I'm more cultured than you

This weekend I watched a Chinese-style Taiwanese-language opera outdoors on Dihua St. in Taipei. The opera was directly inspired by the Nicholas Cage/John Travolta movie Face/Off and takes place during the Ming Dynasty.

Obama Post

A fascinating nugget of wisdom from a Washington Post online chat about Obama rumors:

Cleveland, Tenn.: My Uncle Glenn, who raised me and with whom I would trust with my life, has heard on good authority that Obama is Muslim. Why does Obama keep suggesting otherwise? This makes Obama seem shifty and disingenuous. I could (maybe) deal with a Muslim president but (definitely) not a dishonest one.

Now, personally, I give this post about a ten percent chance of not being a troll.

Still, I absolutely applaud the use of Uncle Glenn as a serious source of information. In this history-making election between John McCain, a man brainwashed by the North Vietnamese to turn America into a Communist state[1] and Barack Obama, a fanatical Muslim intent on surrendering our country to terrorists[2], it's good to have reliable, impartial sources of information. An uninformed electorate back in 1992 elected Bill Clinton, a known child molester[3] who sold crack cocaine from the Oval Office[4] and had illicit relations with British Prime Minister John Major on April 16, 1995[5]. In 2000, George W. Bush, the son of a Nazi sympathizer[6] who fathered eleven black children and four Asian/Pacific Islander children between 1974 and 1978[7], was elected by a nation who was largely uninformed of his past. And he was very nearly unseated in 2004 by John Kerry, who paid a lookalike to go fight in Vietnam in his place[8] .

Notes

1. Uncle Glenn.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.

Prince Caspian

I saw The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian on Sunday. I was a completely virgin viewer. Not only have I never seen the first Narnia movie, but I've never read anything by C. S. Lewis.

This is the ideal way to watch a movie that comes with loads of baggage. I had no way of knowing when the movie was making massive deviations from the book. I couldn't tell when a character came across quite differently from anything C. S. Lewis intended.

Instead, I just accepted everything as it came (Talking badger? Cool! Swordsmouse? Okay!!) and didn't worry about how it all fit together. Nothing like blissful ignorance.

I was vaguely aware that the movie series had some of C. S. Lewis' Christian symbolism. But if I hadn't already known that Lewis saw his Narnia as infused with Christian meaning, I'd probably have seen the religious aspects of the movie as Hollywood trying for a deeply spiritual meaning while still being vague enough to avoid offending anyone.

Miraz is the most wonderfully stereotypical Evil Overlord I've seen in a very long time. He is an utterly uncomplicated character. He has no eccentricities or odd character traits. He is simply an Evil Overlord. Period. I can respect that.

For all I can tell

Political bloggers are all abuzz over what Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee member Fred Hobbs (note party affiliation) has to say about Barack Obama:

“He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Political discourse is great, isn't it? Thanks to his excellent use of qualifying statements, there's no way to logically argue with any of that.

Because of such wonderful phrases as "It sounds like" and "for all I can tell", it is absolutely impossible for any of the following statements to be proven wrong:

Fred Hobbs may be a member of the Illuminati, the Priory of Sion, and NAMBLA for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.

It sounds kind of like Hillary Clinton keeps a copy of Mein Kampf by her bedside. For all I can tell she might be a Nazi.

For all I can tell, George Bush might well have summoned Hurricane Katrina with his black magic. It sure sounds like the sort of use he'd find for his wizarding skills.

It sure sounds kind of like Randall Shelton, in Mrs. Glenburg's second period trigonometry class, has no friends. He sleeps in a barn and never takes a shower for all I can tell.

Curse You, Trash Talkers!

Wherever blog comment threads turn to politics, the general intelligence level takes a nosedive. I'm okay with that - I made my peace with it long ago. But here's something that makes me uneasy.

John Scalzi has some snarky things to say about FOX News calling Michelle Obama a "Baby Mama", and Michelle Malkin's bizarre little defense of same. I agree with Scalzi.

(Aside: I generally make it a habit of not worrying about what FOX News has to say. It's easy because I don't live in the USA, and I don't own a TV. Also, I try not to think of Michelle Malkin, ever. I used to think she was a real person. Then the Dunkin' Donuts thing happened, and now I feel dumb for thinking she was a real person.)

Ninety-two comments in, one "Charles" calls Scalzi's snark "one of the most hateful rants I’ve read yet this election year." He goes on to say:

I shouldn’t be surprised though that you secular-progressive socialists, borderline communists, smear tacticians continue to defame everything about Fox News. You complain that Fox News is the right-wing news channel…blah blah blah. Okay, so the conservatives have one tv channel that leans their way. Liberals control the rest of them. I am willing to bet the majority of the people commenting on this blog have never even watched Fox News long enough to form their own opinion (not one derived from someone else you heard talking about Fox News) about their reporting.

And then he goes on for some length, in which he also repeats some rather overdone anti-Obama talking points absolutely identical to what thousands of other overly dramatic Obama critics are also saying on the Internet.

Scalzi responds:

Charles:

“That had to be one of the most hateful rants I’ve read yet this election year.”

Get out more, Charles.

Also, re: “token conservative,” there are lots of conservatives who visit and comment here, and rather more substantively and with fewer rote talking point cliches than you just have, so please get over yourself. Your problem is not that you’re conservative, it’s that your comment is unoriginal, boring and lame. Other conservatives here do better in their arguments. Strive to emulate them.

And Charles issues a rebuttal:

John,

You call it cliche, I call it truth. Very typical of a liberal to sling insults to attempt to make a point.

And so on.

Here's what bugs me. What if Charles is serious? What if he's real?

Now, I understand the attitude of "do not feed the trolls."

And a few months ago I wrote a post (also inspired by a Scalzi thread) about how most "dissenting opinion" posts on political comment threads are basically just sports fans screaming trash talk at their opponents before a game. I wholeheartedly believe that trying to calmly discuss the issues on their merits with a trash-talker (regardless of the trash-talker's political orientation) is just insufferably nerdy.

But... I've got a smidgen of doubt in my mind. What if Charles is real? What if he's sincere, just not very good at expressing his opinions? What if John Scalzi made a mistake by not trying to have a real constructive dialog with him (or just ignoring him - Scalzi's presumably got more going on in his life than participating in his own comment threads)? What if Charles actually, genuinely meant it when he said, "Very typical of a liberal to sling insults to attempt to make a point"?

Okay, I know it's hugely unlikely. This is the Internet. I wasn't born yesterday. This isn't real. Charles may be a partisan fan of the GOP, but that doesn't mean he thinks everything (or anything) he says is literally true.

But still, that bit of doubt persists. And it's why I can't be a political blogger.

An Obama Presidency

Zompist refuses to predict the Presidential race.

I think the November election is still wide open.

Well, I'm a lot stupider than him, and I predict Obama's got a 90% chance of being the 44th President of the United States.

It mostly comes down to this: Obama and his team are much, much smarter about the nitty-gritty of politics than the Gore or Kerry campaigns ever were. The mistakes and missteps he's made so far this year have been relatively minor. Some bloggers and commentators would have you believe his campaign's been a gaffe machine since March, but I just don't see it.

I'm also encouraged that he's showing every sign of putting the GOP on defensive in states like Virginia and North Carolina, which were supposed to be safe GOP locks.

That said, I'm worried about what will almost inevitably happen when Obama's core of True Believers figures out sometime in 2009 that the man's not perfect, and that the President of the United States inevitably has to make compromises.

It's almost inevitable that a newly elected President is going to suffer a catastrophic drop in popularity in his first year, particularly one who was elected as representing a New Generation or a New Kind of Politics. About the only sure way to avoid it is for some Massive Unanticipated Event to come along and change all the rules, which is how George W. Bush managed to end his first year in office more popular than when he started it.

Massive Unanticipated Events tend to be bad news. I'm going to hope one doesn't happen.

I guess this is the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the meme that's going around GOP-Bloggerland right now that an Obama Presidency will be reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's, in all the worst ways.

But now I want to make another prediction, one which is somewhat out-there but might make me look like a genius in eight and a half years:

Barack Obama will be a two-term President, but he'll do it Grover Cleveland-style. His first term will leave a lot of his base unhappy, and he will lose the 2012 election to some Republican. After a year or two of Republican rule, some remorseful Dems will begin thinking "That Barack guy, he wasn't so bad after all". And he'll be term-limited this time, so you know he'll be an actual leader rather than some dope just worrying about his own re-election. So Obama is renominated in 2016 and wins the Presidency.

(And just to make all the Obama-haters' hair stand on end: Even in this scenario, when Obama retires from the Presidency for good in 2021 he'll still be only sixty years old. Not too old for a Supreme Court appointment...)

Texas and Ghost Cats and Cubicles

I just read James Hynes' Kings of Infinite Space. An office satire. With undead creatures. And sex. (Not in the same scenes.)

My official Thoughts While Reading It:

- I never, ever, ever, ever again want to find myself earning $8/hr to pay for the food I eat and the apartment I sleep in. I've been there and it sucks. IT SUCKS. Have I mentioned that IT SUCKS?

- This Paul Trilby guy, he's not supposed to be an Everyman character, is he? If he is, he's not a very good one. He's borderline psychotic. He drowned his ex-wife's cat in the bathtub. His condescension towards Texas suburbia is a bit overdone even for my tastes, and I'm a snobby Blue Stater who prefers Belgian beer to American beer, foreign films to NASCAR, and who plans to vote for Obama this November. (I'm relieved to see I was right. Apparently Hynes considers Paul Trilby to be his "evil stunt double".) If there's a true moral center to this novel, it's Callie the Oklahoma Girl.

- I hated Olivia more than I have hated any fictional character I've come across in months. I wanted to see her cut up into little pieces and then I wanted to see the pieces eaten by goats. In other words: Olivia is a very effective character. I wish I'd seen more of her.

- (Not that this will make any sense if you haven't read the book, but...) Just for the record, I didn't know what synecdoche meant either. But now I'll never forget it.

Provigil

Johann Hari experiments with this drug called Provigil:

A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

I am torn between two diametrically opposed reactions:

1) Ha ha! Look at you, taking drugs that are doing who knows what to your brain. Don't come crying to me when you go senile at 45.

2) DUDE! Where can I get me some of this Provigil?

I'm not sure which will win out in the end.

Hypotheticals

Gene Weingarten's weekly chat at the Washington Post has brought us another wonderful pre-chat poll:

Which statement by a presidential candidate running in 2012 would MOST assure he could NEVER be elected?
a) "I support religious freedom for everyone, but I do not attend religious services and personally don't believe there is a God."
b) "At the age of 19, I robbed a liquor store at gunpoint. It was the biggest mistake I ever made and I have spent the rest of my life atoning for this terrible thing."
c) "I am a bisexual man, and in the distant past I had romantic relationships with men and women. I have been married to my wife, to whom I have remained completely faithful, for 20 years."
d) "I m a Christian fundamentalist. The world is 10,000 years old, dinosaur skeletons are a trick by God to test our faith, and, as much as this pains me, Jews and Muslims who have heard the word of Christ and rejected it are condemned to burn in hell."

Which person would be LEAST likely to win the 2012 presidential election?
a) A man who is 5'10" and 300 pounds.
b) A man who had an affair with a younger woman and left his wife and teenage children five years prior to the election.
c) A woman widely believed to be a lesbian, but who has never acknowledged or denied it: "My sexuality is a private matter unrelated to my public service."
d) A person who worships as a Muslim, but who has been a war hero for the United States. He is married to a Christian and his children are Christian.
e) A woman who is, by absolutely anyone's assessment, hideously ugly.

Of the same choices, which person would be MOST likely to get elected?
a) A man who is 5'10" and 300 pounds.
b) A man who had an affair with a younger woman and left his wife and teenage children five years prior to the election.
c) A woman widely believed to be a lesbian, but who has never acknowledged or denied it: "My sexuality is a private matter unrelated to my public service."
d) A person who worships as a Muslim, but who has been a war hero for the United States. He is married to a Christian and his children are Christian.
e) A woman who is, by absolutely anyone's assessment, hideously ugly.

And now, for something completely different:

If you had to do without one of these for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
a) Coffee and tea
b) Denim jeans
c) All nonalcoholic carbonated beverages
d) Any form of alcohol

As for the most important question, I voted denim jeans. I never wear jeans. I'd slow down into a stupor without coffee though.

Oh, there are some politics questions too. My hunch is that the atheist, the bisexual, and the Muslim will have an easier time getting elected as a Republican than as a Democrat. Those are the groups that the guys who write attack ads and "Please Forward To All Your Friends" emails have decided are the designated bogeymen for Republicans. So if one of them actually runs as a Republican, many of the GOPers who would have forwarded the nasty emails will decide to support their candidate instead.

The reverse goes for the Christian fundamentalist who thinks Jews are going to hell. He's the kind of monster that lurks under the beds of little Democratic paranoiacs, so if he runs as a Democrat, he'll get the votes of the partisan Dems and crossover vote from the Republican side.

This all pretends, of course, that these guys would stand a chance of making it through primary season. It would be a seriously weird year if the GOP nominate a bisexual or a Muslim and the Democrats nominate a fire-breathing fundie caricature.

Aren't we all just so witty

Over at Making Light, a discussion is going on regarding whether a certain commenter at BoingBoing.net is a troll or not.

Ah, Trollology. It would be the perfect subject for me to study in depth if I were sufficiently brain-damaged that I was unable to study anything else.

I've come to some very unsettling realizations about the bizarre side of human nature by paying attention to trolls. I think I once witnessed a very weird creative impulse at work in the comment section of Kevin Drum's blog.

Kevin Drum is a liberal Democrat. His blog has a lively and vigorous comment section. Most of his commenters are liberal Democrats. Trollery is inevitable in this environment. Post something that purports to be from a conservative point of view, and people are going to read it wondering if it's meant to be some sort of joke.

Now. There seems to be a long-standing tradition on Kevin Drum's blog that there be some designated "troll handles". They have names like "Al" and "egbert" and "American Hawk" and spout a conservative point of view.

Here's what deeply and profoundly disturbs me.

Sometimes, say, American Hawk (I haven't seen the name on KD's comment threads in a while, but he was a typical example while he posted) will obviously be a liberal parodist spouting dumb ol' Republican tomfoolery, the better to make fun of those stupid old Republicans. Sometimes American Hawk will sound like a somewhat unhinged right-winger. Maybe this version of American Hawk is a liberal parodist, but just as likely he really is a somewhat unhinged right-winger. And sometimes he sounds like a relatively reasonable conservative, maybe a right-wing version of Kevin Drum.

It's perfectly possible "American Hawk" is a handle shared by several people. But think about it: why would a reasonable conservative post using a handle that has previously been used to make fun of Republicans?

So I came to an unsettling conclusion: many people think that if you want to make fun of a certain subset of humanity, like Republicans or religious fundamentalists or progressives or vegans or whatever, then the thing to do is mimic them so exactly that no one can tell it's a troll.

Well, it was unsettling for me. Maybe this is old news for everyone else. I just think it's weird that I could be reading some apparently sane comment by an Obama supporter about what he should do to ensure victory in the Indiana primary, and for all I know it might actually be written by some snickering Republican wit who wants to see Obama lose badly because he's a Democrat, and who thinks it's the height of cleverness to pretend to be posting some level-headed analysis by an Obama supporter.

Not only is this something of an alien mindset to me, but it means anything I read on these here Intertubes could just be utterly fake, just someone's idea of scintillating wit. Anything.

Philosophical Correctness

I like to think I'm pretty tolerant and libertarian when it comes to social issues. (This has got nothing to do with political libertarianism. I live in a country with universal government healthcare, and I like it!)

This is a libertarianism that states that it's none of the President or Attorney General's business what my neighbor is doing behind closed doors, whether he's making a religious offering to the ancient god Gab'Shokoth, teaching his kids to hate Methodists, or having sex with his brother, assuming they're consenting adults.

Let's say the conservative religious couple down the street want to teach their kid that God created the world 6,000 years ago and modern science is a bunch of lies. Well, I don't approve of that, but ultimately it's none of my business.

Let's say these neighbors of mine want to teach their kids that Jews and Muslims are to be distrusted, gays are evil and people of other races ought to be kept separate. That's much, much worse, and I have every right to be offended, but I can't condone the State butting its head in and telling them to knock it off. You let the State go after racists and anti-Semites today, and you never know who it'll deem ideologically unfit next week.

Now let's say my neighbors down the street are physically beating the stuffing out of their kid every evening. Let's say they're sexually abusing the kid. Now most people would agree that they need to be separated from the poor child before they can inflict further harm.

OK, now does the State have any right to interfere in this, which involves two competent, consenting adults?

An Australian father and daughter who conceived an apparently healthy child are being monitored by police and social services after going public about their incestuous relationship.

John Deaves, 61, and his daughter Jenny, 39, say they want to be treated as an ordinary couple despite being biologically related, but their case has sparked outrage.

Court documents have revealed that a child they had earlier died from a congenital heart defect a few days after birth.

The couple, who have pleaded guilty to incest and been banned by a judge from having sexual contact, appeared on a television news programme in Australia to tell their story. They were shown with their nine-month-old daughter, Celeste, who they said was fit and well.

My reaction to the story of this loving couple was a slightly disbelieving "okaaaaaaaaaaaaay". Even so, I'm a bit uncomfortable with a judge banning two adults from having sexual relations with each other.

I suppose you could say that this kind of incest ought to be illegal because any kids who are born as a result would be at a very high risk of genetic defects. (This is where the history geek in me points out that Cleopatra was the result of several generations of sibling marriages.) There are all sorts of things mothers can do while pregnant, from drinking to smoking to eating certain foods, and I'd feel distinctly uncomfortable if the State decided to legally ban pregnant women from doing these things. I can't see a reason to ban close relatives from having a sexual relationship.

Then there's the recent government action against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Just to make my feelings clear: from what I've heard about this church, it sounds extremely creepy. But the U.S. Government is not my superego, and creepiness is not against the law.

But marrying off kids against their will is.

And yet, there's a bit of social libertarianism in my head that protests that no, the government has no right to come in and break up this little subculture that isn't hurting anyone in the wider world.

I think the government action is the correct thing to do. I think this subculture, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is actively harmful to many of its own members. I just need to convince all sectors of my brain that the government raid is the philosophically correct thing to do.

April Meta-Fools!

The Featured Article blurb on the front page of Wikipedia today, April 1, 2008:

Ima Hogg was an enterprising circus emcee who brought culture and class to Houston, Texas. A storied ostrich jockey, she once rode to Hawaii to visit the Queen. Raised in government housing, young Ima frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums and a bear. Her father, "Big Jim" Hogg, in an onslaught against fun itself, booby-trapped the banisters she loved to slide down, shut down her money-making schemes, and forced her to pry chewing gum from furniture. He was later thrown from his seat on a moving train and perished; the Hogg clan then struck black gold on land Big Jim had forbidden them from selling. Ima had apocryphal sisters named "Ura" and "Hoosa" and real-life brothers sporting conventional names and vast art collections; upon their deaths, she gave away their artwork for nothing and the family home to boot. Tragically, Ms. Hogg (a future doctor) nursed three dying family members. She once sweet-talked a burglar into returning purloined jewelry and told him to get a job. Well into her nineties, she remained feisty and even exchanged geriatric insults with an octogenarian pianist. Hogg claimed to have received thirty proposals of marriage in her lifetime, and to have rejected them all. Hogg was revered as the "First Lady of Texas", and her name and legacy still thrive today—just ask Ima Pigg, Ima Nut, and Ima Pain, who have all appeared in the U.S. Census.

Now, the average human being is going to read that, look at the date, and think, "Oh, I get it. It's an April Fool's Day featured article. Ima Hogg isn't real."

But Wikipedia is actually practicing a subtler - and more sophisticated - form of humor. Ima Hogg was a real person.

And every individual fact in that featured article summary is true. They're just edited together in a way to make for some really loopy reading.

April Fool's articles aren't generally known for their subtlety. But I thought Wikipedia's was really well-done.