Comment on "you can't eat justice"

here:

The law in its majesty forbids the rich and poor alike from stealing bread. Anyway, it doesn't much matter to the poor that they can't eat justice, because it's not on the menu where they eat, or if it is it's much too expensive - and even when they luck into some it usually arrives cold.

Killing a gnat with a neutron bomb

Amazingly intense blog comment: Sarcastr0 Winston Blake • 4 hours ago

Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth

Update - I'm informed in comments that this comes straight from something called penny arcade.

Schadenfreude showing

The news that Tacitus aka Josh Trevino had an unfortunate $400k relationship with the government of Malaysia briefly made me want to go to the Obsidian Wings blog and gloat, but happily I was quickly able to be sad instead. This example of animus-based misreading makes me feel more pleased to have reconsidered my first impulse.

dxmachina on the Republicans

dxmachina commenting on a Kevin Drum post:

Go back to 19th c. France, and you see get the same thing. A royalist party in a parliament has no real interest in participation in parliamentary government. Their purpose for being is to shut the assembly down, and hasten the Restoration thereby. It's illegitimate anyways, why bother getting involved in its smooth running? When the rightful King-Emperor comes into his own again, the real work of government -- courtiers jockeying for grace and favor, pensions and preferment, governorships and royal monopolies -- can return. And parliament can go back to its real role -- a talking-shop that occasionally votes the King credits for his wars. The weirdest transformation of political terminology hasn't been what happened to the word 'liberal' since the days of John Stuart Mill -- it's what happened to the word 'republican'. They're divine-right monarchists -- spaniels looking for their King Charles.

Short answer to stupid question

Glenn Greenwald writes,

(2) As for Drum’s insistence that it’s inherently wrong to ally with Paul for any reason, does that apply to Barney Frank, Alan Grayson, and Dennis Kucinich, all of whom have done exactly that? Indeed, in 2008 Kucinich said he would consider Paul for his Vice Presidential pick (Paul said the same about Kucinich).

Yes. Slightly longer answer: Greenwald of course confuses the position of a politician and that of an advocate. He writes, after a great deal of blather about "crazy" (refusing to consider Drum's argument that Paul's positions are in effect due to the paranoid strain in American politics),

why doesn’t Drum unveil the roster of national political figures with a serious platform who are making these points instead?

But as Drum showed, Paul is a bad advocate for the ideas Greenwald wants discussed, due to his racism, his nutty beliefs, his anti-Semitic/homophobic/etc comments, etc. etc. Plus of course that Paul's a poor advocate for Greenwald because he doesn't actually get to positions Greenwald likes for reasons he could countenance. Either Greenwald needs to find a (for some reason satisfactory) person with a national presence who's not a crank, or he needs to cast his lot with folks like Grayson and Sanders who, if not perfect in his eyes, can move the conversation in the direction he wants without deserved repulsion from the left.

randomly_1

Links relevant to the previous post: the state defends a rapist, and an essay on another crime.

randomly

Interestingly crappy thread moderation by John Scalzi here. People who disagree with the dominant view in discussions should be afforded extra protection, not less. Worse, in this case I judge that the suppressed minority voices were making trenchant points.

Also interesting for a conservative (I assume) reading of LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas" I hadn't thought of in political terms - that the ones should have walked to the nearest gun store. This I think runs into the problem of where responsibility ends - plenty of children in this world live in Omelan circumstances.

Re LeGuin, having reread _TLHOD_, _The Dispossesed_, and the Earthsea trilogy recently, I read _A Fisherman of the Inland Sea_ and found it about evenly split between preachy failures and incoherent failures, with one beautiful story, "The Kerastion", in the middle. Really high peak, long decline phase, in baseball parlance.

Rilkekind's dancer

A dancer in time

Stupid New York Times health coverage

Unbelievably, this article about high autism rates in Somali communities in the US manages to present a full description of the viewpoint of the anti-vaccine advocates without noting that the science is settled against them. The article says that the vaccine "theory" has "weaknesses" - but doesn't list any, only citing the case of one child who had seizures before being immunized.

Here's a theory - Donald G. McNeil, Jr. is deliberately misleading his readers. This theory has a weakness - Bob Somerby probably says he's just an idiot.

More music news

The other day I had a hankering to listen to Schubert's beautiful D940 Fantasia in F Minor for piano four hands, so I dug it up from the bottom of the bottom box of classical music awaiting a set of shelves somewhere in our house. The cd also had the much less interesting Marches Militaires - during one Rilkekind looked up from his toys and said, "This is march music". Or something not unbelievably precocious which sounds similar, though I can't figure out what.

I/P conflict news

Interesting if accurate: a Palestinian Center for Public Opinion poll says that support for Hamas in Gaza has fallen to 28% from 51% in November. And Fatah is up to 41%. There will be much gnashing of teeth in some quarters of the blogosphere if this holds up. Well, more likely it won't get discussed.

Also, the conflict reportedly got to a senior British diplomat, who allegedly said a few unfortunate but not psychotic things. I somehow hadn't realized this is the sort of thing one can get arrested for in the UK.

Music news

The other day Rilkekind said, "Daddy, sing 'Oh My Darling' with bananas".

I was listening to Hindemith's _Mathis Der Maler_ recently and he remarked, "Big dustbuster [i.e., vacuum cleaner] music". I'll have to try him on the solo viola music, which I love.

The first movement (segment?) of _Mathis Der Maler_ ends as excitingly as any work I can think of. But the balance of the whole work is thereby thrown off for me. For that matter I've always wondered about e.g. Brahms putting the weightiest movement of say the 4th symphony first - it sometimes seems backwards.

There's a note in the first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto that seems wrong to me - it's rhythmically awkward. I wonder if a century of violinists and conductors have triple-checked the score there. But surely there's a good reason for everything in the piece. Sadly googling "wrong note in Brahms violin concerto" doesn't yield much of obvious use.

Listening to Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony recently I was reminded by what turns out to be the "statue theme" of the phrase in measure 16 of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for organ. A quick google doesn't reveal a link - guess I should sit down at a piano and figure out all those accidentals.

Frank Black's reading of the line "God willing I won’t put you in the ground" from "California Bound" off _Black Letter Days_ is great - he has an awful but expressive voice and he undersings the threat or prayer perfectly. Compare to Paul Hillier's reading of "That the wolf ate" from "Song for a Sea Tower" off bitter ballads - he uncharacteristically overemphasizes the line by putting a sort of chuckle into his wonderful voice. The two albums, which make an interesting pair, have taught me a lot about what one can do singing songs in a mode closer to speech than what one might call the usual Liederstimme.