Bad Reporter Does NSA Phone Monitoring
I really don't think the domestic spying on Americans thing is a laughing matter, in general, but somehow Don Assmusen manages to get a laugh out of me:
Click on the picture to get the rest of the headlines.


Filed under: Comics as Life and Politics

Pigs Fly
When I start agreeing with Newt Gingrich, it's time to start really worrying.

Filed under:Politics

Happy Cinco de Mayo!
Because I am such a gringo, even though I grew up in Lard, here is some info stolen brazenly from Wikipidia:

In 1862, in response to Mexico's refusal to pay off its debt, Britain, Spain and France sent troops to Mexico; they arrived in January of 1862. The new democratically-elected government of President Benito Juárez made agreements with the British and the Spanish, who promptly recalled their armies, but the French stayed, thus beginning the period of the French intervention in Mexico. Emperor Napoleon III wanted to secure French dominance in the former Spanish colony, including installing one of his relatives, Archduke Maximillian of Austria, as ruler of Mexico.

Confident of a quick victory, 6,500 French soldiers marched on to Mexico City to seize the capital before the Mexicans could muster a viable defense. Along their march, the French already encountered stiff resistance before Zaragoza struck out to intercept the invaders.

The battle between the French and Mexican armies occurred on May 5 when Zaragoza's ill-equipped militia of 4,500 men encountered the better-armed French force. However, Zaragoza's small and nimble cavalry units were able to prevent French dragoons from taking the field and overwhelming the Mexican infantry. With the dragoons removed from the main attack, the Mexicans routed the remaining French soldiers with a combination of their tenacity, inhospitable terrain, and a stampede of cattle set off by local peasants. The invasion was stopped and crushed.

Zaragoza won the battle but lost the war. The French Emperor, upon learning of the failed invasion, immediately dispatched another force, this time numbering 30,000 soldiers. By 1864, they succeeded in defeating the Mexican army and occupying Mexico City. Archduke Maximillian became Emperor of Mexico.

Maximilian's rule was short-lived. Mexican rebels opposed to his rule resisted, seeking the aid of the United States. Once the American Civil War was over, the U.S. military began supplying Mexicans with weapons and ammunition, and by 1867, the rebels finally defeated the French and deposed their puppet Emperor. The Mexican people then reelected Juárez as president.

Filed under:Politics and Pop Culture

That is So Gay
If only I were as funny as this:


Check out the rest of the comic today here.



Filed under:Comics as Life and Politics

Net Neutrality

Apparently, we need to make sure that a law which allows companies that provide internet service to create 'tiered' service doesn't happen. If it does, then all of our access to various websites will depend on how much those websites pay the ISPs.

Moveon.org has a good letter-writing campaign going. Write your congressperson today.


Filed under:Politics

Culture o' Destruction
Quite often lately I've seen a bunch of ads online which really just make me sorta angry:


They get worse than this, even--I saw "Shoot the Terrorist" but it changed before I could get a screen print of it. I know I'm probaby being reactionary, but I think this sort of thing just speaks volumes: Kill, destroy, demolish, and get cool stuff! It's right up there with "Get this surgery and be happy!" or "Take this pill and lose all negativity!" or "Vote, and the Country won't get taken over by religious fundamentalists!".
Filed under:Politics and Pop Culture

Personal Responsibility or, The Ex-Libertarian
Had an interesting conversation with my neighbor the other day. I haven't talked to the guy very much, but it had been pointed out to me in the past that he's a die-hard libertarian. Now, knowing that isn't enough to size the guy up, really, because there are lots of different flavors of libertarian. Still, I knew it would be an interesting conversation to a point, if things got down to politics at all. Which, of course, they always do.

He's an interesting guy, actually--a study in blind spots and apparent contradictions--though I may have been projecting. He is a really devout libertarian, to the point that he is angry that his taxes help pay for the public education of other peoples' children and such. He believes in getting rid of all gun laws. That sort of thing. And yet, he was for a very long time a member of the machinists' union, a strong union. Presumably he gained quite a bit from being part of that union (in a good way, to me...but to him? hard to tell).

We argued for a while about particulars, but then I tried to delve into his underlying conception of reality. For him, he repeated again and again, it all comes down to individual, personal responsibility. When I tried to get him to elaborate on that, of course, it was difficult for him to say why he believed that, and what it meant, exactly. But he did think it means that, no matter what situation you are born into, it's your responsibility to create your life, and nobody else's.

It's tough to argue agains positions that are this (in my mind) incoherent. Or at least it's tough to know where to start. I talked a lot about it being a black-or-white fallacy to think that responsibility (whatever we decide it means, exactly) for an act is either all mine or all "the world's". I wasn't able to get it across to him--when I talked about the way we are connected, he said that I was suffering from guilt about what I owed people. He might be right, as far as that goes, but that isn't the whole picture, by far.

Later on, I realized that I should have brought out my old staple I use against uber-libertarians when they go into the hyper-individuality shpeil: What about family? Parents, brothers, sisters and kids make poor libertarians, in part because of the often explicity connectedness that they find in their lives. But I also thought about this:

The idea of a person being completely, utterly responsible for everything that happens to her doesn't even make sense, logically. This is what I wished I had asked him:
--Are you responsible for everything you do?
A: Yep.
--Then you are responsible for what you do to other people?
A: Yep.
--So if you smack somebody else upside the head, who is responsible?

Now, he might respond that he was responsible for doing it and the other guy was responsible for getting hit--but I think that's dodgy, of course. The more clear answer (I think) is that both are responsible, to varying degrees, and those degrees might change depending on how we frame the situation (i.e. if I am goading him on to hit me, maybe I'm more responsible). The point being that it just doesn't make sense, in a world full of other agents, that I am the only one responsible, all the time, for whatever happens to me--because then the same can't be said for any agents that interact with other agents.

I'm really sure that would have convinced him. He would have said, "Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than the fact-avoiding bs that I'm spouting!"

Or not.

Still, Linus gets it:

Filed under:Comics as Life, Philosophy and
Politics

Ableism

It's Blog Against Ableism Day (soon every day will be a blog against day, but would that really be so bad?), and, for lack of some time and even more lack of insight, I'll like ya to an interesting, yet sad, article about how callous and stupid people on a bus can be:

A few weeks ago the driver of the X28 bus refused to let me board, because I could not safely board backwards on the lift. Although New York City Transit policy says we can board either forward or backward, this bus driver wouldn't allow me to board forwards.

When I insisted, he called a supervisor, and we waited.

The other passengers got off to get on another bus.

As they came out, they formed a line. Their eyes were full of hate. Many cursed me: "You selfish b----!"

I was crying.

That is just amazing. I remember various times wheelchair-using people boarded busses I was on. I did often feel frustration, but it was almost always at either drivers who were being slow and giving the disabled a hard time of it, or at the system that obviously doesn't really train drivers to accomodate people quickly, kindly and efficiently. Why didn't one person on that bus stand up for the woman using a wheelchair?
Check out lots more to read here.

Filed under:Politics

May Day

It's May Day, and there are protests going on over immigration, and I am feeling like it was wrong of me to come to work today.

Sigh.


Filed under:Politics

Colbert Is God

I love Jon Stewart, but only Stephen Colbert could pull telling off the president to his face like this:

He said this while looking Bush Jr. in the eye:

Now, I know there's some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

I am very jealous that Colbert was able to do what I could only dream of doing--and he did it better than I could, of course. Bush Jr. deserves much worse, of course, but it was very, very pleasant to watch him squirm under some real (albeit satirical) pressure.



Filed under:Politics