Posted Thursday February 20 I feel very strongly that no one should have taught John Derbyshire how to use the internet. It's just not right, dammit! And why is he watching the "romantic" adventures of banana hammock model Joe Millionaire, anyway? Shouldn't he regard reality TV as just another sign that we are living in the End Times, and be home wrapped up in an afghan reading Hayek, while sucking on a Werther's original? He's too conservative to use eBay, after all, as he explained recently. What follows is the kind of thing that gives evolutionary biology a bad name; I don't think Steven Pinker-types realize that this is what turns people against them even when they make modest, falsifiable claims. I'll just give you the whole post here: ZORA! ZORA! ZORA! [John Derbyshire] Darwin in action. Evan/Joe wants to propagate his genes. He wants to be quite sure that when his woman gets pregnant, it's his kid. Ergo, he disses the sluts and picks the one real woman. May their first child be a masculine child. There are so many things wrong here that I don't know where to begin. Derbyshire using the word "dissing"? Sluts aren't real women? Darwin says otherwise, baby. And why does he hope thay have a boy, speaking of babies? And how is it that he is so deluded and naïve that he thinks that Zora is actually going to marry and have childen with a gay prostitute? (OK, it's just a rumor, but go back and look at those pictures. He may be the world's single gayest looking man. I haven't seen the show, so I can't comment on his mannerisms, and I know he got a blowjob from the runner-up, but so what (and shouldn't that be enough to turn Derb off the show, BTW?). Even William Burroughs had sex with women occasionally, and it just served to remind him that sometimes sex is worse than no sex.) There's no bio for the Derbsterino up at the NRO site and I can't seem to find much elsewhere but various hints scattered through his writings suggest that he is in his late fifties (when he was a child in England his teenage neighbor listened to lots of Hank Williams) and has a rather dubiously young son (young enough to want to play really lame computer games, anyway)...I can only assume that Darwin is at work causing some young lovely to propagate Mr. Derbyshire's dubious genes. We are all the poorer for it. No, that's mean. But if he ever says NRO readers ROCK again I'll just have to stand by it. Everyone over there, stop him from saying rock. Update: his neightbor must just have been behind the times, because he doesn't really look all that old. His manner makes him seem like me must be about 9,000, but I guess that's just part of being a conservative. He's married to an attractive Chinese woman and they have two cute kids. She maximized her genetic ultility by trading her Communist Chinese passport for a US one, giving her children the gift of being native-born US citizens, and I say it was cheap at the price. So, maybe Darwin was right. But still, never say rock again. Now, about those war protests...I read a very odd column in the Guardian the other day, and I won't say too much about it, except ...well, read for yourself: This was a protest with no leaders and with little to say; it was not interested in debate. The "little" it had to say, was NO. It was as simple as that. This was the most important aspect of all. The demonstration was driven by one very powerful and very accessible emotion: a deeply felt revulsion against modern warfare... All of this knowledge is underpinned by something much more visceral. It is a sensibility formed by scores of war films such as Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, and thousands of TV images of the suffering of war's victims. How can we endure the suffering of Iraqi civilians on our television screens in two months' time?... That makes Tony Blair's battle to convince the British public all the harder. You can argue with people who are angry - there's a debate to be had, but you can't argue with "No". This is the politics of emotion which is fed, inspired and manipulated by mass communications. Blair is fighting against the images of war's victims which we hold in our heads - such as the one the Daily Mirror published of a sick child on its front cover on Saturday. Does it really seem like a good thing to admit that you are not open to reasonable debate because you are swept up in a fire of emotion kindled by watching Saving Private Ryan? One thing that is odd is that lots of people are going to get killed by Saddam Hussein if there isn't a war and no one protesting for peace seems to want to talk about that. Does it really all come down to the fact that we aren't allowed to see pictures of the people tortured to death in Iraqi prisons? It's true that most of the 1,000,000 or so deaths he's responsible for happened some time ago, so maybe he's running out of steam, but is that a good thing to rely on? It's almost as though you offer someone a trolley car problem and they won't touch the switch no matter how you construct it because then they'd be complicit in killing someone. That sick child isn't going to get any better under a continuing sanctions regime. What are these people proposing, exactly? Oh wait, that's right. This was a protest with little to say. Posted Tuesday, February 18 Having duly established my credentials as one who is substantially resistant to the siren song of the 'surrender monkeys' meme, let me ask just one eternal question: What the hell? I was linked to this, dove in, scrolled up to double-check that I hadn't ended up at "the Onion". . . well, all right, then. So the man wants to spank Eastern Europe's naughty bottom. We all have kinks; that's what the internet is for, if I'm not mistaken. On we go. Then I run into my colleague: a thoughtful Indian gentleman of the 'George-Bush-is-a-cowbow-who-wants-to-blow-up-the-world' persuasion - or maybe he just likes to yank my chain, day in, day out - and I show him the piece. He dives in, scrolls up to double-check I haven't sent him to "the Onion". . . Do you get it? It took Jacques Chirac to bring us together, my friend and I. I feel better about the world today. But I'm still going to watch movies tonight, instead of reading the entire blogosphere, which - as many have noted - is in a barky, yappy, nervous-as-an-overbred-small-dog state. I'm going to watch Signs, then K-19(because Lileks said it was good), then some random Chinese thing I grabbed because if you rent 3, you get for 4 days. So I'm ready to last for a while, man, if the world doesn't get it together Posted Monday, February 17 Man, I don't know what to think. World is a mess. Rented Gosford Park, Eight-Legged Freaks, and Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. Like I said. A mess. I always think I want to watch bad movies when I'm tired at the end of the day. Turns out, bad movies are boring. Maybe that is one of the reasons why they are bad. Though I did like the bit in Kung Pow where the martial arts fighting cow goes into flying sideways slo-mo Matrix homage mode, shooting two jets of milk at Steve Odekerk, who flails back a la Neo. That was dumb. Gosford Park was a joy. So beautifully set-designed and staged and directed and cast and acted and (if I knew what this meant) gaffed and best-boyed. As I was saying: that you almost don't notice. . . well, it's a tragedy. It's got a sad ending, but you don't feel sad at the ending. Like if Lear had such a well-appointed heath, with the best in blastings. . .no, not like that. You watch Kristin Scott Thomas walk through those doors at the end and you think: you've come a long way, baby, since Under the Cherry Moon. Posted Friday, February 14 It was my own lovely lady. . . A special, Valentine's Day pina colada moment was had by all - by me, anyway - when Belle read my lazyweb wish o' last night and informed me it had been granted in advance. There already exists a Wayback Machine for the internet (which was actually what I was going to call it myself! - except I couldn't decide whether to hyphenate way-back.) But I think there are a few bugs in the system - or not enough system to fill out the space around a few starving bugs; or something. Our expert web-drivers took the device out for a test drive on a closed-course. . . Flux capacitor, fluxing. . . I thought to myself; self, I thought, what was the Instapundit thinking. . . way. back. when? Turns out, according to old Wayback Machine, old Glenn Reynolds has been a lazy boy. Only updated his site ONCE since 1996. He got off his ass ONCE, shambled over to the keyboard (dusted it off, bats flying from beneath the keys) and GAVE Leon Kass a swift kick in the shorts. Take that, Leon! Then Glenn shuffled back - like a mystery mummy back to his crypt; like some sort of Yog-Soggoth, never-heard-from-before, never-to-be-heard-from-again force-from-meatspace. I exaggerate. There is a whole week of posts, from August 10-16, 2001. Ah, mid-August, 2001. It was wayback, wasn't it? And, to be fair, the Wayback Machine did a bit better for Lileks. But I get the sense the Machine is wearing down, not doing well in 2003. But, on the gripping hand, I found - same mainpage as the trusty Wayback - a link to something called the Million Book Project, which eventually took me here. Happy Valentine's Day, honey. Scroll down to see a special, Valentine's Image just for you! Posted Friday February 14 Here are the creepiest valentines ever. Dig the exopthalmic cricket player(?) in #3. The second page is the best, especially the toddler being attacked by ravening cats. Via East West. Also via East West, probably the scariest website I have ever seen. (Why scour the net for cool things when you can just let professional homosexuals do all the work for you?) You must read this. It is the rantings of a mentally ill woman against her probably equally crazy sister. Your imagination will start working overtime to create the backstory for this agonizing family disaster, with photos. If your family is anything like mine you will feel a frisson of recognition blowing in across ths timestream from some alternate family reality in which everything went to hell, everybody did drugs all the time, and everybody went directly to crazy without stopping, passing effective therapy or getting that scrip for Wellbutrin filled. I'll show them who's crazy! Then, at night, the ice weasels came. The thing that is a particular bummer for this woman and her sister is that they are speed freaks. This may be the worst type of drug addict you can be; it combines all the bad things of other addictions in one tweaky package. Like junkies, speed freaks lie to you, and rip off and then pawn your guitar. Like potheads, they are too paranoid to deal with life effectively and think people are plotting against them. Like cokeheads, they can't stop talking. And then, like alcoholics, they are prone to up and do something crazy and violent, such as take somebody's head off with a hacksaw. The most dangerous spot in the US right now is probably not in a blighted inner city but rather some meth lab trailer in Oregon run by skinny rednecks. Frankly, is there an upside here? Let's see. 1) Easy to keep off those extra pounds. 2) Lost of energy for clubbing. 3) Home improvements. If you've never met any speed freaks you may be surprised at this last. Let me tell you, there's nothing like thinking giant cockroaches are crawling all over you to really get you cleaning the kitchen. With bleach. William Burrough's wife was addicted to Benzedrine, and apparently much given to 2am kitchen cleaning. I spent one night in the Haight apartment of a friendofafriend gay speed freak/artist. I know you're thinking, "a gay man doing speed in SF? Surely not." But it was so. His apartment looked really fabulous. In the living room the walls were covered with what I first thought was eggplant-colored wallpaper over a high-gloss black chair rail. Then I looked closer and realised that it wasn't wallpaper. The design wasn't printed, but had in fact been etched lightly into the plaster with an exacto-knife, using a stencil this guy had made himself, and was just moving around freehand. I got to see him work on this for about 10 minutes before he lost interest and started sanding the kitchen cabinets for a quarter of an hour, and then he moved on to sculpting a larger than life size head out of clay. Did I mention it was 6am and we had already gone to the Endup? The saddest thing was when my friend and I decided we were tired, and the speed freak asked "are you going to try to pass out for a while?" Just think about that. He hadn't slept properly in so long that he had forgotten it was a human possibility and started thinking only in terms of "trying to pass out." We were like..."dude we're going to go to sleep." He went back to sanding, I think. Huhhhhh. It gives me the cold robbies, as Pogo would say. So remember: DARE to keep kids off drugs. (Scroll down to 1/30.) Posted Thursday, February 13 A cool site. Yep. Almost as cool are the 'explanations'. (As in: if it weren't for bad explanations, some people wouldn't have any explanations at all.) My fave, due to Larry S.: I viewed the source code and could not discover understandable mathematical computations which would aid the web page in making a decision. However, I did note that if the user does not look at the card layout (thus denying the "web site" the opportunity to follow the user's eye movement), and that if the user decides beforehand which card to choose, that the ESP program fails to determine the user's card selection. Does the technology exist that would: (1) allow interaction between a server/program and a user to the extent that the server/program could scan the user's eye movement; (2) and, precise enough to detect pupil dilation resulting from concentration? A "website" that could spontaneously convert an ordinary computer screen into a camera for monitoring pupil dilation in the viewer would have to be fairly "sophisticated". My guess is that plain old HTML wouldn't be "enough". DHTML would probably be "required". But what do I know? I use a WYSIWYG application, GoLive. Maybe it is also WYSIWYGSB, i.e. 'what you get seen by'. How would I know what's going on under the hood? Probably Larry is just having fun, like the rest of us. Posted Wednesday, February 12 I've been trying, on principle, to get interested in Pepys' diary. It's such a good idea; the site is so nicely designed; such care is obviously taken. But Mr. Pepys' turgid writing style is getting in the way of Mr. Phil Gyford's elegant hobby-horse-riding style. (He's the site creator.) I read (and now I can't find the quote) that Gyford poked around, looking for other similar material for like projects, and failed to come up with much. There aren't that many whopping great famous, yards-and-yards-of-the-stuff literary diaries in the public domain. (Can that really be right?) At any rate the blog boom has solved that problem for the foreseeable future. Which brings me to my thought for the day: reflect on how - in 30 years, or 300 years - historians and students of society and culture, and other insomniacs and layabouts, will be able to find out what tens of thousands of fairly ordinary folk were thinking about on any given day. Lazyweb notion: your web-browser has a time-machine setting. Well, yes, and if Explorer and Navigator came equipped with faster-than-light-drive, that might be handy as well. (Probably it will be late-stage bloatware. After all software has, as per current projections, evolved to the point where it can send mail, it will begin seeking to send itself to the stars.) No, seriously: call it a time-slice function. You set the date; the web - through the good offices of some fantastically complete google cache - appears as it appeared on that day: the news, government sites, commercial sites, the blogs, the homepages devoted to cats and encrusted with rotating GIF's; the works.) Imagine if you could do that right now - and not just for 1996, but for 1967, 1941, 1860; hell, for 1066. Yes, I realize that last 'what if' was silly. Sort of like: how might history have been changed if W.W. I had been fought afterW.W. II. But never mind. You see the point: in the future the past will have been so bright, you'll have to have worn shades. Posted Tuesday, February 11 Enjoy your annoyance! I'm working on a paper on Slavoj Zizek's new book, On Belief. The man is a Leninist-Kierkegaardian. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's worse. Words fail me. Links aren't much better. But here is one anyway. Mr. Zizek was involved, some time ago, in an academic round-table discussion of a book (which I haven't read), The Black Book of Communism; which apparently contains accounts of the sorts of things one would expect a book of that title to contain. The linked document contains, as it were, severely condensed minutes of the session. As a result, it's basically a highly mannered yet strangely artless attempt to smother awkward facts; in a can. My favorite bit. . . It was all just an accident, your Honor... According to the "Black Book," Lenin thus set a decisive example, which was emulated and often exceeded by all subsequent Communist leaders who claimed the Leninist legacy. A number of problems with this voluntaristic interpretation of Communist violence were identified by the other speakers. I lied. This is my favorite bit. (This is a Ms.Fullbrook, not Mr. Zizek, opinionating). . . You say liqui-DAY-ted; I say liqui-DAH-ted... The "Black Book" offers no basis on which to commensurate the evil of the systematic extermination of targeted groups and the evil of indiscriminate, arbitrary slaughter and malign neglect; the two forms of mass death remain distinct and the reader of the "Black Book" is left no better placed to decide whether they are truly comparable or whether one form is more, less, or equally worthy of condemnation. Oh, all right; so it's a distinction. But eager grasp at this straw of extenuation - 'I never meant to exterminate them; I just wanted to, you know, malignly neglect them all to death' - makes me trust Ms. Fullbrook about as far as I can throw a gulag archipelago. Meanwhile, I lied again: this is my favorite section. . . It's like that part from 1984 about, how, like, a boot will be ground in the face of humunity, like, forever - only, get this; it's told FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BOOT... Professor Kolankiewicz suggested that these attempts by surviving victims to look at things from the perspective of their former gaolers, which may lead to reconciliation and forgiveness or at least to an understanding of their motivations, are far more useful to social scientists than encyclopedias of horror like the "Black Book." Ah, science. I lied one last time. This is my surely my favoritest section: But you can also think of it as 'grinding your face up into the heel of the boot'... Jon Beasley-Murray recommended "gray books," by which he meant any form of representation or dialogue that would allow greater ambiguity, openness, and respect for the agency of the victims rather than portraying them as passive and incomplete. I suppose I can just barely see the point. A quote from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago: If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? But, then again, why does it sound so incredibly fatuous and dumb when they say it?