Olbermann

Better than ever. And ever more necessary. He is truly a Great American.

Go watch.

Tyger

Via DragonLadyFlame, Tyger, an absurdly cool animation. Burning bright, I tell ya.

Korean nukes

Want to do your homework on what's happening, and how we got here?

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has the goods, going back to the Clinton administration. Fascinating and horrifying.

Buried underground

CBGB
Coolest club on Earth
1973-2006

How did this happen without anyone telling me?

Of course, I should have known. Last year, my soul sister told me a story from work. She's a high school principal, and some of the kids were speculating about what kind of music she favoured. No jokes about Lawrence Welk from them; I'm sure that they have never heard of him. Or of Cole Porter or Frank Sinatra, or of Trent Reznor or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, any of which would have been correct. She refused to answer, and one kid finally closed the issue with a snort, “She probably listens to rock ’n’ roll.”

Rock, the music of old people.

Just hearing that said will make a fella feel old, well before his time.

What can I say about CBGB that hasn't been said already? That I'm even qualified to say? I was there exactly once, in the company of a dazzling young woman who stopped by to say hello to friends who worked there. This was when I was very young so I hadn't heard of the place ... though I have a hazy memory of being stunned by the names of the bands on some old flyers that were posted somewhere.

I found out through James Wolcott, who was there.

It never occurred to any of us then that someday the CBGB's t-shirt would be a ubiquitous cultural signifier, Richard Hell's byline would grace the op-ed page of the NY Times, the Ramones' “Hey ho/let's go” would rev up car ads, Please Kill Me would be as much a classic of oral history as Edie or Studs Terkel's books, and Deborah Harry would achieve her dye-job dream of being a Warhol superstar in a post-Warhol world.

If that gets ya, he has more, as does Neddie of By Neddie Jingo!

Dream date

The very witty Biography Channel dating site offered me Frieda Kahlo, Mata Hari, and Agatha Christie. I was hoping for Dorothy Parker or Victoria Woodhull ... but still, that's a good list.

Bubble

If you loved that Saturn picture you might also like this bubble in space from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Happy Hallowe'en

Echidne of the Snakes notices another sign of feminism's slow, creeping victory in America's ongoing kulturkamph, quoting from conservatives' discussion over at the National Review Online about little girls allegedly wearing slutty Hallowe'en costumes as a result of Those Nasty Feminists.

For the record, my daughter will be a princess this year. Last year she was a cowgirl. In the future she wants to be a “doggy-doctor,” a cowgirl again, and a witch. She has plenty of ideas on the subject and feminism hasn't entered into any of them as yet.

Being a cowgirl is not feminist? How many cowgirls do you remember from the old Wild West movies? How many female “doggy-doctors” were there before the second wave of feminism? Was it Jerry Falwell^* who said that feminism would make women leave their husbands and turn to witchcraft? You get the point. Mr. Goldberg doesn't seem to realize how very much his daughter owes feminism already.

----
It was Pat Robertson. Thanks,mba.

It'd be nice if these folks didn't attribute their unwholesome Girls Gone Wild fantasies to feminism, but nonetheless, the transparency of key feminist cultural victories is a reassuring sign that, in some ways, it's inconceivable for us to go back to certain kinds of sexism that were pervasive within living memory.

Exhibit A

The President signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 today. Here's a picture.

These men have a date with the Hague.

Digby elaborates.

I don't ever want to hear anyone on the right talk about moral values again. They are concepts which they clearly do not understand. And if they dare to bring up the Bible or Jesus Christ after this I will laugh in their faces, knowing that by their own standards they are going straight to hell for what they've done.

Seconded.

Torture is a cancer

Vladimir Bukovsky reminds us that torture is not only evil, it's counterproductive—and hard to eradicate, once it get a foothold.

Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will.

Today's quote

From Krugman, via Tristero at Hullabaloo.

The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn't a conspiracy theory; it's simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn't do such a thing.

Tough guy

Via Christa Faust, a little noir tale, “The Last Kayfabe” by Ray Banks, about an aging wrestler who's down on his luck.

Mind you, “wrestler” now means something different than it did back in the days when noir characters wore fedoras.

“That time you fucked up New Jack,” says Monty. “That for real?”

They don’t always recognise me. This one can’t believe a white boy pinned a former bounty hunter with four justifiables. I stare at him, wish he’d move his ass and hand over the fuckin’ dimes.

“No,” I say. “Wasn’t for real.”

“Any of that shit for real?”

Shake my head. Apart from the blood. The blood was real. The pain. Shit, you wanna talk pain, we can talk pain.

Mmmm. Noir.

Design

In a comment on an old post on Brazilian urban design, TheWayOfTheGun points us to a fascinating Wired article about traffic engineer Hans Monderman. His philosophy: remove signs and road markings and rely on the geometry of the roadway to calm traffic.

This is the hip new thing in traffic engineering, and apparently it works. Again, I've been reading City Comforts, and David Sucher advocates curvy roads and roundabouts, arguing that it's not slow driving speed that frustrates people, it's signs telling them to drive slower than the road is designed to accomodate — and then having to start and stop in the process. Steady driving at slower speeds is calming.

Monderman clearly has the knack for traffic design. The Wired article talks about an intersection he did.

We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior—traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings—and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous — and that's the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. “I love it!” Monderman says at last. “Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

That elegance of subtly encouraging folks to do the right thing is a hallmark of good design in any field. And the knack for getting the sum of small details right to do that is the defining characteristic of a good designer.

I've talked about Maya Lin before, as an example of this principle. For the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, Lin was very insistent on using stone that could be polished to be reflective. She knew that for the memorial to work, you had to see your face reflected behind the names.

A good designer studies principles and successful examples, but that's not enough to make a good designer. It also requires that knack for cooking up the elements just right. This is one of the baffling things about both art and craft. It feels the same to create good art and bad art. The artist, or the craftsperson, is certain.

Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square —backward—straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

Which is not to say that certainty is a sign that a designer is talented. But uncertainty is always a sign that a designer doesn't have the knack.

---

Update: Another article on Monderman, and a little observation about intersections without stoplights:

The key thing is that basically everyone drives slowly and steadily rather than in a stop-and-go manner. Stop-and-go turns out to be less a way of increasing safety than a way of maximizing the value of vehicles with high top speeds (i.e., automobiles) rather than slower vehicles (bicycles, scooters, motorcycles). So filling your city with signalized intersections turns out to be a kind of backdoor subsidy to automobile ownership.

A Spiegel article about Monderman hits another point about the psychology of driving:

“The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior,” says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. “The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”

Monderman could be on to something. Germany has 648 valid traffic symbols. The inner cities are crowded with a colorful thicket of metal signs. Don't park over here, watch out for passing deer over there, make sure you don't skid. The forest of signs is growing ever denser. Some 20 million traffic signs have already been set up all over the country.

Psychologists have long revealed the senselessness of such exaggerated regulation. About 70 percent of traffic signs are ignored by drivers. What's more, the glut of prohibitions is tantamount to treating the driver like a child and it also foments resentment. He may stop in front of the crosswalk, but that only makes him feel justified in preventing pedestrians from crossing the street on every other occasion. Every traffic light baits him with the promise of making it over the crossing while the light is still yellow.

The result is that drivers find themselves enclosed by a corset of prescriptions, so that they develop a kind of tunnel vision: They're constantly in search of their own advantage, and their good manners go out the window.

The new traffic model's advocates believe the only way out of this vicious circle is to give drivers more liberty and encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. They demand streets like those during the Middle Ages, when horse-drawn chariots, handcarts and people scurried about in a completely unregulated fashion. The new model's proponents envision today's drivers and pedestrians blending into a colorful and peaceful traffic stream.

It may sound like chaos, but it's only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously.

The Lost Room

Here's the kind of thing you'll like, if you like that kind of thing.

In the 1960s, there still were hundreds of motels with thousands of rooms along Route 66 as it jinked its way from Chicago to L.A. and back. None of them stood out from the rest until one day—nobody's really certain when—something very bad happened in Room 10 of the Sunshine Motel, outside Gallup, N.M.

What happened isn't known, but the repercussions have been destroying lives and twisting reality ever since.

Room 10 and many of its mundane contents—a pen, a comb and so on—gained unique and dangerous properties on that day. The pen burns things from the inside out. Things like human beings. The comb stops time for five seconds when you run it through your hair. The room itself is an unchanging haven and a portal to any destination. But it can also take that which you value more than your own life.

This is the premise for a television series. The Sci Fi Channel is getting gutsy. And they've rustled up a hell of a cast of character actors.

Liberation

I want to finally follow up on my earlier post about blackhearted pirates. That's going to require getting into Freudian psychology, the Talmud, humanistic spirituality, esoteric spirituality, Star Trek, and all kinds of other stuff that I know some readers love and some readers hate.

This starts with a comment from Reya Mellicker on my previous post.

I try not to comment here, you know why, but I've been thinking about your Black Heart [of Innocence] post from the other day. I'm compelled to speak, though I will try to make this brief.

I'm sure you know that Johnny Depp is an actor, that the pirate he plays in the movies is a fantasy.

But the BHoI is real. When I think of it outside of the realm of fantasy, I think about my friend as a child being sexually molested by her cousin, also a child, in his parents' 1950's bomb shelter. I think of the children I knew when I was growing up, kids who (for instance) turned box turtles on their backs and laughed while they watched the poor animals struggling to turn upright. It was the BHoI that inspired these kids to leave the turtles to die of thirst and starvation. The lascivious purity of small children is very cruel.

The BHoI is yetzer ha ra—the urge to evil. It's a part of human nature, but the practice of cultivating it, especially without any accepted ethical or moral framework, creates horrors like Abu Gharib. Quasi-sexual torture is brimming with the energy of the BHoI.

In real life, Johnny Depp is a husband and father who, at the end of the day, washes off the make up, takes off his silly costume and—I hope—talks to his children about the characters he plays. I hope he explains why the fantasy is so much fun, but why the reality of the pirate's black heart is so potentially dangerous.

Victor Andersen was a charismatic and talented sorcerer. He was very disturbed.

I think the identification of the Feri symbol of the Black Heart with the Jewish Talmudic concept of the yetzer ha'ra is spot on, but I'm not satisfied with the reading of yetzer ha'ra as simply the “urge to evil.” Considering the nature of the yetzer ha'ra opens the door to some very interesting psycho-spiritual questions.

In what we might call “Talmudic psychology,” we are driven by the twin forces of yetzer ha'ra and yetzer ha'tov, the inclinations to evil and good, respectively. The Talmud teaches that we are born with the yetzer ha'ra, but the rabbis disagree about the yetzer ha'tov; some say that we are born with that as well, while others argue that we only acquire the yetzer ha'tov with the passage into adulthood of the bar mitzvah, at age thirteen. If we consider the latter to be true, that the yetzer ha'tov is a developmental consequence of maturation, then the yetzer ha'ra does match the Black Heart's “lascivious purity of small children and wild animals.”

But I submit that “evil” is a misleading term for the yetzer ha'ra. It suggests that we should simply avoid it entirely, resist it in every way. I think that's very unwise. The yetzer ha'ra is also sometimes translated as the selfish inclination, which has its purpose. Consider this traditional midrash:

If not for the yetzer ha'ra, no one would build a house, marry, have children, nor engage in trade.

We cannot do without the yetzer ha'ra. It contains a necessary vital force — what a Freudian would call libido, with yetzer ha'ra the id and yetzer ha'tov the ego.

Googling for someone else making that comparison, I discovered that David Holzel has already made both that analogy and another analogy that I was tempted to make, to the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within.”

Pity poor Captain Kirk — a transporter malfunction splits him in two. Kirk No. 1 is a wild, irrational brute — pure id. Kirk No. 2 is gentle and compassionate. He is presumed the real captain, until the crew notice he is unable to make a decision — fateful or otherwise — and, in fact, is sinking into paralysis.
....
Viewed through a Jewish lens, this episode is an allegory of a man whose yetzer hara, or evil inclination, is split from his yetzer hatov, or good inclination.

I submit that the the Black Heart of Innoncence, the evil Kirk, the yetzer ha'ra, the libidinous id, the kundalini chakra, the Thelemic Will, and so forth are parallel descriptions of a source of vital energy in the human frame. In describing it Feri, Star Trek, the Talmud, psychoanalysis, tantra, and Thelema all say similar things. They say that this centre is integral to human nature and inherent in our drive to live and act. They also say that this centre is prior to the steadying effects of social convention and is obscured by the rational mind, neither of which can eliminate the voice of that centre, but both of which will distort its voice by trying to eliminate it, cutting us off from our full human potential. All of these schools I allude to—esoteric Judaism, psychoanalysis, tantra, Thelema, Feri—are liberatory schools, concerned with how we can reconnect to that centre without losing the benefits of our rational minds or the moral awareness of the society beyond our selves.

Doug Muder, on his way to a brilliant assertion that “humanist spirituality” isn't an oxymoron, has both an excellent description of liberatory spirituality and a helpful caution about how liberation alone isn't enough.

Connection is a positive sense of identification with something bigger than yourself, usually something that contains you. Bigger can be at almost any scale. Maybe you feel connected to your family. Maybe you belong to a church community or identify with a group like this one. You could connect with a political movement, a philosophy, a nation, the progress of humanity, the biosphere of the planet, or the well-being of all living things.

....

Liberation is the awareness of possibilities and potentials, combined with a sense of choice efficacy. “I can make things happen.” Liberation is about energy, creativity, inspiration. Liberation is that feeling you get when you break a pattern you weren’t previously aware of.

....

At first glance connection and liberation seem like opposites. Connection might mean strengthening your personal relationships and getting more involved in your community, while liberation might tell you to leave a small-minded community or break free from relationships that hold you back.

But this zero-sum view is too simplistic, because connection and liberation can be allies as well as competitors. Sometimes you need to liberate yourself from bad connections before you can make good connections. And disconnected, alienated people are the ones most likely to loose their freedom to predatory groups and dysfunctional relationships.

....

Now we're in a position describe good spirituality, and how it differs from bad spirituality. Good spirituality serves both connection and liberation. Bad spirituality sacrifices one to the other. The sacrifice can go in either direction. A cult satisfies your connection needs by robbing you of all your independence. A self-indulgent spiritual path liberates you personally by letting the world go hang—your self-expression or pleasure or power are the only considerations, and it doesn’t matter who else gets hurt.

I think that Muder's description of the liberatory project gone wrong is the dangerousness that Reya cautions against. I'm guessing that many of my readers are familiar with examples of folks who are products of psychoanalysis, tantra, Thelema, or Feri gone awry. But that is not an indictment of the liberatory project.

Nor is it an indictment of liberation that Evil Kirk, Captain Jack Sparrow, and so forth are fictional and fanciful. There is definitely a place for these poetic evocations of the yearning for liberation.

Saturn

Ganked directly from Chairman Bruce Sterling.

Saturn eclipsing the sun, as seen from Cassini. If that image doesn't inspire you with awe, you're uninspirable.

Too true. Wow.

Update: NASA offers a bigger version of the image.

Civil war

President Bush explained last week that we're seeing a bit of fringe terrorism in Iraq.

The terrorists understand the threat a democratic Iraq poses to their cause, so they've been fighting a bloody campaign of sectarian violence, which they hope will plunge that country into a civil war. Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war.

Whew. It's a good thing this hasn't turned to civil war. Imagine how bad that would be. The American Civil War, for instance, was a notoriously bloody conflict.

The war produced about 970,000 casualties (3% of the population), including approximately 620,000 soldier deaths

Now that's serious. 3% is a small number for many purposes, but when it comes to this ... well, think of every class you took until you graduated high school. The war would have taken one person out of each of those classes.

The Iraq war isn't that bad, is it?

As it happens, just this week we have probably the best figures yet about Iraqi casualties.

A new survey says more than 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a consequence of the invasion by the United States and Britain, with an estimated 200,000 violent deaths directly attributable to Allied forces.

Even I'm surprised by these numbers. But I believe them. This study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, is the sequel to a controversial study a couple of years ago showing that about 100,000 Iraqis died in the first 18 months of the Iraq war. That previous study was controversial, of course, because war hawks insisted that the war must have made things better in Iraq in every way. Crooked Timber has a thorough review of resources on the subject that convinced me that the original Lancet study was legit, so I presume that the same applies to this new, more thorough, study.

And no, things wouldn't have been even worse under that evil tyrant, Saddam. That 100,000 was how many more died than than would have had we not invaded. Likewise with the new study.

Well, at least we put an end to Saddam's torture chambers. Uh. Or not.

But I digress. How does Iraq stack up against the American Civil War?

The 654,965 deaths estimated to have resulted from the invasion represent about 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population.

See! Another 130,000 Iraqis are gonna have to die before this counts as a civil war.

You may also be wondering how the duration of the Iraq war compares to that of the American Civil War. Confederate troops captured Union forts on 3 March 1861, and Lee surrendered on 9 April 1865, putting the American Civil War at 1498 days. Whereas the Iraq war, which began 20 March 2003, has lasted for only 1301 days.

So not to worry. We've got an entire Friedman to get things sorted out before this becomes a civil war.

Some regular readers may be recalling an earlier post of mine, asking if the US spent longer fighting World War II. Not to worry. We haven't crossed that threshhold yet, either.

We have another month on that clock. So relax.

Today's quote

Keith Olbermann on Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

They are never wrong, and they never regret. Admirable in a French torch singer. Cataclysmic in an American leader.

It's a wonder he isn't on Comedy Central.

An ounce of prevention

Digby provides a good analogy for the Bush Doctrine.

In other words, you can kill your neighbor “in self defense” because you know he hates you, he has weapons in his house (and has talked about getting some more!) and you can't just wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom souffle. Invade his home and kill him. (Oh and hold a gun to his kids' heads and force them to pick a new daddy for the family. That way, it'll be their decision.)

You say you want a revolution?

Well, you know ...

The revolution will not be blogged, will not be blogged,
Will not be blogged, will not be blogged.
The revolution will be no Web diary, brothers;
The revolution will be televised.

I guess I'm missing out on the revolution.

Via Chairman Bruce, who also offers us George Carlin's meditation on similar subjects.

Art direction

With the way Americans seem not to have noticed that we have legalized torture and permanent detention in the US, I'm thinking about art direction. Yeah, art direction.

See, I had mixed feelings about the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, but in at least one respect I thought it was an improvement over Moore and Lloyd's original graphic novel.

In the novel, David Lloyd's detailed linework and use of muted colours not only looked like dreary, gray, rainy England ... it looked like you would imagine a dystopian, fascist England should look. Michael Radford acheived the same thing with the brilliant photography and production design in his film adaptation of Orwell's 1984.

Not to knock David Lloyd's brilliant work in V, but the film actually does something more subversive with its look and tone during the first act. Things just look normal. And people act normally. There are signs that they're living in a fascist society—there are creepy propaganda posters scattered here and there—but people aren't talking about it constantly. They're talking about work, and what they're going to have for lunch, and other ordinary things. Because that's what a totalitarian society looks like, not Lloyd's art or Radford's movie.

This reminder is important, because as IOZ observes:

You talk about Soviet America, or Fascist America, and people look at you like you're nuts because, after all, where are the bread lines? Where is the uniform drabness (well, okay, there's plenty of that)? Where is the oppressive misery?

We seem to believe that every single person in an oppressive regime or one party state spends his days smoking stale cigarettes and waiting to buy stale bread with his stale government paycheck on a dim street in atmospheric drizzle while the party newspaper blows by and a baby carriage rolls down the stairs, or whatever. But hey, there were plenty of Muscovites who lived high and fine during even the slender years of Soviet decline, and there were certainly plenty of Germans and Italians living fine and dandy pretty much until the bombs started falling on their cities.

I found that by way of Jim Henley, who alludes to it before he suggests that maybe the way to think of slip of the US into a corrupt, repressive one-party state is not like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia but like Mexico.

Mexico was a nominally multiparty democracy with all the ceremonies you’d expect but functional one-party rule by a corrupt ruling class willing to use just the level of targeted violence and vote fraud required to keep control. And it was frequently sunny with some great beaches if you could afford them. A very bad place to be between a police captain or party official and something he wanted, and a poor country—that’s how corrupt party-states end up—but by no means the least pleasant place on earth. In your mind the film of Soviet Russia is always black and white and way too cold, but you can only see your mental movie of Mexico in technicolor.

As I've alluded to before, the Germans of the Nazi era thought they were free. And I've said before, American fascism would have to look like a Norman Rockwell painting. So art direction isn't the thing to look for, if you want to know whether it's fascism yet.

Congress just passed a law saying that the President can order people locked up and tortured indefinitely without them ever having a trial. Is it fascism yet? When, exactly, will it be?

Hakim Bey

Bloody hell. I didn’t know.

I just found out that anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson, a.k.a. Hakim Bey, is a pedophile. I’ve written about his long essay Temporary Autonomous Zone on this blog. I feel that it’s my responsibility to my readers, many of whom are acquainted with Wilson’s writing, to inform them about this aspect of his character.

Having brought it up, I want to be very clear and specific.

In America, pedophilia is a magic word that leads to panic, making me a little wary. I don’t want to be making a hysterical condemnation of Wilson. I want to condemn Wilson in as serious and clearhead a way as possible.

This starts with being very clear about the sexual mores in play. In my experience many social conservatives have a hard time understanding this stuff, so let me be a little long-winded.

Consent is the centerpoint of my whole conception of sexual morality. It doesn’t matter to me who’s getting it on with whom, or how. The configuration of bodies is neither moral nor immoral. A man kissing his boyfriend on the lips, a professional dominatrix working over a client with a flogger, four drag queens in a whipped cream orgy ... whether or not I or anyone other than the participants think the act is good (or appealing, or tasteful) is not the moral question. Nor is desire itself moral or immoral. What does matter, morally, is that everyone involved an exchange is consenting to do it: they know what they’re getting into, they’ve agreed to it, there was no coercion, they’re mentally capable of consent.

And that last absolutely excludes children, who simply cannot sexually consent with an adult. The differences in power and understanding are too great for the relationship to not be fundamentally coercive.

I also think it’s important to distinguish thoughts and acts. The best evidence is that the fundamental shape of one’s sexual desire is deep, immutable, and not subject to personal choice. The sexual desire for children — the desire itself — is beyond choice and has no consequences for others. I would not see people punished for having that desire, which is not a sin but a curse.

Yes, that’s a touch of sympathy for pedophiles you’re hearing. To desire partners who cannot consent to your embrace? Who will, in fact, likely be severely harmed by your embrace, by even the knowledge of your desire? To have a sexuality that can never be morally expressed? A nightmare. I don’t have it in my heart to condemn a person for feeling a desire which taunts and tortures them.

But.

Violation of sexual consent is rape, in the first rank of moral crimes. To do this violation with a child, who is profoundly vulnerable and likely to be severely harmed, is truly monsterous. A pedophile who acts on their desires has committed one of the worst imaginable crimes. And making an effort to justify pedophilic acts is perhaps not monsterous, but is certainly repulsive.

Which brings us back to Wilson.

In a long and troubling article from anarchist Robert P. Helms, I see him make clear that Wilson is undoubtedly not only a pedophile in desire, but in unforgivable words and actions.

First, Helms argues that Wilson's anarchism is of a piece with his pedophilia, and serves as a justification for it.

Beginning with the July-August 1985 issue, the [NAMBLA Bulletin] carried a long series of items by Hakim Bey, who was already a distinctly anarchist writer. Most of them were discussions of the paedophile obsession with a clear anarchist slant. Anarchist ideology was the mode of justification, the method of persuading children to have sex and to keep it secret.

Helms provides a poem by Wilson, published in the NAMBLA Bulletin, as an example. Here’s the damning bit.

The touch of his wet, bath-wrinkled fingers in my hand… but then…
one of his parents clumps down the hall… I suppose to make sure neither of us is raping the other…
[chorus of groans] Ohhh! for a
Buster-Keaton-bomb all spherical & black as coaldust with sweet sparkling with sweet sparkling fuse a mindbomb to
Drop on the Idea of the Family! O for a libertarian isle of runaways! O goodnight Moon, I am lost, actually lost without him
But I didn’t want this to be
Just another poem about hopeless love. Pretend it’s a manifesto instead. Down with School! Boy Rule OK! In the land of dreams
No governance exists
But that of anarchs and kings, for dreamers have not yet learned to vote or think past the unfurling of the moment. He touches my cheek, runs delicate fingers through the hairs on my arm.
My liege shatters all Law for a triple kiss.

This makes it very clear — especially if you’ve read some of his more directly anarchist writing — that his anarchist vision is thoroughly entangled with his pursuit of the embrace of young boys.

Further, Helms provides evidence that Wilson has apparently used anarchist circles as an unwholesome way of getting access to children.

In the letters column of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (^#20/21, Nov-Dec 1989, p. 42), a letter announced a new a zine for contributors 17 and under. Wild Children, as the zine was called, solicited articles on “anarchy (of course!), sci-fi, sexuality & love, spiritual paths (or lack thereof), and anything else kids would like to submit.” The letter gave Hakim Bey as the editor, at a Brooklyn PO Box.

In another essay, Helms argues persuasively that this agenda poisons Bey/Wilson’s anarchist writing sufficiently that anyone reading his work should be informed of the connection.

In this writer’s opinion, the pedophile writings of Hakim Bey indicate a general deceit in his philosophy, and are evidence that his concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone is inspired by opportunism, not by good will. He presents arguments for human freedom while actually wishing to create situations where he is free to put his deranged sexuality into practice. This is an abuse of anarchism, and new readers of Hakim Bey should take the pedophilia into consideration before being led “down the garden path.”

And last, and worst, back in the first article Helms quotes Wilson making what sounds like a roundabout admission to consummating his pedophilic desires.

“I admit to a philosophical preference for Mackay's position …” [which means the] “giving up of all false chivalry and self-denying dandyism in favour of more ‘pagan’ and convivial modes of love.” He closes the essay with his clearest anarcho-paedophile statement: “it has taken on a tantalising reality and filtered into my life in certain Temporary Autonomous Zones an impossible time and space and on this brief hint, all my theory is based.” What he means by this is that he really has sex with children, rather than leaving the matter to fantasy, and that this is his purpose when he preaches anarchism.

This, of course, is cause for the most vigorous condemnation. I’ll be linking this essay everywhere I mention Bey / Wilson.

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Update:

Robert P. Helms further underlines how entangled Bey’s pedophilia is with his anarchism.

In this writer’s opinion, the pedophile writings of Hakim Bey indicate a general deceit in his philosophy, and are evidence that his concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone is inspired by opportunism, not by good will. He presents arguments for human freedom while actually wishing to create situations where he is free to put his deranged sexuality into practice. This is an abuse of anarchism, and new readers of Hakim Bey should take the pedophilia into consideration before being led “down the garden path.” Once the awkwardness has been overcome and we look at pedophilia as an item for discussion, we will make very short work of it. All attempts to justify the practice are morally idiotic, and the TAZ is no more than a “Neverland” on the anarchist landscape.

Jeeves vs. Pooh

Via Contentlove, the astonishing story of P.G. Wodehouse, A. A. Milne, and the politics of WWII.

Geneva conventions

This is a direct copy of a post at Making Light which breaks my heart.

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Attention US military personnel

by Jim Macdonald, 2 October 2006

You are not required to obey an unlawful order.

You are required to disobey an unlawful order.

You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The Constitution states (Article VI):

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Here is article 3, the common article, to the Geneva Conventions, a duly ratified treaty made under the authority of the United States:

Article 3

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
   
   To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
   1. Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
   2. Taking of hostages;
   3. Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
   4. The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
   
   An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.
   
   The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.
   
   The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is straightforward and clear. Under Article VI of the Constitution, it forms part of the supreme law of the land.

You personally will be held responsible for all of your actions, in all countries, at all times and places, for the rest of your life. “I was only following orders” is not a defense.

What all this is leading to:

If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, it is your duty to disobey that order. No “clarification,” whether passed by Congress or signed by the president, relieves you of that duty.

If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, this is what to do:

1. Request that your superior put the order in writing.
2. If your superior puts the order in writing, inform your superior that you intend to disobey that order.
3. Request trial by courtmartial.

You will almost certainly face disciplinary action, harassment of various kinds, loss of pay, loss of liberty, discomfort and indignity. America relies on you and your courage to face those challenges.

We, the people, need you to support and defend the Constitution. I am certain that your honor and patriotism are equal to the task.

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This post may be quoted in full. A linkback would be appreciated.

RAW

In case you haven't heard yet, Robert Anton Wilson needs our help.

October surprise

Via Ken MacLeod, the following news items:

The US Navy, three days ago.

Nearly 6,500 Sailors departed Oct. 3 with the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) Carrier Strike Group (IKE CSG)

The Nation, ten days ago.

the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major “strike group” of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

Turns out they are rushing things.

The Eisenhower had been in port at the Naval Station Norfolk for several years for refurbishing and refueling of its nuclear reactor; it had not been scheduled to depart for a new duty station until at least a month later, and possibly not till next spring. Family members, before the orders, had moved into the area and had until then expected to be with their sailor-spouses and parents in Virginia for some time yet.

What's their mission?

According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

Hmmnn. Election day is November 7. The ships should be in place two weeks before that.

What do you think will happen?

Size matters

Warren Ellis has been thinking about the form factor of comic books and paperback books.

It’s why paperbacks were such a revolution: they were cheap and they could be stuffed in a pocket.
....
Portable culture is crucial to any society in motion. Manga in all its indigenous forms has been a thing built for Japanese commuters. Part of why that style of anthology doesn’t play so well in America is that America’s a culture of private cars, not public transport.

Holy McLuhan, Batman!

And I thought my blog was frivolous

Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke in 500 words or less

Marmaduke is interrogated by Owner-Man about an inflammatory dog-authored diatribe that was published in that day's newspaper, as if he is the only dog in town who would write a letter to the editor. Marmaduke resents the implication, so he ignores the question and keeps napping in Owner-Man's chair.

Every day.

Charity

I live and work downtown in San Francisco; my apartment is on the periphery of the seedy Tenderloin district. I encounter beggars every day. I've given a lot of thought to how I respond to the hand outstretched. In this town, you have to.

I do not — I could not — offer money to everyone who asks, but as much as possible I try to at least recognize their humanity. I say “sorry,” or “not today,” or shrug. Sometimes a minute's conversation seems like a greater kindness than the change in my pocket. I try to make eye contact as much as possible.

And sometimes I'll decide that a little change, or a dollar or three, is the right thing to do. Maybe because I want to reward a beggar for asking so politely. Maybe it's someone who looks crazy enough to really need it. Maybe a lean kid on the road looks to have gotten herself into a tight spot, and will soon return home, having learned a valuable lesson. Maybe I just admire a well-executed example of the beggar's craft. The quarter I once paid to have a traffic light changed from red to green was a fair payment for the laugh I got from the offer.

Once a well-dressed stranger confronted me, angry, because I gave five dollars to a heartbreakingly strung-out crack addict. “Don't you realize that man is going to spend that money on drugs?” I told him the truth: I had looked at a man whose body was lying to him, telling him that he was going to die if he didn't get his fix, and lacking the power to free that man of his addiction the best thing I could think to do in that moment was to help relieve his pain a little.

There are a couple of folks I see on the street where I always stop and chat and give them five or ten or even twenty dollars if I have it. Casie is good-hearted and polite, sane enough to really benefit from a little money but far too mad to rejoin the working world; I've been giving him money for a decade now and I'm frankly surprised that he's survived so long. Anthony is ebullient and witty and forever plotting to get his life together; his addictions are stronger than he is, but I admire his cheerful determination.

And yes, of course, I also give money to charities that do a much more systematic job of these things than I can. I'm a soft touch. I know I am.

I want to quote an entire short post from Bluce about a beggar we both have seen downtown.

the test results came up negative

There's a beggar on the corner outside my office. Every morning I see him sitting crosslegged on the curb with a sign that says, “testing for human kindness.”

That sign is so heartwrenching, whenever I walk past him I have a strong urge to kick him in the face.

My point is not that I'm so much more compassionate than Bluce. My point is that I know exactly how he feels.

The city wears you down. I walk twenty minutes from office to home each night, and if only a dozen beggars come to me on that walk, it's been an easy day. I said I try to make eye contact with every one. But that's “I try,” because I fail. Sometimes I'm tired, or preoccupied, or in a hurry, and the beggars are too wretched, or hostile, or otherwise impossible to engage with in my current state.

Buddha compassion is limitless, but my time and money and energy are not limitless, so there are days when I feel fresh out of Buddha compassion. There are days when I hear the voice from my reptilian brainstem that wants to kick a beggar in the face, out of sheer frustration with the whole situation. It's human. The frustration and the compassion both, human.

The thing that's really happening is that Bluce and I are having our circuits blown by our circumstances. Remember I started by saying that I've given a lot of thought to how I respond to beggars because I have to. If I tried to respond completely fresh, a dozen or more times a day, I could not hold it together. Choosing a philosophy for dealing with beggars may be called wisdom, but it could also be called a scar.

This, I think, is the hidden meaning to all those myths where a king or an angel or a god comes to town disguised as a beggar, and judges the whole society on the basis of the aid they do or do not receive. It's not a caprice, where a few random individuals encountered by the faux beggar bear inordinate responsibility on their shoulders. It's not a test of the virtue of the citizens, as though the people of one place would have more kindness in their hearts than the people of another.

No, it's a test of the society as a whole because it's a test of whether that society exhausts the compassion of individuals. If the society systematically cares for its citizens who are poor, or lost, or broken, or mad, then individuals in that society will encounter the open hand rarely, and have the strength to respond with an open heart when they do meet it. If a society lets its needy wander the streets, then its' people's individual compassion will be quickly exhausted.

I'm a person who takes myths seriously. So I worry about the fate of my society.

Updates

Vinay Gupta on “selfish helplessness”.

Test, a little story

Gods and Beggars, a meditation from Sarah Gailey about this theme in their novelette Fisher of Bones.

Perhaps the Beggar-God is looking for a culture where such sacrificial giving is a natural, compassionate response to the suffering of another, because the idea of turning one’s back on such suffering is simply unthinkable.

A Twitter thread from Ana Mardoll.

Every time I give this ^$20 bill to the person who finds me, two things happen. (EVERY TIME.)

1. The person asking for money tries to give it back to me because “^$20 is too much!”
2. The people who observe this interaction get angry and scold me afterwards.

David Roberts at his mailing list Volts rejects the trolly problem, which leads him to explain Why I Am A Progressive.

Life is composed of dozens of small decisions every day, decisions in which conflicting interests and principles must be resolved, long-term benefits, personal and social, weighed against short-term desires. To maximize the net welfare of society, which ought to be our goal, we need to improve those decisions, incrementally, at the margins, bit by bit.

We do that by creating better moral agents, which we know how to do. We make sure that everyone has their basic needs cared for; that every family expecting a baby receives prenatal care and basic childcare training; that every family with a new child receives time off from work and regular nurse visits; that every child has access to quality public education, from pre-school through college; and that every adult receives adequate health care and housing. We create a compassionate, law-bound society that incentivizes prosocial behaviors.

Doors

I think the door vault chase at the end of Monsters, Inc. is probably the greatest science fiction film ever made.

I'm serious. It takes the idea of the magic closet doors and really follows through on the implications. It acheives an effect that really is best suited to film—in fact, would have been impossible to do nearly as well in anything other than a 3D animated film. The result is playful, inventive, unique, kinetic, visually exciting, and intellectually delightful. A milestone in the history of film, no exaggeration.

It understands something that I've mentioned before, “Professor” Brian Moriarty's chant to his brethren and sistren in the computer game industry.

The cyberpunk conception of virtual reality is not really very interesting. Only a hacker would find the problem of avatar collision interesting.
...
Space and time are not intrinsic properties of virtual presence. Space and time will not exist in virtual presence unless we bring them with us. Space and time are boring. Let's not invite them.

Via Cobb, I learn that someone in the computer game business has finally taken the lesson. Wow. Even if you have no taste for games, you should go take a look; it's brilliant. Even the format of the demo is exceptionally witty.

Nontransitive dice

Dig this crazy math.

The game involves four specially numbered dice. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three dice. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins the throw. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more throws, you will nearly always have more wins.

You can then invite your opponent to pick a different die, perhaps even the one that worked so well for you. You select one of the remaining dice. Again, in a game of at least 10 throws, you're very likely to come out the winner.

Indeed, it doesn't matter which die your opponent picks.

There has got to be some cool application for these dice, but I cannot think of what it could possibly be.