226) [T]he truth has to fight constantly for its life! [...] [An idea] will have to be rephrased and reprinted many times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth that in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and sociologists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just a narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!).
Douglas R. Hofstadter "World Views in Collision" Scientific American magazine (2/82), reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)
227) Seeing clear to the essence of something unfamiliar is often best achieved by finding one or more known things that you can see it as, then being able to balance those views. Physicists have long since learned to juggle two views of light: light as waves, light as particles. They know that each contains a grain of the essence of light, that neither contains it all, and they know when to think of light which way. Don't be fooled by people who knowingly assure you that physicists don't depend on crude images or analogies as crutches, that everything they need is contained in their formulas.
Douglas R. Hofstadter "Post Scriptum to 'Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity'" in Metamagical Themas (1985)
228) Chance favors only the mind that is prepared.
Louis Pasteur quoted by Rene Vallery-Radot The Life of Pasteur (1927) [B15]
229) We celebrate individual styles, rather than seeing them negatively, as proofs of inner limits. What in fact is curious is that those people who are able to put on or take off styles in the manner of a chameleon seem to have no style of their own and are simply saloon performers, amusing imitators. We accord greatness to those people whose "limitations", if that is how you want to look at it, are the most apparent, the most blatant.
Douglas R. Hofstadter "On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity" Scientific American magazine (9/82) reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)
230) How can cooperators get started in a world of unconditional defection - a "primordial sea" swarming with unresponsive ALL-D[efection] creatures? The answer [...] is that invasion by small clusters of conditionally cooperating organism, even if they form a tiny minority, is enough to give cooperation a toehold.
Robert Axelrod findings from The Evolution of Cooperation (1984) summarized by Douglas R. Hofstadter in "The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Evolution of Cooperation" in Scientific American magazine (5/83) reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)
231) Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them? Better start rushing before the rush begins!
Ashleigh Brilliant quoted by Douglas R. Hofstadter in "Post Scriptum to 'The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Evolution of Cooperation'" in Metamagical Themas (1985)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 822 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.
Analysis: No major movement today, except a very slight edging forward in the averages on the Senate side for the Democrats. On the other hand, the Democratic House trendline dropped a bit, and the Senate trendline flattened out. (In about a week, when I have enough data, I'll add graphs tracking the House and Senate averages.)
Complicating matters is the conservative belief that they're the free-thinking iconoclasts, and we're the lemmings who worship the cult of personality.
I think this is quite true, making a double whammy -- not only do they project their own behavior onto us, but they also cannot see themselves for who they are.
It's one thing to misunderstand your opponent because you're blinded by your own prejudices and misconceptions, but to be denied even a modicum of self-knowledge at the same time skews both sides of the equation simultaneously.
I think this ties in with the necessity for those on the right, especially the religious right, to always see themselves as the underdog, persecuted by the big bad Liberal Establishment. (Which, of course, includes that terrible Liberal Media). I guess it's some kind of psychological syndrome? Ring-wing Persecution and Projection Disorder?
Kevin Drum has an interesting post about the "Tet analogy" first proposed by Thomas Friedman and (apparently) adopted by Bush. Drum offers "three competing historical perspectives" about the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War:
There's the military perspective: Tet was a huge setback for the North Vietnamese. They were badly defeated, took huge losses, were operationally crippled, and achieved none of their objectives.
There's the liberal media perspective: Even though we won, the left-wing press spun it as a defeat. That's why the public lost faith in the war.
There's the government mendacity perspective: For some time, LBJ had been assuring us that the war was going well and the Viet Cong were on the verge of collapse. Tet demonstrated that he was either lying or else completely divorced from reality.
I've always sided with #3. There's no question that #1 is technically correct, but in practice it simply meant that Giáp was vindicated in his preference for guerrilla warfare over conventional offensives. North Vietnam was fully able to continue prosecuting the war. And while the press was indeed gloomy about U.S. prospects after Tet, that was almost certainly because of #3, not #2. Walter Cronkite, the most famous of the pessimists, stated this clearly: "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest cloud." He concluded — correctly — not that we had lost, but that we were "mired in a stalemate."
What Kevin perhaps misses is that #2, the media's (and not the "left wing press", as such a thing as that did not then and does not now exist in America, except in unimportant, underfunded and uninfluential pockets of dreary half-baked ideological infighting) disenchantment with the war after Tet was a directly consequence of #3, being told so often that things were going swimmingly. Cronkite's remark makes this quite clear. After so many times of being told that everything was OK, or on the verge of being OK, Tet made it much more difficult to continue to believe in that particular fairy tale, which lead to the press starting to take a much more pessimistic attitude toward the war.
P.S. This post is an example of something I do with some frequency here, which is to respond to an entry from another weblog on this weblog instead of posting my reaction in the comments thread on the original blog. There's a reason for this: on high-volume sites like Washington Monthly or Daily Kos, being the 167th or 374th or 1283rd comment in a thread that's 65% troll-related (counting both toll-spew and troll-baiting) and 30% infighting among the regulars and abuse of the blogger isn't such an interesting thing, even if your comment has a much better chance of being read by more people. I still post on those sites occasionally, but mostly I prefer to put my reactions here, where only 10 people willl read it, and none of them will comment on it.
Today's theme (or, really, the theme for this particular political era) is the inability of many people -- for instance pundits, political insiders, the movers and shakers of the mainstream media, and a great number of the American public who take their lead from these people -- to accurately see what's going on around them, or to remember it if they do. Whether it stems from ignorance, willful stupidity, or the inability to see the big picture while immersed in the inside-story -- or whether it's a deliberate propaganda strategy -- these people appear to believe that the breakdown in political comity and civility and bipartisanship we've been living through in the past 12 years can be laid at the feet of both parties. They also seem to think, or profess to think, that extremists of the left have the same influence in the Democratic party that extremists of the right have in the Republican party.
I find such claims (discussed lately here and here, for instance) annoying and incredibly stupid. Any sentient being with an ounce of political perception can see that:
While Democrats have surely had their share of politicians who live on the dark side of civility, it's by far the Republican party, following the advice of people like Lee "Darth Vader" Atwater and his acolyte Karl Rove, and egged on by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and their ilk, who brought negative campaigning, the politics of personal destruction, and the permanent campaign (which replaced the goal of proper governance with winning elections) to the depths it has reached today, when anything and everything -- smear campaigns, push polling, blatant and outrageous lies, associating your opponent with the enemy and calling them traitors, religious defamation, voter suppression, the misapplication of law, and the abuse of foreign policy for selfish political goals -- is used without qualm to crush your political opponent.
It's also obvious that people who hold beliefs that 40 years ago would never have been heard outside a meeting of the John Birch Society now control the Republican Party with an iron fist, and through it the Federal government, while people whose views are equally extreme on the other side don't have any representation within the Democratic party, and liberals and progressives (who are not extremists at all, but a long-established part of the mainstream of American society) have to fight unceasingly just for a seat at the table and consideration of their views.
The right has for so many years and with great insistence complained about liberal bias in the media, deliberately conflated liberalism with communism, and branded anything remotely progressive as dangerous and un-American, that these ideas have been absorbed into the zeitgeist, so that mainstream commentators (who really ought to know better because they lived through the same stuff that I did) accept them as gospel without perhaps even understanding that they have, or realizing what ill-begotten assumptions they represent. I suppose to them these things come to seem like nuggets of common sense wisdom that helpfully sum up reality in a nutshell, instead of seeing them for what they are: smears, lies, misperceptions, ideologically-based propaganda, and distilled hatred.
You're positive your route and your vehicle are going to get you there.
When the evidence mounts that your path isn't working, that it isn't taking you where you thought you were trying to get to, and that your car isn't really suited for the trip you've planned, then it's pretty silly not to pull over, take a look at a map and figure out a better way to go and a better means to get there. If things are bad enough, it might even be a good idea to rethink your destination.
Of course, that presumes you can see and hear the evidence that's before your eyes, that you can rationally evaluate it without prejudice or bias, and that your initial goal was one that was reachable in the first place -- not to mention that your reason for beginning the journey made good sense.
There's nothing profound or earth-shattering or particularly original about any of that, it's just a matter of common sense and ordinary human behavior, and the everyday application of rational thinking to life's little problems. We all do it all the time, most of us. It only becomes momentous when people are dying in great numbers in the course of the trip, and the idiots driving refuse to stop and reconsider anything at all about what they're doing or how they're doing it, in the mistaken belief that being bullheaded and intransigent is somehow manly or strong.
Analysis: Not much movement for the Democrats today in the averages -- the House was give a little, take a little, but numbers in the Senate numbers didn't move at all (at least to one decimal place). For the Republicans these was a little slippage on the House side.
225) Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, weary and reserved. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You pride yourself in being an independent thinker and do not accept others' opinions without satisfactory proof. Your prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.
Your sexual adjustment has presented some problems for you. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong need for other people to be like you and for them to admire you.
Stock astrology phrases used in "cold readings" collected by Bertram Forer (1948) quoted by Ray Hyman in "Cold Reading: How To Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them" in Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Spring/Summer 1977) quoted by Douglas R. Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas (1985)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 823 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.
Analysis: Some minor slippage for the Democrats, although both the averages and the trendline (it for the first time) show the current mnority party taking bare control of that body. On the Senate side, a new WSJ/Zogby poll seems, at 46-54, very different from all the other sites, and it pulled the Dems' numbers down. Whether that's an outlier or the sign of Democratic momentum slacking off is something to keep an eye on, but right now the Senate seems to be just a fraction farther away according to the collective wisdom of these sites.
222) The problem is how do you maintain a democracy, when there are so many millions of people who are stupid enough to believe anything?
Unidentified psychologist quoted by Robert and Shirley Eberle in The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial (1993) quoted by Lloyd K. Stires in "America's Longest and Costliest Criminal Trial" Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Fall 1993)
223) Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level.
Douglas R. Hofstadter Metamagical Themas (1985)
224) In our lives we are continually encountering strange new situations in which we have to figure out how to apply what we already know. It is not enough to have common sense about known situations; we need also to develop the art of extending common sense to apply to situations which are unfamiliar and beyond our previous experience. This can be very tricky, and often what is called for is common sense in knowing how to apply common sense: a sort of "meta-level" common sense.
Douglas R. Hofstadter "World Views in Collision" Scientific American magazine (2/82) reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 824 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.
216) I don't see any way to put a limitation to the degree of intelligence [a machine] could acquire. The only qualification I make, and I can't understand why it is resisted, is that the intelligence that we will develop in machines will always be alien to human intelligence. [...] Consider how different the intelligence of a dolphin is from that of a human being, or how the social intelligence of a computer will be even more different. [...] I don't understand what that reservation takes away from any ambition the AI people might have.
Joseph Weizenbaum quoted by Daniel Crevier in AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)
217) [W]e will probably discover in building artificial minds that it pays to design a little differently than Nature. Much as airplanes have wings but do not flap them, intelligent machines will operate on the same principles as their natural equivalents, but will exploit these principles better. Streamlines, robust, and faster, they may well surpass our minds the way airliners do sparrows.
Daniel Crevier AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)
218) We achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.
Claude Bernard quoted by Daniel Crevier in AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)
219) To know that one knows what one knows, and to know that one doesn't know what one doesn't know, there lies true wisdom.
Confucius quoted by Daniel Crevier in AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)
220) Running a program in a von Neumann [i.e. serial architecture] computer is like moving your household from New York to Los Angeles in the following senseless fashion. First load the TV set in your car, drive it to Los Angeles, and come back. Take the laundry iron, drive to L.A., and come back. Take the coffee pot, drive to L.A, and so on. To enhance matters a bit, computer manufacturers have recently tried flying between cities instead of driving: they have improved data-transfer rates between the parts of the computer. Unfortunately, this amounts to speeding up the circuitry, and soon bumps into the speed-of-light and heat dissipation limitations I mentioned.
An analogue to the obvious solution - using a van to move all items of your household at once - is not possible in a computer. Each bit transferred between processing units and memory requires a separate wire, and there is a limit to how many of these can be crammed into a machine. Over the years, manufacturers have widened the data path from 8 bits at a time to 32, and even to 128 for large machines. A small improvement, this amounts to little more than letting you move both the coffee pot and the laundry iron together.
In terms of my two-city analogy, the solution adopted by our brains is surprising. In consists in moving Los Angeles to New York and mingling the two cities so you don't have to move at all! In my fable, New York plays the role of processing unit, and Los Angeles that of memory. It turns out that the brain does not make any difference between these two functions: each neuron serves as both memory and a processing unit.
Daniel Crevier AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)
221) [T]he things we do so well that we hardly have to think about them (watching a movie, reading a novel, holding a conversation, playing tennis, and walking down a crowded street) are extremely difficult for computers, while on the other hand, the same computer can be masterful at tasks that stretch our own abilities, such as mathematics, chess, medical diagnoses, and troubleshooting of electronic circuits. It may be that the paradox can be resolved in the following way: Some of the things we do exceptionally well are very complex tasks that require multiple levels of processing but they are also the result of ten of thousands or even millions of years of evolution in which these processes have been refined to a high degree and "hard wired" into our brains. We do not find the act of speaking or recognizing a face to be immensely difficult because all the processing and problem solving takes place below the level of our conscious mind and appears to us as trivially simple. "Difficult things," on the other hand, involve tasks that are evolutionarily more recent and must therefore be carried out in the arena of conscious thought.
F. David Peat Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Think (1985)
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 825 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.
A friend of mine writes to say that she is outraged at Bush's signing of the Torture Bill, and wonders where the outrage is from the rest of the country. My response:
I think many, many people are outraged -- it's just that it's been 6 solid years of outrageous bullshit from Bush, starting with stealing the 2000 election, and people really are suffering from a bad case of outrage fatigue. Outrage is just not an emotional state that you can carry on constantly for years, our defense mechanisms work to dull it down until the next outrageous act, and each outbreak is somewhat less sharp than the last.
I've begun to realize that while I like following politics to a certain extent, what I really want is for this country to return to a state where I don't have to worry about politics for a while, where I have at least enough trust in the people running things to let them go about their day-to-day business without the need for my direct and active oversight, and I can get excited or annoyed or perturbed about specific events or issues that come up, instead of being in a state of constant worry about everything.
Some calmness and rationality and reasonableness would go down nicely right now.
Update: I wanted to add too that I think a lot of the energy that's fueled the rise of Democratic activist sites like Daily Kos and Act Blue is generated by the outrageousness of Bush and the radical right currently in control of our government. I think most people realize that there's only one way to stop that behavior, and that's to kick them out of office or at least weaken their hold on the reins. So people are putting their outrage to good use, instead of expending it in ways that might be more immediately satisfying (demonstrations, for instance) but which have little or no chance of changing anything (because those guys apparently lack a conscience -- they seem to feel no guilt and cannot be shamed into changing).
Analysis: Momentum continued to be Democratic as the average numbers inched in their direction, but they continue to be closer to their goal in the House than they are in the Senate.
1. “I have not been informed of any investigation or that I am a target”
2. “I am cooperating fully, but this whole thing is a political ploy by the Democrats”
3. “I’m SHOCKED by the mistakes made by my subordinates”
4. “I’m deeply sorry for letting down my friends and family. I now recognize that I am an alcoholic. I will be entering rehab immediately, so I have no time for questions”
5. “Can I serve my time at Eglin Federal Penitentiary (aka Club Fed)?”
207) As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein "Geometry and Experience" address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences (12/27/1921) Sidelights on Relativity (1922) [QE] quoted by Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger in Fuzzy Logic (1992) and by Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics (1975) [CQ]
208) As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision.
Lofti Zadeh "Law of Incompatability" (c. 1970) quoted by Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger in Fuzzy Logic (1992)
209) The great sage [Aristotle] is also rather witty. Why are beautiful women so sought after? "That is a question fit for a blind man to ask." Did someone insult him the other day? "He can hit me too, if he likes, in my absence."
Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger Fuzzy Logic (1992)
210) These "higher" psychological processes in the human being did not fit gracefully and comfortably into the extant machinery for achieving reliable knowledge. This machine, it turned out, was much like something I have in my kitchen called a "disposall," which nevertheless does not really dispose of all things but only of some things. Or to make another comparison, I remember seeing an elaborate and complicated automatic washing machine for automobiles that did a beautiful job of washing them. But it could do only that, and everything else that got into its clutches was treated as if it were an automobile to be washed. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Harold Maslow The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966) posted by Alfred M. Kriman [UAQ] (5/14/1995)
[Note: Aphorised as To a person who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. - quoted by Joseph Weizenbaum in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). According to Ralph Keyes, the earliest known instance of the idea embodied in this expression came in The Conduct of Inquiry (1964) by Abraham Kaplan: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.[QV]]
211) Knowing ignorance is strength. Ignoring knowledge is sickness.
Lao Zi [Lao-tzu or Lao-tse] Dao De Jing [Tao Te Ching] (The Tao Virtue Book] (c. 600 B.C.) quoted by Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger in Fuzzy Logic (1992)
212) If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically He's an underachiever.
Woody Allen Love and Death (film, 1975) [ODQ]
213)nut, in botany a dry one-seeded FRUIT which is indehiscent (i.e. does not split open along a definite seam at maturity.) Among the true nuts are the acorn, chestnut, and hazelnut. Commonly the word nut is used for any seed or fruit having an edible kernel surrounded by a hard or brittle covering. Thus the peanut pod is actually a legume, the Brazil nut is a seed enclosed with others in a capsule, and the almond is part of a drupe, a type of fruit that includes olives and peaches. Others that are not botanically true nuts are the cashew, coconut, litchi, pecan, pistachio, and walnut.
The New Columbia Desk Encyclopedia (1975)
214) In some cultures, the sight of a woman's nose and mouth are considered irresistibly seductive. In others, the soles of a person's feet are perceived as disgusting beyond comprehension. In mainstream American culture, sex is obscene but violence is television fare for preschoolers. What is acceptable in swimwear is unacceptable in a restaurant. In an elevator we condone contact that would otherwise be actionable in criminal court. Rules of behavior are not absolute; we negotiate them constantly. [...] Immodesty, indecency, obscenity are cultural factors, mutually agreed upon and negotiable. Contrary to the cliche, we don't "know obscenity when we see it"; we decide what obscenity is, sometimes without even seeing it. We are enjoined to "cover our nakedness," but there's considerable disagreement about what our nakedness is. Our noses and mouths? The bottoms of our feet? A lack of trust or mutual respect?
Roger L. Welsch "Science Lite: The Naked Truth" in Natural History magazine (9/93)
215) Contrary to common belief, uncertainty is often proportional to the amount of available data rather than in inverse proportion!
Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky Symmetry in Chaos (1992)
Sources
[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) [ODQ] - The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992) [QE] - The New Quotable Einstein (2005), Alice Calaprice, ed. [QV] - The Quote Verifier (2006), Ralph Keyes [UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup [posted by, date]
Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began). As of today, there are 826 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.
Before the 2004 election, I did a series of posts which surveyed the various sites which projected the results of the Electoral College. (The final full post of that series is here.) I've been contemplating doing something similar for the upcoming election, but have been put off both by the complexities of the House races (the quest for control of the Senate being conceptually similar to the Electoral College) and by the memory of the long hours of slogging work that went into those survey posts.
Nothwithstanding my reservations, I've decided to at least dip a toe in and take a look at some of the predictions that are out there. I've started with some of the sites that I included last time, and will add additional sites as I find them or they are brought to my attention.
I don't expect this survey to get quite as complicated (and time consuming) as the last one, but I've been wrong about stuff like that before.
Analysis: According to the collective perception of the people who put together these projections, it looks as if the Democrats are very close to taking the House with a bare majority, but may fall one or two seats short of taking the Senate.
I hope to continue to update this survey every couple of days, or at least twice a week, until the election.
Update: I delved into the archives of some of the sites to collect some older data, and with it made these, showing the general trends in the House and Senate projections:
A correspondent wrote that if the Democrats want to win in 2008, they've got to seriously address national and internation security issues and toughen up their image. I responded:
I agree, but it must be an imagistic thrust and not one of policy, per se. What matters is not how many white papers and policy platforms the Dems put out, or, frankly, what there content is (since only wonks really care), but that the public start to see the Democrats as better able to protect them.
The first step, revealing the Republicans as unable to do that job, is under way already (thanks to the incompetence, arrogance and ideological absurdities of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress), but the Democrats need to take the next step themselves. To do that, they don't need to abandon civil liberties or adopt neo-con idiocies or reject rational solutions to national security problems -- they can keep all the good policy stuff, they just have to project an image that people find comforting without ending up looking like Michael Dukakis playing soldier in a tank. Talking tough is part of it (as Bush showed), but that can be done without the stupid macho posturing, ideological rigidity and alienation of the rest of the world -- it just takes the right balance. Finding someone who understands that, and is comfortable with positioning themselves that way, and is able to convincingly project that image is what the next couple of years had better be about.
In order for that to happen, we're going to have to realize that there's a disconnect between image and policy, that it's deliberate and that it's also absolutely necessary in order to elect a Democrat to the White House in the post-9/11 post-Bush world. Nurturing, caring progressivism and liberal values can and should be the core of the candidate's platform and choice of policies, but it's got to be presented in populist language by a person with a protector's image.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:
Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
