I watched Star Trek: Nemesis a few nights ago on video. The greatest fun was counting the cliches as they went by: a love scene with Riker and Troi, the personal heart-to-heart chat between Picard and Crusher, Data questing to discover what it means to be human, the obligatory final-desperate-act in the middle of a space battle (which in most recent Star Trek movies seems to mean ramming the Enterprise into some large object, either deliberately or accidently, it certainly gives the special effects artists something to do).
Salon has an excerpt from Dispatches From the Culture Wars by Danny Goldberg. He complains about the usual lack of will among the Democrats and their astonishing capitulation to the political manipulations of the Republicans. But then he links this all to a very interesting thesis: the Democrats have lost touch with young people, or as the subtitle says “How the Left Lost Teen Spirit”
One problem seems to be that many members of my generation, the generation now in power, have a basic resentment toward young people.
Bill Moyers recently spoke at the Take Back America conference in acceptence of a lifetime achievment award
Pessimism:
It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime. I’ll be frank with you: I simply don’t understand it – or the malice in which it is steeped. Many people are nostalgic for a golden age. These people seem to long for the Gilded Age.
Listening to the news today that another suicide bomber has attacked Israel and that another missile has been fired at the Palestinians made me shake my head and wonder whether we will ever see peace in the Middle East. The event prompted more thoughts about the fine differences between ambition and fanaticism. When do our beliefs and the actions we are willing to take to defend those beliefs become fanatic or even lunatic?
I read Thomas Friedman’s recent column, The real reason (and 3 others) for war on Iraq with some consternation. As I read it the logic seems to make a lot of sense. There is a very real truth that we cannot let the terrorists rule our lives. Sometimes force may be the only alternative. An exemplary demonstration of force may make terrorists think twice. And yet…
I was watching part of a BookTV interview with Noam Chomsky over the weekend and he was citing many examples of how America has acted badly in the world throughout its history.
For my notes and observations about the futility of argument some citations for Godwin’s Law: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
Jargon Dictionary As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Two examples:
From a meta-review of The Clinton Wars, published at Salon.
Even before the Lewinsky story broke, Murdoch’s outlets remorselessly hyped malevolent stories about the Clintons – from Whitewater to Travelgate – even after they were proven to be false. In 1998 and 1999, their slanted coverage of the impeachment drama performed a singular disservice to the truth. They have never corrected their numerous false reports, let alone apologized for them.
So I’m watching the online stream of the Bill O’Reilly, Al Franken and Molly Ivins dustup at Bookexpo America, which was aired on C-Span2 BookTV. In just the first 5 minutes Bill answers two phone callers by immediately going into ad hominem attacks on the liberal cabal, and then calls Todd Gitlin a “pinhead” academic. As the caller said this is O’Reilly’s constant M.O. - he talks right over the caller or whoever he is talking to.
From Wired an interesting take on a program called Denim, website sketching and design sofware. Also a project at MIT called Open Prototyping, on improviving program interfaces. GoboLinux: An alternative linux distribution that redesigns the unix directory tree. via an article at Kuro5hin: The Unix tree retought. Finally an article on the social software brouhaha.
Going crazy with links to interesting material from the crew at Corante. Renee Hopkins, of IdeaFlow, points to a very intriguing taxonomy of idea geneating methods.
I especially enjoyed the title of Renee’s post “Creative Taxonomic Lust.”