Ringing in 2008 | December 31st, 2007
Happy New Year, and don’t forget to watch the Penguins decimate the Sabres New Year’s Day at 1 p.m. on NBC.
Archive for December 2007
Bill Kristol at the Times | December 30th, 2007
This announcement reads like a parody of lefty self-flagellation:
The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist
Echoing this thing, it’s pretty tough to argue that rightist media is more self-critical when you examine this dealie: you have a commentator dude who’s not only kept up his unflinching pro-war thing even as the rationale looks worse and worse, but has called for criminal prosecution of the very “liberal” media outlet that just hired him on as a commentator. Meanwhile, the media outlet both hires him anyway and makes a point to echo his past denunciations of said outlet.
Assuming you think the Times opinion page editors are liberal, I’ll echo walking-in-snowy-woods dude Robert Frost on this one: “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument.”
One More Pakistan Thing | December 28th, 2007
For a note on just why this stuff matters, you can read this paper, particularly the last paragraph.
Bhutto | December 27th, 2007
Pakistan really can’t catch a break.
If you were Musharraf, would you go ahead with January’s elections knowing that everything is in even more turmoil than before, or would you risk the nation getting even more pissed after another suspension of democracy? (Or here, “democracy”, considering that independent media had been banned from election coverage.)
I think he might come out ahead if he allows the elections to continue: if Musharraf can pin this on Islamist sympathizers — not a given since his own sympathy for Bhutto was more forced than genuine, and the attack may instead feed anger toward Musharraf — then he might see more of the country turn towards him as the man most able to restore order, no matter how un-democratic that order might be.
Not that India is doing a much better job recently with the factional reconciliation thing.
Return of the Steeler Funerary Rites | December 19th, 2007
The Post-Gazette wrote that another fan tied his memorial rites in with the Steelers, this time by having the Steelers logo carved into his gravestone and having his wife bring his ashes to the game on Sunday. This story was kind of bittersweet, in that he died having never fulfilled his wish to go to Heinz Field, but he did make it there in the end and it gave comfort to his family. He gets extra props by being from New Hampshire and becoming a Steeler fan by choice instead of by region.
This follows the infamous Pittsburgh funeral of two years ago, where the dude was laid out wearing Steeler gear, sitting in a recliner in front of a TV that played Steeler highlights. He even had a pack of cigarettes and a beer next to the chair. That one was more awesome than sad, and made me think that the deceased must have been a great guy to hang with.
In poor taste, I’d like to note that the Steeler / burial connection is starting to prove a lot more relevant after the past two games.
Busch-Swilling Bolsheviks | December 18th, 2007
This one goes out to my senior-year apartment crew.
I was once discussing political philosophy with my dad, and we both agreed that under ideal theoretical conditions, a socialist utopia could be pretty cool: from abilities according to needs and all that lot. (Before someone from the future reads that and declares me a godless pinko, keep going.) But as dad pointed out, the fact that every utopian philosophy throughout history has failed applies just the same to communism, and the millions who were starved, repressed, detained and killed by benevolent guardians of the proletariat like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge indicate that, hey: communism hasn’t had such a great track record.
The conservatives among us argue that socialism fails because human nature is inherently corrupt, and thus people are always out to get theirs no matter what the system. Then they see the wealth generated by capitalist societies, and naturally want it for themselves. The leftist argument states that communism failed because of constant foreign anti-communist interference, and that capitalism’s economic impact on the lower classes has been too effectively degrading for them to rise up in revolution.
Those theories both have some truth to them, but that’s some heavy theory. For a simpler explanation, here’s one from personal experience.
Yeah dude, I’ll get in on that five-year plan next week, for real.
Senior year of college, five friends and I lived in a big apartment just off campus. We had just spent a year living in our fraternity house — still easily claiming the No. 1 spot as the filthiest place I have ever lived — and we thought, “F this, we’re seniors and men with standards: instead of nothing but Busch Light, we’ll now keep Rolling Rock or Miller Genuine Draft in the fridge in addition to the Busch Light. And while we’re at it, we’re going to keep our apartment in great shape. Not only do we deserve a clean living space, but you never know when some fine ladies will be stopping by to be flattered by our well-groomed apartment and Carlo Rossi wine.”
Planning for the glory of this collective effort, we made up a chore wheel that rotated each week so that each person would cycle through bathroom duty, floors, kitchen, trash, etc. We were pumped, we were planned, and we were in full agreement on just what we had to do to achieve our collective goal.
Then the next weekend came along, and that was pretty much the end of that.
There’s no good reason this plan shouldn’t have worked out. We all clearly wanted a clean apartment, and were smart, motivated dudes. The tasks were divided fairly, so that nobody felt an undue burden. This was a big group payoff for a relatively small amount of effort, and yet it still didn’t get done, mostly for a variety of personal reasons. Some of us laxly defined “clean” as only leaving boxers on the bathroom floor for three days instead of a week; others were so stringent about standards of cleanliness (substitute this for “party loyalty”) that several dudes stopped cleaning altogether in protest. Now we had the infamous free-rider problem, and it was back to growths in the refrigerator before you knew it.
Perhaps we could have increased each person’s stake in the outcome somehow and things would have worked. But to me, when you can’t get people to participate in a collective effort on something that is right there, solvable, in front of their freakin’ face every day, how in the hell are they going to do it when the impacts are esoteric and spread among millions? Moral of the story is that planning is one thing, but level of involvement is wildly variable.
And college is awesome.
Diamond Dave | December 18th, 2007
If you had to set Pittsburgh to music, I always imagine the soundtrack to be early-era Van Halen. (Think Van Halen and 1984.) Particularly “Cradle Will Rock” and “Runnin’ With the Devil”.
This is almost solely attributable to WDVE.
Argumentative | December 15th, 2007
I’ve noticed lately that I write much more clearly when responding to something than I do when initiating the discussion myself. Am I alone in this? Perhaps it’s time for more self-debating on the site.
Duality of Pat, here we come.
