The World's Dirtiest Joke

A new act comes in to a vaudeville booker. It's a man, a woman, a little girl, and a little dog. They're all well dressed and clean-cut and wholesome looking.

"So what's your act?" the agent asks.

"It's kind of hard to describe", the man replies. "We'll show you."

So they start into a sweet little song-and-dance number. However, it starts to change. Soon is is the most ghastly, obscene routine imaginable. It's the kind of act that would be banned in Thailand.

(This is what makes this the World's Dirtiest Joke — it's all in your head. I'm sure you can think of things that would gross you out totally that I might consider a mildly boring kink, and vice versa. Just imagine the grossest thing you possibly can.)

As the act comes to a close, it changes back to a sweet little song-and-dance. They've worked cleaning themselves up and rearranging clothing into the act, so that when they finish, they're all clean-cut and wholesome looking again.

The agent is aghast. "Well, what do you think of it?" the man asks.

The agent is speechless. He tries to think of something to say, but all that comes out is "What do you call your act"?

"The Aristocrats"

The metaphor is obvious.

New Template!!

Woohoo!

The old one was nice for its time, but it was seriously long in the tooth. It used lots of tables for layout, and was quite cluttered. Blogger doesn't seem to have the little graphics that did these table outlines any more. Sic transit Web.

I've tried to keep the CSS down to a set that any modern browser can handle. If not, it'll work just fine without it. The only Javascript is for the comments and site counter. When I figure out an acceptably obfuscated way of handling mailto: URLs, it may use Javascript.

Naturally, I'm not completely happy with the template. In particular, I'm not sure about the popups. They're CSS, not Javascript, so they'll work properly on non-CSS or text browsers. I don't know if I like having the sidebar boxes as popups or not. If you have an opinion one way or the other, please leave me a message in the comments. After all, it'll be mutating anyway. What about the popup lists coming up over the post text? The template doesn't need the extra width, and if I start getting a zillion hits, there's lots of room for Blogads. (Ha!)

Some general coments

• The font for the posts is set to the default font. If you don't like it, or it's the wrong size, check your own browser settings.
• If one of the popup lists goes off the bottom of the screen, you can navigate in it by putting your cursor somewhere inside the list and using the arrow keys or the scroll wheel to go up and down.
• I may or may not go back and add tags to old posts. It's probably not worth the effort.
• The "No comment" section is just a bunch of random links that I find interesting, for some reason. They'll come or go at whim.
• The template is set up to resize properly. I hate having to side-scroll to read something. (I'm lookin' at you, LiveJournal.)

Anyway, we'll see if it works!

Alternate Universe

Another traditional SF theme is the Alternate Universe. What would things be like if some historical event happened just a little bit differently? It's a fun area of speculation; two of my favorites are Too Many Magicians, by Randall Garrett (Richard III didn't die at the siege of Chaluz) and 1632, by Eric Flint (small town in West Virginia gets dropped into the middle of the Thirty Years War. Alternate History ensues).

Now, folks in the Administration have come out with statements about American and World history that range from wrong to hallucinatory. Assuming they're not just Making Stuff Up, what Universe are they from? Greg Cochran has an article in American Conservative that puts all of the pieces together. By golly, they all fit! So, our current ruling politicians are, quite literally, from another world. A not very nice one, it seems.

The question, of course, is what to do about it. Greg suggests:

Of course this means that we need to corral some or all of these visitors for study and experimentation. Such experiments would, I suppose, interfere with their civil liberties, if they had any, but they’re obviously not citizens of these United States. Technically they’re illegal aliens. Gitmo’s a-waitin’.

Hey, it's their laws!

"Pro-Life"? Bunk.

So the Supremes uphold the ban on the medical procedure "intact dilation and extraction" (IDX), misnamed "partial- birth abortion". What other specific medical procedures have been banned by name? I can't think of any. Misnamed? IDX is almost never used on a viable fetus. I say "almost" as a safety measure; I've never heard of it being used on a viable fetus, but I'm no expert.

IDX is a method of getting a dead or dying fetus out of a woman's body. Just how, exactly, is banning it "pro-life"? In its absence, a woman is supposed to wait for a "spontaneous miscarriage", which will hopefully happen before she dies. Often, it doesn't.

Yeah, IDX is icky. Note that "icky" is neither a medical term nor a legal term.

So we are going to have women dying to keep doctors from doing an icky procedure. Shows ya how much the "pro-lifers" value women.

The so- called "pro- life" types cleave naturally into two camps. The true pro- life folks are the ones who push sex education, provide prenatal and neonatal care for poor women, work with adoption agencies, and in general try to see to it that the people who get born have as good a chance as possible. Do they want to ban abortions? Some do, some don't. Most see it as a necessary evil. Legal abortion may be bad, but illegal abortion is a lot worse. I have really nothing to say to the true "pro- lifers"; it's a respectable position.

The "anti- choice" contingent is a lot simpler. Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant. It's not about "life", it's about control. Simplistic way of telling who's who — "pro- lifers" are women; "anti- choicers" are men.

The anti-choicers are the ones who make most of the noise — to the extent that a lot of pro-choicers I've talked to don't seem to think the "real pro- lifers" really exist. They do; they just tend to be quiet.

I could get into all sorts of things like the bogus theology that the anti- choicers throw around — St Augustine and Original Sin and the Immaculate Conception and the Scofield Bible, but that would bore most people to distraction. I could document that the most fanatical anti- choicers have real Issues with (ie, are terrified of) women, but that's pretty obvious.

I'll just say that this nonsense is going to kill people.

There's a Word ...

So Georgie made a fool of himself at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. I've not seen any speculation as to why Georgie acted this way, other than the usual and unhelpful he's a jerk.

Nobody else seems to have said this, so I will. Looks to me like he was drunk.

Time to Drop Anchor

So the DLC is saying that Democrats should move to the right; tringulate, to use their term.

Wrong.

Voters are polarized, to the point that any more movement to the right will lose significant numbers of votes on the left. They may vote for Ralph Nader or just stay home; either way, they're lost. And, because of the degree of polarization, you're not going to pick up any appreciable numbers of voters from the Republican "base", either.

Time to drop anchor. The Democratic Party needs to dig in its heels and not let itself be dragged any further from its own principals. Remember, you never really compromise with a fanatic — you move, the fanatic doesn't.

So what should the core principals are we talking about? Well, let's see:

• Start with Civil Rights. This means everybody's civil rights — white, black, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, atheist, straight, gay, whatever. Everybody.
• War on Terror: Get the bastards. But make sure we're going after the right bastards. We don't need more Iraqs. Also, this will involve more diplomacy (ie, twisting Saudi arms) than military action. Essentially, this is police work with soldiers backing up the cops.
• Foreign policy: We can't be the World's Nose Wiper. Yeah, there are Bad People in the world. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about most of them. Iraq was an attempt to do so; see how well that worked.
• Fiscal policy: Wants are infinite, resources are finite. Work toward a balanced budget and paying down the national debt. Yeah, this means raising Paris Hilton's taxes.
• Energy: Start prying the House of Saud's fingers off of our throat. At the same time, we can work on lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
• Healthcare: While true universal health care is not an option in the next election cycle, we have to start looking toward it. A good start would be to move public programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and their state and local equivalents in the direction of a "single payer" system. The current system is a nightmare; it wouldn't be hard to improve it a lot.
• Honesty, openness, accountability, and competence. Easy to promise; hard to deliver, and the Republicans' biggest weakness.

Some minor points, and implications of the above:

• Abortion: Pro-choice all the way. Siding with the anti-choicers in a misguided attempt at "triangulation" will just lose votes from the base.
• Stem cells: Ditto. The vast majority of voters on all sides are in favor of stem cell research.
• Iraq: Start working on digging ourselves out. It ain't gonna be easy — the choices I see range from disasterous to catastrophic.
• Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, torture, and "extraordinary rendition": They all stop. Now. If this means high-level spooks and generals walk out, so be it.
• Gun control: Let it drop. The arguments on both sides are all heat and no light.
• Social Security: It ain't broke. Don't screw with it. Point out that the "privatisers'" numbers don't add up.

Some tactics:

• Run against Bush. His popularity is down about to the Yellow Dog level. The slogan "Rubber Stamp Republican" is good here. Congressional Republicans have gone along with just about all of Bush's harebrained schemes; call them on it.
• Yeah, the press is against you. Deal. Likewise, the Republicans are going to be spewing large amounts of slime It's all they have left. Plan for it; have responses ready. Don't get Switboated again.
• Learn to use numbers effectively. Know when raw numbers are better and when percentages are better. Use familiar analogies — credit cards, car loans, etc.
• Lose the fruitcakes. We're not going to outlaw SUVs, confiscate guns, disband the military, tear down the suburbs, or commit any other form of ritual suicide. Anybody who wants to is Outside the Tent. Let 'em piss in; you're known as much by who your enemies are as by who your friends are.
• Lose the DLC. They're the Neocon wing of the Democratic party — and financed by the same foundations that fund the Republican neocons. They're the ones pushing the line "We're just like Republicans, only better". If there was ever a guaranteed loser of an attitude, that's it.
• Lose the Big Bucks Consultants. They're the ones who have been consistantly losing elections for the last 25 or so years. They also suck enormous amounts of money.
• Make damn sure everybody knows you're going to fight tooth and toenail over any suggestion of vote fraud, especially anything involving electronic voting machines. And carry through after election day. Don't be afraid to raise a fuss.

Above all, keep in mind that we're in this for the long haul. We don't want to just win this election; we want to force the Republicans to cough up the Neocon - Theocrat furball permanently, like the Democrats threw out the Communists and the white-sheet crowd. This means plan for the long haul, and don't just assume that the NTs, or whatever other group that wants to drag us back to the rule of the Priest-Kings can be ignored just because they're ridiculous.

LATER — Avedon has another tactical suggestion, via American Microphone. Learn how the Republicans run their "big tent". Do it. When somebody is willing to work with you, don't insist that they agree with you on every tiny little detail. My "lose the fruitcakes" comment above refers to either people who try to hijack the party for their own personal crusades (uhh ... jihads?) or who are so far out on the fringe that nobody wants to deal with them I'm lookin' at you, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky. Nothing wrong with the granola crowd if they're willing to go along with the program and not claim that, for example, the Democrats will outlaw SUVs. Yeah, I've heard this one.

The Center

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ...

— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

The Common Wisdom in politics is run to the center. Supposedly, Bill Clinton was the master of triangulation; moving enough to the Center to get what you want by giving the other side some of what they want. This used to be called compromise, but that word seems to be out of favor now.

Mathematically, opinions are usually on a normal distribution — the familiar bell-shaped curve. In this situation, the candidate that's closest to the center of the curve will get the most votes. Undecided votes are considered to be in the center.

Note that I said usually. If everybody pulls back into their own side of the argument, the opinions become polarized. This is represented by two overlapping bell curves. If they are far enough apart that there's a dip between them, moving to the center will lose votes.

Currently, it looks to me like our polarized curves are not only far apart, they're in different universes. The one on the left is the traditional Liberal-Conservative distribution while the one on the right might be thought of as the Neocon-Theocrat axis. There's simply no way to appeal to both. Unfortunately, right now, the N-T axis is controlling the terms of political discourse and attracting a good chunk of the right-hand side of the left (L-C) curve.

Yo! Democrats! Stop moving to the Center (which doesn't really exist) and you can pick up the whole left-hand curve — practically everybody. Your friendly average "conservative" (yes, they really do exist) has no interest in massive deficits, giveaways to Halliburton, foreign empire building, gay bashing, or Christianism.

"Them" and "Us"

One of my first blog posts was about Them. The point of the post was that everybody has a Them, and everybody's Them is different.

This post is about Us, as opposed to Them. In normal social/business activities, it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Them and Us. After all, They are Them because they're Not Like Us. Now, as the groups get bigger, it gets harder to draw the line. It's easy to tell who's one of Us in a bowling league; it's a lot harder with, say, a religion or political party. By the time we get up to the State or National level, the concept of Them isn't useful any more — it's all just Us.

From an anthropoligical point of view, the strongest sanction that a group has available to it is expulsion from the group. This converts one of Us to one of Them. Nowadays, on a State or Federal level, the only way to "expel" somebody is to kill them. The alternative of exile is not available any more, as there are no real State controls on movement, and even the most backwater countries has passport control. Jails? Prisons? They're still here. Prisoners may be isolated from non-prisoners, but they're still here. Their "Us" is now other prisoners. Eventually, most prisoners are released and go back to being one of Us, although a lot of people seem not to like this.

What brought this up was a video (via) dated 1947, from the War Department, talking abot what we would now call "diversity". It simply points out that the US is one big Us, and anybody who tries to break us up into little warring cliques is up to no good. The example used (from those carefree pre-Godwin days) is the Nazis. Remember, this was 1947, and the memories of the horrors of WWII were still very fresh.

Another thought on this fine (until it storms again) Fourth of July is the idea of Tolerance, which goes hand in hand with Diversity. Some claim that Tolerance is self-defeating, because it means that the Tolerant have to be Tolerant of the Intolerant, who can then do anything they want to the Tolerant. This is based on a bad definition of Tolerance.

Tolerance is a two-way street. The only way I can "tolerate" you is if you "tolerate" me. If you don't tolerate me, the proper phrase for what I'm doing is "putting up with", or "trying to ignore", or some such. The reason to put up with the hate-spewing Dividers is simply that most folks recognize the tricks and ignore them. Helps that the groups that the hatemongers are trying to drum up support against (gays, Muslims, Democrats) are too big to be safely charactertured. It's very easy to work up a good hate against a group that you don't know any members of. When you say "they're talking about my friend Charlie", you've taken the first vital step to seeing through the hate. Now you can ask the question, "Why are they saying that?". This way lies freedom.

So go out this Independance Day and enjoy the burgers and beer and fireworks with all your wild, crazy, and, yes, Diverse Fellow Americans. Let's hear it for Us!

UPDATE -- that link for the War Department video is dead. Another one is here. Go watch!

The War is Over

You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.

— Talleyrand

The War is Over. We won.

Which war? The one in Iraq, of course. Remember "Mission Accomplished"? That's as good a point as any to declare the war "won". The Iraqi army had been completely smashed, Saddam Hussein was in hiding, and the US military controlled the entire country.

But aren't we still fighting? Well, yes, but we aren't fighting a war. We're conducting an occupation. Big difference.

Isn't it just a matter of semantics? Well, it's certainly a matter of semantics; I question the "just", as if semantics don't matter.

War is active. Fight battles, capture territory, force the enemy leaders to surrender. An occupation is passive. Keep order, prevent the old enemies from regrouping, try to return the occupied territory to a semblance of normalcy. The aim is to turn the place over to a "legitimate" local government.

An occupation is essentially an administrative matter. There's no "won" or "lost"; it's all a matter of definitions and degrees. Did you make your quarterlies? It's generally pretty miserable for people in the occupied territory. Battles are generally fought Somewhere Else; the occupation is here.

Right now, we have the most powerful army in the world, running around Iraq, waiting for Rommel to show up. He ain't gonna. Treating the situation in Iraq as a "war" leads to messes like Falluja. American soldiers are terrible as occupation or peacekeeping troops. Fighters, yes. Occupiers, no.

So if we pull the troops out of Iraq now, we're not "losing" anything. We're not "cutting and running", except to get out of the way of a low-intensity civil war with about a zillion different sides.

So What *Is* a Liberal, Anyway?

For years now, since Reagan got elected, we've been hearing rants from the Right on the evilness of Liberals. Listen to Limbaugh or his ilk, and you'll get the idea that Liberals are all a mixture of Jimmy Hoffa, Jessie Jackson, Noam Chomsky, and Hubert Humphrey. You'll note that these are completely incompatible. To the Right, "Liberal" is just a "hate word" — its only real meaning is "I don't like it". Just the thing for a two-minute hate, but no good for a real discussion.

So what are we really talking about here? Well, let's see what one of the more famous American Liberals had to say about it:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word "Liberal" to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a "Liberal," and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.

In short, having set forth my view -- I hope for all time -- two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world's history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Tonight we salute Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman as a symbol of that spirit, and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for all Americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961.

Many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of the American labor movement. They are the men who sweated in our shops, who struggled to create a union, and who were driven by longing for education for their children and for the children's development. They went to night schools; they built their own future, their union's future, and their country's future, brick by brick, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and now in their children's time, suburb by suburb.

Tonight we salute George Meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that goes on in our day. But in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at home. For here and around the world the fear of war hangs over us every morning and every night. It lies, expressed or silent, in the minds of every American. We cannot banish it by repeating that we are economically first or that we are militarily first, for saying so doesn't make it so. More will be needed than goodwill missions or talking back to Soviet politicians or increasing the tempo of the arms race. More will be needed than good intentions, for we know where that paving leads.

In Winston Churchill's words, "We cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from them. We dare not pretend such dangers do not exist."

And tonight we salute Adlai Stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort to achieve an intelligent foreign policy. Our opponents would like the people to believe that in a time of danger it would be hazardous to change the administration that has brought us to this time of danger. I think it would be hazardous not to change. I think it would be hazardous to continue four more years of stagnation and indifference here at home and abroad, of starving the underpinnings of our national power, including not only our defense but our image abroad as a friend.

This is an important election -- in many ways as important as any this century -- and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be associated with us in this great effort.

The reason that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad, and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

I think it is our task to re-create the same atmosphere in our own time. Our national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of our country. I am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history of the great Republic.

Some pundits are saying it's 1928 all over again. I say it's 1932 all over again. I say this is the great opportunity that we will have in our time to move our people and this country and the people of the free world beyond the new frontiers of the 1960s.

— Sen. John F. Kennedy, acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination, September 14, 1960.

Now when right-wingers talk about how bad liberals are, just ask them exactly what part of this they disagree with.