Month: October 2007

Uh-oh. Well, at least we got a great Larison blog-post out of it:

This strikes me as a really bad idea, and this isn’t just because I have been such a harsh critic of Santorum on foreign policy. I don’t object to the suggestion that more conservatives should make documentaries. Conservatives definitely should make more documentaries, but they should do so because they actually want to be filmmakers and want to tell stories.  They should do this because they have a talent for doing it, which ensures that they will be doing the work that best expresses their particular gifts.  Conservatives should not make documentaries just because that’s what leftists do and we need to counter their propaganda arm with one of our own. As much as it may stun certain folks to read this, left-wing politics prevails among actors and artists for the same reason that it prevails among most journalists: it is a kind of politics that initially fits very well with the kind of work that these people do, and these professions attract people who already tend to share these beliefs.

He also gets why the idea of a career in acting was a non-starter for me. All those dumb-ass, mindless, sanctimonious lefties can turn you into Mickey Kaus or Dennis Miller if you’re not careful:

I suspect conservatives don’t get into a lot of acting or art or journalism today because they know a few things about all of them: they know that these areas are all full of people who are not like them temperamentally or culturally, there are some strong entrenched forces opposing the sorts of work they would like to do (consider how difficult it was for Robert Duvall to get The Apostle made) and this sort of work strikes them as unattractive because they deem it less practical or less meaningful.

"The debate I expect to have next fall with Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani or whoever’s the Republican nominee is whether or not to end this war. But the debate Sen. Clinton would be in is how big a war you’re going to have," – John Edwards, upping the ante.

The technology is changing everything:

Prosecutors in the case against former Bosnian army chief Rasim Delic this week filed an urgent motion requesting that an audio recording of a farewell ceremony of a unit of foreign Muslim fighters, recently posted on the internet, be admitted into evidence, because they believe it could be central to their case.

The audio clip in question was part of video footage posted two weeks ago on YouTube, the popular internet site, in which General Delic allegedly says that the El Mujahed unit was part of the command and control system of the Bosnian army.

Delic is on trial for allegedly failing to take the required steps to prevent or punish foreign Muslim fighters, or mujahedin, who apparently executed and mistreated tens of captured Serb soldiers and civilians during 1995.

It never dies and now there’s a blog-post that’s making new waves.

A classic from Isaac Asimov, posted by Jeremy Bruno:

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Ron Bailey responds to my reader email.

Real enough – in crocodiles.

A reader writes:

I served in the Marines as a young man. I was stationed in Japan and saw duty in  Okinawa, the Philippines and throughout the Caribbean. I was willing at that time to sacrifice my life for the country if called upon  (hoping, of course, that such a call would not come.) My willingness was predicated upon a belief that America was different, not only different, but better than other countries and that we offered the people of the world a vision which they could follow to a better way of doing things.   

The other day I heard the president’s press secretary condemning the Burmese dictators for holding people in secret jails without charges. I was saddened to think that we were no better than them.  What would I think now if I were in the Marines?  What do we offer the world that is different than any benighted country?   

Tragically, Andrew, it is not just Bush but Congress and the federal courts that folded the tent on what was right about the country.

This poll suggesting that up to a quarter of Republicans would vote for a Christianist third-party candidate if one ran against Rudy and Clinton next year has got to give the GOP some heartburn. I don’t buy the 27 percent figure, but even ten percent would be a big problem in a tight race.

Memory is over-rated; forgetting is what it means to be human. Money quote:

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story "Funes the Memorious," about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form – or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. "What you do online is potentially there forever," says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. "Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo – but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere."

The personal costs of this reality are clear, but there may be broader social costs as well. "What a lot of people forget – no pun intended – is that forgetting is hard-wired," says Mayer-Schönberger. "Cognitively and sociologically, we’ve never had to develop the capacity to forget or to put things in temporal perspective, because forgetting was built in biologically."

Now where was I?