The Free Market of Ideas

The fact that they believe they will lose the debate without that legal coercion speaks volumes about how confident they actually are in the rightness and persuasiveness of their views.
-Glenn Greenwald

This is an almost perfect encapsulation of what I think every time I come across someone who wants to legislate morality or squelch the other side of any debate or conversation.  If your ideals and ideas can't stand up to scrutiny and can't survive the crucible of reasoned argument and debate, if they can't be compared side-by-side and win on the merits, then maybe you ought to reconsider them, because by refusing to allow opposing ideals and ideas to be aired you are more or less saying outright that you don't think that yours are very strong and you don't have very much faith in them.

"I was born," the Mouse said.  "I must die.  I am suffering.  Help me.  There, I just wrote your book for you."
-Samuel R. Delany, Nova p175

Quick Note

So, turns out I will not be blogging the Clarion experience.  Our first instructor, Delia Sherman, made a very good case last night as to why we should not (having mostly to do with focusing on our work), and I have decided to bow to her wisdom and the strength of her arguments.

As a result, I expect posting will be sparser than previously expected, though you never know:  I may just take it into my head here and there along the way to spit something out that I'm thinking about that doesn't fit into any of the things I'm doing here.  You'll just have to check periodically and see.

I will, however, continue with my plan to post micro- and flash-fiction, along with various fragments and cast-offs from what I'm working on, on my Facebook Writer page.  So if you just really need a fix, try that.

1200 Miles Later

I have arrived in San Diego.  Too tired to talk in detail about the trip (which was good) or the four fellow Clarionistas I've met thus far (they're awesome), but I am here, and this is happening, and, so far at least, noone's popped up and said "Smile! You're on Candid Camera" so I'm just going to continue on the assumption that this is not some elaborate hoax played by the forces of evil on yours truly.

Perhaps tomorrow I will be less exhausted, and I will blog more blogfully about what's happening, but for now I am pretty well done in by three days on the road and reunions with friends old and new.  Those few who're just absolutely jonesing for some content can look to my Writer page on Facebook, where I posted a little splash of a thing that I made tonight.  Not sure how I feel about it, if I like it or not, but I promised myself I'd put new content up there most every day, and I didn't want to not do it on the first day.  So there.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

Change is coming to the anticontrarian blog.  Those of you that already read it probably know that I'm attending the Clarion Writers' Workshop this year (indeed, in two days).  Those of you who've found your way here from elsewhere probably know that, too, come to think of it.

Up til now, this blog has been whatever I wanted it to be:  rants on politics, work, and people in general; a few stabs at philosophy; links to things I think are cool or funny; other cool, funny things that I embedded; quotes from other writers that struck me for some reason and that I wanted to share; the occasional aphorism.

However, given the focus I expect to exert over the coming six weeks on writing and craft and particularly the craft of writing short fiction, I expect the focus of this blog will also change to reflect that.  I imagine I'll still post interesting quotations and/or the occasional video of a dancing cat.  But I'm moving into a phase where I'll be focusing almost exclusively on fiction writing, and so the political stuff and general internet-related weirdness is likely to decrease.

The plan is that I'll use the anticontrarian blog to write about writing, about the workshop and the things I'm learning there, and how I'm applying them to my own work, both at Clarion and on other projects (most notably my novel-in-progress, which is provisionally entitled GoATDaD and the Army of Monkeys).

Those of you who are interested in what I'm actually producing are invited to view my Facebook Writer page, under my full name:  Dallas Simmons Taylor.  I would be grateful if you hit the like button there.

I won't be making any longer-form fiction available online in the immediate future (and I haven't really tried selling any yet), but I will be posting flash- and micro-fiction pieces there, along with interesting phrases and fragments from works in progress that I like but can't use.  I hope you enjoy them.

Welcome to my brand new world; I'll show you around once I figure out where the lights are.

Two Haiku I Wrote a Couple of Years Ago

The mountain looming
over my fair city will
one day destroy it.

Paranoia may
destroy ya, but only if
They don't get you first.

Yup

There are many ways to distinguish between the two major political parties in the United States, but one of the more obvious ways is in how they choose to implode. Democrats, for example, tend to implode in slow motion, when their own aimless, plodding inertia turns them into lugubrious and easy targets for the right wing media, which scurries around them, draping yet another thin, disingenuous stratum of “they’re socialist grandmother killers!” over them until the whole sludgy edifice collapses from the accumulated weight, and the Democrats are crushed underneath. Republicans, on the other hand, implode like old, fat, gassy stars, when the depleted fuel of their empty ideology can’t sustain further inward pressure from their personal idiocy, and the whole mess sucks down and then spectacularly erupts into a blazing display of abject stupidity.
-John Scalzi

Warm Fuzzy Moments

Me to my friend (whose son was born a couple of months ago):  So how's fatherhood treating you?

My friend:  Like the first chapter of a book that you know you're gonna love.

Obama's Oval Office Speech

Can be viewed here.

In all, I can't say I was impressed.  For me, this was a lost opportunity, a chance to go big, and ask the American people to rise to the historical occasion in a meaningful way.  Which, frankly, he didn't.  Far as I could tell, his grand call to arms was sort-of kind-of urging the Senate to pass the Climate and Energy bill that passed in the House a few months ago.  Oh, and to pray.

As somebody said in the comment thread at the Washington Monthly (and I'm paraphrasing here), when the President tells the American people to pray, we are well and truly f-cked.

Here's what I would have liked to have seen:

Fascinating Stuff

It's interesting.  I had a very similar notion about the northern/southern nation prosperity gap a long time ago, which I attributed to weather, rather than time.

True Dat

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but you always lose if you never try.
-John Cole

Night never leaves the Atchafalaya, she just lies up through the heat of the day, same as the rest of the swamp creatures.  Live in the swamp long enough, you'll see her pooled in the deep cypress groves or hiding out in the black depths of a mangrove ticket, patient and sure, biding her time.  Now and then, you'll catch a glimpse of her in mid-day, in the wind-driven shudder of a palmetto leaf or in the languid dapple of Spanish moss, draping the trees like cast-off wedding finery, ivory veils aging slowly to an antique gray.  Then the sun starts down.  Slowly, imperceptibly, night takes hold.  She steals invisibly across the water, like smoke; she spills out from the wells of shadow beneath our houses.  Night's like love.  She creeps in and takes possession of everything you ever knew or hoped to know without so much as a by-your-leave.  She takes dominion of your heart before you ever know she's there.
-Dale Bailey, from The Census Taker (The Resurrection Man's Legacy, p 164)

On Dying, and What Happens After

About a month ago, my grandmother passed away after a long period of mental and physical deterioration.  She was ninety-six, and had had a good long life, with children and grandchildren and even a couple of great-grandchildren who gave her great joy.  She died peacefully in her sleep, and we buried her next to my grandfather not far from where they'd lived their lives and raised their children.

She had a Catholic funeral, since she was a devout Catholic her whole life (her last words, so far as I know, were near-endless iterations of Our Fathers and Hail Marys), and we all agreed that it was right and proper, since she remained strong in her faith to the end, even if none of us really shared it.

And that's the thing I'm wrestling with.  Not the funeral, but her faith, and, I guess, what (if anything) it means for her after death, and what that means for me.

My Entry for the Scalzi/Wheaton Fanfic Contest

If you'd like to know what the following is about, click here.  It'll make a lot more sense when you see the picture.

Behold, this Last of Days has come.  Dark clouds roil.  Volcanoes thrust themselves skyward, hurling dust and ash into the clouds, which cause them to roil even more roilishly.  Magma flows, glowing in the darkness, which is good, because otherwise the dark, roiling clouds, which have blocked out the sun entirely, would make it too dark to see, completely ruining the atmosphere; but it’s also bad, because magma is hot and will kill you if you touch it.  Believe me, I should know.  Not that I’ve ever touched magma, because if I had, I’d be dead, and  obviously I’m not, ‘cause if I was then who would be telling you this?  Not me, that’s for sure.  But I saw it once on TV, maybe an episode of Jackass or something.  To tell you the truth I don’t really remember.  Maybe I just read about it somewhere, like on the internet or something.  Anyway, it’s not important.  What is important is that there’s no lightning, which seems weird when you think about it, but it makes sense because then the colors would be all wrong, because lightning is kind of blue-tinged, and the theme for Behold this Last of Days is definitely red and not blue, and if it were blue, well, I can’t really imagine it would be this Last of Days because even if it was lightning-ing, that would mean it was probably going to rain, which makes plants grow, and if it’s Behold this Last of Days then that probably means that there aren’t any plants anymore anyway, so lightning is out for lots of reasons, not least of which is that there isn’t any.
Anyway, where was I?

If it wasn't for high school poetry, this would be the dumbest, most fatuous thing anybody's ever written.

Pure, freakin' gold.

Also, Too

In our fear, we create false histories devoid of our failures and full of super-human heroes.  We fabricate an impoverished, monochromatic history that tells us we’re wonderful and always have been.  We lie to ourselves about who we are and what we’ve done.
We lie to our students, our children, because we fear that if they learn the truth they will lose all respect for our society, they will despise our government, they will “overthrow” our power structure.
In short, we lie because we’re afraid of our kids.
-Russell King

...what we Americans are is not a stew but a salad, in which all the individual ingredients retain their unique flavors and nutrients but combine to create a greater meal.  This has always been true, as we have always been a nation of immigrants, and it is even more true today as we become ever more diverse.
-Russell King

Libertarianism and the Limits of Ideology

Just in case you've been hiding under a rock these last couple of days, here's Rachel Maddow's interview with newly-minted Libertarian Senate Candidate Rand Paul (R-KY), son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, in which he admits that he'd probably have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on ideological grounds (can't seem to get the video to embed).

For what it's worth, I don't think that Rand Paul is a racist. He goes to great lengths to say so, and I'm willing to believe him. He even comes across as a not unreasonable guy, who takes his beliefs seriously, even when they lead to conclusions that are difficult to defend.

And see, that's the sticky part. In the rarefied air, well separated from the dirt and grit of the real world in which we are all constrained to live, in which intellectual argument takes place, Paul's argument, and even libertarianism in general, has some merit, and he's to be respected for being willing to enunciate that he believes that business owners have a constitutional right to be racists and to discriminate against potential customers, even if he finds racism and discrimination to be personally abhorrent. On this ground at least, Paul is being intellectually consistent, which is laudable, if in this case almost wholly misguided.

There is, after all, a certain attractiveness to libertarianism. If everybody was cool, it might even be sort of viable in the real world. But everybody isn't cool. And that's where it all falls down.

"...Hawk, I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where the walls not only have ears, but probably eyes and long, claw-tipped fingers. Anyone about me--yea, even very you--could turn out to be a spy. I suspect every sewer grating and second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommy gun, or worse. What I just can't figure out is how these insidious forces, ubiquitous and omnipresent though they be, induced you to lure me into this intricate and diabolical--"
-Samuel Delany, from Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (in Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories, p 239)

Fun story, with one of the best titles ever (almost as good as We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line).

Smart Guy says Something Smart

Whenever I think about the environment (Be Green; Love Mother Earth; Blah Blah Blah), I like to think of a family going out to a nice restaurant. Mom and Dad place their orders–but for some reason, the kids don’t get anything. Instead, the kids wait and watch while their parents gobble down dinner.
Their parents eat the arugula salad, the rosemary-infused bread, the sun-dried tomato farfalle, the veal piccata, and generally have a pretty great time. Maybe Mom’s wearing pearls, because, you know, it’s a nice restaurant. Dad is definitely wearing a tie–he’s classy that way. Mom and Dad go through a couple bottles of wine, linger over the tiramisu, and then, when they’re stuffed to the gills, they shove their picked-over and scraped-over plates down the table to their children, with the last bits of pasta and the runny lines of sauce, and some chewed-up bits of meat, and say, “Here kids, eat up!”
So the kids get the scraps, while their parents get the meal.
And then, to top it all off, Mom and Dad get up from the table and walk out the door, leaving the kids to deal with the pissed-off waiter who just showed up saying that the credit card has been declined. So the kids end up washing dishes in the back for the next couple hundred years to pay off the bill.
That’s Environment 101.
-Paolo Bacigalupi

This Is Awfully Smart and Well Put-Together

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self- deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognised.
-I Ching, Hexagram 5 (Calculated Waiting), Wilhelm translation

The Perverse Incentives of Modern Day Capitalism (first in a series)

BP has wasted so much time on efforts to save the oil and its investment in the well that it is just now getting around to attempting to seal the well. It's pretty simple. Fuck BP. Fucking blow it up. Fucking collapse the earth around it. And be fucking done with the spill and get to the clean up.
-The Rude Pundit

It has long been an intention of mine to produce a series of short think pieces on the perversion of incentives inherent in modern day capitalism--how the elevation of making a buck to the highest (some might say only) good creates not only negative objective outcomes, but actively devalues much that is good and beautiful and righteous and true in the world.

I'll give you an example from the wonderful world of booze, a world I am both professionally and personally conversant in, and that I think illustrates the sort of thing I'm getting at.

This Made Me Smile

Furthermore, the lack of appropriate outrage from the left on this is also an outrage.  In response, we need to put together two simultaneous protests--one against the outrage, and one against the outrageous lack of outrage expressed by the absent left.
-Chris Bowers

 The whole thing's pretty funny.

Talk About Yummy Couture...

More here (hat tip the internet)

And the first time some brave patriot gets sloshed and lights up a honky-tonk, you know whose fault it will be? The patrons who weren’t packing heat. If they’d had guns, they could have stopped him.
-DougJ

Speak, brother. Speak.

Delia Sherman's Changeling

I'll start by saying that Changeling is not the sort of book I'd've likely picked up on my own. Were it not for the fact that its author, Delia Sherman, will be the instructor for my first week at Clarion, I'd likely have gone my whole life without reading this. It's not that I don't like fantasy. I do. It's just that the kind of fantasy I tend to read these days is more in the China Mieville/Jeff VanderMeer vein.

That said, I'm really glad I did read it, because I really liked it.

Set in New York Between, a sort of fairyland version of NYC populated with imaginary monsters and spirits from all over the world (not unlike the real city), Changeling is the story of Neef, a mortal child stolen by the fairies and replaced with one of their own (which is what a changeling is, btw), who breaks the rules of the Genius of Central Park and has to go on a quest in order to return to her home and the life she has always known.


Like many a YA fantasy heroine, Neef is long on moxie and short on foresight. She knows the rules (we all do, because we all grew up listening to fairy tales, which are really valuable life lessons disguised as parables and stories and where the negative consequences of foolish actions are exaggerated for pedagogic effect), but she's at that age where rationalization and the beginnings of adolescent entitlement start to blind us all to the realities of the world as it is (as opposed to how we think it ought to be). We've all been there: old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway and rationalize after the fact. Of course, she learns some valuable lessons along the way, and everything comes out alright in the end; but, as with all quest tales, the journey is the destination. And for the reader it's an enjoyable, engaging page-turner of a journey.

Can't Get This Song Out of My Head

Odessa, on Caribou's new album, Swim, which is not at all what I expected it to be, but is pretty awesome nonetheless.

Further Evidence that Teabaggers are Dicks

Some folks, while caucusing in a rented classroom at the nearby middle school, got it in their heads that the classroom’s teacher was a commie liberal indoctrinating the children with commie liberalism, and so they just dug through all of his stuff and trashed the place.

-Wonkette

Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris Cycle

Thanks to a bout of unexpected travel (with its attendant lengthy spans of time in which one is obliged to sit in place and do, essentially, nothing, during which a good book (or two, in this case) can really come in handy for the whole staving off boredom, madness, and anxiety thing (painkillers also work, but are not nearly so entertaining)), I have recently had the opportunity to finish the second and third books of Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris Cycle, Shriek: An Afterword and Finch.

Being that Mr. VanderMeer will be one of my instructors this summer at the Clarion Writers' Workshop, I'm going to do my best not to gush here, as there is some small chance he will read this and it would not be seemly and could conceivably make things a bit awkward come the end of July. But given that his presence at the workshop was the primary driver behind my application (I was perfectly content being all autodidactic and such until I realized I'd have a chance to work with him and the other stupendous badasses who will be teaching there this year), the possibility exists that I will not be able to stop myself.

But the truth of the matter is that I love these books, and am amazed and inspired by them, as individual works and, most especially, as a whole. I'm going to do my best not to spoil them for anyone who might be inspired to give them a read, but there's a lot of formal innovation and dialogic interplay that I'd like to suss out and explore, because I'm so bleepin' impressed with it. I think I should be able to do what I want to do without unduly exposing the overall narrative arc of the cycle or ruining the enjoyment of the story as such. If I do, apologies in advance.

Sounds About Right

OK, put the kids to bed and lock the cat in the cupboard, because I'm going to reveal an Awful Truth about the Real World.

Ready?

The Real World is run by dolts, drones and particle-board humdrums.

There. I said it. And there ain't no takesies-backsies on Teh Internets.

Me and mine have traveled far and crossed many latitudes and longitudes across the great, wide Sea of Gainful Employment and -- with all of the usual exceptions excepted and stipulations stipulated -- I can tell you flat out that, whether you're taking the measure of the titans of industry, or education, or gummint, or not-for-profits, or faith-based organizations, like as not the people you will meet in the executive suites are some timid, risk-averse motherf**kers.

Not necessarily evil people, but not the tamers of frontiers, conquerors of mankiller mountains or tortured geniuses who have shed blood and sinew to hew the Great New Thing from the raw rock of an unforgiving Universe. Instead, you'll find Organization Men who roll off the assembly line hard-wired with a whole set of behaviors optimized to mute and mollify and reflect back on their superiors flattering images of themselves.
-Driftglass

(hat tip Megan M.)

Hear fawking hear.

Found on a Coaster in the Bar

I thank the fuck-ups in the world for showing me how to be a better person and live the life I want to live. Thanks fuck-ups.
-S.B.

Thank you, S.B. Thank you.

True Dat

Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill baby drill' should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty.
-Bill Maher

I really like this guy.

Hmmm...

It's almost as if the right-wing crowd is only offended by government abuses when they're imaginary.

-Steve Benen

I hadn't thought about it that way, but you have to admit, it makes a certain amount of sense. Otherwise, why is it that the Tea Party, who are, apparently, so upset over government overreach, not rallying against Arizona's new immigration bill? Seems like it'd be exactly the kind of thing they'd be up in arms against, if their stated reasons for their protest were factually accurate.

Whatever the explanation, I'm sure there's not a racial component to it. I mean, it's not like we have a Hispanic in the White House.

Credit Where Credit is Due

"...It does offend me when one out of every three citizens in the state of Arizona are Hispanics, and you have now put a target on the back of one out of three citizens, who, if they're walking their dog around a neighborhood, if they're walking their child to school, and they're an American citizen, or a legal, legal immigrant -- to now put a target on their back, and make them think that every time they walk out of their door they may have to prove something. I will tell you, that is un-American. It is unacceptable and it is un-American."
-Joe Scarborough

He's right. It is un-American.

It's like in every movie ever about Nazis or Commies or Fascists or whatever other totalitarian regime, historical or fictional.

"You have papers?"

I don't think the incrementalism is creeping anymore, at least not in Arizona.

Just About the Dumbest F-cking Thing I've Ever Read

But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more than just entertainment for Fox News, I have a suggestion:
Become the Green Tea Party.
-Tom Friedman

Because the teabaggers are so environmentally conscious, after all.

Seriously, they pay this guy to write this shit. In some circles, he's considered quite the deep thinker.

Also.

This Seemed Like a Useful Encapsulation

[T]he whole idea of civilisation – the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can.
-Matt Taibbi

Had to Repost This in Full

Found at The Agonist (hat tip to Russel King for the link):

To be a Republican you need to believe:
1. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton
2. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's Daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
3. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Viet Nam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
4. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq .
5. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational drug corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
6. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing
veterans' benefits and combat pay.
7. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.
8. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
9. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but providing health care to all Americans is socialism. HMO's and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.
10. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
11. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
12. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet .
13. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.
14. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your
recovery.
15. Supporting "Executive Privilege" for every Republican ever born, who will be born or who might be born (in perpetuity.)
16. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960's is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80's is irrelevant.
17. Support hunters who shoot their friends and blame them for wearing orange vests similar to those worn by the quail.

Best Amazon Review Ever

Wow, I guess there really is something to The Secret.

Ultraviolet Sun

I have to say I loved the sheer randomness of it all-there is nothing more liberating than playing an illogical game where only you understand all of the rules.
-Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword, p.77

To the Late-Night Kids From the Bar Last Night

So, I generally have two responses when people I don't know ask me to hook them up at the bar. The thing you have to understand is this: at this point, you're already an asshole. In fact, even if I know you, and have swung you a little love in the past, you're still an asshole for asking. The reason you're an asshole is that a shot is a shot and the price is the price, and it's up to me, not you, to decide whether and when to bend or break the rules. And if I do decide to do that, it's usually for a good reason: either you're a friend, or a regular, or somebody who's been good to me, who's built up a bit of goodwill through playing the game according to the rules.

And one of the rules is this: you never ask for anything that you do not expect to pay full price for, no matter what your history with the establishment or the person serving you. Period. It's not classy, and it's not okay. It may be that you have some relationship with the place, or the people serving you. It may be that you have been comped a drink or two in the past, or had your bill discounted because the people there like you. Good for you. Probably you did something to deserve it, and you should figure out what it was and keep doing it.

But when you walk in the door, you have your money ready and you expect to pay for what you get, just like everybody else.

"In this entire year and a half of cleaning up the mess, it's been tough because the folks very responsible for a large portion of this mess decided to stand on the sidelines," Obama declared. "It was as if somebody had driven their car into the ditch and then just watched you as you had to yank it out, and asked you: 'Why didn't you do it faster -- and why do I have that scratch on the fender?' And you want to say: 'Why don't you put your shoulder up against that car and help to push?' That's what we need, is some help."

This guy is so toast.

Chase Whiteside Strikes Again

There's a lot I could say about the people documented here, but I think they say everything that needs saying on their own.

Pretty Much

The Left, on the other hand, is more or less organized around the difficult task of Solving Actual Problems, one of which is the fact that Conservatives broke the country, and another of which is the fact that the Conservative Movement has lost its fucking mind.
-driftglass

Time for the left to nut up, and the right to nut down.

The Political is Personal, Too

"There's so much frustration going on right now with people not being heard," Tidrick said. "And we see this country in a spiral downward. People are lashing out in different ways... You take somebody that's had a bad day and sometimes they may say things they regret later. But until things get straightened out, we don't have a lot to hope for."
-from Eli Sanders' interview with a speaker at the Yakima Tea Party rally on April 10

In the above quote, Brad Tidrick is trying to, if not defend, then at least explain some of the rage that might've led Charles Alan Wilson to make more than a dozen threatening phone calls to WA Senator Patty Murray, cluminating in such statements as "Somebody's gonna get to you one way or another and blow your fucking brains out. If I have the chance, I would do it."

Obviously (at least it should be obvious), there's no real defense for such behavior. I'm all for rigorous disagreement in the realm of politics and ideas, but when you get to the point of making death threats, you're no longer debating the issues, you're essentially engaging in terrorism.

But there's a line in there that reflects something I've been thinking for a while, and I wanted to highlight it and tease out some of the implications. The line is "You take somebody that's had a bad day and sometimes they may say things they regret later."

I think a lot of what drives the passion that many people bring to their political views, especially those whose politics is driven by anger and rage, has little or nothing to do with politics at all.

(hat tip to Buddy W.)

Again, what he said.

What he said.

Asshole of the Week

And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.
Sons of Liberty, this is your time.
-Mike Vanderboegh

Mike Vanderboegh is a 'Christian Libertarian' and former militiaman who lives outside Birmingham, Alabama. Recently, he's gotten a lot of attention for his online call to break the windows of Democratic party offices nationwide, in response to passage of the Affordable Care Act, which he deems an unacceptable intrusion of government into the lives of its citizens. And despite the fact that people have taken him up on it, and have indeed taken things even further (death threats, noose-faxes, the gas line at a Democratic Congressman's brother's home intentionally and maliciously cut), he stands by his call to vandalism.

So, you ask, what does this principled libertarian, who so abhors government handouts and the redistribution of wealth to the poor and the sick, do for a living? You know, when he's not committing acts of sedition and encouraging petty criminality in the service of right-wing terrorism?

Why, it turns out Mr. Vanderboegh doesn't work at all. Doesn't earn his money by trading his skills and his productivity for money in the free market. Nope. Mike Vanderboegh is on federal disability.

That's right. This principled libertarian is just another welfare queen, buying t-bones with his food stamps. Probably has a cell phone, too. I bet if he were old enough, he'd probably be on Medicare.

What an asshole.

I let my head fall back in this angry season. There, tensions I had hoped would resolve, merely shift with the body's machinery. The act is clumsy, halting, and without grace or reason. What can I read in the smell of her, what message in the code of her breath? This mountain opens passages of light. The lines on squeezed lids cage the bursting balls. All efforts, dying here, coalesce in the blockage of ear and throat, to an a-coporal lucence, a patterning released from pleasure, the retained shadow of pure idea.
-Samuel R. Delany Dhalgren, p. 250

And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some linual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog, to pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imprefect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the cabonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows.
-Samuel R. Delany Dhalgren, pp. 156-7

Class War

According to numerous reports, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have pumped upwards of $14 trillion to support failing financial institutions. There are approximately 100 million households in the US. So if you divide that $14 trillion by 100 million and that means that each and every US household could have been sent a check for $140,000.
-Michael Thornton

We're not allowed to talk about class war in the United States.

Some of it has to do with our founding mythology. We like to see ourselves as having broken from the old European model of stratified society, in which the social class to which you are born is overwhelmingly likely to be the one in which you spend your life and die.

Some of it has to do with the Cold War, because the class struggle was and remains a revered trope of our Socialist enemies (not that they're really our enemies anymore in any realistic sense, but we hated on them so long that we're still not allowed to take any of their ideas into serious consideration, lest they infect us like AIDS or teh gay).

But mostly it has to do with this: the class war is already being waged and won, and the winning side doesn't want the rest of us wising up before it's too late.

For a good thirty years after WWII revitalized the American economy, things got better for everybody. Wages rose as productivity increased. The GI bill put college in reach for previously unheard-of numbers of Americans. You could support your family of four with a job in a factory, and know that when you'd put your twenty or thirty years in you would be taken care of for the rest of your life.

Sure, we still had rich folks, but the gap between the haves and the have-lesses was less gratuitous and obscene. As the economy grew, as it did each year, everybody made more money, right up til the early '70s. Since then, real wages have stagnated.

But the economy kept growing. So where did all that money go?

Into the hands of the super-rich.

Sure, they already had more money than they or their heirs could spend. But they wanted more. After all, when you have all the money and the sprawling masses don't have enough to feed themselves and pay their bills, it gives you a great deal of leverage. Leverage you can use, among other things, to hijack the national discourse to your advantage. You can pay smart, morally compromised people to come up with seemingly good reasons that the fruits of our collective national labor and effort should rightfully go to those who already have more than they or their heirs will ever need, instead of, say, to guaranteeing that nobody falls below a certain level, to sharing the wealth around more broadly, which would do all sorts of psychological and social good.

The truth is simple. We're not allowed to talk about class war in the United States because if we do, we'll realize that it's already happening. That is has always been happening. That throughout the history of human civilization, since the first tribe stayed in one place long enough to grow its own food, thus guaranteeing their survival and allowing some of its members to do things other than hunt and gather, there has always been a parasite class, who through monopolies first of violence and later of ideas arrogates to itself a greater than is rightful share of the fruits of the tribe's efforts and labor. Who takes more than it deserves because it can, leaving less for the rest of us.

We're not allowed to talk about class war, because the super-rich own most of the voices in the national discourse, and they do not want it spoken of, because they've been waging that war since time immemorial, and winning. They are a cancer on the body politic. And just as cancer eventually kills the host, through arrogating to itself more of the body's resources than the body can stand, so too does the parasite class sicken and weaken the American body politic.

Now let me be clear. I do believe in capitalism. Healthy competition keeps animals and organizations fit and capable, and drives innovation and progress. But capitalism is like fire. When channeled appropriately, it can be incredibly useful and productive. When left to burn unchecked, it consumes everything in its path, destroying all and leaving only ash and devastation in its wake.

The Reagan Era, which it seems perhaps we are on the verge of getting past, finally, after thirty long years of everybody getting fucked in the name of unfettered free-market capitalism, can and should be seen as a particularly effective and successful maneuver in the age-old war between the parasite class and the body politic. Despite its flaws, I believe that the passage of Health Care Reform signifies an important sea change, a tectonic shift, if you will, in the meme wars that serve as a proxy for the actual one.

A recognition that everybody, simply by dint of being American, deserves a safety net, a fair share of the fruits of our collective prosperity, enshrined into the law of the land and never to be repealed, despite how the parasite class and their mouthpieces and dupes might squawk.

It's a hopeful sign. An important victory. But without the collective recognition of the larger picture of the forces at work and the stakes over which they are struggling, it's not enough, and never will be. To borrow a right-wing trope, you can't fight a war properly if you don't recognize you're at war.

It's about time we did.

Clarion, Meet Dallas...

He sat at the computer, brow furrowed, just a little short on sleep, wondering what he was supposed to say. There was a questionnaire he could fill out, some guidelines at least. A skeleton to hang the flesh and the skin of his life on, if he cared to. It would be easier that way. Safer.

He thought for a moment. Stared at the empty box on the screen he was supposed to fill with introductory material. Who was he? Why was he doing this? What did he want? What would he be leaving behind? All good questions.

He stopped to make a cup of strong coffee. It was cheap stuff, a memento from his time in Florida, best when sweetened a bit and drunk without paying too much attention to the flavor. He tapped away, lackadaisically, while it percolated on the stove. On the headphones, Charlotte Gainsbourg gave way to Willie Hutch, postmodern dissonance dissolved in the butter-cream smoothness of blaxploitation funk.

Who was he? Just some guy who'd always wanted to be a writer. Who'd taken it up and put it back down more than a few times over the years, first because he had nothing much to say, later because life has a way of intruding on dreams. But it had always been there, this thing he knew he wanted to do.

Eventually he started writing a book. A book made of brambles and rhizomes, that wouldn't stop growing in every direction possible. He fought and he hacked at it, Hercules against the Hydra. He buried it in a closet, deprived it of the sun. But its tendrils refused to release their hold on him, and so he returned with a torch, an angry mob of one, and burned the whole god-damned thing down. He gathered the ashes, then, and sprinkled them on the ground in the space he'd created. Gently, carefully, he began to coax forth new shoots, husbanding them more deliberately this time.

Why did he want to be a writer? Because he was a reader, a text addict whose eye was drawn to words wherever they appeared, whose gaze caressed the curves and ligatures of letters and phrases the way a hand might caress the curve of a hip or a spine, whose love of language and the things that could be done with it blossomed in the secret garden of his inmost self in such profusion that it grew into and among all of the other botanicals, its roots spreading and pushing under the foundation stones of the walls, toppling them in places and opening up to the vast horizons beyond. Because such worlds had been opened up to him by the works of others that what was best in life seemed to him to be this: this strange magic between writer and reader, these mystic incantations and the filament-worlds they could weave in that magical space.

What he longed for most was to learn to work that magic himself, to write something he'd want to read, to give to others the wonders that had been given to him. To open those worlds and explore the logics and suchnesses that made them just so. To chart a path through them that others might follow.

What did he want? To focus. To learn. To be pushed. To have his best efforts torn to shreds that his skills might improve. To be taught his craft by those who had mastered it, whose work he knew and admired. To be sunk in a community of peers devoted for this small time to the cultivation of that craft and the life that went with it. To finally become the thing he'd always wanted to be.

What would he be leaving behind? A good life. An interlude of sunshine in an overcast land. The alternation of solitude, writerly and otherwise, with periods of intense entanglement in social networks and communities of friends and friendly faces. The bar where he'd worked for so many years, a community in itself, where he was loved and respected and not infrequently hated on (he does not suffer fools gracefully, for time is too short, and so can his patience be). An orbit of known faces and the places in his heart that they occupied.

Soccer on Mondays and ultimate frisbee on saturdays. Circles of friends and the unpredictable ways in which they intersected. A city vibrant with urbanity, with culture and music and gustation and art, yet cozy enough to feel like home. A community of creative souls and critical thinkers, of people who follow their dreams and can still hold down a job.

Love: the sweetest he'd ever known, the smiling girl who made it so much better. Who made him so much better. Who wanted him to be what he'd always aspired to.

These things he was leaving, they were good things. They made him happy. He was blessed and he knew it.

But he'd always been a restless sort, poorly wired for contentment. And though he was happy with this life he had made, there was more that he desired, work yet to be done, steps along the path that were yet to be taken.

The things he was leaving would be there when he returned, to build the life he desired. After all, every quest is a circle, a return to the place from which it began, though the wanderer who returns is rarely the same as the one who has left.

Obscurity had been his friend. Solitude his ally. But he could only teach himself so much. The time had come to seek the company of others, devotees like himself and the masters who would teach them.

Eyes turning southward, he began to gather those things he would need...

St. Patrick's Day

It's funny. I worked open to close yesterday, as I do on Wednesdays. And though I had many customers later on who told me they were Irish (suppose I might lay claim to the sobriquet myself, having received some twenty-five percent of my genetic material from the Emerald Isle), I had only one who was not actually just an American using his great-grandparents' ethnicity as an excuse for their drunkenness, but an actual honest-injun born-in-Ireland Irishman.

I won't give you his name, not that it matters. But he's one of our happy hour regulars, a small coterie of folks, mostly men, who come in during the slow times, in the afternoon, when the place is empty and the beer is cheap. I see him most Wednesdays, and have known him for years. He's a good cat, happy to talk but more than capable of keeping himself entertained, who has three or four beers and then leaves, usually before dark. And he tips well, so we like him even more.

Being that he was Irish, and we were the only two people in the bar for quite some time, we got to talking about St. Patrick's Day, which is an almost entirely American holiday. He found the whole thing rather ridiculous (as do I, but then, after 14-odd years of bars and bartending, I think most American drinking holidays are ridiculous). Apparently the Irish do not celebrate their island's lack of herpetic inhabitants in the way Americans do, by drinking to grand excess and either vomiting, getting into a fight, or having ill-advised and unprotected sex with a new-found friend (or all three, in some cases). Nor, apparently, do they eat corned beef and cabbage, which everyone seems to think is what Irish people eat. I certainly saw more than a couple of people enjoying such a repast.

It's funny. I've been on the wagon for several weeks now, as part of a pretty major cleanse/lifestyle overhaul, and I worked all last night without taking a drink (which is, as you might expect, a comparative rarity in the bar industry). The other bartender I worked with seemed amazed at that, and sad that I couldn't drink with her after hours. St. Patrick's Day is a big deal for her, I guess, and I think that, though she was glad to make the money, she was also a little sad not to be out there amongst the revelry. Call me jaded, but to me, St. Patrick's Day is just another amateur night, worse than most even, because to Americans it's just about drinking (and wearing something green, I suppose). And this year, what with St. Patty's on a Wednesday, it was more amateur than most, because the responsible adults who might normally leaven the youthful dumbfuckery all had to work the next day. Now, I got nothing against the kids these days, as such. But I do with their parents had taught them how to act. And how to drink, too, while they were at it.

I'll spare the details. Suffice to say, stiffing was rampant, as were stupid drink choices, and I had one guy I had to kick out, who got mad when I told him to get out from behind the bar. "I work in the Industry!" he said. I love when people say that. Like it makes it ok when they don't act right.

Still, I suppose I shouldn't complain. As with all amateur nights, I made money. Not as much as I should have (and yes, sometimes I do), but certainly more than I would have almost any other Wednesday night.

But I do wish our Great American Drinking Holidays didn't bring out the douche in people. I know we drink to give ourselves permission to cut loose and let it all hang out, to just relax and have a good time and be ourselves. It's just a shame that so many of us turn out to be assholes.

Note to Clarion West Hopefuls

I see from my sitemeter that a lot of y'all are checking in here because of the post-script to my Clarion announcement. Hi, and welcome. Hope you stick around to check out some posts.

As far as Clarion West goes, what little insight I have into where things stand I will offer here. I got a call on Monday, as I mentioned. The woman with whom I spoke told me she'd meant to call me over the weekend, but hadn't been able to. So they had at least their preliminary list put together then. I'd gotten my email from Clarion a week before, but hadn't notified Clarion West because I was convinced I had hallucinated the whole thing, or would somehow manage to screw it up in the interim (yes, I'm a little off my rocker, which is one of the reasons I want to be a writer when I grow up), and I didn't want to jinx anything. Once I'd got the email from Clarion confirming it, I emailed Clarion West and withdrew my candidacy. Shortly after, I got the call. The lady who called me did not seem to know that I had withdrawn from consideration, which makes sense, since it literally was a matter of minutes.

And that's pretty much that. I hope it helps. And that y'all get in, and that it's all you hoped it would be and more. Whatever happens, keep writing, and do it for love.

Confidential to SWB: Yeah, I'm a him, and thank you.

What I'm Reading

I've got a couple of books going right now, both of which are pretty deep. And though I'm reading them for different reasons, and started them at different times, there seem to be some interesting confluences. Both are deeply literary, by which I mean both seem intent to delve into the depths, not only of the human psyche, of the lived experience of being a person in a particular place and time, but also of history, as well, although in a more metaphorical than literal sense. And both seem to revolve around themes of alienation between the two.

First is Roberto Bolano's 2666. I have, thus far, only read three of the five novellas that comprise 2666, or about half of the total page count. There's a note in the beginning from Roberto Bolano's heirs to the effect that his plan had been to publish the five separately, so as to maximize the economic returns that his heirs would enjoy from his posthumously published work (he died in 2003). Having read them, though, they decided that the work was best served being published together in its entirety, a decision I applaud and am grateful for. As it is, my reading of this book has been staggered and interrupted enough. It's tricky stuff: easy enough to read in terms of the density of prose and meaning, but the cumulative effect is strangely overwhelming. But I'm halfway through and I'm just starting to understand (I think) what he's doing here, and I think if the books had been released separately that it would be more difficult to get that sense.

It may be that I'm writing this too early. After all, I have yet to begin Book 4: The Part About the Crimes, in which the murders of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa, the northern Mexican city that serves as the crux of the work will, presumably, be explored directly, rather than simply serving as a sort of background, as history does to life. But I feel as if I've gotten through enough to at least put down some preliminary thoughts.

Nearly all the protagonists, thus far, seem to have a few things in common:  they are people of letters, mostly literary critics and university types, with one journalist who writes for a specialty magazine; each seems to be only marginally in control, of themselves and their lives; and each is drawn, for very different reasons, to Santa Teresa, which lurks in the background almost menacingly as they live some portion of their lives there.

The Clarion Writers' Workshop

I have now officially been given the go-ahead to shout it from the rooftops:

I have been accepted to the 2010 Clarion Writers' Workshop.

Clarion is an intensive six-week summer program focused on fundamentals particular to the writing of science fiction and fantasy short stories. It is considered a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.  Instructors are among the most respected writers and editors working in the field today. Over one third of our graduates have been published and many have gone on to critical acclaim. The list of distinguished Clarion alumni includes Ed Bryant, Octavia Butler, Bob Crais, Cory Doctorow, George Alec Effinger, Nalo Hopkinson, James Patrick Kelly, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Martha Soukup, Kelly Link, Bruce Sterling, and many others. 

They told me a week ago, but asked that I keep it under wraps until all the candidates had been chosen and the invitations sent out, so, although I've told a number of people through word of mouth and hinted at it on my Facebook page, this is the first official announcement I've been able to make.

I am, to say the least, deeply humbled. The most I expected was to make the wait-list, if I was lucky. They've been accepting applications since December, but I only found out about the workshop and the deadline somewhere around the second week of February. The deadline was March 1st, at 11:59pm. I came across it kind of randomly, on a thread at John Scalzi's Whatever blog, and decided kind of on the spur of the moment to go for it.

But here's the thing: it's a short story writing workshop, so, naturally, they wanted two short stories as part of the application.

I don't really write short stories. It's not that I have anything against them. It's just that all my creative energies, such as they are, have been directed at my novel in progress, GoATDaD and the Army of Monkeys. I've been working on it for years (seven or eight of them now, off and on). It's my self-declared and self-taught apprenticeship to the craft of writing.

I'd begun toying with the notion of writing a few short stories as secondary texts to the novel, which is a giant, sprawling mess of a thing, in which lots of interesting ideas are sort of glossed over in the background so I can focus on the other interesting ideas that are more at the forefront of the story. I thought it might be helpful to write out some shorter pieces, both to flesh out some of those ideas that are being given short shrift, to do a little world-building, as it were, and to maybe take a crack at something I could credibly finish in a relatively short time. I'd already sort of started in on a couple of things, though I'd yet to really do much with them.

But now I had a reason. And a deadline. Both of which were marvellously focusing for me. I honestly didn't expect anything to come of it, aside from what I'd learn in the doing, but the application fee wasn't much, and some of the instructors at Clarion this year are people whose work I am deeply enamored with and impressed by (Jeff VanderMeer and George R. R. Martin especially, although all of the instructors are really impressive authors, and I look forward to working with all of them).

To tell the truth, I have never attended a writers' workshop, nor really been tempted. I'm a bit cussed that way, set for some reason on teaching myself what I need to figure out in order to follow my chosen avocation. I've labored away in obscurity for all these years by choice (and some degree of fear, to be honest), working when I could find the time and motivation, figuring I could teach myself what I needed to know and that I'd figure out the whole getting published thing when I had something I thought was worth publishing.

It's always been my stated purpose in life to become a writer, but I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't gotten distracted here and there along the way. But my mother's death last summer had a profound effect on me, and one of the repercussions of that was a determination to quit fucking around and get serious about this thing I meant to do with my life. And applying to Clarion (and Clarion West, while I was at it) seemed like a good excuse to hunker down and get some work done. I am, after all, easily distracted, despite my determination, and there's plenty of other business for me to attend to and things to spend time on.

So, for most of three weeks, I spent as much time as I could make in front of the computer, pounding away. The first story came easily enough. It's not my most original work, certainly, but it gave me an opportunity to explore a couple of things in the background noise of the novel that I wanted to get a better handle on but that I didn't plan to really dig in to. It almost seemed as if the story was already there, more or less complete, just waiting for me to write it. I even liked it (which is pretty rare; I'm usually insanely critical of my own work, and read it with the same macabre fascination most people experience while driving past an accident on the highway). The second story, well, that was another thing entirely. That one didn't come easy, and took several false starts before it took on its own momentum. I'm not sure if it's because it comes from later in the novel, a section I haven't focused on for a few years, or because it's a bit more original than the first story, or if it was just buried a few dozen feet deeper in my psyche, but the second one felt like pulling teeth from the south end of my body cavity. In the end, though, it seems to have worked out, and I think it's probably a stronger effort than the first one.

Whatever it was, I seem to have done something right.

I still kind of can't believe it. I've spent the last week convinced that it was a mistake, or a hallucination. But it's real.

I'm gonna go squee into my pillow some more now.

Post-Script: Today seems to be a good day for my ego. Not two minutes after emailing the folks at the Clarion West workshop here in Seattle, thanking them for their consideration and withdrawing my candidacy (the two run more or less simultaneously), I got a call from one of the admissions people offering me a spot there as well. She said she really liked the story I'd submitted, and seemed quite sad that I'd already accepted a spot at Clarion. I hardly knew what to say. It's one of those problems you dream of having, ya know?

Ideals without results of any kind are essentially worthless.
-Chez Pazienza

Bush did push us into a baseless war and rich bankers do rip everyone off, just not in the way that some conspiracy theorists think.
-DougJ at Balloon Juice

The America that I know and signed up to defend does not stand exclusively for security. It also stands for freedom, justice, and liberty. It stands for universal rights afforded to every human being (even unlawful combatants or "detained persons"). America, as Thiessen surely has written into many a presidential speech, is a beacon of light precisely because it represents the protection of basic human rights. Yet, in Courting Disaster, Thiessen thoroughly villainizes those who defend individual rights against the state (such as members of the Center for Constitutional Rights). Thiessen's ideology represents exactly what we are fighting against in the battle with Islamic extremism—the regression of human rights and the sacrifice of individual protections to the state.
-Matthew Alexander, former military interrogator

I think this is going to be my new favorite album.

True Dat

"It's no good for a family values Republican to get picked up on a DWI. But substantially worse to get picked up for a DWI after leaving a gay nightclub with an unidentified man in a state vehicle."
-Josh Marshall

Maybe we should try and tone it down a notch. The neighbors changed the name of their wifi network to "i can hear you having sex".
-from textsfromlastnight.

Go Rachel

True Dat

Alarming personality changes and firearms are a very bad combination.
-Emily Yoffe

Love Me Some APOD

Why I Do What I Do

I have known for most of my life that a writer is what I wanted to be when I grew up. There are those who’d say that I’ve put that off (growing up, that is) longer than was necessary or even appropriate, but in response I would say that a writer takes more seasoning than the average person does. To produce a literary work of any depth and substance wants an understanding of life and the human condition much deeper than most callings require. Few are those who can produce great works before they’ve accumulated sufficient years and experience, as my own youthful experiments in the craft proved quite conclusively. But the aspiration was there, and remained, even while I needed to step back for a while until I had something to say.
It’s all my mother’s fault, really.
She hooked me on reading at a young age, and I took to it like the proverbial fish to water. I was and remain insatiable, the sort of fellow who will read the ingredients on a shampoo bottle to pass the time in the shower. And while Mom was always a thrillers and mysteries girl, it was science fiction and fantasy that captured my heart. At first it was merely escapism. The opening of new worlds, the thrill of adventures and quests, the stakes always high, the kingdom or planet in peril and only our hero and his ragtag band of misfits able to save the day.
But as I grew I began to realize that there was more to it than that. More to it than just escape and entertainment. Because behind the scenes there were other things going on: larger issues were lurking, big questions being asked and then answers attempted. And the question was always this: ‘What if..?’
As I got older, my tastes became more complicated. More literary, even. I began to hunger for bigger questions, deeper considerations, of history and the human condition and just where this whole thing might all be going. I delved into the great books, both past and present. I bled at the cutting edge. I read and reread and thought and discussed and got my mind blown open so many times that it hasn’t shut since.
But through it all, no matter how far out into the literary mainstream I’ve waded, my heart of hearts always did and always will belong to speculative fiction.
It’s not just sentimental, either, this attachment I have. Because even though it feels like coming home when I open that page to the first chapter and dive in to a new world, I’m also aware that this new world before me was imagined by someone in my world, in the world that I live in, and that the explorations this person is leading me on have to do with more than just faerie-folk or faster-than-light travel. They’re asking that question, ‘What if..?’ and then answering it as best they can, and the answers to that question resonate from the world inside the book to the world outside of it. It’s that right there, that bit of literary thaumaturgy, that’s always fascinated me, and that drives my desire to be a writer.
Because I’ve always known, for most of my life, that a writer was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve always wanted to make that magic, to ask and then try and answer those questions. To lead others on such wondrous journeys as I have been on.

Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive.

-Larissa Macfarquhar, from her profile of Paul Krugman in the New Yorker

The Spaniards, who were hot-blooded and didn't think too far ahead, mixed with the Indian women, raped them, forced them to practice their religion, and thought that meant they were turning the country white. Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can't rape that many people. It's mathematically impossible. It's too hard on the body. You get tired. Plus, they were raping from the bottom up, when what would've made more sense would be raping from the top down. They might have gotten some results if they'd been capable of raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard great-grandchildren. But who's going to go out raping people when you're seventy and can hardly stand on your own two feet? You can see the results all around you. The semen of those Spaniards, who though they were titans, just got lost in the amorphous mass of thousands of Indians.
-Roberto Bolano, 2666, p 288

But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it's a wall.
And you shouldn't have to hit it to find that out.
-Leonard Pitts, Jr.

And whether you, like Good Professor Sartwell, object to the use of your money in funding the world's preeminent wardeath machine or you object to the use of your money to feed imaginary inner city crack faggot Kenyanites, a fundamental truth remains: our government is a huge, implacable, rapacious, imovable death god into whose insatiable maw we are damned to make perpetual sacrifice. It is not unusual that this is going to raise some hackles.
-IOZ

Posted Without Comment

What's being tested here is not just our ability to solve this one problem, but our ability to solve any problem. Right now, Americans are understandably despairing about whether partisanship and the undue influence of special interests in Washington will make it impossible for us to deal with the big challenges that face our country. They want to see us focus not on scoring points, but on solving problems; not on the next election but on the next generation. That is what we can do, and that is what we must do when we come together for this bipartisan health care meeting next week.
-Barack Obama

Posted Without Comment

[T]he term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates.  It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does.  Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it's only being done to "Terrorists," who, by definition, have no rights.  Even worse, one becomes a "Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch.  The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that's the end of that:   uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he's a Terrorist (by which they actually mean:  he's been accused of being one, though that distinction -- between presidential accusations and proof -- is not one they recognize).
-Glenn Greenwald

Python vs. Alligator

This is just awesome. Wish I could embed this.

(hat tip Camilla M.)

He Stares at Me Blankly...

The sheer bullheaded stupidity of some people never ceases to amaze me. Even after some fourteen years of tending bar off and on, I still just don't understand how some people just don't get it.

Take tonight's case in point.

So, it's eleven or so at night. Not the busiest night, but the band is playing, people are dancing and ordering drinks; it is, as they say, going on. I'm in the second well making drinks, and there's this yahoo frat boy signing his tab on the lightbox in the middle of the bar, which is our service area. In addition to being not so bright, he's clumsy, and as he goes to grab his card from the check presenter he misses, or drops it, or something. Long story short, I see his card fall off the light box onto my side of the bar. I go to retrieve it for him, but he's managed to drop it in such a way that it's fallen through the crack between the ledge where we make the drinks and the bar itself. I can see it, there down the crack, leaning against the back wall of the space under the light box where the wiring is. It's gonna be a bitch, but I'm pretty sure I can get it out with the proper tools. I hold up my finger, the universal signal for 'just wait a minute and I'll deal with this' and I go over to the POS where there're some random tools and suchlike among the various and assorted useful things that we keep over there. After digging around for a couple of seconds, I come up with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and I go back over.

This is the part where I start to realize that I'm not dealing with the sharpest knife in the drawer here.

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The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
-Joe Stack

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If constitutional conservatism means anything, it has to mean that the executive branch does not have wide, sweeping, inherent powers derived from the President’s (temporary) military role. It has to mean that all these conservatives will start arguing that the President cannot wage wars on his own authority, and they will have to argue this no matter who occupies the Oval Office. It has to mean unwavering conservative hostility to the mistreatment of detainees, and it has to mean that conservatives cannot accept the detention of suspects without charge, access to counsel or recourse to some form of judicial oversight. Obviously, constitutional conservatives could in no way tolerate or overlook policies of indefinite detention or the abuse of detainees. They would have to drive out the authoritarians among them, and rediscover a long-lost, healthy suspicion of concentrated power, especially power concentrated in the hands of the executive.
-Daniel Larison

Tea Baggers, in Their Own Words

(hat tip Bob Cesca, film by Chase Whiteside)

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Their movement is as much a matter of identity and tribe as it is politics. This tea partier may believe that he's part of something "unique" and "fresh" but the American far right is the same as it ever was: angry, resentful, bigoted, xenophobic and nativist, afraid of change, anxious to blame those who they perceive to be undeserving and the elites who defend them.

-Digby

Recycled

Having to defend your position in the face of direct and personal opposition is healthy for democracies and other living things. The worst ideas, the worst ideologies, always insist that they have a sole lock on the truth of things and always act in such a way as to undermine or suppress debate. And that is as un-American as a thing could be. The greatest of the ideas underlying America, what makes us truly special among nations and among experiments in governance, is that America is a place where the free marketplace of ideas is not only enshrined in the national consciousness, it's actually built in to the system.
-Me, a bit over two years ago, just before the Iowa caucuses

Quick Note on Populism

I actually am a populist, but not in the usual sense. I do think that the vast majority of people are getting screwed and that the shit has got to stop. I just don't think the answer is to elect regular folks to positions of power. I think you have to elect really smart folks who are on the side of regular folks to positions of power, because the issues and political minefields to be negotiated are, frankly, beyond the understanding of the average person.

Which I guess makes me a populist elitist, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The Moderator of Moderatism Takes a Shine to Radical Right-Wing Dingbat, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dumb

Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good. 

-David Broder

If you'd like a brief encapsulation of just how fucked the Republic is thanks to the degeneration of our adversarial press corps into a coterie of court-scribes and bootlickers, you need look little further than this piece by longtime respected Washington Post columnist and conventional wisdom Pez dispenser David Broder. It's all about Sarah Palin, and how good a retail politician she is. And indeed, give her a script and she can deliver the fire and brimstone, no small trick given the gratingness of her voice (and her ideas, such as they are, really more like feelings, or something like that, something altogether squishier and lacking in the sort of precision and clarity that you might expect from something usually symbolized as a light bulb appearing above someone's head).

The piece is all about how we all have to take Sarah Palin seriously, because she gave a speech at Tea Bag Nation (for $100k, to people that paid like $500 a pop for the privilege) and then answered some softball questions on the Sunday Morning Blabfest Circuit on Fox News, where I'm pretty sure they give her a backrub during commercial breaks and all the hard candy she wants, which "showed off a public figure at the top of her game -- a politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself, even with notes on her palm."

Quick Note

If you think the continued existence of winter and snow disprove global warming, you are a fucking idiot.

Whitey Knows Best

This is Laura Silsby. She's a member of a Baptist Church in Idaho and the ringleader of a kidnapping ring.

That's what the Haitians say, anyway.

What's known for sure is that on Saturday January 30th, she and nine other members of her church were arrested at the Haitian/Dominican border with a busload of 33 Haitian children that she and her group claimed were orphaned by the earthquake. They had no documentation saying they were legally empowered to do such a thing, and, in fact, few to none of the children appear to actually be orphans (none of the ones old enough to speak have said they are, and the relatives who gave them to the Americans say that the missionaries said they'd be taken to a better place).

A couple of days ago, they had a hearing, at which, apparently, they fully expected to be released. They were, apparently, surprised and dismayed when they were not.

"We simply wanted to help the children. We petition the court not only for our freedom but also for our ability to continue to help," said Silsby.

Although nine of the ten really didn't know they were doing anything wrong, at least according to their lawyer Edwin Coq, Silsby, the leader and organizer of the expedition, did. "I'm going to do everything I can to get the nine out. They were naive. They had no idea what was going on and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border," Coq said. "But Silsby did."

A Little Bit of the Funny from Over on the Other Side of the Pond

(hat tip Bob Cesca)