What is the point of video game violence?

Clive Thomson observes that a video game about killing Japanese soldiers in WWII sells briskly in Japan because the ''subject matter'' of computer games doesn't matter.

Really hard-core gamers often look past the cultural ''content'' of a game. They're mostly worried about a more prosaic concern, which is whether the game is fun. The geopolitics of a game melt away as players, like philosophers musing on their favorite platonic solid, ponder gameplay in the abstract.

We're accustomed to thinking that a piece of entertainment is nothing but its cultural content. A movie or TV show is just what you see on the screen. But a game is also about play, and play is invisible. That's why outsiders are often puzzled by the success of games that would appear to be nothing but screamingly offensive content. They can't see the play. Sure, you've got raw guts flying around -- but for the player, part of the joy is in messing with physics (even if that happens to be bullets and shoulder-launched grenades) or with strategy (even if that's figuring out how to starve a village).

Computer game designer Brian Moriarty finds this puzzling and provocative.

A conflict without hope. A forever war. I suspect that this is the secret reason why non-hobbyists are disdainful of today's computer games. They intuitively sense the lack of a larger purpose behind the events they see on the screen. Aside from a few jingoistic platitudes, a bit of narrative hand-waving to set up the slaughter, there's little or no justification for anything. The fighting just seems to go on and on. It's not the violence that bothers people, really. It's the uselessness.

Coture au courant

From the nice people at T-Shirt Hell, some ''wait a minute, that's actually kind of sophisticated satire.''

I only support gay marriage
if both chicks are hot

Today's quote

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,--I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, ''Be silent: I see it, if you don't.''

Abraham Lincoln

Surprise surprise surprise

George W. Bush (address to the nation):

Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all. Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife.

Andrew Sullivan (weblog post)

Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.

Captain Louis Renault (dialogue from Casablanca)

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

---

---

I have a long follow-up post about how thoroughly terrible Andrew Sullivan is.

Interracial dialogue

Cobb has a terrific post about one of my favorite points, our lack of a good language for talking about racism in America.

The reason 'racism' seems to be such a squishy term is because of racism. That is to say, blacks and whites and others are not engaged on a permanent basis in discussions about race and racism. They are separate. So if you grow up white talking about racism with whitefolks, then you will have a separate idea about what it is from that of blackfolks. What's also implied is that you will have fewer ways to talk about it in practice because it is a theory to you. So being provocative about it, theoretical discussions about racism within in a single race group only exacerbates the problem of racism itself because it reinforces words with meanings that are not shared outside of the group. Without firsthand experience this dissonance may be irrevocable.

I think this is a powerful insight. It is very, very hard just to get to the point where we are communicating clearly about this stuff, much less are gaining any insight. In my experience, even smart well-intentioned people of mutual goodwill keep saying to each other, ''you're misreading me!''

I suspect this isn't even primarily about miscommunicating the content of what's said -- though there is that. I think a lot of this comes from assumptions in the background. I've had countless dialogues which looked (to me) like this:

Me: I want to get some insight about what kind of things I can do on an individual level to act against racism.

Person of Color: You're letting yourself off easy. Racism exists on an institutional level.

Me: Not at all. I recognize that racism exists at an institutional level, and I think that part of my responsibility is to act against it. I just wanted to open a discussion about individual action.

PoC: I think you're trying to let yourself off the hook, saying ''racism isn't real because look, I personally am not a Klansman.''

Me: I recognize that racism is real. Maybe it's more productive to talk at the institutional level first. There's a lot going on there. What should responsible whites do about it? Voting Democrat sure isn't enough.

PoC: You have to stop accepting the white privilege that comes from those institutions.

Me: Absolutely, but I'm puzzled about how to go about that on an individual, day-to-day level. It's not like I can just sign a form saying ''I renounce my white privilege as of today.''

PoC: You're not recognizing the privilege you experience. Whites don't, because they don't have the perspective that comes from suffering the effects of racism.

Me: Maybe so, but I'm trying to, right here.

PoC: I know you don't see this and you never will, nor are you even capable of even beginning to do so.

There are several breakdowns going on in a situation like this. My perception of this kind of dialogue is that somehow I'm incapable of engaging without repeatedly appearing to dismiss racism as a phenomenon. Indeed, it seems to be hard to ask for elaboration on anything without sounding dismissive of it. It's hard to talk about fixing these rhetorical problems without seeming like I'm saying our problems demand rhetoric rather than action. All of these are in the background before we even get to what's being said.

The net effect is that whites and PoCs both lose interest in the dialogue because it leads nowhere, or even seems to demonstrate intransigence on the other side. I'm stumped for how I personally, or we as a nation, can pull out of this trap.

For readers' convenience, I've created an index of dialogue with commenter Demondoll2001 so you can see the full progress of the discussion

Not that I resent Social Security, mind you

I'm still insanely busy from work, so today it's another dose of ''today's quote'' from my dusty email archives.

Over the next two decades, the Greatest Generation's elderly will be replaced by old boomers, who'll be the largest, noisiest, and most demanding political constituency in American history--you and I among them. Tens of millions of boomer bodies all will be corroding. If you think prescription drug coverage is a big deal now, wait until medical science promises boomers we can look young and have sex like rabbits and party until we drop. Across the land there'll be outcroppings of ''Med-Meds'' for boomer geezers--think of Club Meds combined with medical facilities. Snorkeling all morning; extra oxygen in the afternoon. Worse yet, most boomers haven't saved a dime for retirement. All the equity's in their homes. And home prices will take a dive when the boomers all want to sell.

In other words, brace yourself. We'll be lucky if the Dems, as well as Republicans, don't sell out completely to aging boomers. Increasingly, a fault line in American politics will be generational. Who will represent the young? Who'll inspire them? Enable them to feel the joy of politics? I haven't seen a Dem among the current crop who comes close.

Robert Reich

Warning: Adult language

Another quote recovered from the old email bin.

A free Iraq, a peaceful Iraq will help change an area of the world that needs peace and freedom. A peaceful Iraq and a free Iraq is part of our campaign to rid the world of terror. And that's why the thugs in Iraq still resist us, because they can't stand the thought of free societies. They understand what freedom means. See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction. There will be a free and peaceful Iraq. What's taking place in Iraq is the evolution of a society, to be democratic in nation --- nature, a society in which the people are better off.

George W. Bush, 3 October 2003

When I originally spotted this, my comment to a friend was

Jesus fucking Christ, this rat bastard is a goddamned Kafka nightmare. What the hell is this shit, a fucking ploy to deliberately make intelligent people sputter and swear?

I'm not saying your life is empty in comparison

I've now seen Nina Hagen sing ''Fever''.

Passion

I'm looking forward to seeing Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ which opens Wednesday.

I am not a Christian by a long shot, but I have a weird soft spot for Passion films. It started when, as a teenager working in a video store, I discovered that Jesus Christ Superstar would gather dust on the shelf until you ran it on the TV in the store: by the time Judas shows up on screen, you have half a dozen people begging to rent it. Since then, I've kept an eye on the genre: I own a copy of Scorscese's Last Temptation of Christ and will eventually pick up Jesus of Montreal, which are both terrific films by any measure. Plus you have Max von Sydow as Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told! And Life of Bryan!

Gibson clearly has an interesting cinematic vision. I'm disappointed that the picture will be released with subtitles -- Mel clearly really wanted to do a ''silent'' film.

And there's the dustup over whether the picture is antisemitic. There are reasons to take those concerns seriously. The only way to have an meaningful opinion is to see the picture.

Newsweek has a fascinating article about the film, the history, and the Gospels. Not only does it weave the three strands together intelligently, you have to admire the mainstream media deftness with which it attempts to grapple with the hard questions without offending anyone.

Paranoia will destroy ya

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden

Ain't it the truth.

Still more wedding pictures!

I never get tired of looking at them. And this little tribute makes me weepy.

I cannot help but hope that Atrios is right, that looking at pictures of people sleeping outside in the rain for a chance to get married will start to convince ambivalent Americans that opposition to gay marriage is churlish after all.

More wedding fever

What's this I hear about gay weddings ''eroding the institution of marriage''? It's just not so.

Is Heinlein's writing sexist?

I’m pressed for time today, so I’m going to recycle some comments I wrote an online discussion forum some time ago.

A few folks there called SF writer Robert A. Heinlein a “sexist pig” in his writing. I have to agree that it's as fair a short summation of his attitude as you could manage. But he was a writer extraordinarily resistant to such short summation. If you said that his political attitude was “anarchist” I would agree to that as a fair one-word description. But if you called his political attitude “fascist” I would agree to that as a fair one-word description, too.

That may sound impossible to those of you who haven’t read much of his writing. He’s a complicated guy. I know I have readers who have read him and are chuckling because they’ve probably made both arguments about his politics themselves, at one time or another.

Considering that the man was born in 1907, he was surprisingly un-sexist in many ways. In the 1950s — an era when women showed up in SF to need rescuing, when they showed up at all — he wrote Hazel Stone complaining that none of the men she worked with could solve a double integral without a pencil, and a military recruiting officer telling a young man that he shouldn’t apply for training as a starship pilot because the people with the necessary mathematical and kinesthetic talents are almost exclusively women. Later in his career, his character Friday could take any three of his male characters in a fair fight without breaking a sweat. Women are often in positions of authority in his work, and no one thinks it strange. His characters of both genders routinely assert that women are smarter than men without a trace of irony.

But.

Women in Heinlein’s fiction are still vastly outnumbered by men. While many of them are strong and interesting, more of them are either cardboard cutouts or fools. Even the strong and interesting ones really, really, really like being pregnant. And are discomfortingly deferential to the male characters. And in fact display a nauseating delight when those men treat them like children. And are pornographically willing to drop into those fellas’ beds. And have a particularly unwholesome attraction to grumpy old male author mouthpieces. And are often absurdly psychologically unreal, as any woman — any human — who has read I Will Fear No Evil will attest.

And while I understand that he comes from a generation that sincerely believed that if we could just get over the guilt, sex would be good clean fun, the resulting attitude is chillingly callous toward women in too many places. Women are never frustrated with their feminine gender role, never injured by sexual attention.

And my personal un-favorite: there’s a little attempted witticism he repeats in a few different stories about a female character wearing “a perfume that was probably named something like ‘Summer Orchard’ but would be better called ‘Justifiable Rape.’” At the risk of sounding like a cartoon humorless feminist, Mr. Heinlein, that is just not funny.

Updates

• A Quora discussion with a pointer to this post
• Heinlein: Forward-looking diversity advocate or sexist bigot? Yes by Mitch Wagner at Tor
• Heinlein’s Female Troubles by M. G. Lord at the New York Times
• Dread of Heinleinism by Charlie Stross
• Me talking about Starship Troopers, exploring why I make the weird claim that one could fairly call Heinlein either “anarchist” or “fascist”.

Strange outbreak of politeness

I cannot discern what the hell is really happening in this story.

The skinheads looked at him incredulously, and not without a degree of sympathy. It was obvious that he actually thought he belonged there, amongst white power kinfolk. ''Well, you haven't broken any of the festival's rules,'' began another skinhead, employing the sort of ''I hate to break it to you'' tone of voice of a father explaining to his 5-year-old son why a bed sheet tied around his neck doesn't mean he can fly. ''The thing is, you're not white.''

Crestfallen, the kid stood silent for a few beats, then responded, ''Okay, okay. I understand. I respect that. I just hope you know I didn't mean any disrespect by being here. I just wanted to come out and show my respect for the white race and support the cause.''

''We respect that, and we appreciate your attitude, you not giving us any trouble,'' said a skinhead, gently guiding him toward the exit. ''It's just we don't allow any non-whites here, and, you know, a judgment call was made and that call was that you're not white. We'll be happy to refund your money. Your friends can stay if they like, and if not, we'll give them their money back as well.''

It's just weird, weird, weird.

He forgot dashboard religious icons

In the middle of a piece about how SUVs are more dangerous than cars, Greg Easterbrook makes this wry observation.

Please don't tell me SUVs and pickup trucks should not be regulated because an American has a ''right'' to any kind of vehicle he or she desires. As far as the Constitution lays it out, you've got a right to own a gun and to read a newspaper; those are the consumer-purchase categories specified as hallowed.

Did she just say what I think she said?

I'm too burned from work to write or find anything new, so here are just a few things heard in passing in Berkeley. I didn't even hear them myself.

''So I got an email from The Guy, and I thought--''
''Hold on, hold on, hold on. The Guy? I'm going to need a lot more context here. Knowing you.''
''Shut up.''
''Could say worse.''
''Shut up.''
--Two women talking at Andronico's

---

''It's 'nett' not 'dit'. 'Pundit squares' sounds like a tic-tac-toe gameshow from hell.''
''Or a slimy breakfast cereal.''
--A guy and a girl outside Andronico's

---

''You get a magazine about gardening? What, are there trends and runways like fashion? Celebrity watering tips?''
--One woman to another at Berkeley Bowl

---

''Did you know that cellos can get frequent flier programs? And they can get upgraded to first class? Because you have to buy a seat for your cello, you can't check it.''
''I wonder if cellos get two pieces of checked baggage. Like a violin, and a viola.''
--Two guys outside Triple Rock

---

InPassing.org

''Winning'' isn't everything

Via Atrios, a nice summation from Digby at Hullabaloo of why the Iraq adventure is a catastrophy.

By invading Iraq the way we did and being proved complete asses now that no WMD have been discovered, one of our best defenses has been completely destroyed. It may have always been nothing but a pretense that we had hi-tech, super duper satellites with x-ray vision and all-knowing eavesdropping devices that can hear a pin drop half a world away but it was a very useful pretense. Nobody knew exactly what we were capable of. Now they do. It appears to everyone on the planet that our vaunted intelligence services couldn't find water even if they fell off of a fucking aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

It's this kind of thing that makes really crazy wackos like Kim Jong Il make mistakes. When a hugely powerful country like the United States proves to the entire world that it is not as powerful as everyone thought, petty tyrants and ambitious generals tend to get excited.

Digby writes largely in response to a post by Nick Confessore who sums up the argument that we've bogged down our military, drawing heavily in turn on James Fallows' dazzling article about military preparedness in The Atlantic Monthly.

It's a slight exaggeration to say that the entire U.S. military is either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go. But only slight.

The basic problem is that an ever leaner, numerically smaller military is being asked to patrol an ever larger part of the world.

''Unanticipated U.S. ground force requirements in postwar Iraq,'' a report for the Army War College noted late last year, ''have stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point,'' with more than a third of the Army's total ''end strength'' committed in and around Iraq.
...
Meanwhile, barely noticed, the United States still has some 75,000 soldiers in Germany, 41,000 in Japan, 41,000 in Korea, 13,000 in Italy, 12,000 in the United Kingdom, and so on, down through a list of more than a hundred countries -- plus some 26,000 sailors and Marines deployed afloat. The new jobs keep coming, and the old ones don't go away.
...
Despite our level of spending and our apparent status as the world's mono-power, the United States has few unused reserves of military strength. Sending troops in a hurry to the Korean DMZ -- or to Iran, or the Taiwan Strait -- would mean removing them in a hurry from some other place where, according to U.S. policy, they are also needed.

Wedding pictures

There's a bloke who has published some neat photographs of couples at SF City Hall -- I'm tempted to buy one of his cool posters of the rose petal and rice strewn steps.

Plus: pictures from the Chronicle.

Remote control design

A New York Times article today describes the process by which the folks at TiVo created their remote control.

In the pursuit of ease of use, the design team struggled with how to symbolize the notion of rating a program, an unfamiliar button concept for most viewers. (By telling the machines what kinds of shows they like or dislike, users ''teach'' TiVo what programs to record on its own.)

''Rather than pick some esoteric technical term about 'preferred' or 'not preferred' television programming, we came up with the thumbs,'' Mr. Newby said.
...
The next challenge was to fend off an attack of buttonitis.

''Buttons proliferate on remotes like rabbits,'' Mr. Newby said, adding that he and his designers, who ranged in age from 25 to 45, had ''bloody battles'' over which ones to include. They managed to hold the number at 30, a considerable achievement given how many functions the TiVo receiver performs.

Angel in America

Joss Whedon is a little disappointed at the cancellation of his show Angel.

Some of you may have heard the hilarious news. I thought this would be a good time to weigh in. to answer some obvious questions: No, we had no idea this was coming. Yes, we will finish out the season. No, I don't think the WB is doing the right thing. Yes, I'm grateful they did it early enough for my people to find other jobs.

Yes, my heart is breaking.

When Buffy ended, I was tapped out and ready to send it off. When Firefly got the axe, I went into a state of denial so huge it may very well cause a movie. But Angel... we really were starting to feel like we were on top, hitting our stride -- and then we strode right into the Pit of Snakes ’n’ Lava. I'm so into these characters, these actors, the situations we're building... you wanna know how I feel? Watch the first act of “The Body.”

As far as TV movies or whatever, I'm not thinking that far ahead. I actually hope my actors and writers are all too busy. We always planned this season finale to be a great capper to the season and the show in general. (And a great platform for a new season, of course.) We'll proceed ahead as planned.

I've never made mainstream TV very well. I like surprises, and TV isn't about surprises, unless the surprise is who gets voted off of something. I've been lucky to sneak this strange, strange show over the airwaves for as long as I have. I don't FEEL lucky, but I understand that I am.

Thanks all for your support, your community, and your perfectly sane devotion. It's meant a lot. I regret nothing (except the string of grisley murders in the 80’s -- what was THAT all about?) Remember the words of the poet:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN’ SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.”

See you soon.

Love Love Love

This may be the amazing Mark Morford's best column ever.

I was there. I saw the lines, the smiles, felt the intense emotional energy. It was simply irrefutable: These are people in love. These are couples who have been together for years, decades, who have started families and raised children and set up homes replete with dogs and dinner parties and antiques and regular shopping excursions to Safeway and the mall. You know, just like ''real'' Americans.

These are couples who are willing to go the distance, to commit and connect, and who are eager to prove to themselves and the world that their love is something true and real and momentous, something that, in truth, can only serve to reignite and reunite our stagnant, fractured, contentious, 50 percent-divorce-rate nation. Hey, we need all the help we can get.

And one other thing was very apparent: It was a situation in which you simply could not imagine anyone hurling gobs of intolerant hate at it. It would have required a serious amount of nasty, inbred ignorance and appalling nerve to march up to any of the passionate and committed couples waiting patiently in line for their marriage ceremony and say, you know, God hates you for this, you immoral disgusting sodomites, and it's intolerable and unacceptable that you wish to love and honor each other till death do you part.

Worth every penny

It seems that Howard Dean's run for the presidency is over.

I've been a Dean supporter for a long time -- I first read about him over a year ago, before he had any campaign staff at all, just driving around New Hampshire speaking to anyone who would listen, talking about health care and balancing the budget. I saw a long article about him, and was very taken with the things he was saying, for many of the reasons that people would take to him later: he was pragmatic, forthright, and had picked some good key issues he wanted to focus on. This was a guy who could stand up and fight and win.

At the time, my work situation was looking shaky, and not-so-idly wondered if I shouldn't give up my job and volunteer to work for him like Donna Moss and end up working in the West Wing.

Last year my soul sister Alysse and I both contributed very heavily to his campaign, and I sent him some more money this month to keep things going. With Dean's campaign fading, and Kerry's star rising, we got to talking last week about whether we had wasted our money.

I always thought that Kerry was a potentially strong candidate. His war-hero / anti-war-hero one-two punch is mighty. I couldn't get behind him, though, because you'd look at what he was saying and ask what he stood for. Unlike Dean, and like the other Democrat candidates, I felt like he was so afraid of making a mistake that he hadn't really shown up. He wasn't a guy who I felt could be a vigorous enough candidate to win in '04.

That's not true any more. In the last few months, Kerry's rhetoric has gotten a lot stronger -- especially around Iraq, which had become Dean's signature issue -- and primary voters responded to it. Campaigning against Dean turned Kerry into a candidate with a chance of beating Bush in November.

I told Alysse we bought a change in the discourse. Money well spent.

Product placement

An acquaintance of mine, I recently discovered, has collected several photographs of himself reading The Economist on mountain peaks around the world.

The page has links to a few other odd things, if you look carefully.

Koufax awards

The Koufax Awards recognize the best of the lefty blogs. If you check it out, you'll recognize the contents of my blogroll. One of these days I mean to introduce my blogroll entries in some detail. In the meantime, check out the award winners and nominees.

I try not to let it get to me

There's nitpicking and there's stuff that kills your willing suspension of disbelief.

The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics index lets you decide for yourself.

Ever notice how cars in movies always burst into flames the instant they collide with anything? Our favorite is when a car falling from a high place explodes the instant before it hits the ground. It's as though its gas tank gets panicky and detonates at the mere thought of striking Earth.
...
If he were not on the sidewalk by a display window, then invariably he'd be blown into a rack of whisky bottles, a giant mirror, or some other large glass object. This happens so often that if we didn't know better we'd think Hollywood had discovered a new principle of physics: the attractive force of glass for shooting victims.

Of course, the best is ...

Worst Physics Movie Ever
This movie is so bad we finally had to force ourselves to quit writing and post the review
The Core (2003)

What our president wants to be when he grows up

I really try to resist the temptation to get too deeply into psychoanalyzing our nation's President, but I fail, fail, fail. Kos has a biting rant about ''Bush and hero worship''. It's consistent with the old saw about Bush wanting to be President as a resume item to help him get a job as Comissioner of Baseball.

Most people outgrow hero worship when they develop a sense of their own competence or success in life, and their identity isn't tied to people they don't know as much as it is to their own achievements, fulfilling their own responsibilities and nurturing their ties to family, friends and co-workers. They stop dreaming about what they'll be when they grow up -- pilot, major league pitcher, war hero -- and they just grow up. But for a guy who never succeeded at anything in life until he ran for Governor, and who since then has mostly been a figurehead uninterested in the details of governmental executive power, there is little Bush can plausibly tell himself he's achieved on his own except get sober -- a laudable and not to be scoffed-at accomplishment -- and be disciplined at delivering messages crafted for him but about which he has scant interest.

Today's quote

It turns out that, at least as far as economic policymaking is concerned, things inside the Bush White House were worse than I had imagined possible -- even though I thought that I had already taken account of the principle that things are generally worse than you imagine.

Brad DeLong

Your ad here!

So I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself about weblogging. I wasn't sure if I would take to it, and here I'm posting pretty regularly, getting in a good mix of stuff. Maybe all y'all have stopped reading, but this is a blog I would read.

I told myself that if I stuck with it I would start to pay Blog*Spot to get rid of the ugly advertisements at the top of the page and give MKB his bleedin' geeky RSS feed.

But I'm starting to get entertained by my own ads. There's evidently some kind of none-too-bright algorhtym that determines what your ads should be based on words in your blog. So right now my ads say

President George Bush
Free environmental news by mail. Sign up today at Grist magazine.

Build a Stronger America
Support the RNC and the President's Compassionate Conservative agenda.

Um, yeah. Whatever.

Forensic journalism on Bush's lost Guard duty files

Atrios points to an excellent post by Calpundit today about the “files in a wastebasket” strand of the Bush National Guard service story.

[Former Lt. Col.] Burkett’s friend and fellow guardsman, George Conn, led him to the base museum, which was run by General Scribner. Once there, Burkett saw a trashcan sitting on a table, and when he looked in he saw 20 to 40 pages of documents with George Bush’s name on them.

If this is true, the story is major league Washington scandal. You know the rules: revealation of the cover-up is always more damaging than the original issue would have been.

Beyond the implications of the story itself, Calpundit’s article is worth your time for his walk through the supporting research required in covering it.

Unlike the basic National Guard story, which has been fuelled largely by odd discrepencies in the documentary evidence, there is no documentary evidence regarding Burkett’s story. We just have his word for it, and needless to say, all the people he has accused of cleaning up Bush’s records vigorously deny it.

To judge the truth of Burkett’s story, then, all we can do is ask certain questions: Is Burkett’s story internally consistent? Has it stayed consistent over time? Do other people corroborate it? Does Burkett have a track record of telling the truth? Does he have any axes to grind?

The short answer is that I think Burkett is probably telling the truth. The long answer is — well, long.

Calpundit gives us the long answer, answering each of the questions he asked in turn, explaining why he thinks Burkett is credible but making clear what room there is for doubt. It’s good journalism.

It’s an example of the kind of forensic journalism practiced routinely by mainstream reporters. I see a little more mockery of journalists than I’d like in the blogosphere, and I think a lot of it is because too many people don’t realize how much reporting and how much judgment are behind the small snippets of writing that end up on newsprint or on the air.

[⋯]

That’s one of the nice things about blogs: if I feel like spending a lot of time on a single topic I can do it, and if I feel like posting all the detailed background information I can do that too. I hope you found it an interesting exercise.

Indeed.

This post also points to something important about how things work in American journalism now. I think that the Bush administration is hoping to dodge the bullet on the whole Guard duty story (as well as other potential scandals like the Valerie Plame story) by counting on scandal fatigue from the Clinton years. Journalists were taken for a ride in the ’90s by the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy, spilled a lot of ink — and burned a lot of credibillity — covering countless “scandals” with no substance. My favourite example is Whitewater, a corruption “scandal” in which the Clintons actually lost money. David Brock’s strange memoir Blinded by the Right is most interesting for its description, from the inside, of how sloppy journalistic practices prevailed within the right’s smear machine.

After following these stories for years, mainstream journalists have learned the wrong lesson, and now easily dismiss potential scandals. Calpundit demonstrates what they should have done during the Clinton era, and what they should do now.

Liberationist improv television

Heather Havrilevsky is so powerful that she can even tempt me to like Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Most adults are unspeakably full of crap. We recognize this when we're young, but most of us slowly but surely develop into full-grown, full-of-crap adults anyway. A perky co-worker asks, ''How are you?'' and we say, ''Great!'' even when we're in a foul mood and wouldn't mind kicking her teeth in.
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America is probably the most full-of-crap country on the globe, but the consensus here is that lying and sugarcoating everything keeps us on everybody's good side -- oh, except for the European Union, but they're just jealous, right? We're told that people who speak their minds like, say, Yoko Ono or Denis Leary or Ralph Nader, are slightly unsavory and will only screw things up and rob the rest of us of the good life we're entitled to. Plus, they usually smell funny and have lint on their sweaters.

And then there's Larry David, also known as the Only Man Among Us Who Is Truly Free. On his popular HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sundays at 9:30 p.m.), David does what he wants and says what he's thinking at all costs. While critics have described David's character as obnoxious, selfish, rude, nasty, pathetic and worse, considering the unbearable burden of politesse the rest of us struggle under, David is a true American hero, one whose confrontational behavior is merely a natural response to the absurd and moronic requirements of modern life.