Horrid…

Ladies and gentlemen here is one of the reasons I am a vegan.

Navel gazing pt. 2…

This has the best headline I’ve read in awhile.

Also this:

Navel gazing…

After reading this I’m pretty sure that if there’s no clear winner after March/April, Clinton is going to try and push Obama out of the race claiming that she has a “popular mandate” of a majority of Democratic voters (but not Democratic delegates).

sex farm for sex hooker

…is one of the search terms that brought someone here today. Welcome!

UPDATE: Here’s another good one: “black cat and mary jane lesbian images”.

UPDATE II: As of right now we’re the third fastest growing blog @ WordPress. Huh?

UPDATE III: I can’t get enough of these! Here’s another “what is premartial sex?”

UPDATE IV: OK. OK. These are the last two: “is the superman a sex move” & “Warren Ellis is an asshole”

Hawt…

Yes, Previews again.

Sexy, no?

Bad history!

(Via Washington Monthly)

As anyone who knows me personally understands, I get very annoyed when history is put to bad use in our cluster-fuck of a political discourse. Many commentators out there attempt to wield history as a political sword, seeking to use the a historical anecdote or a hazy historical argument to slash at their opponents and score political points. America’s “Founders” are especially vulnerable to this sort of political misuse and I often groan whenever I hear someone invoke them (even if I agree with the invoker!).

It’s one thing, a great thing, to draw inspiration from the past and see yourself carrying the legacy of one’s historical forebears. It’s different, a terrible thing, to invoke long dead leaders to endorse specific policy approaches. History must inform and aid our political beliefs and judgments for history has an infinite amount of lessons to teach us about today; but it must always be remembered that we do not live in the past. We can not let precedent trap us and prevent us from correcting moral wrongs and from addressing the problems we have today.

It’s one thing for a person in an argument at a bar to invoke Jefferson to prop up some argument, it’s another when someone who should know better does so.

This brings me to Joseph Ellis’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times this weekend. Ellis piece is a critique of those who damn Barack Obama’s non-partisan appeals. Critics, according to Ellis view this sort of talk as invoking an impossible”pipe dream”.

According to Ellis:

Central to the critique is the claim that Obama’s message flies in the face of U.S. history, that partisanship is, as one critic put it, “the natural condition of politics.” Zero-sum, “I’m right, you’re wrong” battles are fundamental to the republic. From the beginning of our history, so the argument goes, an Obama-like message has been a rhetorical veneer designed to obscure the less-attractive reality of irreconcilable division and an inherently adversarial party system.

Ellis then goes on to add (remember that Ellis is, perhaps the top Early American historian that appeals to a broad non-scholarly audience):

While you can certainly marshal evidence to support this interpretation, very few of the so-called founding fathers (save perhaps Aaron Burr[1]) would agree with it. And the first four presidents — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — would regard it as a perversion of all that they wished the American republic to become.

I have to call bullshit on Ellis’s claim here because, like virtually everyone who attempts to evoke the “Founders” to prove their point, he has to muddle the ‘historical waters’ to make his point.

Essentially Ellis has to obscure what exactly the “Founders” meant when they talked about “faction” and how they viewed their opposite number across the partisan divide in order to make his point. I agree with Ellis in that most of the leading “Founders”, that we so swoon over, constantly denounced faction as a problem for the infant Republic. To the “Founders” factions were an aberration that was taking the country down the wrong path and must be stomped out. The problem comes when we understand that each of the early political parties (the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists) viewed each other as aberrational factions, not as natural by-product of ideological disagreement. This was a revolutionary, pre-partisan age, were there was no “loyal opposition” each side saw the other as completely illegitimate. [2]

Jefferson, Madison and their allies views Hamilton and his allies as faction that was subverting the natural principals of American government and the “Spirit of ‘76″. Hamilton and his ilk views the Jefferson/Madison axis as a faction seeking to illegitimately undermine the government and advocating dangerous, radical ideas.

Thus calls against the evils of “faction” were really calls about the evils of the opposition. Partisanship, as we understand it, with a role of a illegitimate opposition it did not truly arise until the coming of Jackson. [3]

Bi-partisanship, a word Ellis drops throughout his piece, could not exist in this sort of atmosphere. At best, leaders such as Washington and Adams, sought to be non-partisan, to act in what he saw as the national interest despite what their particular faction may or may not have approved of. This is not as we would understand it “bi-partisanship” because bi-partisanship means compromise and compromise was not really possible in the atmosphere of the Early Republic (especially during the Washington & Adams administrations).

At one point Ellis even cites Washington’s oft-quoted “Farewell Address”:

And here is how Washington put it in his Farewell Address: The spirit of party “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” Sound familiar?

This is a bad quote of Washington’s to pull out in defense of his famous “non-partisanship”. By the end of his second term Washington was at most partisan point of his public career, having been so sickened by Republican attacks on him and his administration. [4] Thus this call against faction was not a rallying cry to bi-partisan compromise but instead a rallying cry for the Federalist Party.

The thing is I agree with Ellis assertion that Obama’s bi-partisan/feel good message “is not a weird historical aberration” and has a historical basis and a real appeal. I just wish Ellis didn’t have to fudge history to make his argument.

__________________
Notes
(I’d like to have peppered this post with more footnotes, because I love footnotes, and even some primary source quotes but I’m away from the ‘Great Library’ thus don’t have access to my books. Thus this post was written “from memory”.)

[1] Poor Aaron Burr. I don’t think there’s a big name Founder-centric Early Americanist who hasn’t bashed the man. For an excellent corrective that oversells its case see: Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr.

[2] This is understanding of Early Republican politics is drawn, more or less, from Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic.

[3] The latest book I’ve read on this shift into a truly partisan politics is Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. My favorite history book of all time (Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln) is also useful in this.

[4] My understanding of Washington at this point in his political career is drawn from Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. For more enlightening discussion on the Farewell address see: Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation.

Episode II: Attack of the Links…

I know that’s a lame title for our second link-blogging entry but I couldn’t think about anything else.

Here is a bunch of great stuff from the internets:

• @ Edge of the American West: Because I can’t get enough of Ari and Eric, here’s a great piece on MLK and another on the history of the Federal Reserve
• @ Blog@Newsarama one learns that Garth Ennis’ The Boys is up for a GLAAD award, for reasons I can not understand or comprehend. Wasn’t the lesbian member of their Teen Titians send-up very stereotypical & treated very poorly?
• @ Matthew Yglesias: Can History hesitate?
• Via Penny-Arcade: Perhaps the funniest thing I’ve read in years.
• @ Club Jade: Look for a Indy 4 Trailer next month
• @ Progressive Ruin: Is the Flash a man-whore? The answer is clearly yes.
• Very interesting (and tense! for a Stewart interview) A Daily Show with Jon Stewart Interview with Jonah Goldberg. That’s a mouth (brain?) full of a sentence.

One day I am going to have something clever to put at the end this feature.

Tears for fears…

Submitted without comment.

Except to say that you must remember, kids, that this sort of horrible shit is pretty common.

Bleached…

Over the last several weeks at work (I’m such a slacker) I’ve managed to read all 21 volumes of Bleach that have been released so far in the US. There is something to note here, namely that Bleach is a manga and I don’t normally read manga. At all. The question is why exactly I decided to read this particular series.

Honestly I don’t know. Is it because it’s part of a youth revolution that will save us comic fans (or DESTROY US?)? Or was it a whim of a bored man? I’m not sure.

Anyway, what I thought about Bleach…

What struck me most about this series (once I adjusted to the whole reading right to left thing) was how much it really is just a very well done superhero story. Oh sure there’s a bunch different trappings, you know, swords, death gods, etc. but fundamentally Ichigo Kurosaki’s story is no different than the stories of Spider-Man I’ve spent much of my life reading. (Youth gains powers through no fault of his own and finds himself in increasingly complex situations as he tries to use his powers to do the right thing).

What made Bleach a very enjoyable read was Tite Kubo’s excellent sense of pacing. He seems to know exactly how and when to throw in a plot twist or reveal this or that about a characters “dark past” which constantly keeps you interested and moving on to the next volume. He also is very capable of keeping his increasingly large cast straight and make each character (even most of the minor ones) relatively unique and memorable. His characterization skills are also solid, making his main protagonists likable and interesting.

Kubo’s best strength as a writer, I feel, is that he’s an excellent world-builder. The gibberish he makes up to shape the world around his character is interesting and he does a good job of adding more and more elements to keep the plot going without contradicting what he’d established before. This is of the keys to this sort of serialized fantasy story and many American superhero writers could learn from his example.

Certainly the man is no Shakespeare but Bleach is a very enjoyable and solidly written book, some of the best stuff you could expect from this sort of story.

Kubo’s art on the book is workman-like; it does everything it’s supposed to do but does nothing spectacular. That’s not always true, occasionally for be scene Kubo will show-off but usually his art take a detailed but very by the books sort of approach.

My biggest fear going into reading his series, being that it was unabashedly written for men, was how the female characters would be portrayed. Their treat of course was a very mixed bag. Severalof the female characters are shown to be strong, competent (since Bleach’s story is very martial this means, of course, being good at inflicting violence) and in the thick of things. The series only occasionally descends to the level of cheesecake but does sometimes portray men groping women in a neutral (positive?) light.

My biggest problem with the series is the character Chizuru Honshō, described as “the school lesbian”. This character is a terrible stereotype, who sexually gropes women, is a misogynist and is always portrayed as a gross stereotype of her sexuality. One wonders if Kubo has actually ever met a lesbian in his life. The character is offensive to the point where every-time she shows up I just want to put the book down.

In any eventuallity, I generally enjoyed Bleach and am  looking forward to reading the next volume when it comes out at the end fo the month.

HOLY SHIT (better late then never, eh?)

(Via Club Jade) 

Today is a very Star Wars day. 

Yoda will be in the 360 version of Soulcaliber IV.

Damn you Lucas and your damn merchandising department!