Cybrpnk's Rantings

One of the truly surreal things about the current power of the Republican party is the way in which it has conned two groups with radically different philosophies into seeing past their cognitive dissonance and supporting the party which both promotes, and undermines, their goals. Talk about your devil's deals. The two groups are the free market, less government crowd, including the libertarians; and the religious right. Let's look at one side of this dissonance. Sure, the religious right is getting people in office that are willing to advance their narrow-minded bigoted agenda, but at what cost?

What is it that the religious right really seems to want? They seem intent on turning back the clock to a mythical past in which all children were born in wedlock; all women knew that their place was in the home and beneath their husbands (both physically and metaphorically); all sex was between husband and wife; people took responsibility for their own actions; and god had a central place in everyone's lives. I've read a lot of history, and I haven't run across even oblique references to any time and place that even vaguely approximated this vision. Not even Puritan New England in the 17th century, although that might have been as close as anything.

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Just got back from seeing Fahrenheit 9/11. Definitely recommend it, but that's not what I'm going to write about. Instead I would like to talk about this year's election, the insanity of voting for anyone but Kerry, and the importance of ridding the country of our political parties.

I heard Arianna Huffington give a speech at a Kerry fundraiser recently. She addressed the question of how people should deal with reservations they might have about Kerry with this line: 'when your house is on fire is not the time to be talking about remodeling.' I agree with that. Given our dysfunctional electoral system, it is simply fact that the only people who have a chance to be elected this year are Kerry and Bush. If you are thinking of casting a 'protest vote' for anyone else, do not be deceived, that vote can help no one but Bush. It may make no difference at all, but it will do no good.

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While our so-called president continues to attempt to explain just what he meant when he claims to have ruled out 'torture' by American troops, the vice-president has been having words on the senate floor. Again there appears to be some controversy over exactly what was said, but apparently Dick lived up to his name by aiming one of these three classic lines at Senate Patrick Leahy: 'fuck you' or 'fuck off' or possibly 'go fuck yourself.' Cheney, perhaps illustrating why he spends so much time out of the public eye, told Fox News: `I felt better after I said it.'' and ``A lot of my colleagues felt what I said badly needed to be said.'' As of this writing there has yet to be an outpouring of support for Cheney's claim from Republican senators, although one suspects that Cheney's real colleagues, that is to say Halliburton employees, are probably solidly behind him on this one.

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Okay, you people out there (I know there must be someone other than me who reads this stuff), I think it's time for me to start sprinkling in some more of that 'gee, this is actually a person and not a venom-spewing AI program' stuff. Today's topic, which is not wholly orthogonal to political ranting, is books. Figured I'd run down some of what I have been reading lately (complete with hyperlinks to Amazon, although I personally prefer actually buying things from your local independent bookseller).

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Some very reassuring news out of the White House today. The NY Times is reporting that President Bush issued orders that all prisoners taken in Afghanistan were to be treated humanely. Hello! Isn't that the default? Isn't that how our soldiers are trained? Did he issue orders that they should wear their uniforms and clean their rifles too? And if this is really the case, why lock them away in Guantanamo and keep the Red Cross away from them? And what about the prisoners that were turned over to the CIA? No mention is made of them in the White House disclosures. And Bush is claiming that he never authorized torture. Which would you rather have the president debating: the meaning of the word 'sex' or the meaning of the word 'torture.' Sure am glad W is bringing dignity back to the office of the president.

Meanwhile the Republican smear campaign is already nit-picking at Michael Moore's latest film. Fahrenheit 9/11 just opened in NY this week, and goes national on Friday. So far the most amusing critique they've come up with is the observation that the Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, that were evacuated from the US immediately after the attack didn't actually leave until 9/14, after civilian flights were reauthorized, not before as Moore claims. This statement is then followed up with the statement that the FBI had cleared all those evacuated with White House assistance, and stated that they weren't involved in the attacks. How interesting. We have people we've been holding in Guantanamo for over eighteen months and we still aren't sure whether or not they are threats, but the FBI was able to clear Bush's friends in three days. And why was the FBI even asked to dedicate resources to perform what is clearly a favor for the Bush family's business associates at a time of national crisis? If anything Moore has apparently missed a bigger stink, not overblown a non-issue.

According to many supporters of the war in Iraq, the main justification is neither an imminent threat to America, nor the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Rather they propose a radical theory that we can impose American Democracy on Iraq by force, and therefore remake the entire middle east. A tempting theory, but doesn't it require concerted effort on our part to take the highest moral road possible in all of our dealings in Iraq? Even putting aside such excesses as those in Abu Ghraib prison, clearly there is something amiss in our approach in Iraq. Under international law we may, as an occupying power, detain people we perceive as a threat to the security of our forces. Fair enough, the concept of keeping prisoners of war is an easy one to grasp. But we have gone badly wrong on this concept on numerous fronts.

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Last night was the wrap party for the Visual Effects work on I, Robot. Unsurprisingly some of the conversation was about the difference between Isaac Asimov's world with robots as envisioned back in the 1950s, and our contemporary, darker view. This got me to thinking about the dramatic divide between what America used to try to be, and what it now tries to do. This distinction can be simplified into a distinction between America as an optimistic society, as opposed to America as a greedy society. One of the most striking themes that runs through a lot of the classical sci-fi, and which strikes as us so naive today, is the unspoken belief that the purpose of scientific and technological progress is to improve the lives of all humanity. This was a time when we, as a society, saw ourselves as locked in a bitter struggle with godless communism, which we faced down not with piety and open markets, but good old American know-how. The fundamental premise of the mythology of the cold war was that we were going to band together and out-innovate the Soviets, and that the result of that would be a better world for everyone.

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I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine who is fairly conservative. Part of what we talked about was the question of use of governmental regulation to enforce environmentally friendly policies in manufacturing. His argument is that the market should be allowed to sort this sort of thing out. If people care about such things, he argued, then they will be willing to pay a premium for them, and manufacturers will adjust their practices to accommodate this change in market preference. A perfectly coherent argument, but one which is deeply flawed. The most obvious problem is the vigorous battle fought by most manufacturing segments to prevent consumers from having access to the information necessary to make such choices. Another problem is the over-reliance on people's ability to make good long-term decisions; a requirement that seems to fly in the face of common-sense, academic research, and history. Finally, the foundation of this argument comes back to that old canard, the ability of the market to sort things out, which treats the market as some sort of omnipotent force of nature. Let's tear down these illusions.

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Just charming news out of the Supreme Court today. Rather than addressing the merits of the suit challenging the use of the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, the court has weaseled out of the matter. They have declared, and this is a curious decision, that a non-custodial parent has no standing to question the way their child is being raised. One wonders how far-reaching such a ruling might go. Does this mean that one parent can choose to raise the children as Wiccans without fear of interference from their ex-spouse? And what public good is served by thus limiting access to the courts? Is the matter of official sponsorship of a particular worldview something that all citizens have a compelling interest in? I don't have kids, yet I still feel that I personally have a stake in this case.

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As those of you who have been reading my rants know, I'm not much of a fan of big corporations, and tend to be pretty negative about lots of things in business. I'm not that way about everything. I don't want this blog to be nothing but complaining. Here are a couple of stories about companies that I have really good things to say about.

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Ronald Reagan was an evil man. I'm glad he's dead. Harsh, sure. But I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings about Reagan's time in office. I always thought his 'morning in America' blather was just hooie. Here was someone launching a full-out war on virtually everything I think makes America great, and claiming he was making things better. Fantastic, all of those poor people getting their social services cut, the insane being thrown out on the street, woo hoo! At least they can be psyched about what a great country they live in. Meanwhile we're waging war to support the military dictatorship in El Salvador, and to take down the democratically elected, but leftist, government in Nicaragua. We're funneling arms (illegally) to Iran, while openly supplying them to Iraq.

And then there was the blatant hypocrisy, this bastard had the self-righteousness to preach to us about not doing drugs, while he's gulping Halcion like it's candy. No wonder he thought everything was so chipper, he was coked to the gills. Lovely. And then there's his darling wife. While her husband is dismantling the social safety net she's telling people that conquering drug addiction is a simple matter of will power. Well fuck you, Nancy. You try living in poverty and finding the will power to say no to something, anything, that will take you away from the radical surgery your government is doing on your income, your community, and quite possibly your family back in the old country.

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