:) Thanks Takuan, good advice.

No, mekrod, you attacked me rather viciously and presented arguments without defending them. Then you misrepresented my argument and attacked the resulting straw man - I never argued that any entity in the fast food or costume industries was responsible for releasing toxic chemicals into groundwater. There are however a number of manufacturing companies, including a few in my area, who are responsible for situations similar to what I described, and I was presenting this as an example of generic corporate irresponsibility and wrongdoing.

Personally I've already written you off as a troll, as I stated above, and here I see that you continue in your attempts to provoke people to pay attention to you. I have, twice now, but I'm done. If other forum denizens (sorry Takuan that's the best I can come up with to describe you) want to continue to interact with you, then more power to 'em. If you decide to stick around (and if you can name-drop TG then you are probably someone who can contribute to the discussion on the site), then to prevent further disemvowelings you may want to read the moderation policy. You can find a link to it in the right-hand column near the top under "Don't Miss".

not @#115 (mekrod):

Sorry everyone looks like I fed a troll. Whoops.

@#85 (mekrod):

"Wow what a cartload of horse poop. So they are gonna sue over a trademarked flowerpot? Why not sue the Chinese costume company that makes the flowerpot hats I see every Halloween in the Dollar Tree? I mean really, an *ahem* artist that created a flowerpot hat by turning it upside down and putting it on a guy's head??? That's the hack calling the kettle black. This is just dumb."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29

You may not agree with its significance, but for nearly a hundred years people have been considering it art.

"But I guess if your claim to fame is a freakin upside down flowerpot then the lameness just bubbles over sooner or later. Similar to the well-timed copyright lawsuits against Google after the purchased Youtube. Wait until they have money then sue... got it. FROWNY FACE"

You pretty much answered your own question there about why they sued. Well, that and the fact that the costume company a) doesn't spend millions to advertise -- primarily to children -- a product that has dubious qualifications as "food" and b) the resulting demand for said "food" very directly leads to dire ecological consequenses that will before long begin to affect us all, and particularly those who live with the least.

These aren't problems exclusive to any one fast food company, nor are they exclusive to that industry (see the soda industry for plenty of other examples). But I have the same problems with any company that behaves in this manner as I would with say a manufacturing company that allows toxic chemicals to seep into an area's groundwater and then ties efforts to make them pay to clean it up it in court for years, or a pharmaceutical company that markets a largely ineffective drug and conceals evidence of dangerous side effects. That is, this is corporate wrongdoing at its worst and they deserve what they get, if only because its so much less than what they could have got. (Ask MobilExxon about that.)

@#93 (Noddy93):

I have yet to see anything that indicates Mr. Waits misled Frito-Lay into thinking that he has authorized them to use his song. They asked, he said no, they gave him a one-finger salute as they hired someone to sing in his style. Sort of sounds like they were daring him to sue if you ask me. Now, sometimes you get the bear, but sometimes the bear get you.

This reminds me more than anything of the Tom Waits-Frito Lay lawsuit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Waits#Lawsuits

Worked out rather well for Mr. Waits.

@#7 "danwhits":

"Second, I've been researching the economics of oil and have been unable to find any readily available info on the value of a barrel of refined oil. That is, what is the retail value of all the products obtained from a barrel of oil? The closest answer I 've found is "$1000s of dollars". Anyone?"

It's probably impossible to put an exact value on the final products of a barrel of oil, simply because oil can be made into an enormous variety of different things. (A lot of plastics are produced from oil, for example.) So the value of any given barrel of oil would depend on exactly what things it was made into, and possibly also where you sell those things.

I can't verify this so it could be totally false, but I have also heard that making oil into gasoline is probably the LEAST valuable thing you can do with oil. However, since gasoline is in huge demand everywhere, so you can still make a awful lot of money turning oil into gas and selling it in huge quantities.

Wisconsin Public Radio's "Chapter a Day" program just finished a reading of "Musicophilia" last week. Some of the programs are probably still available at http://wpr.org.

I'm pretty sure they abridge the books they read (I really don't see how you can fit a chapter into a half hour otherwise) but you can't argue with free. And the source text was great, I learned a fantastic number of fantastic things from it. (As I often do whenever I find something that Dr. Sacks has had a hand in...he's often on "Radio Lab" too, ferinstance.)

Thanks for the clarification regarding the disemvowellings, TNH. I think that it's a good thing to tell someone why their post has had the vowels taken out, even if it's just because it's unwise to help people feed the trolls.

Like ME, I had also caught that post and wondered about why it had been removed, although I assumed it was just because the article it was about was slightly dated (but still fascinating to me). I've seen posts removed for what I assumed was a similar reason and figured this was more of the same. That's not why I bring it up though, it's because I notice that the link he included was also disemvowelled. Since that doesn't simply make what he wrote harder to read but in essence creates a broken link with no hope of repairing it (I tried and failed), wouldn't it be better to cut it out and say something like "(Link Removed)" in this situation?

@#43 (davvee):

You are right that the word "fascism" does derive from the Latin word "fasces", which was a bundle of reeds that Roman consuls (if I remember right) carried around to symbolize the principle that that which is weak individually becomes much stronger in a group. (See Akira Kurosawa's amazing movie "Ran" for a demonstration of this, as well as its limitations.)

This symbol has been adopted in many places by the US government, largely to symbolize that although one individual (US) state may be weak, by joining together they become much stronger, which no doubt seemed to the classically-educated Constitutional framers a fitting symbol of the US Congress in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly because the Roman Republic was in many, many ways a model for the form of government they were looking to establish.

The political doctrine of fascism, however, arose much later, in the early 20th century. Mussolini named the doctrine after the fasces as one of many attempts to invoke the periods of the Roman Republic and Empire, which comparatively must have looked extremely attractive to many in post-First World War Italy. However, to say that these earlier periods were fascisms in any way is not true, fascism being in many ways a political doctrine that could only have arisen after the Industrial Revolution and the societal transformations that were induced by it.

In other words, although the two have the symbol in common, it is used somewhat differently and different aspects of it are emphasized. One could say that the olive branch, also common in US governmant symbology, is meant to symbolize God's mercy after the Flood of Noah, but in fact it is a very generic symbol of peace. Poor example, but I hope you get my idea.

For those saying, "Why not corporations from (some other place and/or time) that was just as bad?", well, let's face it, Nazi Germany is widely held (at least in Western civilization) as the #1 Worst Bad Government of all time, and as such is going to have a certain attraction to someone looking to assemble a list of this kind. The immense amount of documentation of this time and place that exists for Western scholars and commentators to examine also assists with this.

Personally, I would love to see some other lists, such as still-existing corporations that were complicit with the genocide of American Indian tribes, corporations that were involved in slave trades, corporations that propped up South African aparteid, etc. Like people and governments, corporations are capable of very evil acts. I applaud any corporation that willingly investigates its own past, admits to wrongdoings, and promulgates this information to prevent similar actions, just as I applaud the German people for not hiding their recent history from their children but instead using it as a teaching moment. (I wish the US would do the same, it might have avoided several recent errors that have been made.) However, Siemens adopting the name "Zyklon" for a line of products indicates that this was not the case with that company, although the information that I have doesn't indicate how long ago this occurred, and perhaps things have changed there.

@#18 (Charlie Stross):

I'm going to expose some of my ignorance here, but aren't the effects you describe largely due to inherent assumptions under a capitalistic scheme? That is, capitalism seems dependent on ever-increasing sources of property/resources (be they human, natural, geographic, intellectual, or whatever) to exploit/consume in order to continue functioning in a healthy (or at least non-disastrous) fashion.

We seem to be coming up on a ceiling on at least some of the essential resources for our global economy, and other axiomatic assumptions regarding the underlying "playing field" that the global capitalistic model functions on seem to be shifting. (I think at least partially because in some sense the phrase "global capitalistic model" is self-contradictory.)

As such, if the method of resource distribution we call capitalism were to shift its assumptions (primarily I'm thinking by adjusting the conditions it defines in order a participant to be considered "successful", and thereby changing the goals/activities of those participants), could the economic disasters caused by shrinking global population/castastrophic climate change/what-have-you be lessened or avoided (or perhaps even not perceived as being disasters)?

@#13:

The bodies of dead aliens (as in UFOs) are what's in the trunk in "Repo Man".

#49 sez:

[quote]
The "current one" and I use that phrase very loosely, has been evolving for all of those 100 years, and is far from being agreed upon among the believers(of sciencism).

But my point is, if it is truly unimpeachable, then it has nothing to fear from a bunch of crackpot fundies.
[/quote]

Actually neo-Darwinism, or more correctly the modern evolutionary synthesis, was mostly formulated in the 1930s and 1940s. It is a combination of Darwinian evolutionary principles (in particular the theory of natural selection) and Mendelian genetics, which provided a mechanism by which these principles could operate.

Previous to the MES, there were a large number of now-discredited hypotheses by which evolution was proposed to take place. These were widely argued in their day, but are now mostly of curiousity only to science historians. I think you will find that the MES is now widely accepted as fact in the biological sciences (that is, by those people who study and describe biological systems), and has been for several decades.

As others have already noted, your reference to "believers" of science is an erroneous one. Belief (and the related phenomenon of faith) is dependent on an absence of evidence. One believes in, for example, a Tooth Fairy, and has faith that it will exchange teeth deposited under one's pillow for money, despite the lack of hard, exclusive evidence that fairies of this sort exist. Similarly, one must believe that pursuing the Eight-Fold Path will result in them achieving Enlightenment, as there is no hard, exclusive evidence that this will be so. (I've tried to choose a childhood fantasy and a basic tenet of a widespread modern religion as examples here in order to be nonoffensive, but apologies if I've come across poorly.)

This does not apply to a scientific theory such as the MES. A scientific theory originates as an explanation that is proposed to fit a certain body of evidence. This proposition is then judged against further bodies of evidence and predictions are made from it. Observations that deviate from the original proposition are accounted for by modifying the original proposition, or in extreme cases partial or total abandonment of the proposition. After a proposition has been well-tested by many scientists and has been accepted as fact by them, it is generally referred to as a scientific theory, or a theory for short. However, this is not an idea for which belief plays a role.

Simply because a proposition, or even a theory, is considered an idea that is capable of being changed does not remove its power as a predictive model. Even as a good estimate is suggestive of the actual answer to a question, so a scientific theory that may be changed in the future can give a very good description of events that are observed now. You may wish to think of the MES in its current state as a 'rounded' answer to the question of how the diversity of life we now see (and see in the fossil record) came to be, and further modifications of it will establish an answer of greater precision. Just as Classical Mechanics was modified by the Theory of Relativity to explain observations that deviated from expectations (and remains open to further modification), so the MES remains open to modification from observations to be made at a later date. However, up to this point the MES has proven remarkably accurate, and some of the thousands upon thousands of possible examples of its predictive power are given above.

"Sciencism" is not a word I recognize. Would you care to explain what you mean by it?

As for "crackpot fundies", they have proven themselves capable of doing some rather disagreeable things to those they disagree with. For example, Galileo Galilei was put on trial and threatened with death essentially for suggesting that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth (which incidentally is now widely accepted to be true). I think that the current state of affairs is preferable to those times, and do not wish to see people be threatened with death (or even loss of employment) for proposing things that political appointments find politically unpalatable.

Finally, you make a reference to the MES as an evolving idea. This may in fact be the case, but I would suggest not using the word "evolving" as a synonym for "changing" (and this is something that our culture at large is proving very bad at right now). Although an evolution does connote a change in the thing that is evolving, it also implies that this change is occuring under an evolutionary pressure of some kind, which is not the case in all changing things, and I think may not be appropriate in a context of scientific investigation. At the very least, you may wish to state what sort of pressure you think the MES has been under, as it isn't clear to me what they might be.

@#11:

It's a poor shadow of the greatest (and evilest) game ever. Looks nicer, though. (Yes, even with a tile set.)

It does have YASDs though.

"Basing an industry on the whims of 14-year-olds? Yikes!!!"

Well, it probably made sense when they represented the dominant music consumers, but now it's biting the music executives on the rear sides of their anatomies. And it's why ringtone revenues are growing so fast, as teenagers are the primary consumers of them.

This after all was the demographic that had their purchasing decisions made by MTV, allowing surface appeal to flourish at the expense of talent (not saying the two are incompatible, but think of how many performers out there have the former and not the latter).

Now teens are looking at youtube and myspace (if they're even on myspace any more ;) for the same, and listening to the same 40 songs rotated through mass media a lot less, meaning no more multiplatinum singles. (The monolithic ideal of 'the mass media' has been fracturing considerably over the last few decades anyway, something that the success of MTV ironically was an early indicator of.) All in all, it means the companies that based their business models on teens making purchasing decisions heavily influenced by mass media are now getting hosed.

That doesn't mean that they can't point fingers though. And as we're seeing over and over these days, it's much easier to point them at nebulous bogeymen than the poor decisions made by you or your peers.

@#5: The $12.5b in lost revenue likely comes from making some assumptions in a calculation like this: 50 billion songs downloaded * $.75 wholesale per song * 1/3 of pirate downloads would have been purchases = $12.5b lost by the music industry to piracy

The last assumption is to my mind astronomically high, and the numbers you point out make that even more obvious. I would assume a number more along the lines of 1/10 to 1/20, if even that much. The number of songs downloaded is possibly also an estimate based on specious or incomplete data.

Finally, all the focus on the numbers of big music ignores the other entertainment content producers/distributors, one of which in particular (gaming) is exploding. Entertainment budgets are pretty much a zero-sum game, all the money for it comes out of the same pot. The better Halo 3 does, the worse Jay-Z will do.

Evolutionary psychologists I believe study how psychological traits evolved in a population. Since human psychology is the one best understood, they tend to focus most on humans. It's also a term that seems to have been co-opted by what looks to me like some folks who straddle the line between crank scientist and crank philosopher, in that they have some speculation that they either don't research well or that isn't researchable but they claim is scientific (which is an idiotic claim to make). It's all looking to me a lot like the same old pig with new lipstick on.

Devolution isn't a technical term, but if it were it might refer to the emergence of traits in a population that had previously been selected against to the point of them no longer being expressed in the population.

I suppose this could happen either by the traits being regressive but persisting in small quantities in the population until the selection pressure against them disappears or by genetic mutations that cause the trait to reoccur in the population after it has been removed, and the selection pressure that caused it to be removed has at this point disappeared. (An example would be a species like the naked mole rat that has practically lost the use of their eyes; their ancestors probably had functional eyes, but there is no longer a selection pressure for sight and as such a sightless naked mole rat is as or more fit, evolutionarily speaking, as a sighted one. You might have to go back to the Burgess Shale to find the last sightless naked mole rat ancestor, though.) Either way, the idea that this reversion is in any way to a 'lesser' life form is of course mistaken, coming from a confusion of evolution and progress.

When DEVO talks about devolution, though, it is sublime. ;)

Pyros, it's a mistake to claim that natural selection somehow no longer applies to humans. Evolutionary pressures still exist, it's just that for us they aren't as simple as the coloring of moths for camouflaging themselves on trees. The problem is that you can't look at the past few generations and expect to find long-term evolutionary trends (and that holds true even for moth coloring); you have to compare humans to those of thousands of years ago (or longer) and see where the morphological changes occur. As a very tenuous hypothesis, I'd tend to say something like human fingers are longer on average today than they were 20,000 years ago, as milennia ago there (maybe) were fewer tools around that required fine manual dexterity to operate (and skill in tool operation looks to me to have been a trait that has made a human more likely to reproduce over the last several thousand years).

But you are right in that Mr. Curry's claims (at least to me) seem to be much more about certain status quo conditions, and making arguments to perpetuate or exascerbate them, than it is about how people are going to have "evolved" in 10,000 years. That's kind of what I was trying to get at with my crack about genital size: "Hey! you're at the top of the heap now, so guess what? In 10,000 years, your descendants are all gonna have huge penises or cute perky breasts, etc.! Keep on keeping on!" Except it's all BS -- but people tend to be less skeptical of the prophecies that they want to hear.

Just to get it over with: "I for one welcome our new Eloi overlords."

I personally am confused about how it is this "top scientist" (an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics named Oliver Curry) thinks he can determine anything about the relative genital size of the "attractive, intelligent ruling elite" thousands of years in the future.

Then again, he pretty much seems to be part of that whole Kanazawa nonsense that was posted here a while back. (Kanazawa is also an evolutionary psychologist at LSOE, which makes me wonder what that department is teaching over there. Or maybe what's in their kool-aid.) In other words, it strikes me as being about as likely as The Beginning Was the End is.

to Thorzdad (#12):

First off, I completely agree with you. But excepting the Clinton administration this is pretty much par for the course for FEMA, which has long been the federal equivalent of the city sealer's office. Admittedly this is a little more reprehensible than usual, though.

Clinton was as far as I know the first (and only) president to actually appoint a FEMA head that actually had experience in disaster response, and who ran the department accordingly (and was loved by the FEMA rank-and-file for it). Under every other administration (again as far as I know), the department has been an epitome of patronage staffing (read: incompetent and wasteful). Michael Brown worrying about his wardrobe was not so much an egregious gaffe as it was par for the course.

If it was up to me I'd make it a criminal offense to appoint people here, the department most responsible for being on the front lines and saving people in disasters, on the basis of which of your cronies are most deserving of a plum (as long as people aren't dying), fat-paying government job, but then I'm not in charge of things. Republican administrations are worse, as the lives FEMA saves tend to belong to people who don't vote Republican, but neither party has much incentive to make things better, as the people saved don't really contribute to campaign funds either.

A clarification: The domestic wiretapping program run by the NSA was not started before Sept. 2001. This is the one that was supposedly started after the passage of Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists, and involves wiretapping without the use of FISC warrants. Its existence was confirmed by ex-AG Gonzales.

The program that Teresa is referring to is one by the NSA to access data about domestic telephone calls. This is the one that the EFF is suing AT&T over. The existence of this program has been neither confirmed nor denied by the administration, and the information I've seen reported in a quick check seems to indicate that the NSA first requested to gather call information from phone companies months before Sept. 2001 (probably days after GWB was first sworn in as president).

See NSA warrantless surveillance controversy and NSA call database on Wikipedia for more info.

Much support to Obama and Clinton on this stand, although I wish they would join with Dodd in placing a hold on the lawsuit immunity legislation. Although I'm not at all an expert on Senate rules, and I'm not sure of the technique of placing a hold on legislation, so maybe they can't join him, and this filibuster support is as good as they can do?

I'm baffled by the degree of online gaming hate going on, especially considering where it's happening; the postings on Boing Boing tend to be fairly MMOG friendly, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek so at times.

Jack's rant against people with Asperger's syndrome is even more worrying (unless you're just trolling). Jack, I don't know if someone with Asperger's has caused you harm in the past, but if so I'm pretty sure that in a lot of ways your life has been improved by people with Asperger's, and as such maybe you'd like to reconsider what appears to be a low opinion of people with the condition.

Now, I'm a moderately addicted WoW player myself (as of last night I have my second 70), with not insubstantial misgivings regarding that fact, as well as someone who has fed an animal that I've later eaten (in other words, I'm no stranger to farming). I've lived in areas ranging from rural to heavily urbanized, and I've associated with everyone from rustics to eggheads (and even one or two rustic eggheads).

All that established, here's what I've got to say on the debate raging here:

*Try not to spend your life in front of a screen. It's simply not healthy for you, physically or mentally. I'd recommend getting an average of 3 hours of WoW a day at most, which I'm well aware can be pretty hard to do.

*Assuming you can tear yourself away from a screen to do more than sleep, there are a lot worse ways to spend your time there than by playing WoW, which has in its favor a high degree of social interaction (largely absent from television, film, or the typical video game) as well as meaningful things to do in the game besides kill stuff, although admittedly this is the primary focus of the game.

*Too much real-life social interaction is just as bad for some people as not enough is for others, and an inability to be comfortable when you're alone is just as unhealthy as an inability to be comfortable when not alone. Perhaps it's much more socially acceptable, but then again why wouldn't a phenomenon facilitating social interaction be socially acceptable?

*Finally, it beats me what makes anyone think that real-life social interaction is any less of a resource management game than teaming up to defeat an orc is. Hell, I'd go so far as to say that our shared social reality can be as much a virtual construction as Azeroth is, or that it can be more addictive than any MMORPG to date. Some people enjoy it more than they would WoW, some less. I'm not here saying that you suck because I think the game you enjoy isn't fun, or because you can afford to go to Ireland and I can't. I'd appreciate it if you showed the same restraint. And I say this as someone who's been able to show sympathy for your position in the past; perhaps those expressing the most vitrolic positions are themselves recovering MMORPG addicts?

(In addition, I'm always disappointed by those who bring up the allegory of the cave in this type of situation. In a modern context, it's far too facile to use it to criticize our dominant forms of entertainment, when in fact its meaning is more that direct knowledge of a truth is preferable to distorted representations of it. Or are you saying that those poor people locked up in the dark, dank cave shouldn't have even had shadow puppets to amuse themselves with?)

OK. As far as the original posting goes, those pointing out that this is something like comparing the population of ballerinas with those collecting teacups are pretty much spot-on (although I'll admit farming is more crucial to our continued existence than ballet is).

It is however telling that a leisure activity that didn't exist 5 years ago is now more widespread than the dominant method of supporting oneself about a hundred years ago, but then again the population of golfers in the U.S. is even larger than that of WoW players. But does this mean we have anything more to look forward to than the Happy Gilmore of MMORPGs?

It's not completely accurate here, but:

Is not the enemy of my enemy...my friend?

Who cares why he's doing it, as long as he makes good on his promise and doesn't back down? Although now, I have to admit, I'm going to look a lot more favorably on his campaign.

Hamish beat me to it. :(

But The Funeral, like everything I've seen by Itami, is really good. It's his first so it doesn't have the confidence you see in, say, Tampopo, but in some ways this is a benefit.

Fr ths lkng t cmmnt n th L Gn sttn, th Lssg pst (nfrtntly) hs dscssn gng n thr.

Words can't describe the appreciation I feel toward the EFF and everyone else who is pushing the current administration to stop obfuscating and argue its case in the courtroom. The secrecy and corruption of this administration appall me, and I have an even dimmer view of their attempts to dismantle the US Constitution.

I wish there was a possibility of having 60 Democrats in the Senate before the 2008 elections, but there isn't so you're who we depend on to keep fighting the good fight.

In a related vein, The Nutley Brass did Muzak-style versions of Ramones songs. Bizarre and entertaining...you haven't heard Rock 'n Roll High School until you've heard it easy listening style.

Reducing copyright terms to a reasonable amount of time is hardly comparable to shoplifting. Sam Clements tried to make a similar argument about 100 years ago, it didn't hold water then either.

Copyrights last essentially for perpetuity right now -- past the average person's lifetime, at any rate. This is obviously not optimal for most people, and as such it's entirely to be expected that social movements will crop up and agitate for change. Reasonable limitations so that ideasmiths can feed their families is one thing, unreasonable limitations that allow monolithic institutions to carve out bits of our shared culture for themselves to own is another.

The entirety of art, and civilization, is built on appropriating pieces of the ideas of others. Preventing ourselves from doing this benefits the few at the expense of everyone (including those being benefitted, as they'll lose the ability to crib ideas from anyone but themselves).

The example of Sleeping Beauty is especially telling. What's next, copyrighting individual words for 100 years? "The term 'fun' belongs to the Disney Corporation. Cease and desist this unauthorized usage of our property immediately. You'll have to find some other way to describe your child's birthday party."

Would be interesting (although difficult) to see if these 'misfirings' have the same effect as random mutations do in evolutionary genetics.

That is, maybe almost all of them cause a 'mistake' but once in a while they result in a better way to do something. Or an insight into something previously inscrutable, or a new Hobbesian 'complex idea' (that notion itself the result of a misfiring?), or...

This discussion is starting to remind me of the one for the ikea time chart.

I didn't find anything about it confusing, but then again I couldn't make sense of the ikea chart for about 5 minutes.

Each object (it's supposed to be like a tower of hanoi, a series of ever-smaller objects stacked on top of larger ones, and each object's top surface area corresponding to...well, surface area) is discrete. Wendy's doesn't have 150k+ stores. It makes sense if you only want to get relative information (Subway has a few fewer stores than McDonalds, Blockbuster stores tend to be a lot bigger individually than 7-11s) but for real numbers it does the proverbial suck and blow.

A lot of the other retailers on the chart are smaller in size; coffeeshops, fast food places and convenience stores are hardly going to match the behemoth that is the Wal-Mart Supercenter. I'd be interested in seeing where Target, Best Buy, Home Depot -- even Walgreens -- would fit here.

Also, does the size include the parking lot? 'Cause Wal-Marts tend to have some big honkin' parking lots.

Found a link for (part of?) it on youtube:

Werner Herzog on images, TV, and shoes

More Werner Herzog posts please. Here's something to get you thinking:

"Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe"

noen, you're reading a lot more into my post than what I said. I didn't call for a worldwide government, or for an invasion. I didn't say that rapes don't happen, that children aren't abused, be it where I am or elsewhere.

I said if you are able to stop someone from being raped, or a child from being taken advantage of, or anything else like this from happening, then you should. Saying that "We shouldn't get involved" is not a healthy response to this situation.

I'm well aware of man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man. I don't shirk from the many, many other stories that have paraded through the news like this, not since I learned about what occured in Rwanda. I've also been in situations where someone I know is being physically abused by someone they love, and has asked for help. I've done what I could for them, even when people close to me advised me to not get involved. From their perspective I'm sure they thought it was the right thing to do, but I still think that if you are in a position to help or protect someone who desperately needs and wants it, you have a responsibility to do so, and "don't get involved" is wrong.

I'm well aware that this can be read as an endorsement of a certain recent disastrous U.S. policy; that is misrepresenting what I'm saying. I also don't think another invasion is wise at this point, either for the invader or the invadee. Nor do I think that I have the answer to this horrible situation.

What I am saying is: To say that nothing should be done is wrong. Morally.

"I just don't think we should."

No. Just no. When this sort of thing happens in the world and you have the ability to stop it, YOU SHOULD. Damn the consequenses.

If these good intentions pave the road to hell, then to hell we must go; but I can't believe that they do.

@ Whistlingfish

From what I understand, censorship and censureship are not the same. Congress is free to pass a resolution condemning anything and anything they want (except apparently GWB :\ ) and I don't believe that it involves the First Amendment. Bad judgement and pointless infighting, maybe, but that's another discussion.

and @ Dybbuk:
"PS it made me laugh that in a forum about censorship i was...."

Good thing you didn't say censored, because you weren't. I can still understand what you were spouting in #2, it just took some effort. That's the beauty of disemvoweling.

You have plainly been pointing out Haggard and Kelly both. You might have even had a point with Kelly, but you chose to troll instead of discuss. Please take your ball and go home. Nobody but you is laughing.

Hey everyone, stop reheating the same old argument. Sheesh.

Believing in a higher power and having an open mind are not in fact mutually exclusive, nor is having an open mind and being a member of a religion. (To some degree inconsistent – maybe, but then I don't know anyone or anything carbon-based who is 100% consistent always.) Denominations of any religion have a vast spectrum of variation in what they think, thus there are denominations, and that's why some people belong to one, others a different one, and others yet to none at all.

The whole point here is a) secular groups ought to identify which groups within the majority religious culture have similar goals and b) then extend a hand to them in order to form coalitions to achieve these goals. It's a marriage of convenience, sure, but that's politics, folks.

(And I'm irreligious, if it matters. Was raised midwest Lutheran though, so I'll tell you, if you're secular you want to talk to the ELCA more and Missouri and Wisconsin synods less.)

This is almost as bad as when they called in the bomb squad for the guacamole someone left on the CTA in Chicago a few years ago.

I say keep up the good work guys, the more incidents like this that happen the more people will realize that terrorism isn't the "OMG WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!1!1" that some people make it out for. Not there it some danger, but driving on the Interstate is probably a bigger threat.

@ Antonio Lopez and others:

Radiohead might not be the best example of what you're trying to argue, as they've been able to consistently hold onto and grow their devoted fan base since "Creep"/Pablo Honey came out. They're more like Bob Dylan, or Muddy Waters, or the Stones, I think, in the sense that they could record themselves reading the phone book, and there are (a lot of) people who would buy it. I think it's likely that artists like this would eventually emerge from the mass of musicmakers and achieve some measure of fame and riches. Whether it's as much as was able to be amassed in the long heyday of the major record labels, that I can't tell you.

I think a better question here is: with the seeming impending demise of the record industry, would it be possible for a highly-packaged pop star to even partially dominate the music scene? To put a name on it, is another Britney Spears going to be possible in a few years? I'm hoping not. Not that disposable music isn't going to continue to be produced, marketed and sold, but I do hope it's no longer the baseline.

Ten years ago, I remember friends would buy everything that came out on Thrill Jockey because they knew that the label wouldn't sign something that they wouldn't like. It's maybe like an art gallery knowing their regular customers, and looking for artists that would sell to them. Having a coterie of similar artists and selling records on that reputation didn't sound like a bad business model then, and it only sounds like a better idea now.

So, this is an overhyped concatenation of already-existing tropes? 'Cause that's basically what Dogme 95 was to cinema verite. (Not to mention, merely pressing 'record' and 'stop' on a camera are edits, the most basic ones of all.)

I don't mean to sound snarky, setting artificial limits on the techniques available to you can be both a very successful way to create otherwise unlikely art. (Heck, "Lumiere et compagnie" shows this.) It can also be a very helpful exercise to the artist. But, as when Dogme 95 originally hit, I have some doubt whether this revolution is in fact in aethetics, as it seems to claim, or in self-promotion.

I wonder if boyhowdy's exercise, fascinating though it is, wasn't hamstrung by the establishment of a deadline. Would things have happened the same if the class could have modified the rules at any time, but there would have been a week (during which time the rule couldn't be changed) between when the rule was written and when it went into effect?

And I'm not sure what you're talking about OM, maybe you'd like to give something more than a vague accusation? I don't doubt that something happened, like any system the guidelines surrounding wikipedia are open to exploitation, I'm just wondering what it was and how it played out.

You know it's going to be a good day when you roll out of bed, check BoingBoing, and see a link to a DEVO performance from almost 30 years ago. Thanks!

I doubt the government is behind the Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, it would be like them being behind the boy band craze of a few years back.

That is, why would the government be behind something that is full well and capable of getting itself going without anyone outside a dedicated core of devotees putting any effort into helping it along?

In an event as scrutinized as the Sept. 11 attacks, it's inevitable that ironies, suspect coincidences, and contradictory sets of evidence exist. Reality is messy, and the more you look at it the messier it gets. However, Occam's Razor indicates that the official story is in fact the correct one. Unless new evidence comes to light that indicates that the official story is no longer plausible, I'd recommend acting as though it holds the water that it seems to hold.

Anyway, to get to the actual topic of the original post, I also don't agree with Rushkoff's argument that these alternative theories are any particular threat to anything. There are always going to be people who doubt the veracity of a narrative. This is a very good thing. Without that impulse, there would be a lot more superstition and irrationality going around (and if you ask me, there's still too much these days). Remember that we had to have someone think up phlogiston before we could understand the way things really work in the universe. Also Rushkoff's claim that these theories are what "they" want you to be thinking doesn't hold up. Always think of who benefits from a conspiracy. In the case of a cartel, it's the members who collude to set prices. In the case of Iraq, it's the government contractors that have (quite openly) ransacked the reconstruction budget, as well as those who are allowing them to do so. In the case of Sept. 11 conspiracies, the US government does not benefit from encouraging people to think that they're being lied to by the US government.

Something that looms as large in the collective consciousness as the attacks of Sept. 11 still does is bound to have a lot of people doubting the official story, just as JFK and Hitler and Elvis can all tell you. ;) But any faulty reasoning that results is always preferable to unquestioned dogma.

However, I do also understand that there can be a desire to believe in anything but the official story that takes over (becomes dogmatic), that's when this situation becomes unfortunate for everyone involved -- there was a episode of This American Life recently about a conflict between a witness of the London mass transit bombings and the conspiracy theorists for that event that made this very clear. And I abhor how the GW Bush administration took advantage of the Sept. 11 attacks to promote an agenda that is unamerican to the core, as well as how they have wrapped this core in a cloak of patriotism.

CantStopTheSignal said:
"How does someone even get so out of touch with reality that they think America is anywhere even remotely close to this?"

The point isn't that the US is close to this, but that right now it's moving in that direction. And that's a bad direction to go. In other words, it's not the position that bothers me so much as it is the vector.

I don't think that anyone would say that the US is close to all 10 of the steps. Personally I wouldn't say that we're even close to more than 2 or 3 of them.

But the very fact that I think the US is close to 2 or 3 of those steps frightens the bejeebus out of me. Ten years ago, we weren't close to any of them. Not a single one of them. There was no Guantanamo prison, no "Axis of Evil", no rationalization of torture. You had to watch the X-Files to find anything close. Now we have it on the front page every day. When this happens, those that value living in a free society have an obligation to speak out against it.

I'm pissed off at the violent extremists who punched a hole in the US psyche on Sept. 11, 2001. They stole from me the vision of a shining civilization that I'd hoped would come to be within my lifetime. But I'm even more pissed off at those in power who have taken advantage of that hole, who haven't patched it, who have used it to move us further and further away from what could have been. And for what? I certainly am not substantially better now than I was in December 2001, or December 2002, or December 2004, nor is anyone I can think of, except those I know who aren't serving in Iraq any more. Are you?

I really want to believe that there would never, ever be a coup in the US. But then, ten years ago I wouldn't have guessed that we'd be as close as we are to even 3 of those items on Wolf's list. Or that there would be a hole called "Ground Zero" in Manhattan. Things don't always happen the way that you would expect them to, it could be that instead of an obvious coup there is massive and untraceable voter fraud that barely ends up putting more of the same into power next year. If done right, nobody would be able to prove a thing. What happened in Florida in 2000 has been described that way, as have the electronic voting mishaps that happened nationwide in 2004. I think it all had more to do with ineptitude than fraud personally, but ineptitude around the right to vote is worse in some ways. And you can see where it might give bad eggs some ideas on how to manipulate a vote.

And finally, for the record, I have no respect for dogmatic thinking no matter what the subjective stance of the dogmatic. The left is as guilty of it as the right is. The only difference I see is that the left has a little bit less of a tendency to take an intransigent "Us vs. Them" stance than the right does.

(Incidentally, the reason why all the posts by your previous login are gone, CantStop, is probably because rescinding a login removes all the posts done under that login. And whatever reason your login was rescinded is something you can probably describe better than anyone, I'm guessing.)

I agree with ianm, I don't know if it's shilling or ostrich syndrome or what, but things are bad and unfortunately stand to get a lot worse in the US over the next few years.

The US has moved toward a vastly stronger and more pervasive (and invasive) executive branch of government in the last several years. This is a dangerous direction for them to move if you value your freedom. The executive branch was limited in the US Constitution in large part to prevent the executive branch (i.e. the English monarchy and its colonial system) excesses that sparked the American Revolution in the first place.

Personally I think that the 10 steps Wolf points out are inevitable whenever you have an executive with insufficient checks. The problem the US has now is that an executive finally rose to power that realized the situation and is now running as far as they can with it -- and notice how many of them first came to prominence in the Nixon era -- hopefully they won't decide that January 2009 isn't a good time for them to stop being in power. And that last part seems to be Wolf's point.

I really want to know what those who think that Wolf and Mark pointing these things out is somehow wrong or misguided are thinking; that gets reminiscent of points 3, 5 and 9, people.

And the Paglia quote is unhelpful (not to mention out of context). Reading Lacan can be good for you, go check out some of Slavoj Zizek's work. He's a Lacanian theorist who has very little problem taking a stand against the policies of the GW Bush administration. Here's an example:

IRAQ'S FALSE PROMISES

Nick (#5):

Capitalism isn't really a form of government, I think you're thinking of a kind of fascism.

Last time I checked, Wikipedia had a pretty good writeup of the different flavors of fascism.