I was just reading an interview with Matt and Trey (South Park is in way up in the top 3 favourite shows in our house) and a couple of things jumped out. First of all, I love this line from Trey :

So I think we’re losing our edge, but hopefully we’re gaining something else.

I have always worried that South Park will get more and more extreme until eventually they start making fun of shark-jumping. Gaining something else would be fandabidoze. They seem to gain something else every season and long may they continue to do so.

I watched Team America a while back and I found it incredibly offensive. Not because of the puppet sex [I like sex and I like puppets] or because of the subject matter or the swearing or the 10 minute vomit scene. I felt they had crossed a line where they were saying nothing matters, nothing at all.

That’s why South Park is so great. It’s not cynical. It’s curious - like a 4th grader. Like Trey said,

South Park has never been a cynical show and a show where we just want to throw gas on the fire and ‘F**k all you.’ It’s never been that. It’s always been trying to lighten things up. And that’s what we hope we’ll keep doing with the show.”

Or even better like the pope in Bloody Mary said,

A chick bleeding out her vagina is no miracle. Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time.

They just tell it like it is. Like a little kid would see it.

Randy:	But the statue wasn’t a miracle!
Stan:	Yeah. The statue wasn’t a miracle, Dad. So that means you did it. That means you didn’t have a drink for five days all on your own.

Team America was like, all you people who care, fuck you. If 98.7% of the people watching are being satirized, is it still satire?

I contributed for the first time last night to a Wikipedia discussion page.

The entry on Godwin’s Law was missing the most interesting fact - that Godwin deliberately created his law as an experiment in memetics. He wanted to see if he could create deliberately create a meme and watch it through usenet.

I have made minor edits to Wikipedia pages before but this seemed such a blatant omission that I thought it would be more polite to enquire about it in the Talk page first. I was not familiar with Talk page etiquette so I tried to reverse engineer it from the existing comments. There seemed to be a bunch of substantive discussion about the content of the article, neatly divided into sections, with a bunch of name-calling and complaining about the edit wars (Lawrence’s Law - any Talk page at wikipedia will have a bunch of substantive discussion followed by name-calling and complaining about the edit wars. Just don’t call anyone a Nazi!) so I carefully inserted my question at the end of the substantive discussion.

Shouldn’t there be a reference to the fact that an Godwin originally proposed Godwin’s Law as an exercise in memetics?

Less than 8 hours later, I logged in to find that my entry had been moved, formatted, attributed and had it’s own little sub-section with name-calling and complaining about the edit-wars. I was also gently prompted to pay more attention to the four or five rules of etiquette that I had broken. Someone even asked me for a cite Those guys are efficient! I would certainly trust them to keep my trains running on time.

The Onion article about Wikipedia would be funnier if there were a grain of truth in it. It might have been true once-upon-a-time but just try adding some random crap to a wikipedia page and see how long it lasts. The WikiGnomes will have removed your weeds before you have even finished planting them. They are Nazis in the best possible sense of the word.

I want to address Rob’s comments to my previous post more fully by quoting from Robert Wright’s contemporary analysis from March 2003.

Rob makes two related claims:

1. It’s disingenuous to claim that we knew he didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction at the time because
2. he was ignoring UN inspection demands.

It’s true that we didn’t know for sure whether or not Saddam had WMD but 2) is outright false.

It was thus a surprise to many observers when the Bush administration started agitating for war even though inspectors had been allowed to go wherever they wanted but hadn’t yet found anything.

I don’t remember anyone claiming at the time that Iraq definitely did not have WMD. I did hear lots of frustrated people complaining that, if Bush&Co had any evidence at all, they should just hand it over to Blix and Baradei and catch ‘em red handed. There were also lots of people - some of them French, one of them English - claiming that a second resolution authorizing an escalation of the inspections with specific triggers for war would settle the matter one way or another. Robert Wright suggests that this was all beside the point:

So why didn’t the administration try such a resolution? Lots of reasons, but the biggest one may have been fear of success. From the beginning, Bush wanted not just disarmament but regime change, and he worried that the former would preclude the latter; if inspectors actually found weapons, the world would insist on giving them time to find more weapons, ad infinitum. (Indeed, Bush seems to have signed onto Resolution 1441 on the assumption that Saddam wouldn’t let inspectors into Iraq.)

That was certainly my opinion - that Bush would settle for nothing less than regime change - at the time. Ultimately, I share Wright’s sorrow that this golden opportunity to prove that multi-lateralism - even acting through the oh-so-inept UN - can be successful was squandered. Not squandered, sabotaged.

The question is whether the United Nations offers an institutional framework through which the United States can pursue valid goals–such as disarming and sometimes even deposing regimes that have weapons of mass destruction in violation of international law–more effectively than it can pursue them outside the United Nations. The answer is that, in this case, it almost certainly could have.

Jeff and I pair-read 1984 and Brave New World a couple of years ago. Most people - me included, until my latest reading - seem to miss the point of 1984. ‘1984′ means they are watching you to those with only a casual acquaintance with the book. ‘1984′ should mean they are manipulating language, history and even thought to make criticism impossible. The lessons of 1984 seemed very relevant a couple of years ago (I wait with baited breath to see if the American public can see through the lies in the present election season) but I expect, that if we end up in a dystopia, it will be closer to the one described in Brave New World where even the alphas are conditioned and everyone is happy with their lot because all their basic needs are provided for.

I picked up Huxley’s Island without knowing what to expect. It started well (I fear I oversold it to Jeff based on that promising beginning) but what seemed at the first to be an overly stodgy exposition turned out to be the entire thrust of the book.

If you can get over the fact that you are reading Huxley’s prescription for utopia - dystopias are so much more interesting as long as you don’t have to live in them - it wasn’t too bad. I like the idea that you could build a perfect society by combining the harmless, distilled essence of Buddhist spirituality with the most positive offerings of science and technology. But - and I am sure it won’t surprise you, even if you haven’t read the book yet - it’s the unenlightened ones on the outside who will come along and fuck it all up for you.

Back to 1984 for a moment…the horrific ending of 1984 completely neutralizes, negates and ultimately ruins 1984 for me. It’s like an another corollary to Godwin’s Law. Room 101/the Holocaust were so evil that to compare anyone or anything with them is such an over-exaggeration you automatically lose the argument. If the Nazis had not committed the terrible crimes of the holocaust and if Orwell had not rolled out the rats-in-a-cage-torture-device you could make some very fruitful analogies with the Nazi’s and with Airstrip One’s manipulation of popular opinion. But because they did, anything short of 6,000,000 seems benign by comparison. I am not complaining about Godwin’s Law - 6,000,000 murders is a lot of evil - but I wish it were safe to quote Orwell and Rove in the same sentence. It should be.

I came across this from 2003

It has been a week of some vindication for hawks, but doves are right in denying that their full arguments — about the dangers of preemptive war, fomenting terrorism, destabilizing world alliances, and so on — are thereby proven wrong.

That’s an understatement to say the least (except the first bit). This is the saddest part though…

Ultimately, the best reasons for supporting the war were liberal, humanitarian ones. Will antiwar leftists be able to accept that?

Sully was dead right about that. The tragedy is that America would never have gone to war for liberal, humanitarian reasons but, if it had, it might have found a way to do it in a liberal, humanitarian and - most importantly - multi-lateral way. And now that we have post-hoc justified the war in terms of liberal, humitarian reasons - the others having turned out to be phantom reasons - I fear most of all that America will shy away from ever going to war for liberal, humanitarian reasons ever again.

I am blogging from my back yard in the early evening and it’s getting kinda chilly which, if you have just survived 10 days of triple digit temperatures - two of them without power and all of them without A/C - is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

While searching for a cite to back up the bold assertions in my rant about Andrew Sullivan - i had pangs of guilt that the blog entry I linked to did not support my boldest assertions (still looking) - I came across this at The Daily Howler. Taking it at face value, it shows how, even back in 2002, the conservative cheerleaders for the war were dismissing anyone who councilled caution. Not by addressing their arguments head-on, but by constructing grotesque charicatures of their arguments and addressing those instead.

This bit (from 2002, remember) stood out for me :

KRAUTHAMMER: But, ah, there is a third way. It is the position of Democratic Party elders Al Gore, Ted Kennedy (both of whom delivered impassioned speeches attacking the president’s policy) and, as far as can be determined, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. This third way accepts all the premises of the antiwar camp. It gives us all the reasons why war could be catastrophic: chemical or bio-weapon attacks, door-to-door fighting in Baghdad, alienating allies, destroying the worldwide coalition of the war on terror, encouraging the recruitment of new terrorists, etc.

Moreover, they argue, deterrence works. “I have seen no persuasive evidence,” said Kennedy, “that Saddam would not be deterred from attacking U.S. interests by America’s overwhelming military superiority.” So far, so good. But then these senior Democratic critics, having eviscerated the president’s premises, proceed to enthusiastically endorse his conclusion—that Saddam Hussein’s weapons facilities must be subjected to the most intrusive and far-reaching inspection, and that if he cheats and refuses to cooperate, we must go to war against him.

“This is utterly incoherent,” Krauthammer rails. After all, if deterrence works, why would you need to conduct inspections? Why would you ever need war?

It is jarring to note that most of the opinions that Krauthammer was so quick to ridicule back in 2002 - in the no-one-could-have-predicted era - have come to pass. It turns out that deterrence and inspections did work. If we had continued with the inspections - as Kennedy and Chirac and Blix among oh-so-many-others were arguing back then we would have discovered that, in fact, deterrence and inspections had worked and Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. We might also have less alienated allies, recruited less new terrorists, lost less coalition soldiers to door-to-door fighting and we might still have a worldwide coalition in the War on Terror. I am not brave enough to predict what might have happened in Gaza, Lebanon, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran had an intact coalition with the full force of the pre-emasculation United Nations been behind the War on Terror. Remember the pre-war support for America ?

If this sounds like a big I-told-you-so, I half-heartedly apologize for that.

It still bothers me a great deal that conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan still manage to criticize the motives of pre-war critics, even while apologizing for their part in the process. Quote :

Observing this, many of us have gone from denial to despair to grim hope to acceptance that the scale of the task was greater than even the pessimists foresaw and the means deployed to achieve it almost pathetically unequal to the goal. I guess a miracle may eventually emerge. Maybe a de facto Iraqi partition after more bloodshed and sectarian massacres may pave the way for a more peaceful future. We can hope. But Baghdad is fast turning into what Beirut once was - a cualdron of unrestrained sectarian hate and violence, fomented by a few empowered by the incompetence in Washington. I’m left with contrition at my own small contribution to the misunderstanding; and abiding, deep, and furious anger at the administration who conducted this war with such arrogance and negligence.

Day after day, Sullivan repeats the same, sad lines about how no-one could have predicted the situation in Iraq and that those who did predict it either didn’t understand what they were talking about - like these guys

In late 2002, Mr. Ricks reports, 70 national security experts and Mideast scholars met at the National Defense University to discuss the looming war and concluded that occupying Iraq would “be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.”

- or predicted it for narrow partisan reasons. This is the first time that he hasn’t hedged his apology with the one about how Iraqis are better off because Saddam is no longer in power so it was all worth it after all. I wonder when Blair, Rice et al will stop doing that too.

I have tried to stay away from books about the war because it is all too depressing but this one looks like it might be worth the read, if only to remind myself of the reasons for starting the war before they are redacted from the official history. I don’t think we’ll be hearing much about “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” during this election cycle. I hope it goes the way of “we’ll be greeted as liberators” and “the war will pay for itself”. That is, I hope people will stop saying it as though they believe it, but I hope the full list is on display somewhere prominent so that the voters can peruse its contents.

112° yesterday and we lost power so we went to the air-conditioned mall. Was gonna see An Inconvenient Truth but the line was too long.

We got there at 8:30 and it was already over 95°. There were just a few trees on a neighboring property and everyone was crammed under that tiny scrap of shade as we waited for the first game to start. By the second game there was no shade at all.

During that second game, our goalie was sent off with a red card performance that would have made Zidane’s mother proud and we struggled on with 10 men. After the game, I bought two of those large bottles of Gatorade and quaffed them straight down leaving me looking like a pot-bellied Biafran refugee.

The temperature had passed 110° as the third game got underway but luckily a hot wind that stank of horseshit had blown up. Someone announced that, because of the eccentric scoring system they were using (points for clean sheets, points for goals, points deducted for cards), if we won with a clean sheet and some other team lost, we would qualify for the knockout round on Sunday. The last game was a bad tempered affair with players falling down with cramp and we won with a clean sheet.

We trudged sadly up to the results desk to confirm the bad news and the lady there told us with a smile that the other team had in fact lost and that we were tied on points. Fortunately, that red card meant that we would not we playing tomorrow. A tiny cheer went up among our team and we resolved to buy a crate of beer for our fiery Italian goalie. We had dodged the bullet.

I am sorry to say that I have no great pee stories from Saturday. I have no pee stories at all for I did not pee on Saturday.

Epilogue

I went for a swim later that evening. Remember when your mum used to tell you not to go swimming after eating cos you’d get cramp. I have some advice to add. Never go swimming after playing football for 3 hours under the hot desert sun in record temperatures. You’ll get cramp. I did anyway. Cramp in both calfs and both thighs simultaneously. I sank.