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Friday, December 24, 2004Coming soon, movie and music reviews. For now...Merry Christmas!
posted by gbarto at 11:12 PM Wednesday, December 22, 2004Hobbits, Menehune and BiodiversityGuytak, who is also found on the gbarto.com server, has an interesting post on the "hobbits" found on Indonesia, the Menehune of Hawaii and New Zealand and the possibility of actual hobbits roaming the hills of Merry Olde England. While his questions about little people provide the same sort of fun as the Charlie Rose interview with Paul Nurse that started his thought process, a bigger question is raised - of the sort that eco-liberals probably don't want people thinking about: Does natural selection really lead to (bio)diversity? Here is my theory: perhaps the range of humanity in terms of height was greater in the past than it is today. Perhaps "Natural Selection" weeded out the "unfit" extremes and left the middle to survive.If so, are we helping mother nature by promoting biodiversity when we try to repopulate eco-systems with locally endangered species? Or are we throwing her off kilter by creating an artificial pocket of life that consumes resources needed by other species but that can no longer use them efficiently enough to contribute to the balance on its own? Save the whales? Certainly. Save the Southern Tallahassee County dribbling snail lest we only have Northern Tallahassee County dribbling snails left? A tougher call. (The snail varieties are made up for rhetorical effect; no need to look them up for societies to contribue to.)
posted by gbarto at 6:05 PM Monday, December 20, 2004In response to this Belmont Club post about AP grabbing live-action shots of the triple murder of election officials, one poster wonders if it's safe to consider the AP an enemy:This is not "aid and comfort" to terrorists. On the contrary, it is active cooperation with them in providing the pipeline of information that is at the heart of terrorist tactics: the communication of information in the present that is intended to strike fear...Wretchard notes the language used to describe the gunmen. The tone and tenor are not dissimilar from what you'd expect from the coverage of a rally by a Democratic candidate for office. These guys are definitely with the enemy. The question is why. Short and sweet answer? Terrorism works quickest on the faint of heart. And for all the b.s. we hear about the intrepid reporter taking any risk to find the truth, the average journo picked his career because it looked pretty in the movies, not because he'd lived a life that let him know there were deadly important stories to be told. These AP jokers, just like the espèces de merde working for Paris Match didn't pick sides on principle or even anti-Americanism. Rather, they're like the CNN collabos who were in Iraq pre-war: They like to pretend to bold, important missions while having their tushies covered, so they screw around with the side that won't shoot them and busts its ass not to shoot any innocents. So don't go overboard figuring out the political motives of the folks playing the anti-US angles. All you need to know is who they need to sell out to if they want minimum risk carnage shots with minimum risk of consequences. You'll never see an AP story about Marines boldly and bravely shutting down a group of insurgents because we have a free press; AP doesn't need to buy us off.
posted by gbarto at 7:49 PM My knowledge of Abélard and Héloïse is limited to a stanza from Villon's "Où sont les neiges d'antan?" and the footnote at the bottom of the page in my edition of his Testament (was it the big one or the little one? - must have been Le Grand Testament). Here is the stanza: Où est la très sage Héloïse,Funny thing, though. You take a story of forbidden love and a castrated monk and some on the left think, "He's our boy." GetReligion notes how a commentator in Salon assumed that Abélard's prosecutor must have been the W of his day. Cicero points out how interesting it is that if the liberals find someone to have been transgressive, they assume they've found a kindred spirit. Actually, sadly, curiously, the liberals' best friend in this whole game is the decidedly illiberal Sade, who was not only transgressive but assumed that his physical power and power as a noble gave him the right to make use of people from the lower orders however he saw fit. Strangely, the man gets quasi-celebrated in films like Quills, even though he carved up and abused prostitutes among other things. It is left to relatively conservative academics like Roger Shattuck to answer De Beauvoir's query, "Faut-il brûler Sade?" with something approaching a "oui." (The libertarian leaning TurkeyBlog says, pourquoi pas? I'd oppose banning him, but if the reprints slowed and he disappeared from the 18th c. French lit reading list, I don't think the wolrd would be missing much.) The Abélard issue comes from the other direction, with the transgressiveness being assumed due to the transgression, though it appears Abélard's biggest sins were doctrinal, not sexual. The Salon article that launched the discussion seems to really fall into the trap. At least, GetReligion reports that its author was disappointed by the lack of exploration of Héloïse's S&M fantasies. The TurkeyBlog suspects some serious overreading of texts regarding submission to God's will, something they took pretty seriously back in the day.
posted by gbarto at 2:51 AM Here's Hewitt with the latest on Target. Very brief thoughts: 1) businesses do have a right to decide how and to whom they will donate. 2) the reflexive hurt feelings and sinister suspicions of the Salvation Army's backers were over the top. 3) if I were running a corporation with multiple good causes asking for support, I'd be ordering extra aspirin and Pepto-Bismol and, worse, be trying to decide whether the best charities to help weren't the ones that practiced social blackmail most effectively. Will we see Operation PUSH kettles next year? 4) though Target was within its rights and the SA backers showed less than Christian attitudes in suspecting and asserting the worst about Target... when you're beat, you're beat. It's time to seek some sort of conciliation. What's most unfortunate in the whole mess is that conciliation will be difficult. Hugh says: Only vanity explains the decision to dig in and double down, when an honest admission of error and a change of policy could recover the situation, and get the Salvation Army the support it needs to care for the country's least and lostBut given the way Target was villified, it's natural that the management team would dig in. If you call me Satan's second cousin and accuse me of wanting to starve the poor, I'm likely to get defensive too. Hugh says an honest admission of error would do, but the comment traffic I saw when this hit the front pages wasn't looking for "admission of error," it was looking for blood vengeance against the pagan heathens. Of future e-mails, Hugh says: Another e-mail might help, but one that strikes the "more in sorrow than in anger" tone. Send it to guest.relations@target.com, or use the other contact info the corporation provides.This is what good, open-hearted Christians should have been sending in the first place. Those who reflexively assumed their faith was under assault again showed no more charity than Target has. And they put the CEO in one hell of a bind. Hugh again: The CEO ought to overrule all the lower-downs who put him into this position and issue a welcome back invitation and work to get the kettles back this year.In other words, he ought to announce, "I'm a good guy and I'm sorry about the idiots I entrust with the management of different aspects of this company." That makes for real productive staff meetings. Target blew the call in cancelling on the Salvation Army. No question. But a lot of good Christians blew their call in turn, labelling stupid management as the second cousin of the Anti-Christ without looking for either legitimate reasons why their wishes were denied or ways to assume the best about people and provide an opportunity for it to be brought out. What's sad is this is not, ultimately, about "a pox on both their houses." It's a pox on the homes of those who look to the Salvation Army for help this time of year. Hopefully, by next year the pissing contest between good Christians who know when they're being dissed and Target's oblivious management will have been sufficiently forgotten that Target can quietly recommence working with the SA. But for this year, I'm not optimistic. After the onslaught that followed the first major complaints against Target, any Target executive of good faith has as much reason to be wary of Salvation Army backers as sensitive Christians have to be wary of mega-corporations. Let's hope that next time, 1) the mega-corporations will do a better job feeling out how to approach these things and 2) the good Christians will take a little more interest in saving those who they see as having strayed and a little less interest in drawing blood for their righteous cause.
posted by gbarto at 1:59 AM AOL is running their usual weekend "Omigod! Look how bad things are in Iraq!" story. Here's the TurkeyBlog's take from two weeks ago when we had roughly the same breathless headlines. Brief summary: I'm concerned, of course, about the violence. Feel bad for those affected. But still, this insurgency isn't really going anywhere because it has no positive agenda. The insurgents have demonstrated yet again their ability to massacre Iraqis. They haven't given any indication that they could govern them, even as despots, much less ameliorate their circumstances. The sooner elections are held, the better, so that the Iraqi government can act on the authority of that part of society that believes in or is at least willing to play along with the idea of self-government. If the Sunni heartland isn't ready, too damn bad for them. They don't seem to want democracy at the moment, and don't deserve to have everyone else bust their butts to give it to them. Let 'em spend a few years in the wilderness so that the law-abiding, ordinary citizenry have a good reminder both of how much of a damn the insurgency really gives for them and the costs of playing it cool with the thugs when Americans, Brits, Aussies and others, including fellow Iraqis, are risking life and limb to bring them a stabler place to live.
posted by gbarto at 1:06 AM |
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