As I said I would, I'm working up a top post and some ground rules for the promised American Exceptionalism thread.
In a spirit of community, I offer notice of a kind of ideal for contribution here.
The following, written by Marshal Festus, has been added by Marshal Nort to the Winds Comments Policy.
For the record, here is a Disagreement Hierarchy from Paul Graham's March 2008 essay How to Disagree --
* DH0. Name-calling.
* DH1. Ad Hominem.
* DH2. Responding to Tone.
* DH3. Contradiction.
* DH4. Counterargument.
* DH5. Refutation.
* DH6. Refuting the Central Point.
As it pertains to comments at Winds of Change, Resolved:
Higher on the Disagreement Hierarchy is Better.
Head over to the comments policy post if you care to comment on this.
Nonsubstative or OT comments there will be pruned.
"That is all."
In the classic noir film The Maltese Falcon, there's a scene that contains what I've always called "The Gutman Moment." Kasper Gutman aka "the Fat Man", the unsavory but well-heeled Sidney Greenstreet character, tells the protagonist
"Yes, but this is real coin of the realm. With one of these you can buy ten of talk."
I'll avoid spoiling the movie by telling why he says that, but its relevance to current events is as follows: Tim Oren has pointed out that
An acquaintance pointed me to this, which looks like it'll be a really dense infodump. Anyone interested in signing up ought to try. The anti-sticker-shocker: it costs $100. For two days. Parking at the venue adds 30% to that ( :) ).
Sponsors: APS Forum on Physics & Society and AAPT
Physics of Sustainable Energy:
Using Energy Efficiently and Producing It Renewably
Saturday/Sunday, March 1-2, 2008, University of California at Berkeley
D. Hafemeister at calpoly.edu is handling registration. In the interest of reducing spam I'm not posting email in the clear. And I have yet to find an online link for this event.
I wish I could make it to this...
Short Course on Energy
Update: Here's the pdf announcing the event . And it would probably help if you are able to pass as an APS or AAPT member.
I'm observing the fourth anniversary of Wretchard's notorious/notable Three Conjectures (strictly, it's closer to the anniversary of Smokin' Joe Katzman's "Touchstones" survey piece) ...by more or less letting veteran WoC commenter J Thomas have his way with it, and related memes. I altered some capitalization and removed hard line breaks, but the work is otherwise as he delivered it to me.
Start your engines.
{Note: A version of this post has already appeared in a Winds comment thread}
Mr. Thomas writes:
Here is the best argument I ever heard for invading Iraq. It went like this:
----
US foreign policy is completely out of control. Whenever the US public goes crazy and demands that we do something insane, US foreign policy does what they want. Now, after 9/11 it's only a matter of time before Muslim terrorists get a nuke and set it off in an American city. This is inevitable. The terrorists will get nukes, no possible doubt. They will smuggle them into the USA. They will nuke us. Anybody who doubts this is an idiot. And after the terrorists nuke us, we will nuke every Muslim nation. This also is inevitable. We will have no choice, the US public will go crazy and the US government will do what the public wants.
Over at Greg Burch's blog Burchismo, grudging admiration for the clever text of the most recent bin Ladin video to surface...
ONE SMART S.O.B.I've got to hand it to bin Laden. He really is one smart son of a bitch. I just read the transcript of his latest video. I strongly recommend it. He and his close advisers have been studying the West closely. This message is carefully crafted to plug into some very powerful currents in the left -- he uses Islamic rhetoric to push the basic Marxian buttons that lie beneath the ideology of the left in a very deft way. And then he turns and pushes Christian religious buttons. All the while, he plays the parallels to Vietnam, takes a side shot at race-guilt and even gets in a solid reference to the current credit melt-down in Western economies. Brilliant.
Prediction: None of the main organs of leftist communication, whether mainstream or extreme, will call him on the game he's playing here. It's too smooth and, compared to al Qaida's actual action, too gentle.
Good job, ObL! As a lawyer, I have to hand it to you.
Greg kindly provided a link to a PDF scan of an English-language translation of Osama's text. I hope a straight ASCII version shows up; I might tackle that myself while I'm doing chores this weekend.
Good old George Lakoff says (approximately) we mostly think using hardware and circuits overloaded with structures--thinking patterns--that are metaphors that we already have wiring for. If the metaphor is battle, the battle circuits are running even if we're sitting at a keyboard. If the metaphor is exploration, those neurosomatic elements are what are active as we read and type. [Addendum: What he means is that to a great extent, figures of speech are actually embodied. A fascinating prospect when he first proposed it in his Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, since somewhat sidetracked by Lakoff's celebrity consultancies among other factors.]
Lately I've wondered again: Are comment threads here on Winds arguments, battles, or are they conversations, explorations? What should they be, in what proportion?
What kind of "bar" do we run here?
In the comments guidelines and associated thread, Joe Katzman mentions "backchannel discussion". But what if there's no backchannel available? I contend that it leads to more battle, less exploration. Let's talk about that.
Via BoingBoing. Bunnie Huang blogs about his encounters and experiences with Chinese Mainland manufacturing culture. Here's a live link to his blog category Made in China.
Reminiscent of Neal Stephenson. Factory complexes big enough to have their own border control and freeway exits, for instance.
Foxconn is where all of the iPods and iPhones are made. It’s a huge facility, apparently with over 250,000 employees, and it has its own special free trade status. The entire facility is walled off and you apparently need to have your passport and clear customs to get into the facility…just short of the nuclear-powered robotic dogs from the nation-corporation franchulates of Snowcrash.
I'm told that Movable Type's "Allow comments" setting on WoC now works -- which is to say, Marshals ought to be able to lock threads, disallowing new posts temporarily or permanently. This is something I'd prefer would only be used to combat sp*m on sessile entries, not to restrict discussion. But having the option is important.
To celebrate, I think a spirited "food fight" is called for. Here. In this thread.
Here are the ground rules...
