Category: The Dish

A reader adds:

It is unbefuckinglievable that someone would say unfuckingbelievable. The stress test is tautological, it isn’t just that the stress follows where fucking would normally be inserted, it is that fucking SHOULD always be inserted prior to the stress. It is a phonetic necessity for the use of fucking to have its full impact.

Another explains:

Obviously your reader isn’t familiar with the "except after ‘un-‘" exception to the Fucking Stress Test. Drop prefixes before applying the test.

I guess if I haven’t yet been blocked from most expletive-leery sites, I am now.

Unimpressed by his address to the Freedom From Religion Conference:

Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again…

There were a scattered few who applauded wildly at every mention of bombing the Iranians, but the majority were stunned into silence. People were leaving — I heard one woman sing a few bars of "Onward, Christian soldiers" as she left to mock his strategy. The questions were all angry or disputative, and were all dismissed with comments about the audience’s intelligence. The answers were always, "War, war, war," and that we weren’t good atheists if we didn’t agree with murder as the answer. He seemed unable to comprehend that people could despise and oppose all religion, Christian, Moslem, or otherwise, yet have no desire to triumph by causing physical harm to the believers.

"By now, it’s clear that "We don’t torture" is going to be George Bush’s equivalent to "I am not a crook" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"–an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn’t been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case," – Phil Nugent.

Yeah! Rumsfeld!!!”

There seems little doubt any more that it has dramatically declined in the past couple of months. Quite why is not as clear: a function of shifts in Anbar, and possibly disgust with Shiite militias in some Shiite areas, as well as US troop levels slightly more realistic than in 2003 – 2006. The drop is also facilitated because ethnic cleansing has reduced ethnic friction in some areas. What we may be approaching is a situation in which local opportunism, higher numbers of troops, and terror-fatigue from the local populations may be allowing Iraq’s splintered polity to stagger on with less carnage. It’s worth remembering, however, that the goal of the surge was to create the conditions for national reconciliation at a political level. That’s still the necessary precondition for a more permanent peace. And it’s still not there. Worse: If US troops help keep the peace in a partitioned Iraq, and the pressure for movement on Baghdad thereby recedes, it may never be there. This is Sanchez’ "nightmare without end." Another word for it is empire. Such empires have ups and downs. They have intermittent insurgencies. And periods of relative calm. But they endure, as will the US occupation.

First vulvas, now Tom Ford’s gayer scent. Video smell-tests here. Ewww.

Moscow, Russia, first snow, today, 3 pm.

"All of the approaches to interrogation supported by President Bush as "nontorture" (head slapping, freezing temperatures, water boarding) qualify as torture under international law.

During my last year in Vietnam, 1968 to ’69, I was in charge of US Air Force interrogation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners. None of what Bush labels as legal was legal under the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is still a signatory. US Army, Marine, and Army of Republic of Vietnam personnel were constantly amazed at the interrogation results produced by the Air Force, and we were never allowed to touch prisoners, let alone head-slap them. Every human being has needs, and we learned those needs and exploited them. Neither Bush’s bullying approach in the Mideast nor his unlawful interrogation program has worked. Sophisticated psychological methods are not being used by the Bush people, so the alleged "nontorture" bullying will continue," – Francis X. Stone, retired lieutenant-colonel, US Air Force.

A reader writes:

I found it interesting that you decided not to quote Alex Ross’ comment about the research on birds and music, but felt strongly enough about his work to mention his latest book. The point that Ross made was that maybe the researchers were narrowly defining "modern music" in only using Schoenberg, Carter, and similar composers who write very dense dissonant music. Maybe, the results would have been quite different for the sparrows had the researchers used Messiaen’s music to define "modern."

If you’re not sure what Ross’ point is, it’s this: Messiaen’s music, while often dissonant and dense, makes abundant use of the actual melodies (including rhythms) of songbirds. Many of Messiaen’s compositions use birdsongs as their source material. Other notable "modern" composers have done the same (for example, John Harbison). Ross–and I–wonder what the sparrow’s reaction to THAT modern music would have been.

(Sidenote: I’m a composer, and I often have trouble making heads and tails out of Carter and Schoenberg, precisely because it is HUMAN ART at its highest form. Asking sparrows to make sense out of such music is like asking your beagles to choose between a Rothko and a Rembrandt, or an essay by you and an essay by Juan Cole. In the end, this kind of art isn’t meant to be "natural" or reflective of anything natural. It is a human activity, as every artist knows… if only the viewers/listeners/readers could remember that, too…

Another reader counters:

Saying that Messiaen invalidates the music-bird experiment is like saying that dusk invalidates the difference between day and night.