Weblog Entry for 04 April 2002

In Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime (which is an inside-out locked-room murder mystery), there are a couple of characters with direct brain hookups to powerful computers. At one point, one of them loses her computer in an unexpected catastrophe, and laments about having to cope with the world using only the information she happened to have been carrying around in her brain. That’s how I feel away from the Net.

And it’ll only get worse, thanks to StickyBrain. This cool Mac app (with both Classic and OSX versions) is like a big ol’ drawer you can toss any kind of info into — text, images, URLs, whatever — and it’s got a search utility you can use to find stuff later. I wish this had existed a decade ago. I’d have instant access to almost anything I’d ever thought about while using my computer. And I’d be a hopeless shambling vegetable away from it.

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Eve Tushnet has tossed a theory; Gary Farber tossed it right back. It’s about liberals, and coherence of political philosophy, and there’s some truth to it. There’s a powerful social organization component to the political sides phenomenon — lots of people choose one side because of how they feel about a few issues, and then either absorb the rest of that side’s issues by osmosis, or define those issues where they disagree as not intrinsic to that side. And this happens all over, both right and left. And I score 2.3 out of 7 on Eve’s quiz. Hmm... fair’s fair, here’s another quiz: You may not be a conservative anymore if...

• You support deficit spending.
• You think it’s OK to break up a family if one member lives in Cuba.
• You think “federalism” means the US Supreme Court overturning a state’s voting laws, or the US Attorney General ordering prosecutions in defiance of a state’s new assisted-suicide law.
• You think democracy is just better.
• You think the government should stay out of people’s sex lives.
• You support ending the War on Drugs.
• You think the Civil War was about slavery.

Anyway, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice, long entry on the history of liberalism that’s worth reading if you’re interested in this sort of thing. They don’t seem to have a corresponding entry on conservatism.

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Sgt. Stryker (quoting Donald Rumsfeld) reminds me of something that doesn’t get mentioned often enough: Terrorism kills Arabs and Muslims as well as Jews, Christians, and secular Westerners!

Look. What's happening in the Middle East is terrible. It is a tragedy. It is terrorism. Innocent people are being killed -- men, women and children of all religions and -- you know, you go in and you blow up a supermarket or a restaurant or a pizza parlor, you don't know who's in there. Israel's a country that has Arab citizens, as well as Israeli -- Jewish citizens. And same thing with the World Trade tower. There were people of every religion, every nation, killed in the World Trade Center.

It’s true. Bin Laden sponsored attacks in Kenya and Tanzania that killed many more locals than Americans; many of those killed were Muslims.

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The other day, I saw Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs) make a comment about Adam Shapiro “hating his own people”. I ignored it, not having heard the name before and not being terribly interested. Today, I saw Gary Farber’s post about how Shapiro’s parents have been hounded out of New York by assholes who think their son is another John Walker Lindh, and his link to a New York Post column calling Shapiro a traitor. What’s Shapiro done? As far as I can tell from the Jerusalem Post, NY Post, and NY Times, he’s tried to teach Palestinians about non-violent resistance, and had breakfast with Arafat. He tried to treat and evacuate the wounded from Arafat’s compound. He’s worked at a summer camp that tries to teach Jewish and Arab teens to coexist peacefully. If that’s “hating his own people”, let’s have more hate.

The Jerusalem Post did have one tidbit that Charles might have been thinking of: Shapiro apparently doesn’t consider himself a Jew. Big deal, neither do I. Consider myself, I mean; I have no opinion about Shapiro’s Judaism. This doesn’t mean that I hate either Jews or the people I do consider my own people (science-fiction fans, New Yorkers, and Americans, roughly in that order) — doing either would require hating my family and most of my friends.

There are people who’d call me a “self-hating Jew”; they’re assholes who think their notion of how to identify me takes precedence over my own concepts of self-identification.

Anyway, it wasn’t until I read Alexander Cockburn’s piece supporting Shapiro (4 Apr 2002, he doesn’t provide permanent links to current pieces) that I saw anything objectionable about him:

Or the extremely articulate and self-possessed Adam Shapiro, whose testimony ended up in the New York Daily News and on CNN, where he told Kyra Phillips: "This is not about politics between Jew and Arab, between Muslim and Jew. This is a case of human dignity, human freedom and justice that the Palestinians are struggling for against an occupier, an oppressor. The violence did not start with Yasser Arafat. The violence started with the occupation."

No, Adam, the occupation wasn’t till after the Six Day War in 1967; even the Palestinians and other Arabs talk about earlier violence than that. Still, there’s a world of difference between being ignorant about history and being a terrorist.

(There, one link to the Israeli Defense Force’s version of history and one to the Jordanain government’s. That ought to keep off accusations of bias. Nah, what’ll probably happen is everyone will accuse me of bias.)

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Charles Murtaugh debunks Michael Fumento’s claim that a recent pair of reports about stem cells in Nature were published for political reasons.

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