"people tend to misbehave"

Bush speaks! On Thanksgiving! With a message of America's universal compassion and general awseomness. NYT:

this year, the White House hoped to show a more contemplative side of Mr. Bush, who, his aides say, has been struck by the goodness of the many ordinary Americans he meets during his travels

Of course, only to a closed group of prescreened supporters.

Menwhile, USA Today writes about an initiative designed to keep all such events off of college campuses. The Soapbox Alliance wants to preserve the traditions of the founders and encourage presidential connection with the all the people. Some responses:

"[L]etting in radicals that just want to make a mess of their event — what good would that do?" [David Horowitz... guess you know how radicals behave, right you old hack?]

"Do you want to cut off that revenue stream?" [Democratic operative]

...and the classic statement of Bushian fascism:
"It's a nice concept, but people tend to misbehave," says Trent Duffy, former deputy press secretary for President Bush.

Talk to the stormtroopers, buddy.

Carpetbagger Report here.

steampunk

Interesting video from WSJ Online about a custom-maker of steampunk style computers. He calls himself Datamancer and his site is here (scanner example). So sweet!!

Assassins!

Kevin Drum asks whether assassins really succeed in their goals, or whether they set them back. I had always assumed the latter... my historical studies have shown that violence begets violence.

But Henry Farrell chimes in with a link to a new study "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War" (pdf here) that says "on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy". Interesting.

HF also links to another study (Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, "The Political Consequences of Assassination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming) whose findings

support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations’ effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated

Interesting pair of articles.

why we hate... or think we do

Article online (In-Mind.org) by social psychologist Alex Gunz summarizing some useful research into authoritarian politics. Interesting critique of the Frankfurt School:

Psychologists have long noted people's over-fondness (at least in the western world) for explaining actions in terms of the personalities of the actors involved. We tend to neglect the possibility that a person who falls, for example, might have been tripped, and that they aren't just clumsy. This bias is so commonplace that psychologists have named it the fundamental attribution error. Perhaps it isn't surprising, then, that the first attempt to explain prejudice chalked it up to an authoritarian personality.

Goes on to talk about Altemeyer, recent takes on this issue. Pretty good intro usable for students.

and then there were five...

BBC reports on five remaining British veterans of WWI. Includes video interviews with Harry Patch, Claude Choules, William Stone, Syd Lucas, and Henry Allingham -- the last one 111 years old!! Tough old bastards, all of em.

BBC One will air a special program this Sunday (Remembrance Sunday, the 11th).

telecom complicity confirmed

Mark Klein's story hits the NYT today. Story isn't that great compared to his Countdown performance an hour ago.

The difference in coverage is telling: NYT focuses on the congressional implications at the expense of the details. They don't even mention the specifics: that he knew the setup and all the equipment, had to maintain it and had a schematic. And on that are splitters copying all internet and phone traffic. Keith kept repeating "Room 614A" as it it were Room 101. (Go Keith!) NYT didn't even name it.

But hopefully this will shake things up.

wingnut welfare wars!

FDL chuckles at how Regency's authors are suing them for not sharing enough of the "profits". I never knew the bloggers were in on the welfare. From an earlier FDL post on it:

When the wingnuts chant their talking points like a bunch of tambourine-beaters at the airport, they want to be paid for their efforts. And Pajamas Media was set up to do just that. They received by some accounts $7 million dollars to subsidize 70 right wing bloggers, and if you look at their sites there are no ads, many don’t even identify their affiliation with a logo. Look at some full-on loon like the Confederate Yankee who earns his/her 800 hits a day by having seizures over Google’s attempts to mock Christmas with Jesus butt plugs. The General will easily draw twenty times the traffic with his rapier-witted takedown, but the Confederate Yankee probably earns a lot more money than the General. These illiterate zeros are being paid out of principal, not out of any ad revenues. They are all Armstrong Williams.

Ha. But it's an interesting point on how successful they've been spreading their message. I guess they have more money than we do :(

EDIT: Regnery. All this time and I just read it right for the first time. Not Regency, Regnery. Lol.

nazi news

All from the SPCL's Hatewatch:

IHT reports on a Texan's address to Russian neo-nazis:

"I'm taking my hat off as a sign of respect for your strong identity in ethnicity, nation and race," he said, exposing his close-cropped head to a freezing drizzle.

"Glory to Russia," Wiginton, 43, said in broken Russian, as the crowd of mostly young Russian men raised their right hands in a Nazi salute and chanted "white power!" in English.

Racist nationalism on the rise. Ethnic cleansing to follow. The Jews are definitely in trouble, as are any ethnic minorities in south.

And the Modesto Bee (cute!) reports that a white supremacist has just been convicted of robbery and murder. But in an interesting twist,

Two words scrawled over Milam's eyebrows, "Aryan Honor," never were mentioned during his two-week trial because his white supremacist beliefs did not have a direct connection with his crimes.

Fair trial and all! God bless America!

more writing tips from Left Behind

Slacktivist's continuing evisceration of LB brings us to an interesting problem for writers of fiction: when you describe your characters as superlative, you'd better be able to back that up with your own prose. He offers three rules to avoid this trap (abridged):

1. Don't write about great poets....

2. If you're not writing a fairy tale, avoid superlative characters....

3. Be very careful about big scenes in which your preternaturally talented character wins over the crowd with an awe-inspiring display of his/her art/skill/cleverness/humor/charm. Such scenes are less likely to inspire awe than they are to result in anticlimax, with readers losing respect for you, your character and your character's audience, in that order.

Same problem with Studio 60 -- the show was supposed to be teh funniest evah, but the writers couldn't reproduce teh funny. So in practice you saw very little of what should've been the center of the show.

smoking gun on rendition

ABC news reports on the system:

In this secret facility known to prisoners as "The Hangar" and believed to be at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, al Libi told fellow "ghost prisoners," one recalled to me for a PBS "Frontline" to be broadcast tonight, an incredible story of his treatment over the previous two years: of how questioned at first by Americans, by the FBI and then CIA, of how he was threatened with torture. And then how he was rendered to a jail cell in Egypt where the threats became a reality.

In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi's interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for "further debriefing."

Torture of people and of the English language. Brought to you by the people who were upset at Clinton's parsing of the "definition of 'is'" and promised to restore honor and dignity to the White House. Fuck you all.

Vonnegut's rules

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

adventures of Mary Sue

Learned a new term today: the Mary Sue story.

Mary Sue literary theory has changed my professional life. Before, when discussing manuscripts with my colleagues, I had to say things “You know, one of those books that keeps telling you how wonderful and talented and perfect the main character is and how much everyone loves her, but aside from that there’s nothing at stake and nothing really happens? No logic, no causality, no narrative development, just that character being wonderful every barfy step of the way?”

Generally they knew what I meant; we see a lot of books like that. But those conversations have gotten much easier now that I can say things like ... “I sent it back. The agent was all excited about how the author’s ‘expanding into a new genre’, but it’s just a Mary Sue with jousting scenes pasted in.”

Teh funny. Also includes link to cartoon showing the inevitable effects on Hogwarts when all these Marys show up at the same time.

Hat tip Slavkivist, whose post in his AWESOME Left Behind series brought here here.

slouching toward fascism, part whatever

Firedoglake spikes my alarmism.

Jim Hightower wonders whether a coup has already taken place.

Daniel Ellsberg is concerned as well.

Ron Rosenbaum wonders why the White House is hiding its disaster plans from Congress.

USA Today reports that the terrorist watch list is expanding by 200,000 names a year.

Blackwater's e-newsletter whips up its readers' paranoia (Assassinations! Threat to small planes!! Peak oil CIVILIZATION IS ENDING!!!)

And Frank Rich calls us the Good Germans.

Can I just move back to Germany before we need permission to travel??

blogofascism

Dunno if Lee Siegel would count fascism from, oh, the right... but here's some scary intimidation and stalking of a lefty blogger -- all the way past HIS DEATH. Fuckers. Original post at DU:

What followed was a coordinated effort to block Andy’s medical care or his benefit from the medical care we could secure for him. In specific, the Bush right had its agents make small donations so they could then call Paypal with allegations of fraud that froze Andy’s account. They also called Paypal, misrepresenting themselves as the hospital to “verify” that this effort was a scam.

And it got more vicious from there. Due to the frozen funds and the confusion it caused us all, Andy’s surgery date was cancelled by Johns Hopkins. It was with great difficulty that we were able to persuade the doctor to be put Andy back into the surgical rotation. That cost him two weeks while he suffered from the most aggressive, invasive form of cancer.

And after he eventually died, they still kept up the harassment. Fuckers!!

mirror neurons

Neuroscientists have discovered "gandhi neurons" that mirror the emotions of others. Cool find of possible use for first week evo psych, or week eight hinduism stuff. (Salon)

Like many of science's great accomplishments, mirror neurons were discovered by accident. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team at the University of Parma were studying motor neurons in the frontal cortex of macaques and had attached tiny electrodes to individual cells in the monkeys so they could watch how very specific hand movements were initiated in the brain. When a wired-up monkey picked up a peanut, the neuron fired. But to Rizzolatti's surprise, the same motor neuron also fired when a perfectly still monkey was watching a lab assistant pick up the peanut.

Why would a motor neuron fire when there was no motor action? They not only fired when the macaques tore a piece of paper and saw a piece of paper torn by another macaque, but also when the monkeys merely heard the sound of paper being torn, without any visual stimulus at all. Many tests and retests later revealed the whole new class of brain cells, mirror neurons, located in the parts of the macaques' brain that process both sensory information and kindle emotions.

Pretty cool.

maleblogging

Some good sources to use for militant masculinity, all based on the most recent popping up of the (in)famous "Pussification of the American Male".

"D" over at Lawyers, Guns and Money discusses this classic rant in relation to TR and 1900-era masculinity. (Cites Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization, 1995) The "Pussification" is of course hilarious. But then:

But my students and I noticed something interesting. Speaking in April 1899 -- just a few months after the Spanish-American war ended -- Roosevelt condemned the "pussification" of American men while calling upon them to suppress the Philippine insurrection; over the next few years, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos would die as the country learned what "the strenuous life" was all about. Writing in November 2003 -- just a few months after the Iraq War had supposedly ended -- du Toit similarly condemned the "pussification" of American men while calling upon them to drive fast, get drunk, and emulate Donald Rumsfeld (who, he insisted at the time, could have laid nearly every woman in the country over the age of 50); over the past few years, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, in large part so that men like Donald Rumsfeld would not have to wake up in the morning and see a "pussy" staring back at them in the mirror. Kim du Toit, I suppose, should be so fortunate.

Possible assignment.

WWI blogger

This takes milblogging to a whole 'nother level. Posts letters of a WWI vet 90 years to the day after they were written. Sweet!