Not a Potted Plant

We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illustion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. Theyw ere all, however, turned into donkeys — a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.

— Chris Hedges

The porn industry is quick to raise the First Amendment as its primary argument against governmental intervention of any sort. And not without justification — governments from the Feds down to municipalities are notoriously hostile to pornography. Which is odd, because judging by the way the market behaves, it sure looks like pretty much everyone likes the stuff. When no one else is watching.

But the City of Los Angeles cannot help but be cognizant of the fact that a whole lot of porn gets made within its city limits and that this generates substantial tax revenue. At the same time, it has passed a municipal ordinance mandating that producers of porn require the performers to wear condoms while performing. And the idea seems to be spreading. Continue Reading →

The Top 15 states, in the contiguous 48 states and excluding Washington DC, in order: California, New Jersey, New York, Washington, Nevada, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Illinois, Oregon, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Texas.

Sins may be forgiven. Crimes require punishment.

– George R.R. Martin

Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded.

– David Anthony Durham

I don’t know how other people use the “Clippings” feature on their Kindles, or the equivalents on their e-readers. I do know that mine is getting on two years old, full of stuff that I haven’t used again later even though I really liked them when I read them. So I’m going to post them, one by one, every day, until they’re all gone.

Think of it as a daily meditation.

Games are won and lost by kids aged 18-23 or so. Worse than that… National Signing Day. I’m keeping track of Southern Tech’s recruits. And as these 17 and 18 year olds change their mind, my day gets better or worse.

This is insane.

But this is college football.

I did tabletop RPGs as my hobby when I was a teenager, and when I went off to college and discovered just how many girls there were, I sort of lost interest in things like Dungeons and Dragons.

But a few months ago, I let myself get talked into running a tabletop RPG, by a woman I work with and her husband. They’d always been curious why their kids thought RPGs were so much fun. The Wife said she was interested, and took it upon herself to recruit another couple. My co-worker and her husband are closer to my parents’s age than my own, the other couple is about the same age as The Wife and I.

So the next thing you know, I’m designing a whole world, with different political factions, trying to work through in my mind what its economy would be like, building a back story worthy of George R.R. Martin, and doing my best to reconstruct rules from five different RPGs from memory. Commenters here were helpful in steering me to different places for ideas which I could borrow, and I set to writing. Continue Reading →

The top five states are: Delaware (40.3%), Maine (37.8%), South Dakota (35.3%), Nevada (34.9%), and Montana (33.4%).

The bottom five states are: Florida (13.8%), New York (13.2%), Nebraska (12.3%), Virginia (11.4%), and California (10.1%).

It probably says something about me that if I’d been asked to guess, I’d have thought that the state that had the most would have had maybe somewhere from 10-15%.

Since there is always an interest in how the Dakotas stack against one another, North Dakota is 29.8%, so relatively close to South Dakota.

Gillian Tett laments the partisanship of news:

[Excerpt Redacted]

This isn’t exactly… errr… news. But I thought the juxtoposition was interesting. As she opened, one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was “other countries have partisan news outlets, don’t they?” (I knew the UK did). I didn’t know that our TV situation was so unique, though. In fact, for reasons I am not going to get into (involving a manga on a US presidential election that provided a neat Japanese view of how American politics works), I had thought that ours had been (with the exception of Fox News and before MSNBC took its leftward turn and The Current signed Olbermann) a little different in the sense that it is self-described as objective and neutral.

Anyhow, A part of me actually wonders the extent to which the attempts at neutrality in newspapers (in particular) spawned the hyperpartisanship of cable news and the increasing separation between liberal news content and conservative news content. One of the things that always struck me about Fox News is that it is, at least in the eyes of the people I know who watch it, a response to what is perceived to be liberal bias elsewhere. Now, we can argue the extent to which there is (MSM) news bias. But rightly or wrongly, the perception is there among conservatives. And I wonder if, had there been more soft-right news outlets before, Fox News never would have really come into fruition. And if conservatives felt less alienated by traditional news outlets, if they wouldn’t have spent all of the time and effort coming up with their alternative ecosystem.

I look at Fox News as a distorted sort of mirror of what the right considers the MSM to be. Though I do believe that there is a leftward tilt in media (not in all times and all places, but generally speaking), I still couldn’t find Fox News to be any more different from CNN than I do. In other words, they got it all wrong. And, having done so, figured out that getting it wrong actually gets it pretty awesome ratings. So wrong became the new right. At some point, liberals tried to come up with their own counterparts (Air America, MSNBC) and got it wrong (Air America, early new-MSNBC) until they got it right (new-new MSNBC) (or so it would seem). And the result is that the news organization that tries to play it straight, CNN, is struggling mightily.

To get back to my main point, if I had one, I do lament the current state of affairs. The appropriate response to the perception of news bias should have been to come up with more conservative-leaning news outlets. Not mere media outlets that are conservative-friendly. I fear, however, that it’s too late to provide that niche. Conservatives have their raw meat. They don’t want their veggies. And so there is some malnutrition involved.