Obsidian Wings

your Moby Dick Friday open thread

by liberal 'ahab' japonicus

The battery in the wireless handset of our phone no longer holds a charge, so I went to the local electronics store to pick up a replacement. Found the catalog with the models and the equivalent replacements, and in the spot where that battery should be, there was an empty space. The THB 101, there, THB 103, yep, 5 of them, the THB 102 (the fact that I now have the number memorized should be taken as foreshadowing) a little card marking its place. So, over the course of a week, I figured I would stop at a different branch and get it. And then maybe a different store. Last weekend, I had to drive to the country and I thought I would check there, where I assumed I would find it, because it would have been pushed out to the branch stores to make way for the newer batteries.

"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.

"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. 

You probably see where this story is going. Of course, I'm not going to buy a new phone just because a battery dies. My wife, just as if there had been a Mrs. Ahab, was saying 'maybe we should go online to find it'. But, just like Ahab, I had reached the point where I realized that this battery, hanging unsold on a rack, in its pristine, unopened package, was emanating pure evil into the world, and it was my task to find it and buy it retail. So I'm in Tokyo this weekend and with an afternoon free, I am going to rid the world of this curse. So if you hear of a foreigner being killed because a pile of old satellite dishes collapsed on him in Akihabara, you can tell the tale.

Feel free to note your own obsessive quests here.

 

MiniTrue and Bush's attempt at immigration reform

by Doctor Science

As the swallows return to Capistrano, so the Senate returns to immigration reform. Over at Balloon Juice, Kay reminds us what happened to President Bush's big attempt:

NYTimes:

The bill called for the biggest changes to immigration law in more than 20 years, offering legal status to millions of illegal immigrants while trying to secure the nation’s borders. ... Mr. Bush placed telephone calls to lawmakers throughout the morning, but members of his party abandoned him in droves, with only 12 of the 49 Senate Republicans sticking by him on the key procedural vote that determined the bill’s fate.

I followed the last immigration debate, and the politics were interesting. Obviously, Bush and Rove understood that alienating and enraging a voting bloc was stupid and short-sighted, but the activist conservative base ignored them and killed the bill.

This was brought home to me locally during that period, because LOCAL Republicans were convinced that a rabid, spit-flecked “NO!” response to all things immigration was a sure-fire political winner for them. I live in a conservative area and a good part of my local political gossiping includes dire warnings from conservatives that I (personally, I guess) have awakened either a silent majority or a sleeping giant. I heard the “you have awakened a sleeping giant!” warning often on immigration in that period.[1] They truly believed that the GOP stance on immigration was a political plus, and Democrats would be punished for Kennedy and others even suggesting a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. They believed that the GOP anti-immigrant stance would help them in the 2006 midterms. It was the first time I really understood how completely captured Republicans were by their base and their media echo chamber.

I was already thinking about this while writing about Fox News as the Ministry of Truth, because it was the clearest case I could recall of the Republican party leadership, especially business interests, being defeated by their voting base. What I don't remember is how Fox News presented it. Did the most popular voices on Fox support Bush's plan, or oppose it?

I'm really wondering if the GOP base -- the rank-and-file voters -- followed Fox News in opposition to Republican and business leaders, or if Fox was on the side of the leadership and the base was rejecting Fox, too.

Or, in Orwellian terms, do the proles follow where MiniTrue leads -- even if it's in opposition to the ostensible "leadership"? Or are there areas where the proles' opinions are so deeply held that even MiniTrue can't change them?

My sense as an outsider was that the anti-immigration GOP voters later became part of the Tea Party. What I don't know is whether they were following Fox, or whether Fox was following them -- or whether it's possible to tell the difference.

I'm not interested at the moment in discussing what's in the current plan, or what's likely to pass, or even what *should* pass, because right now it's all Congressional inside baseball.

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[1] Interestingly, when I google back to find out who was using this expression at the time, I mostly find references to the sleeping giant of the Hispanic vote. And in fact it seems to have happened: the Hispanic vote has moved away from the GOP since 2004.

Change is easy in 1984

by Doctor Science

Tom Edsall at the NY Times asks Can Republicans Change Their Spots? after the losses of the 2012 election.

The problem that faces business leaders pressing for reform is not just the normal reluctance of a political party to change. Instead, it is the fact that much of the Republican electorate, as presently constructed, is profoundly committed — morally and ideologically — to “traditional values.” You’re asking groups of people to change who were brought together by their resistance to change. Their opposition to change is why they are Republicans.

But as slactivist (Fred Clark) has been pointing out, conservatives are quite capable of changing their minds on their core issues: evangelicals used to be favor of contraception and they weren't initially opposed to Roe v. Wade.

Fred keeps being shocked, not that conservative evangelicals have changed their minds, but that they keep claiming that they *haven't* -- and keep re-writing history and their own memories to reflect that. We have always been at war with Eastasia, in fact.

Join the War for Peace! The message -- "Over There! So You're Safe Over Here!" -- fits seamlessly into contemporary American politics.

I don't know who made this poster, but it looks like something from LibertyManiacs.

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Fred assumes that the people who are doing this are lying: they lived through the history they're re-writing, they must know it wasn't like that. I think he's overlooking a lot of research showing how much memory re-writing is a normal human process. One thing I think Orwell got wrong is how easy this is for the leaders of the Inner Party as well as the Proles. That is, the Inner Party thinks we've always been at war with Eastasia, too. Objective truth doesn't stand a chance when it's up against self-image.

The greatest weapon forward-thinking Republicans have, in theory, is their version of Minitrue: News Corp, which includes both Fox News (the prolefeed) and the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is effectively the Inner Party organ, where the American business community gets its information and opinions.

Edsall says

If the conservative movement continues on its downward trajectory, the American business community, which has the most to lose from Republican failure, will be the key force arguing for moderation.

This will only happen IMHO if Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes agree. If they do, then I think they could get Republicans to change -- not by saying "change", of course, but by staking out a new position and saying over and over again that it's what they believed all along. "We have always been worried about global warming", "we have always wanted universal health care" -- I don't see why these should be any more difficult than "we have always been opposed to abortion" or "we have always liked MLK".

Immediately after the November election, I had some hope that Murdoch and his orcs associates would see the need for the Republican Party to adapt to long-term demographic reality, and would fire up Minitrue to start making it so.

One of the most discouraging recent developments, then, is what James Fallows calls WSJ harmonization:

that the WSJ's news coverage, which for decades has seemed independent from the Journal's editorial pages, is increasingly conforming with the editorial line. My China-beat buddies will recognize the term "harmonization" for this reining-in of unauthorized views.

When I first started reading the WSJ in 1980, I was startled to discover that the reporting was first-rate, objective, and not infrequently compatible with liberal interpretations, even while the editorial pages were slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. There was obviously a firewall in place to let reporters work without fear or favor from editorial, and the result was really solid, reliable reporting -- presumably because that's what the hard-headed businesspeople readers wanted.

Fallows is now documenting changes suggesting:

•Hypothesis: Under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and the editorship of Robert Thomson, the Journal is deliberately bringing its news operations into closer alignment with its editorial views.

•Sub-hypothesis: You don't see this shift in the line-by-line content of the stories themselves but rather in the headlines, subheads, and placement of the stories in the paper. That is, we're looking at editors' work rather than reporters'.

This is very worrying, because it suggests that not even Murdoch, Ailes, et al., are alive to the political realities. As Paul Krugman said about Mitt Romney's 47% speech, this is what happens when the Inner Party believes the prolefeed. As the WSJ is "harmonized" with Fox News, it will become harder for the business community to chart a course away from Republican Party orthodoxy, and to realize that maybe it's time to have always had a different approach to Eastasia.

Friday comeuppance open thread

by liberal japonicus

In the middle of a very interesting intro to a movie that was surreptitiously filmed inside of Disney World is this gem.

A famous case over the artist Thomas Forsythe’s “Food Chain Barbie” series is similar to this one. In the late nineteen-nineties, Forsythe created a line of artistic photographs of Barbie under attack by various vintage appliances. According to Forsythe, he wanted to “critique the objectification of women associated with [Barbie], and to lambast the conventional beauty myth and the societal acceptance of women as objects because this is what Barbie embodies.” His work made just thirty-seven hundred dollars, but Mattel sued for both copyright and trademark infringements. The courts threw out the complaints under a fair use and First Amendment rationale. The judges were so annoyed by the lawsuits that they awarded attorney’s fees of nearly two million dollars to the artist.

To be a fly on the wall of the office of Mattel's lawyers after that decision came down.

The military academies, abstinence, and rape culture

by Doctor Science

Bruce Fleming, an long-time English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, thinks that It's impossible to teach young officers-in-training what's wrong with unwanted sex when even consensual sex is against the rules.. I don't know if this would really make enough difference at the academies, but it definitely echoes something I've long thought: Abstinence is part of rape culture.

"No Means No" only works when you have the option of saying "Yes".

Before the 70s or so, the, ah, "joke" was: "If a lady says 'No', she means 'Maybe'; if she says 'Maybe', she means 'Yes'; if she says 'Yes', she's no lady." You should note that there is no room in this traditional formula for a lady to say "No" and mean it. That, right there, is rape culture.

This is another reason I say I'm a mom against abstinence. "Abstinence" as it's usually taught (and enforced) means that you (especially where you=female) may never say "Yes", you must always say "No". But in human practice that means "No" has to do duty for both "No" and "Yes", and that trick *never* works.

I don't know if Fleming's proposal would make a significant improvement to the military's toxic sexual culture, which goes well beyond the academies. But it would be a start.

The Heroism of Non-Violence

by Doctor Science

A MLK Day post, slightly delayed

One of the reasons gun fans give for wanting everyone to bear arms is that armed people are better able to resist or change a tyrannical, unjust government. In one of our recent discussions, for instance, someone said:

Not that guns are the way to fight every problem. Sometimes peaceful ways are much better, like MLK. But I think Nazis would have shot MLK and then gone about their business.

Along these lines, last week Rush Limbaugh said:

If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? I don't know, I'm just asking. If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?

John Lewis replied:

Our goal in the Civil Rights Movement was not to injure or destroy but to build a sense of community, to reconcile people to the true oneness of all humanity. African Americans in the ‘60s could have chosen to arm themselves, but we made a conscious decision not to. We were convinced that peace could not be achieved through violence. Violence begets violence, and we believed the only way to achieve peaceful ends was through peaceful means. We took a stand against an unjust system, and we decided to use this faith as our shield and the power of compassion as our defense.

Cut due to spoilers for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey movie:

Bird of the Week: Barnacle Goose

by Doctor Science

It's winter, which means Rare Goose Time in New Jersey if you can't get to The Shore. Finding rare birds has become much easier than it used to, as birders use online tools to show and tell about our discoveries. Earlier this week, I saw two Barnacle Geese, which were Life Birds for me (i.e. the first time I'd seen them in the wild, though they are quite common in captivity):

Barnacle Geese, seen in Twin Rivers, NJ. Photo by Larry Scacchetti, but I was there, too. Also seen the same day: Pink-Footed Goose, Northern Lapwings.

Two days later and a bit north, I saw this Greater White-Fronted Goose.

Another view of North Korea

by liberal japonicus

This view of the Richardson/Schmidt visit to North Korea, by Eric Schmidt's daughter, is well worth the time. The coming together of post boomer irony and the Glorious Leader is like the bringing together of matter and anti-matter.

What I'm doing this weekend open friday thread

via liberal japonicus

Tomorrow is the Daigaku Nyūshi Sentā Shiken, which is like a horrific lovechild of the SAT, GCE Ordinary and Advanced levels, and French Baccalaureate exams. (three parents? I said it was horrific) The Koreans, who always try to one up the Japanese in things like this, actually ground all planes during the administration of their exam, called the Suneung. That's what I'll be doing this weekend. Fun, fun, fun. How about y'all?

Whatcha reading Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Well, I had forgotten I had ordered this, a translation of the Iliad into South African English, so it was a surprise yesterday.

My favorite version of Homer is Christopher Logue's, and here is him reading this passage, based on Book 16, 633-637)

Try to recall the pause, thock, pause,
Made by axe blades as they pace
Each other through a valuable wood.
Though the work takes place on the far
Side of a valley, and the axe strokes are
Muted by depths of warm, still standing, air,
They throb, throb, closely in your ear;
And now and then you catch a phrase
Exchanged between the men who work
More than a mile away, with perfect clarity.

Likewise the sound of spear on spear,
Shield against shield, shield against spear
Around Sarpedon’s body.

Here is Whitaker's version:

As the sound of woodcutters goes echoing
through mountain kloofs, and is heard far away
so from the wide ways of the earth arose
the clash of bronze and well-made bullhide
shields, struck by swords and two-edged assegais

To be fair to Whitaker, he's writing a much more constrained translation that could be compared to the Greek text line for line, whereas Logue couldn't have given a flip about matching the lines.

I like how kloof (Afrikaans, from Middle Dutch, related to clove and cleft) and assegai (I think the more apt iklwa can't be pluralized) decenter the text and make me look things up, rethink images, lots of fun stuff.

But beyond that, I remember the first copy of War Music that I got, which is below, a paperback from Penguin. I'm not sure if Logue had approval of the cover, but it connects these two versions of Homer for me.

So what are y'all reading?