Individual solutions to climate change, I think, are kind of a waste of money and cycles, it's going to be structural, societal, governmental changes, and fast (not over a 30 roof life) or we as a biosphere are in deep trouble. So, lawyers now > save a trickle of energy for 30 years.
I hate to be negative for a company that, like you say, is trying to do something, but I think a better environmental case could be made for doing a conventional roof and donating the $X,000 you'd save over a Tesla roof to the Sierra Club or 350.org to sue the Trump Admin more and better.
Sheesh, America is mirroring its enemies, beards are hip in some crowds and pseudo-Medieval execution of political enemies is in others. Is Woolsey running for Caliph, trying to land consulting gigs with the Saudi government, or just considering a stab at US President 2020, and why is there so much overlap between those jobs?
I'm likewise amazed how often people in capitalist quasi-democracies are *more* paranoid about government abusing individuals than corporations abusing individuals. I'm not saying this is black/white -- of course there are *plenty* of examples of totalitarian government -- but corporations are clearly, inarguably non-democratic. Quasi-democratic governments (such as the US) have *some* public interest and public input (the rest of their motivation and input has been bought by the investment class). Both corporations and "democratic" governments are necessary evils, but "democratic" governments are gonna be the lesser evil.
I can second the gist of this (I'm not an agent by any stretch). My family's been off corporate health insurance for about 6 months now and it would have been *much* worse if not for working with a good agent, I believe. What a byzantine, horrible system. We got hit with some pre-exisiting condition ridiculousness, had rejections, etc. Our agent helped steer us and prioritize and advise.
We're insured, not broke because of it, have decent coverage, and can do the work we want to and get the pay we deserve (versus the work that provides health insurance, what a bizarre criterion for a career!!).
Still, I don't feel really secure -- health insurance drops people, etc. Next step is we'll form as S corp to get better rates (I think) and group protection. We'll have our agent help with that.
Next step after that (seriously) is considering immigration to Canada, not even so much about health insurance, but more about a rational, workable society, versus the oligarchical wealth grab known as the US economy and government.
I think these are very important topics -- raising good, capable, happy people, being good to kids. These topics used to be vitally important to me as a student in "good," but mainstream public schools. I checked out the alternatives as best I could, especially for college. I found that the "structureless" alternatives, like Goddard College, spent a lot of time focusing on what structures, if any, to have. At a certain point, I wanted to spend my schooling focusing on something other than schooling itself. The Big 10 model -- thousands of people taking a class, even over video camera -- from one authority seemed somewhat criminal to me.
I settled on a middle ground, the Great Books model, in my case the Hutchins School at Sonoma State University. The seminar is the heart of it: dialogue, discussion, shared enquiry, shared not-knowing. There are classes, teachers and students have different roles, there are reading assignments, but those are to a large extent scaffolds to make seminaring possible. Good stuff. 16 years out and no regret here in my choice.
Slashdot actually has always reminded me a lot of a good Great Books seminar.
Like a lot of arguments, I think the most effective options draw creatively from the domains of both extremes versus getting stuck at one extreme -- authoritarian structure versus structurelessness.
any other alternatives to *slim which are not that expensive. ?
Hardware-only-wise, anybody using and liking an external sound card that's cheaper and/or better sound than the SqueezeBox?
What I'm currently doing is cheap and pretty dang good, but sound quality could be improved: Got a noisy PC in the basement running Yahoo music engine (free, supports FLAC (say no to losey audio compression), good enough interface), piping the music out of decent internal sound card (a weak link) from the 1/8" line out to male RCA's, out and in a window and to my pretty good strereo. I control the Yahoo software via an old iBook running VNC.
This cost my very little beyond the stuff I already owned (I think the 50 foot 1/8" to RCA cable was about $25) and I'm pretty happy with it.
My next step is to get a very good external sound card, pipe from the basement to near the stereo via some sort of digital connection (USB, Ethernet, wireless, whatever) and then do a short RCA analog jump into the strereo. The SqueezeBox would do this, but I just want a damn good sound card, period.
Our two comments are not at all mutually exclusive; in fact, what you're saying works perfectly well with a major point I was trying to make, that our current electoral process does not reflect Americans views on issues. As I was saying, our current corporate-elite sponsored electoral system reflects corporate-elite interests.
Take a look at this site for public opinion research. Basically, pick any issue at will and read a bit. See if their findings reflect the Bush admin's position (who, of course, got the majority of the vote from our present system). See if the opinions reflect even the Democratic platform. Very often you will find they don't.
Again, very often by the standards of public opinion, the US population is left of the Democratic Party, and that this is very poorly reflected in the electoral process should point out problems in the electoral process.
It is truly terrifying that Bush won the popular vote, given that Americans -- even his supporters -- are not in favor of his policies. Acording to this U of Maryland study, http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Election_04/html/new_10_21_04.html, Bush supporters actually are mostly against the war in Iraq if there were no weapons of mass destruction or cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. Problem is, a high majority of them (60-75%) believe that Iraq did actually have WMD or a major program towards them and was involved in the Sept 11 attacks. Scarcely should need saying, but both are clearly false.
When surveyed on issues, Americans are generally left of the Democratic Party. Our media and political structures do not allow adequate democracy in the US. Of course they don't -- the elites have too much at stake here, the richest prize in the world. A socially concerned, left-ish public must not be reflected in the political process.
The media did not educate Americans as to such concrete, specific issues such as the lack of WMD in Iraq and the lack of Iraq involvement in Sept 11. The major political parties do not allow for the true wants and needs of the American people to be given a platform.
Solutions? Support functional democracy in this country, like by pushing for no private money in elections (http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/) Support alternative, independent media (such as http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm).
Ehh, a ruling elite that _is_ the state (state totalitarianism, the overt evil of _1984_) is not terribly different practically than a ruling elite that overwhelms, undermines, and corrupts the state (as capitalism must attempt to do, and has to a large extent).
_1984_ can most easily be read as an attack on state totalitarianism (e.g., the Soviets), but at a structural level it teaches us quite well about capitalism (corporatism) triumphiant.
BTW, the NYT article reminds me of a conversation with a friend about if psychology is amoral or essentially morally biased towards the good. I'm a grad student in psychology, and I was sickened to realize that psychology is essentially amoral -- it can be used to manipulate people to act in another's interest than their own, it can be used for torture, etc. _But_, practioners of psychology must choose to be moral, as human beings, not as a field. The field is a tool, the person who uses it has the soul (and chooses to respect it or not).
Yes, they lied -- but their current big lie is that it was "faulty" intelligence that was to blame. That's why this NYT story is important: an elite source is not buying the damage control lie of the Bush Admin, that they were misled by an incompetent CIA. Don't let Tenent falling on his sword cover the administration's direct lies.
It was clear to me (and yes, I'm American) that the Bush Administration was lieing about their key claims before the invasion, from the Nigerian uranium bullshit to these tubes, to the mobile weapons labs. (And yes, I wrote my reps pre-war saying as much and hit the streets, talked to people, to say as much.) I'm just a schmuck with a decent Internet connection and a willingness to think that my government was lieing, and it wasn't too hard to figure out from there.
Yes, most Americans are subjects of propaganda. We are the most powerful country in the world, that the world has ever known. Therefore our population must be subject to some of the best propaganda that the world has ever seen, because if democracy broke out here, the elites have an unimaginable amount of power and wealth to loose.
The US corporate media are complicit. Chomsky and Herman do a great job explaining the American propaganda model in _Manufacturing Consent_ (the book, not to the movie). Self-censorship is far more effective than state censorship. I remember talking with friends who grew up in the former East Germany, and they were telling me how they and they whole families would sit around at dinner time listening to the state radio news and just laugh and laugh. What I, as a "free American," would give for a dinner like that with my family -- when I was growing up, the news was always really serious, the real deal. I especially remember the Chicago Tribune's lingo that had "democracy" and "communism" as the set of polar opposites, thus equating "capitalism" with "democracy" and making critiquing capitalism tantamount to being against democracy. Orwell and Confucious would have understood this well -- control the language, and you will make certain thoughts unthinkable, such as that one could be opposed to _both_ the Soviet system and the American system (that is, capitalism).
BTW, Z Net and Z Magazine are in financial trouble. They offer some of the best information outside of the American propaganda model, and if they go souls and lives will go with them. http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm Seems to me, if you want to do something to make this all better, one thing to do is throw some money at the Z people.
I work on an adolescent in-patient psych unit and fairly often see family members trying to deal with an initial diagnosis of schizophrenia in a child or sibling. NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) is a source we often give out. NAMI has a great website and they do excellent advocacy and support work.
http://www.nami.org
Or, to link right to their schizophrenia information:
http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illn es s&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID =3&ContentID=10850
A quick "my $.02" (full disclosure, I'm still in grad school, no license, etc.) -- schizophrenia has a worse image in the public mind than I think it deserves. There are some pretty good medical treatments. Also, something you might be interested in is family therapy targeted at schizophrenia. This is _not_ (NOT!!) suggesting that schizophrenia is caused by parenting or other family social influences (that idea is long gone, thank God, in psychology/psychiatry), but there are ideas on teaching family members how to best support themselves and the family member with schizophrenia that can make a real difference for everyone. See pages 279-280 of _the Essentials of Family Therapy_, Nichols and Schwartz.
Carl Jung coined the terms "introversion" and "extroversion" and I think he'd jibe with your post -- introversion and extroversion are not properly understood as simplistic binary alternatives. People will tend to have one that is their dominant mode in most situations, but the other mode (when secondary, Jung used the term "inferior function") will just about always be present and in some situations actually dominate.
Jung was very interested in the inferior functions. He seemed to believe that the inferior functions often were the place of some of the richest possible growth and learning for people. The inferior function is often the most unconscious for a person, and Jung was of course pretty interested in what was going on with someone's unconscious....
To boot, Jung talked about human development as striving towards a rythym of introversion and extroversion that he likened to the systolic diastolic functions of the heart -- human life works best with both!! To flesh this out some more, he stated that one function will probably always be "first nature" for any individual and the other a sort of second nature, but "second natures" -- learned, hard-won development -- are an amazingly great and important part of human life.
Wow, never thought I'd be throwing this stuff down in a Slashdot post. The streams have crossed....
I haven't checked it out in a while, but emusic.com had a pretty damn good selection of jazz stuff available. I don't think you'll find the top selling stuff like Kind of Blue or Take Five, but there's plenty of good stuff in the margains that they had.
Also early blues stuff and some outside "classical" music (jazz equals (maybe?) blues + 20th century "classical" music ideas, all mixed together via ideally collective instant composition (e.g., "improvisation")?).
Was it Duke Elington who said that there are two kinds of music, good music and bad music? Of course, the same can be said of jazz, and hence your question. I'd rather download the stuff at $10 a month or whatever they're charging and sample to see what I dig.
WNUR (Northestern's college radio) seems to have some very good jazz shows and web streaming. http://www.wnur.org
Curt.
Re:Mushy thinking, hard to push away
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
A few responses: No, I do not believe that "terrorism is a rational political strategy under certain circumstances." I think I made it clear in my post that the people who did this were dispicable and that what they did is disgusting. Are there realistic basises for many, many people to be very hateful of the US? Yes. Does that mean that they should slaughter innocent people. Of course not -- and neither should we.
Second point: Yeah, you're right on the ad hominem thing. I just get really pissed off to see such vapid, dangerous ideas (such as Katz's ideas here) float out into the cultural collective atmosphere. I must say, I think such thinking is substantially responsible for allowing the evils that we do, which leads to the evils done to us, which all leads to many, many innocent people being killed, societies being wretchedly damaged, and people living in fear for their lives and those of their families.
Third point: I'm not so much being "dismissive" of the ideas Katz wrote about, but saying that they are inadequate to the discussion. Sure, there is cultural conflict. Given. Is that an adequate and our best understanding of what the hell's been going on around the Sept 11 attacks. No. If viewed as such it's, as I said, dangerous. Lack of good information, good debate, and good democracy has got us into this disgusting mess.
Curt.
Mushy thinking, hard to push away
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
Well, Jon Katz's scree here is just lame; so lame, in fact, that it's hard to rebutt it, because he says so little beyond bland, basically amorphic conjecture. A few points: There is a conflict between democracy-cosmopolitanism and Islamic fundementalism, but that is not a relatively deep explanation for why we were attacked on Sept 11 or why we are hated. We are primarily hated for foreign and economic policies and actions, policies and actions that are anti-democratic and often terroristic. "They" are Islamic fundementalists (probably, there has been no really good evidence I've seen, but assuming); but "we" are not truly democrats (small "d").
We were attacked primarily for colonialistic policies and actions in the Middle East. We have been treating the people there like dirt and only relevent as obsticles or aids to our power and wealth drain from the region. This is standard colonialism. The only thing that's remarkable is that we pissed off some people who are crazier than we are: there was a weird convergence of us being assholes to a region and peoples and some of those people being crazy, twisted fuckers with a lot of money. What's remarkable is that we weren't attacked before, say, by Central Americans.
The stupid, ahistorical, aconscious discussion of viewing the Sept 11 attaks as "fundementalism versus democracy" is not only -- well -- ahistorical, aconscious and stupid -- it's dangerous. If we stay this stupid, history will repeat itself, the history of Sept 11, and the history of us killing people, terrorizing people, and destorying civilizations, like we are again doing in Afghanistan now -- how many innocent people will we starve? How much further will we set back Afghan civilization? How much further will we destroy our own domestic security? My answers to all the above: A lot. Enough to make me literally sick to my stomach.
Jon Katz, get an historical perspective. You're dangerous and ignorant otherwise. http://www.zmag.org (website for Z Magazine) is a good place to check out. I dare you.
Slashdot Mirror
Individual solutions to climate change, I think, are kind of a waste of money and cycles, it's going to be structural, societal, governmental changes, and fast (not over a 30 roof life) or we as a biosphere are in deep trouble. So, lawyers now > save a trickle of energy for 30 years. I hate to be negative for a company that, like you say, is trying to do something, but I think a better environmental case could be made for doing a conventional roof and donating the $X,000 you'd save over a Tesla roof to the Sierra Club or 350.org to sue the Trump Admin more and better.
Sheesh, America is mirroring its enemies, beards are hip in some crowds and pseudo-Medieval execution of political enemies is in others. Is Woolsey running for Caliph, trying to land consulting gigs with the Saudi government, or just considering a stab at US President 2020, and why is there so much overlap between those jobs?
I'm kind of amazed at the image used here -- the fox guarding the henhouse. Wouldn't that image best apply to Google assuring us they'll do no evil?
Quite contrary to the business propaganda, Adam Smith spelled this out Way Back When: the invisible hand needs a counter to it, and that's democratic, public government. "Unless government takes pains to prevent it..." http://books.google.com/books?id=-mxKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA163&dq=unless+government+takes+some+pains+to+prevent&hl=en&ei=Ku_ATM3jE4yr8Abmio3hBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=unless%20government%20takes%20some%20pains%20to%20prevent&f=false
I'm likewise amazed how often people in capitalist quasi-democracies are *more* paranoid about government abusing individuals than corporations abusing individuals. I'm not saying this is black/white -- of course there are *plenty* of examples of totalitarian government -- but corporations are clearly, inarguably non-democratic. Quasi-democratic governments (such as the US) have *some* public interest and public input (the rest of their motivation and input has been bought by the investment class). Both corporations and "democratic" governments are necessary evils, but "democratic" governments are gonna be the lesser evil.
I can second the gist of this (I'm not an agent by any stretch). My family's been off corporate health insurance for about 6 months now and it would have been *much* worse if not for working with a good agent, I believe. What a byzantine, horrible system. We got hit with some pre-exisiting condition ridiculousness, had rejections, etc. Our agent helped steer us and prioritize and advise.
We're insured, not broke because of it, have decent coverage, and can do the work we want to and get the pay we deserve (versus the work that provides health insurance, what a bizarre criterion for a career!!).
Still, I don't feel really secure -- health insurance drops people, etc. Next step is we'll form as S corp to get better rates (I think) and group protection. We'll have our agent help with that.
Next step after that (seriously) is considering immigration to Canada, not even so much about health insurance, but more about a rational, workable society, versus the oligarchical wealth grab known as the US economy and government.
I think these are very important topics -- raising good, capable, happy people, being good to kids. These topics used to be vitally important to me as a student in "good," but mainstream public schools. I checked out the alternatives as best I could, especially for college. I found that the "structureless" alternatives, like Goddard College, spent a lot of time focusing on what structures, if any, to have. At a certain point, I wanted to spend my schooling focusing on something other than schooling itself. The Big 10 model -- thousands of people taking a class, even over video camera -- from one authority seemed somewhat criminal to me.
I settled on a middle ground, the Great Books model, in my case the Hutchins School at Sonoma State University. The seminar is the heart of it: dialogue, discussion, shared enquiry, shared not-knowing. There are classes, teachers and students have different roles, there are reading assignments, but those are to a large extent scaffolds to make seminaring possible. Good stuff. 16 years out and no regret here in my choice.
Slashdot actually has always reminded me a lot of a good Great Books seminar.
Like a lot of arguments, I think the most effective options draw creatively from the domains of both extremes versus getting stuck at one extreme -- authoritarian structure versus structurelessness.
any other alternatives to *slim which are not that expensive. ?
Hardware-only-wise, anybody using and liking an external sound card that's cheaper and/or better sound than the SqueezeBox?
What I'm currently doing is cheap and pretty dang good, but sound quality could be improved: Got a noisy PC in the basement running Yahoo music engine (free, supports FLAC (say no to losey audio compression), good enough interface), piping the music out of decent internal sound card (a weak link) from the 1/8" line out to male RCA's, out and in a window and to my pretty good strereo. I control the Yahoo software via an old iBook running VNC.
This cost my very little beyond the stuff I already owned (I think the 50 foot 1/8" to RCA cable was about $25) and I'm pretty happy with it.
My next step is to get a very good external sound card, pipe from the basement to near the stereo via some sort of digital connection (USB, Ethernet, wireless, whatever) and then do a short RCA analog jump into the strereo. The SqueezeBox would do this, but I just want a damn good sound card, period.
Take a look at this site for public opinion research. Basically, pick any issue at will and read a bit. See if their findings reflect the Bush admin's position (who, of course, got the majority of the vote from our present system). See if the opinions reflect even the Democratic platform. Very often you will find they don't.
http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/issuehome.cfm
Again, very often by the standards of public opinion, the US population is left of the Democratic Party, and that this is very poorly reflected in the electoral process should point out problems in the electoral process.
Curt
When surveyed on issues, Americans are generally left of the Democratic Party. Our media and political structures do not allow adequate democracy in the US. Of course they don't -- the elites have too much at stake here, the richest prize in the world. A socially concerned, left-ish public must not be reflected in the political process.
The media did not educate Americans as to such concrete, specific issues such as the lack of WMD in Iraq and the lack of Iraq involvement in Sept 11. The major political parties do not allow for the true wants and needs of the American people to be given a platform.
Solutions? Support functional democracy in this country, like by pushing for no private money in elections (http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/) Support alternative, independent media (such as http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm).
Curt
Ehh, a ruling elite that _is_ the state (state totalitarianism, the overt evil of _1984_) is not terribly different practically than a ruling elite that overwhelms, undermines, and corrupts the state (as capitalism must attempt to do, and has to a large extent).
_1984_ can most easily be read as an attack on state totalitarianism (e.g., the Soviets), but at a structural level it teaches us quite well about capitalism (corporatism) triumphiant.
BTW, the NYT article reminds me of a conversation with a friend about if psychology is amoral or essentially morally biased towards the good. I'm a grad student in psychology, and I was sickened to realize that psychology is essentially amoral -- it can be used to manipulate people to act in another's interest than their own, it can be used for torture, etc. _But_, practioners of psychology must choose to be moral, as human beings, not as a field. The field is a tool, the person who uses it has the soul (and chooses to respect it or not).
Yes, they lied -- but their current big lie is that it was "faulty" intelligence that was to blame. That's why this NYT story is important: an elite source is not buying the damage control lie of the Bush Admin, that they were misled by an incompetent CIA. Don't let Tenent falling on his sword cover the administration's direct lies.
It was clear to me (and yes, I'm American) that the Bush Administration was lieing about their key claims before the invasion, from the Nigerian uranium bullshit to these tubes, to the mobile weapons labs. (And yes, I wrote my reps pre-war saying as much and hit the streets, talked to people, to say as much.) I'm just a schmuck with a decent Internet connection and a willingness to think that my government was lieing, and it wasn't too hard to figure out from there.
Yes, most Americans are subjects of propaganda. We are the most powerful country in the world, that the world has ever known. Therefore our population must be subject to some of the best propaganda that the world has ever seen, because if democracy broke out here, the elites have an unimaginable amount of power and wealth to loose.
The US corporate media are complicit. Chomsky and Herman do a great job explaining the American propaganda model in _Manufacturing Consent_ (the book, not to the movie). Self-censorship is far more effective than state censorship. I remember talking with friends who grew up in the former East Germany, and they were telling me how they and they whole families would sit around at dinner time listening to the state radio news and just laugh and laugh. What I, as a "free American," would give for a dinner like that with my family -- when I was growing up, the news was always really serious, the real deal. I especially remember the Chicago Tribune's lingo that had "democracy" and "communism" as the set of polar opposites, thus equating "capitalism" with "democracy" and making critiquing capitalism tantamount to being against democracy. Orwell and Confucious would have understood this well -- control the language, and you will make certain thoughts unthinkable, such as that one could be opposed to _both_ the Soviet system and the American system (that is, capitalism).
BTW, Z Net and Z Magazine are in financial trouble. They offer some of the best information outside of the American propaganda model, and if they go souls and lives will go with them. http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm Seems to me, if you want to do something to make this all better, one thing to do is throw some money at the Z people.
I work on an adolescent in-patient psych unit and fairly often see family members trying to deal with an initial diagnosis of schizophrenia in a child or sibling. NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) is a source we often give out. NAMI has a great website and they do excellent advocacy and support work.
n es s&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID =3&ContentID=10850
http://www.nami.org
Or, to link right to their schizophrenia information:
http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Ill
A quick "my $.02" (full disclosure, I'm still in grad school, no license, etc.) -- schizophrenia has a worse image in the public mind than I think it deserves. There are some pretty good medical treatments. Also, something you might be interested in is family therapy targeted at schizophrenia. This is _not_ (NOT!!) suggesting that schizophrenia is caused by parenting or other family social influences (that idea is long gone, thank God, in psychology/psychiatry), but there are ideas on teaching family members how to best support themselves and the family member with schizophrenia that can make a real difference for everyone. See pages 279-280 of _the Essentials of Family Therapy_, Nichols and Schwartz.
Take Care,
Curt
Carl Jung coined the terms "introversion" and "extroversion" and I think he'd jibe with your post -- introversion and extroversion are not properly understood as simplistic binary alternatives. People will tend to have one that is their dominant mode in most situations, but the other mode (when secondary, Jung used the term "inferior function") will just about always be present and in some situations actually dominate.
Jung was very interested in the inferior functions. He seemed to believe that the inferior functions often were the place of some of the richest possible growth and learning for people. The inferior function is often the most unconscious for a person, and Jung was of course pretty interested in what was going on with someone's unconscious....
To boot, Jung talked about human development as striving towards a rythym of introversion and extroversion that he likened to the systolic diastolic functions of the heart -- human life works best with both!! To flesh this out some more, he stated that one function will probably always be "first nature" for any individual and the other a sort of second nature, but "second natures" -- learned, hard-won development -- are an amazingly great and important part of human life.
Wow, never thought I'd be throwing this stuff down in a Slashdot post. The streams have crossed....
Curt.
I haven't checked it out in a while, but emusic.com had a pretty damn good selection of jazz stuff available. I don't think you'll find the top selling stuff like Kind of Blue or Take Five, but there's plenty of good stuff in the margains that they had. Also early blues stuff and some outside "classical" music (jazz equals (maybe?) blues + 20th century "classical" music ideas, all mixed together via ideally collective instant composition (e.g., "improvisation")?). Was it Duke Elington who said that there are two kinds of music, good music and bad music? Of course, the same can be said of jazz, and hence your question. I'd rather download the stuff at $10 a month or whatever they're charging and sample to see what I dig. WNUR (Northestern's college radio) seems to have some very good jazz shows and web streaming. http://www.wnur.org Curt.
A few responses: No, I do not believe that "terrorism is a rational political strategy under certain circumstances." I think I made it clear in my post that the people who did this were dispicable and that what they did is disgusting. Are there realistic basises for many, many people to be very hateful of the US? Yes. Does that mean that they should slaughter innocent people. Of course not -- and neither should we.
Second point: Yeah, you're right on the ad hominem thing. I just get really pissed off to see such vapid, dangerous ideas (such as Katz's ideas here) float out into the cultural collective atmosphere. I must say, I think such thinking is substantially responsible for allowing the evils that we do, which leads to the evils done to us, which all leads to many, many innocent people being killed, societies being wretchedly damaged, and people living in fear for their lives and those of their families.
Third point: I'm not so much being "dismissive" of the ideas Katz wrote about, but saying that they are inadequate to the discussion. Sure, there is cultural conflict. Given. Is that an adequate and our best understanding of what the hell's been going on around the Sept 11 attacks. No. If viewed as such it's, as I said, dangerous. Lack of good information, good debate, and good democracy has got us into this disgusting mess.
Curt.
Well, Jon Katz's scree here is just lame; so lame, in fact, that it's hard to rebutt it, because he says so little beyond bland, basically amorphic conjecture. A few points: There is a conflict between democracy-cosmopolitanism and Islamic fundementalism, but that is not a relatively deep explanation for why we were attacked on Sept 11 or why we are hated. We are primarily hated for foreign and economic policies and actions, policies and actions that are anti-democratic and often terroristic. "They" are Islamic fundementalists (probably, there has been no really good evidence I've seen, but assuming); but "we" are not truly democrats (small "d").
We were attacked primarily for colonialistic policies and actions in the Middle East. We have been treating the people there like dirt and only relevent as obsticles or aids to our power and wealth drain from the region. This is standard colonialism. The only thing that's remarkable is that we pissed off some people who are crazier than we are: there was a weird convergence of us being assholes to a region and peoples and some of those people being crazy, twisted fuckers with a lot of money. What's remarkable is that we weren't attacked before, say, by Central Americans.
The stupid, ahistorical, aconscious discussion of viewing the Sept 11 attaks as "fundementalism versus democracy" is not only -- well -- ahistorical, aconscious and stupid -- it's dangerous. If we stay this stupid, history will repeat itself, the history of Sept 11, and the history of us killing people, terrorizing people, and destorying civilizations, like we are again doing in Afghanistan now -- how many innocent people will we starve? How much further will we set back Afghan civilization? How much further will we destroy our own domestic security? My answers to all the above: A lot. Enough to make me literally sick to my stomach.
Jon Katz, get an historical perspective. You're dangerous and ignorant otherwise. http://www.zmag.org (website for Z Magazine) is a good place to check out. I dare you.
Curt.