20.12.02

VVV So now Trent Lott has stepped down. I can only assume he did it specifically to spite me. Nevertheless, I think my comments hold for any further attempts to pressure the Republicans on the race issue.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:09 -- link --

VVV The more I hear about Howard Dean, the more I'd like to see him get the Democratic nomination in '04. He signed the civil unions law in Vermont. He and his wife are both doctors, so I tend to trust him more on health care (until such time as I understand the situation well enough to make my own judgement). He thinks we've got about the right amount of gun control in this contry. He wants to repeal most of Bush's tax cut. He's against the war (though that position alone may make him unelectable).

But he'd also make it possible to re-use a gag from a comic I saw (I think it was in The Australian) during the 2000 race. A guy was surveying a bunch of signs that said "Gore" and "Bush," and he remarked, "No matter who wins, Americans will still call their president a four-letter word."
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:02 -- link --

19.12.02

VVV

Clinton Calls GOP "Hypocritical" On Lott Former President Clinton said Wednesday it is "pretty hypocritical" of Republicans to criticize incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott for stating publicly what he said the GOP does "on the back roads every day." "How do they think they got a majority in the South anyway?" Clinton told CNN outside a business luncheon he was attending. "I think what they are really upset about is that he made public their strategy." He added: "They try to suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the Republicans supported it."

Now I think we can pretty much guarantee that Lott will hold onto his post.

I haven't said anything about Lottgate yet, but since I've put up that one-off observation, I'll delve a little deeper.

My first reaction was that it wasn't a big deal. He was just trying to suck up to Strom, and made a comment that implied things that were not acceptable in political discourse. Then I learned about Lott's history of segregationist sympathies (and, we're learning now, those of John Ashcroft and even John McCain, which wrecks my little fantasy that McCain could be voted majority leader by a coalition of anti-Lott Republicans and all the Democrats). So what is still (in the grand scheme of things) a minor comment has become an entry-point for exposing a lot of skeletons in the party's closet. This is important stuff to get out, but it seems like there has been an awfully exclusive focus on the Republicans. Sure, the Repblicans made a specific strategy of appealing to neo-Confederate voters, but there's no reason why and individual racist couldn't be in favor of abortion and labor unions and the environment. It's mentioned in passing -- if at all -- that Robert Byrd, a Democratic elder in the Senate (who I never did like, anyway), was a member of the KKK.

Conventional wisdom these days is that Lott's career is over. Liberals are getting excited about bringing Lott down -- especially if a Lott resignation and a Lincoln Chafee switch make Tom Daschle (who I don't care for either, though as far as I know he's not a racist) majority leader, while conservatives are hoping to make Lott the scapegoat for the party's image of racism. Meanwhile, some cynical-strategic types on the left are bemoaning Lott's doom, on the grounds that a wounded Lott would be a much more ineffective leader, as well as a constant embarassment to the party, than a self-righteous Don Nickles (who seems to have channeled all of his bigotry into homophobia). But I don't think Lott will be getting the pink slip any time soon.

The GOP conference to decide Lott's fate is scheduled for January 6. This gives Lottgate ample time to blow over. Especially given the holidays coming up, it's questionable whether the "racist GOP" storyline will hold for the next three weeks. Once it leaves the headlines and the pens of nearly every commentator, people will feel they have more perspective and that, in the heat of the media frenzy, Lott's comments were blown out of proportion. I mean, he never outright said "I hate black people," right? So public opinion will be behind giving him a strong scolding, but not removing him from office.

If the story doesn't blow over on its own, Republican spinmeisters will unveil a new talking point. "The Democrats," they'll say, "are taking one little comment and blowing it out of proportion as a divisive political tactic. Racism is bad, but we need to put this little fiasco aside and move forward." The media, eager for a fresh angle on the story, will lap it up. Liberal commentators will be put on the defensive. Conservatives will reconcile themselves to the idea that punishing Lott isn't worth jeapordizing the strength of the party, and he's been humiliated and forced to apologize enough, and besides, he's not currently proposing policies any more racist than opposing affirmative action (noting correctly that opposing affirmative action is not necessarily racist).

Wow. I think that's more footnotes and parenthetical statements than I've ever used in a post before.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:58 -- link --

VVV I was excited to see that I'm the internet's #3 resource for "Strom Thurmond joke". But then I noticed that only 9 sites come up in Google. How can there be such a dearth of Strom Thurmond jokes on the internet?
posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:34 -- link --

18.12.02

VVV

Harvard Advertises For People Abducted By Aliens "The whole notion of repressed memories has done a great disservice to the field," Dr. Clancy said. "Some people are prone to forget how, where or when a memory was acquired. They see a movie as a kid and remember the events, but don't remember whether they saw it or it actually happened to them." - via Matthew Yglesias

The idea of Harvard studying alien abductions is cool, but I was struck by the quote I pulled out, halfway through the article. It reminds me of how I remember my early childhood. I have a few scenes in my head, pictures of what it was like living in Tionesta. But as I think about many of these memories more, I realize that I'm remembering myself in the third person. I can see my hair (it was just about white then) and the expression on my face. I have a vivid recollection of my dog coming back to the house with the headless body of one of our rabbits (it was attacked by an owl), who had escaped a few days before. The only problem is that I never saw Shane holding Ralph's body. The memories -- at least some of them, and who knows how many others -- are constructed based on stories I've been told, events whose structure I recall or can figure out, or photographs I've seen. I can't tell you what my first real memory is.

Maybe that's normal, or maybe I've just repressed the memories of alien abductions.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:55 -- link --

VVV The prospect of effective fire management is daunting. These days most people have accepted that total fire suppression in forests and other environments is neither possible (catastrophic and uncontrollable wildfires will eventually happen) nor desirable (for example, the health of the giant sequoia forests is declining because of fire suppression). But this leaves us with the question of how we ought to burn wild areas. Different management goals require different types of burning. Hazard reduction burning isn't ideal for logging or grazing, for example.

Now, let's say we're a national park, so we can agree our foremost goal in managing the environment is to preserve biodiversity. This still doesn't extricate us from the problem. Different species need different fire regimes. Some would be killed by intense fires, others need that heat to crack open their seed pods. Some need patchiness in order to recolonize burned areas, but unburned patches provide refuges for herbivores that can decimate seedlings. Some prefer to be burned every 3 years, some every 20 years.

The usual tactic is to try to imitate the "natural" fire regime. In some places it has been recognized that "natural" fire regimes haven't existed since the Ice Ages (when the environment was quite different), so there's an effort to resurrect premodern (often indigenous) fire practices. Yet how can any fire practice, no matter how authentic, meet the conflicting requirements I mentioned in the last paragraph?

Part of the answer is, I think, spatial variability. It was possible to favor one species in one area and another in another area -- and shift those favors over time --, and over the long run and the wide extent of the biome, it would all even out. You could burn one area every year and another area every 50 years. You could have giant fires some places and patchy ones other places.

In most areas, that strategy is no longer as viable. Wild areas are chopped up into little chunks, and we're trying to preserve a full cross-section of a biome in each little piece. Different fire regimes can't support each other. We're forced to look for a modernist truth -- one correct answer -- instead of a postmodernist one -- lots of decent answers making up for each others' shortcomings.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 15:51 -- link --

17.12.02

VVV

Bush Orders Deployment Of Missile Defense By '04 President Bush said today his administration will begin deploying a limited system to defend the nation against ballistic missiles by 2004. As a candidate, Bush promised to build an anti-missile shield, and earlier this year he pulled out of an anti-ballistic missile treaty to advance the plan. Today, he cited the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America as evidence that the country faces "unprecedented threats" and needs the anti-missile shield.

Let me get this straight. We're spending huge amounts of money that we don't have*, to build a system that doesn't work**, to protect us from a threat we don't face***.

* Thanks to the recession and in future years Bush's own tax cuts.
** Well, it works if the enemy shoots one missile and phones ahead of time to let us know where it's coming.
*** Terrorists don't use intercontinental ballistic missiles.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:57 -- link --

VVV The story I did about the shark photo hoax turned out to be National Geographic News's top story of the year.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:28 -- link --

15.12.02

VVV

This Xmas, Keep Your Religion To Yourself Religion is private. It no longer has a place in the common life. This is why I cannot complain any longer about being pressured to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." - via WitchVox

Normally I would never complain about people wanting to ban religion from the public sphere. Usually that argument is made as a weak and scurrilous accusation against people who oppose things like school prayer and posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings. But this article (as well as some of the comments at WitchVox) reminds us that there are people out there who really would prefer if everyone kept their religion in the closet.

To a certain degree I can sympathize. The public expressions of religion that we hear (and think) the most about come in two varieties -- proselytizing and theocracy. I don't have much patience for people haranguing others about how they need to be saved, and certainly there's no room for making strict shari'a the law of the land. But it's problematic to jump to the conclusion that we ought to act in a purely secular way whenever we're around others. If someone doesn't like another's public affirmation of religion (the writer seemed to have a real issue with religious headgear, for example), that's not the religious person's problem. In some ways it resembles the "keep it in your bedroom" attitude of people who don't like homosexuality, but can't think of any rational arguments against it.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 16:14 -- link --

VVV

At The Corner Of Free Speech And Hate The year Abe was born, I was attending a Midwest boarding school where I suffered overt anti-Semitism from some of my classmates. But I also suspected that the school itself was complicit. I felt unwelcome and inadequate. For years, I wondered whether I was just paranoid. Then, two decades after graduation, I was invited to return as a "distinguished" guest-lecturer. That was when I got a glimpse of my student file. There, on the outside jacket, was a Star of David and a tiny notation that suggested that perhaps in the future, local fathers might screen out such applicants. The note didn't upset me as much as it brought a sense of relief that my suspicions were being confirmed. If only I and others of my generation had had the opportunity to confront the authors of such notes. If only they had spoken their objections and aired their biases publicly. Why in the world would we now, in the name of speech codes, want to drive them back into the safety of their secret lairs? Speech codes threaten to take us back to the old days when prejudice was vented only in whispers between like minds. My own history has convinced me that a silenced bigot can do far more mischief than one who airs his hatred publicly. Even the most reviled of hate symbols, the burning cross and the swastika, are just that -- emblems of unspeakable evil. But their sporadic resurfacing has produced not waves of terror but waves of public revulsion, not Kristallnachts and lynchings but community rallies against racism. Hate speech need not be a precursor to violence. On the contrary, it can defuse tensions that could turn explosive. Hate speech can discredit nascent movements that might otherwise draw strength from authoritarian efforts to snuff them out. Intimidation invites intimidation.

This is an excellent article on why the right to free speech ought to trump protection from offensive speech. It's an argument I've made before, and it's what makes me concerned that Justice Thomas seems to have convinced the Supreme Court to uphold anti-cross-burning laws.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:19 -- link --