Maybe I was wrong being against the proposed blogger code of good niceness. I’m seeing it a whole new –– a whole special, new! — way!
Blogger code good, free speech sunny
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007
Posted in Blogophilia | 1 Comment »
The silent majority
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007
I am constantly impressed at the phenomenon of lurking on email lists and the roughly equivalent one of reading blogs without commenting. I realize that in fact most people do these things and do not contribute to discussions. It was the same in school; most people do not wish to speak up in class. Yet here you can do so anonymously. There is no grading. Still you remain, mostly, silent. And what I crave is your society. Connection.
You demur. I wish I had an ounce of that humility (others also wish I did). But the one thing I couldn’t stand in the old newsprint days was that They, by virtue of having a printing press, could say, and I had to just read.
Today was a good day for a humble blog — no, I’m no Ali Eteraz! — with about 700 unique readers. I got about 40 comments, also a lot, but it was from about 15 people. That ratio amazes me. You can say what you think! You can disagree with the writer! You can agree with the writer!
“Nope. No thanks, just looking. Go on.”
I guess it takes all kinds… mostly the other kind, in fact.
Posted in Blogophilia | 16 Comments »
I like good metaphors
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007
Sen. John McCain has been careening his Straight-Talk Express all over the highway in recent months, but late last week, he finally slammed it into the guardrail, plunged over the cliff, and went splat in the big muddy.
Kaplan’s a good writer, isn’t he? I always enjoy it. He’s especially good at finding damning contradictions, which he does in that McCain piece in Slate — where McCain both says, in effect, “Wining isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” and “Unless it’s too politically painful to keep at it till you win.” A fair criticism. Just remember, though — Kaplan loves criticizing Republicans so much, he’ll contradict himself as well in doing so.
So take this latest slam on John McCain with a grain of salt, and by all means enjoy the wreckage. But keep your own eyes on the road!
Posted in Medialites, Politics and Poker | 3 Comments »
Escherblogging
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007
Mickey Kaus is terrible with permalinking so I am just pickup this entire segment of Kausfiles from last Friday and reprinting it here based on some moral or legal right thing. It is just such a geshmakeh example of inside-baseball, personal, navel-gazing, self-referential, inside-out, yummy catty witchy blogging, featuring one of my favorite targets, the Unhinged One himself:
Howie Carr condemned Imus? If memory serves, Howie Carr’s radio show was the most offensive radio program I’d ever heard when I listened to it during the 2000 New Hampshire primary–more offensive, in terms of ethnic insensitivity and general sneering inhumanity than anything I’ve seen
attributed to Imus’s broadcast.
**–In 2004, I appear to have blogged that when I tuned in again that year, “Carr’s show wasn’t vile anymore.” I defer to my 2004 self on that issue. Still. …
Update–Sullivan Unhinging Watch: I thought the above post was pretty clear about Carr’s show: Vile in 2000! Not vile in 2004. Andrew Sullivan seems to believe this is a contradiction, and proceeds to condescendingly defend me while soliciting similar forgiveness because he’s a “human being” and “blogging in real time” and therefore guilty of some “minor inconsistencies.” (Like ‘Yes, war!’ and ‘Sorry, mistake!‘) No thanks. … P.S.: Sullivan declares the asterisked graf above was “subsequently added.” I forget, but think the whole thing was posted at the same time. … P.P.S.: What happened to “Faggot-Guy“? I thought I was Faggot-Guy. You just can’t rely on some people.
Oh, Mickey, on you I can rely! At least when it comes to Andrew Sullivan.
Posted in Blogophilia | Leave a Comment »
The Western World: “I grow fatigued”
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007
Mary Madigan writes, in a great post:
A few weeks ago, I was watching an original series Star Trek episode, “Space Seed”, which originally aired in 1967. The vision of the future in “Space Seed” assumed that by the 1990’s we would:
1. Have a reasonable space program
2. Have lived through a eugenics war
3. Have lived through a nuclear holocaust and an attempt by Ricardo Montalban to take over the world.
From what I’ve seen of science fiction from ’60’s, (and I’ve seen a fair amount) most
people assumed that we’d be living in some sort of nuclear-wasted mutant-populated dystopia by now.
It’s kind of funny to see how they got it wrong, but it’s not funny to see that they may have gotten some things right. Would the folks who made up the Greatest Generation have called an attempt to dialogue with fascists ‘realism’?
It’s hard to have any optimism on this point.
Posted in Ars Longa, Past is prologue, Stragety | 4 Comments »
Everything looks like a nail
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 16, 2007
When you’re a carpenter, of course. And when you’re a Second Amendment enthusiast — the real kind, not the mildly interested in the topic kind such as I am — every nightmare shooting is proof of how bad gun regulation is. But a smart guy like Instapundit?:
These things do seem to take place in locations where it’s not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns, though, and I believe that’s the case where the Virginia Tech campus is concerned. I certainly wish that someone had been in a position to shoot this guy at the outset.
. . . . And reader John Lucas, who works with a Virginia law firm, emails that Va. Tech is a “gun-free zone.” Well, for those who follow the law. There was an effort to change that but it failed: “A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly.” That’s unfortunate.
Glenn, Glenn, Glenn! College students are not cowboys or sharpshooters! What are you thinking? College students barely wear clothes and you want them packing heat and picking off crazed mass murderers? And professors? Give me a break!
I like the concept of “concealed carry” for streets… bars…. places where adults can get in trouble. (I’ve never touched a gun but I’m told they’re useful.) The empirical support for it as a policy is solid. But let’s not get ridiculous — implementing it here almost certainly would not have saved anyone today.*
Gun control doesn’t kill people. People kill people.
—
*Last clause added for clarity. I am not arguing for gun control. I am arguing against fantasy.
Posted in Americana, Lex scripta | 37 Comments »
Why hasn’t Keith Olbermann been fired?
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 15, 2007
Posted in Medialites | 77 Comments »
All things in “moderation”
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 15, 2007
Prisoner exchanges are a terrible idea for an obvious reason: They provide an incentive for future kidnapping. It’s even worse when you kid yourself, while engaging in this foolish strategy — the sort of thing you might do in order to try to compensate for, let’s say, launching a new war in Lebanon with the sole stated aim of recovering a prisoner, and not coming even close — that you are making “inroads” with “moderate elements.”
Lynn B. cuts right through the concept of “moderate Palestinians,” and that true rara avis, the “moderate Hamas” — a wild fantasy object of Israeli leaders who eat green eggs and ham on Yom Kippur and swear they are not men of superstition and boogety-boo:
It seems, according to one unidentified Israeli official, that there are now three separate elements fighting for control of Hamas: 1) the ones who want to pretend to think about conceding a few points re: Israel’s right to exist in order to appear moderate and thus gain concrete concessions of their own from Israel, the US and the EU; 2) the ones who want to stand firm on their “principles” and continue to reject every possibility of co-existence with Israel; and 3) the “most radical” ones, who were behind Cpl. Shalit’s kidnapping in the first place and have no intention of allowing any agenda other than their own to dictate his destiny.
Thus we can see how easily the veneer of a palestinian Arab “moderate” is concocted. That first group now looks pretty good in comparison to the second and third groups, although the distinction between the goals of the latter two is somewhat unclear. But what does this have to do with Shalit?
It’s what they are threatening to do to him that’s the problem, of course — and to the rest of us. But perhaps what’s worse is what we do to ourselves in lying so profoundly about the reality of the world out there.
Posted in Orient, Stragety | 1 Comment »
Johnny Hart Dead at 76
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 15, 2007
Johnny Hart, the creator BC and The Wizard of Id, has passed away. Creators’ Syndicate did a little tribute (hat tip to Batesline).
Hart was notable for a couple of reasons.
- His comic strips were not brilliant, though they were pretty good. But he had two of them running in a lot of papers — an extraordinary achievement.
- He was instrumental in changing the way comic strip artists and authors benefited from their own work: “Because of his commitment, syndicates no longer insist on ownership when they sign new cartoonists. He had revolutionized an entire industry, and empowered cartoonists to take control of their work and demand the freedoms they enjoy in their contracts today.”
- He wore his Christian faith on his sleeve. Today’s cartoonists are almost all blatantly political, but with the passing of Charles Schulz and Johnny Hart, expressly religious topics aren’t likely to find their way back into comics. Sometimes he stepped on toes — Jewish ones (oversensitive ones, in my opinion) and Muslim ones (perhaps not so oversensitive, actually, based on this story — scroll down), but it was remarkable that he got away as much as he did.
It’s just comics, but I once wanted to draw and write comics and as a child I drew and dabbled quite a bit; one of my high school and college friends grew up to do just that (of course he blogs too), and I envy him a little. I’ll miss Johnny Hart a little, too.
Posted in Americana, Ars Longa | 6 Comments »
Floodwaters in Memorial Park, Passaic, New Jersey
Posted by Ron Coleman on April 15, 2007
Floodwaters in Memorial Park, Passaic, New Jersey
Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman.
Those trees on the right are not supposed to be in the water.
Mary Madigan is experiencing (and photographing) the same thing just a few miles away.
Posted in Suburbia | 8 Comments »
