Here’s a ques­tion I thought of last night:

To what extent is the Bushe­viks’ belief that they can alter real­ity cre­ated or sup­ported by the main­stream media’s prac­tice of report­ing oppos­ing sides’ state­ments with­out con­sid­er­ing the facts?

For exam­ple, when the Feds started claim­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein had thrown out the UN weapons inspec­tors, the media started repeat­ing it as if it really hap­pened. Is this an exam­ple of the Bushe­viks alter­ing real­ity; or at least, real­ity as per­ceived by peo­ple with short mem­o­ries who rely on the main­stream media for information–which is to say, most people?

Hob­bits and Scots­men. The Wash­ing­ton Post reports: Sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered a tiny species of ancient human that lived 18,000 years ago on an… [Hit and Run]

The pun of the week comes from the com­ments to this post:

bq. Researchers sus­pect the ear­lier ances­tor may have migrated to the island and evolved into a smaller dwarf species as it adapted to the island’s lim­ited resources. This phe­nom­e­non, known as the “island rule,” is com­mon in the ani­mal world but had never been seen before in human evolution.

So island liv­ing can be hobbit-forming.

From root:
bq.
“How does it become a man to behave towards the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment
today? I answer, that he can­not with­out dis­grace be asso­ci­ated with
it.” — Henry David Thoreau
[End the War on Free­dom]

news flash: fun­da­men­tal­ism and tra­di­tion­al­ism aren’t the same thing. An arti­cle in the Inde­pen­dent dis­cusses the pop­u­lar­ity among ordi­nary Afghans of shrines ded­i­cated to the “Arab Afghans” and other fight­ers who made up the core of al-Qa’ida. The first thing that occurs to any­body read­ing this who is at all famil­iar with the var­i­ous move­ments in Islam is that the Wah­habi form of Islam prac­ticed by many of the Arab fight­ers and the Taliban’s ver­sion of Islam are fer­vently opposed to the “folk Islam” that includes mak­ing pil­grim­ages to shrines and pray­ing at them.

In fact, the arti­cle itself men­tions this, twice:

When they talk about fear­ing a “resur­gence of fun­da­men­tal­ism”, they’re refer­ring to the kind of Islam prac­ticed by Wah­habis and the Tal­iban, right? So how exactly does the pop­u­lar­ity of a prac­tice (ven­er­a­tion of shrines) that is absolutely abhorred by the fun­da­men­tal­ist groups indi­cate a “resur­gence of fun­da­men­tal­ism”? It may indi­cate that there’s a resur­gence in tra­di­tion­al­ist Islam in Afghanistan, or that there’s a rap­proche­ment between tra­di­tion­al­ist and fun­da­men­tal­ist groups. But I’m not not quite see­ing how it indi­cates a “resur­gence in fun­da­men­tal­ism”. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

It’s inter­est­ing that the Arabs were going around tear­ing down dec­o­ra­tions on graves. I’ve read the same thing about the Arabs who went to Bosnia.

#
Rus­sell Mad­den at Atlas Mag­a­zine -

The Mir­a­cle of Vot­ing — Mr. Mad­den teaches a col­lege class, with a
sim­ple hypo­thet­i­cal exam­ple, that theft is still theft no mat­ter how
many peo­ple vote for it. [claire­files]
bq.
Unless and until all vot­ers under­stand the true nature of modern-day
vot­ing as a means to dis­trib­ute other people’s wealth (rather than as
merely a pro­ce­dural means to elect those who will guard and pro­tect
our rights); unless and until they real­ize that it is wrong — immoral
– to rob Peter to pay Paul and vice versa, we will con­tinue down the
path to a bur­geon­ing State and a dimin­ish­ing freedom.

I accept and acknowl­edge that such a sea-change in aware­ness and
action among peo­ple today is unlikely to occur any­time soon. But there
was a time not so long ago in this coun­try when most cit­i­zens real­ized
that they had no claim on the lives of other Amer­i­cans. If such
atti­tudes pre­vailed once, they can gain ascen­dancy again.
[End the War on Free­dom]

A clear and sim­ple expla­na­tion of what vot­ing really means.

Around noon last Fri­day a coworker stopped by my cubi­cle and told me that there was some sort of protest going on in front of the MTV build­ing, which is across an inter­sec­tion from the office com­plex where I work. I wasn’t busy at the time so, I picked up my cam­era and headed out to see what was going on.

I found per­haps twenty or thirty peo­ple on the side­walk in front of the MTV build­ing hold­ing Bush cam­paign signs and hand­made signs accus­ing MTV of lying. I couldn’t tell exactly what MTV was sup­posed to have lied about, so I crossed the street and asked the first per­son I came to what it was all about. This par­tic­u­lar pro­tester was a middle-aged woman who looked like a stereo­typ­i­cal soc­cer mom. She told me that MTV had claimed that Bush intended to rein­state the draft and that it was a lie. Although she didn’t pro­vide any more details, with that infor­ma­tion I was able to fig­ure out from the signs that the pro­gram in ques­tion was some­thing called “rock the vote.” The soc­cer mom had a stack of printed signs lying on the ground, which led me to won­der if their turnout was lower than expected.

Both groups of pro­test­ers were over­whelm­ingly made up of white middle-class peo­ple in their early twen­ties. They looked like a bunch of col­lege kids, and indeed some ever had col­lege t-shirts. Ignore their signs and polit­i­cal t-shirts, and they looked identical–you couldn’t tell them apart.

The Repub­li­cans who were the­o­ret­i­cally protest­ing MTV were stand­ing with their signs fac­ing the street. Only one or two of them were vis­i­ble from the MTV build­ing, and those were some of the more unin­tel­li­gi­ble signs. There was a small group of MTV employ­ees on the steps of their build­ing watching.

Besides myself, I saw two other pho­tog­ra­phers (one of whom was a Repub­li­can car­ry­ing a sign), and there was some­one with a small video cam­era and attached micro­phone inter­view­ing pro­test­ers. It looked like a cheap ama­teur out­fit, so I fig­ured he prob­a­bly worked nearby and was there out of curios­ity, as I was.

I don’t watch MTV, so I’ve never seen the ads the Repub­li­cans were so upset about. How­ever, I described what I had seen to my cowork­ers later and got some back­ground from one of them. Appar­ently MTV has a non-partisan cam­paign to encour­age young peo­ple to reg­is­ter to vote, called “Rock the Vote.” In their ads, this cam­paigns sug­gested that a rein­state­ment of the draft was a pos­si­bil­ity, and that peo­ple who might be sub­ject to it should keep that in mind and vote. The Repub­li­can Party then sent a nasty threat­en­ing let­ter to MTV claim­ing that this ad con­sti­tuted a par­ti­san attack on Bush. A search on Google later revealed that this is correct.

So the ques­tion remains–why are the Repub­li­can par­ti­sans get­ting so worked out and (as it turns out) lying them­selves about what MTV’s ad said? Look­ing at the mat­ter log­i­cally, it would seem that if the ad is unfair to any­body, it would be unfair to Kerry, who has said that he intends to increase the occu­py­ing force in Iraq by around 30,000 while Bush is say­ing that no more troops are needed. Those new troops would have to come from some­where, and since the mil­i­tary is cur­rently over­bur­dened, it seems that (tak­ing their state­ments at face value) a draft would be more likely under Kerry than under Bush.

It’s quite obvi­ous that the Feds’ mil­i­tary is cur­rently not large enough to even main­tain a firm grip on Iraq, let alone invade other Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries. Clearly the draft is one way of get­ting enough sol­diers to solve that prob­lem. This is only real­is­tic. And that’s where the Bush wor­ship­pers are get­ting upset. They have lit­tle or no con­nec­tion with real­ity, believ­ing instead that they can alter real­ity just by wish­ing it. To such peo­ple, real­ity is indeed “partisan.”

From Talk­ing Points Memo:

bq. Look­ing over var­i­ous report­ing on Tora Bora from the win­ter and spring of 2001/2002, it seems clear that most major news out­lets ran sto­ries which flatly con­tra­dict what the Bush cam­paign is now say­ing on the sub­ject (see this ear­lier post for more details.)

I’d be curi­ous whether, in report­ing the Bush campaign’s cur­rent denials about what hap­pened at Tora Bora, any major news out­let has made ref­er­ence to their own ear­lier report­ing which makes it clear that, as nearly as such things can be known, what the pres­i­dent is say­ing is sim­ply not true.

I doubt they have. This isn’t the first time the main­stream media has repeated Fed lies as the truth even when it con­tra­dicts their own web site’s archived cov­er­erage of what really hap­pened. Con­sider, for exam­ple, the lie about Sad­dam throw­ing out weapons inspec­tors.

#
Manuel Miles, aka Kapt Kanada at The Lib­er­tar­ian Enter­prise -

The Need for Man­ners — an enter­tain­ing rant on man­ners and the
dif­fer­ence between man­ners and tact. [tle]
bq.
I once received an email from a reader who wished to inform me that I
was an opin­ion­ated idiot. I wrote him back to say that he could bother
to begin his epis­tle with a greet­ing if he wished to have a reply from
me. To my sur­prise, he apol­o­gised in his sub­se­quent, prop­erly writ­ten
email let­ter, and we entered into a brief but infor­ma­tive
cor­re­spon­dence. Nei­ther man changed his views, per­haps, but we were
bet­ter able to berate one another once the suit­able for­mat was
estab­lished.
[End the War on Free­dom]

The arti­cle as a whole is ram­bling and semi-coherent, but he does make an excel­lent point:

bq. Well, it obvi­ously isn’t tact that I’m con­cerned about; tact is just another word for dis­hon­esty and trick­ery. (These traits are com­bined in the word we bor­rowed from the French, ruse.) You see, one can have man­ners with­out hav­ing any tact at all.

For exam­ple: on occa­sion, I men­tion the rather obvi­ous fact that I am ugly. It isn’t a char­ac­ter defect and, short of plas­tic surgery, there isn’t much I can do about it. I’ve learned to live with it, and I have dated some remark­ably good-looking women in spite of it, but it’s a fact as plain as the huge, twisted nose on my face. I have a mug that fright­ens babies and horses. Yet, when I refer to this fact, most women will auto­mat­i­cally and reflex­ively say, “Oh, no, you’re not ugly at all.”

That is tact­ful, but it’s bad man­ners. In fact, it’s down­right rude, because it’s a lie that’s as plain as, oh, say… the schnozz on my face. I have to shave this ugly mug every morn­ing, and you think I don’t know what I’m talk­ing about? That’s like say­ing that Bush and Kerry don’t know how to tell lies–hell, they’re pro­fes­sion­als. And if ugli­ness were a pro­fes­sion, then Jamie Farr and I would be the chair­men of the asso­ci­a­tion, and a por­trait of Our Founder, Jimmy Durante, would hang on the club­house wall. It’s insult­ing to con­tra­dict peo­ple when they com­ment on a sub­ject in which they are expert.

So, a tact­ful lie is bad man­ners, campers. You don’t have to pub­licly agree with state­ments which embar­rass you, but don’t go on record with a damned lie, either.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Avoid­ing the Johnny-come-latelies: what are those non-white ear­phones you got there? Wired on iPod and indi­vid­u­al­ity.… By Karen De Coster. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

An inter­est­ing look at how silly peo­ple can be. I don’t use the white ear­phones that came with my iPod, but I’m not inter­ested in appear­ance or “fash­ion,” I don’t use them because they don’t fit my ears. I bought replace­ment ear­phones from Ety­motics instead.

Lind on Iraq.  Our nightly bomb­ing of Fal­lu­jah illus­trates another impor­tant point about 4GW: to call it “ter­ror­ism” is a mis­nomer. In fact, ter­ror­ism is merely a tech­nique, and we use it too when we think it will ben­e­fit us. In Madam Albright’s bou­tique war on Ser­bia, when the bomb­ing cam­paign against the Ser­bian Army in Kosovo failed, we resorted to ter­ror bomb­ing of civil­ian tar­gets in Ser­bia proper. Now, we are using ter­ror bomb­ing on Fal­lu­jah. [John Robb’s Weblog]