Lurn to spell edition
- I really like the idea that the guys who bust these kids' balls and brains over the spelling of diverse English arcana can't spell Maryland right. Apparently, they misspelled Virginia as "Virgina," too. I normally have few qualms about spelling errors. Whatever. Even elementary fleas do it. But when you're holding spelling as this idol to be worshiped and slaved over, you'd better spell the names right. Yeesh.
- Speaking of spelling bees, do spelling bees work in other languages? Slate says... sort of. I actually participated in a "word memorization" competition in Chinese school for a few years. You were given a word and then had to give a number of phrases which used the word. This was easy up until they started to get obscure, and in a language with tens of thousands of characters, it's not hard to do.
- On the topic of consistency, we return as always to the Bush Administration and its war-cheerleader base. So, maybe you've heard about the al-Qaeda torture training manual (warning: NSFW, graphic, cartoonish depictions of violence)? Well, maybe you haven't. Probably because it hasn't been heavily reported by mainstream media... because the fact that al-Qaeda tortures people is not news. We know they do. They're a fanatical, amoral, nihilist group of killers bent on destroying Western civilization and employing any means to do it. That's why they are bad guys. The right-wingers, however, are riled up. How dare the mainstream media report every piece of news where Americans are accused of torture, but sweep under the carpet this (in their deluded eyes) equally important story? Let's note that the manual is a little shady on its own... if you're al-Qaeda do you really need Tarantino-esque bloodspurting? But let's suppose it is authentic and surprise! al-Qaeda tortures people. Do these guys listen to themselves when they talk? This is their basic question: why is it news when we torture and not news when al-Qaeda tortures? And the simple response is... because we're not supposed to. They want to accuse the media of "boycotting" the al-Qaeda torture story? Fine. But torture is now the policy of my government, and it undermines the ideals of our nation. The only reason our global dalliances were justified was our moral standing as an extraordinary nation, that never tortured, that valued human rights, that invoked the "Four Freedoms." Now, we're trying to be the moral equivalents of al-Qaeda. What a long way we've come. (I was thinking this yesterday and mentioned it to someone, then came home and read Greenwald. And what do you know? Greenwald basically says the same thing I do, but, you know, better. Man, that guy's a hoss. Also, you should read Andrew Sullivan's piece on "enhanced interrogation." It's among his finest work.)
- A side note: the right-wing is always accusing us lefty academics of being wishy-washy "moral equivalence" relativists who don't mind women being subjugated so long as it's done by another culture. Because we have to "respect cultures" and whatnot. But the greatest "moral" leader of their side (who they now run away from as if he was carrying antibiotic-resistant TB) has led America into the worst depths of morally ambivalent behavior. Never mind natural laws, or the rights of man. We can hit them because "they" hit us, and sometimes even before "they" hit us. We can torture because "they" torture. We feign outrage at China blowing a satellite out of the sky even though we're trying to do the same thing. We feign outrage at Abu Ghraib prison photos while the horrors depicted within become our policy. We feign outrage at clamp-downs on the press in the Sudan, while Cheney kicks the reporters out of the room. I think we're still suffering whiplash from the last 7 years, and everything that we have lost. When all the Republican candidates for President stand up to out-Rambo each other on how much they'd like to torture people, and the crowd cheers, you know you must be in America... or Pakistan.
- Onto lighter things, here's a website at which I wasted about ten minutes. It's called Celebritymustache.com and it's exactly what you think it is. Celebrity faces + drag-n-drop mustaches. Awesome.
- Surprise. David Hyde Pierce is gay. You don't say.
- I really want to see this movie. Why, oh, why does France have to release it three months from now? The New York Times Magazine feature last week on Judd Apatow is enlightening, too.
- Finally, here's an intriguing and disturbing paper I read from Bryan Caplan at the Cato Institute. It's an excerpt/adaptation of his new book about why democracies choose bad policies. The intriguing stuff: voters often pick dumb policies and misunderstand basic economics with systematic errors and biases. The disturbing stuff: the only way to eliminate such problems is to leave things up entirely to markets (what a surprise coming from Caplan). But I've been chewing on this for a while. After all, democracy shouldn't be the be-all-and-end-all of governments, right? We should always keep improving, and what comes next? Also, I found his thoughts about anti-market bias as rather thought-provoking... are we who don't understand economics worse for our country? Maybe we should be teaching economics in high school, eh?
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