Per aspera

Jesus Christ.

(via Unqualified Offerings)

UPDATE:  Robert Farley at LGM has a slightly longer and more thoughtful response than I:

Long story short, it’s quite likely that an invasion would cause a lot more people to die than are likely to die sans intervention.

The idea of a threat of an invasion in order to force SLORC compliance with international aid efforts is a little bit better on its face, but collapses when subjected to scrutiny. The primary interest of the regime is survival; it cares more about survival than the lives of the Burmese people. Allowing itself to be forced at gunpoint to accept international assistance strikes me as considerably more dangerous to regime survival than to simply allow the disaster to run its course. The regime, undoubtedly, also has a strong sense of the difficulties that any invasion would face, especially one with a humanitarian objective. In other words, SLORC has a) reason to believe that the international community is bluffing, and b) strong incentive for calling that bluff. Again, the threat of military intervention in the short term is likely to lead to more, not fewer, dead Burmese.

I’ve heard a disturbing number of people, all of whom I know to be otherwise sane, tell me that they think John McCain would make a good President, or even tell me that they might vote for him. This is nuts. He would be an awful President. Of course, you wouldn’t know that by watching the news or reading the paper, because the narrative of John McCain among the political press is that of the Saga of Commander Maverick of the Straight Talk Brigade. Never mind that the guy has no coherent domestic policy, nor does he seem particularly interested in one. Never mind that his foreign policy, which is supposed to be a his strength, seems to be nothing more than Bush’s “Obey, or be destroyed,” applied even more widely.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to approach building my own little counternarrative for you, my audience, because I love all eight of you, and want you to be thoughtful, skeptical consumers of political media. If along the way I can convince you that the contemporary Republican Party is a cancer on the American body politic, so much the better.

Anyway, my quandary is solved: Ezra Klein reminded me that it’s McCain week at the American Prospect. The first article, by Matt Yglesias, is called “The Militarist.” Ezra comments, in part, thus:

He was humble. Bipartisan. A nice guy, liked by partisans on both sides of the aisle. An instinctual moderate who’d constrain America’s foreign policy ambitions and ably manage our finances. He was George W. Bush, and despite what the press said, he was none of those things. Rather, the truest understanding of Bush’s candidacy came from those who had read his policy plans. The shockingly regressive tax cuts, the dismissive attitude towards international treaties, the inattention to our unraveling health care system, the denial of our energy problems — it was all there. The press assured us that those plans were just election-year pandering. Turned out they were his governing agenda.

Similarly, John McCain, we’re told, is a moderate. A nice guy. Respected on both sides of the aisle. Conscious of the limits of American power and the constraints of our fiscal situation. His plans? That hugely regressive tax cut, radical dismantling of the health care system, appetite for endless war? Oh, you know how elections go.

Bullshit.

Ezra’s own article is about McCain’s godawful health care plan.

Survival instinct.

The only thing more annoying than Joe Lieberman himself is his conceit, which many people indulge out of habit, that he is some kind of “centrist.”  Perhaps if we think of the political spectrum as a series of rings surrounding a cavernous abyss (or perhaps a pit like the Sarlaac), then Lieberman and McCain can fairly be called “centrists.”

 -Daniel Larison in The American Conservative

Entire selection bitten from Matt Yglesias.

New posts at Fafblog (which is the best blog, for those of you unfamiliar with it)!

They redesigned the site an everything, so presumably they mean to write more than just two posts.  One can only hope, as does Robert Farley, that its revivification isn’t just a cruel April Fool’s joke.

In conclusion, fuck Joe Francis.

-Ezra Klein

To which I would only add:  in the neck, with a sharp stick.

I don’t usually write about work, because that’s my real name up there, and writing about work on the web is a fantastic way to lose your job.  For that reason, I’ll try to be deliberately hazy with any identifying details.  But I must speak, for this may be my last communication with the outside world.

My immediate superiors have decided to get some machine for the reception area that pisses out fragrance into the air.  It’s basically an industrial-strength Glade plug-in, because your business is growing, and you need next-level choke-the-air-with-perfume solutions.

The miasma now looming over my desk, like the threat of devourment by an unnamable Great Old One dressed in tapered khakis and a pink Newport News twinset, is named, I’m told, “Fresh Air.”  I imagine one develops a sense of vicious irony, working for a company that makes fragrance-pissing machines.

But now my breathing grows labored, my sight grows dim, and I fear I can type no more.  Blasphemous magenta flower-print patterns dance at the edges of my vision, and beneath it all, across the nose-withering gulfs of time, I can hear the music of the insane pipers who dance endlessly around the throne of the blind idiot-god of olfactory chaos: “Potpurri-ri!  Potpurri-ri!”

My purity is based on the fact that nobody offered me much money.

Leonard Cohen

That article comes from a link in the comments to an essay about the evolution of the song “Hallelujah.”

…I should add that all of this comes via a Sidelight on Making Light.

Aw, man.  Gary Gygax died.

I bought the D & D basic set when I was, like, eight, I think.  I didn’t have anyone to play it with until I got a little older and a) thus, so did my younger brother, b) some kids around our age moved in up the street.  So I contented myself with rolling up characters,  reading the monster descriptions in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and drawing dungeon maps on graph paper.  To this day I write in all caps, having developed the habit because it made my writing more legible on graph paper, which we also used for our homemade character sheets.

Anyway, D & D was hugely influential, on me and on our culture, so I lift a flagon of mead to Gygax’s memory.

The full text of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (a book I personally love) is now online here for you to read, for as long as you can stare at a computer screen.

And while I’m at it, I’ll remind you of the existence of Escape Pod, a weekly podcast of science fiction short stories, read aloud.  It, too, is awesome, and free.

Today, it has been two years since I set this fiasco into motion. It has been, at best, a minor fiasco, but it is my own.

Happy Blogoversary* to me!

*Ha ha ha, you bastards, I made you pronounce the word “blogoversary” in your heads.

UPDATE: Aw, thanks, Shakes.

SRSLY.

That I dig the crap out of Tilda Swinton.

…Also, I think it’s possible that Jon Stewart is a genuinely good guy.

Robert Farley has made the case that the Air Force shouldn’t be its own branch of the military.  It should be folded back into the Army and Navy, with, according to my basic understanding of his argument, the Army taking over its tactical roles and the Navy taking over its strategic roles (especially w/r/t nukes).

The whole ensuing discussion on that article is interesting to me, and I bring it up because of his recent post on the subject.  I don’t have anything to add, I just think it’s worth reading.

Wait, I do have something to add.  I’m all for the Navy taking over the Air Force’s space defense mission.  Every SF space-battle scenario I’ve ever seen equates spaceships with naval ships, and maps the structure of a navy onto space fleets.  So obviously, our species has already decided which branch of the service should handle space defense.

Spaceships, not space planes.  QED.

So Obama gets asked at a press conference about some negative ad that Clinton aired about him, and says this: 

“I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal,”

‘Cause gals are so emotional, y’know?  They get to feeling down from time to time.  Some might even say “periodically.”  And during those times the claws might come out.  Know what I mean, fellas?

It seems to me it takes a lot of effort to argue that Obama wasn’t using standard male shorthand about women’s motivations - or rather, the unspoken, pervasive idea that men act because of motivations and women react because of emotions.

I hear that kind of shit all the time from other men.  And I think the idea is so pervasive and implicit that it can almost literally defy explanation sometimes, as now (not that I’m not going to try).  What I mean is that as I try to explain this, I know that many, if not most of my readers (all eight of you) will think that I’m straining at gnats, seeing things that aren’t there because I’m predisposed to do so ’cause I’m always trying to be all liberal and feminist and whatnot (you know, fuzzy-headed, dare I say emotional).  That I would make the case that sexism is so systemic and pervasive that this comment can just drip with it and even someone who normally spends a lot of time making the feminist case will miss it sort of pre-emptively disqualifies me from making that case.  As zuzu says, putting it in the context of a dogwhistle:

Another way to send your message to your target audience while maintaining deniability is to go the wink-wink-nudge-nudge route, where you know that many people not in your target audience will pick up your meaning, but because you’ve crafted your statement to be facially innocuous, anyone who objects will be accused of being hysterical, hypersensitive, or overreacting.

And I’d add that the meaning will be picked up a lot of the time without your intended audience even realizing they’re picking it up, because it would be like noticing that people in our culture are constantly personifying the concept of an ordered universe into a male sky god named “God.”  The luxury of not having to notice that your society is structured to your advantage is what’s been called the fog of privilege.

Please see also:

Lauren

MadKane (via Avedon Carol)

Shakespeare’s Sister:

Once again, I’ll note that the same person who is almost universally regarded as an orator of unrivaled competence, who is heralded as a linguistic maestro gifted with the talent for launching a political movement with the mere power of his well-chosen words, cannot believably claim to not have had the slightest inclination that “periodically feeling down” might be construed as having a double meaning as applied to a female opponent.

And Jeff Fecke, also at Shakesville.