Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

MORE SCOTT ADAMS

Reading more of his blog, I gather that he's a bit on the conservative (libertarian?) side as well -- which is fine. Takes all kinds.

Today, he offers this regarding the efficacy of torture:

Move me to the skeptical column [earlier he states that he was in the "pretty certain" column]. The burden is on the proponents of torture to produce some proof that it works. I still don’t rule out the possibility that torture can be effective, but if it’s being done in my name, I want some fucking evidence.

(Note to prudes: I tried writing that last sentence without profanity. It just didn’t work.)

Welcome to the party, Scott. posted by Carlton at 5:39 PM

WHEN WORDS FAIL

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, recently lost his voice permanently. And then he got it back.

It's a crazy world. Good for him.

Via Scott, at left. posted by Carlton at 5:31 PM

WE'LL FIGHT THE CYLONS IN MORDOR SO WE DON'T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM IN PENNSYLVANIA

I have geeked out on this page in the past about my love for Battlestar Galactica, one of the Sci Fi Channel's Friday night winners: a really outstanding show. (Along with Doctor Who, of course. I haven't said anything about Sci Fi's other shows, like Stargate: Atlantis. Guess what: they suck.)

I also recently pointed to Rick Santorum's use of The Lord of the Rings as a defense of our current Iraq policy. Call it the Mordor/Flypaper strategy. I gave you Stephen Colbert's take on the matter.

Now, there's this article from The American Prospect, about BSG and the right-wingers' attempts to map their own agenda onto Battlestar Galactica.

“The more I watch the new Battlestar Galactica series, the more the Cylons seem like Muslims,” wrote “Michael,” the author of the Battlestar Galactica Blog, back in March. “They believe they are killing humans for their god. This is very much like the Muslim concept of jihad, which instructs Muslims to spread their religion through war.”

Thank you for that insight, Michael.

As the series takes a few turns, notably through a phase in which the "good guys" mount a planet-bound insurgency against the occupying Cylons, a lot of conservative viewers end up shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers. Needless to say, this did not go over very well in the Galacticon camp.

“The whole suicide bombing thing … made comparisons to Iraq incredibly ham-fisted,” wrote a frustrated [Jonah] Goldberg, who had hoped the struggle against the Cylons would look more like Le Resistance than the Iraqi insurgency. “The French resistance vibe … is part of what makes the Iraq comparison so offensive. It’s a one-step remove from comparing the Iraqi insurgency to the (romanticized) French resistance.”

I have two responses to this:

1. One of the great things about BSG is its moral ambiguity, and how characters that the audience likes and identifies with can end up doing questionable (if not outright pathological) things, and otherwise unsympathetic characters are allowed to be right and take the moral high ground from time to time. It's potent stuff, and it could put off some viewers.

2. What kind of nitwit would try to map the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq onto a show like Battlestar Galactica? Here's a hint, Goldberg: maybe one reason you're having some trouble figuring out whether the Cylons are supposed to be the Americans or the Islamic terrorists is because they are neither -- they are killer humanoid robots that appear on a science fiction television show. Does "with us or against us" go as far as fictional characters who live on another planet?

This goes deeper than BSG, naturally. Many of my cohort on the right grew up with Star Wars, and you see those themes revisited again and again.

At Friday’s House Republican retreat at Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a short video, produced by the National Republican Congressional Committee, depicted GOPers as the virtuous rebels, being pursued by “Darth Nancy” and her imperial henchmen, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Democratic campaign chief Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.).

Yes, that's right -- in February 2006, the Republicans, who controlled every branch of government plus the military, portrayed themselves as the Rebel Alliance versus the Democratic Galactic Empire in their internal propaganda. God bless them, all the kids want to play Han Solo, and no one wants to be a Stormtrooper! (Or even Grand Moff Tarkin, it seems.)

I swear, these people aren't just fighting the Democrats, they are fighting complexity itself. You're either with us or against us, all good or all bad, always right or always wrong -- oh, and WE are always on the positive side of the comparison. Any information to the contrary must be disregarded or suppressed.

Well, that tells you how we got where we are today, I guess. posted by Carlton at 4:24 PM

WHITHER ATRIOS?

For the record, Atrios does suck.

But if you go to a site like that (or this for that matter) for deep analysis, you probably eat dinner at Ben and Jerry's. posted by Carlton at 10:02 PM

A TOUGH ONE

Which will history regard as the greater blunder, the invasion of Iraq or sitting idly by while North Korea armed itself with nuclear weapons? posted by Carlton at 10:29 PM

COLBERT ON SANTORUM ON LORD OF THE RINGS

Don't say I don't keep up with things. (video/audio link) posted by Carlton at 10:22 PM

THE SUCK REPORT: JACOB

I am a big fan of the website Television Without Pity, link at left. I visit there certainly every day, if not every couple of hours that I'm awake. I like the format, I like the community, I like that the people in charge over there seem to like the same shows that I do. But I hate Jacob.

Jacob is the person that TWoP has assigned to recap and forum-moderate my aboslute current favorite shows, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. Let me be gentle: he sucks. He's not a bad writer; he is the worst kind of writer -- self-indulgent, with no editor. Result: suck.

What do I mean? Let the man speak for himself. The following is from the recap of the latest (really awesome) episode, School Reunion:

The Doctor grabs Sarah Jane's hand and they run, young and beautiful and in delicious danger. And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say? If all was good and fair we met, This earth had been the Paradise It never look'd to human eyes Since our first Sun arose and set. And is it that the haze of grief Makes former gladness loom so great? The lowness of the present state, That sets the past in this relief? Or that the past will always win A glory from its being far; And orb into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein?

Get me? Beyond "The Doctor grabs Sarah Jane's hand and they run," he's just -- not to put too fine a point on it -- beating off. He has his themes, which are invariably of the "look at me, I read a book!" variety (last season it was Gnosticism, for example), and he runs with them. And he goes on and on and on. His School Reunion recap is twenty pages, as opposed to eleven or twelve from someone else, and it's all this nonsense. I have to skim each page just to see if there are any character's names from the show on that page, so far do his tangents run. Blech.

Speaking of last season (from The Parting of the Ways):

Jack then executes a very Yogi Bear kind of self-launched run toward the elevator, shouting out, "See you in hell!" Already there, that's the point. The Doctor and Rose watch him leave, and Rose starts telling lies again: "He's gonna be alright, isn't he?" The Doctor looks at her, but he doesn't have anything to say: Jack's a hero. He's going to die. Back to ex-Gnostic Saint Augustine and I'll keep it short: as a sincere Platonist and rationalist, his Trinitarian explorations are kind of mind-blowingly Aspergers-ish, as any good saint's detail-oriented overthinking should be. They always start with the friggin' diagrams when it gets too close to the uniterable. But he had this idea about how the Holy Trinity was mirrored in every human soul through memory, knowledge and will. Everything that ever was, the ability to analyze it, and the will to commit to the process -- and that's God, which is about as Gnostic 101 as you can get. And, as he saw it, the restoration of the divine was a three-part act of faith: holding God in your mind, contemplating the truth of God, and delighting in it. Retentio, contemplatio, dilectio. Each of the three supporting the others, leading to a meditative ecstatic experience of God, which cannot be put into words. I think you know where I'm headed with this, but for now: Captain Jack is the Will. Even without his memories, he delights in the truth (and the now) in a way that the Doctor can only get to about half the time -- given his cosmic ADD and soul-crushing guilt

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Worse, though, is what comes from a convergence of this dreck with another TWoP Bad Idea (trademark) -- in the past, each forum has had an "appreciate the recapper" thread, where Jacob or whoever could go for a tongue bath after the recap came out. ("OMG Jacob, I love reading your recaps, they really shed so much new insight on the episode!!@! I never would have seen those parallels without you!") It's a plain attempt to curry favor or get brownie points against being banned later on. I hate that shit, but I didn't have to go into that thread, so all right.

Now, however, TWoP has done away with the appreciation threads, and so the miserable sycophants have to post in the episode threads, where I DO like to go. So now, I have to either watch the fellatio or stay away, starting as soon as the (crappy) recap is published.

Worst of all, the powers in charge over at TWoP are notoriously sensitive about criticism, and I do believe that voicing any of these concerns there would get me a one way ticket out of there -- and I like it there. So I have to vent it here, for you fine people.

And it's BOTH my shows. The SAME guy. posted by Carlton at 6:54 PM

I HEAR HE'S UP SEVEN POINTS AMONG THE AINUR

Howdy folks -- there's obviously a lot of stuff going on right now, what with the war and the election and all. What better to bring me back than a story about the war and the election, and of course Pennsylvania's favorite junior senator:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been drawn to Iraq instead.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy classic “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S.,” Santorum continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

In an interview with the Bucks County Courier Times editorial board late last week, the 12-year Republican senator from Pennsylvania said he's “a big "Lord of the Rings' fan.” He's read the first of the series, “The Hobbit” to his six children.

A spokesman for Democratic opponent Bob Casey Jr. questioned the appropriateness of the analogy.

I can't imagine what the objection could be. I mean, Iraq and the War of the Ring are both wars, right? posted by Carlton at 6:49 PM