Send some good thoughts Steve Gilliard's way
I hadn't been aware he was in the hospital in the first place, but now he's in the middle of a serious operation that's lasting much longer than one would like.


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UPDATE, 3/13: The surgery will be completed today (!), hopefully. Best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery.
UPDATE, 3/14: Continued rough sledding.
UPDATE, 3/20: Sigh. As of 3/17, right side paralysis of unknown origin. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:27:00 PM -- |    

 
Cool stuff: Department of Music

Last.fm --- This widget lets you sample music "similar" to artists or bands you name; click on "change station" to see that, or just click the "play" arrow to listen to random stuff.

"Similarity" is apparently guesstimated by tags users assign to music via the iPod or computer music listening behavior they share (or "scrobble," if I understand correctly). Like anything else, sometimes you'll agree, sometimes you won't, but it's a nice way to listen to new stuff.

UPDATE, 3/9: Paul comments that he likes an alternative called Pandora. Try it, try 'em both, but whichever you try, try it soon, because WebProNews reports: "In a decision that could drive the nail in the coffin to Internet radio providers, the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has endorsed a proposal by SoundExchange to enact royalty rates for webcasts and streaming music sites that will stay in effect from 2006 until 2010." Thank RIAA -- and ask them whether all those artist royalty checks are still "in the mail." (I'm not sure, but last.fm may benefit, at least for a while, from being based in the UK. ) Save Net Radio gives their side of the story.
UPDATE, 3/12: Also check out Grateful Dread Radio, Natalie Davis' Live365 internet radio station.

Folk Songs for the Five Points* --- mix five tracks worth of found sound, music, and interviews with people from the Manhattan's Lower East Side. Spooky, melancholy, beautiful guitar work by Victor Gama provides some musical scaffolding; you move any of five points to new locations on a map of the neighborhood to change a given track from, say, steam from a manhole cover to a "Nuyorican" poetry recital or from pigeons cooing to sounds from underneath a highway bridge. Reading this may or may not make it sound like much, but as I wrote a while back, I think it's kind of beautiful.

Actionist Respoke* --- by Michael Janoschek and Rüdiger Schlömer, "Mouse on Mars." From the introduction:

...this work reflects the question if music has to please the listener and if an interface has to obey the user. A kind of »Sound-Biotop« [ecosystem, habitat -- ed.], this interface is a stubborn, difficult to use system, which develops a chaotic/poetic dynamic of its own until it totally gets out of control.

Ja! Ausgezeichnet! If that doesn't tempt you, I don't know what will. (Shockwave upgrade may be required.) Via Interactive Audio for the Web, via the Wikipedia "Interactive Music" entry, which observes "We are now at the stage where a musical score is able to adapt in real-time to what is happening in a game." Somewhat along those lines, see...

Field Excursion* --- Brazilian soundsmith Amon Tobin creates music to go with animations of extraterrestrial or alternate-world undersea creatures:

There are five creatures to be found and sampled. Each one makes its own unique sounds. If you interact with them by sampling each individual noice, they will demonstrate how they use their sounds to get down.

At least a couple of the names are adapted from those of protozoa. I liked the sticholonched, whose sounds "include a passing train, gated and processed with harmonics added to equalizer." (Broadband connection advisable even for initial link. Via Julian Sanchez, "Notes from The Lounge," where Tobin's latest work is showcased.)

The Concert: A Classical Musical Podcast --- Free classical music to listen to at your computer or download to your iPod, provided by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The music is performed by its chamber orchestra or guest artists, and is at least sometimes themed to illustrate a musical point. Thus Concert No. 14 is called "One degree of separation: Vivaldi and Brahms":

As Vivaldi became increasingly popular, though, people started to realize what an influence he’d had on Bach. It’s no secret that Bach, in turn, had a great influence on Brahms. In the second piece on this program, Brahms’ cello sonata in E minor, you’ll particularly hear the influence of Bach’s fugues in the final movement. And maybe you’ll even hear a trace of Vivaldi’s counterpoint.

Django* --- The Modern Jazz Quartet, 1987, Freiburg, Germany

See also the Miles Davis "So What" recording I showed here last year -- more good music to calm down by.

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* EDIT, 3/12: Where indicated, a broadband connection may be advisable even for the first link, which may attempt to stream music or Shockwave images. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:05:00 PM -- |    

 
pander n.

1. a go-between in a sexual intrigue; esp., a procurer; pimp.
2. a person who provides the means of helping to satisfy the ignoble ambitions or desires, vices, etc. of another

-- Webster's New World Dictionary

I return to Jackson Diehl's Monday opinion editorial in the Washington Post, "The House's Ottoman Agenda," and specifically to his charge that H.R. 106, the Armenian Genocide Resolution was an example of "constituent pandering."

"Start with the pandering," begins Diehl, continuing that the resolution's sponsor, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA-29), "cheerfully concedes that there are 70,000 to 80,000 ethnic Armenians in his district, for whom the slaughter of Armenians by the Young Turk regime during World War I is 'anything but ancient history.'" "Concedes?" What's to concede? Mr. Schiff is a "representative," which suggests he will "represent" the people of his district. When he proposes a legitimate goal of people in his district to the Congress of the United States, then in our "democracy" that's not a bug, that's a feature.

Diehl's sloppy, deeply stupid opinion may well have meant to use the word "pander" in the same sloppy, stupid way it has come to be used generally: something done purely for local, short term political advantage that will benefit a few but cost more to others. But the word's original meaning reveals that at its core, "pandering" doesn't mean favoring the few over the many, it means catering to ignoble aims or vices.

It ought to be needless to say that remembering the wholesale slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 and 1916, and holding its perpetrators to account, is neither ignoble nor a vice. Mr. Diehl's choice of words is a libel against Representative Schiff, but it is a far worse libel against his constituents.

Imagine if the Washington Post chose to call the United States January UN resolution against Holocaust denial "pandering" to anyone at all. There's simply no such thing when it comes to opposing lies about that monstrous crime against humanity -- especially when those lies are given the official blessing of a country's government. Or consider Congress -- in the 105th Congress of 1997-1998 alone, there were three binding and two nonbinding resolutions related to the Holocaust, including ones about establishing presidential commissions to investigate the disposition of Holocaust-era assets, identifying such assets for the purpose of restitution, setting aside $25 million to assist with that, and expressing the sense of Congress that Germany should do more to simplify and expand reparations. "Pandering"? Not at all. Helping see justice done? Of course.

I'd rather not speculate why some crimes against humanity seem to merit more attention than others, or why attempts to recognize them get more respect by the media than others -- or at least aren't subjected to disdain and mockery. I'll simply restate what I said below: Diehl's arrogant op-ed was a disgrace, marred by words like "pander," "frivolity," "shrug," and "comical" in connection with one of the worst crimes against humanity that ever happened. He and the Washington Post should be profoundly ashamed, and everyone concerned -- from Diehl to the publisher to the op-ed page editor -- should reflect and then apologize for their contemptuous treatment of a genocide and its victims.



ADDENDUM: While I'm on the subject, it's extremely disappointing to note that Matthew Yglesias has also -- and once again -- put his name to a supercilious, apathetic statement about genocide and responses to it. I realize it's just a bunch of people with "ian" at the end of their names, but there's simply nothing that's "pretty funny" about the Armenian Genocide or about Diehl's hatchet job on HR106. Deniers of the Holocaust are rightly derided and despised these days -- yet surely not because of statements like Mr. Yglesias's, but rather despite them. (Via Robert Farley at TAPPED.)

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EDIT, 3/7: Nevertheless, "statements like Mr. Yglesias's" etc. is more supportable than "people like Mr. Yglesias" etc.
UPDATE, 3/9: My comment to Yglesias' post has not appeared; I got a comment pending message. My comment in full: "I disagree: not funny. Not funny at all." Maybe the two links got caught on some spam filter, maybe the coComment thingie I use has bollixed things up somehow. Or maybe the comment hasn't been and won't be approved.
2D UPDATE, 3/9: Looks like it was the links; my somewhat longer comment without any external links has posted.
UPDATE, 3/13: WorldWideWeber ("Notes from The Basement") points out a decent editorial, "Turkey's Chutzpah," in The Jewish Press, saying that Turkey shouldn't play the uniqueness-of-the-Holocaust card with American Jews. It also simply "acknowledg[es] as genocide the systematic murder of a million and a half [Armenians]." See? That wasn't so hard. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:47:00 AM -- |    

 
Re Jackson Diehl's "The House's Ottoman Agenda"
Jackson Diehl has an op-ed in today's Washington Post ("The House's Ottoman Agenda") about the possibility that the House may pass a non-binding resolution (H. Res 106) recognizing the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Below is my response to his article, as submitted to the Post:

Mr. Diehl dismisses as "comical" the quest of Armenians to have their ordeal in 1915 recognized for what it was: genocide -- without the scare quotes he puts around the word. He dismisses Representatives pushing for the vote as "pandering." He recommends Turkey dismiss the bill's passage with a "shrug."

He wouldn't feel that way if his ancestors had been murdered by the tens and hundreds of thousands -- and then faced a constant propaganda campaign by the perpetrators that nothing really happened. And op-eds in the nation's premier newspaper that the whole thing is some kind of minor joke.

This is possibly the most callous, offensive op-ed I've ever had the misfortune to read in the pages of the Washington Post. Diehl should reconsider the entire article, retract it, and print an apology to the decent Armenian Americans of this country who have worked so long to see not justice, but a simple acknowledgement of the crime against their people see the light of day.

If you know little or nothing about the Armenian Genocide, you're (a) not alone, and (b) you should; whether Diehl thinks it's far-fetched or not, Hitler is quoted as saying "Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" I wrote about it in April, 2005 -- "90 years ago today: Armenian genocide begins" -- and there are links to more substantive resources there if you care to learn about it. Hundreds of thousands -- the consensus is actually around 1.5 million -- were either massacred outright, succumbed to disease and starvation, or perished in forced death marches into the deserts of Turkey and present-day Syria. For such grief and horror to receive such a brush-off from the Post is nothing short of reprehensible.

Diehl notes that the Turkish ambassador has been lobbying against the bill's passage, warning that "a nationalist tidal wave could sweep Turkey and force the government to downgrade its cooperation with the United States, which needs Turkey's help this year to stabilize Iraq and contain Iran." These are not exactly weighty cudgels to swing at those of us who want the U.S. out of Iraq and dialing down a confrontation with Iran, but even a realistic appraisal of Turkish politics may not support the ambassador's or Diehl's alleged forebodings.

As Diehl noted, an ultranationalist teenager recently assassinated an Armenian Turkish journalist in Istanbul. But far from revealing the strength of anti-Armenian sentiment in Turkey, Hrant Dink's murder appears to have galvanized the opposite among both the people and the media of Turkey. Tens of thousands of Turks took to the streets with signs saying "We are all Armenians" to protest what happened; the media widely condemned what it called a "lynch culture." A great number of people in Turkey may be ahead of their ruling classes on this issue -- rather than behind them. Meanwhile, the one thing Turkish elites really want these days -- EU membership -- is hardly going to be advanced if they whip up nationalist resentments about a US genocide resolution.

Mr. Diehl is also clever, but deeply misleading to imply H.R. 106 is some kind of Democratic ploy (sponsor Schiff is "pandering" with it, Speaker Pelosi supports it, "even" some Democrats oppose it). A look at the bill's co-sponsors shows plenty of Republicans -- the Diaz-Balarts, Wamp, Sensenbrenner, Rohrabacher, and Musgrave, to name a few, are hardly pushovers for partisan Democratic skulduggery. Former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole always supported the Armenian genocide resolution during his tenure in the Senate.

Diehl makes much of the non-binding nature of the resolution; why all the fuss, he implies, for something that doesn't matter? The question answers itself when you see how a Turkish full court press has apparently taken in the Washington Post. Why is the Turkish government bothering? Why do they want to keep a 90 year old crime against humanity covered up for another year? And why should the Post aid and abet them in that?

A final note: I'd like to think I'd support H.R. 106 one way or the other. But I don't doubt I'm more aware of the issue because my wife is part Armenian. If you've stuck with this post, I've passed on a little bit of that awareness; if you'd like your Congressman or -woman to support the bill, send them a fax via the Armenian National Committee of America.


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UPDATE, 3/6: As of today, ANCA shows that 47 Republicans are among the 178 Representatives "pandering" by cosponsoring HR106 and speaking out about a genocide that has gone unacknowledged by its perpetrators for more than 90 years. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:44:00 AM -- |    

 
Heh. Indeed.
In early February, "d" (Lawyers, Guns and Money) did a four year anniversary look back at Colin Powell's bravura performance at the UN:

And then the whole world was kind of looking at each other a little bit and saying, "Hey, Mr. President guy, chill -- take some vitamin C and drink some water, man, 'cuz you're kind of freaking us out here," and the President guy was like, "No, man, I'm cool, I'm cool," and then that snarly bald guy with the heart problem was all, like, "grrrrrrrrrr," and we just bugged out and said, "Ok, ok, we believe you a little bit," even if we really didn't, because after all that classy military dude had gotten on TV and swore to God that Iraq had all this shit that -- you know -- scared us and shit?

I deplore the use of the word "shit" in this satire; see below.

The "Bill Clinton" entry, as "defaced" with one truthful statement and one helpful summarizing statement at the collectively edited "Conservapedia" web site:

Bill Clinton managed to serve two terms without botching the prosecution of two wars, manipulating intelligence, engaging in a systematic program of torture, or mishandling the federal response to flooding of a major American city. Obviously, he is the devil incarnate.

Robert Farley ("Lawyers, Guns, and Money") --

The odds may be against us, the argument conventionally goes, but it (whatever "it" may be) is worth a try. Recall that the Surge was initially justified as "doubling down", which pursued the gambling metaphor even further. One would almost come to believe that the value of a particular policy is inversely related to the likelihood that it will succeed... [...]

I would dearly, dearly love to own a casino hosting a convention of conservative bloggers.

The editors of the Poor Man Institute Journal of Civil Political Behavior have thoughtfully provided a side by side listing of Incivil/Unserious words as used by far too many on the left, and Civil/Serious arguments as used by far too many on the right. Excerpts:

Incivil/Unserious	Civil/Serious
“f*ck”	Suggest that Arab countries, being too primitive for democracy, should be reduced to rubble.
“sh*t”	Imply that the media is working with al Qaeda.[...]
“d*ck”	Congratulate people for recognizing that the ethnic cleansing of Muslims is inevitable.
“c*nt”/”c*ck”	Point out that Arab Muslims are bloodthirsty savages.[...]
“b**b**”	Suggest that the only thing a baby-murdering terrorist did wrong was not kill more journalists.

Etcetera, etcetera, etf*ckingcetera. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:37:00 PM -- |    

 
Worth reading
Boerish (HTML Mencken, "Sadly, No!") --- the wonderfully pseudonymed 'Mencken' collects statements by pro-war enthusiasts Max Boot, Josh Trevino, Glenn Reynolds and others seeking inspiration for American strategy in Iraq in the Boer War -- paraphrasing, "sure, there were concentration camps and scorched earth, but the Brits won" -- and sets them against an assessment of that debacle by mid 20th century historian AJP Taylor. Eerie similarities surface between politics here and now and politics then and there. Mencken:

The ground conditions SNAFU and the politician schemers realized they hadn’t thought things through, hadn’t considered contingencies. Check. Policies and practices which scandalized world opinion. Check. Depraved policies and practices that make a mockery of one’s country’s ideals. Check and mate.

Taylor, emphasis Mencken's:

Fifty years afterwards, it is clear that victory has gone to the worst elements on both sides. Milner got his war without achieving his vision; the Boers lost their independence without being won for progress and civilization […] The mining houses and the most narrow-minded Boers, Johannesburg and Pretoria, have joined hands to oppress and exploit the native peoples who are the overwhelming majority of the population[…]

(PS: In case you've never read this, either, by Liberal/Radical John Morley, in an 1899 Manchester speech: "You may make thousands of women widows and thousands of children fatherless. It will be wrong. You may add a new province to your empire. It will still be wrong. You may increase the shares of Mr Rhodes and his Chartereds beyond the dreams of avarice. Yea, and it will still be wrong!")

What Went Wrong? (Bjorn Staerk) --- As Staerk acknowledges, he once considered himself among the original post-9/11 "warbloggers." Like me, he came to support the Iraq war; like me, he came to regret that:

When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that's the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trace center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war. [...]

And by "us" I don't mean that everyone thought alike, I mean that there was an identity based on an unspoken agreement about who were "ok" and who weren't. And - God help me - I was ok. I haven't been for a while now, but it's only recently I've realized just how little there's left of what I believed five years ago. Our worldview had three major focus points - Iraq, terrorism and Islam - and we were wrong about all of them.

I dodged the anti-idiotarian bit he talks about, at least, and I know I parted ways with the LGF crowd fairly early on as it became clear that the racist hatred on display there was a feature, not a bug. But none of that made me immune to many of the same mistakes Staerk describes himself making -- despite not being the teenager Staerk was. Staerk's post clearly didn't satisfy many readers at the sites taking note of it, to put it mildly -- one commenter at Crooked Timber wrote "Is this idiot going to crawl on his bare hands and knees over broken glass"* -- but it will speak to many of the rest of us who've had to look in the mirror and wonder how we let ourselves go so badly astray. Or rather, shake our heads and see how hubris and naivete can get the better of oneself, too, not just of people in history books or works of fiction.

Liberating Iraq (Hilzoy, "Obsidian Wings") --- Hilzoy might have been responding to Staerk, but instead this piece is a reply to Peter Beinart's mea culpa in The New Republic. Her essay is liable to be remembered mainly for this crystalline paragraph:

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

But it's more than that, and should be read carefully by everyone. Perhaps especially Mr. Staerk and myself. Staerk may have been ironic in speaking of "the moral courage to want to change the world by force" early in his essay, or he may have simply been describing a mindset he now rejects. Hilzoy continues:

And another was this: liberation is not just a matter of removing an oppressive government. It can seem that way when you live under tyranny. Nothing is more comprehensible than people living in apartheid South Africa, or under Saddam, thinking: if only that government were removed from power, things would be better. They would have to be. After all, how could they possibly be worse?

Unfortunately, there are almost always ways in which things could be worse. [...]

When you use force to liberate a country, like Kuwait, that has only been occupied for a short time, you can hope that its people will accept their previous government, and that whatever made that government function in the past will have survived. But when you liberate a country like Iraq, a country whose people have been brutalized, you risk loosing Hobbes' "war of all against all" on its people. You remove the sovereign who has kept that war in check, without thereby creating any of the political virtues that allow alternate forms of government, like democracy, to function.

I think some of her argument suffers from the India vs. South Africa example she uses to introduce her ideas; South Africans faced a far more determined and violent foe in the 1980s than Indians did in the late 1940s, and the very partition Hilzoy alludes to shows that Gandhian methods didn't forestall extreme violence in that country once the liberation/independence was achieved. Of course, that wasn't Gandhi's fault. But the South African women of whom Hilzoy wrote might well have said at that rate, who knows what will come, we will stand up regardless.

But that was how South Africans might justifiably feel about liberating their own country. The aspirations of many Americans to liberate Iraq are not in the same class -- as the widespread buyer's remorse demonstrates. That's not to say other aims were much more sensible: I thought WMD or advanced programs for them were there, and that Saddam was not deterrable. They weren't, he was, and I might have guessed that from the lack of evidence for WMD and the shifting rationales Bush et al presented for the war. And while Americans might feel differently about the price they're paying for Bush's decision if there actually had been an Iraqi WMD program to nip in the bud, Iraqis would have been just as stuck with the results either way.

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, (Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books) --- Eagleton, a professor of English literature at Manchester University, takes on the straw man version of religion in Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. [...]

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

Eagleton's a funny writer, but he makes points more seriously as well, including that Dawkins and many others conflate the intolerant fundamentalists in religion with everyone else who believes in the same God. Here Dawkins et al have a straightforward answer, though: you nice, thoughtful religious folk seem to let the fundamentalist ones represent you everywhere, so to all intents and purposes they're the religionists the rest of us have to deal with. I hope Mr. Eagleton can be persuaded to wield his entertainingly sharp pen at, say, Jerry Falwell's or Pope Benedict's or the Ayatollah Khamenei's expense sometime soon.


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* See also a paragraph by paragraph rebuttal by Grand Moff Texan -- and Staerk's reply.

NOTES: Boerish via Roy Edroso ("alicublog"). Staerk via Mona (one of the new co-bloggers at "Unqualified Offerings") and John Quiggin ("Crooked Timber"). "Liberating Iraq" via many, including Patrick Nielsen Hayden, where interesting comments about the post may be found. Including Hilzoy's, who re-summarizes: "you can create a democracy when you invade for other reasons, but if that's the point of invading, it will almost certainly fail." Eagleton v. Dawkins via Teresa Nielsen Hayden's sidebar.
EDIT, 3/14: aspirations "are", not "is." Sheesh.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:11:00 AM -- |