Democrat & Chronicle: Free beer if you register to vote

Cool. Take the poll and pass it on. Currently, "This is a cheap ploy to get votes" is winning, though I guess since they're only giving out 2oz beers it is a little cheap; c'est la vie.

Limmy.com : Xylophone

This is much fun. Click around. Brits; hillarious what happens to a culture after they get over their imperial apex. I look forward to being a salty old man in post-imperial USA.

In light of the death of Ronald Reagan, I bought HST's Generation of Swine -- which turns out to be mostly a collection of his columns in the SF Examiner -- to get a feel for the era. I spent a lot of my early days on a commune, traveling like a gypsy, going to hippy elementary school, sequestered for some summers on a farm in Iowa, and I wasn't really politically conscious during the Reagan era, except to know that my mom didn't fancy him too much. I picked up enough backwash on my own during the tenure of Bush the elder to realize Dutch was probably not my cup of tea, but Hunter really brings the heat:

The legacy of Ronald Reagan will be different from those of the other three... Richard Nixon was a crook, Gerald Ford was a shameless fixer and Jimmy Carter was an awesome bungler who gave once-proud political values like "decency" and "honesty" a bad name.

But these things are small compared to the horrible stains and half-blotted failures that Ronald Reagan is going to leave on the lives and memories of this sad generation of the 1980s that he once presumed to lead and inspire, while that the same tiem telling a reporter from People magazine, "This generation may well be the one that sees the end of the world."

...

Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the '80s. In addition to the huge and terribly crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool.

-- H.S.T June 22, 1987

Earlier in the book he noted that white males aged 18-30 voted for Reagan by a 71% margin in 1984. Given that's the generation in power right now (white males aged 38 - 50) it's not terribly surprising that the whitewash of history has come on so strong. Still; a shame that people can't admit they were wrong.

freedom.mov

Oh man.

Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice

Dave Weiner is obviously a smart guy and a visionary. It's also clear that he's a dick. It's too bad that those two traits coincide so often.

And so plans are made and a new season swings into action. The thrill of adventure, of peril, of a worthy adversary. We're stepping up to the next level. I feel that the adventure is back.

I'm sick of doubt, of being downtrodden, of being self-oppressed. There's enough fucking external oppression out and about these days man, it just won't do to have it coming from within as well. This cop in the head has got to go.

I used to be a more free person, more exhuberent and more honest in the sense of being unguarded and without so much calculation. I recall all the personal progress I made throughout my time in school and I think maybe I should take up yoga again, return to the life of an artist. Perhaps a return to graduate school, or some wild international program.

But I also feel that a lot of what I've lost has to do with an end to innocence, and grad school is a cop out on that tip. Innocence, optimism, maturity, growth, cynicism, pessimism... that shouldn't be a one-way transition. There's been a lot of heartbreak in the past year, I know. A lot of sorrow, and I sort of let it get to me. Lonely nights absolutely crammed with work and worry wear down ones spirit, and without question I been depleted.

Yet I can't cotton to retreat. Not just because it feels like failure. I really don't believe there is any going back. A truly lucky person is gifted to return in triumph with new eyes, but it's foolish to try getting anywhere in reverse.

And so it's time to make a move forward. This situation isn't working out. Something's got to give, and it's unlikely to be my material circumstances. My mindset has got to change. Wild bohemain values, man. Hew to the fucking ethos! Rediscover your love for humanity, for the beauty in souls, for all the tragi-comic ideosyncratic magic of lived experience. This is life; and you do no good by failing to enjoy the world. Be in love wity yr life, reclaim the dignitiy of yr own experience, the most important thing is to stop struggling.

So this is the end of my subterranian life, my homesick blues. No more longing for the past no more. Indeed, it's high time I was a little more bold, a bit more of an explorer.

Glaciers break slowly. Something shocks the system. Fissures spread in the facade, and deep beneath things begin to stir.

Big bike ride yesterday, bounding up to the top of twin peaks. The ocean was clear and the heavy wind coming over the top of the hill was enough to lean into; trust fall with mother earth. Rambled through the city, which is charged with a couple of conferences, some peace marches, and various gatherings of the far out. All that and the normal hustle of a Saturday. Hit the bank, then the Zeitgeist for a beer and a garden burger and calling my mom, then home.

And then out again. Bowling organized by my friend Zephyr and attended by DeanSpace colleagues and other allies in town for the Planetworks conference. Bowling is fun. Then up a hill to a woman named Abigail's house, a friend of Z's, and conversations about free will and public art and the new philosophy and of course politics. It's good. I don't get to talk about free will all that often, and it's something I like to do. Mmm... intellectual stimulation.

Speaking of stimulation, the balmy weather does make the blood run. I'm prowling, and it's getting to be annoying. It's not like a conscious thing I go and do, but rather some mood that just seems to settle over me, where I can't seem to have any interaction with anyone female without feeling an over/under-tone of sexual tension.

This is annoying to me because the desire to fuck obstructs my ability to interact with women as fellow human beings. This is largely a flaw in my own psychology, I think, because there are clearly people out there in the world who have greater libidinous appetites than I do who still manage to move through life without feeling similarly blocked. I think what it boils down to is that somewhere in me I'm uncomfortable with my own desires, and so when these things come up it throws me off balance.

Intellectually, I don't see any reason for my being uncomfortable. Yet there it is. More estrangement from self.

I've had two very odly sexy dreams the past two nights. Friday night's also had strange racial overtones. I dreamt that I was in a grocery store in NYC, picking up my basket off the ground I bumped into a voluptuous half-black pregnant woman, and after speaking a few words she asked me how old I was. I answered 25 and she said, "good, then I can take you home." On the way back to her house, we (or rather she) got razzed by some black men in an SUV. I don't recall if there was any actual sex in the dream, but there was the very clear intent, and a definite feeling of arousal. It was all tied up in some larget bohemian storyline about politics and the occult, I think.

Last night I dreamt -- again as part of some larger storyline that I can't really recall -- that I was making prank phone calls to the police, reporting non-existant bad drivers from a payphone. I stepped out and ran into Caryn Johnson, who was one of my original highschool crushes. There was a similar spark as we kind of both circled back to say high, to catch up, and in the dream I'm standing there with my hands on this woman's hips, getting closer and closer, and then these two kids bust into the picture, a younger boy and and older girl. They're not hers, but somehow she's responsible for them. After that I don't really remember.

So that's kind of odd... two not-really-erotic dreams (but with titlating sexual content) both involving random encounters and children. What would Freud say?

I got some decent pushback on my GOP Team Leader comment from the other day. Rather than just answer in the comments, I'll take the opportunity to go through the process here on the front page.

Not only do I think the Iraqi Body Count (IBC) is too high, it does not support your use of it. For example, when Iraqis or foreign terrorists blow up the ICRC building, the UN building, and other “soft” targets, those deaths go into the IBC database.

Valid, and I thought of that while I was writing it. However, it would seem unlikely to me that more than 2/3 of the Iraqi civilian casualties have been caused by insurgents. Likewise, there are few other force on which one can attribute collateral damage in Afghanistan for.

I personally don’t find it unbelievable that “The war on terror has taken more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Great, we agree! Moving on.

It is completely dishonest to say that “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up”. Unless, of course, you are making the argument that despite spending “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up” that fewer fatalities (lower fatality rate) have resulted in both countries.

You're making what is called a counter-factual argument, saying that the consequences of not taking an action would have been worse than taking said action after the action has been taken. This is not a way to engage in rational discourse. It is also the same illogic that Bush uses, for instance, to justify his massive tax cuts: "things may be bad, but they would have been much worse if I hadn't done this."

You presuppose of binary view of possibilities, in this case, "war or nothing." This was a big part of how the pro-war faction succeeded. They were able to frame the debate as war vs doing nothing at all, which of course is a completely ridiculous way to look at things.

The real rub with counter-factual arguments is, of course, that there's no way to know what would have happened if alternative courses of action had been taken because the matter is already settled. They're useful in science because you can go back and re-do an experiment, a luxury we don't have in the world of statecraft.

Beyond this, your argument is further flawed in that you equate any innocent lives lost through US non-intervention to innocent lives we directly bring to an end. This is not rational either, unless you want to say that we're responsible for every unjust life lost world-wide in the same way that we're responsible for blowing up a wedding party by mistake.

WWII killed more “innocent civilians” than the attack on Pearl Harbor. Especially in Europe, whose people had nothing to do with the attack on Hawaii (not even a state at the time).

And so the inevitable comparison to "the good war" comes out. This is pure jingoistic masturbation. Comparing the non-threat of Iraq with the very real threat of the Axis powers is bullshit. Don't take my word for it. Ask a vet about it sometime.

I guess, by that logic, we should have just rounded up 3,000 or less Afghani and Iraqi civilians, murdered them, and called it even? Is that the point?

No, but it would seem that's somewhere near the point the GOP is making. The point I'm making, Tim with no email address or home page, is that the notion that the GOP really thinks it's "Unbelievable" that George Soros would get up and say things like this in public is a pretty unbelievable in and of itself.

Further, it would seem to me that the GOP refuses to admit (finds "unbelievable") that there are strong moral arguments against what we are doing right now in Iraq and around the world. It would seem that when such an argument is made the GOP, rather than making any attempt to actually engage in the work of undertanding and justifying what is going on, seeks to marginalize that moral position in any way it can. My point is that I think the GOP is acting in an immoral and untruthful fashion. My point (which was there all along) is this:

This GOP apparatus is an enemy of truth, an enemy of logic, an enemy of compassion and rational thought. They’ve got to fucking go, and decent Republicans are going to realize this sooner or later. You cannot run a good political party on lies, greed racism and religious fervor. (I just added greed, forgot it before)

If, on the other hand, what you're trying to draw out of me is what I would consider to be a better response to September 11th, you might want to read Why War is Not the Answer or Thoughts on an Anti-War Movement, both of which I wrote in the fall/winter of 2002. I haven't given a lot of thought to the matter lately because, well, a course of action has already been taken and I'm more concerned with what is going on than what might have been.

Boots + Jam Jam are a couple of Reedies. I like Reed. They have good party and smart kids. These two guys have two great projects: MakeMeATape and WriteMeALetter.

The kids are allright.