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 Comments, possibly informed. Tim Wilson Daytona Beach, Florida, USA timatollah@mackandtim.net Personal Homepage Professional Homepage Agenda Bender Dave Barry Bull Moose The Corner Defense Tech Matt Drudge Half Bakered Hit and Run Huffington Post Instapundit Kausfiles Mark Lane Ken Layne James Lileks Josh Marshall PaperFrog Virginia Postrel Shattered Buddha Mike Silverman Sploid Andrew Sullivan TPM Cafe Tapped Matt Welch Archives  |
Monday, October 28, 2002
Bad Newspaper Article, Number 2952210 This AP story in the Palm Beach Post set off my bullshit detectors bigtime. The headline and lede refer to "tourists" supposedly complaining about Disney (beware, obnoxious Flash) having -- gasp -- a shooting gallery attraction with -- gasp -- toy guns at Disney World, but the article, at least as it appeared in the Post's online version, only had one tourist complaining. And that person was a Brit. "It just seems a complete contradiction to be selling toy guns at a time when security searches are trying to detect concealed weapons and explosives that may be about to be used by terrorists," said Les Wright, a tourist from Oldham, England.O-kay. My instincts say that more likely some British tourist from Oldham, England, had a friend who was a reporter who wrote the story which got picked up by the AP. I mean, it's not like Disney issued a press release about the subject. Friday, October 25, 2002
Former NFL Defensive Linesman Coming Out This story at ESPN says that Esera Tuaolo, who played for Green Bay, the Panthers, the Vicking, the (one season only) mighty Jags, and the Falcons (with whom he went to the Super Bowl) is gonna come out on HBO's Real Sports show. The blurb at Real Sports says: REAL SPORTS tackles head-on one of the most explosive issues in professional team sports - the notion of having a gay athlete on the squad. Correspondent Bernard Goldberg talks to a former NFL veteran, burdened with keeping his homosexuality closeted during his long career, who has now chosen to reveal his long-kept secret. ESPN link from Drudge. Tuesday, October 22, 2002
"But We're Not" Read this Bleat entry from James Lileks. The big middle section starting with, "Today I became one of those people...". Why, yes, I am against attempts to indoctrinate kiddies in anything but the most basic civic virtures. Don't use kindergarten and pre-school to subvert the dominant paradigm: Give kids the personal and social skills to make their own decisions way on down the road, and the right things are more likely to happen. Things are rarely such that having mindless sheep will ever make for a good citizenry, national or world. Enforcers in Action Again This time it's Republicans for Heterosexual Purity vs. Log Cabin Republicans. Story here, from the Houston Chronicle. Link from Andrew Sullivan. Orlando Terror Victim One of the victims of the bombing of fun spots in Bali was from Orlando. A surfer guy looking for a great wave. Story here, from the Sentinel. Anti-Discrimination Ordinance in Orlando Finally, the mayor of Orlando has gotten off the fence. Even though she said she'll vote "no," Mayor Glenda Hood also said she'll finally let an ordinance extending Orlando's anti-discrimination in housing and employment laws to people who don't happen to be heterosexual come to a vote before the Orlando City Council. (Aside: How does that work? Does O-town have one of those "mayor is coucil president" kind of governments?) Story here, from the Orlando Sentinel. Monday, October 21, 2002
Prediction, Number 150928 When the Jerry Sienfeld movie comes out, some people will complain, "It didn't have that announcer thing in it, like in the trailer." (The trailer's here, at Apple's movie trailers site.) Endorsements-O-Rama Mark Lane keeps up with who's endorsing whom so you don't have to. But what about those Gannett sites, Mr. Lane? And the "No Shit, Sherlock" Award Goes To... Drudge with his headline: "Drugs Found on Kid Rock's Bus". The Palm Beach Post Intelligencer Diplomat Herald Tribune Times has the story here. Link from Shattered Buddha, since Drudge had already updated by the time I got home from work. Sunday, October 20, 2002
Beautiful Loser The new Beck. It's drenched with sadness. After a casual listen, it's like, "where's the weirdness?" "Where are the layers?" A closer listen reveals that the layers, the Pere-Ubu-like weirdness remains. But it's integrated with such mastery into the overall structure of these beautiful sad pop numbers that it rarely becomes the focus. Instead, the feelings, the beautiful sadness, dominate. Why Shattered Buddha Rules Read Shattered Buddha. He makes eclectic look easy. Dave Barry, dobro inventors, tragedy-stricken Mexican immigrants, plus Jerry Springer and Katherine Harris, together again for the first time, with Wal*Mart thrown in to boot. Anti-Anti-Idiotarianism The herding up of those who have expressed opposition to the wars, those who have kowtowed to dictatorial power, those who have apologized for hate, those who have insulted the survivors of the attacks of 9/11/01 and since under the rubric of "Idiotarian" is a popular approach with some folks. It may have some measure of utility in contexts of discussing what should be done, but it is, in my opinion, not the right approach to the life-and-death debates that matter. I'm not against calling stupid things said "stupid things". I'm not against having well-formed and firmly-stated opinions about idiotic comments. But I am skeptical about the degree of correlation presumed, even in a string of consistently stupid things said, between what someone has said and what they're going to say next. There are two aspects to this: The first is, as noted below in the diversity entry, people are often internally conflicted. We have ways of holding nearly-conflicting opinions and feelings at times. The upshoot of that is that just because someone has a really stupid opinion or has made a really inane comment in one area, it doesn't necessarily mean that their comments in some other area are going to be equally stupid or inane. Example: More than one of the "Idiotarian" slingers has questioned Chomsky's linguistic theories. The fact is that it's perfectly consistent with human nature as observed that Chomsky could be Mr. Super Linguist Who Figured Out the Secrets of Language and be wrong wrong wrong about how human societies should be organized, on either the national or international levels. The second aspect is that people aren't necessarily consistent in time. They change their minds -- sometimes discontinuously, sometimes along a continuum -- about particular issues. While how folks see things today might be a fair indicator of how they'll see things tomorrow, it's not really an excellent indicator. Just think of some of the things Hitchens has said and advocated over the years. There's also a dynamic exchange involved where people hopefully read, listen, learn, change, grow. The changes that lead one opinion or another to be expressed don't just happen internally: they happen in a larger context involving other people. Not only people, but power, either formal or informal. I'm not so naive as to not understand that many of the so-called Idiotarians would be big trouble if they ever actually had real governmental power. There is, undeniably to me, an fairly-consistent misindentification of which governments really misuse governmental authority for causes that denigrate humanity. If there is a they, then they seem to be speaking out for the wrong side. But, the fact remains that they're part of our culture. They might even play some useful role in criticizing, however wrongheadedly, proposed policies and actions. To me, it's easy enough to identify stupid things said and done on a case by case basis, without getting totally into an "us and them" mentality. These people who are often wrong and who often say stupid things and who really seem to miss the larger picture about human freedom and who's really denying it shouldn't be totally ignored, blackballed, put into the corner, or wrongly labelled as idiots. Identify their output as stupid, call them every time they say something idiotic, do what you will to refute and dispute dumb or hateful things they say, but don't cross the us-and-them threshold. Each of us very likely has some opinion or attitude that goes against either clear thinking or the opinions of broad groups of society, and each of us is very highly likely to say something really stupid at some point. So can the generalization and stick to the details. Refuting the details is the only refutation of the hateful and stupid ideas promoted at times by some people that matters. It's almost certainly the only refutation that will convince others now (unless you're looking for anti-idiotarian bullies or sheep) or convince others at distant times and places. Saturday, October 19, 2002
The Nature of Diversity The homophobia issue referred to below -- there's a host of issues related to this raised by Arthur Silber here, particularly as it relates to Andrew Sullivan -- has stirred up ideas I never got down about diversity. It just seems that a really substantial fraction of the population has really unimaginative ideas about the true nature of diversity. Real diversity means understanding that people will display just about every attribute imaginable in every possible combination. So, there will be animal-rights-motivated vegetarians who like to wear leather. There will be black gay Republicans. There will be Baptists who like to do the frug. I know that most of us search for consistency in our lives -- who wants to be a big old honking hypocrite? But I think that at some point we come to accomodation with ourselves that everything doesn't line up the same way. Forces of habit don't agree with analytic thought. One set of friends thinks one way about one set of issues; another, a different way -- somehow we keep them all as friends. It's complicated. It's complicated enough. Add to that some much smaller fraction of the population that's vocal about attempting to enforce their own ideas about how all the various aspects of one's life ought to correlate, and you have a bad situation. I think it's likely that the shouters and the enforcers, while a small fraction of the population, by dint of their loudness and intensity, command a disproportionate share of attention. Self-appointed thought police on the left and on the right are abhorent. They're so concerned with being correct -- politically or otherwise -- they miss the larger picture. There's no room for doubt, of self or others, in their framework. They're basically little Hitlers, little fans of Stalin. We should be grateful that, by and large, they have little real power. Why Not Anti-Islamofacist It's telling that Eric Raymond's manifesto is titled "An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto", as opposed to something like "A Call to Arms to Defend Freedom" or "An Anti-Islamofacist Manifesto". Here's what I posted in comments on Eric's blog: The manifesto should concern what we should do to defeat our enemies, not inside-politics inside-baseball who-shoves-whom-around-the-blogosphere nonsense. I don't have any problem with identifying stupid positions and policies and calling them what they are, but this whole "idiotarian" thing is a ridiculous playground-level waste of time. It's codification of an ad hominem approach to discourse. Homophobia In a post here, InstaPundit, who is, by and large, really together about issues pertaining to personal sexuality and the like, links to this post by Charles Murtaugh. The issue Charles brings up concerns incidence of left-wing homophobia, and whether it's related to Andrew Sullivan's visibility. My own sense of these matters is that expecting left-wing people to be perfectly consistent regarding not exhibiting homophobic behavior is like expecting anybody, gay people included, to be consistent regarding homophobia. Ever hear of internalized homophobia? Yes, it's fair to hold visible institutions like the Montana Democratic Party to high standards concerning seeming or obvious homophobic behavior, but it's not clear to me that expecting consistency in this regard from a large collection of left-wing bloggers, or even non-web pundits, is reasonable. Fair game, yes; reasonable given the vagaries of human behavior, no. After all, just a few posts down from his entry about left-wing homophobia, in this post, Glenn quotes from Bitchpundit, including the following regarding Islamic yahoos trying to hack her. Buncha script kiddies, that's all these butt pirates are. They can't wage real war, so they are sending Hi-Tek Teenage Mutant Ninja Muslims from Bloggerstan, instead.I don't know about you, but "butt pirates" seems to be used pretty consistently to denigrate homosexual activity. Consistency is difficult. So, let's just call things homophobic when they're homophobic and not worry as much about whether it's coming from the left or the right. Friday, October 18, 2002
ISS Flyover Just came inside from watching the Space Station fly over. Wow! That's the fourth time I've seen it: once before here in Daytona Beach and twice in the Oklahoma panhandle. I haven't tried too hard to keep up with it. Luckily, our upstairs neighbor had clued into the fact that it was going over closely tonight, so we all went out for a good look. Smiles Forever Lost Photos of some of the Australians killed in the Bali bombing can be found here, from the Sydney Morning Herald. These were surfers, rugby players, beach bums: kids enjoying their youth in the outdoors, in the sun. Is there any people on Earth more like us Americans than the Australians in terms of loving the active life of a free individual? My heart goes out to all the folks over there down under who have lost someone. That our common enemies would choose such a group to kill and maim should not surprise anyone. Our enemies hate freedom. Our enemies hate fun. Our enemies hate diversity. Our enemies think their book, as interpreted by a self-selected few, can tell them everything about how to live. Apparently, it tells them nothing, for the first rule of how to live is, "Live and let live." But once our enemies take the lives of our friends and our neighbors intentionally, and intend to keep doing so, we are not, cannot be, bound by that rule. Ultimately, they will regret their choice to destroy the lives they have. Air Force One It's not every day that I get to see a 747 take off from DBIA, but the odds are good that if I do get to see one, it's going to be Air Force One. When I was getting ready to leave work yesterday, I heard a jet take off; looked up and saw that it was some military model that already had too much altitude for me to ID it easily. Then, I saw folks lined up along the fence where DBIA butts up against one of our parking lots, and I figured that the President must be fixing to depart. So I hung out by the car for a minute and, sure enough, Air Force One comes lumbering down the runway. I'd seen it just after takeoff the last time GWB was here, sometime last year, I believe. The relative scale of a 747 compared to the usual assortment of Riddle planes and Delta's three-or-four-times-daily MD-80s to Atlanta made Air Force One look positively huge. Its takeoff was graceful and direct; beautiful. I quickly called Mack, and he was able to see the plane headed eastward, crossing the Halifax River toward the beach and then the Atlantic. I'm no Republican. I have fairly high regard for much of GWB's foreign policy and conduct of the various conflicts we find ourselves in, largely not of our own doing. I'm strongly opposed to his economic policies, particularly his income and estate tax policies. But I have great respect for the office of President of the United States, and I guess I'll always get a thrill out of seeing the President's plane take off and fly by. Thursday, October 17, 2002
Better Kausfiles Get this. Mickey Kaus has, like, multiple posts today. And they're not even all about the New York Times. Politics. Welfare. It's there. What about Timatollah? More than one post here, too. -- Ed. Yeah, but I have a day job. See, it's the Kausfiles "Ed." device. Get it? Oh, nevermind. Carter's Prize Folks (including Howard Owens) have been asking: "What did Jimmy Carter really do to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?". Well, he did put into place the plan that eventually led to Pershing IIs being installed in Europe, an act that I still believe positively contributed to the decline of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. That's probably more important in the longer run than having lunch with Castro. Pistol Packin' Transsexuals Here's an article from the Seattle Times that even my brother-in-law (brother-out-law? -- Mack's brother) ought to love. Link via InstaPundit. Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Gay Israeli in Parliament Today's New York Times has this story about the first gay member of the Israeli parliament. What happens to gay Palestinians? Oh, yeah, they get beaten by their families (links via this entry) and the Palestianian cops. "Terrorists Don't Want Liberty. They Want Death." Read Tim Blair in The Australian. The paper's site also features latest news on the Bali bombing. Saturday, October 12, 2002
The Taylor Ad Broughaha Just about everyone and their mother has weighed in on the Taylor ad controversy. Among them are Ted Barlow, Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, and Andrew Sullivan. One man's opinion: The ad is blatently designed to appeal to homophobia among the general-election voters. But, it's also a run-of-the-mill attack ad disguised as information. Like most attack ads, it's intrinsically dishonorable. An honest ad would feature the Democratic Party candidate, Baucus, saying in his own words the problems he had with Taylor's beauty-school operation. I don't know any way to put the attack-ad genie back in the bottle, but this ad, for all its individual problems, is just an example of a larger festering wound on the political process. The hypocrisy of those who attack or who defend this particular ad, but defend or attack ads just as nasty by their own or the other side is pretty obvious and pretty disgusting. Coming Out as Good Citizenship I've put the text of of my NCOD speech online here. I'm sure the argument's been made a zillion times before, but the crux of the matter is that coming out involves
We had a good crowd: the young people from GALBA, some locals from the Daytona Beach Business Guild and their mailing list, and a few faculty friends who I very much appreciate being there. Tuesday, October 08, 2002
NCOD: Self Promotion Speaking of National Coming Out Day, yours truly will be speaking at an Ice Cream Social held by GALBA, ERAU's Gay-Straight Alliance. Friday, 11 October, at 6:30 p.m. in the atrium of the Spruance Building on the Embry-Riddle Campus. If you're in the Daytona Beach vicinity, drop in. Another Tuesday, Another Onion This week's Onion features an appropriately-timed story on coming out. Monday, October 07, 2002
Holland and Knight The Miami Herald today features this L. A. Times length article on Holland and Knight, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride's law firm. The story starts by describing how Holland and Knight didn't take the gay adoption case pro bono, how McBride made the decision not to. The situation involved conflicting positions between some partners in the firm and others, especially some new ones of an Orlando-based firm that had just merged with Tampa-based Holland and Knight. The article is a little all over the place. After the gay-adoption angle, it's just a littany of Holland and Knight situations that don't look good for McBride: pro bono environmental work versus environmental cases in the employ of big business. Except for its length, there's little exceptional in the story, unless you have some image of the head of one of Florida's largest law firms as some kind of innocent or angel. Still, given his new stature as nominee of the Dems for governon, it's not surprising that big Florida media would see it necessary to give McBride at least the illusion of a once over. Vive Delanoë! Claire Berlinski has written to Instapundit about the attack on the mayor of Paris. The entry is here. Navigating the Herald Mark Lane, who "navigates the Miami Herald so you don't have to," posted this entry which includes a quotation from a blog entry with (it seems to me) broken permalinks from Shattered Buddha, which includes a link to this story from the aforementioned Miami Herald Say, Mr. Lane. Can you explain how to navigate the Herald's site? In the category of hard-to-get-around-ness, it's highly competitive. And if you can do that, I have several other newspapers' sites I'd be happy to let you navigate. You can start with just about any old Gannett site. Unless you hate pop-up ads. Anyway, the story linked to above is about an older trailer park in Wilton Manors (Ft. Lauderdale) that represents a certain time in the cultural evolution of Florida. Sunday, October 06, 2002
Why War with Iraq? This past week saw two very clearly reasoned pieces for why war with Iraq is justified, responsible, proper, and necessary. One was Jeffery Goldberg in this dialogue entry (scroll down) on Slate. In 1995, the government of Saddam Hussein admitted to United Nations weapons inspectors that its scientists had weaponized a biological agent called aflatoxin. Charles Duelfer, the former deputy executive chairman of the now-defunct UNSCOM, told me earlier this year that the Iraqi admission was startling because aflatoxin has no possible battlefield use. Aflatoxin, which is made from fungi that occur in moldy grains, does only one thing well: It causes liver cancer. In fact, it induces it particularly well in children. Its effects are far from immediate. The joke among weapons inspectors is that aflatoxin would stop a lieutenant from making colonel, but it would not stop soldiers from advancing across a battlefield.The second piece (here) appeared today in The Boston Globe. It's by Jean Bethke Elshtain. Once the case for preventive force has been made, the question then becomes one of jus in bello - what sort of force and against whom? The single most important factor here is the principle known as discrimination. This means that noncombatants cannot be the intended targets of harm, as were the victims of Sept. 11 and the Iraqi Kurds. In any conflict civilians will fall in harm's way. But it is forbidden to knowingly and maliciously target them. Of course, if the United States goes to war, it must not target civilians. As for Saddam, we know he has no compunctions in this regard, and that fact, too, weighs heavily in evaluating the threat he poses and our own actions.Dr. Martin Luther King once said, "The time is always right to do what is right." A continued failure to act -- and the current situation is one in which we have failed to act already -- regarding the weapons that Iraq has developed and continues to develop would constitute a grave moral neglect. A future which includes the likes of the current regime in Baghdad holding its own citizens, the citizens of neighbor nations (democratic or not), or the citizens of the rest of the world hostage by its use or threat to use chemical and biological, much less nuclear, weapons is simply unacceptable. It is entirely proper to use all forces at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, and military -- to make sure that future does not happen. Addendum: The 7 October 2002 New York Times features this op-ed by William Safire. The piece includes the URL for this testimony to the House Armed Services Committee by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regarding the Bush (II) administration's stated reasons for action against Iraq. Even though this is prepared testimony, it is expressed with Rumsfield's usual clarity and lack of obfuscation. Friday, October 04, 2002
Things You Don't Expect to Run Across Example: This nice profile of Janis Ian in the Naples Daily News. Of course, the article could've mentioned the URL, http://www.janisian.com/, for Janis Ian's website. They Are Not Making These Up The 2002 IgNoble Prizes were awarded last night. Details here, from the Annals of Improbable Research. Topics investigated by this year's winners include beer foam, belly-button lint, effect of previous highlighting on reading comprehension, dog-to-human translation, pet washing machines, and the use of imaginary numbers by corporate accountants and auditors. Thursday, October 03, 2002
World's Funniest Joke In case you don't catch it during its fifteen minutes of fame on Google News, here's the story (from some web site in Wales) about the world's funniest joke. Yes, it includes the joke, and the joke actually is pretty funny. You might've heard it before. And it's not Garry Shandling's: "I told my doctor, 'My penis is burning,' and he said, 'That means someone is talking about it'," which Esquire reported several years ago to be some kind of number one joke. |