Category: Thoughts

Tell me Fox isn’t biased. I dare you. Or that our science research system is not being corrupted by the right. If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.

Disjointed notes on the theme of superheroes:

Awhile ago, Fafblog noted disappointment in the Kerry/Edwards ticket, wishing instead for Kerry/Batman. I told my father about it, and he responded that he actually met someone named Batman while he was in Australia. You know, Jeff Batman.

You know, if my last name were “Mann” I would totally name my kid “Super” and not “Bat.”

Earlier this week I woke up in the middle of the night mumbling about how Batman had been impersonating me and going on a murderous rampage. I don’t remember this dream or telling Bookdwarf about it, but I think it means either a) I am worried that my subconsious will force me to do something I’ll regret later, or b) I am afraid of someone else doing horrible things that will affect me. Can it be both?

Regardless, if I had a superpower, it would totally be x-ray vision or invisibility or the power to stop time– anything that would let me know things I couldn’t normally know. I would use it to spy on naked ladies, and also for securities fraud. The delivery of next week’s Wall Street Journal would work, too.

Andrea Lafferty, of the Traditional Values Coalition, says, “There’s an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American.” Perhaps that’s because scientists are are educated and knowledgeable enough that “knowing more than the average American” is actually their job, just like “being better at fixing cars than the average American” is how an auto mechanic gets paid to fix cars by average people who respect that expertise. The fact is that if Andera Lafferty actually represents the average American citizen, then America is a nation so mired in barbarous superstition that it opposes the very concepts of science, research, and the advancement of knowledge.

My old spanish teacher, Señor MacDonald, often said “You pays your money, you takes your choice.” I think he meant that there were limited choices in life and that you were supposed to do what you could. Play the hand they deal you. That sort of thing.

We all make compromises. At least, most of us do. The rest of us, depending on the nature of the desires on which we refuse to compromise, are called idealistic, pigheaded, quixotic, exacting, annoying, stupid, or insane.

Recently I wonder about bicycle helmet laws. Lady K, friend of the nauseated bloggers, died in part because she wasn’t wearing a helmet. I blame the car, of course, more than I blame her or the helmet. But would a helmet law have saved her life? Would constantly mussed hair have ruined her artistic career? Would a helmet law make it too inconvenient or too expensive for some people to bicycle, make them walk more, be late more, lose their jobs, exercise less, ultimately creating greater obesity and killing more people than it would save? What about the lives of the sweatshop workers in Indonesia manufacturing the helmets, ruined by the sudden popularity of newly mandated styene foams?

You pays your money, you takes your choice.

Brilliant new blog: Winning Argument. It’s like a cocktail-party political cheat sheet, or maybe a set of talking points for reasonable people. Each day they explain, in simple terms that you can remember and discuss with others, why we’re being ruled by, as Brad DeLong says, “these imbeciles,” or as I would say, fucktard wing-nuts. It reminds me, for some reason, of D-Squared’s challenge to the general world: show me one thing those nutscrapes have done right.

Ken MacLoed has posted a short elegy for the better days of our nation, and the Gadflyer is writing about Moonies and their theocratic billiionaire leader hanging out with senate types.

Maybe Fafblog! really is the only one that can explain how this world works.

Good: I’m in Brad DeLong’s Blogroll! I hate the word “blogroll.” It sounds like “bog roll” which in British means toilet paper.

Bad: The Garfield Movie: NYT Review: “I have a feeling ‘Garfield: The Movie,’ which opens nationwide today, is only the beginning. I’m bracing myself for ‘Cathy,’ for ‘Ziggy’ and, of course, for ‘Marmaduke.'” Don’t fail to miss it, kids.

Crazy: Angry man in armored bulldozer. Not just angry, but patient and determined: he spent months armoring his bulldozer, then welded himself inside it, and knocked down the businesses of people who’d done him wrong. Now that is some serious western-style revenge.

Lyensko and the Bush administration. The more I learn about Stalin and Bush, the more they seem to have in common. Think about Iraq and Stalin’s statement that “everyone extends his social system as far as his army can reach.”

Ah, good ol’ Uncle Joe.

It’s hard to speak ill of a dead person, especially one whose failures can be ascribed to a crippling degenerative illness. Still, Reagan was not a good president. He was not as bad as he could have been, he may not have been any worse than his rivals, and he was not the worst ever, but he was not a good president. His were the years when my father bought a book on how to survive nuclear holocaust. His were the years when the word “AIDS” was never mentioned. His were the years of ballooning deficits, the foundations of “soak the poor” policy, the libertarian rhetoric used to destroy basic social services. Yes, he spent the USSR into the ground, but I don’t know that Carter or Mondale would have done any worse. At least he wasn’t as much in the thrall of theocrats and end-times lunatics as our current regime.

Saw the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, ate popcorn, and suspended my disbelief and critical functions to just enjoy the damn thing, with very few exceptions. One, the perhaps inevitable budding romance and tender moments between Ron and Hermione were kind of cliched. Two, butt-and-boob shots that remind the viewer that Hermione is nearly a young woman now, and wearing low-rise jeans (with a long-enough shirttail carefully tucked all the way in, fortunately), also make the viewer feel kind of creepy for noticing it. Three, when the werewolf teacher is resigning because “someone has let slip the, er, nature of my ailment” and people don’t want a teacher “with his condition” to be near their young ones, I couldn’t help but read it as an allegory of homosexuality. You can take the sensitive young man out of the liberal arts college, but he’s ruined for life by even one class in gender studies.

(I did think the Sirius Black prison tats were awesome).

Similarly, I was able to enjoy most of last week’s Somerville Memorial Day parade, except for the Aleppo Shriners Oriental Marching Band. Yes, Oriental. As in, “exotic” purple satin capes, turbans, funny trumpets, and curly shoes you’d thought we’d left in the 20th century, if not the 19th. I can’t have been the only person immediately reminded of Edward Said’s Orientalism and its sound debunking of most of the views espoused by Patai’s The Arab Mind. After all, The Arab Mind has just been reprinted, and is apparently being used as a general handbook for neocon rule of Iraq, which means that it’s also finding use as one more explanation for the international clusterfuck that is the Bush administration. And, when faced with that sort of blind willful fuckupedness, I once again cannot suspend my disbelief.