the Greater Nomadic Council

It's Official

According to this prognosticating tool, John Kerry is guaranteed victory on Tuesday.

For Once, I Believe the Newspaper.

This headline ran in the Daily Iowan - the University of Iowa's student newspaper - this morning. The paper has since put an apology on its website (brief registration required), citing "editing errors at several levels". If you're interested in reading the second part of the article (which has no more to do with the headline than any article about Republicans), it can be found here.

ConservativePunk.com

Rocking out for Bush!

Conservatives for Kerry

To the list of conservatives endorsing Kerry, which already includes Drezner, Sully (which definitely surprised me), factions of The American Conservative and The Economist, we can now add the ultra-conservative Bob Smith.

In Bush's favor, he did pick up the endorsement of Europe's largest and most reliably dishonest, sleazy, and sensationalist newspaper--the Bild Zeitung. Maybe Bush can begin touting a new "Coalition of the Irresponsible".

The Religious Right and Inhumanity

Georgia Christian Coalition people really take the cake when it comes to hypocrisy and cruel intolerance. These are the same flaws that initially drove me from the Church and they will ultimately drive away the American people as well. The majority of religious leaders today, obsessing over homosexuality while ignoring or condoning violent imperialism, are a morbid caricature of the Christian tradition's humanism. A healthy dose of psychoanalysis and humility is what they need.

Tolkien Was Right

Hobbits did exist:

A 3ft tall 'hobbit' discovered on a remote Indonesian island has raised the extraordinary possibility that our human species might not be alone on Earth.

The female creature has been identified as a completely new member of the human race.

But, although she lived 18,000 years ago, scientists believe her relatives survived for thousands more years on the island of Flores.

Now they just need to find some Elf skeletons. Of course, we all know that won't happen since they all sailed off to the West at the end of last age.

Little Drummer Boy

Check out this video of an amazing 12 year old drummer.

UPDATE: Check out his homepage.

The Election...

I must say, I'm getting way too emotionally involved in the election right now.... One way to get really tense is to follow the vacillating poll reports. Electoral Vote (via Piraeus) is good, as is Slate's detailed scorecard. Both are updated daily. It looks as if the election will come down to 6 states--Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. Yet we're still fighting hard here in Colorado and the latest Zogby has Kerry ahead. Still, the state is probably out of reach unless Kerry has a good day. Apparently there is statistical reason to believe the new voter and minority turnout may yet make a big difference.

More Video Games

In other news, I played Fable for six hours today. I have two wives!!

The Wired Creative Commons CD

Wired has come up with some new (to me) sampling licenses that allow various degrees of sampling use and redistribution, and they've released a freebie CD with this month's issue that contains open-licensed tracks from a variety of (former) heavy hitters, including the Beastie boys and David Bowie. It's great to see the idea gaining some traction in the wider press - kudos to Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, and of course my own main main, Kembrew McLeod here at Iowa, for making major contributions to advancing this debate.

See, academics actually are good for something.

Here is a Torrent to DL the CD.

Here is the Wired web page devoted to it.

Buckley and Oil

Willam Buckley does a good job of debunking those who would say that oil is not worth dying for, or that protecting oil resources is far less important than we thought it was. And while this is true, it doesn't respond to what Teresa Kerry means by "greed for oil". The problem is not our rational acceptance of the fact that we need oil. The problem is the huge profits that oil brings and the "natural" desire to dominate such profits. Securing oil fields as a major initial objective in Iraq is defensible enough. More unsettling is the fact that the potential for individual profits was a driving force behind the decision to go in.

In today's economy, oil is not a national resource--it is a private one. Or at least that is the case in contemporary Iraq, until (if ever) the oil fields and their lavish profits are returned to the Iraqis. Even if it is true that most of the oil profits go back to Iraq, Iraqis will never stop resenting the Americans making money off their natural resources.

Buckley is correct that America should fight for oil if such resources are unfairly denied to us. But that is not the same thing as fighting for oil company profits.

Eminem's New Video

Via Salon, Eminem has put out a pretty powerful anti-Bush video for the song "Mosh". Kudos to white boy for risking the alienation of what must be a significant number of his fans in order to make such a timely statement.

I think the frustration and bitterness felt by many of us is eloquently expressed here. Considering the occasionally unsettling imagery of voting as a kind of riot on the streets or violent revolution, I think Eminem may succeed in stimulating certain voters who are more sympathetic towards violence and despise the Democratic party and Kerry as impotent and effeminate.

Artificial Intelligence Flies Plane

Well, ok, so the title is a little sensational, but this is still really cool:

A University of Florida scientist has grown a living “brain” that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.

The “brain” -- a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat’s brain and cultured inside a glass dish -- gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level.

. . .

When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”

To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane’s controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.

What I want to know is why the article keeps putting "brain" in quotation marks. Is there some minimum number of required neurons before it's classified as a brain? Do grasshoppers not have them? To me, this sounds like a human-created and trained brain.

Bias Alert

Here's a moderately interesting article on Slate about the author's experience infiltrating Red and Blue zones flashing the wrong colors. It's a good idea, but the application is flawed. He visits only two places in "Red America," neither of which are outlandishly so, but goes to numerous liberal spots, most of which are guaranteed to be full of almost militant liberals. Furthermore, he spends only 403 words on the forays into GOP-land, but 1082 on his Democrat invasions. If he wanted a true test, he should have worn some of his Kerry/Edwards garb in a few Deep South small towns. As the article's written, I got the distinct impression that it was purposefully structured to show the liberals in a bad light. Either this "journalist" is an incompetent hack or an obvious partisan (not that the two are mutually exclusive).

How Circuits Are Made

Have you ever had the slightest interest in how those things inside your computer and other electronic devices are created? Maybe not, but I guarantee that these pictures will change the way you think of circuits forever.

Election Night Guide

We've all been obsessively watching the swing state polls, but how to interpret the results on November 2nd? Which states must Kerry or Bush win? Which losses signal that one should abandon all hope? Contrapositive has the goods. The best line:

We will probably know who the next President is sometime before 11PM--or not until December.

I imagine I'll print this out and have it by my side while I'm watching the results come in... provided I can get out of class early that night.

Newsflash!

George Bush and John Kerry are cousins. Sadly, this is not a joke. Maybe we should just skip the preliminaries and go right back to monarchy.

Beowulf versus Dante

Slashdot has an interview with Neal Stephenson that is quite excellent. Here's an excerpt:

a while back, I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

This only serves to set up a fairly long meditation on the bifurcated nature of today's writers. He divides them into Beowulf writers and Dante writers. The former are like himself able to make money from their writing. They write popular, commercially successful works. The Dante writers are those that, like Dante, must receive patronage to pursue their writing; in our age that patronage comes from academic institutions in the form of tenure. I hope eventually to become part of the second group. Some have bemoaned the fact that many writers (and practically all poets) now work as academics as if that must necessarily lead to lesser poetry, but I see no evidence of that whatsoever. While it would be nice for poets to either be independently wealthy like James Merrill or able to support themselves from their sales like Robert Frost, that's simply not realistic in most cases. Poets are naturally bookish, academic folks anyway, so why not put them to some use as well? Like Stephenson I see little difference between tenure and patronage. Both could potentially influence an artist's work, but in practice that seems to happen very little. Instead, it provides the time, environment, and money to permit an artist to create something of little to no commercial value. While this is largely (or should be) uncontroversial, there are still a significant number who assume that poets should be Out There Living Life rather than gathering dust in libraries. I suspect most of these people are not poets.

The Case Against the Liberal Hawks

This Nation article by Anatol Lieven is arguably the most effective and comprehensive rebuttal of the liberal hawk ideology I have yet read in a magazine. It is time for the Bermans of the world to not merely berate the admin for failing to unleash an effective propaganda onslaught, but also to acknowledge that conflating the Baathists and Islamists as partners in "Islamofacism" was tragically mistaken.

I only wish The Nation and other magazines that opposed the war had mustered Lieven's argument, in this form, before the war. The analysis and historical work necessary to arrive at it existed, but the Left was seemingly too caught off guard by the neocon onslaught and too distracted by the hysteria over WMD.

Army "Eats Its Seed Corn."

Things are getting bad - anyone denying that the army is stretched too thin has one more cold, unfeeling fact to overcome.

For History Geeks

The New Republic is a magazine with a fascinating liberal/progressive history. In 1980, for example, they decided to endorse John Anderson for president, as a "rebuke" to Carter. That same year, the Libetarians were running strong as well. For their part, The Nation decided to endorse a far left progressive candidate who finished 5th. I can certainly understand why they preferred Anderson or other 3rd parties on substance, but I imagine both TNR and The Nation went on to regret their decision, regardless of how ineffective a president Carter was.

A far worse judgment (underlining, perhaps, how the emotional violence accompanying war gradually distorts the faculty of reason) TNR refused to endorse Hubert Humphrey in 1968 because of his stance on Vietnam, even though there was no palpable 3rd party alternative.

But these endorsements are not merely lessons on the folly of getting too caught up in 3rd partyism. TNR was also the scene of the philosopher John Dewey's "pragmatic" endorsement of Al Smith in 1928--where he detailed, with remarkable vision, the folly of voting Socialist and the deficiencies of Hoover. TNR also had a variety of views on the 3-way race in 1924 between Coolidge, Davis, and La Follette that was actually a more important race than many of us realize, as WWI reparations, prohibition, nationalism, and the post-Bolshevist discussion of socialism were all at issue.

I look forward to them continuing to put up past endorsements as a way of reflecting on rationales for voting and how they seem different in the light of history.

People That Shouldn't Vote

Early voting started today in Colorado, so I made mention of this to my students. There is a student in my class who is good-natured and likable enough, but has a tendency to run his mouth in idiotic ways. Typical was one observation--"Well, Germans just like to be in wars. When they're not at war, they're just not happy."

Today after I made the announcement, I overheard him saying to another student "well I just don't vote--it's a kind of principle."

I wasn't about to contradict him.

Indymedia FBI Shutdown

A few of the less active members of the GNC are heavily involved in Indymedia's Austin outlet. I'm sure they're already well aware of these events. The actual details are a bit unclear at this point, but the gist of it seems to be that the FBI collaborated with Swiss authorities in seizing the servers hosting about 20 nation's Indymedia sites, pursuant to photos of Swiss secret police at the 2003 G8 summit, which they had asked the FBI to help remove from a French Indymedia site. You can read more about this and sign an action petition here. The servers have been returned at this point, but what remains unclear, apparently, is exactly who ordered them seized. Updates will be available at the Indymedia homepage.

Better: Jon Stewart for President

Stewart did what all of us would love to do--let the hacks over at Crossfire know that mindless spin does not productive discourse make. What was once an interesting face-off between the likes of Pat Buchanan and Mike Kinsley has degenerated into the lameness of Begala and Carlson and the repulsive negativity of Novak and Carville. Americans deserve better.

Video here

Some gold....

STEWART: Yes. You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don't you think that, for people watching at home, that's kind of a drag, that you're literally walking to a place called deception lane?

And I believe the Kerry guys believe President Kerry would do a better job. But what I believe is, they're not making honest arguments. So what they're doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

John Kerry for President

The New York Times gets it just right

Rove's Dirty Tricks

As the debates only helped Kerry, many observers expect to see Rove break out his traditional bag of crunch time dirty tricks in the next few weeks. Josh Marshall began a Karl Rove Dirty Tricks Watch writing:

Well, now that we've had the primaries, the convention, and the nail-biting debates, all that's really left now is the Karl Rove dirty tricks portion of the campaign, right?

. . .

It'll be like a 'where's Waldo' thing: Karl Rove Dirty Trick's Watch. (For examples, see the Green piece.) Who will be able to spot Karl's dirty tricks first? Who has the sharpest eye? Sit back in your seat. Get out the popcorn.

Today he announces we may have our first entry:

A nasty flyer has turned up in Tennesse politics which depicts a handicapped athlete running on a track with George Bush's face pasted on.

The text reads:

Voting for Bush is Like Running in the Special Olympics -- Even if You Win, You're Still Retarded.

The Traditional Values Coalition and other right wing operations in the South jumped on this fast alleging that Tennessee Democrat Craig Fitzhugh's office, which shares space with the Kerry/Edwards Campaign, was distributing this flyer.

Naturally, the campaign has vociferously denied this. They have no need for such a campaign nor does Kerry, despite being a politician, seem likely to stoop so low. Even if he were, it would make no sense considering the momentum is already on his side. Nevertheless, it leads me to ask: how can people support a candidate knowing that someone as unscrupulous and diabolical as Rove runs the campaign? Isn't there some proverbial phrase about birds of a feather? Surely Bush is well aware of Rove's modus operandi which must mean he endorses such dishonest, shameful tactics. Furthermore, such willingness to engage in dirty tricks implies that winning is the only thing that matters to such people. The means justify the ends. There is no concern for basic integrity or honor. Given that many of Bush's supporters consider themselves and Bush eminently (or, at least, striving to be) moral, how do they reconcile this to his history of Machiavellianism? Even if this particular instance turns out not to be Rove's handiwork, the mere fact that no one would be surprised if it were implies a clear knowledge of his penchant for such.

Kerry 3, Bush 0

Slate has two good articles on the debate. The first one ends with this:

I wasn't surprised when the instant polls showed Kerry winning the debate handily. I bet Bush wasn't, either. All night long he looked like a pitcher who knew his stuff wasn't working and was stuck out there, alone on the mound in front of millions of people, with no idea what to do next. Now he's given up four runs and the lead. But he's still got the home field. And he's got half an inning—the bottom of the ninth—to turn things around.

Read them both.

Little Leeches of Subtlety

Henry James, in his short story "The Figure in the Carpet," calls literary critics "little demons of subtlety." Even though he means it disparagingly, I think the positive implications of the phrase are quite right. The variety of readings and the insights into a work they provide greatly enriches your experience of the work while allowing you to consider how and why you may disagree. In other words, rather than wasting time adumbrating meanings that have already been more clearly and deeply explained than you are likely to be able to do on your own, you can move on to the more elusive and difficult nuances of a text. As one who once was suspicious of reading too much criticism, I find now that I truly love it. Of course, I still avoid reading any criticism until after I've already read the work myself and thought sufficiently about it so that my opinions won't be entirely informed by another's reading.

Something struck me today as an essential characteristic of most (if not all) criticism that led to this post—it's all parasitic. The scholar or critic explains some minor point about a work that hadn't been noticed before and finds themself endlessly cited from that point on as a near permanent part of the constellation of criticism surrounding the particular poem, novel, or what-have-you. Even in the case of truly brilliant and erudite critical work, the critic's noteworthiness hinges upon that of their source's. It's an odd and obscure immortality they seek. Nevertheless, the work is worthwhile and incredibly useful to us poor, confused students. I don't mean to denigrate the critic's efforts at all, but in most cases they're still only leeches. All hail the mighty author!

Fact-Checking the Debates

Kevin Drum has a review of how well various news organizations fact-checked the last debate. He also attempts to quantify the number of lies and their seriousness for both candidates. Guess who loses.

Dred Scott

Confused about Bush's Dred Scott comments in the debate? Apparently, that's just code for Roe v Wade.

Michael Ledeen's Intellectual Genealogy

Via Matt Y, here's an enlightening Boston Globe profile on everybody's favorite warmonger. It's hardly surprising to read he is an admirer of Machavelli. But I was certainly surprised to see he was once a member of the Social Democrats, U.S.A and actually studied with (the excellent) historian George Mosse. Ledeen went on to write a book on how Gabriele D'Annunzio--a poet, proto-fascist and all around charismatic guy--"helped invent modern politics". Money quote (below):

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Mosse studied the manner in which fascists won mass support not through their ideas but through mastery of public spectacle. In addition, he traced the roots of fascist culture deep into European history. At the heart of Mosse's methodology was a commitment to historical empathy, to "seeing fascism as it saw itself and as its followers saw it."

Ledeen adopted Mosse's methodology, but used it to draw a quite different conclusion. A lifelong internationalist and socialist, Mosse always looked at nationalism with an outsider's eyes. By contrast, Ledeen displayed an activist's interest in deploying sacred nationalist mythology for contemporary political purposes. For Ledeen, early 20th-century European mass politics, rooted in a half-millennium-old cultural legacy, could serve as a wellspring for reinvigorating contemporary middle-class nationalism, particularly in the United States.

As opposed to the Jewish émigrés who were generally deeply committed to an internationalist order in the wake of WWII, Ledeen seems to fit into the pattern Jewish neocons of the next generation--raised in left-leaning homes (though in Ledeen's case, it seems to have been a more religious family), going into academia or leftist political life, and eventually joining the nationalistic neocon movement championed by Irving Kristol in the 80s.

Some more interesting quotes...

Any discussion of America and human rights must begin with the recognition that this country was created in a revolutionary period and that the democratic revolution -- of which America is but one element -- is, by its nature and of necessity, universal," Ledeen declared. ". . . It is crucial for us to remember that the 18th-century revolutionaries and statesmen who created this country recognized that it is impossible for [democracy] to flourish if it is limited to a small corner of the world. The revolution, in other words, must be exported."

"All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .," Ledeen declared. "What we hate is not casualties but losing."

I am compelled to wonder--what are the real origins of this sort of militancy? Granted, the US did emerge in a revolutionary era and some of the founders would have liked to export the revolution, but can it really be argued that the necessity of US style political revolution applies to every culture and every historical period?

Indeed, Ledeen's rhetoric makes me think of another historic period. When Ledeen speaks about war and warlike cultures, we behold the sort of jingoistic talk that, historically, was mainstream in America during the pre-WWI era, when it (largely as a result of Social Darwinism) was fashionable throughout the Western world. It seems the same discourse has lurked within the intellectual world throughout the 20th century, ready to spring when revolutionary or violent moments arrive. We can only hope the National Review, formerly under Buckley's relatively civilized guidance, has not completely succumbed to this sort of logic.

Elfriede Jelinek's Nobel Prize

In a surprise decision that amazed even the author herself, the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Whether or not she deserves it is beyond me, since I have never read her work. The only thing I have ever seen is the French film based on her novel "The Piano Teacher", which was disturbing but definitely worth watching.

The award has generated so little press that the first I heard of it was via a hateful and inaccurate (at least concerning Gunter Grass) Weekly Standard hatchet job. The writer, Stephen Schwartz, points out that Jelinek has recently written a play critical of US nationalism and that Jelinek was once a member of the Austrian Communist party. The Nobel Committee claims they were more impressed by the radical social critique and concern for the exploitation of women demonstrated in her earlier books. This is certainly at least half true, but I imagine there is a political component to the award as well. After all, the Nobel Committee is appointed by the Swedish parliament, which is currently controlled by left of center parties. She is also the first woman to receive the award in 8 years, which must have been a factor, as Jelinek herself acknowledges. In any case, Schwartz's reaction is probably typical of right-wing literary critics in the US, given Jelinek's political affiliations.

For myself, I don't have a problem with the fact that the Nobel Prize will be given out with political considerations in mind--and I don't think Stephen Schwartz does either, judging by the fact that he judges writers according to their politics. The Nobel Commitee has to strive for geographical distribution, they have to consider various struggles going on in the world, and they have to make decisions about what sort of writing is relevant, important, and interesting--all of which involve politics. And most importantly, one of the characteristics determining the greatness of a body of work is its continuing relevance. So it's not really surprising that the award this year has a political, socially critical tenor, especially with regard to consciousness about violence. The dean of German literary criticism, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, says he's "overjoyed" about such a bold decision in favor of an "extraordinarily extreme and radical author".

To some extent, this sort of decision might be seen as a palliative, or a response, to certain academic critics who view the Nobel Prize as a hopelessly bourgeois award, based on political considerations, that tends to pass over genius in favor of what is safe. Nevertheless, when I asked members of my own department whether they had heard of Jelinek prior to the Prize, the answer was a resounding no, although Der Spiegel reports that she has a certain cult following in the German-speaking world. Still, if avant-garde stylistic tendencies were the main consideration, then they could have gone with another Austrian, Thomas Bernhard, instead. Undoubtedly, political and strategic considerations went into the award.

Yet as far as I'm concerned, the very fact that the award is a non-story speaks to the folly of awarding the Nobel Prize to a little known avant-garde writer. I actually remember reading Ranicki a few months back, answering the question of what authors he felt were worthy of the prize, and whether German authors were among them. He said he didn't think a German had a fighting chance. It was his wish that the award would go to John Updike or Philip Roth, who obviously deserve it. It seemed a likely scenario, since no American has won since Toni Morrison in 1992.

Not only do both of these writers deserve it, but giving the award to either of them would constitute a real story--both here in America, but also abroad thanks to hard working translators and their (especially Roth's) popularity in Europe. Consider for a moment what a breath of fresh air a lively discussion of Philip Roth's work would be for this country--a body of work that encompasses the entire history of America since WWII and has dealt with the implications of psychoanalysis, modern notions of sexuality, political violence, Zionism, Utopianism, the position of the Jewish-American, the 60s and their aftermath, political correctness, identity politics, and so on. Roth may not be stridently or publicly anti-war like Jelinek, but the fact is, that's not what this country (and by extension the world) needs right now. No conservative is going to read Jelinek because she won the Noble Prize if all they know about her is her politics. When it comes to politics, literature is more helpful as a means of stepping back and having a discussion about who we are, how we came to be what we are, and whether the kind of moral, spiritual and psychological strategies we use actually work, which is the exactly the kind of discussion Roth and Updike's work could engender.

I can't get inside the minds of the Swedes. I just wish they would consider the political implications of the Prize more gravely, especially in a time when a Noble Prize for an American is long overdue :)

Downtime Notice

The site may be down for a little while tomorrow as our illustrious admin replaces some heatsinks and fans on the server. Maybe. If the site's unavailable, that's why. If not, expect it in the next few days.

Lateblogging the Debate

Yes, that's right, lateblogging - it's the new thing, haven't you heard? Anyway, I don't have much to add to what seems to be a confusion of varying opinions clustered tightly around "it was a draw." Bush was scary to me, yelling a lot, but to many people I'm sure that comes across as strength. Kerry, once again, looked mad presidential.

But the most entertaining part to me was the array of high-quality Bush slip-ups and malapropisms, some of which seem to have slipped through the blogosphere's usually hair-fine net. I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that Bush called Kerry "Kennedy" when talking about his liberalism - it might remind a few people about what liberalism once meant in this country, but for most I'm sure it was just confusing. I also loved that Bush referred to terrorists and extremists as "haters" - shake 'em off, Georgie, just shake dem haterz off!

But the real doozy came close to the end, and I'm so shocked at its relative absence from the blogosphere that I'm tempted to think I imagined it. I may not be exactly right on the wording, but I swear to god essentially these words came out of Bush's mouth:

"If John Kerry had been President, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and the world would be a better place."

Yeah, I think that just about sums it up. Please tell me that I'm not just making this up, and that someone, somewhere, is making (cheap, petty) political hay out of it.

25 Memorable Games

Gamespy is running its 25 Most Memorable Games of the Past 5 Years and I'm very happy to see that their number one is the same as mine.

Patrick Neate's Where You’re At - Peer at a Rap Planet

I felt I owed this book a brief word or two, since the publisher sent me a reader’s copy- the first free thing I’ve ever gotten from my blog, and from one perspective the worst-considered five bucks the promoter could’ve spent. But while I don’t have “influence” or “readers,” I did enjoy the hell out of this book, so he got that right at least. Basically what it is is a world hip hop tour, focusing on hip hop culture in Japan, France, Brazil, Italy, and South Africa. First off, it’s truly awe-inspiring to really think about the impact that the obscure innovation of putting a breakbeat under somebody boasting about themselves has had. I doubt it’s possible to have a greater sense of self-satisfaction than what guys like Flash, Doze, Rammellzee, Fab Five Freddie, and what have you must feel every day when they wake up: “Holy shit, I changed the got damn world!” Most of us will never experience that feeling, but this book does a great job of giving us a view of the staggering scope of their collective accomplishment.

It’s also really useful historically, because it breaks down the importation of rap into all of these places really well, lists important artists and important singles, and provides a lot of good sociological analysis of the situations in each of the locales. The situation in Rio is certainly the most inspiring, as the AfroReggae collective works to reverse the tide of desperation that overwhelms Rio’s drug-war ravaged illegal slums, called favelas. But my own personal interest has long been in Japanese hip hop – not because it’s particularly artistically interesting, but because every bit of it I’ve seen has an amazing and fascinating superficiality to it. In one way, Neate confirms my prejudices here, in a sense. He describes in particular an exchange with a Japanese fan in which he asks the guy repeatedly why he listens to hip hop, and the guy responds that he has to “keep it real,” and that he’s there to “represent,” and can’t seem to come up with anything more substantive.

But in another sense (and this is the most important thing I got from this book), there’s possibly more political significance to hip hop in Japan than in, say, the United States – in a society that is far more hidebound and, believe it or not, even more racist than the United States, listening to black music, dancing with black G.I.s, and wearing freaky-looking baggy clothes are all actually significant acts of rebellion, in much the same sense that being a long-haired hippy or wearing bell-bottoms could be read as inherently resistive in the sixties. Neate is pretty astute in these sorts of readings.

But it’s also just a fun book to read. It’s told in the fairly standard nineties/00’s style in which the narrator becomes part of the story, and while I often find this annoying, Neate does allright, using his narrative form to smoothly link together his various historical overviews and pithy observations. This isn’t really a book that transcends its hiphop-ness to become something that I’d recommend to just anyone, but if you’re a head, it’ll be enjoyable – I give it the sleepnotwork seal of approval.

Goddammit - I think Cheney won.

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure Cheney came out ahead in tonight's vice-presidential debate. It wasn't the kind of "Ooh-you got served!" sort of thing that Kerry got, and, granted, the fact that he didn't sprout horns and a tail onscreen pretty much put him ahead of where I expected. But over and above not revealing himself as a minion of Baal, he actually came across as fairly reserved, policy-oriented, and clear, while Edwards, doing his lawyerly thing in the unconducive sit-down format, often seemed overslick and overzealous, to say nothing of his frequent flubs and stammers. Charming, sure, but presidential? Not in the least.

The evening's one moment of what could almost be called nobility went to Cheney, too, who calmly declined the opportunity to vigorously defend the administration's anti-gay marriage policy, which Cheney himself, despite some superficial and unconvincing rhetoric about supporting the President's decisions, doesn't seem to truly believe in (for obvious reasons). In contrast, it was hard not to read Edwards' overzealous praise of Cheney's love for his daughter as a backhanded and calculated maneuver to make the situation explicit.

It wasn't a pretty debate by any means, and the power of Edwards' closing statement was a reminder of exactly how much a lectern format would have shifted the balance of rhetorical power. But I think my opinion of Cheney actually improved somewhat - as often as he's painted as a the power and reason behind the current corrupt throne, it's easy to forget that he belongs to a branch of pre-Religious Right conservatism that, for all its flaws, is policy more than rhetoric-oriented.

Still though, when he started talking about El Salvador as a model for democratic reform, it was a firm reminder that, with or without the pointy accessories, he's still a squat, hateful little demon. Also, he did flub one small, but funny, thing (NSFW due to porn ads).

Blogger Reactions to the Debate

To save you all the effort of looking these things up yourself, here's a roundup of reactions.

Daniel Drezner liveblogged the debate and thought Kerry's performance got much stronger as the night wore on.

Andrew Sullivan declare Kerry the winner by a small margin, saying he looked confident and calm.

Josh Marshall thinks Kerry made a good start, but must follow up well to gain any advantage.

Pejman, however, thinks it was a draw and, hence, a win for Bush.

Kevin Drum points out that the immediate reaction is a resounding win for Kerry.

RP thinks Bush did better because Kerry didn't provide enough specifics for his taste.

Downto thinks Bush looked distracted and fatigued and gives Kerry the win.

Today's War Room on Salon has a further roundup as well. I won't link each individual post, since there are quite a few, but I definitely recommend it.

There are plenty of other reactions out there, but this seems to be a pretty representative group from both sides of the aisle.

Debate Verdict

I personally thought the debate was a resounding victory for Kerry, but of course, my assessment doesn't ultimately mean a damn thing, since it's based on the candidates' respective ability to deploy things like "facts" and "arguments." As both Mallarme and the Daily Show have pointed out, the undecideds the debates are aimed at are, generally, uninformed morons, and so what really matters is overall appearances and general impressions. Gee Dubs, by trotting out his roughly 3 (three) points repeatedly, played strong to the moron vote just by appealing to their fellow feeling. Kerry, on the other hand, surprised me by coming off as truly presidential in a way that I hadn't conceived him before: forceful, clear, and telegenic.

But as irrelevant as it is, I think a few brief points about the debate's rhetoric are in order. Bush's overarching point (and I'm working from memory here, so don't get mad) was that Kerry's doubts and reservations and complexities were the single greatest threat to our success in Iraq and in the world. Though the "f-f" word didn't come out, he repeatedly threw back at Kerry the "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" quote, asking as he did so whether that sentiment could possibly leave room for Kerry to be a trusted CIC in Iraq. I don't think that, rhetorically, Kerry did a great job of rebutting this (and again, I'm reading for the moron vote on this one) - the best he had was the bit about the "Pottery Barn" rule (though it doesn't quite fit since, if you get technical, while we certainly broke it, both plenty of our soldiers and plenty of Iraqi innocents have bought it).

It should go without saying, though, that as policy, Bush's point represents a fundamental, and startlingly contemporary, misunderstanding. Certainly, image is important, and it does effect our relationships with other countries. I can certainly imagine a situation where the U.S. did not want to appear "weak" in the context of an ongoing, focused struggle with a unified enemy - say, the U.S.S.R. But it is not the President's primary job to make sure the actions of the nation appear unified, forceful, and carefully planned - it's his job to make sure that they actually are all of those things.

It's easy for those of us who know how to do things like follow extended arguments and conceptualize the ideas in multi-clause sentences to see that John Kerry has a stronger and more concrete plan for the future, and that it is actually his plan, or at least one that he understands and agrees with. But George W. Bush managed to not engage with those horns at all tonight - instead, he contended that the most important difference between himself and John Kerry is that he, Bush, would be better able to appear right, and sure, and determined. To whom? Certainly not to the international community, who see Bush as either an utter buffoon or as outright evil. Certainly not to a large proportion of Americans themselves, who share these opinions to varying degrees. To our enemies, I suppose, who will, based on the firm set of his lips, forget that he allowed their leader to go free, and created for them the greatest symbol for recruitment since Israel. Determination will see us through - well-constructed policy is, apparently, of at best secondary importance.