Brains: Couldn't Happen To Nicer Guys

Five tips to avoid annoying other people

Gretchen gives us stuff to think about:

1. Don't use a whiny voice
2. Watch your cellphone use
3. Don't curse
4. Clean up after yourself
5. Think about whether you're being interesting

Focus on the Family loses jobs

( Couldn't happen to a bunch of nicer guys. )

New Gingrich Vs. The Rising Homosexualist Facist Horde!

( What a great movie that would make )

The call to 'route around' the Human Rights Campaign grows

( The Internet views it as damage. )

David Frum leaves NRO!

( NRO is becoming as relevant as World Net Daily )

The very model of common sense conservatism!

( Sarah Palin, the mistress of the word salad? Really? )

Bush team engages in 'burrowing.'

( Moving political appointees to senior civil posts )

Brains: One Long Form You Have Got To Be Kidding Me...

File this one under "You have got to be kidding me." In a piece for NRO, Andrew McCarthy reaches for mind-boggling levels of searing idiocy and vies with Joseph Farah for the crown of fools. In a hand-wringing article about the Status of Force Agreement reached between the United States and Iraq, McCarthy writes:

INCONVENIENT FACT: THE IRAQIS DON'T LIKE US

This last point is the one that gnaws. Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam's terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates.

"Ingrates!" Jesus wept. You'd think the Iraqi people ought to be happy that we wrecked their infrastructure, killed thousands of civilians, removed official barriers, and created resources stresses that led to intertribal warfare that killed tens if not hundreds of thousands more, and saddled them with the Maliki administration.

"Ingrates." Can you name a single war anywhere in which invaders were welcomed? Anywhere? Any time? Even in Germany and Japan, which McCarthy cites as positive examples, did not want our invading forces; they lived with them and wrote good things after we were gone. But they weren't happy ever with our presence.

McCarthy wrings his hands further over the fact that Iraq's government isn't going to be our puppet but will instead pursue its own interests in the region, interests which coincide with Iran's in a lot of ways. And we shouldn't be surprised: many of the most competent administrators Maliki has, the ones who know how to run an agency, were trained in Iran, and Maliki accepted them knowing this. Shiite Muslims dominate both countries. You'd think McCarthy never read right-wing pornographer Tom Clancy. In Executive Orders, written in 1996, Clancy points out that if Saddam Hussein goes down, Iran's and Iraq's Shiite interests converge on counterbalancing the Sunni/Wahabbi economic strength of Saudi Arabia. Seven years before our war with Iraq, Tom Clancy had done more research and understood the problem better than McCarthy ever has in the six-year-long course of the war.

McCarthy ends with this charming layer of permafrost:

Victory in Iraq has never meant a functioning democracy. It means defeating radical Islam, which in turn means routing al-Qaeda and leaving behind a stable Iraq that is an American ally against jihadist-sponsoring regimes like Iran.

But "radical Islam" wasn't a problem in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was the problem in Iraq.

I hope McCarthy is being disingenious with his audience. I hope he's just lying to them about the threat of "radical Islam" in Iraq.

Because if he really believes what he writes, I can only conclude one thing: Andrew McCarthy is a true-blooded Crusader. The brown people of Iraq never mattered to Andrew McCarthy. They are irrelevant to his agenda, and if they die in horrific numbers, Andrew McCarthy doesn't care. All that matters is that the United States gets its base of operations from which to kill more "jihadist-sponsoring" brown people in Iran.

When Ann Coulter wrote of the Middle East, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," National Review Online killed her column, citing "journalistic differences." McCarthy has revealed himself to be a proponent of callous state violence without regard for law or humanity. It is time for National Review to fire Andrew McCarthy as it fired Ann Coulter, and for the same reasons.

Question arising from a conversation with Kouryou-chan

Why is there no zombie tarot?

Imagine the Nine of Swords, or Temperance, or the Five of Pentacles, but with zombies.

That would be cool.

Arse Electronica, "Sex-Related Interfaces:" well, that was a waste of my time

Earlier this year, a convention entitled Arse Electronica was held in San Franciso. The purpose of the convention was to describe the way sex and technology intermingle, with surveys of past human/tech interactions, the state of the art, and predictions about the future. AE was kind enough to put all of their material on-line so that the public could listen to the presentations.

I listened last night to "Sex-Related Interfaces," a subset of a presentation called "Make It So" by Nathan Shedroff, in which Shedroff and Chris Noessel discuss a survey of designs found in fiction that show how technology influences the way human beings have sex. Their material covered three distinct categories: augmented matchmaking, augmented coupling, and sex with machines.

All of which are interesting categories. Shedroff and Noessel completely blew their material, however, by doing all of the footwork themselves and using only material from movies and television. Noessel even went so far as to say that they considered animation, but animation was too low-resolution to have anything worth presenting. If there was anything in books, they hadn't considered it.

Although I was less than a quarter of the way into a presentation, and I did ultimately listen to the whole thing, I have to say that, right there, most of my interest in the presentation evaporated.

The presentation beyond that was completely predictable. Star Trek's holodeck for masturbation. The roulette wheel of available females from Logan's Run. The Buffybot. There were some cute moments, like when Noessel praised Joss Whedon for depicting sex'droids as "tools for the immature."

I have a problem with Noessel's analysis of the Buffybot. The purpose of every techonological advance in this arena is to smooth out the rough spots, make sex better or easier, and deny us the "maturing" experience of difficult sex. Noessel's analysis is anti-Kassian, which is good, but to denigrate it is to denigrate the human tradition in its entirety.

But beyond that, I have a problem with Shedroff's dismissal of anything outside of a visual medium. Shedroff at one point complains that most presentations of technological advances in the erotic sphere are wholly physical: about making the mechanics of sex better, about making the physical sensations stronger, last longer, be done with more cleanliness and efficiency. It's about the surface stuff and none of the messy connectivity of humanity underneath. Well, what did he expect to get when his chosen medium was the most facile, most about the surface, least interested in the underneath? Television and movies are not well-equipped to give us a serious look into the inner lives of characters, and indy studios don't have the budgets or the interest to make SF movies.

Shedroff is a designer, a surface kind of guy. He's all about the design of personal things, and how they make us change. He wants to see these things and ask how they influence us. But by ignoring books, Shedroff misses the most important science fiction of the day. Shedroff understands where the cell-phone came from, but somehow missed the waterbed, the waldo, the taser, swarming robots, and e-ink, all of which appeared in popular books long before they ever made it onto video screens or into homes.

I've written more interesting stories about technology-mediated matchmaking, augmented interactions, and lots of lots of love-bots, than has ever appeared on any screen large or small. If Shedroff is really interested in how these things shape human beings, he's not going to get far watching the tube. Predictions about how people interact with robots, even (or especially) in bed are the province of SF writers and will be for some time. Matchmaking via Craigslist or Manhunt is more interesting that most of what we've seen on the television screen. Books such as Peter Watts' Blindsight, Karl Hansen's Dream Games, and Charlie Stross's Halting State show us much more vividly how technology will ultimately make, or break, our humanness.

Because of the need for a mass audience to justify the expense of camera, crew, and actors, television and movies will always be less interesting, less forward-looking, and less challenging than literature. Ignoring it because it doesn't meet your paradigm is laziness on the part of the researcher.