to their participation and received intensive medical and psychological attention during and after the taping of the show.
One man was forced by doctors to withdraw after he contracted hypothermia.
Hm. a socially-useful reality show. What will they think of next.
The risk with such a show is that the precautions the producers must take probably end up understating the devastation the techniques cause in real life. We don't torture "volunteers," nor are they "rigorously screened" for psychological and physical stamina. I suppose it's inevitable that torture apologists will say, "See! If you can make a reality show about it it can't be so bad!"
But then our torture apologists will say anything. There's an irony there somewhere, now that I think about it.
Via a pointer from a discussion of torture and TV at Moonage_Daydream's Livejournal, to which I was tipped by Eve Tushnet. There's an evolving BSG discussion in the thread which is quite good.