| Congress sux |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|04:58 pm] |
I've decided to stop reading anything that has to do with health care in the US, since it now seems all but certain that the "reform" will inevitably be just a measure forcing everyone to get health insurance one way or another, with little done to actually change our horrific system or offer a feasible alternative to it. Maybe they'll still make it illegal for insurance companies to deny care based on medical conditions...if we're lucky, but anything more than that means the Soviet Union has won, as is my understanding. Instead of hoping for a miracle, I'll just focus on emigrating to Canada or getting married to a Dutch or Swedish man for my long-term health care needs; like I said before, that's all more practical than expecting anything substantial from the politicians I did my part to vote into office.
On a related note, why does Congress keep up the pretext that they actually represent the interests of the voters in any shape or form? Let's change the nomenclature in Congress to reflect the obvious reality, so instead of, say, Senator Reid D-NV, let's have Senator Reid D-Health Insurance Industry. Another example: Barbara Boxer D-CA should instead be Barbara Boxer D-Defense Industry. Various representatives can openly stand for pharmaceutical congolmerates, wealthy religious special interest groups, the oil industry, and so on. It would at least make matters much clearer and far more simple for the vast majority of Americans. Plus, maybe if we drop the pretense, they'll be kind enough to let us have a representative of our own in Congress someday. |
|
|
| yes, a Simpsons reference... |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|09:19 pm] |
|
I think I know why I'm having trouble shopping around my new manuscript: "You make various threatening references to Orson Scott Card and at the end you repeat the words 'Screw Foucault' over and over again." |
|
|
| "I'm a Rageaholic, I'm addicted to Rageahol." |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|03:28 pm] |
I think the woman driving ahead of me who stopped her car in the middle of a two-lane highway just to have a chat with a friend who was out walking a dog expected the person behind her to do anything but refuse to budge, hold down on his horn, and scream at her and her friend. Well, I proved her wrong...DEAD WRONG.
(In case you're wondering, this wasn't a hellion teenager or college student, but someone in their 40s or 50s. You'd think that would be ample time to realize that there are other people on the planet.) |
|
|
| I am my own PR department |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|11:09 pm] |
The idea of putting sections from my Big Secret History Book Project up on a blog as I finish them has crossed my mind, especially now that I'm nearing the halfway point. Now I don't believe that digital media is going to completely replace print media and any Luddite tendencies on my part spring more from inclination than from ideology or deliberate planning - certainly I know enough about digital media to be confident that there are plenty of people more than willing to pay for a print version of online content, thus the question "Am I just giving away for free what I can make money on?" isn't really one I'm losing sleep over - so I don't really have actual beliefs leading me toward either direction, but I do have some practical pros and cons.
The various pros all boil down to the obvious: free exposure. There's also the sort of convenience the Internet offers aspiring writers through its very nature. Fishing for feedback would be a very simple matter and shopping the manuscript around (when and if it's done!) will be a little less painless. Perhaps even there will be enough of a buzz that offers of representation or publication will even come to me; it happens.
The cons, though, are worrying. For various reasons I'm uncomfortable with the idea of openly displaying a project that will not be anywhere near completed for a long time, especially before it's edited and critiqued by peers and others. This might be easier to swallow if it was a work of fiction or opinion-based non-fiction, but this will be a history written for a broad audience but under academic standards, and leaving a simple yet severe and excruciatingly embarrassing mistake in the text (which really is inevitable) open to universal scrutiny might cause enough harm that all the good would be moot. Also, while I won't be making any revolutionary, orthodoxy-shattering arguments, I do have several points I make that, as far as I know, are original or at least have only been touched on by other historians and writers. Maybe I am a tad paranoid, but the possibility of plagiarism - or maybe someone "taking the bloom off one of my roses" is a less harsh and more apt way of putting it - is the strongest barrier against going through with this.
Anyway, there are alternatives: having a blog that just posts key excerpts and/or keeping it in an online portfolio that's open only to people I invite in, among other things. I'm not terribly good at promoting myself, which is really unfortunate given my career aspirations, but I hope at least I can take advantage of the technology of my time and do something rather than trusting everything to word-of-mouth and whoever publishes my work. |
|
|
| TIME WARP! |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|08:27 pm] |
So you might have heard that a private swim club in Philadelphia threw out a group of black kids. Usually country clubs, golf clubs, and the like are discreet about their bigotry, enough so that the racism, sexism, and classism at such places is often treated like an open secret, but in this case the club's president actually issued this statement: "There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion...and the atmosphere of the club." You couldn't aspire to a more catastrophic choice of words than that.
There is a happy ending of sorts; a private boarding school is letting the kids have full and free access to their pool and it seems like the public, the entire Internet, and even Congress is about to go vigilante on the club's asses.
At the same time, a co-host of FOX News' morning show, "Fox and Friends", capped off a discussion about a study on dementia by suggesting that Alzheimer's and dementia is caused by people intermarrying with other ethnicities and "species" (!!!). This is too much for even FOX News, apparently, and another co-host tried awkwardly to laugh down her cohort's eugenic-y perspective. The camera crew must be commended for still catching a look of exasperation and horror on her face. Oh, FOX Newz, never change!
So, yeah, you probably didn't need more evidence that we've somehow gone back in time to the Age of Robber Barons and Segregation and Eugenics, but if you did here it is. |
|
|
| so soon after July 4, we learn DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK, at least not here in the US of A(ss) |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|05:02 pm] |
Yeah, I'm still furious about health care, so thank God for news sources that stir the bitter in with the raging sarcasm:
In short, the lesson of today’s health care anger-parsing cycle is that if the Democrats want to pass a reform bill with 60 Senate votes, the final product Obama signs will probably just be to mail every American a pistol and a single bullet with a little note saying, “For when you get cancer.”
I couldn't have said it better myself.
My personal health care plan is to hope I gain citizenship to Canada, the Netherlands, or some other country with same-sex spousal benefits and a public health care program by legally marrying some nice, handsome Canadian, Dutch, whathaveyou. It's a hell of a lot more feasible than expecting the Democrats to actually do anything other than kowtow before health industry lobbyists. |
|
|
| Chad's history corner |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|12:00 pm] |
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - And How It Died by Philip Jenkins - Like most cliches "History is written by the winners" is largely true in a sense, but at the same time it is often possible to piece together the history of the losers and distill a reasonable reconstruction of the truth from propaganda and distorted accounts. If it weren't, then we wouldn't be able to have sympathetic or neutral book-long histories of the Zoroastrians, the Aztec Empire, and al-Andalus. Philip Jenkins makes the case that there's another "history of losers" that often gets overlooked - and it involves, contrary to expectations, the majority of Christians in the medieval era.
Jenksins' argument can basically be broken down into two parts: European Christianity in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was, in terms of raw numbers as well as cultural influence, actually the stagnant fringe of Christianity, while the numerical majority of Christians and the true vital core of the religion was based in Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia; and this African and West Asian Christianity was all but wiped out by a combination of growing and systematic Islamic intolerance, the failure of most sects of Christianity to survive the decline and collapse of many eastern cities in the later Middle Ages as well as the catastrophe of the Mongolian invasions, and other geopolitical factors. A little distracting but amusing part of his arguments here is his visible impatience with scholars who argue that Islam was exceptionally aggressive and those who overcompensate by maintaining that Islam was exceptionally tolerant. You can almost hear Jenkins fighting the temptation to type, "Islam doesn't really have a worse or better track record than most if not all religions, including Christianity itself, okay?" Of course, it does jar the narrative to have such digressions to contemporary politics, but I for one can hardly blame Jenkins for doing his best to keep his book from being cited with approval by someone like Jonah Goldberg or the folks at WorldNetDaily. (Jenkins does raise the fascinating fact that, between 1000 and 1400, the countries of Europe and the Middle East as well as China all almost simultaneously went from being relatively tolerant to becoming increasingly xenophobic and hostile to minorities, but he doesn't dwell on that point too long).
Also the last third of the book asks general historical and cultural questions about why and how religions die out, what imprints they leave, and what are the theological implications for believers who face the loss of all political representation, marginal status, unrelenting persecution, and a centuries-long history of failure. It's very interesting, particularly for anyone with the slightest interest in the history of religion and culture, although at times he reiterates points made in the rest of the book. Still, the section does have very recent and very tragic anecdotes, such as the brutal persecution of the few remaining outposts of Iraqi Christians after the Iraq War and the discovery in 1997 of an old woman named Lucine, literally the last Armenian Christian in the Turkish city of Diyarbakir. The one complaint I have is that Jenkins, apart from discussing at length its influences on Islam and European Christianity and that it may have been the purest representation of Christianity from the first century CE, doesn't really go into much detail about how these Christian sects regulated their communities and what distinct beliefs they developed, but admittedly these things are probably better suited for another book entirely.
(Oh, and I especially want to recommend the book to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alagbon, since Jenkins does discuss briefly but in some detail the influence the music used by the Syrian churches had on European Christian religious music.) |
|
|
| yeah, I'm mocking the 24-hour news channels, how original |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|12:49 pm] |
So, after an admittedly shallow investigation, I am convinced that all the American 24-hour "news" channels are 20 % Angry White People With Extremely Dubious Credentials Shouting Down People With Actual Credentials, 20 % Attempts To Convince The Audience That A Pedophile Could Be Abducting Cute White Children In Your Neighborhood THIS VERY MINUTE, 20 % Celebrity "News", 30 % People With Extremely Dubious Credentials Talking About Celebrity "News", 9 % "stories" like "Teenagers Are Having Sex!" and "All Stereotypes About Women And Gays Are True According To SCIENCE!", and 1 % (at most) actual national news.
Today I had CNN on while I worked for about two hours, out of both morbid curiosity and a sense that I should familiarize myself with something I have been comfortable about bashing. There were lots of "news" about Michael Jackson's funeral and will, the Sandford scandal, promotions for some kind of conceptual art project with a woman who has apparently time-traveled from the Reagan years screaming nonsensically at lawyers, crime stories (almost all of which were suburban child abuse cases; seriously, it's bizarre how as a culture we've gone from ignoring child abuse to obsessing over it) that by rights have little or no national relevance, and pundits spouting off opinions that are allegedly professional yet are usually less well-articulated and grounded in fact than what I read from blogs, even "snarky" politico-blogs like alicublog and Wonkette. Admittedly there was a little bit about the recession that wasn't at all bad and uninformative, but mostly it was on-the-street analysis with very little hard data or input from experts. However, there was absolutely no mention of the President's health care "town hall", of any of the ongoing stories surrounding the gay bar raid that happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, or of Iraq or Afghanistan.
Now I know the lack of substantial...well, anything from all the news networks here in the US is a well-known joke, especially among the people who read this, and I know I wasn't surprised by what I saw. Still, actually seeing it for myself, rather than through the filters of, say, "The Daily Show" or Wonkette, was a pretty unpleasant eye-opener. At the least it brings into perspective the real reasons why "traditional" news media is dying. Blogs and infotainment like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" may be fierce competition, but competition isn't even really a necessary factor when the core product is so transparently awful. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|11:20 pm] |
I really don't consider myself that much of a gamer, unless still being terribly fond of the 8-bit and 16-bit generations of console games and the now dead text-based/point-and-click adventure game genre counts, but I have a weird nostalgia for the Console Wars of the '80s and '90s, especially all the strange, exotic consoles that kept popping up.
I actually didn't know anyone who owned a, say, CDi or a ZX Spectrum. My older brothers did have a Commodore 64, but otherwise we followed the herd by having a Nintendo while my friends who had video game systems at all fell into either the Nintendo or Sega camps and/or still had kept their old Ataris around. So the question haunted me; who actually owned these damn things? I'm bored, so...why not ask now?
Poll #1423136 NERD ALERT
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllDo you own any of the following obscure (that is, non-gen 1 Atari, non-Nintendo, and non-Sega) consoles from the '80s and '90s? Any I missed? (And I'm sure there are...). Did you know anyone that owned these systems? Any that I missed? And, fess up, did any of you actually own a Virtual Boy? |
|
|
| RIP The Atlantic Monthly |
[Jun. 28th, 2009|06:16 pm] |
It really hurts me to see the state of "The Atlantic Monthly" nowadays, although I suppose one can see it as a convenient microcosm of the decline of American letters: from Mark Twain to Megan McArdle. It's also time-saving to have an entire publication to point toward when someone asks, "Why do you hate Andrew Sullivan so much?", should this, this, and his epic and infamous "But how was I supposed to know that George W. Bush would ever pander to homophobes?! It's not like he had a political past before becoming President that I could have researched!" whine all prove somehow insufficient.
But it is sad that now the magazine has become the print, right-wing Libertarian version of FOX News, while, also like FOX News, hiding under a mask of political neutrality that's as effective as a sheet of notebook paper covering a view of an ocean right from the beach. If I was called upon to give them advice, I suggest that they just drop all the pretenses and aim to become the political equivalent of the b-movie and embrace the current fad for self-aware irony. An honest and amusing slogan like "Watch As Upper Middle-Class Hipster Yuppies Spin An Entire Ideology Out of Their Transparent Greed And Baseless Elitism!" should bring them in. For Sully-haters like me, "Think You Know How Much of a Worthless Self-Absorbed Jackass Andrew Sullivan Is? Think Again!" would probably also be effective. I know the Atlantic is being bankrolled by a politically-motivated rich guy (because the free market simply can't be trusted to promote the message that the free market is always good), but no serious publication can - or at least should - expect to rely on an audience of aging techno yuppies forever.
Hell, you know people like me would love to be the Joel Hodgson and Mike Nelson to the Atlantic Monthly's Albert Pyuns and Greydon Clarks - and get paid for it! |
|
|
| Everyone talks about "Thriller" and "Bad", but no one talks about "Ben"... |
[Jun. 27th, 2009|10:08 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Talking Heads - City of Dreams | ] |
Yes, I admit it, I'm one of those vultures who was prompted to get a Michael Jackson album because of his death, but I'd been meaning to get a copy of "Thriller" anyway since...well, it's freakin' "Thriller." (But, yes, I did at least have a copy of "Bad" as well as "Ben.") |
|
|
| Music Video Friday |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|11:49 pm] |
I know, it should be a Jackson video, but I did "Thriller" not too long ago and I still pride myself in being unpredictable. |
|
|
| My first big life update in I don't want to think how long... |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|12:46 am] |
Well, I was finally offered funding to study for my PhD at the University of Missouri-Columbia. There's still a slight chance I might be able to afford to go to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or that the three scholarships I applied to enable me to study at the University of Leeds might come through, but, at this moment, this is the most likely opportunity. In this godawful economy, I am at least grateful that I can gracefully duck out of the job market for a few years.
I know about beggars and choosers and all that, yet for me Missouri, in terms of the department, wasn't the optimal choice, but it does have a few things going for it:
1) I have a friend who lives there, so I won't have to restart my social life at point zero.
2) For my stipend I just have to grade papers for one advanced level class; I won't get paid as much as the TAs, but I hate even the idea of teaching. Frankly I see it as a possible plus regardless. I'll have the free time to get another job that might possibly involve something I want the experience in, or at least that I don't really mind doing day after day (as much as I complain about having been an office grunt for many years, I actually sort of like it, probably because of all the workplace comedies I watched growing up), which may compensate for the gaps in income, and best of all it will also be easier to pursue an internship with the university's publisher.
3) As much as I would like to be in Europe, New England, or New York City instead, I do love college towns, and apparently Columbia is a nice example of the breed.
So as always I have my misgivings, but it's better than it could be and it's definitely better than where I have been the past year or so. So...here goes. (If you happen to live on the East Coast or within a 150-mile radius of the East Coast and you hear a loud sound that seems like a combination of a squeal and a scream, then you'd know that I'm going to study in England instead.) |
|
|
| This has been building up for some time... |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|11:32 am] |
I'm more than pissed off by the health care "debate", but not all that surprised that the Democrats and the Republicans are both teaming up to shove all of us under a bus because insurance company executives are in danger of shedding tears. The outrageous thing about all this, besides how flagrant Congress is being this time about totally ignoring the common weal (which given our recent history is really saying something), is how transparent a lie the line about private insurers being driven out of business is. In nearly every country with government-run health care private insurers co-exist quite well; it's just that they don't enjoy a stranglehold on a necessity, as is the case with our horrific system. Even from a cold economic perspective, there is no practical reason not to offer a public option. Congress is being led by the pull of special interest groups, and by a corrupt, intellectually empty, self-serving ideology as rigidly and unquestionably sustained as Stalinism back in the mid-twentieth century USSR. This is why, in my wildest fantasies, someone descends upon DC with the twenty-first century equivalent of a mob of fishwives. Forget Iran; we apparently need a strong dose of old-fashioned rioting and violence here at home.
Digby puts it well:
Other countries have systems that prioritize health care treatment on the basis of need --- a triage system. We prioritize health care on the basis of who can pay. And in the most perverse form of rationing there is, we make the sickest people have the most difficult time getting access to health care. (The sickest, after all, can't hold down a job, so the employer based system doesn't really work for them, at least not in the long term.)
The idea that the US doesn't ration health care is absurd. We certainly do. We just make people do it to themselves out of economic hardship. I guess that's supposed to be a tribute to our sense of individualism and personal freedom.
Hey, nobody's going to tell you you can't be treated --- you made that decision all by yourself when you opted not to have a lot of money. That's what freedom's all about. (Unless you're sick and you want to die, of course, in which case the state won't let you.)
The debate is really about irrational rationing vs rational rationing -- and the US is the undisputed leader of the first method. When we set our minds to it, nobody can be as irrational as we are. (h/t to fengi)
I'm taking this health care kerfuffle hard, more so than any other political issue in my lifetime besides gay marriage. This is an option every other industrialized nation has, one that a clear majority of Americans want, and something that will clearly lower health care costs for the nation as a whole (putting aside all the moral, social, and even constitutional arguments in its favor), yet it's all but out of the question because - and they have the gall to admit this - it may spoil the profits for a handful of wealthy people and their companies. I can't say for sure, but I think this is as close as any politicians in a modern legitimate republic have come to literally yelling, "Let them eat cake!"
I'm hoping, after all these years, this will finally be the proverbial straw, that with a unity that has not been seen in far too long Americans will loudly and unequivocally reject whatever awful, "centrist", rich people-and-corporations-friendly "compromise" Congress will inevitably churn out on health care, but I am not holding my breath. I suspect Americans will continue their proud tradition by being outraged by trivialities or injustices carried out in foreign countries that do not affect them in the slightest, while being as complacent as the subjects of a well-rooted autocracy when it comes to the injustices at home. |
|
|
0 (0.0%)