Month: July 2004

Nader Smackdown

I wish I were half the writer Billmon is. Whiskey Bar puts the smack down on Ralph Nader. Go read it. It’s even better than the smacking Matt Yglesias laid down on Nader not too long ago.

A sample:

If the robber baron economics, constitutional obscenity and foreign policy lunacies of the past four years haven’t convinced progressives of the need for a united front against Bush and the authoritarian right, then nothing I can say now will, either.

But up until the past few weeks, I’ve never questioned Nader’s motives or his sincerity. As destructive as I think his actions have been, and as much as I detest his stubborness and his increasingly bizarre egoism, I’ve taken it for granted that Ralph’s objectives were exactly what he said they were: to give the voters a progressive alternative to the Republicrat political duopoly.

I may have thought he was wrong – disastrously wrong – but I always assumed Nader was basically an honest person, and a man of the left. And as high as I know the stakes are in this election, it still made me uncomfortable to see the Dems using hardball tactics to try to keep him off the ballot in as many of the key states as they could. In my book, the Democratic Party was (and still is) just an instrument, a tool – a weak one, but the only one we’ve got – for fighting the movement conservatives. Ralph, on the other hand, was more like a crazy uncle – a real pain in the ass, but still, when it comes right down to it, family.

But Nader’s increasingly open and shameless alliance with the GOP – as demonstrated so flagrantly in Michigan – leaves me with the sinking feeling that I’ve misjudged him.

I Miss Aaron Sorkin

Per Atrios, a reminder of how good The West Wing used to be:

We all need some therapy, because somebody came along and said “liberal” means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we’re gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn’t have to go to work if they don’t want to. And instead of saying “Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-eductaion, anti-choice, pro-gun, ‘Leave it to Beaver’ trip back to the fifties,” we cowered in the corner and said “Please, don’t hurt me.” No more.

PC Madness Continued

I lost most of this weekend to the ongoing drama of my computer upgrade. On Saturday FedEx delivered not one, but two replacement motherboards. The vendor screwed up again. Now I have to pay to ship yet another piece of hardware I didn’t need.

At any rate, I shut down the old PC and started putting the new PC together. After assembling the old and new parts into the new PC case and powering it up, we experienced exactly the same problem with the secondary IDE controller.

Thinking that one busted mobo was bad luck, but two was not likely, Scott did a little more research and found on person reporting that unplugging the cable that powered the two USB ports on the front of their PC case solved the secondary IDE problem. We tried it and poof! Problem gone. It’s a little annoying to have plugs that can’t be used, but it’s not a deal breaker at this point because I only have 3 USB devices, one of which is rarely used, and there are 4 other working USB plugs on the back of the case. And right now I just want a working PC.

That leaves the next problem — the boot device BSOD we keep getting even though the system is seeing the CD just fine now. Scott fiddles and announces that it must be something relating to the CD drivers. I had trouble following his explanation, frankly. Whatever the problem is, it’s way beyond my level of ability to solve. He thinks that we might be able to fix it if we reinstall Windows 2000. Fine by me. Except when we did so, we discovered that my lovely HDs (the ones with about 40GB of programs and data) were the problem, not the CD. For reasons as yet unknown, the new system does not think they’re bootable, and Windows 2000 wants to reformat them before it will reinstall. This makes no sense to me because they were working perfectly well on the old setup and if you boot to a floppy, you can then CD to the drives and read them just fine. But they cannot be booted to now.

All along, I’ve made life more difficult on this upgrade because I did not want to reinstall my system. But now it seems that the one thing I most did not want to do is what I have to do.

To avoid having to reformat the HDs and totally lose my stuff, Scott pulls out a 70 GB hard drive that’s currently not in use, puts it into the new case, and starts installing Windows XP onto it. I then spend most of the rest of the weekend bit by bit reinstalling and reconfiguring some 30+ applications and deciding whether to reinstall another 20 or so. Some of them I haven’t used in a while but I like to have them just in case.

The only thing that kept me from screaming and throwing things is that I did not lose any data. Between the old HDs, my iPod, the backup CD I burned before starting all this, and my Tungsten C, I have a good copy, if not two copies, of all documents, files, MP3s, photos, fonts, bookmarks, etc.

I’m not quite done yet but the worst is over this Monday morning. My system is more or less looking how I like it and is running noticeably faster; and when I finally reinstalled the game that started this whole mess – City of Heroes – it ran smoothly and looks great. So in that sense I suppose it was all worthwhile. But still, I am not a very happy camper about the whole thing.

Here’s the new configuration, if you’re curious:
Antec case
Asus P4S800 motherboard
Intel P4 2.8 GHz CPU
2 512MB DIMMs
ATI Radeon 9600SE video
Creative SB sound card (old)
FireWire card
70GB Maxtor drive
Windows XP SP2

Hopefully I won’t have to go through this for another couple of years.

Jesus and Jihad

Kristof has a column today worth reading in its entirety. He’s talking about “Glorious Appearing,” the latest work in the “Left Behind” series. If you’ve had your head under a rock, these books are best-selling novels, widely available – I even saw the most recent one for sale in the downtown SF Costco. In “Glorious Appearing” Jesus finally does return, and not only does he send nonbelievers into a chasm with a wave of his hand, but also the bodies of others are ripped apart and left strewn around the Earth, presumably as a warning to the remaining believers what could happen to them if their faith wavers.

Kristof:

It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture.

I’m with Kristof 100% on this. Why do Christians get a pass for this kind of language when Muslims don’t?

Here in America, we’re free to believe what we want and to read what we want. I completely support the right of evangelical Christians to read “Glorious Appearing” and believe that God will cast their friends, neighbors, and even their relatives into a pit of fire (not to mention billions of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and even Mormons). But that doesn’t mean that other people shouldn’t ask hard questions about what kinds of paths those beliefs can take a believer down, and whether actions generated by those beliefs are truly right.

It’s also well-known that the current Presidential administration is a deeply Christian one. We need to ask whether this attitude of “they’re all going to Hell anyway” (aka the James Baker ‘Fuck The Jews‘ point of view) has had a real impact on their foreign and domestic policies. This President, after all, has not been shy about saying Jesus is his favorite philosopher and a more important guide to him than his own father.

Kristof also says:

As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.

It leaves me uncomfortably wondering where Jews fit into the picture.

Going off on a quick tangent – I sometimes wonder – how, if you’re a deeply devout evangelical, do you live with the sincere belief that most of your fellows on this planet are going to burn in hell? Do you worry about it, pray for them, and hope they see the light? Or do you just pretend to be nice to them and in the privacy of your home, laugh at them all for being doomed to Hell?

I doubt many Christians of that persuasion read this blog, but I would really like to know.

Slender Bodies, Empty Minds

Not that I’ve ever used the stuff, but if you do use SlimFast, you should know:

Slim-Fast has dropped Whoopi Goldberg from its advertising after the comedian made a sexual joke about George Bush.

Per Atrios. He has contact info if you want to give the SlimFast folks a piece of your mind.