Some notes on blog-surfing I’ve been doing lately….

:: I’ve had Laputan Logic blogrolled pretty much since John Hardy launched it — he’s a fellow participant in Collaboratory — but I’ve been remiss in reading it, despite the fact that he somehow unearths more fascinating stuff that I ever thought possible. Check him out; it’s like National Geographic in blog-format.

:: I can’t vouch for the content, but I love the name of this blog.

:: I’ve also taken a liking to Punning Pundit and RaptorMagic, enough so as to add them to “Other Journeys”. (BTW: I’ve seen it remarked occasionally that the longer a blogroll, the less valuable it is to readers. Can anyone explain to me the reasoning here? I only link blogs that I read at least on a weekly basis, and most of them I check at least once daily. Of course, maybe this is a sign that unemployed people who are in limbo while they await their opportunity to launch their freelance careers — like me — spend too damn much time blogging. Nah, that can’t be it.)

:: And finally, joinging MetaFilter and SportsFilter is BookFilter, for which I’ve signed up. It’s just like the first two, albeit with a specifically literary focus, as the title implies.

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The esteemable James Capozzola, writer of one of the left’s finest blogs, The Rittenhouse Review, is apparently mulling over running for United States Senate in 2004, as a challenger to sitting Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. I read Rittenhouse daily and would unhesitatingly vote for Capozzola, if I lived in Pennsylvania. (Which, after all, could end up happening, with the frequency of our moves lately….) But I remember the brouhaha between Rittenhouse and Little Green Footballs a while back, and that’s got me thinking. Not so much about that incident, in which I thought Capozzola went a bit over-the-top, but about some of the effects that the Internet — particularly blogging, bulletin boards, and Usenet — are likely to have on political candidacies in the future. I’m not talking about political commentary sites, which have already started to show signs of muscle — witness the way Atrios and others kept the Trent Lott story from dying on the mainstream press’s vine — but about what happens when bloggers and people who have made other postings to the Net start running for office.

We’ve seen, in recent campaigns, how the press likes to dig into candidates’ pasts, bringing up very old writings and incidents from more than two or three decades before. The high-water example of this, to my mind, is the whole business about Bill Clinton and the Viet Nam draft. In the case of Jim Capozolla, the existence of The Rittenhouse Review will make it much easier for anyone to research Capozzola’s opinions and general stances on the issues, which on the face of it can only be a good thing. But I’m not even so much thinking of Capozzola’s running next year but some young person blogging today – say, a nineteen-year-old college student – running for office in, say, 2028. I wonder if the semi-permanence of Web writings – especially the Usenet archives, where just about any goofy belief under the sun can be found expressed by someone, somewhere – will be held against future candidates, exacerbating the problem of recent campaigns in which candidates’ lives are pried into twenty or thirty years prior to that person’s seeking of office. I expect to watch press conferences and interviews with candidates in the future, with questions like this:

Congressman, in 1998 you wrote a Usenet post in which you said that any Republican willing to vote for impeachment should be castrated. Do you still endorse castration for your political opponents?

Mr. Mayor, you’ve proposed for your Fiscal Year 2027 budget a ten percent increase in public-school funding. How do you reconcile this with your writings, on your weblog in 2003, that public schooling should be ended in favor of exclusive home-schooling or private education?

Sir, you are running for Congress in a district that is fifteen percent Jewish; and yet, in 1999 you posted to an Internet bulletin board that there was no justification whatsoever for Israeli opposition to a Palestinian State. Can you elaborate?

Sometimes you’ll see a portion of the Blogosphere erupt into a massive debate on the same subject. This happened a month or so ago, with D-Squared and his “Shorter Steven Den Beste” posts; a similar eruption happened last summer, over Demosthenes and the virtues/sins of pseudonyms online. These eruptions tend to be fairly ephemeral, though: even though the participants can get quite worked up, and their regular readers can flood the other participants’ comment sections, things tend to die down when the posts in question inevitably move off the front page. This is similarly true of Usenet, where even the biggest flamewar will eventually die of attrition once the participants become bored. And many such postings are made in something of a “heat of the moment”, when the posters or bloggers are focused not on whether they want the particular view they are expressing and the way they are expressing it available for everyone to see, and for all time, but rather on the argument at hand.

So it seems to me there’d be a certain dilemma for people presented with their own writings, years after the fact: they can distance themselves from them, which tends to involved manufactured events and speeches and writings designed to accomplish this task (and thus, paradoxically, keeping the story alive); or they can simply stand by their original words, which can then become an albatross around their necks. That’s not all, though: they can take a third tack, and simply ignore the questions utterly, trying to make virtue out of the very fact that they’re not answering. Here I think of George W. Bush’s refusal to answer questions about his drug use. Now, on the one hand, I’m not sure that whether he used drugs twenty years or more before he ever ran for President is entirely relevant; but on the other hand, his refusal to even discuss the subject seems a bit disingenuous. Ditto Clinton and Viet Nam: were his attempts in the 1960s to avoid service in a war just about everyone now agrees was a colossal mistake relevant to his ability to serve as Commander-in-chief in 1992? Probably not. But did those attempts go some way in painting a portrait of the man as something of a waffler? Probably. Candidates for office already have enough work to do, balancing the people they used to be with the people they wish to become.

The rise of “Gotcha!”-style journalism has been fairly roundly decried in recent years. If it’s going to get better — and I’m not sure it will — then it has to happen soon, because the rise of the Internet is just going to provide that much more muck to rake through — and it’s going to be more high-quality muck, too, because Net postings — by their nature, textual and somewhat disconnected from our everyday selves — tend to be a lot more provocative than the things we say in real life, to real people.

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Whenever people complain that the quality of today’s movies is not as good as, say, the movies of the 1970s or the 1950s or 1930s, it’s generally been my habit to wonder if they’re remembering the hits and forgetting the misses — in other words, if they’re nostalgically overvaluing the time periods that produced Singin’ In The Rain or Taxi Driver or Gone With the Wind while forgetting the dozens, if not hundreds, of lousy films that must have been produced during those periods. I used to watch some of the movies that showed up on AMC in the middle of the night or in the afternoon and thought, “My God, they used to make some bad movies.” It’s also been my general belief that in any particular time period, the people living in that period are the least adequate to the task of judging the art they’re producing — whether it’s movies, music, architecture or anything else. This is because such judgments are two-pronged: greatness depends not just on inherent qualities but also on the roads taken after, and since by definition the people in a given epoch are not able to foretell what is to come, they can only basically judge works on the basis of their own response to it, which is colored mainly by what’s gone before. So, to return to my original statement above, I tend to not get worked up when someone tells me how bad today’s movies are. I figure we’ll know in twenty or thirty years how our movies were. Not now.

But then, maybe I’m wrong and our filmmakers really are a bankrupt bunch of yutzes.

I’m trying to think of a film project I would less like to see. I’m not having much success.

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CalPundit has returned, and there was much rejoicing. (He blogs about his cats on Fridays, though, which saddens me a bit because one of his cats is named Jasmine, which reminds me of my cat named Jasmine, who died last fall. Ah well….)

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On another message board I frequent (for discussion of non-political matters), there are some very vocal and very conservative participants — the type of people who are happiest if they can find any reason at all to both exalt George W. Bush and vilify Bill Clinton in the same post, and double-credit if they can do it in the same sentence. I mainly ignore all of that, because these same people can be quite sensible when discussing that message board’s actual focus (film music). But yesterday, one of them commented to the effect that President Bush should get credit for choosing to set aside “Shock and Awe” in favor of the “surgical strikes” we saw, in which our forces attempted to either “decapitate” the Iraqi command, or better still, kill Saddam Hussein in the very first hours of the war. This was contrasted, of course, with the air campaign in Kosovo, when President Clinton directed massive air strikes in an attempt to kill or incapacitate Slobodan Milosevic.

Well, yes, I suppose the current commanders deserve some credit for this. I’m not prepared to give credit to President Bush — at least not all the way — for the same reason that I’m not willing to blame Clinton for any civilian deaths in Kosovo. I’m far from a military expert, but I very much doubt that Bush or Clinton — or any President — has a direct role in planning military campaigns. This is why they have things like Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense and National Security Advisors. If the President decides to attack, he asks for options from his commanders, they present their recommendations, and then the order is given. While Bush’s decision may have been clear — intelligence provided someone with some information about the whereabouts of some very important people in the Iraqi command, and time will tell if one of them was Saddam himself — I have a very hard time castigating Clinton for Kosovo, especially considering the campaign there was ultimately a success, if definitely messy.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The Ministry of Planning building in Baghdad, after being struck by a missile.

While I’ve come in recent months to view this war as probably necessary, I also can’t help but consider with sadness the nature of a species that so often makes a necessity of killing off large numbers of its brethren in as violent a manner as possible.

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It’s really easy to focus on the wrong stuff, out of habit or anger or other reasons. I remember, eight years ago when I was entering restaurant management, a boss of mine (who was soon to be fired) decided to focus on food-cost issues in our restaurant, which were quite out of control. Food-cost is basically that: the amount of money a restaurant spends on the ingredients for the food that it prepares and serves. In our case, a Pizza Hut, this involved the dough mix, oil, cheese, sauce, toppings and all the rest. The unit I was in at the time was in the habit of discarding at least three full batches of unused dough each night — which anyone can see is a pretty big expense — but the manager (who was soon to be fired) focused on tiny things like the amount of ice in the beverages, the number of shakes of seasoning we put on the breadsticks, and so forth. He was concentrating to exclusion on things that had little, if any, effect on our food-cost problems and ignoring larger practices that had a big effect on those same problems. This is what the saying “Penny wise, pound foolish” means: concentrating on ways to save pennies, because pennies are often easier to track and we’re simply in the habit of doing so, and not seeing the more important big things going on behind it all.

That seems to me to be what the anti-war movement is now experiencing.

I’m sympathetic, I really am. I’m one who is supporting the war, but not without a queasy fear deep in my stomach that things are going to be messed up afterwards. But the thing is, the war has begun. It’s happening, and the only thing that anti-war protests — especially civil disobedience designed to shut down, or at least hamper, major metropolitan areas — is going to accomplish is to make the anti-war people look more and more flaky and disconnected from reality. It reminds me of the liberal commentators and bloggers who never refer to President Bush without a parenthetical comment like “You know, you weren’t really elected”, and it quite frankly reminds me of the conservatives who still find ways to blame the evils of the world on Bill Clinton.

So if you opposed the war, and went to the trouble of screaming your opposition at the top of your lungs, great. That’s what America, and democracy, are all about. But America and democracy are also about moving on to what’s next — and in this case, the “what’s next” is far, far more crucial than the war which I think everyone knows we’re going to win. If the Left wants to be productive, then it seems to me that protesting the war itself needs to end; what the Left needs to do now is to start holding the Administration’s feet to the coals to make sure that the post-war stuff isn’t screwed up the way Afghanistan was. To keep up Bush’s poker-metaphors, we on the left really need to stop crying about the hands that have gone by, because the cards are being dealt again. It’s a new hand, so let’s play it.

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Sometimes the gravity of events must be forced to the back seat, and having a three-year-old in the house is just the way to do it. Instead of watching war updates on the news this morning, we watched Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. There’s plenty of time for war stuff, and for all our pious rhetoric about the Reasons We Fight — to preserve our liberties, our culture, et cetera — I think that sometimes we still forget to actually partake in the things for which we fight.

(Yes, I’m still suffering the cold and hopped-up on over-the-counter stuff. Deal with it.)

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Just a quick book-note: this morning I finished The Duke of Uranium, by John Barnes. This is a colorful SF adventure story that’s a pure romp — action, romance, and some actual “sensawunda” to boot, about a young man in the 36th century who falls into adventure when his girlfriend is kidnapped. He’s plunged into the standard world of intrigue and interplanetary adventure when he embarks on a mission to get his girlfriend back. It turns out, of course, that she’s not who he thinks she is; but then, this is one of those books where nobody is who he thinks they are. The book isn’t loaded with surprises, but surprises aren’t the point in this kind of story. The point is the sharply drawn characters, the interesting background (Barnes gives a lot of hints-in-passing of the history that intervenes between now and AD 3600), and the excellent pacing. SF is such a versatile genre. You can have tragedy, or thought-provoking literature, or mind-expanding stories about the universe and our place in it, or extrapolations of our possible future as a species — and you can have just plain fun, which is what The Duke of Uranium is all about. Highly recommended.

(This is the first in a series.)

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Just in case anybody’s wondering, I’ve seen this little thing around the Web the last couple of days that tells you to do a Google search on “French military victories”, and then click “I’m feeling lucky”. This causes Google to respond that no results are found, and it asks you, “Did you mean French military defeats?” Heh heh heh.

Except that it’s a prank, folks. Don’t take this as meaning, well, anything.

When you click “I’m feeling lucky” on Google, that takes you directly to the Number One page in the Google search results. In this case, someone’s finagled a page to look exactly like a real Google page, as described above. (And, in fact, that page has now been replaced by another that’s soared to “Number One”.)

(BTW, France’s past is certainly checkered — as is the past of just about every European nation — but they’ve had their military successes. Yeah, it’s been almost a thousand years since the Battle of Hastings, but I wonder how different British history might have turned out had William the Conqueror lost there. And of course, Napoleon Bonaparte was something of a military success before he overreached. And then there’s the greatest Frenchman in history. He hasn’t been born yet, of course, but his destiny is to shape humanity’s outreach to the stars. I’m talking, of course, about Captain Jean-Luc Picard.)

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