During the 90's, there was a lot of what I call "gnostic cinema" - films like The Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City, eXistenZ, and such were all about radical Cartesian doubt ("is the world all lies? Can I trust my senses? etc.") I really do connect them with the Clinton era, and also with the apparent unchallenged dominance of what was called the Washington doctrine. Although Clinton was a Democrat, the idea that unfettered markets worked best and that we were on the road to permanent prosperity was very much the consensus, far more than under Bush. After all, the Cold War was over. With that consensus came gnawing doubt - expressed in those films - that perhaps things underneath the gleaming, shiny surface weren't so good after all. When the dot.com crash came, and then 9/11, such Gnostic doubt was no longer necessary: that optimism disappeared.
As far as why Democrats are vampires and Republicans are zombies, remember that culture trumps economics in representation. The Democrats are still considered the party of the cultural elite. The Republicans are the populists, at least at the base (so much of the last election was a demonstration of the contradictions between the Republican base and the Republican elite.) Democrats may tax you more, but they also, ironically, believe in a heirarchy of cultural values: that a salad at Chez Panisse is superior to a cheeseburger at McDonalds. Republicans like uneven economics, but flat cultures (which make, after all, simpler and bigger mass markets, which creates economic elites like Sam Walton.)
The connection is historical, and has a name: Kant. Until Kant, the analytic and critical philosophical traditions were the same. After Kant, the analytic tradition went one way, and through Hegel, what we call the continental tradition went the other way. At times (e.g., Wittgenstein, Searle, Heidegger via Dreyfus) there are good-will ambassadors sent from one camp to the other, but generally they are now different disciplines, with the continental tradition being more important to the social sciences, humanities, and arts and the analytic tradition speaking more to linguistics, mathematics, and computer science.
My personal belief is that if computer science is to thrive and grow, it will become more of a humanities-type field and less of a hard science. Not that the programming and math is going away: only that most of the hard theoretical problems are either in mathematics or in electrical engineering now (depending on what type of hard problem it is) while we are beginning to realize that computers are a very important communication and representational media, and that this aspect of them is what is probably going to dominate for the near future.
Race is still a fiction. The fiction is based on selecting certain superficial features that have a genetic basis, and so there will be a loose correlation with other genetic traits in populations. The fiction is that one takes a handful of genetically-determined characteristics - skin color, hair color, facial features - and and treating it as a category.
He's not white. He's not really "half-white." He's black. He's also half of African descent and half of European descent.
Being black is like being red-haired or left-handed. It's a constellation of physical characteristics that have been lumped into the idea of a "race" by a few hundred years of domination. The same is true of being white. These races are historical inventions which used certain physical features for their rationale. Now these inventions have a certain cultural reality to them, which is why we talk about "African Americans," as a shorthand for describing the communities of people whose ancestors were brought into the US by slavery and who share a cluster of cultural experiences. Obama, of course, was not born into that community - he was raised by a white grandmother, his father came from Kenya. etc. - but by virtue of being black, he was associated with that community.
Yes, it's complicated. But you can work it out. It is important to not think of being white as the same as being Irish, and more like being red-haired.
You have clearly never been to anywhere near Africa or the Middle East, or you would know that moderate versions of Islam thrive there. And, that BO's closest brush with Islam was in Indonesia, anyway.
This really is an indication of the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the modern right wing. I hope real conservatives from Burke through Oakeshott to Buckley rise up from the dead, join forces under Bacevich, and get medieval on your know-nothing self.
Except there is no basis for believing that he is a Muslim at all. It defies all sense unless you have a sense of reality that is a cross between The Manchurian Candidate and Austin Powers.
Do you really think he would have been able to come all this way as a crypto-Muslim? Fooling his own grandparents at the age 7 and beyond? The so-called slip is a basic subjunctive tense.
It has nothing to do with being a messiah or such. I have disagreements with Obama, particularly on his health care plan: I actually think that both HRC and JM are, in their own ways, more right than BO is (HRC is right that BO will not insure everyone; JM is right to seek to uncouple health insurance from employment.) That the main reasons people like you come up with for not voting for Obama are tinfoil-hat material is what is really at stake.
This entire thread is peppered with the talking-points of the die-hard right, who have absolutely nothing positive to say about McCain or the Republicans, and can only spread bizarre rumors, conspiracy theories, and smears about Obama, before they completely turn on each other. The Republican Party has lost the bearings and conservative principles that held it together for years, and resorts to the kind of gutter-snipe, anti-intellectual ignorant ravings that are littering message boards.
I have a lot of respect for conservatism, even if I'm not a conservative. I respect fiscal responsibility, Oakeshottian skepticism about the possibilities of social change, the sense that not all values are equal and that Beethoven really is better than Britney Spears, and a certain hard-headed realism. All these things have been ripped out of the Republican party as it pandered to its lowest common denominator, the wingnuts who rave on talk radio, attack as traitors anyone left of center-right, and spread the kind of bald-faced lies that have constituted their political strategy. I want to see them as exiled far out of political discourse as hare-brained, pot-addled bliss-ninnies have been exiled from most actual left politics. I want there to be a conservative equivalent to MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post. Actually, there is one: Culture 11, which may be the future of the conservative movement. But, of course, it is under attack from post-Free Republic wingnut right as well.
Studies have shown time and time again that public education produces people who say things like "studies have shown time and time again" without actually ever referring to a single such study.
So here's the tough question: are we going to have a minimum wage or not? And if we're not, are we going to artificially keep the labor market high by restricting migration or not?
No one I've met - left, right, libertarian, not-libertarian, whatever - has really been willing to grapple with the range of issues around immigration. Those on the left, like me, generally are unwilling to confront the fact that it exists because it depresses the labor market. People on the right are unwilling to confront the fact that it is vital to American business and affordable foods. It is to dafoomie's credit that he is asking the hard questions. I personally believe in a fairly open immigration policy for generally humanitarian reasons (and as the child of an Hispanic immigrant, I consider "cultural dilution" concerns to be a veiled form of racism), but I recognize the complicated economics around it.
Which do you think is more likely: that Obama believes in Sharia (or would if he were otherwise exactly what he is now, but Muslim) or that Palin believes the world is 6000 years old and that evolution is a lie?
There is definitely a modern, moderate version of Islam that is compatible with contemporary, secular humanism. Likewise with Christianity (and while little in the New Testament needed a retrofit to adjust to modernity, a whole lot of the Old Testament did - and no one is questioning whether Lieberman ascribes to Deuteronomic laws.) The reason why some religions seem to be more about The Law than others has to do with the historical circumstances in which they developed. Judaism, Islam, Confucianism and Hinduism grew up in relative political vacuums, where the religions did dual-service as theories of state-and-society creation. Christianity, Jainism and Buddhism developed in the context of strong existing states, and so could seem to occupy themselves with the "merely" spiritual, or offer solace to those who were unhappy in their regimes.
The music comes from wherever you are - watching TV, on a bus, sitting next to some guy in his car who is playing his stereo too loudly, whatever. Shazam identifies music in your environment that you record. Pretty neat, really.
I'm afraid that the HotAir.com link is exactly what the middle finds repellent about the right. The attempt to smear by association, the claim that Obama is playing the "race card" (when he clearly isn't: anything but, frankly) - and if you read HotAir.com, particularly its comments, you read the kind of over-the-top, conspiracy-theory type thinking that is turning the Republican party into a rump party.
What McCain needed to do was to work on his positives - at one time, he was a persuasive moderate with cross-the-aisle appeal, which he squandered with negative campaign ads and the Palin pick - while picking up the two strengths he really did have for people who aren't already solidly in the right-wing camp: his experience and his relatively strong hand in foreign policy. Instead, his campaign has generally followed the talking points you linked to, and we see the results: a perception of McCain as mean-spirited, angry, and dishonest. And the Palin pick obliterated his positives completely.
What the conservatives have to understand is something the left has already figured out: that they aren't the majority, and the stories they tell themselves to build consensus aren't the stories that the history-making middle wants to hear. The fact that the conservative movement is more defined by resentment of the left rather than by positive and appealing ideas, in no small part due to its very contradictory constituencies, makes that task all the more difficult.
In many ways, it's You Tube that's killed the Republican coalition between fiscal conservatives (libertarians), social conservatives, and the "National Greatness" conservatives (the neo-cons, more or less.)
Obama's campaign helped the Republicans self-destruct by aggressively running a 50-state campaign, not a 50% +1 campaign. This meant that the RNC had to run ads to shore up its base in formerly secure red states. The problem is, the message that rallies the base - using "liberal" as a smear word, attacking patriotism, etc - alienates the middle. An ad attacking the Democrats in North Carolina will be seen by voters in New Hampshire and Minnesota, and they will find it repellent. Meanwhile, Obama does not have to appeal to the far left to mobilize his base, and his base is already extremely well mobilized. He is more or less in a situation where he never has to apologize or be sheepish about any ad with "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message" on it, while a lot of the John McCain ads are frankly embarrassing.
The result is Republican meltdown. Fiscal conservatives already suspect that it may be easier, as in the Clinton era, to get fiscally conservative policy out of a Dem administration than out of the Republicans. It's definitely easier to push fiscal conservatism in the Democratic party than it is to push social liberalism in the Republican one. Now, the tensions between the generally secular neo-cons and the religious social conservatives (many of whom, like Huckabee, are actually comfortable with a government that provides a lot of services) is being reflected in the cracks between McCain's camp and Palin's camp.
I think what YouTube has done is put an asterisk next to Tip O'Neill's old axiom that "all politics are local." That asterisk is "but all communications are global."
No, you just don't get it at all. If an institution receives federal funding to keep its lights on, those lights can't go on in a lab where that research went on.
Do some research on the role of the NSF before blathering on subjects you clearly know nothing about.
Perhaps. It depends on how partisan his constituency is. It may be that in Alaska, the Republicans are the Harlem Globetrotters and the Democrats are the Washington Generals.
Stevens feathered his own nest a little bit with his job, but to be honest: what he did wasn't serious and did not have substantial consequences. There's too much Schadenfreude over nothing going on here.
And I say this as someone solidly on the left who is looking forward, somewhat, to a Democratic Congress. It's funny how this kind of error-correction is more likely on the left than on the right, though: people say they are equivalent, but if you look at the margins of left and the right, they way that they treat heterodoxy is different. Nutty liberals get corrected from the center and usually either accept the correction or find another target: the rabid right values loyalty over truth and attacks any nuance or correction as traitorous.
France 1799 was pretty much a case in the people who could hire the most guys with guns (the upper middle classes) dispensing with the ones who were in charge (the aristocracy.) The terror was more or less the lower orders being allowed to run riot and finish the job for them.
You know nothing about how research works in this country.
If you block any federal funds from reaching a category of research, you more or less make sure it will not take place on research universities. Especially for basic research that won't immediately lead to product, that pretty much kills it.
Not only that, but child pornographers might be neither pedophiles nor child molesters, but simple profiteers. All the medical and psychological screening in the world won't flush them out.
Slashdot Mirror
During the 90's, there was a lot of what I call "gnostic cinema" - films like The Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City, eXistenZ, and such were all about radical Cartesian doubt ("is the world all lies? Can I trust my senses? etc.") I really do connect them with the Clinton era, and also with the apparent unchallenged dominance of what was called the Washington doctrine. Although Clinton was a Democrat, the idea that unfettered markets worked best and that we were on the road to permanent prosperity was very much the consensus, far more than under Bush. After all, the Cold War was over. With that consensus came gnawing doubt - expressed in those films - that perhaps things underneath the gleaming, shiny surface weren't so good after all. When the dot.com crash came, and then 9/11, such Gnostic doubt was no longer necessary: that optimism disappeared.
As far as why Democrats are vampires and Republicans are zombies, remember that culture trumps economics in representation. The Democrats are still considered the party of the cultural elite. The Republicans are the populists, at least at the base (so much of the last election was a demonstration of the contradictions between the Republican base and the Republican elite.) Democrats may tax you more, but they also, ironically, believe in a heirarchy of cultural values: that a salad at Chez Panisse is superior to a cheeseburger at McDonalds. Republicans like uneven economics, but flat cultures (which make, after all, simpler and bigger mass markets, which creates economic elites like Sam Walton.)
The connection is historical, and has a name: Kant. Until Kant, the analytic and critical philosophical traditions were the same. After Kant, the analytic tradition went one way, and through Hegel, what we call the continental tradition went the other way. At times (e.g., Wittgenstein, Searle, Heidegger via Dreyfus) there are good-will ambassadors sent from one camp to the other, but generally they are now different disciplines, with the continental tradition being more important to the social sciences, humanities, and arts and the analytic tradition speaking more to linguistics, mathematics, and computer science.
My personal belief is that if computer science is to thrive and grow, it will become more of a humanities-type field and less of a hard science. Not that the programming and math is going away: only that most of the hard theoretical problems are either in mathematics or in electrical engineering now (depending on what type of hard problem it is) while we are beginning to realize that computers are a very important communication and representational media, and that this aspect of them is what is probably going to dominate for the near future.
Diamonds make girls easier to sleep with; tequila makes girls easier to sleep with. We really should have seen this earlier.
Wit and charm work much better, and don't wear off in a day. Cheaper, too!
Eh, being witty and charming gets tedious after a while.
I prefer Jewish foreplay: 40 minutes of begging.
Race is still a fiction. The fiction is based on selecting certain superficial features that have a genetic basis, and so there will be a loose correlation with other genetic traits in populations. The fiction is that one takes a handful of genetically-determined characteristics - skin color, hair color, facial features - and and treating it as a category.
He's not white. He's not really "half-white." He's black. He's also half of African descent and half of European descent.
Being black is like being red-haired or left-handed. It's a constellation of physical characteristics that have been lumped into the idea of a "race" by a few hundred years of domination. The same is true of being white. These races are historical inventions which used certain physical features for their rationale. Now these inventions have a certain cultural reality to them, which is why we talk about "African Americans," as a shorthand for describing the communities of people whose ancestors were brought into the US by slavery and who share a cluster of cultural experiences. Obama, of course, was not born into that community - he was raised by a white grandmother, his father came from Kenya. etc. - but by virtue of being black, he was associated with that community.
Yes, it's complicated. But you can work it out. It is important to not think of being white as the same as being Irish, and more like being red-haired.
His white, Kansan grandma might secretly be a subversive Muslim communist collaborator?
Good God, you've lost the plot.
You have clearly never been to anywhere near Africa or the Middle East, or you would know that moderate versions of Islam thrive there. And, that BO's closest brush with Islam was in Indonesia, anyway.
This really is an indication of the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the modern right wing. I hope real conservatives from Burke through Oakeshott to Buckley rise up from the dead, join forces under Bacevich, and get medieval on your know-nothing self.
Except there is no basis for believing that he is a Muslim at all. It defies all sense unless you have a sense of reality that is a cross between The Manchurian Candidate and Austin Powers.
Do you really think he would have been able to come all this way as a crypto-Muslim? Fooling his own grandparents at the age 7 and beyond? The so-called slip is a basic subjunctive tense.
It has nothing to do with being a messiah or such. I have disagreements with Obama, particularly on his health care plan: I actually think that both HRC and JM are, in their own ways, more right than BO is (HRC is right that BO will not insure everyone; JM is right to seek to uncouple health insurance from employment.) That the main reasons people like you come up with for not voting for Obama are tinfoil-hat material is what is really at stake.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/obama.asp
The context makes it clear. This was nothing like what is being suggested happened.
This entire thread is peppered with the talking-points of the die-hard right, who have absolutely nothing positive to say about McCain or the Republicans, and can only spread bizarre rumors, conspiracy theories, and smears about Obama, before they completely turn on each other. The Republican Party has lost the bearings and conservative principles that held it together for years, and resorts to the kind of gutter-snipe, anti-intellectual ignorant ravings that are littering message boards.
I have a lot of respect for conservatism, even if I'm not a conservative. I respect fiscal responsibility, Oakeshottian skepticism about the possibilities of social change, the sense that not all values are equal and that Beethoven really is better than Britney Spears, and a certain hard-headed realism. All these things have been ripped out of the Republican party as it pandered to its lowest common denominator, the wingnuts who rave on talk radio, attack as traitors anyone left of center-right, and spread the kind of bald-faced lies that have constituted their political strategy. I want to see them as exiled far out of political discourse as hare-brained, pot-addled bliss-ninnies have been exiled from most actual left politics. I want there to be a conservative equivalent to MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post. Actually, there is one: Culture 11, which may be the future of the conservative movement. But, of course, it is under attack from post-Free Republic wingnut right as well.
What interview? I think this is another talk-radio generated lie.
Studies have shown time and time again that public education produces people who say things like "studies have shown time and time again" without actually ever referring to a single such study.
So here's the tough question: are we going to have a minimum wage or not? And if we're not, are we going to artificially keep the labor market high by restricting migration or not?
No one I've met - left, right, libertarian, not-libertarian, whatever - has really been willing to grapple with the range of issues around immigration. Those on the left, like me, generally are unwilling to confront the fact that it exists because it depresses the labor market. People on the right are unwilling to confront the fact that it is vital to American business and affordable foods. It is to dafoomie's credit that he is asking the hard questions. I personally believe in a fairly open immigration policy for generally humanitarian reasons (and as the child of an Hispanic immigrant, I consider "cultural dilution" concerns to be a veiled form of racism), but I recognize the complicated economics around it.
Which do you think is more likely: that Obama believes in Sharia (or would if he were otherwise exactly what he is now, but Muslim) or that Palin believes the world is 6000 years old and that evolution is a lie?
There is definitely a modern, moderate version of Islam that is compatible with contemporary, secular humanism. Likewise with Christianity (and while little in the New Testament needed a retrofit to adjust to modernity, a whole lot of the Old Testament did - and no one is questioning whether Lieberman ascribes to Deuteronomic laws.) The reason why some religions seem to be more about The Law than others has to do with the historical circumstances in which they developed. Judaism, Islam, Confucianism and Hinduism grew up in relative political vacuums, where the religions did dual-service as theories of state-and-society creation. Christianity, Jainism and Buddhism developed in the context of strong existing states, and so could seem to occupy themselves with the "merely" spiritual, or offer solace to those who were unhappy in their regimes.
The music comes from wherever you are - watching TV, on a bus, sitting next to some guy in his car who is playing his stereo too loudly, whatever. Shazam identifies music in your environment that you record. Pretty neat, really.
I'm afraid that the HotAir.com link is exactly what the middle finds repellent about the right. The attempt to smear by association, the claim that Obama is playing the "race card" (when he clearly isn't: anything but, frankly) - and if you read HotAir.com, particularly its comments, you read the kind of over-the-top, conspiracy-theory type thinking that is turning the Republican party into a rump party.
What McCain needed to do was to work on his positives - at one time, he was a persuasive moderate with cross-the-aisle appeal, which he squandered with negative campaign ads and the Palin pick - while picking up the two strengths he really did have for people who aren't already solidly in the right-wing camp: his experience and his relatively strong hand in foreign policy. Instead, his campaign has generally followed the talking points you linked to, and we see the results: a perception of McCain as mean-spirited, angry, and dishonest. And the Palin pick obliterated his positives completely.
What the conservatives have to understand is something the left has already figured out: that they aren't the majority, and the stories they tell themselves to build consensus aren't the stories that the history-making middle wants to hear. The fact that the conservative movement is more defined by resentment of the left rather than by positive and appealing ideas, in no small part due to its very contradictory constituencies, makes that task all the more difficult.
In many ways, it's You Tube that's killed the Republican coalition between fiscal conservatives (libertarians), social conservatives, and the "National Greatness" conservatives (the neo-cons, more or less.)
Obama's campaign helped the Republicans self-destruct by aggressively running a 50-state campaign, not a 50% +1 campaign. This meant that the RNC had to run ads to shore up its base in formerly secure red states. The problem is, the message that rallies the base - using "liberal" as a smear word, attacking patriotism, etc - alienates the middle. An ad attacking the Democrats in North Carolina will be seen by voters in New Hampshire and Minnesota, and they will find it repellent. Meanwhile, Obama does not have to appeal to the far left to mobilize his base, and his base is already extremely well mobilized. He is more or less in a situation where he never has to apologize or be sheepish about any ad with "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message" on it, while a lot of the John McCain ads are frankly embarrassing.
The result is Republican meltdown. Fiscal conservatives already suspect that it may be easier, as in the Clinton era, to get fiscally conservative policy out of a Dem administration than out of the Republicans. It's definitely easier to push fiscal conservatism in the Democratic party than it is to push social liberalism in the Republican one. Now, the tensions between the generally secular neo-cons and the religious social conservatives (many of whom, like Huckabee, are actually comfortable with a government that provides a lot of services) is being reflected in the cracks between McCain's camp and Palin's camp.
I think what YouTube has done is put an asterisk next to Tip O'Neill's old axiom that "all politics are local." That asterisk is "but all communications are global."
No, you just don't get it at all. If an institution receives federal funding to keep its lights on, those lights can't go on in a lab where that research went on.
Do some research on the role of the NSF before blathering on subjects you clearly know nothing about.
Perhaps. It depends on how partisan his constituency is. It may be that in Alaska, the Republicans are the Harlem Globetrotters and the Democrats are the Washington Generals.
Stevens feathered his own nest a little bit with his job, but to be honest: what he did wasn't serious and did not have substantial consequences. There's too much Schadenfreude over nothing going on here.
And I say this as someone solidly on the left who is looking forward, somewhat, to a Democratic Congress. It's funny how this kind of error-correction is more likely on the left than on the right, though: people say they are equivalent, but if you look at the margins of left and the right, they way that they treat heterodoxy is different. Nutty liberals get corrected from the center and usually either accept the correction or find another target: the rabid right values loyalty over truth and attacks any nuance or correction as traitorous.
France 1799 was pretty much a case in the people who could hire the most guys with guns (the upper middle classes) dispensing with the ones who were in charge (the aristocracy.) The terror was more or less the lower orders being allowed to run riot and finish the job for them.
By "live", I take it you mean "get eaten last."
You know nothing about how research works in this country.
If you block any federal funds from reaching a category of research, you more or less make sure it will not take place on research universities. Especially for basic research that won't immediately lead to product, that pretty much kills it.
Not only that, but child pornographers might be neither pedophiles nor child molesters, but simple profiteers. All the medical and psychological screening in the world won't flush them out.
America is a peaceful country. As long as you do what it tells you to do and don't get in its way. Then, nobody gets hurt!