Citizens Don’t Let Citizens Watch the RNC

Rana and Harrison
are both feeling somehow obliged to pay attention to the Republican National Convention, or barf trying. Nonsense, I say! There are only three good reasons to watch the RNC:

  1. The Republicans (or protesters) might possibly do or say something that will change your vote.
  2. The Republicans (or protesters) might possibly do or say something that will inspire you to pull out your checkbook and/or get off your ass for the Democrats - or your favored third-party alternative.
  3. You relish the thought of blogging, snarking, playing a drinking game, and/or throwing things at the TV.

Yeah, some people feel compelled to give 'em "equal time". I don't know about all y'alls, but I've been giving these assholes better than equal time for four years and I still think they're assholes. At some point, enough becomes more than enough.

To properly honor our civic obligations, then, I propose that the following activities also be given "equal time":

  1. Learning about the state congressfolk, judges, and county assessors who'll be taking up all that space on the bottom of the Presidential ballot in November;
  2. Volunteering with the local chapter of your favorite political party or lobby group (if you have to force yourself to watch the RNC so you'll be riled up enough to do this... why not just force yourself to volunteer and save the pain?);
  3. Chatting with a crazy guy on the street corner (he'll probably appreciate your willingness to listen more than W. will, and his policy towards stem cell research will make just as much sense as W.'s, if not more!);
  4. Stopping to smell the roses;
  5. Attending a meeting of the city council, school board, or miscellaneous local government commission;
  6. Informing your fellow civic persons about what you learned in items 1-5 with a letter to the editor, or in any case something other than a blog entry.

If our civic obligation to absorb the agenda of the governing party overrides our civic obligation to do any of these things, then civil society sucks and I'm moving to a hermitage in the South Atlantic.

yami · 20:08 · 31 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics, Political Theory and Practice

On What Grounds Is This Legal?

It seems Secret Service agents were busily protecting the President from those dangerous Michael Moore media interviews at the Republican National Convention. Or perhaps they were just protecting Mr. Moore himself from an armed and dangerous NPR reporter, hoorah!

If the Treasury Department lawyers1 are even half as clever as the Justice Department's, they'll have already written a comprehensive memo outlining exactly how this kind of behavior can be squared with the First Amendment. In this instance, I imagine it's by chanting the words "Congress shall make no law" while rocking back and forth with your hands clapped over your ears and your eyes tightly shut to avoid the past 200 years of American jurisprudence, but I'm open to less sophisticated legal arguments. However, the entire contents of those memos will need to be redacted - for security purposes, natch - so we'll never know for sure.

1Yes, the Secret Service is a subsidiary of the U.S. Treasury. No, that doesn't help anyone who's trying to interpret the Wizard of Oz as a fable about the gold standard.

(nodnod to Island of Balta)

yami · 12:35 · 31 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Today’s Factoid

In the strictest botanical sense, the brazil nut is a lie. Nuts are single-seeded fruit, and brazil nuts come several per package. So there you have it.

yami · 11:32 · 31 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: Science

Note to People on Political Volunteer Phone Lists

When someone calls you up and asks if you'd like to volunteer again this year, please don't tell them about your disappointment with the Democratic Party. The person on the other end doesn't necessarily like the Democratic Party any more than you do, though her feelings may or may not be accurately characterized as "disappointment". The person on the other end is not even an enthusiastic volunteer ready to change the world and/or party one local chapter at a time. She's a phone banker. She hates people.

By all means ask if your special talents can be put to use, but don't start in on how you're too smart to be working the phones. Your phone banker is smart too, and pretty fucking full of herself, and she forgot to eat dinner. Her talents are also wasted on the phones, and on her job, and really on anything that isn't the geology of a remote tropical paradise, writing the Next Great American Weblog, or eating a bowl of Crispix. But even the sootiest depths of her bitter, traffic-jam befouled soul aren't dark enough to wish four more years of George W. Bush on the world - not even if it does happen to be a world full of idiots who deserve what they get.

yami · 21:51 · 30 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: Political Theory and Practice

Weekend Review

  1. Went to a focus group Friday night, subject: television. Was hoping for an intimate atmosphere where I could fail to impress anyone with my sparkling snarky comments; instead, had to write WHO BUYS THIS SHIT??? in the free-response box after viewing a commercial for some kind of over-engineered storytelling air freshener. Perhaps some data-entry temp worker will be entertained by my brief summary of the situation in Darfur as it relates to the ethics of publicizing capitalism's absurdist excreta.
  2. Took the GRE on Saturday, and utterly 0wnzøred the quantitative reasoning (as they say in common parlance). For once I actually sat down and answered the questions that were asked, as opposed to similar questions not asked at all. Did okay on the rest of it as well; my "analyze an argument" argument was about earthquakes. Ha!

    I am so smart, SMRT! Now I'll go to grad school and feel stupid again for another half-decade or more, hoorah!

  3. Our dish drainer is on top of the fridge, for lack of counter space and because we can't be bothered to keep the table clear. It's taken quite the toll on our dishes - even indestructible plastic bowls will break falling from that height. I broke the last one today, and had to make an emergency run to Goodwill. $2.72 for four cereal bowls, estimated lifespan, 3 months.

    But what I wonder is: why do people like such shallow bowls? Or perhaps they don't like them much at all, given how many of them seem to end up at Goodwill for me to puzzle over on my way to the deeply curved scaled-up tea cup style bowls, the correct kind of bowl, hiding at the back of the shelf with the commemorative shot glasses.

yami · 21:25 · 29 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Broken Pipes and the Electoral College

  1. The water was shut off at the office this morning, due to a broken something something. It's amazing how slowly something as simple as "there's no water" can move through one's consciousness - I kept turning the faucet ("tap") and being surprised when nothing came out.
  2. I promised Harrison a response to
    his discussion of the Electoral College; said response is in the extended entry.
  3. What do you call a pundit on the radio? They're not precisely talking heads, because there's no camera to cut them off at the neck... talking voices? Talking talkies?

(more...)

yami · 13:05 · 26 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics, Political Theory and Practice

Gmail

Anyone want an invite?

UPDATE: If you still want one, you'll have to participate in some kind of Czech chinchilla photo competition. Awwww, chinchillas, fuzzy!

UPDATE UPDATE: Nah, actually, I've still got several. They're a little bit irritating.

yami · 10:14 · 26 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: Announcements

Pedantry, Physics

Who among you allowed me to go without reading Pedantry on at least a quasi-regular basis? I mean, really, what else have you been holding out on?

In any case,
Towards a Critical Theory of Physics is kinda tangentially related to the old post-structuralist/physics connection, except it actually has to do with, you know, physics. And contains a sage reminder to anyone interacting with a wannabe grad student:

The ugly truth is that science is full of arguments that were never resolved by falsification, consensus or rational argument. The ultimate decision maker in the hard sciences is graduate students. Arguments are resolved when old physicists die without convincing any grad students to continue to work on their theories. Graduate students in the hard sciences need to understand that their profs need them desperately, because it is only through grad students that their work has a future.

Which sounds nice, but - this grad student wannabe isn't just after thesis problems of sexy scientific merit. She wants funding, too, in quantities not often doled out by fellow grad students. Which of course is the point: these decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Funding, too, is a social decision, but it's probably best not to gloss over the role the Old Guard's purse-strings (not to mention the public's purse-strings, which moves us briskly out of the purist realm of scientific argument) can play in the establishment of scientific orthodoxy, lest one disrupt the academic hierarchy entirely. Chaos! Would! Ensue!

Note to professors still in need of a new generation of crackpotty standard-bearers: evidence of financial stability will be considered on even standing with evidence of empirical or theoretical soundness, please direct all inquiries to the author.

yami · 22:48 · 23 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, Science

John Kerry, War God

After reading this I want to grab a stuffed animal and hide under the blankets and cry and maybe join the Green Party again:

It's all part of the seemingly successful plan to paint Kerry as a born killer, somebody who would not only invade Iraq or any other country for no reason at all, but a guy who would insist on going himself for a few Glory Kills. ... That stiff demeanor and long, cruel face is beginning to look like something else entirely. It's beginning to look like a God of War, a total monster who kills for the sheer pleasure of it, and saves lives for the pure enjoyment of watching a puny human whimper below him in quivering gratitude, giving tribute, sacrificing animals and the first born to His power and whims.

And I simultaneously feel guilty for having missed the Young Dem volunteer night tonight. How's that for political wherewithal on a nice sunny day, eh?

(linknod to Ampersand)

yami · 21:47 · 23 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Monday Silliness: California Creeks

Some mornings, anything will make me giggle.

Oddly, these are all Northern and Northish-Central California features. One might interpret this as evidence for the relative phonetic unsilliness of the Chumashish and Aztec-Tanoan language families, but preliminary data from Cahuilla belies this hypothesis. The monotonous crappiness of Southern California place names can instead be blamed on the Spanish missionaries, as if we needed another reason to hate them.

yami · 9:47 · 23 Aug 2020 · #
Filed under: Whimsy, Language