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Wednesday, June 18, 2003 |
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Reality Crap TV American Juniors. Paradise Hotel. Fame. Last Comic Standing. The Amazing Race 4. This is just a sampling of television shows that are on in the past few days. They are all the only first-run shows this summer. In fact, they're bumping a lot of good shows in re-runs to air this crap. Crap. It's Just Crap. Well, Last Comic Standing not included. That show is halfway decent, even if it's over-edited.
Attention Networks: I would rather watch Nothing than watch crappy reality TV. Thank you. |
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More on Metis, Ares, Athena and Worldviews in Politics. This began as an email, but I felt it deserved a blog entry. Let's start from the beginning. Doc wrote about an article that Glenn wrote about a few months ago. Basic gist: Conservatives know things Liberals don't. Not a surprise, but a revelation in print. Anyhow. Doc decided it needed a response and wrote one. In turn, he linked to Jonathan who wrote about it too. I responded in the comments, as did he in turn, and this is the latest. I think you're missing another part of the worldview here. Think of it kind of like this. Let's go back a few thousand years to Ancient Greece. You've got Athena, goddess of wisdom, and craft (metis) and war. That's an odd combination, so let's examine metis a little bit further. Think of metis as craft, not as macrame or weaving, but of technology instead. She's the innovator goddess. She's also the goddess of war. War tends to be brutal, any way you look at it, but frequently in the history of the world, a shocking technological advance is made and deployed and thusly the war is won. Metis meets war. If you've read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a fantastic work of fiction that covers this very dichotomy (followers of Ares vs followers of Athena, which I'll be getting to shortly) toward the end of the book, then you'll see where I'm going with this. There's another set of folks who are only interested in the destructive aspects of whatever power they can lay their hands on. The followers of Athena tend to be rather critical of said policy. Here are a couple things to read before I go further, they're short, fear not.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0116463/2003/06/16.html#a489 Let's take a look at what the Conservatives have provided us with, so far, mindless of the execution of their policy, which I've *not* found to be apropo. The Conservatives have begun to wield Athena's Aegis. This is brutally important. There are bad people in the world. We know this. They rule countries like Zimbabwe and The Congo and North Korea. They starve their citizens to fill their pockets, they engage in all sorts of evil practices in order to screw others. Basically, they are textbook evil. It's awful hard to stand up and say this, however. Because people start talking about moral relativism, which contends that it's okay to do something that we consider bad because their culture considers it to be a "good". Except, that, really, I think that some consideration of absolutes in morality, like, say, driving out the white farmers in Zimbabwe so that you can give your farms to black farmers, and then run them into the ground, is a Bad thing that has thusly affected Zimbabwe poorly. We can now use the Aegis we've created to drive out the Bad People there. It will be messy, but in the long term it will be good for the people there. That's what happened in Iraq, except that we were too chicken-shit to justify it on a moral level, and decided to use the only excuse that we could find that people would buy, but that we couldn't prove without a serious discovery in the aftermath. Now Conservatives are faced with a dilemma. "But they were Bad People!" they'll shout to the highest heavens, whilst the people are shouting "But where is the Anthrax and VX that you told us about?" And while we won't necessarily have a smoking gun to point to, which would be incredibly helpful for explanation's sake, all we can say is "but our intelligence community told us they had this stuff" and that brings about recrimination after recrimination, etc from all the nurturing types. Now that we've laid the groundwork, let's get back to Lakoff. You are right, we've never spent more on foreign aid than we do now, but people don't see this as nurturing, they see it as a responsibility, which is innately different. Let's go back to nurture vs. authority and look at things with this added lens of Ares vs. Athena. I find it hard to believe that there are many worshippers of Ares in the United States Government. Not even Donald Rumsfeld. He's pushing for a smaller, more technologically savvy force, which fits nicely with the Doctrine of Athena that we've laid out: better tech wins wars more quickly and with fewer death. If we were followers of Ares and not of Athena we would not have gone to such lengths to prevent civilian casualties. For all the complaints that we're a bunch of bloodthirsty heathens we went to war dedicated to the cause of minimum casualties and that doesn't fit with the Ares model.
All of that being said, absolutism is a convenient evil that I think we should avoid where we can, but there are some things that just cry out for it. Terrorists are, indeed, as the president said, Evil. I think we can all agree that a kid strapped full of explosives and sent to blow himself up in a marketplace is Evil. So, there are indeed good and evil in this world, and they're more prevalent now than they were 50 years ago. |
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MacSlash: The Story So, there are many people out there wondering, "what the hell happened to MacSlash?" and rightfully so. The migration didn't go as planned. There were several bits along the way that were rather frustrating, and I'm sure we'll get to those in a bit. As of this afternoon, the site is back, but slow as molasses as we get things sorted with Apache. This all started several months ago, when we decided it would be a Good Idea™ to get MacSlash off the old Pentium III shared server in Florida where it had resided for quite some time, and onto the Xserve that we'd bought last summer. We had made some initial attempts ourselves to get Slash installed on this box, but met with all sorts of problems with mod_perl and apache not playing nicely with slash. This was the point where our intrepid engineer, the frequently-named Les, either eloped to Canada with his fiancée, went crazy, or got really busy with work and stopped answering our emails. We gave up. In March, I bugged Chris about Perl programmers. He was kind enough to refer me (no charge) to a gentleman who has done all the work on MacSlash so far. A contract was created and eventually signed. We had a developer. Nat Irons was going to do the work for us. The Xserve got set up in Ben's apartment and off we went. We talked with our ISP, the ever-awesome toad.net and got our testing domain set up. Nat tore through the initial setups in a few weeks and we were away on the test. We hit a bunch of snags getting everything functional and working like it should.
I'm afraid Slash is beyond my ken, so I'm going to leave it to Nat to explain how it all went down, but don't bug him yet! Put away that email client and let's get the rest of the bugs out before we talk shop. |
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So, I won the Lottery last night... That's right ladies and gents, I won the Mega Millions lottery last night. Some coworkers and I slapped down a fat $18 at the 7-11 on South Wakefield in Arlington, and came up winners.
Total take? $2. I'm spending my $.55 on sodas. |
Last update: 7/1/03; 9:27:51 PM .
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