centercannotstand

I came across a snippet mentioned in passing in Casey Jones' political humor column in the Trib from Sunday. Some googling brings up this:

In an e-mail sent Wednesday to the 168 voting members of the committee, RNC member James Bopp, Jr. accused President Obama of wanting “to restructure American society along socialist ideals.”

“The proposed resolution acknowledges that and calls upon the Democrats to be truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party,” wrote Bopp, the Republican committeeman from Indiana. “Just as President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism.”

The resolution, proposed by a committeeman from Washington state, was agreed upon by 16 RNC members from 16 different states and is part of a petition asking RNC Chairman Michael Steele to set a special committee meeting next month when the state chairs meet in Washington, D.C.

I think it's kinda funny. The Republican leadership has been attacking their own moderates because they've moved so far right that anything too close to the realms of sanity looks like the October Revolution to them.

I'd be all for the name change if the Democrats even halfway resembled democratic socialism. (Which covers a number of diverse viewpoints, all a far cry from the imagined resurgent Stalinism the Republicans think to define their goodness by their opposition.) In realms closer to reality and fair judgment, the Democratic Party is pragmatically centrist and has been so for a long time. They play host to some people with real leftist views who don't have anywhere else to go if they want influence, but most of these people are successfully corralled to pose no risk of actually upsetting the status quo. If there was Hope in President Obama's campaign, I held some glimmer of hope he might be one of those who successfully broke free, but I don't think that's really likely anymore.
Pragmatism means Democratic Party will occasionally be on the right side just because being seen to be right can be good for the party. So for example, in the sixties they placed a bet on which way society was moving and shed their Southern Dixiecrat stronghold to attract black voters. Likewise, though I hope they've underestimated the pace of social change, they've mostly aligned themselves with the right side of the gay rights movement.

Of course the Republican Party has not usually been less pragmatic. The current Republican leadership is blinded by devotion to the holy trinity of neoliberal economics, neoconservative foreign policy (and those two are very intimately linked), and evangelical Dominionist social values. This is a temporary holdover from what probably was a very safe bet in the later decades of the 20th century. The Clinton Presidency likely should have been an alert that the third point of that trinity wasn't as safe a bet as they thought, but Clinton didn't vary much from the first two points, and Republicans missed the lesson. And having the 9/11 card to play during Bush II meant they didn't think they needed a lesson. This all will change, and the Republicans will very likely return in coming years once they find a new center. (And finding a new center won't necessarily mean "moderate" just different from what they are now.)

Pity, I'd rather like to see the Republican Party weld itself inescapably to the wrong side of something like gay rights and be ground to nothing by the course of history. Ideally something would lead the Democratic Party to schizm and implode at about the same time and then maybe we can ban parties from the political process.
Change; I can always Hope.

notheOTHER(evilanduncool)skinnybitch

As a gesture of open-mindedness and a sign of how much I love and respect some conservatives I was interacting with online, I offered to read Ann Coulter's Treason.

I tried, really I did. No, I didn't finish. I read some of each chapter, I flipped around trying to pick up threads of meaning, I scanned the index and read anything related to topics I knew or found interesting, I read her conclusion chapter. The phrase 'rhetorical storm' comes to mind, though that implies something a good deal more orderly than what is found here. Most of the statements are at a tangent to, or utterly incidental to, any facts she happens to cite. Even if every fact cited is correct, I can't think of her as an honest writer. Everything is... spun just so.

Coulter writes to give the ignorant and belligerent a sense of justification. This isn't a work meant to persuade anybody, it's intended to draw in people already sympathetic to her view and take them on an emotional fairground ride pointing out who they should love and who they should hate. Sweeping a variety of liberal, Democrat, (no those two are not the same and only coincidentally overlap) and perhaps even a handful of actual socialist and other statements together, she paints a picture of a monolithic force of evil that True Patriotic Conservatives Like Her and You can define their goodness by their opposition.

I count it as self-evident that you can't assume you're so obviously the good guy that all of your acts can be simply justified by that foundation. Coulter does not agree here, "Republicans proceed from the assumption of America's virtue. Democrats do not." This is apparently proof of Republicans' moral superiority in her version of the universe, never mind the fact that I know several Republican voters and self-described conservatives for whom it's not true. There's the "patriotism" (really nationalism, per Orwell) which says "we are absolutely the greatest," and there's the patriotism which says "we should and can be better." Coulter puts herself firmly in the former, and considers you an America-hater if you fall into the latter.

preludefluff

Today, I was getting ready to leave work, about to pull my non-work shirt on over my work shirt, when I noticed a single strand of Milky cat fur inside the collar. I just stared at it a minute, wondering what to do. Then some damn stupid customers needed attention so I clocked back in and helped them.

I couldn't see the cat hair anymore when I got back.

I actually did a kind of daily diary during the last days of my catgirl's life. I'm not going to post them straight, but I will write something up based on them and share it with you, because I think I need to.

Stay tuned.

So it turns out getting my computer to hunt down every flac music file in my collection and encode an ogg version of it takes just under four seconds to type, and just over four days to run. It doesn't slow down basic web surfing at all. I used to think typing on the command line was something one tried to get away from in computers.

On something of a whim, Tuesday, I drove up to the capitol and sat in on the hearing for HB 288, to allow cohabitating unmarried adults to become foster and adoptive parents. It got shot down, of course. Whaddaya expect? I didn't speak for the audience participation bit, though maybe I should have. I noticed the speakers from organizations opposing the bill tried to bring in statistics on the allegedly greater volatility of gay relationships. Speakers for the bill generally tried to argue against these numbers, but I think they missed a valuable moral point in doing so.
It actually matters not at all how much more or less likely homosexual couples are to break up, or have abusive relations, or take drugs than heterosexual couples. (The speakers against were actually very vague on just how much more or less.) Suppose tomorrow someone published a clear statistical study showing left-handed people were more likely than right-handed people to suffer from mental illness. Or ethnic Italians more likely than ethnic Albanians to divorce. Or that Mormons were more likely than Baptists to let their kids have too much ice cream and too little exercise. No one would actually believe that therefore these demographic categories should be entirely cut off from adopting children, even if the differences were quite large. The DCFS has a whole vetting process in place specifically to evaluate these things on a per-family basis. (And however effective or ineffective it is, it's likely to be just as effective or ineffective for all demographic groups.) An essential moral principle of America's progressive values is that you don't restrict someone based on their broader demographic category. I regret not saying anything then (not having articulated this paragraph entirely on the fly during the open mic period.) I'll probably rework this into an LTE and a too-little-too late email to the State Representatives on that committee.

In other news, today I've started biking to work again. Had to dial the speed down a bit for my lazy delinquent legs. It's several hours later now and I'm not aching or tired from it. Hopefully I'll get back into some approximation of shape.

musikopi

So my current project is putting my music collection conveniently on my computer in FLAC format, since I picked up a hard drive that can hold that much a couple months ago. (Really, I consider myself fairly computer-savvy, but unlike many people interested in computers, I've mostly made do with hardware that was top of the line back in the final days of Windows 98.) I've been at it a couple weeks now, off and on, and I'm in the middle of 'E.' (I think 'D,' 'M,' and 'S' might make up nearly half my collection.) I find that, actually having the songs a mouse-click away, I've been listening more than when they're in a batch of CDs. Although Exact Audio Copy is still considered the best available ripping program, I've been using one called Rubyripper instead. EAC can work in Linux under WINE, but it and WINE look like Windows programs and I find their appearance jarring. Plus WINE makes for some processing overhead. An audiophile site I found says Rubyripper is nearly as good and I've taken to it. Like most Linux graphical programs, it's a frontend for a command line program. In this case cdparanoia. It's a bit slow going. It works by ripping each track multiple times (two by default, I set it to three), breaking it into chunks about 1/75th of a second long and comparing the chunks from different rips. It assumes anything that matches your preferred number of times is good, then makes additional rips for anything that couldn't match (I have it set to require four matches for anything that didn't work out in the initial three rips.) It's not a quick "rip some songs to put on the iPod before class" program, but for archiving it's pretty good. The only problems I've encountered are on CDs with hidden tracks (that is, audio information in the pregap.) For those (two so far) I have broken out EAC. It seems to struggle with them, too, but it does manage to rip them.

Speaking of copying music, a few weeks back I was playing pool when a really great bluesy rock song came on. I don't know how common my attitudes are but I can't treat music as only a background thing. If it's there it ought to be an occasional part of the conversation, so I commented on it, and then went up to the bar to ask what it was (something I actually do quite a bit at places that have music playing in the background.) The guy told me it was Janis Ian. So after some web searching I've downloaded some tracks off her website, where I also came across this great article against the recording industry's approach to copyright and digital restrictions. Do check it out (although I'm probably late to the party on this one.)

liketechnothrillers?

How about a real-life technothriller story with secret codes, international intrigue, and factionalism and personality conflicts in the face of a devastating global threat? It has 1337 haxxors, and a non-government, not-for-profit, adhocratic organization working for good. And the ending ominously warns, "it's not over yet."

From the pages of Wired

h8enoughforya

(Since the topic doesn't seem to be disappearing from the news...)

I say let the enemies of freedom have their short-lived victory in California. The last time it came to a vote, their side had sixty-something percent, this time they had fifty-something percent. In a few years gay marriage will come to popular vote again and they will lose.

Look for social conservatives to become more and more obviously desperate as they look around and realize that their whole philosophy is dead in the water if people born after 1970 take a liking to this whole democracy thing.

thecommunitynuke

Here's something they can stick in that huge pit in Sugarhouse.

http://www.dailytech.com/Miniature+Nuclear+Reactors+to+be+on+Sale+Within+5+Years/article13389.htm

? ...fail?

Hmm... interesting... Blogger seems to be a few minutes ahead of TribTalk.