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Wednesday, May 29, 2002
Block that "most"! A letter writer to Andrew Sullivan states:
Would the letter writer be so kind as to supply supporting evidence for the use of "most" rather than "some"? Anecdotal personal observations don't count. (Letters to Sullivan are found here. The title of the letter in question is "EPHEBOPHILIA AND THE CULT OF YOUTH".) Don't get me wrong. There's obviously a good sized youth-and/or-beauty-focused identifiable population among gay men. The question is how does one go about qualifying the size of fraction that group makes up of all gay men. Obviously, I'm skeptical that it's over 50%. The writer goes on:
Even if 90% of gay men found the young and beautful exclusively attractive, that fact would in no way justify, excuse, or explain some random priest or any other gay man hitting on some random underage boy. No way. And anyone who's been around enough straight guys watching women's gymnastics knows that it's not only gay guys who might have some disposition -- and who knows whether it's some kind of cultural expression -- towards younger ones when it comes to developing sexual fantasies. Note that for those numerous horny-talking straight guys (well, horny talking until someone says, "Hey, that's my sister!"), most of them don't go around boinking jail bait. Neither do most gay guys go around boinking underage guys, and while I'm comfortable that my use of "most" is entirely appropriate here, feel free to replace it with "an overwhelming majority". This just in! Jennings to continue as anchor at World News Tonight. Stephanopolis to host This Week. Williams to succeed Brokaw at Nightly News. Drudge to continue with web site. Developing... Yow! Bush "Intimidated" by Gay Journalists. TAPPED sends the world to this piece at TownHall.com where Brent Bozell unloads the goofy idea that President Bush was intimidated-- that's right, "intimidated" is his word choice -- by the presence of openly gay reporters on the campaign trail in 2000. See for yourself. Here's an excerpt:
To characterize one of the two major-party candidates as "intimidated" by the presence of one or more homosexual reporters in the coverage pool just seems goofy. We're talking about someone who became President of the USA. It's not necessarily being "intimidated" or even what's easily called politically correct to pay attention to interests outside some narrow scope of what was once perceived as one's base. It's called expansive and inclusive politics. So the Bush White House might be taking a little extra care to make sure it doesn't put its foot in its mouth regarding issues of importance to gay people. While that doesn't make them toadies to gay interests and gay lobbies, it might indicate some small degree of independence and refusal to toady to the interests and lobbies of the looney right. I thought the right viewed itself as smarter and more clearly thinking than the left. Well, the above is one example of someone on the right who doesn't seem to understand the difference between a perceived (possibly imagined) correlation and what is being claimed as causation. Oh well, at least it makes again clear what some on the far right perceive as their issue of import. Operant conditioning. If we send Layne money, doesn't it make it more likely he'll talk about basketball? Aside: I should've read more of Layne's post before commenting. Didn't mean to be cavalier about the awfulness he was noting in the rest of his entry. Sullivan and the HRC. In his gay marriage post (discussed below), Andrew Sullivan once again disses the Human Rights Campaign. My impression, from previous posts of his, is that he thinks the HRC is some kind of way left-wing organization. Sorry, Andrew, but the way-left group is (or, at least, used to be) the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. At least way left compared to the HRC. (Note, though, that among the NGLTF site's first links is this one on gay marriage, although the focus is more on the states that have passed anti-gay-marriage laws than on efforts to get laws passed supporting gay marriage.) Anyway, back to the HRC.... They've always struck me as a rather mainstream liberal political organization, from the refusal to get the "gay" word into their name to their almost unwavering support of Democratic candidates. Seeing that it's really absurd to characterize the contemporary Democratic party as some kind of far-left quasi-Marxist organization, I don't quite understand Sullivan's gripes with the HRC as if they're that kind of group. Doctrinaire, in ass deep with the Democrats along the same lines as organized labor (AFL-CIO here; Teamsters here, not that the Teamsters are as ass deep as the AFL-CIO) and NOW, sure, but not exactly a division of the People's Liberation Army. Gay marriage. Andrew Sullivan has a post here (look! A permalink! -- Thanks!) about gay marriage. My partner/lover/unindicted-co-conspiritor and I have never settled the issue of what we would do if we could get married. It would certainly make easier a lot of the legal hoops and hurdles we have to jump through and over just to institute similar legal protections regarding health and death that our married straight counterparts get. And it would ensure financial and other material employment benefits that many employers limit now to their legally married straight employees. (I know. I'm working on domestic-partner benefits with my own employer. It's like pulling teeth to try and get some movement there.) We consider ourselves married in almost all ways. Our families treat us like a married couple, and our lives pretty much resemble in many ways the lives of any other couple that's been together for multiple years (7+, in our case). Still, there are advantages to not using the marriage model, and they don't all involve the use of what Sullivan characterizes as left-wing labels of patriarchy, etc. It's just simply easier to dissolve the relationship when you're not legally married, if the time should ever come to do that, and that's not an awful thing. Of course, you do so, if you do so, without some of the legal protections that divorce procedings involve, and that's not necessarily a good thing. More data, more noise.  Jerry Lettivn (above, more photos here), one of the authors of "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" way back when ('59), used to say "More data, more noise." The idea is that sometimes you're better off taking one measurement and trusting it rather than taking umpteen measurements and not know which, if any, are reliable. The multiple claims about Al Qaida locations and intentions in the entry below fall into the "more data, more noise" category. I can't, or shouldn't at least, simply treat them all the reports as equally reliable: I have to recognize that I bring my own perceptions and beliefs about their veracity, individually and collectively, to my making sense of them. But, I also have to acknowledge a lot of cluelessness about where the information comes from, reliability of the individual reporters (and skepticisms as to the reliability of who they work for), sources for the stories (and their bosses, too), etc. It's not a real settling situation. Loose lips. Yesterday, this story in the New York Times began with, "Virtually the entire senior leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been driven out of eastern Afghanistan and are now operating with as many as 1,000 non-Afghan fighters in the anarchic tribal areas of western Pakistan, the commander of American-led forces in Afghanistan [Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck] said today." Today, the NYT has this story, somewhat burried (at least on the web site), that starts off, "Senior Pakistani intelligence officials said today that recent terror attacks pointed to worrisome links between local extremists and fugitive Qaeda leaders who -- far from being concentrated along the Afghan border as American officials contend -- have filtered across the country into major cities." Lastly, MSNBC is currently carrying this story where Hagenbeck's Pentagon superiors dispute his claims about Al Qaida planned operations and its leadership being in Western Pakistan. So, how's a web-surfing guy in Daytona Beach supposed to make sense of these conflicting reports. Well, first, I take into account the sources. Hagenbeck is reported in the MSNBC piece to be on his way out of his position in Afghanistan, with a command structure rearrangement in the works. To me, that situation works to enhance his credibility. Alternatively, Hagenbeck could be playing the asscovering game that seems to have become obviously popular among US government officials in the past few weeks. The unnamed ISI official's comments includes the following:
And...
Hmmm. When someone claims "I am certainly not allowing this to happen. On this, the world may rest assured," and "It is unthinkable that there should be rogue elements here," I get suspicious that there's more than a tiny element of too much protest involved. So, I'm skeptical about the ISI officer's claims in total, even while those claims motivate attention to questions about what we should be doing to help Pakistan deal with the situation he describes, should that turn out to be factual. (Aside: How strongly does the reminder that the new head of ISI is Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq in the middle paragraph of what's quoted immediately above suggest that he is, in fact, the unnamed ISI official quoted in the story?) As to Pentagon dismissal's of Hagenbeck's claims, I'm mixed. It goes against the asscovering trend, which gives it a certain amount of credence. But it's also substantially further away from the action. It's also couched in weasel words: "Brig. Gen. John Rosa Jr. of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday he had not seen any intelligence reports warning of specific plots targeting the process, known as the loya jirga." Note the use of "specific." Hmmm. Is this really refuting Hagenbeck or not? Still, one has to question the sensibility of Hagenbeck's making his initial claims, as well as the Pentagon's refuting them. Whatever happened to "loose lips sink ships"? Addendum: USA Today (ugh) is reporting here that Al Qaida is helping Islamic militants in Kashmir. Addendum 2: CNN reports here that the British have begun operations on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to prevent Al Qaida operatives from disrupting the Afghan loya jirga to be held next month. Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Twelve million? Drudge is linking to a Daily Telegraph report (here) claiming that 12 million people could die in an India-Pakistan nuclear war. Ugh. If they want to kill 12 million of each other, maybe they should use that genocide machine from that episode of Star Trek (original flavor). You remember? Each side computes the names of who's to die, then those folks queue up for termination. You'd have just as many bodies, but without the fallout! Seriously, an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange would be a horrible tragedy. Our reactions were it to occur would be sufficiently strong that we would likely question our lack of stronger involvement now. I know we can't dictate to other nations how they should conduct their affairs, but a nuclear exchange anywhere in the world is of sufficient effect from fallout to be at least of serious concern. Ironically, if India and Pakistan had more nukes, a sufficient number to create a Mutually Assured Destruction case, they'd almost certainly have to be more responsible regarding their use. It seems to me that their each having a fairly small number of fission bombs and somewhat unreliable delivery system (although Pakistan's been making some notable demonstrations of ability with their recent rocket (not nuclear) tests) increases the likelihood that a nuclear exchange would happen should war break out relative to the case where they each have enough weapons to assure that they wipe each other out. I'm no expert, and I don't know what we're doing behind the scenes, but this seems to be a matter worthy of serious attention. Maybe the negotiation happy Europeans can make magic happen. What to do about Iraq? Josh Marshall's been referring to the piece on Iraq that he's been working on for a while now. The piece is finally out; it's here at Washington Monthly's web site. The piece doesn't come through as strongly in favor of action as Marshall's entry on the Talking Points Memo page sounds like it will. Still, it seems to be a good analysis, particularly of the inside baseball regarding who thinks what about what to do regarding the current Iraqi regime. A little too much inside baseball and not enough about what the real consequences of any particular policy are, but useful nonetheless. One gripe: There's what seems to me a gratuitous and pointless swipe at the current administration regarding the timing of an attack on Iraq. "There is talk of a military assault on Iraq as early as this winter, though a more likely target date is 12 to 18 months from now. (With victory scheduled in time for the '04 elections? Perish the thought!)" While I don't expect any politician to quit thinking about possible political ramifications of any decision, and while I don't think Bush II is pure as snow in such regards, any war with Iraq is of sufficient consequence in life, not just American, that I'd like to naively believe that the timing of any such attack would be decided overwhelmingly on military considerations relative to political ones. Speaking of timing, The Bull Moose (no permalinks) weighs in today, yet again, with calls to attack Iraq in a piece griping about administration waffling on matters of import. Another day; another TAPPED. TAPPED is, in most ways, a weblog I ought to like: in many ways ostensibly progressive, smart alecky, and skeptical. So what is it about its second use in two days of the old "Speak Truth to Power" saw that's bugging me? (Here's the first, that Wellstone entry from yesterday, and here's my comments on that.) Maybe it's the simple little fact that being powerless has never been demonstrated, to my satisfaction at least, to be an indicator of likelihood to tell the truth. Just like some randomly selected poor person isn't necessarily more noble than a randomly selected non-poor person, a randomly selected less powerful person isn't necessarily any more truthful than a randomly selected powerful person. There seems to be an unspoken assumption in the "speak truth to power" idea that power is necessarily correlated with untruthfulness. Sure there are ample instances of that being the case, but does anyone really take much notice of the cases where power is correlated with truthfulness? Does anyone do so to enough of an extent that it would be possible to get some handle on just how much correlation there actually is between power and lack of truthfulness? Speaking truthfully is a pretty good policy, regardless of whether dealing with the powerful or the powerless. I don't know whether "honesty is the best policy" or not, but I do know that it's a pretty good one; it's not a bad one to take as a default unless other considerations become more pressing. So is "speaking truth to power" any more special of a directive than "just tell the friggin' truth"? One last comment on Wellstone, described here in yesterday's TAPPED as "the outspoken progressive upon whom so much of America depends to speak truth to power." He's a United States Senator, for crying out loud. He's one of the powerful, not some oppressed powerless person without connections. He has power. So, even if he speaks truthfully about matters that are of some importance to some people who don't have power, he's speaking that truth among power, not to power. Monday, May 27, 2002
TAPPED on Wellstone. TAPPED in another entry (here) gets itself into a lather because those looney Greens are going to run someone against Paul Wellstone. TAPPED calls Wellstone, "the outspoken progressive upon whom so much of America depends to speak truth to power." Give me a break. Wellstone is better described as among the last vestiges of the McGovern crowd. Self-righteous, rarely willing to ascribe honorable intent to the other side, seemingly unaware of the concept of "loyal opposition", never having met a government program that he didn't like, Wellstone and his ilk are among the reasons that Democrats have, excepting Clinton, done lousily in national elections in the last several decades. I'd certainly be happier to hear that powers that be in the Democratic Farmer Labor party in Minnesota had found someone of substance to run against and defeat Wellstone in a primary, but if Wellstone can't hold his own against the looney left of the Greens, does he really deserve to win election to the senate? "No atheists in foxholes." As much as I appreciate where I think TAPPED is coming from in its entry regarding the "there are no atheists in foxholes" quotation, I think TAPPED is confused. "There are no atheists in foxholes" doesn't mean, as TAPPED would interpret it, that "only those possessed of deep religious beliefs are capable laying down their lives for their country." What "there are no atheists in foxholes" means is that when you're scared shitless, you start praying to something whether or not you believe in God or not. It has nothing to do with atheists being to afraid to sacrifice their lives for their country: it has to do with the same kind of gut reaction that leads people to pee their pants when they're afraid. As likely as not, it's something believers tell themselves to feel good about their belief, not an accurate representation of reality. But it never occurred to me that it meant that atheists were incapable of patriotism. I've watched the more outspokenly Christian among us in their response to the September 11 attacks. "In God We Trust" may be a national motto that's been in use since the founding of the Republic, but it shouldn't be used to bludgeon those who don't believe. Like TAPPED points out, plenty of atheists have died for this country, for the right of people of whatever beliefs to exercise those beliefs. Or not. I'd love to see an "Another Atheist Willing to Die for Your Right to Believe in God" bumper sticker. Sure, it's a bit long, but... To interpret "no atheists in foxholes" as an indictment of atheists' patriotism seems completely off the mark. I'm surprised that TAPPED took that tack, instead of simply pointing out what the quotation really -- okay, more likely -- means. Correction. In the entry below regarding Cannes, I neglected to mention that the awards panel (chaired by David Lynch) gave the Best Direction award (okay, Prix de la mise en scène) to two individuals, not just Paul Thomas Anderson. Kwon-Taek Im also won the award for "Chihwaseon", which does not star Adam Sandler. Sunday, May 26, 2002
The news from Cannes. Winners have been announced at the Cannes Film Festival. What will gather the most attention? In what context? Will it be
Contexts? What contexts? Oh, contexts might include mass-media outlets (East Coast, West Coast), showbiz outlets like Variety, weblogs (particularly certain almost predictable-response ones), your home-town paper, your mom's Xmas newletter, etc. Complete list of winners here at the festival's site. Oh yeah... Here's a moldy old Lisp joke: (cons 'film 'festival). Still correcting after all these posts. Tag on the previous entry shoulda been "(From Oxblog via Instapundit)". There's some reason to believe I'm too sloppy of a self-editor for blogging with Blogger on BlogSpot. We'll see. The Continuing Saga of Wolfram's book, Part IV. Previously, I griped about how Stephen Wolfram's new book, A New Kind of Science, wasn't getting much media attention. Sure, there was attention to its release and some speculation as to its contents, but there weren't lots of cases of mass-market media outlets putting out written or verbal reviews of it. (Aside: Wolfram on Booknotes? That would be nice. I'd love to see Brian Lamb work through this one.) I have a better idea of why there are no reviews yet. The book is tough. There are lots of up front claims as to some kind of larger scale ability to apply Wolfram's ideas about cellular automata to all sorts of issues in a wide range of scientific areas. Support for those claims is deferred, however, until after a rather long presentation of results of cellular automata and related simple computational systems. In fact, I haven't gotten to the support for those claims yet. I'm still at the end of Chapter 3. The back of the book, a good chunk in itself, is a set of notes over the main text. I believe the way to read the book is to read a chapter, then go to the back and read the associated notes. It's looking like it will be a good thing to go back and read the notes again after having read the entire text and notes, because the notes are full of crossreferences to other parts of the text or notes. Comments by others that Wolfram is full of himself are accurate. But, all in all, it's a refreshing way to read scientific writing. Some of us who've tried writing in the currently accepted style for peer-review publication know just how frustrating that approach can be to getting out just what it is that you're trying to talk about. So Wolfram's first-person science is appreciated in the same way that first-person science by Stephen Hawking, Brian Green, James Gliek, et al. is. Anyway, the bottom line is that for reviews to appear in mass-market publications and outlets at the time of publication, Wolfram would've had to have distributed his book to outlets for review a long time before the publication date such that most science writers would have time to make it through the book and get a review written in a timely fashion. My guess -- i.e., I'm making this up -- is that Wolfram -- who I guess would 'fess up to being a control freak -- decided not to do that. Saturday, May 25, 2002
Obviously, I'm still screwing up closing quotation marks in entries, and Blogger is still unforgiving about letting me fix my screw ups, even in safe mode. So, my apologies for the almost duplicate entries. The Terror... The Terror... CNN's current lead headline says "Terror alerts on all fronts", but the Office of Homeland Security kolor kode (more details here) is still stuck at "yellow".  Current Nationwide Threat Level:  Sigh. The Terror... The Terror... CNN's current lead headline says "Terror alerts on all fronts", but the Office of Homeland Security kolor kode (more details here) is still stuck at "yellow".
Current Nationwide Threat Level: Last word on Memphis cops and Christians then I'm shutting up about it for a while. About the ministers the cops have invited in for the Tyson-Lewis fight, my partner says, "Yeah, but will it keep Mike Tyson from biting someone?" Irony in Memphis. What's ironical about the story about the Memphis Police Department's inviting ministers in to a big public event like the Tyson-Lewis fight (this entry, below) is how several years ago organizers of the annual Memphis in May get together went through one or more lawsuits with local street preachers trying to get onto the grounds of various Memphis in May events. Our old neighbor in Memphis was the plaintiff on the lawsuit against Memphis in May. His copy of the Commercial Appeal's article (2000?) on the lawsuit is here. If the city is taking public action in banning street preachers, then isn't it almost certainly taking public action in inviting preachers in? A lawsuit waiting to happen? This story in the Commercial Appeal tells how the Memphis police have asked Christian ministers to come an proselytize folks coming to the Tyson-Lewis fight.
I'm no constitutional lawyer, but this looks face-value unconstitutional to me. It pretty obviously shows preference by the MPD towards certain Christian sects over other Christian sects, other religions, and non-religious civil organizations. Doesn't that violate the Establishment clause? Friday, May 24, 2002
Small Favors Department. Hey, another day at dinnertime, and Bush and Putin have inked their John Hancocks on an arms reduction treaty, and India and Pakistan have managed not to try to blow each other up. Yet. What "blogosphere"? Go to Google Sets, enter a few blog names, and see what happens. Hmmm. Can this thing play the Kevin Bacon game? Gays ball. Shut up your dirty mind. Yes, but that's not what I meant. I meant this flurry of gay-related baseball stories (here and here (yow! Someone lost his job? I think this one will have to be come back to) and here), including those on Mike Piazza's "I'm not gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that" statement. (SI headline: "Piazza sets record straight about sexual orientation." I'm sure no pun was intended. Check out the pouty picture choice.) I wish I could say that I knew that Mike Piazza's not gay the same way that Kevin Spacey's not gay. ("Queer Duck, is there anyone you don't think is gay?" "Kevin Spacey says he's straight, and I believe him." See Queer Duck, Episode 10.) But what do I know? I don't have privileged knowledge about celebrity gaydom.
Filler. Okay, maybe this post is filler, just to get something below it to show up (with the way I've got my blog hosed right now). Or maybe it's just nostalgia for days of yore, when every Wednesday brought a new Filler. Feel the same? Heather/Rabbit/Polly has them all right here. Not the Lighter Side Department. According to this article at CNN, Mad's Dave Berg ("The Lighter Side of _________") has passed away from cancer. He was 81 years old. I wanna say he was also responsible for their "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" features. My favorite: "Are you using the telephone?" "No, I'm cleaning my ear with this lovely plastic ear scoop." The Commercial Appeal post from yesterday. While trying to fix broken links, I deleted this post. What follows is a repost.
Now, since Blogger seems to be one post behind, I'll have to post something that no one else can see. Damnation! Did it again. Maybe I shouldn't include links. Nah... Oh, well. I'm gonna publish. Maybe a miracle occurs at publication time. Yeah, right. Broked my blog. What happens when the last thing in an entry is a broken link? It seems like it not only breaks the post, it also breaks using Blogger's "edit" link, even in safe mode. Anybody out there know how to fix this? Yeah, yeah... Moveable Type and a real web site. I know. I know. p.s. What I'm referring to is the broken link at the bottom of the Tennessean and Siegenthaler (one `l', not two -- see, I can't even fix that) below. Note to self: Be careful with links. p.p.s. In the meantime, I'll need to bring back the Commercial Appeal post from yesterday. Hmmm. Really easy to screw this blog business up. Thursday, May 23, 2002
More on the Tennessee House income-tax vote. here's coverage from the Tennessean, the newspaper formerly known as the Nashville Tennessean. Kinda like "whatever happened to the `Nashville'?" in Jason and the Scorchers. I don't wanna be stupid-nostalgic here, but The Tennessean was a better paper before those air-headed Gannett vultures got ahold of it. Little John Siegenthaller yapping on on NBC and MSNBC Cable. John, Sr. must be rolling in his grave. Oh, wait, he's not dead, he just was partially responsible for USA Today. Hetero-Pederasty.The unlinkable-to-item Andrew Sullivan has an entry today pointing to this story in the Houston Chronicle about male high-school coaches and band directors having sex with female underage students. You know, like the priest thing, but hetero. Speaking of Drudge... This bit regarding David Brock and the mental ward was unseemly, tacky, creepy. Surprisingly for Drudge, the link has disappeared from his front page, but you can actually still get to it from a link in a TAPPED entry featuring speculations as to the origins of the tacky concept found here. What Hath Drudge Wrought? All Chandra, All the Time is back. Even the mighty NYT leads with this story about the discovery of Chandra Levy's body (file name "23BODY" -- nice). Wednesday, May 22, 2002
In other reading. I'm reading more than the Wolfram book right now. One other read is Political Numeracy, by Michael Meyerson. It's about the intersection between mathematics and law, pretty much in the USA. He discusses matters such as how the Electoral College concentrates voting power to the individual (by having multiple smaller elections instead of one great big one), the Three-Fifths Compromise which led to the adoption of the US Constitution, and supermajorities for overriding presidential vetoes and approving treaties. I just finished Chapter 5, which is an analysis of affirmative action. Meyerson's analysis is insightful. He defines "good faith" participants in the discussion to mean (1) that they're honest and open to persuasion, (2) that they're nonracist and don't believe in some intrinsic superiority of any racial group, and (3) that they're nonjingoistic and that they don't believe that members of their own racial group ought to benefit at the expense of members of some other group. (Beyond some introductory examples, he sticks largely to racial matters, but his analysis is extendable to any cohort identifiable by status or behavior.) He then goes through a nice description of what someone of his definition of good faith ought to desire from employment policy: that the fraction of qualified people who are successful at getting jobs increases, while the fraction of unqualified people who are successful at getting jobs decreases. The he gets to the nub issue: What kinds of measures are used in decision making about job applicants, and how good are those measures at predicting eventual success in the job. He ends up with the following 10 "points of agreement" regarding affirmative action policy that he believes people of (his definition of) good faith ought to be able to adopt as a framework for discussion in trying to determine the appropriate policy. Quoting, his points are:
As Meyerson says, "a recognition that all systems are imperfect will, at least, remove some of the self-righteousness from the debate. Moreover, acknowledgement that the problem of innocent victims affects both sides may encourage a more concentrated effort to find qualified people whoever they may be." A minor point regarding Sullivan's gay-related post from yesterday. It's "others and I have made", not "I and others". Yes, it's proscriptivist to think that way, but it's the right kind of rule to proscribe. Put others first, Mr. Sullivan, not yourself. When you split the last of the milk, do you take the larger fraction? Maybe Virginia Postel was too generous. Andrew Sullivan, yesterday: The broader argument that I and others have made is not that civil marriage or equal civil rights will somehow "tame" homosexuals. We're not animals and we don't need taming. The argument rather is that much of the dysfunction in gay lives stems from social marginalization and the deep psychological wounds of childhood, where same-sex orientation is stigmatized to this day. The effect upon the sexual and emotional development of gay kids can be brutal, and it is this experience - not homosexuality - that accounts for some of the social and psychological problems many gay men have. Imagine, say, that your first heterosexual feelings and crushes were simultaneously understood to be disgusting, threatening and vile. Now imagine suppressing all of those feelings for years, and living with layer upon layer of shame, guilt self-doubt, self-hatred whenever you found yourself falling in love or feeling the first lure of sexual and emotional intimacy. Do you really expect the adults who emerge from this psychological hell will be as adjusted as those whose sexuality and emotional lives have been affirmed from the very beginning? But when these adults have difficulty constructing relationships or maintaining monogamy, some social conservatives use that failure not to argue for a change in the way gay kids are brought up, or for involving gay people in mainstream society and institutions, but as an argument to reinforce the very social ostracism that helps create the dysfunction in the first place. And those gay men and women who, mirabile dictu, do manage to have viable, healthy lives and relationships are effectively dismissed as an insignificant fringe, or, when they struggle and fail, as examples of how depraved they all are anyway. What I'd like to see in all of this is a little more wiggle room on the qualification. Sullivan gets off to a good start with "much of the dysfunction," "can be be brutal," and "some of the ... problems many gay men have" (emphasis obviously mine). But as he moves to the conclusions of his thought experiment ("Imagine, say..."), the qualifications vanish. The results become rather absolute: "Do you really expect the adults who emerge from this psychological hell will be as adjusted as those whose sexuality and emotional lives have been affirmed from the very beginning?" Well, when you put it that way, of course not. I agree with Sullivan's point that it's difficult to construct intimate relationships when you haven't had practice. Lord knows it took me forever to come out, meet other men in an emotional relationship sense, and build a life in a partnership. But, I think it's a fallacy to ascribe "maintaining monogamy" to the fact that as gay men we didn't date when we were young, that we didn't have access to the social structures of meeting others, going out, petting, dumping and getting dumped, etc. when we were fourteen or so years old. Instead, I'd argue that lack of monogamy in gay men has more to do with the fact that we're men. I can't quantify, even statistically, how much more gay men in committed long-term relationships have sex outside the relationship than their straight counterparts do. My suspicion is that it's substantially more, but that the perception regarding how little straight guys do it is likely wrong. My own perspective is that lack of monogamy in gay male relationships has more to do with the intrinsic situation of being male and being gay -- of having more opportunities and of not being constrained to the same degree by social and legal structures of marriage and sexual committment -- than it does with the lack of intimacy socialization we experienced. I think it's also in distinction to the intimacy and degree of monogamy between two women in a same-sex partnership. It's going to be interesting as kids come out earlier and earlier, as they have opportunities for same-sex socialization and dating -- e.g., boys taking their boyfriend and girls taking their girlfriend to the prom -- to see how this impacts the quality of longer-term relationships. My guess, my hypothesis, is that you'll see more successful longer-term relationships involving less baggage and greater fullfillment. But many of those fullfilled guys will still be on AOL and gay.com cruising for tricks. That part of the gay culture is likely not to go away. InstaPundit is way too concerned with numbers and rankings. No? What? Get a counter? What's a counter? Daytona Beach Snooze Journal headline: "Experts: There will be shark attacks, but consider odds". Last year's statistics: 22 bites (a record -- see below) but over 10 million people in the water here in Volusia county. The previous year's number was 12 bites. A more typical headline: "100% increase in shark attacks". What happens if India actually takes all of Kashmir? Is there any reason to believe that either they or Pakistan could govern all of Kashmir? What a shame that there's not leadership in Kashmir for a multicultural Kashmir affiliated peacefully with both India and Pakistan. I can't discount India's claims that Pakistan has aided and abetted those who attacked the Indian parliament last year, but I can't validate those claims either. I'm just a shmoo taking in information over the web. But given the fifty-plus year history of this conflict over Kashmir, it is disappointing that there only seem to be fifty-plus year old positions taken by the parties involved. Today's Friedman column is pretty sensible. He says that the US administration should can this "Chicken Little warnings binge that another attack is imminent, inevitable and around the corner, but we can't tell you when, where or how." Like various Secretaries of Defense and State and the FBI Director, he reminds us that another attack is inevitable. I would like for someone to quantify probabilistically the time frame for inevitable. Lot's of things are inevitable. It's inevitable that there will be another year with more hurricanes than those in the year that had the most recorded to date. In fact, most situations contain an element that a quantifiable aspect of that situation will be exceeded at some point in the future. The new record is called a martingale, and the occurrances of martingales form what's called a point process (a probabilistic process where events happen at identifiable times: bus arrivals, neural firings, etc. You remember? Poisson processes? Those are among the simplest kind of point processes). Okay, so it's established. At some point in the future, there will be another terrorist attack. At some point, there may even be one of larger magnitude than the one of last September 11. What's the government doing to try an prevent that? Well, there was/is the war. Taking out Al Qaida operations and the Taliban government in Afghanistan has been of great success (as noted by Friedman). And the rounding up and interviewing suspects (as Friedman also notes) has had to have helped, too. But I sure hope there's more going on to transportation security and civil defense than the surface-level airport security changes they've implemented. Those were pretty obviously intended to create the illusion of security to get passengers back into the air. The only plausable argument I've heard for actual security improvements due to these quasi-random checks of ordinary passengers is that it facilitates being able to deeply check suspicious passengers without worrying about civil-rights infringements. If Grandma is getting the once over, then Mr. Arabic Man can't cry racial profiling when Ms. Poorly Trained Security person gives his luggage and his body the once over. Okay, it is nice to see heavily armed security personel (military?) at the metal detectors. But hopefully we're looking for a way to implement security at the level that the Israelis practice it for air travel. Yes it would take a lot of resources, but I'd rather see our resources go to that than transfered to the House of Saud for oil purchases. Tuesday, May 21, 2002
Okay, through the first couple of chapters of Wolfram's book. One gripe and one idea so far. The gripe is that I don't think he's adequately defined "complexity," and complexity seems to be what he's most interested in talking about. Maybe I should revert to Webster's dictionary, but I'd really rather know more exactly what Wolfram means when he says complexity. Maybe he forgot that the reader doesn't necessarily share his context of having worked in matters of complexity previously. (I have my own ideas about what complexity is, but I'm not sure they're the same as Wolfram's. Or, I could just be being somewhat characteristically dense about this one issue.) The idea is that I'd love to see what his one-dimensional cellular automata look like in one dimension as they evolve over time. Some of them (hey, maybe the less complex ones) are more easily visualized than others in terms of what a single line of pixels would look like as an animation, but for the more wiggledy stuff (complicated?), it's harder to imagine. This should be doable, maybe even with Wolfram's own Mathematica software (plugged prominently in the book). I'm a big fan of displaying things that evolve in time in proportionate, at least, time. We've all seen so many pictures of sine waves, but do we know what the sinusoidal oscillation of a point bobbing up and down looks like? Okay, so we all almost certainly do. After a little thought. But, if I say "sine wave", most readers will think of a graph on a page or a trace on an oscilloscope, not of one point moving up and down. (One way to see it is to turn off the timebase on a scope with the vertical amplifier hooked up to the sinuosidal output of a function generator.) Similar issues arise in research of my own, because the output of the mammalian cochlea is the firings of several tens of thousands of nerves. I really don't think the brain has access to frozen collections of those firings over some previous N milliseconds; instead, it has to work with the firings that are coming in right now. Oh, sure, it can average out activity over some past interval, but if there's information in the detailed timing of the firings, that's hard to keep around. Or why would one even want to keep it around, when the instantaneous spatial distribution of the pattern has lots of the same information in it as the time between firings does? So, why display that information as if time stopped, as if the information over chunks of time was all available at some same time? Instead, let's see the neural firings -- or Wolfram's cells turning on and off -- as they happen. Again, this is probably easily done in Mathematica. Should heads roll? Well, it would've been nice if heads had rolled back in, what?, '82, when the Marines' barracks in Beruit was bombed. President Reagan's embarrassing "I take full responsibility" shpiel -- deflecting criticism from those who should've had to take responsibility -- for that awful happening is the real starting point for failure of the US Government to engage terrorists on our own terms. I'm sure some would go further and blame Carter. Or even FDR (like some Pearl Harbor veterans I once had the pleasure of meeting in Honolulu did). But FDR's failing to prevent Pearl Harbor, if that was in fact the case, was negated by WWII. And Carter's screw ups in Iran were negated by the subsequent election of Reagan and the humiliating release of the Iran hostages moments after Reagan was innaugurated. Nope, the reality is that our failures in preventing terrorist activities started with Reagan's "taking responsibility." That doesn't absolve those hateful murderous scum who attacked us in September (and our embassies and naval vessels previously) at all. Okay, I can't be the only one who's truly creeped out by the plethora of preemptive asscovering going on over potential terrorist attacks. What do we pay these people for? I surely wouldn't pay them to try to deflect criticism for not being prescient about attacks that, probabilistically, might happen. So there's a nonzero probability that there will be more terrorist attacks on US soil. I'd rather that our paid public officials spend a little more time trying to reduce those probabilities rather than educating the public as to that probabilistic situation. Woo hoo! Mr. UPS just dropped off my copy of Wolfram's book, which I got from Amazon. Okay, now I just have to read the sucker. I'm really surprised at the lack of mass-media reviews of this work. For instance, this is the kind of book you'd expect Slate to have one of their Book Club features going on this. Maybe they will, but somehow I doubt that new editor Jacob Weisberg is very intersted in matters scientific. Kaus might be interested, especially since Wolfram Explains It All might mean that Kaus can find a settling reasoning behind consciousness. Here's a review by Ray Kurzweil, and here's an analysis from, of all places, Business Week. Whatever happened to Memorial Day? On the basis of an unscientific sampling of signs and displays devoted to Memorial Day, it seems that lots of people are confusing Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Sure we want to be aware of the contributions our veterans have made, but from the time of the US Civil War, Memorial Day has been about honoring those who died in service, not those still with us. Yeah, yeah. Situations evolve, and concepts in play at a founding don't necessarily continue to be the ones associated with the founded object or process. But one way situations evolve is for folks to take note of the originating circumstances, sometimes saying, "Hey. Maybe we ought to reconsider the direction this is taking?" I say we memorialize our military dead on Memorial Day, and we honor our living military veterans on Veterans Day. Foreshadowing in Attack of the Clones II Department?: Something like: "I can't breathe because of you." -- Anakin to Senator Amidala. Surely someone else has pointed out there's a non-negligible likelihood that the senator will turn out to have been in cahoots with Palpatine. She seems to be a favorite of his. Foreshadowing in Attack of the Clones I Department: "You'll be the death of me, young Skywalker." -- Obi-Wan Monday, May 20, 2002
Okay, so these folks at Bartcop seem like a bunch of a-holes. Still, here's an image from their site that's pretty friggin' funny. And worth thinking about by the 10-Commandments crowd. Oh well, as Mr. Zappa used to say about religious tomes: "Can't use theirs...it don't work...it's all lies...Gotta use mine..." (Check out St. Alfonso's Pancake Homepage for more Zappa lyrics. The quotation above is from this tasty morsel.) What maroon convinced Google that they need a new logo? Or is it Dilbert that needs the new logo? Either way, ugh. Mike Kinsley's latest piece at Slate starts off too lame to even finish. Often Kinsley has something interesting to say; he wouldn't have gotten where he did if he didn't, especially after toadying as William F. Buckley "examiner" or "instigator" or whatever-the-eff he was way back when on "Firing Line." But his pieces at Slate recently have been ridiculous. He's a better as a straight-up commentator than he is when he tries to be humorous or cute. I suppose he's got his own set of toadies now who don't want to tell him that. Department of Stupidity Department. Those idiotic polls on cnn.com, msnbc.com, and other sites. Sure, they're great if you can compartmentalize what's going on in the world into N-ary choices, but the way they almost always lack a free-response option -- or even "none of the above" -- makes it difficult for me to participate in them. Would it hurt those sites to try to act like there's some semblence of an intelligent readership whether or not there's some semblence of intelligence in the editorial choices at those sites? Thursday, May 16, 2002
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