Glenn Hauman: A View From Above

So there I was at I-Con 27 as a guest (for a change). And while it turned out that I showed up, all the guys from Dumbrella didn't. Could I go sit in on a few panels in their place? Sure, I said.

"Great! There's a panel at 5 on Saturday, called 'Why People Suck'. Can you be on that?" No problem, says I.

I get there a bit early, and there's a crowd outside the lecture room waiting to get in. Crowd? Okay, the panel's running long. I go into the room, and it's already packed with 250+ people. And it turns out that none of the original panelists were there. In fact, there was only one other panelist there, and he was a bit unclear as to why he was even asked to be there.

Yipes. Nothing like doing a panel in front of a large crowd who think that people suck, and the folks who were going to be there couldn't make it.

Nevertheless, it was actually a dang good panel, and people were coming up to me for the rest of the con saying how much they enjoyed it, with lots of folks bringing me books to autograph. I was pretty dang proud of the panel, because not only was it entertaining, it was educational... we actually figured out why people suck.

Entitlement.

You will celebrate it.

Play The Rather Difficult Font Game and tell me how you did in comments. No peeking at sample sheets. I did 30 out of 34, and haven't retake it yet.

...although it does take some very long intermissions.

So, what do you think of the new look? Special thanks to Gary Bacon, who took my Photoshop mockups and rusty CSS skills and turned it into a very pretty little theme; and to Craig Wood, who shepherded the migration from Movable Type to CrowdFusion.

(Yes, this is the first blog migration from Movable Type to CrowdFusion. More will be coming.)

Administrivia: http://www.glennhauman.com is now the main link; the malibulist.com account will redirect here for the foreseeabel future, but you might be happier to just point here. The RSS feed has also changed, the link's at the top of the page. I don't know who set up the unofficial LJ feed to my blog, but whoever it is, please update it. And let me know who you are, dang it!

If there are any problems you're having, drop a note in the comments here. If your problem is that you can't post in comments, send a note to glenn at malibulist.com.

As for me, now that we're finally over here, I'll be updating a bit more frequently. (Yeah, he's said that before.) (No, I have to, I've got too many open windows.)

Eight Belles, the first filly to run in the Kentucky Derby since 1999, finished second-- and then broke her ankles just a few strides later, and had to be euthanized.

The last filly to run in the Derby? Three Ring.

My sympathies to owner Rick Porter, his family, and everybody else on Eight Belles' team.

All sorts of stuff before I do a major backup and upgrade... and I wonder I why keep these windows open, just so I can get around to blogging them.

WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Early Science Fiction Fanzines: A Cover Gallery: So you can see all the scary drawings of... oh, I can't even describe it.

 

It's not you, it's your books.

The World's Best Insulting Lines: or at least the most generic ones...

How to Disagree:

The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments. An eloquent speaker or writer can give the impression of vanquishing an opponent merely by using forceful words. In fact that is probably the defining quality of a demagogue. By giving names to the different forms of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.

Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional. Someone arguing against the tone of something he disagrees with may believe he's really saying something. Zooming out and seeing his current position on the disagreement hierarchy may inspire him to try moving up to counterargument or refutation.

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it.

(Via Making Light.)

 

 

Guy goes to a doctor's office. Doctor says, "I have bad news for you. You have advanced pancreatic cancer and early stage Alzheimer's."

Guy says, "Damn. Well, at least I don't have cancer."

Is View From Above still working?

Well, yes. But we're in the middle of a heavy redesign, which has been taking up most of my time for this blog, whenever I'm not blogging over at ComicMix.

But I should have neat stuff up soon. Trust me. If nothing else, I have to tell you all about "Why People Suck".

Consider the case of Jason Rae, the youngest Democratic super-delegate at the ripe old age of 21. (It is a sobering thought to realize that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for four years.) Matthew Yglesias points out:

Naturally, he's now everyone's best friend. But Jason Zengerle [of the New Republic] observes that Barack Obama's campaign might be getting out-organized here:

P.S. While Hillary has Bill and Chelsea making her case to Rae, it looks like Obama has . . . John Kerry. Uh, two words of advice for the Obama people: Scarlett Johansson. That sounds like good advice.

Uh, not so much. It turns out Jason Rae's gay.

Mark Evanier commented that he hoped the real death was as well choreographed as the movie one. Judge for yourself. From the last minutes of All That Jazz:

Once again, a round up of things I found that interested me that I 1) have no time to fully write up, and/or 20 have no place better to put right now.

The Post-Apocalyptic Workout: How to defend against Zombie hordes or your doom of choice.

vixy.net : Online FLV Converter : Download online videos direct to PC / iPod / PSP. It's free!:

This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology (outline in Japanese). It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.

When you submit an url, it will download and convert to the video format. Then you can download the converted file.

Competency as a Cultural Value:

In the early 1990s in Zimbabwe, one part of my research concerned how the visible ownership of commodities performed or communicated wealth, and therefore aroused the dangerous jealousies of neighbors. This is a different kind of %u201Cmystery of capital%u201D than what Hernando de Soto discusses. I am completely sympathetic to how southern Africans invoke ideas about witchcraft to explain how some people obtain wealth. Obviously it isn%u2019t my own explanation, but there%u2019s a sense in which it%u2019s a completely reasonable attempt to connect the visible surface of material and economic life with the largely invisible mechanisms that move resources and capital around beneath the surface. How did your neighbor get a hold of bricks to complete one wall of his township house when you can%u2019t get any? Where did the family next door get those new shoes, when you know that they don%u2019t have any more access to wage earnings than you do? How did that man keep his job when you lost yours?

One story struck me as particularly potent. I was curious about zvidhoma, spirit beings who are basically the same as the tokoloshe that South Africans talk about. They%u2019re said to be the tools of witches, able to exact invisible revenge on their victims by beating, wounding or causing illness in their targets. But on a number of occasions, I was also told cautionary tales about why you should never pick up what seems to be abandoned or unowned wealth or goods (like a bag of money or a wandering goat) because often these will have zvidhoma u201D to them who will then infest the unlucky soul who picks them up. Money and wealth circulate mysteriously, and carry hidden dangers. The people who get rich, in this worldview, are those who%u2019ve learned to manage malevolent spiritual powers. If you%u2019re not one of those people, you%u2019ll just end up a victim if you chase after phantoms.

u2014u2014u2013

I%u2019ve written before in my blog about how %u201Cblue state%u201D elites in the United States continue to walk into the trap of blandly assuming that competency, skill and experience are sufficient and universally appealing attributes for a political candidate in national elections, as long as that candidate also has generally liberal views. Following the Iowa caucuses, I%u2019m returning to this theme, because it%u2019s one claim that seems to rub a lot of my readers the wrong way and I%u2019m desperately hoping that this time, the message gets across to Democratic voters.

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she%u2019s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she%u2019s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now. The other Texan on the segment talked about a completely different issue, changes to family life and the status of women, but there was some of the same declensionist mood in her remarks. Families and women are just different than when she was young, she said, and she%u2019s mighty concerned about it all.

Educated liberals have a lot of quick answers to these kinds of statements: they%u2019re factually wrong, they%u2019re unfair, they%u2019re reactionary. All true. But those rejoinders don%u2019t get to the heart of what%u2019s being said: that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don%u2019t believe that there%u2019s much to be done about it. They despair at the way the world and their corner of the world is nevertheless.

I loathe the resentment machine that is built into this structure of feeling, I hate its imperviousness to any persuasion or any evidence or anything outside of itself. When I talk to my mother-in-law, I often get a clear view of its workings, and the role that mass culture (including the mainstream media) play in providing fresh narrative hooks and telling incidentals to its churnings. In the last two years, for example, every time I talk to her, she wants to return to the story of Ward Churchill. Or she wants to talk about how terrible crime is. Or about the problem of illegal immigrants. And so on. These are immobile, self-reproducing, stories. Their truth in her mind is guaranteed by something far outside the actualities and realities that compose any given incident or issue.

But the thing of it is, in some measure, many ordinary Americans are not wrong to think that some of what afflicts or haunts their everyday lives is happening on scales of time and change and causality that aren%u2019t reducible to the kinds of neat policy packages and governmental initiatives and ten-point plans that highly competent, experienced, meritorious political candidates tend to showcase. Like southern Africans, many ordinary Americans may invoke vague and metaphysical ideas about conspiratorial action and sinister agency to explain those larger transformations, but the basic take-away (as in southern Africa) is often: we%u2019re fucked.

Badtux the Snarky Penguin: June 2007:

So what do the people that Mimus Pauly so charitably calls "peckerwoods", the music industry suits, and the health care insurers covered by Michael Moore's new film "Sicko" all have in common? Simple: They all possess an unwarranted sense of self-entitlement that says that they're entitled, yes, *ENTITLED*, to make a living in the industry in which they've chosen.

I ran into it first hand working in the oil industry in the early 1980's. Affirmative Action programs had brought the first black oilfield workers into the shop. As far as I could tell, they were competent and did the jobs for which they were hired just fine, but that didn't stop the peckerwoods from grumbling that "goddamned niggers are taking our jobs". Like, the fucking stupid peckerwoods thought they were *entitled* to those jobs, like it was some natural born right or something. Now the peckerwoods are grumbling about how them goddamned cockroaches from south of the border are taking their jobs. Nevermind that the goddamned moron peckerwoods are stupid as a brick and time after time vote for the same goddamned politicians who set up the system that lets the Mexicans swarm across the border. Nevermind that the peckerwoods are lazy, intellectually interested only in beer and football, and do as little work as they can get away with, to the point where a lot of construction contractors I know will hire *legal* Hispanics over legal peckerwoods simply because the Hispanics will work their goddamned tails off while the peckerwoods just slouch around whining about how they're being picked on by "The Man" for, like, being expected to actually WORK. In the HEAT. In the SUN! Without being waited on hand and FOOT! But will they actually get out there and bust their butts to show employers that they're both capable and willing of working hard and getting the job done? Hell no. They prefer drinking beer and whining about Mexicans taking their jobs.

The recording industry suits are the same way. Rather than listen to the public when the public says that, like, firing 1/3rd of the recording artists and suing thousands of your customers is bad business, what do they do? Why, like buggy whip makers whining about that new horseless carriage, they whine that new technology is rendering their job obsolete and should thus be outlawed! It's the same goddamned mentality. They think the world has an obligation to give them a living. Sorta like the linotype operators at the New York Times who whined that the Times had an obligation to provide jobs for them despite all those fancy new computer typesetting widgets the Times had acquired. They went out on strike, the Times said "fine", turned on the computer typesetting widgets, and the linotype operators never came back from strike because, well, they had no jobs to come back to. Technology happens. When it happens, you either learn the new technology and make a living there, or you learn how to say "Do you want fries with that order, sir?". The world has no obligation to give you a good living in the industry you've chosen. Shit, musicians know that, that's why they have day jobs except for a very very few who are lucky enough to make their living at music full time. The suits are scared as hell that they're gonna join the ranks of barristas at Starbucks who work evenings as roadies on the local bar circuit.

Now we get the health insurance companies and their paid lackeys in the corporate media whining about Michael Moore's new film "Sicko" and his call for universal national single-payer health care. They whine, "what about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in the health insurance industry?" Oh cry me a river, you see this . ? Yeah, it's the world's smallest fucking violin. They're not goddamned *ENTITLED* to those fucking jobs. Let'em join the rest of us motherfuckers out here on the free market, who have to show that we goddamned *KNOW OUR SHIT* and work our fucking tails off to get ahead. And the same thing for the billionaire profiteers who own those companies. So their stocks in those companies become worthless? oh WAH! You fucking *CHOSE* to invest in the most evil companies on this planet, and now you're going to whine that your choice was a bad choice? It's your own goddamned fault, you stupid-assed bitches! You and your short-sighted asshole demands for moh profit, moh profit, moh profit at the expense of health care quality destroyed our health care system and kills thousands of people every year (*MORE PEOPLE DIE OF DENIED HEALTH CARE COVERAGE EVERY YEAR THAN AMERICANS KILLED IN IRAQ DURING THE ENTIRE WAR!*), so fuck you. Go jump off the goddamned top of a skyscraper or something, you stupid assholes. You deserve to lose all your money for being such jerks as to place profits ahead of people.

And to all of the people above: *THE WORLD DOESN'T GODDAMNED WELL OWE YOU JACK SHIT!*. *Nothing*. Nada. Not one goddamned thing. If you're too goddamned lazy, greedy, venal, and/or stupid to make an honest living, it's your own goddamned fault. Don't whine that I should bail your stupid lazy ass out because you're too stupid to move into the digital media market or too lazy to compete with Mexicans or too greedy to, like, fucking provide the goddamned health care that we pay and pay and PAY for (15%+ of our Gross Domestic Product, or about twice what a universal single provider health care system would require to cover every single American). Just shut your fucking mouth up and go get a job, you lazy slacker assholes, and quit bothering my fucking ass with your whine whine whine whine (oh do you want fucking CHEESE with that whine, assholes?). I'm tired of it. WAYYYY more than tired of it. Goddamn it, get a fucking CLUE, will ya?!

Newsarama: This is where it all went wrong. (Not where Newsarama went wrong, that's a different post.)

Because in November, during their hiatus, a John McCain supporter asked him directly: "How do we beat the bitch?"



Which in another world, would have cut back to Jon Stewart following up with, "And after that, what do we do about the nigger?"

You're trying to make my head explode?

See you and raise, suckah:

Here's the first note from Paul Krugman, who found Calculated Risk's comparison o "the rise in the price-rent ratio during the Los Angeles housing bubble of the late 1980s with the rise in the United States as a whole as of mid-2005; they were about the same. By the time the US bubble burst, in late 2006, the national bubble of the 2000s had inflated further than the LA bubble of the 1980s ever did.

So what happened after the LA bubble burst? Angry Bear did the calculations. House prices fell for abut 5 years, for a cumulative 20 percent decline. Since non-housing prices continued to rise, this was a 30 percent fall in real terms."



Now, what was happening in LA around that time? A lot of people point to the collapse of the defense spending boom with the end of the Cold War, but that affected defense contractors all over California. But specific to LA? The Writers Strike of 1988, which crippled production of film and TV studios for months, even after the strike ended due to the lag time in producing scripts. And remember that movie and TV production is a huge economic engine for the city, the US film industry as a whole made about $44 billion in 2004.

Now it's two decades later. The LA Housing market is even more overpriced, combined this time with the sub-prime mortgage mess. And the current strike looks to cripple the industry for months again. So if I'm reading this right, the studios are going to help cause California to implode.

I'm hoping somebody can tell me I'm wrong, but this doesn't look good. Mark? Paul? Nikki? Anybody?

Watch out below. And Merry Christmas.

Can you name them all? I'm missing a few...