On this episode of The Foolish Humans’ Podcast, Jason and Neil talk about two different subjects:
1. A scene from the Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous in which Lester Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) lauds the plight of the uncool.
2. The logical fallacy argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to/argument from authority) and the Cascade Effect.
Nineteen Eighty-Four ruined my life. It’s one of my favorite books and not for the reasons many people erroneously reference it as the ultimate cautionary tale about surveillance, government intrusion, and herd mentality. These were all prominent themes for Orwell, no doubt, but the book is more about the limits of the human spirit [vernacular] than anything else, and without spoiling the ending for those who haven’t read it, I will say the culmination of Nineteen Eighty-Four tore open a hole in me that will never be mended. My life after the book bears the weight of an inherent void, a fallibility at once ugly and natural and unconquerable.
That might all sound depressing, but what I find most unfortunate is that the point of Nineteen Eighty-Four — and by extension George Orwell — has become synonymous with their assertions about Big Brother. A book this good shouldn’t be used as shorthand for drumming up fear, and however astute Orwell seems in retrospect (and he does), we should appreciate the nuance of his work.
To those who have read the book and are fans, visit Two Minutes Hate and give Emmanuel Goldstein a piece of your mind. If you’re too lazy to click the link, get your sixteen seconds hate below, but I warn you. The effect is not the same.
Being a man who really “grew up” (notice the air quotes) in the 90′s I’m a big fan of the films of French film maker Luc Besson. So when I saw the following teaser trailer for his new film I got excited.
This is the second teaser…
I’m excited for this one.
Yesterday at the end of my work day I was feeling down, and I thought that spending some money on stuff that I don’t need would make me feel a bit better. Eight out of ten times when I feel this way I end up at Amazon.com or a bookstore, which I think is fine because I rarely spend more than $25.00 on a book, and spending such a little amount on something like a book usually does make me feel a bit better, but does not leave me feeling guilty.
Anyway. Yesterday. I was at work, feeling down, and their was a computer in front of me so I pulled up Amazon.com. I had a plan. I looked up the book Everything Matters by Ron Currie Jr. (a book I really enjoyed) and scrolled down to the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section. The idea here being that I’d find a similar book which I would also enjoy.
One of the books that that popped up in that section was the book Lowboy by John Wray. I read the description, the reviews, etc. The book sounded interesting. Then I saw there was a video (on the Amazon page) of Wray being interviewed by comedian Zach Galifianakis.
“Huh,” I thought “That’s interesting.”
I clicked the video and it made me laugh my ass off. The typewriter with the 1 and 0 keys was what really got me. Check it out for yourself…
Attribution: This picture isoriginally from The New Republic article linked to in this post.
Today I read a great article by Michael Crowley titled Our man in Kabul? which appeared in the March edition of The New Republic.
The article is the typical highbrow journalism that you see in publications like The New Republic, or The Atlantic. It talks about a complex issue, in this case the United States government using an Afghan warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to accomplish a set of goals, in a way that showcases (rather than ignoring) the complicatedness of the situation.
A bit about Hekmatyar. He is a ruthless scary ass dude who seems to be totally willing to do anything and/or sacrifice anything to gain power. And when I say “anything” I mean any-fucking-thing. For real.
Case in point: The United States has hooked this guy up during the cold war. His ruthlessness made him a valued and effective proxy to use against the Soviets.
After the Soviets completed their withdrawal in 1989, Hekmatyar expected to rule the country. But so did other mujahedin leaders, and vicious fighting ensued. From 1992 to 1994, the Afghan capital became a battleground as Hekmatyar, still in possession of a U.S.-supplied arsenal, wantonly shelled the city. “He was sitting in the suburbs of Kabul, and he was sending rockets, regardless of where they would land. Thousands of Afghans died,” says Ali Jalali, who served as Afghanistan’s interior minister from 2003 to 2005. (In a strange historical footnote, one rocket struck a compound where Hamid Karzai was being held captive by political rivals, allowing him to escape and then flee the country.) “We have already had one and a half million martyrs,” Hekmatyar remorselessly explained in 1992. “We are ready to offer as many to establish a true Islamic republic.” But the Afghan people disagreed. Hekmatyar’s brutality marginalized him, and he was no match for the anti-warlord Taliban movement. Unable to hold his ground militarily when the Taliban stormed Kabul in 1996, Hekmatyar fled to Iran.
i.e. this guy made the Taliban look reasonable. That’s saying something.
Clearly the kind of guy you would expect to be on the list of people that the Obama administration (or any administration for that mater) would never want to deal with right? Think again. Despite the fact that Hekmatyar is a madman perfectly ready and willing to sacrifice every drop of Afghan blood in return for power, he has something going for him that power brokers seem to like. He is for sale.
Obama administration officials don’t expect to crush the Afghan insurgency militarily. The current U.S. surge aims to turn the momentum of the war and then attempt a political “reconciliation” with elements of the insurgency. The effort will be aimed primarily at low-level combatants and local leaders who fight more for money and parochial reasons than for grand ideology. Senior insurgent leaders, like the Haqqanis and top Quetta Shura Taliban members, are probably just too fanatical to deal with. But Hekmatyar is another story. During the Afghan civil war, he was notorious for casually shifting allegiances, even if it meant allying with blood rivals. “This is a man who has switched sides his whole life,” says the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel, who led the Obama administration’s first Afghanistan review.)
The United States has tried to use Hekmatyar as a tool in the past. He helped to keep the world “safe” from the Russians. But doing business with someone like Hekmatyar has a high moral cost. Truth be told, it has a high economic cost as well, and I’m not sure that the United States will ever fully pay off the debt it incurred by working with the likes of Hekmatyar.
This article makes its readers confront a few difficult questions:
Where do we draw the line?
How much is the United States government, and its military, willing to gamble?
Can doing a deal with “the devil” help to accomplish a “greater good”?
All good questions to ask. All difficult questions to answer.
Something to think about over the weekend.
[[Further reading: Man Versus Afghanistan by Robert D. Kaplan.]]
Attirbution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohdesign/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Get off of it. Don’t ask questions; just do it.
By now, it should be obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of better and more stable alternatives that Internet Explorer 6 is a husk of a web browser. It is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it rests in peace… You get the idea.
It used to be that IE6 was little more than a nuisance. Sure, Firefox was better, and so were Safari and Opera, and it was a veritable pain in the ass to have to write conditional CSS simply to cater to those folks clinging to a browser released with Windows XP in 2001, but while these nuisances existed, for a long time, they were not so egregious as they are now. In my worthless opinion, the browser battle really comes down to a face-off between Firefox and Chrome. IE8 and Opera can’t hold a candle to them, and while Safari has undergone some nice improvements, I don’t think it’s in the same league.
That’s not what I’m on about here, though. The rise of HTML5 is going to bring with it a number of innovations that will require the operational power of the newer and more robust browsers, and the reluctance to shut down a historical relic will hinder this progress. IE6 also contains a number of security vulnerabilities that continue to compound as the browser grows obsolete. Luckily, large websites and even some governments (Germany) are finally dropping IE6 support, and Mashable has dedicated a tag to its demise: IE6 Must Die. Even Microsoft has finally called for users to upgrade.
Click around and read some of the articles on Mashable. You’ll see why we need to leave this thing behind in order to move forward.
While there has been some debate as to how effective this tactic is, anyone who runs their own blog or website can contribute in some small way by installing one of a number of plugins/apps that alert visitors still on IE6 to upgrade their browser. Naturally, change is going to be spurred more rapidly by large sites with heavy traffic dropping support, but you know what they say about drops in a bucket. Every one of them counts.
As of February 2010, IE6 still maintained around a 20% market share.
I’m a unabashed fan of the Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous. This often results in some people giving me a hard time, but whatever. (I like what I like.)
One of the reasons that I like the movie so much is because of few scenes where Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the late rock critic Lester Bangs. Besides the fact that Bangs is a hero of mine, Hoffman’s portrayal of him is beyond wonderful. I don’t know if it’s because of Hoffman’s acting, or Crowe’s directing, or a combination of the both of those things, but Hoffman seems to really become Bangs, and his scenes have such a feel of real intimacy.
Here is an example: Below I’ve posted a video and a transcript of a scene where the William Miller (the “hero” and protagonist of the film, who is based on Crowe) has called Lester Bangs for in the wee hours of the morning. William has placed this call for two main reasons.
First - William has become friends with the rock stars he is writing about, and because of this friendship William is having trouble being honest in his writing… he does not want to hurt his friends, and so he has turned to Bangs for some guidance.
Second- William has fallen hopelessly head over heels in love with Penny Lane, a girl (Groupie / “Band-Aid”) who follows the band he is writing about. The problem here is that Penny Lane does not love William, she loves the lead lead guitarist of the band that William is writing about.
Lester Bangs: Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
William Miller: Well, it was fun.
Lester Bangs: They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not cool.
William Miller: I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn’t.
Lester Bangs: That’s because we’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.
William Miller: I can really see that now.
Lester Bangs: Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love… and let’s face it, you got a big head start.
William Miller: I’m glad you were home.
Lester Bangs: I’m always home. I’m uncool.
William Miller: Me too!
Lester Bangs: The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.
William Miller: I feel better.
Lester Bangs: My advice to you. I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.
Recently I told someone that I’ve never read any of Norman Mailer’s writing. It just so happened that the person I told had a copy of Norman Mailer’s letters on writing, which appeared in the New York Review of Books in February of last year.
I get a real kick out of reading (some) people’s correspondence. Maybe it is because I’m a bit of a voyeur. Maybe it’s because “real human drama” is something that pulls at me like gravity… Something to think about… Anyway, the few letters in the NYRB piece were a real pleasure to read.
Here is an example where Mailer is writing to the editor of The Naked and the Dead
I know we’ll disagree on this, but I don’t see what virtues will be derived from slimming the book down. True, it’ll go faster, and probably will be more easy to sell, but in my innocence I still feel that the nature of a book determines its length, and not exterior criteria. (Stinky-pinky.) I’ve cut out a great many enrichments because of the bugaboo of length. One of the most obvious ones is the development of the characters. There are at least ten of them who could be presented in some depth and complexity if it wasn’t physically impossible. Also I could improve the whole set-up of the General part of the book by establishing some of the men on his staff instead of treating him in the vacuum I’ve given him so far. I wouldn’t be working in ignorance on this either, because I was a clerk in Intelligence, specifically, a clerk in S-2 of the 112th RCT, for quite a time before I became a rifleman. That whole business of lengthening it or shortening it is a moot business but I’m open to debate on it. The slim volume, I’d like to remind you, does not contain the apotheosis of the novel; nearly all the great ones are quite long, and to quote an author I do not particularly admire, Thomas Mann did say, “Only the exhaustive is truly interesting.”
Here is another example. This is a letter that Mailer wrote to Mr. Max Gissen, a literary critic who wrote for Time Magazine who had reviewd The Naked and the Dead. The review was not positive. Read how Mailer lays into this guy…
December 17, 1951
Dear Gissen,
I suppose one has to make a start at everything. In any case this is the first letter[10] I’ve ever written to anyone associated with criticism or book reviewing. The reasons I imagine are fairly apparent to each of us.
There’s little doubt in my mind that you came off considerably better in our exchange last Thursday night, which is roughly equivalent to saying that you think better on your feet than I do. I wish I were a better speaker, for there was a point I wished to make which was more serious than mere Time -baiting.
After all, you and I do share some little common view. We are both interested primarily in fiction, we are concerned with improving taste, and we care about literary criticism. I think you will remember that a good part of your talk was concerned with precisely those things. Whether you will agree privately that your work fails to fill the prescription in certain important respects is something again.
These letters have made me very sure of two things.
Jason’s recent post on the STOP the OverPrinting Act (H.R. 4640) he mentioned Openongress.org , which is a great resource for people who want to take a look at what the legislative branch of our government is doing.
Poking around Open Congress made me want to point to Thomas.gov, which is the Library of Congress’s official portal to legislation which has been passed (in the past), as well as legislation which is under consideration in the current congress.
The site is called Thomas because it was created “In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson.” Who was a President who really attempted to make government more accessible to the common man.
The site is a bit daunting at first, and the information that is contained in bills is often difficult to wade through, but I think that it is a great tool for people who really want to dig into the legislation or the legislative process.