"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

The Whirlwind/The Thorntress/The Maidens

Big bike ride yesterday, bounding up to the top of twin peaks. The ocean was clear and the heavy wind coming over the top of the hill was enough to lean into; trust fall with mother earth. Rambled through the city, which is charged with a couple of conferences, some peace marches, and various gatherings of the far out. All that and the normal hustle of a Saturday. Hit the bank, then the Zeitgeist for a beer and a garden burger and calling my mom, then home.

And then out again. Bowling organized by my friend Zephyr and attended by DeanSpace colleagues and other allies in town for the Planetworks conference. Bowling is fun. Then up a hill to a woman named Abigail's house, a friend of Z's, and conversations about free will and public art and the new philosophy and of course politics. It's good. I don't get to talk about free will all that often, and it's something I like to do. Mmm... intellectual stimulation.

Speaking of stimulation, the balmy weather does make the blood run. I'm prowling, and it's getting to be annoying. It's not like a conscious thing I go and do, but rather some mood that just seems to settle over me, where I can't seem to have any interaction with anyone female without feeling an over/under-tone of sexual tension.

This is annoying to me because the desire to fuck obstructs my ability to interact with women as fellow human beings. This is largely a flaw in my own psychology, I think, because there are clearly people out there in the world who have greater libidinous appetites than I do who still manage to move through life without feeling similarly blocked. I think what it boils down to is that somewhere in me I'm uncomfortable with my own desires, and so when these things come up it throws me off balance.

Intellectually, I don't see any reason for my being uncomfortable. Yet there it is. More estrangement from self.

I've had two very odly sexy dreams the past two nights. Friday night's also had strange racial overtones. I dreamt that I was in a grocery store in NYC, picking up my basket off the ground I bumped into a voluptuous half-black pregnant woman, and after speaking a few words she asked me how old I was. I answered 25 and she said, "good, then I can take you home." On the way back to her house, we (or rather she) got razzed by some black men in an SUV. I don't recall if there was any actual sex in the dream, but there was the very clear intent, and a definite feeling of arousal. It was all tied up in some larget bohemian storyline about politics and the occult, I think.

Last night I dreamt -- again as part of some larger storyline that I can't really recall -- that I was making prank phone calls to the police, reporting non-existant bad drivers from a payphone. I stepped out and ran into Caryn Johnson, who was one of my original highschool crushes. There was a similar spark as we kind of both circled back to say high, to catch up, and in the dream I'm standing there with my hands on this woman's hips, getting closer and closer, and then these two kids bust into the picture, a younger boy and and older girl. They're not hers, but somehow she's responsible for them. After that I don't really remember.

So that's kind of odd... two not-really-erotic dreams (but with titlating sexual content) both involving random encounters and children. What would Freud say?

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Team Leader Lacks Facts: Part II

I got some decent pushback on my GOP Team Leader comment from the other day. Rather than just answer in the comments, I'll take the opportunity to go through the process here on the front page.

Not only do I think the Iraqi Body Count (IBC) is too high, it does not support your use of it. For example, when Iraqis or foreign terrorists blow up the ICRC building, the UN building, and other “soft” targets, those deaths go into the IBC database.

Valid, and I thought of that while I was writing it. However, it would seem unlikely to me that more than 2/3 of the Iraqi civilian casualties have been caused by insurgents. Likewise, there are few other force on which one can attribute collateral damage in Afghanistan for.

I personally don’t find it unbelievable that “The war on terror has taken more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Great, we agree! Moving on.

It is completely dishonest to say that “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up”. Unless, of course, you are making the argument that despite spending “$200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up” that fewer fatalities (lower fatality rate) have resulted in both countries.

You're making what is called a counter-factual argument, saying that the consequences of not taking an action would have been worse than taking said action after the action has been taken. This is not a way to engage in rational discourse. It is also the same illogic that Bush uses, for instance, to justify his massive tax cuts: "things may be bad, but they would have been much worse if I hadn't done this."

You presuppose of binary view of possibilities, in this case, "war or nothing." This was a big part of how the pro-war faction succeeded. They were able to frame the debate as war vs doing nothing at all, which of course is a completely ridiculous way to look at things.

The real rub with counter-factual arguments is, of course, that there's no way to know what would have happened if alternative courses of action had been taken because the matter is already settled. They're useful in science because you can go back and re-do an experiment, a luxury we don't have in the world of statecraft.

Beyond this, your argument is further flawed in that you equate any innocent lives lost through US non-intervention to innocent lives we directly bring to an end. This is not rational either, unless you want to say that we're responsible for every unjust life lost world-wide in the same way that we're responsible for blowing up a wedding party by mistake.

WWII killed more “innocent civilians” than the attack on Pearl Harbor. Especially in Europe, whose people had nothing to do with the attack on Hawaii (not even a state at the time).

And so the inevitable comparison to "the good war" comes out. This is pure jingoistic masturbation. Comparing the non-threat of Iraq with the very real threat of the Axis powers is bullshit. Don't take my word for it. Ask a vet about it sometime.

I guess, by that logic, we should have just rounded up 3,000 or less Afghani and Iraqi civilians, murdered them, and called it even? Is that the point?

No, but it would seem that's somewhere near the point the GOP is making. The point I'm making, Tim with no email address or home page, is that the notion that the GOP really thinks it's "Unbelievable" that George Soros would get up and say things like this in public is a pretty unbelievable in and of itself.

Further, it would seem to me that the GOP refuses to admit (finds "unbelievable") that there are strong moral arguments against what we are doing right now in Iraq and around the world. It would seem that when such an argument is made the GOP, rather than making any attempt to actually engage in the work of undertanding and justifying what is going on, seeks to marginalize that moral position in any way it can. My point is that I think the GOP is acting in an immoral and untruthful fashion. My point (which was there all along) is this:

This GOP apparatus is an enemy of truth, an enemy of logic, an enemy of compassion and rational thought. They’ve got to fucking go, and decent Republicans are going to realize this sooner or later. You cannot run a good political party on lies, greed racism and religious fervor. (I just added greed, forgot it before)

If, on the other hand, what you're trying to draw out of me is what I would consider to be a better response to September 11th, you might want to read Why War is Not the Answer or Thoughts on an Anti-War Movement, both of which I wrote in the fall/winter of 2002. I haven't given a lot of thought to the matter lately because, well, a course of action has already been taken and I'm more concerned with what is going on than what might have been.

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Boots + Jam Jam

Boots + Jam Jam are a couple of Reedies. I like Reed. They have good party and smart kids. These two guys have two great projects: MakeMeATape and WriteMeALetter.

The kids are allright.

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Team Leader Lacks Facts

I get the GOP Team Leader email of course, and here's what I got today:

...Then in his remarks Mr. Soros--the billionaire supporter of John Kerry and MoveOn.org--equated the attacks of September 11 to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse and went on to say, “The war on terror has taken more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Unbelievable.

Abu Ghraib was bad and the soldiers involved are rightly being punished, but for Democrats to say that the abuse of Iraqi fighters is the moral equivalent of the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans is outrageous.

Leaving aside the smear that Soros morally equivocated Abu Ghraib and 9/11 (he didn't; he said they both produced shocking images), I'd like to focus on that middle paragraph.

Why is it unbelievable that more than 3,000 innocent people have been killed in our military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq? Is it unbelievable that we could have killed so many people, or that anyone would dare to say that we did?

I hate to let a little thing like math get in the way of a good zinger, but 9,284 > 3000. Oh, and don't forget the Afghanis.

So let's be clear here. Even if you think the lowball estimate from the IraqBodyCount is too high, you probably have to admit that when we spend about $200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up, we end up with more than 3,000 unintented (read: innocent) deaths. So the numbers aren't unbelievable.

What is unbelievable then? It must be that someone would have the gall to point out that the underlying emotional motivation for our current military (mis)adventures -- vengance -- is completely morally bankrupt even from the most brutal perspective, which is scale. It's un-fucking-believable to the GOP that a man from the opposition party would get on stage and say, "Holy shit, this is so fucked up! Not only are we bombing the wrong fucking people, but we're killing 3 or 4 times as many innocent civilians as died in the attacks on our own country."

That, to them, is unbelievable. It's unbelievable that people in this country are willing to publicly state that we've killed (and are continuing to kill) more Iraqi and Afghani civilians than we lost here at home.

I've met decent people who vote Republicans. I've even heard of decent Republican office-holders. But this GOP apparatus is an enemy of truth, an enemy of logic, an enemy of compassion and rational thought. They've got to fucking go, and decent Republicans are going to realize this sooner or later. You cannot run a good political party on lies, racism and religious fervor.

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Archive Trips

I wrote this more than two years ago. Strange to think about that. I've been having a protracted crisis of faith with my work in politics. Good to touch the roots.

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What's Been Going On

Well, one of my nipple piercings came out. It's been on the move for a while, and the day finally came. I got my tits done about five years ago by the good people at High Priestess in Eugene. I did it because I was wild and 20, and because my ex-girlfriend dared me. After the fact I found (as I'd suspected and hoped) that girls who were not my ex-girlfriend found the feature quite alluring.

The piercings were simultanious, both at the same time. It was a major rush and probably less hassle to get them done like that, but the right-hand one, done by the apprentice, was always more trouble than the master-pierced left. It took longer to heal, was generally more fussy, and about two years ago the metal stud started making it's way slowly downward with the gentle assistance of gravity. Lately it's been hanging by a thread. I have photos. The process has been kinda painful -- all the times it got caught on something, or smacked around by accident -- and I'm glad it's over, but now the right half of my chest looks strangely barren and featureless.

I have the barbell now; it came out without pain or incident in the shower. The last layer of tissue holding it to my body was so thin it was translucent, and after washing the area to soften it up, I was able to pull it free. Now I find I miss it; have to see about having it redone.

On the other hand (literally), I've noticed that the left-side is a lot more lively, tingling and stiffening and the like, as if finally being the lone piercing on my 25-year-old body has given in a renewed sense of purpose. I also find that without the "problem nipple" I feel a lot less worried about getting hit in the chest. Maybe this little change-up isn't all bad.

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There's a Reason They Call it "USS Clueless "

Stephen DenBeste is likely the most long-winded of all right-wing bloggers. He seems to be a smart enough engineer, and back in the day he and I swapped some emails about the war. I still drop in to see what he's going on about as it's a good way to check in with the people I diagree with. Here's a typical bit I disagree with, from a piece entitled (romantically enough) The price of heroism:

[this film was made] early enough so that the film makers were not infected with post-modernist multiculturalist mindset and didn't need to try to portray Hitler and the other top Nazis semi-sympathetically. (Or to try to figure out some reason why it was actually America's fault.)

See, this is why I can't take his writing seriously, (other than this that is; just kidding... he's outlandish too!). Can someone please tell me what film ever portreyed the H-man (or his top cronies) sympathetically, or ever attempted to place blame on America? Was it Schindlers List? Saving Private Ryan? Bedknobs and Broomsticks? A Bridge Too Far? Maybe he means Das Boot, but that's a German film, and it certainly doesn't portrey the high-brass sympathetically, just a U-Boat crew.

Here's a list of all the movies about WWII from imdb. What the fuck are you talking about Stephen?

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