dubrovnik

City of cats, spackled by shells
firing the red roof-tiles black
chalk outlines the corpse of a city

risen again, swathed in stone and moated
scene of dragon battles staged
where tourists climb the sides of churches

children hang off bas relief fountains
and swarm, ride scooters through squares
dripping sweat and screaming for pasta;

synth sing-a-long at church, jeans
and bad haircuts, long dresses
cross the chest and shuffle behind pews.

Quiet in a vertical garden, sloping
down to the sea where cactus bulwarks
fortress the cliff against the waves

flecked in cinders, they pixelate a peace
that spreads across the Adriatic’s
azure solace, Croatia

maintains, embraced by octopus
split by former comrades, edge that
boomerangs Westward to Europe.

a truly free pathology

[T]heir opponents were people who were content with their lives in the [internet], who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of [twenty-first]-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.

Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later. The more arid and affectless life became in the [internet], the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the [internet] took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspects of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the [internet] like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the [internet] was a model of all that technology and done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' pathology.

~ J. G. Ballard (1975) High-Rise, term "high-rise" replaced with "internet" throughout.

in your face

7 nation army - children medieval band. what it's all about.

government is rape

Fascism and slavery are two sides of the same coin. Control implies the controlled; subjugation implies the subjugated.

When is this relationship legitimate? Only when the subjugation is agreed to by the subjugated starting from a position of equal power. Typically, this only occurs in the bedroom.

The relationship between the government and the citizen is one of unequal power. The government spies on, searches, taxes, controls the movements of, the employment of, the abilities to express oneself of the citizen. This power relation is one of slaver and slavee. But is it legitimate?

Never.

Because the citizen has never agreed to this subjugation beginning from a position of equal power—s/he was never in a position to spy on, tax, search, or control the movements of the government. The agreement was made from a position of power imbalance.

Just as one may "agree" to hand over ones valuables to a thief at gunpoint, we "agree" to hand over our autonomy to the government.

The situation here is not unlike statutory rape. Even "consensual" sex between an adult and a child is reprehensible because the child is in no position to give consent. This is because of the power imbalance between the two participants. The adult abuses the child no matter what the child thinks s/he may have consented to or not. Such "consent" cannot be legitimate.

It is incorrect to identify reason as the distinguishing factor. The child is in no position to rationally assess the consequences of hir actions, one might say, but the mature citizen is, and can legitimately decide to cede power to the government.

This is a red herring. It is completely incorrect.

The only analysis of rationality we have is means / ends rationality. But by this reasoning, it is rational for the slave not to run (because s/he will be whipped); it is rational for the unarmed at gunpoint to hand over hir wallet; and it is rational for the child to submit to the adult who controls hir future. Rationality does not coincide with legitimacy or morality. The means / ends reason for ceding power may nevertheless be morally illegitimate.

This also explains why the government systematically grants itself more power (greater powers to spy, to search, to tax, to control), and why this is so dangerous. Not just pragmatically dangerous (though it is), but morally dangerous. In doing so, the government distances itself further and further from the ideal of legitimacy. The more powerful the government, the less possible any legitimate moral mandate from the governed.

We are being systematically raped by a villain who uses the money from our pockets and tears licked from our cheeks to empower himself to rape us more easily and frequently.

We are slaves.

england, 1802

It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flow'd, 'with pomp of waters, unwithstood,'
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,—
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.—In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

~Wordsworth

snowden on us

From Edward Snowden's latest statement:

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised—and it should be.

sublime sublimation

We all desire, but civilization requires sacrifice. It controls our most brutal aggressive and sexual instincts. Sublime sublimation. . . . Ads do not interrupt as they fill in the blanks. They fill the emptiness of our souls. Fundamentally we are empty. Nature abhors a vacuum. Civilization satisfies desires by inflating them. It's a trade-off. Society credits you life and security in exchange for repression.

. . .

Suddenly evolution makes sense. Protoplasmic capitalism. Protein currency. Amino acid exchange rates. Molecular surplus. Carnivorous conflict. Reptilian exploitation. Cold-blooded shopping. Paleolithic corporations. Cro-magnon capital. Neanderthal profits. Virile enterpreneurs.

Tom Kaczynski, Beta Testing the Apocalypse

"mr. president"

"Don't vote for those who want to take us back in time" . . . i.e. everyone actually on the ballot?

manga editorial techniques

[This is a response of sorts to musings by The League on the abysmal relationship between creators and editors in the US comic book industry.]

In the summer of 1997, I spent six weeks in Tokyo interning at the publisher Kodansha. For the second half of that period, I worked in the non-fiction translated straight-to-paperback department. In the first half, however, I spent each week interning at a different "Magajin," or manga magazine.

One of the most interesting of these was Weekly Shonen Magazine, or 週刊少年マガジン. "Shonen" here means something like "young men's" (literally = "few years"), and I believe the readership was largely young men ranging in age from 15 to 30 or so. This experience was interesting partly because, at the time, Weekly Shonen Magazine was the best selling manga publication in Japan, selling significantly over 2 million copies every single week. Each issue of the magazine was something like 300 pages long, comprising 20 page episodes in serials by a different creative teams.

That's right, contributors to Weekly Shonen Magazine generated 20 pages of a story every single week.

At the time, the chief editor for Weekly Shonen Magazine was Ishii-sensei (I believe, I hope my memory isn't going out on me here, but if anyone knows differently, please correct me). Ishii-sensei had previously edited Monthly Shonen Magazine, and his particular editorial style had succeed in pulling that magazine out of a long term slump and rocketing it to relative popularity. This success prompted his promotion to editor-in-chief-ship of Weekly Shonen Magazine, and it was under his direction that the magazine moved into the most popular slot, against its long time competitor, Weekly Shonen Jump.

Now, what was Ishii-sensei's strategy for extracting 20 pages of story each from a large number of creative teams such that the combined product would be read by millions of young men every single week? The answer is of interest in the context of the present state of US comics as it involved intrusive and overbearing editorial oversight.

Of course, I didn't see Ishii-sensei himself engage in this process, but I witnessed it multiple times by his underlings in various meetings with manga artists.

First, the basic schedule. My understanding is that scripts were worked out one week in advance, and I assume editorial intervention worked the same way during that stage of the process, although I never witnessed it. The artists received the script at the start of their week. Two days later, they met with the editor assigned to their story. On the basis of these meetings, they'd spend the next couple days finalizing pencils, then perhaps go through a final meeting before spending the rest of the week inking.

(Yes, these artists worked hard! I remember talking to one who worked at home, but still complained he never got to see his kids. Editorial meetings with artists might happen any time of day or night, as needed to meet the deadline.)

OK, so what happened in an initial meeting? The editorial intervention was complete and domineering. Change the shape of the panels on this page; show an event from this angle, not that one; give us more of this kind of feeling (usually: excitement, urgency, passion, whatever). No aspect of what the artist had done was immune to editorial intervention. The 20 pages generated at the end of that 2 week period (one for writing, the other for drawing) was very much a team effort, as much the product of the editors' tastes and vision as of the writer and illustrator.

So, why is this interesting? Well, as The League has pointed out, a similar kind of editorial interventionism has been having a disastrous effect on US comics. Titles have been killed, good ideas shelved, bad ideas promoted—all because the editors put their decisions about comic book writing / illustrating on a higher plane than that of the creators.

OK, so what was different in the Weekly Shonen Magazine case, as opposed to (oh, I don't know, say) the current state of DC comics?

Well, the answer is really very simple. One thing which was patently obvious from observing the editors under Ishii-sensei at Weekly Shonen Magazine is that they were all themselves ultra hardcore manga fans.

I mean, these guys were hardcore. If not ultra-otaku, then some kind of refined badass version of the comic fan, high on his power. Not because it was mere power, but because it was power over comics.

I remember, for example, one afternoon, I was traveling around with an editor, and we had an hour to kill before a meeting with an artist. What did we do? Stop at a nearby toy and model store, so he could browse through large scale robot / godzilla / ultraman models. Here, work and play coincided.

Another incident, an editor (much less otaku, more badass) meeting with an artist at midnight in a cafe, then talking to her for hours about the comic, pushing her to improve the art, layout, the "kanji," or "feeling," conveyed by every single page.

Do you think Dan DiDio spends his spare time buying Giant Robot toys? Does he meet with creators in the middle of the night for as long as it takes?

So, I think the difference here is attitude. Interest. Caring.

The interventionist editors for Weekly Shonen Magazine didn't intervene on the basis of some idea about what would sell, or imagination about what goes on in the mind of a teenager. They intervened on the basis of their own fandom, on the basis of what they wanted to read personally, themselves, for real.

This does not seem to be the case for some of the "Big Two" editorial horror stories we've heard in the US.

Not that I'm entirely in favor of interventionism—I'm in general very much a fan of creator control, and letting the idea man (or woman) follow his (or her) vision.

But I also think editorial oversight can be good. Editors can make a novel—or a comicbook!—better . . . so long as their feedback comes from the right place (genuine knowledge and caring) rather than mere fantasy and greed.

oh, america

You bitch:

"The role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In that order. It's like a filter. If the government wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, or takes away some of our liberty, it's okay, providing they're doing it to save our lives. That's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're a danger to yourself or others. You lose your liberty and happiness to protect life. If you've got life, you might get liberty and happiness later."

~ more disturbingly realistic "irony" (= documentary) from Doctorow's Little Brother.

I bolded the naughty parts to help you out if you've drunk the koolaid. God help us all you fuckers if you don't see that this fiction has come true and we live in a fucking police state.

The most important point, though, is to notice where the flag waving happens: if you're pro Obama's shit-on-the-public-and-spend-their-money-in-Africa-beating-up-on-random-dictators-and-replacing-them-with-America-hating-Islamists stance OR you think beating up on foreigners is a higher priority than helping / feeding / employing American citizens in this hemorrhaging economy then you are equally anti-American in my books. Don't believe the Republican v. Democrat hype but look at actual differences (or lack thereof!) in policy.

The good Lord said, "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." We'd better get our own backyard in order before we get back to telling the rest of the world how to mow theirs.

Vote Ron Paul.

good news at last

Some evidence that God still exists. Now those shystering, crap-producing, freedom-hating, audience-cheating fucks in LA can join the poor, the lovers of peace, the African-Americans, and everyone else Obama made promises to during his campaign but whom he has since let down. Of course, unlike those groups, the producers of excrement like Jack and Jill don't have a legitimate complaint, but it's hard to see how this isn't good news.

If both SOPA and Obama lose, we might wake up in a slightly better (i.e. more American) country. I'm in a patriotic mood tonight:

lawyers for sopa

Guess who supports SOPA? In addition to the obvious suspects (e.g. Time Warner or the Screen Actors Guild), there appear to be a large number of law firms. I guess that tells you who's really going to benefit. The culprits:

Baker & Hostetler LLP
Covington & Burling LLP
Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP
Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, P.C.
Davis Wright Tremaine LLP
Irell & Manella LLP
Jenner & Block LLP
Kelley Drye & Warren LLP
Kendall Brill & Klieger LLP
Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert LLP
Lathrop & Gage LLP
Loeb & Loeb LLP
Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP
Morrison & Foerster LLP
Phillips Nizer, LLP
Proskauer Rose LLP
Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP
Shearman & Sterling LLP
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
White & Case LLP

Do what you can to stop SOPA, however insignificant.

ghetto d ~ master p

After SOPA, gems like this will be lost forever, like tears in rain. Do what you can, however insignificant.

sane approach to terrorism

I'd never really believed in terrorists before—I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me—starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia—that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists kill a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worry about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.

~ Cory Doctorow (2008) Little Brother

christopher hitchens, rip

Passing of another great orator / writer / reformed-communist-revolutionary.

I strongly recommend Hitchens' biography, Hitch-22. In all likelihood, given his slow death from cancer, Hitchens will be remembered most for his vocal pro-atheist stance, and his consistency in maintaining and defending his beliefs even in the face of a fatal disease. For me, however, the more interesting and compelling side of Hitchens was his political metamorphosis from left-wing radical to staunch pro-interventionist supporter of both Iraq wars. Like great left intellectuals of the early 20th cent. (e.g. Aldous Huxley or George Orwell) Hitchens gradually grew to realize the inconsistency between the rhetoric of the left (pro-worker / underdog) and its actual policy choices and implementation of those policies (Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, or take your pick of any practicing communist country out there). Amongst many other amusing anecdotes and diatribes, Hitch-22 details Hitchens gradual realization that the libertarian and collectivist tendencies of the "left" (communist?) ideology were in profound and inherent conceptual conflict. Facing a choice, he chose liberty, freedom, and the autonomy of individuals over the dogmatic adherence to collectivism, developing a surprisingly (disappointingly!) idiosyncratic, but internally consistent and well-motivated, stance, unique on the political scene.

He will be sorely missed, both for his courage to hold consistent and reasonable views, and for his eloquence in defending them.

Explaining what the "left" would have to be like for me to identify with it.


If there is a heaven based on merit, Hitchens will go there; and if it is based on faith alone, it won't be worth going to . . .

guarding against abuse of power

Robert A. Heinlein's first novel, For Us, the Living, was finally published posthumously in 2004. Most likely contributing to the reasons it was not accepted for publication in 1939, is that there is hardly any plot, just a sequence of political and economic suggestions for Utopia laid out in relative detail.

Many of Heinlein's suggestions here are compelling, and would find their way in various forms into his later, more novel-like novels. One particularly interesting suggestion concerns a means for guarding against government abuse of power.

In Heinlein's future history, the gradual accrual of power by the government comes to threaten fundamental liberties when a radical evangelist luddite comes close to coercing himself into the whitehouse. Once the freedom-loving recognize they still have the majority, and defeat his election, a new constitution is adopted, one very similar to the original, but with several provisions designed to prevent future abuses of power. Of particular interest is this clause suggested by Heinlein:

Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person. No act shall constitute a violation of a law valid under this provision unless there is such damage, or immediate present danger of such damage resulting from that act.

Here's Heinlein's gloss on the significance of this clause:

Do you see the significance of that last provision? Up to that time, a crime had two elements; act of commission and intent. Now it had a third; harmful effect which must be proved in each case, as well as the act and the intent. The consequences of this change can hardly be exaggerated. It established American individualism forever by requiring the state to justify in each case its interference with an individual's acts. Furthermore the justification must be based on a tangible damage or potential damage to a person or persons. The person damaged might be a schoolgirl injured or endangered by a reckless driver or it might be every person in the state endangered by the betrayal of military secrets or injured by manipulation of commodity prices, but it must not be some soulless super-person, the state incarnate, or the majesty of the law. It reduced the state to its proper size, an instrument to serve individuals, instead of a god to be worshipped and glorified. Most especially it ended the possibility of the majority oppressing any minority with that hackneyed hoary lie that `the majority is always right.'

Personally, I'm a fan, and I endorse the sentiments whole-heartedly. Would this clause do the trick, though? Of course, the dangerous wiggle room here is the "immediate present danger"—just how immediate does it need to be?

Take Heinlein's own example of reckless driving. His intended interpretation seems to be that there have to be particular people in danger if one is to be convicted of reckless driving. Not some schoolgirl, but this particular schoolgirl has to be shown to have been in danger. But how long would it be before someone tried to argue that reckless driving poses an immediate present danger to people who live near the road, say, even if they don't happen to be standing on their lawns when the car barrels by? And if that passes, how long until everyone in the city, or everyone in the state, is argued to be in "immediate present danger" from reckless driving?

And how is statistical evidence supposed to be used here? Consider second-hand smoking laws: is the waitress who works in a smoking environment in "immediate present danger"? Even though, she may never actually contract cancer?

I wonder what Heinlein would think of the escalating removal of liberties associated with air travel? Are these invasions justifiable under the new clause because every man, woman, and child of the United States is under "immediate present danger" of terrorist attack? Even though these measures have never caught a single terrorist? Nor has any empirical measure of their efficacy ever been provided?

I'm pretty sure he would weep, but I wonder what he would suggest as an alternative . . .

real terrorism

Are Julian Assange and wikileaks "terrorists" as some US commentators have claimed?

I'll reserve judgment on that point. But insofar as "terrorism" includes the use of intimidation and the interruption of normal civilized procedures in order to force one's opponents into following some particular course of action, the response by the US government and, especially, various credit card companies seems to exemplify that attitude.

Issuing an interpol warrant for Assange because his condom broke is patently ludicrous. But downright offensive is the recent decision by Visa and Mastercard to block donations to wikileaks. Of course, the claim that using Visa or Mastercard to donate to wikileaks contravenes the user agreement, in particular, the stipulation that funds not be used for illegal purposes, is completely spurious. Wikileaks has not be convicted of violating any international law—treating them as otherwise constitutes a clear violation of the "innocent until proven guilty" principle (not the first time from either the US government or its cronies - one of the very points revealed in wikileaks leaks).

Although the link for credit card donations on the wikileaks page doesn't currently function, donations can presently be made through xipwire. Donate today, or else you may lose control over how you spend your money entirely.

cordoba initiative ii

Pat Condell on the proposed mosque at Ground zero again.

"People keep framing this as a religious freedom issue, but there's a difference between practicing your religion which everyone has the right to do and rubbing your religion in people's faces as a triumphalist religious statement, which is what's happening here. . . .

". . . [T]he mosque part of this building will occupy the top two floors, which means it will overlook the scene of conquest, which is why the site was chosen. When the governor of New York offered to help them find an alternative site, they wouldn't even discuss it. Moving it somewhere else would negate the very purpose of building it, which is to rub 9/11 in America's face. If they can't build it there, there's no point in building it anywhere else. . . .

". . . [T]he people behind it clearly don't have the intelligence or the good grace to withdraw the plans even though they know as well as everyone else that if the positions were reversed, and this level of calculated insult were being directed at Islam, there is no way on earth that this project would be allowed to proceed, constitution or no constitution."

Tru dat.

[For references, follow the link to the original video.]

cordoba initiative

Pat Condell on the Cordoba Initiative, about which there are doubts.

we no longer support . . .

"We no longer support signing in with your old YouTube password."

Am I the only one who thinks this is insane? It's one thing for Google to buy YouTube, it's another thing entirely for them force pre-takeover users to acquire Google accounts. How is this an instance of "Don't be evil"?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

update july 22 2010

Since the above, youtube now seems to sign users out whenever they sign out of gmail. This is can be inconvenient.