[links] Link salad for a Sunday
Undersea webcams — Some cool stuff. (Thanks to lt260.)
Team records ‘music’ from stars — More on COROT and the observation of stellar interiors, this one with a slightly whimiscal bent.
ACLU: 2/3 of US population lives in “Constitution-free” zone — An article about the Border Patrol and Fourth Amendment rights. (Thanks to chriswjohnson.)
Palin’s ‘going rogue,’ McCain aide says — How about that rigorous vetting process, Mr. Straight Talk? (Special bonus, Language Log comments on the usage of the term “going rogue”.)
Dark Night of the Soul — Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Hahahahahaha. Being a Republican these days is like being OJ’s defense lawyer back in the day. You throw everything you have against the wall regardless of logic or evidence and hope some of it sticks. Unfortunately for the reality-based community, some of that stuff does stick. OJ was acquitted, after all.
ericjamesstone on Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan — I disagree with his argument on a number of levels, but he’s a thoughtful guy with whom I disagree with on a lot of things. In short, the high level argument about Obama makes some assumptions which strike me as facile, while the subordinate argument on both Iraq and Afghanistan seems to hing on logic which says “we in too deep to stop now.” Even if you take the Bush Administration’s stated war aims at face value, we’ve long since passed the point of removing Saddam from power, destroying Iraqi state sponsorship of terrorism and eliminating the threat of Iraqi WMDs. Under Eric’s argument, there seems to be no point where changing policy conditions and changing goals ever enter into the question. “Never stop fighting until we win” is not a strategy, it’s a hope.
10/26/08
Body movement: 2 hour, 35 minute suburban walk
Last night’s weigh-out: n/a
This morning’s weigh-in: 227.6
Currently reading: The Best of C.M. Kornbluth
Tags: Iraq, Links, Personal, Politics, Science
Posted: 7:49 am Sun October 26 2008 | Comments(0) |
[culture] I can’t sleep, why should you? Miscellanea from 2 am.
Awake in the middle of the night here in Seattle. The Locus Awards were fine and fun. My shirt tied for third in the ritual Hawaiian shirt contest. (I was robbed, I tell you — if we were judging under last year’s rules I’d have swept it.) Various eliminatory issues are keeping me from sleeping, so naturally my thoughts turn to the sort of random crap that enters my head at two in the morning. Such as these potential discussion items:
- I recently observed in someone’s comment thread that a vanished culture seems to be able to leave certain things behind. Specifically, literature (The Odyssey is an example of this), art/architecture (much of ancient Rome), and toponyms (the Native American legacy embedded in many American place names). Thoughts?
- Once our culture vanishes, future historians may well adopt May 31st, 2003 as the date from which the decline of the American Empire became inevitable. That’s when US Highway 666 was renumbered to 491, in order to “get the devil out.” The primacy of superstitious nonsense in the setting of public policy has driven this country to bizarre extremes in research, education, family planning and foreign policy, but even highway numbering fell victim. (And to give shame where shame is due, this moronic alteration occurred under the stewardship of New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat.)
- It occurred to me this evening that given roughly my same medical and life history (a gross simplification), under pre-modern conditions i would have died around April 30th of this year at age 43, direct cause of death being uncontrolled internal bleeding. As it happens, I’ve also been in the ER twice for closed head injuries, along with experiencing other miscellaneous potentially fatal complaints such as tuberculosis. Anyone who’s ever had major trauma surgery, lives with severe allergies or an autoimmune disorder, experienced a major bacterial infection, or has simply taken a good, hard fall down the stairs is likely living on borrowed time. When would you have died under pre-modern conditions?
Tags: Conventions, Culture, Personal, Seattle
Posted: 2:34 am Sun June 22 2008 | Comments(3) |
[culture] More on the ethics of contact
An observation, and a meta-observation, on my recent post about the ethics of contact.
Observation: Some very good, thoughtful comments have showed up in the thread at jlake.com, including several from people living in South America who have much closer exposure to the issue than most of us in North America.
Meta-observation: Some reactions to my post, both in my comment threads and elsewhere, have been fairly horrified, along the lines of “how could you consider such a thing?” Actually, my intention in my original post was to be very considered, and I believe I concluded with a very specific point against making contact. At the same time, I also note a tendency to conflate a pre-modern life with wisdom or closeness to the planet. That strikes me as a kind of romanticized prejudgment that’s potentially misplaced.
There’s also an implicit challenge (not in a confrontational sense, but in an evidentiary sense) to my standing in even having an opinion — analogous to one that surfaces when white people talk about minority issues, or men talk about women’s issues, for example. The same tension exists in fiction, balancing between writing what you know (middle aged white men, in my case) and stepping outside yourself and thus being vulnerable to criticism for “not getting it right” — I’ve most run into that when writing about Native American characters. It’s a reasonable challenge for me as a writer, as a blogger-cum-cultural-commentator, and as a human being; one that keeps me mentally and emotionally on my toes.
I will say on the topic of standing that I was born and raised in the Third World. I spent much of my childhood frequently encountering people for whom a dumpster to sleep in would have been a vast improvement. (I was always wrapped in a cloak of Western privilege, with a dry bedroom, air conditioning and good food.) Close observation of destitution has leached the romance out of “being closer to the environment” for me. While I am just as much a product of my culture as an uncontacted tribesperson is of theirs, I am not wrapped so closely in my own cultural assumptions that I can’t see them for what they are.
Tags: Culture, Personal
Posted: 6:24 am Fri June 20 2008 | Comments(0) |
[culture] The ethics of contact
I had the radio on briefly during my lunch break, and learned the startling (to me) information that there may be as many as 60 different “uncontacted tribes” in the upper Amazon Basin. Apparently about 45 are in Brazil, and 15 in Peru. The discussion was that Peru is more interested in opening resource exploitation than in cultural protection, while Brazil has an active, long-term policy to keep their “uncontacted tribes” safely isolated. Many of these tribes are thought to be the descendants of refugees and tribal elements fleeing violent contact in prior centuries, and virtually all of them discourage outsiders by violent and even fatal means. Some of them are referred to as “The People of the Arrow.”
The past 500 years of European history have drawn some stark lessons in the ethics of contact. At least part of the Brazilian policy is based on the abysmal healthcare consequences of contact — past tribal contacts have lead to epidemic deaths within weeks of first encounter not unlike the general decimation of tribes in the Americas in the early 16th century. (See 1491 by Charles C. Mann [ Amazon
] for more on this.)
I began turning over the ethics of contact in my head. European, and specifically Anglophone, history on this topic is staggeringly ugly, more so than most of us are willing to admit. Yet at the same time, I am bothered by the notion of leaving people without the opportunity to choose sanitation, healthcare, reduced infant mortality, education access, increased life expectancy, and the whole array of life choices attendant on modern culture when it is functioning correctly.
It is very hard for me to see what is right here. The question is essentially moot for me personally — I am highly unlikely to ever need to make a choice regarding an uncontacted tribe. At the same time, I can argue a number of sides of this question with equal passion. And I do appreciate the value of an extremely conservative, preservationist approach to the uncontacted tribes. Some mistakes can never be undone.
I believe I shall explore this in fiction. Your thoughts?
Bonus question: Would differing immune system requirements be one of the greatest dangers to a time traveller?
Tags: Culture, fiction
Posted: 4:09 pm Tue June 17 2008 | Comments(7) |
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