What makes it even worse, for me, is that these are promos meant to attract members… meaning that they’re probably effective, and that some people are attracted by them rather than repelled by the clearly ridiculous self-mythologizing, the wishful apocalyptic thinking, and the obvious authoritarianism.

(Really, who are they going for with the stoner shots from 00:18 to 00:20?)

[T]he financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down? The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10% now own 85% of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90% been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

That’s rather interesting data, that the bottom 90% have never been indebted to the extent that they are now. Given how things have been going (particularly the steady rise in inequality), it seems that Hudson is quite justified in following that up with:

[W]hat they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards; it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

This just seems like common sense to me—the rich and powerful are trying to become more rich and more powerful. Power isn’t quite a zero-sum game, but clearly diminishing the power of others increases your own in comparison, and I don’t see why it would be at all controversial that the powerful are trying to gain more power. Unless you believe that because of their sense of civic responsibility, the powerful are acting against their own interests and working for the greater good.

As pointed out in a letter to Glenn, this isn’t new by any means (nor, I suspect, is it restricted to the Republican convention—I’d be rather surprised if the same stuff happened around the DNC). It also goes back a lot further than the letter-writer suggests (they cite 2000 as the starting point).

In fact, it’s hard to say how far back it goes, but let’s just start with the post-WWII period. This kind of thing happened throughout the 60s, and while it was absolutely wrong and completely egregious, a lot of the commentators on it don’t seem to link it fully to racism and class warfare, which it is absolutely part of. It’s just that at times it goes beyond the usual assaults on non-’whites’/non-straights (problematic terms, but I need the shorthand) to hitting those in the middle class who get uppity—which is when it gets a little more press. Still nowhere near enough, but a little more.

Warrentless home invasions searches, police brutality, arbitrary confiscation, random harrassment, illegal surveillance—people in this country who are insufficiently ‘white’ and/or insufficiently well-off go through it all the time, and it’s ongoing. There was a time in the 70s when it seemed that oppressive overzealousness had generated serious opposition, culminating in the Church Committee, but the pendulum swang back fairly quickly—and, of course, the Church Committee had no interest in “everyday” police brutality, such as exemplified by the Rodney King beating, the conduct uncovered by the Mollen Commission, the death of Amadou Diallo, and countless other examples.

In any case, having noted that, essentially, this shit goes on all the time and the underclass in this society bear the brunt of it, I wonder about the motivations driving its expansion. After all, one of the reasons that this doesn’t tend to happen to the middle class is that they have some power, political and financial. Right now, though, the powers-that-be don’t fear being exposed in their flagrant abuses.

There are a variety of reasons for that, not least of which is that they know that swarms of bleating apologists will emerge immediately, those who seek to always justify the exercise of authority no matter how appalling it is. They also know that without media support, citizen outrage will sink almost unnoticed.

Nevertheless, I’m still curious about exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing.

There are a number of different groups involved. At the very least, there are the people organizing the convention, the big shots attending the convention, Federal police agencies, local police agencies, and local municipal governments.

I doubt very much that any of these groups are actually worried that the protests, left unmolested, would damage or even noticeably hinder their goals in the short term. Protesters in the Twin Cities are not going to change GOP policy or actions one iota. Even if millions turned out, their impact on the GOP would be minimal, and the media would simultaneously belittle their presence while casting them as frightening and dangerous. So we can eliminate short-term protection of the interests of the GOP big shots as motivation.

The convention organizers and the local government, on the other hand, would be concerned about protests, because they want everything to be as smooth as possible. Both groups are highly motivated to ensure that everything is smooth, and both groups are highly motivated to ensure that the daily activities of the big shots are not disrupted even an iota. Both groups look to those big shots for favors, or will do so in future, and hence will bend over backwards to please them. I doubt that many of them consider routinely violating the Constitution in order to smooth the lives of the vastly powerful as anything other than something that’s simply necessary for their careers. If they even consider it in those terms. That provides one plank of motivation.

The local police groups are probably motivated by three factors: a desire for federal funding, a desire to feel important, and a probable dislike for the kinds of people who protest. The first is obvious: they’re given a lot of money by the Feds to help the various covert operations involved, and possibly for a lot of other equipment, and probably for overtime and the like that eventually directly benefits rank-and-file police. The second is a little more dubious, because it seems so ludicrous that anyone would really believe that it’s of critical importance to the safety of the city to bust up peaceful protesters, but I suspect that the police believe their own (and the Feds’) propaganda, because believing that there are nasty “terrorists” involved makes it all much more palatable. If those “terrorists” are so cunning as to seem exactly like nonviolent peaceful protesters, that’s merely a sign of how cunning they are. Sinclair’s dictum is relevant here: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Lastly, police tend not to like protesters of any stripe, and left-wing ones are usually associated with groups the police regard as enemies, such as the “free Abu-Jamal” and CopWatch (or similar) crowds.

The lower-level Feds are like the police: they want to get the money associated with these operations, they’re probably also aware that doing them well might be important career-wise, and they want to feel important. Higher up the ladder, they’re more concerned with the desires of the elite, a number of whom make up the Republican “big shots” mentioned earlier. We’ve already established that these big shots are unconcerned with the short-term effects of the protests, although they might well dislike any disruption in their days.

That leaves the longer-term impact of the protests. As corrupt as the American political establishment is, I strongly doubt that they would expend so much effort and energy just to make sure their meetings at such events run on schedule. There are longer-term considerations, two major ones that I can see.

The first is the desire to expand the security state. It was already huge before 2001, and has ballooned since thenm, in all directions. Much of it is really about security theater, but with an additional element that I don’t know if Schneier included in his original definition: the presence of security makes further security appear necesary. That is, each event (or procedure) at which security theater is present creates drives for it to be present at other events. Politicians and bureaucrats see it partly as a matter of prestige, and so demand it at more and more events. Those in the public, or the media, who choose not to see it for what it is will also demand it at more and more events, since it becomes reassuring to them and hence they want its presence more or less all the time. Behind these motivations, there’s the usual, perhaps eternal, one: those in power seek more power. The people controlling the security apparatus want more power to accrue to it so they can wield that power.

The second is related, and is about longer-term suppression of democracy. While nobody in power thinks that protesters will achieve anything in the short term, the last thing they want is for protest to become mainstream or acceptable, because then it might well achieve things, and those things would by definition be outside the control of those in power, because they’d be grassroots efforts. While intimidating the protesters is a part of the plan, the larger effort is aimed at those who aren’t protesting now but who might think of doing so at some point. Many of them will be put off by fear of being treated badly, which is understandable, and a sadly large other number will be put off because they will believe that the massive “security” operations must have been justified by something and that hence protesting means joining with “dangerous elements”.

Those last effects, attempting to ensure that grassroots movements cannot spread and that only establishment-approved (i.e. establishment-controlled) means of political participation are considered “appropriate”, are not bugs. They’re features, in fact the main features.

Compared to The Joker, all of the other characters are bland. Most of them are pretty bland anyway. Even Batman and, almost as surprisingly, Gotham City itself. My first thought, at the opening of the film, was that Gotham here looked like something from The Matrix—and the urban scenes in that film were deliberately made to look generic, a setting of AnyCity, Earth.

Gotham’s lack of character was folowed by what seemed to me an extremely subdued performance by Bale. I thought he was fantastic in the first film, the best on-screen Batman by far, but in this movie he seemed almost not to be there at all. In certain respects this makes sense given the plot, in which he’s quite ambivalent about his vigilante role, but evem given that he seemed absent. Attention seemed to move away from him whenever he was on the screen. It’s not that it was a terrible performance per se, it’s just that it didn’t seem to have any weight or presence. The Dark Knight was like an empty suit.

I thought that every other character in the film was quite bad. Harvey Dent was weak and unconvincing. Gordon was more convincing but just going through the motions. Rachel Dawes was another cipher. Alfred, at least, had presence and seemed real. Lucius Fox had some solidity also.

Almost all of the bit characters seemed like caricature (as did many of the main characters, including Dent in particular).

Corruption was interesting, in that it clearly went higher up the chain than most simplistic plots allow, but was frustrating at the same time because it still didn’t seem real, because it was difficult to see how it worked as well as it did. Yes, real-life corruption certainly includes getting to people deeply in debt, but it also involves a lot more honey, a lot of steady co-option that worms its way into everyday life so deeply that it just becomes normal, as it is in most countries today. It’s unreasonable of me to expect The Dark Knight to meaningfully reflect that, but at the same time it seemed to come close occasionally.

Commensurately, the “criminal underworld” were fatuously unconvincing, and this was particularly marked in comparison to The Joker. One of the “mob” bosses was an exception, the one who points out to Batman that his threats are ineffective compared to The Joker’s given that everyone knows that he has rules, whereas The Joker does not.

Some of The Joker’s “sociological experiments” are interesting, but seem to fade before they’re fully explored, and are tucked away by simple heroics, dulling their impact somewhat.

So, overall, it was worth seeing, but veered between being interesting and hugely predictable, between being appropriately complex and boringly simplistic, and between being vividly compelling (when Ledger was on the screen) and generically bland (when he wasn’t).

That’s fairly telling in itself, right? The common perception (myth) about media outlets in this country is that they’ll happily display anything for a buck, and that if they were in the business of refusing paying patrons they wouldn’t survive. But that’s not true, and the myriad stories about the media refusing to publicize or advertise things that have surfaced in the last decade (and before) make that quite clear. They aren’t neutral channels, displaying whatever people can pay for (within the bounds of the law)—they’re gatekeepers, and they see their function quite clearly as such. “Subversion”, or even something that could be mistaken for subversion, is rejected without much consideration.

What the Monbiot article does make clear is that regardless of whether or not decision-makers think it works, they are quite willing to screw around with international diplomacy just to keep the money flowing, as is the case with the recent decision to push Poland to accept the current incarnation of this wishful-thinking “system”.

Monbiot estimates that the US will have spent over two hundred billion dollars on this system since 1983. That’s rather a lot of money. Granted a lot of that money ends up back in the economy in other ways, provides jobs, etc., but it’s still quite horrific to consider the ways in which it could have been spent that would have been better for more or less everyone.

In addition, Glenn Greenwald does the necessary work on contrasting how right-wing commentators treat some men who marry into wealth differently from others.

Even after the fiasco in Iraq, the bloody failure in Lebanon, the downward spiral in Afghanistan and, now, the futile posturing in Georgia, there’s absolutely no evidence the US foreign policy elite is inclined to moderate its ambition to re-organize the world along American lines. Nor is there any sign the political class (including, unfortunately, Barack Obama) is rethinking its lockstep support for that agenda.

As far as I can tell, he’s completely right. I haven’t seen any evidence along those lines whatsoever. It doesn’t seem to matter what the problems are (of course the US President doesn’t think there are any), or how considerable the obstacles, the assumption seems to be that the US can simply make whatever it wants to happen, happen. If that were mere posturing for the press and masses, that would be bad enough, but it seems that it’s actually what passes for thinking at the highest levels of US governance.

I suppose it’s a lot easier to be overconfident about these things when really you’re playing with other people’s money/lives/futures. When the elites overreach, odds are they won’t suffer much as a result.

The Anatol Lievin article billmon refers to is also worth reading.

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    "/media_common/adaptation/adapted_from" : [
      {
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        "other:type" : {
          "id" : "/comic_books/comic_book_story",
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The stuff with “other:type” is in there to filter out films based on comics, since I didn’t want to consider those in my musings.

There are 90 candidates in Freebase. I haven’t gone through them exhaustively, but collating them that way is a lot better than trying to figure out the list by going through every film released in the last ten years and checking to see if they’re adaptations of books. Even given that Freebase is likely to miss some, it’s better this way than wading through all the IMDB entries or similar.

Federer was the world number one for longer, consecutively, than anyone before him: 237 weeks, from 2 Feb 2004 until 17 Aug 2008. The previous men’s record was 160 (Jimmy Connors), more than a year shorter than Federer. Steffi Graf had a record of 186 consecutive weeks at number one, just under a year shorter than Federer.

The numbers sound dry, but really, being the world number one for more than four straight years, without ever dropping into the second spot, is a truly unbelievable achievement. The consistency required is just ridiculous, and my suspicion is that it will be quite some time before anyone comes near that record.

It’s also notable that despite the fact that Federer’s form has definitely dropped, in order to take the number one ranking Nadal had to win the French and Wimbledon and after that outperform Federer in the run-up to the US Open—which he certainly has done, and has now added a singles gold Olympic medal to his trophies (something Federer has never done). At this stage, Federer cannot regain the number one ranking by winning the US Open, no matter how Nadal does, and it’s looking extremely unlikely for Federer to be number one at the end of the year.

Federer’s fade has been quite rapid. Since losing the epic Wimbledon final to Nadal, he hasn’t won any tournaments, hasn’t gotten to the final of any tournament, and has lost to some people that he’s never lost to before, such as James Blake, who beat him in straight sets (!) at the Olympics.

I expect him to make a serious effort at the US Open, of course. His Grand Slam record is ridiculously good, but I think there’s a chance the at Flushing Meadows another of his amazing record-setting runs might stop: that of reaching the semi-final of seventeen straight Grand Slam events. (Also, during that streak he’s never lost at a Grand Slam except to the eventual winner.)

Of course, he might well make the final there, and set up another fantastic matchup between himself and Nadal—in which case I’ll definitely be watching it.

This Wondermark strip strikes me as funny in theory: set up the provocation of the language nerd, show the language nerd’s newfound determined tolerance, and then show him being overwhelmed by the deliberate transgression that’s just too much. I did find it funny, but this was offset somewhat by the fact that the final “transgression” isn’t one that gets me at all (whereas all of the prior provocations would). I’m not sure I really count as a “language nerd”, but I definitely wince at some of what they provoke him with (notably “irregardless” (sic)). So why did the final offense in this strip not bother me at all—and while I’m at it, why do the others bother me in the first place?

So in the final panel, the two provocateurs hit Larry the language nerd with “ginormous”, and it’s simply too much for him to take, despite his having previously ignored:

• anyways
• irregardless
• him and me decided
• could of
• supposably
• the most unique
• I could care less

(All sic, obviously. And I might have missed one or two.)

“Ginormous” isn’t the same as, say, “irregardless”. “Ginormous”, while possibly annoying to some people, is a coining based on mushing together “gigantic” and “enormous”, and is (in my experience) used in a kind of cutesy way to emphasize something being large, as in no-really-it-was-absolutely-huge. As such, so what? I don’t really see what’s wrong with people using a new word in that way. Granted, the English language already has plenty of words for large, so it’s redundant, but I can’t think of any others that have the childlike awe that I think “ginormous” is trying to get across. “Ginormous” is you might have described something really large when you were a child, and that’s critical to its spirit, and (presumably) why people use it.

So it’s a new word, perhaps inelegant (given that it grabs two other words and jams them together, in the process obliterating chunks of the original words), and by a number of definitions it’s “not a real word”. As stated above, it could also be argued that English doesn’t need another word for “big”. On the other hand, it has a certain nuance that isn’t captured by those other words, and so its creation/use could easily be defended on that basis. It’s comprehensible and effective, and why should the creation of effective new words be condemned?

Fine then—so why do the other examples bother me? If I’m so blasé about new words, shouldn’t I accept “irregardless” with open arms?

No. The difference is that when people use “ginormous”, they’re not actually trying to say either “gigantic” or “enormous” and getting it wrong. It’s another option, one that they’re choosing over it (presumably because of certain subtleties they prefer about it). “Irregardless“, on the other hand, is the result of ignorance, of someone taking “regardless” and tacking “ir-” on the front because they have confused it with “irrespective”, or because they’re just confused.

Most of the other early provocations in the comic are similar, although “anyways” and “I could care less could have cases made in their defense that they don’t arise through pure mistakes.

In other words, I’m mostly fine with regional variants and with neologisms, but ignorance-based mistakes drive me crazy.

Why?

I’m not sure. It’s not deliberate on my part. I recognize that Larry is mostly correct when he points out that the correction of such things is worse than the transgression, too, yet I often can’t seem to help making that correction.

The reason for the correction is fairly clear to me, at least. I know myself well enough to know that it’s not done egotistically, or to put down the other person, and in fact I often feel bad about making the correction at all because I know it’ll often be misinterpreted that way. What prompts me (or tempts me) to make it is the strong desire to stop its spread.

Again, why? What is it about that kind of thing that makes me risk social awkwardness and offense? The meaning is clear, so communication has been achieved, so what’s the problem?

The initial reaction, before any thought of a correction enters my mind, is involuntary. I wince, and I just don’t have control over that, although I might be able to manage merely wincing inwardly. But the reaction is there.

The nearest I can come to explaining this reaction is to liken it to music. If you’re listening to a musician and they hit a wrong note, it can feel painful and jarring. That’s what it feels like to me when I hear something like “irregardless” or read something like “your an idiot”. One additional wrinkle is that the musician will have been aware of hitting the wrong note, whereas the speaker/writer of something like that is usually not aware of it… which is what brings up the issue of correction.

I suppose that my appreciation of language, generally a positive thing, brings with it the negative of being highly sensitive to such missteps, and I have to accept it as part of the package.

I do consider language something to play with, not an ossified set of absolute rules that must be followed—but sounding discordant language notes because you don’t know what you’re doing doesn’t strike me as play, espcially when you’re effectively spreading those discordant notes to other speakers. (It’s perhaps interesting also that mistakes commonly made by non-native speakers don’t tend to bug me much, in part because it’s clear that they’re learners.)

There’s something else here, caught in that last paragraph about how speaking or writing isn’t just like a musical performance but is also almost viral, because of how we humans spread language to each other, and I suspect that this is an important factor in why these mistakes bother me, but I’ll have to leave that for another time.

Once that hurdle was overcome, however, it was remarkably trouble free. Installation was easy, and the XP from work also gave me no problems. I was able to upgrade to IE7 without any hassle.

The fact that it (almost) seamlessly works with VPN, too, it great—the host machine’s VPN connection is shared with the emulated machine. I say “almost” because it didn’t work at first, and it took me a while to realize that the host VPN was actually down when I started the emulated machine’s Windows, and so I needed to restart while VPN was available. That took care of it.

One glitch I noticed is that the emulated machine appears to take over the DVD drive. While running the emulator, I wasn’t able to do anything at the host level to access or eject the DVD (but ejecting it from within emulation worked fine).

Overall, based on the fact that it appears to just work, I have to recommend it if you need something that performs that function (and are willing to use proprietary software—sadly I don’t think any of the free software emulators are quite at this level yet).

It’s not necessarily that the authorities actively regard civilians as “the enemy” (although they certainly seem to), it’s that these organizations seek to expand their own powers and influence, and the march towards “security” is another convenient means to do so, especially since it promises money (from politicians eager to a) show that they’re doing something to make voters safer and b) line the pockets of the cronies along the way), increased power, decreased accountability, and a wonderful excuse to do lots of things in secret.

In addition, a major character is a young girl, Miri, who at 13 is of course a tech wiz and who of course is extremely curious and of course sticks her nose into goings-on important to the plot and of course ends up being critical to the denouement. For me, that’s enough to kill a novel right there. You have to either be writing a children’s book or do everything else really really well to get past that, and Vinge sadly doesn’t do much well in this book.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Rainbows End won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2007. I was quite flabbergasted, and kept thinking that a data entrry somewhere wsa responsible for my reading this assertion. Sadly, no. Again, while I respect the technology that Vinge comes up with in the book, and think he did a good job with some of that, it’s still an award for best novel, not best futurist manifesto/prediction. I wondered then if that could possibly have been a really bad year for science fiction coming out of the US, such that there wasn’t anything truly good, and Vinge won through based parlty on past reputation.

But the shortlist for the 2007 Hugo included Blindsight (also available online). Blindsight is an excellently-written science ficiton novel with some truly fantastic ideas, some novel concepts about where the future is going, interesting characters, a fascinating plot, and some extremely interesting musings on the core science fiction question of what it means to be human. I can see how some people might think that it tries too hard to be clever, and I could also see some people thinking that it’s overly intellectual, but even so, for it to have lost out to Rainbows End for the Hugo is a disgrace.

York, however,, seemed initially like a town in Ireland. Same kind of weather, and I can understand what people say, and people dress in broadly similar fashion… but it’s not actually Ireland at all. I can’t even put my finger on many cultural differences, but they’re around, nd all of the irish contingent presnt reamrked upon the odd impression of “it almost seems like it should be the same but isn’t”.

Another factor is that England is of course the setting for so much English literature. Despite this, it didn’t feel like the same place at all. The England of fiction remains a fictional place for me, even as I wander around part of the real England. That isn’t the case for other places—Dublin and San Francisco and Berlin (and even Los Angeles) are all famous fictional settings, and I have no problem reconciling that with the real places. New York is a special case, a mythical and real place that’s almost a meta-city in fiction. London might have a similar property, but York, and Durham, seem entirely disconnected from their literary selves. Essentially, England has always been a fictional setting, and seems to remain so despite visiting it.

A number of comments over the weekend revolved around the consumerism of the English. That the Irish, at this point, would call out any other nation for overly consumerist tendencies seems a little hypocritical, but they might have a point. The class system in England feeds the consumerism, I think, and after all England has been a center of capitalism for hundreds of yeras, occupying a special place in capitalist history.

Nevertheless, I was a little nonplussed to see on the Leeds/Bradford airport monitors, for those flights without gate details the following imperative in place of those details: Relax and Shop.

One of the effects of the uncertainty in my cultural grounding while I was in York was that at times I would realize that, unless I thought about it for a moment, I was uncertain of which side of the road cars drove on. In Ireland that comes naturally, and the same is true in California, but over the weekend it seeemd an open question despite my knowing perfectly well that they drive on the left.

Winner of the prize for best place name I encountered: Nun Monkton. Second place: Blubberhouses.

Also, when Klavan wonders at conservative movie-makers having to “put on a mask” to show off their values, I can’t help but think of Watchmen’s New Frontiersman headline “Honor is like the Hawk: Sometimes it must go Hooded.”