Videos

I had some requests for a link to the "Naughty Little Mermaid" video. Well, there you go.

Call me a nerd, but I like Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner better.

Also, the latest from Andy Samberg and the crew at SNL.

Fanboys

I've been sitting on this link for a while now, thanks to Mr. Brottman for that, without blogging it. I think it's fair to say I'll see this movie.

Child's Play

I haven't mentioned Child's Play yet this year, so it's damn time I do. Now in its fourth year, Child's Play is the brainchild of the Penny Arcade boys. It occurred to them in 2003 that with all the bad press games and gamers get, it'd be nice to point to to say, "See, we're decent sorts of folks too. Games didn't make us killers." This isn't to say this is a purely mercenary affair; doing good deeds to be lauded. The targets of the yearly fundraiser are Children's Hospitals. In the first year they ran the charity out of their garage and supported one hospital in Seattle. Now they run everything online and have the gifts and money sent directly to the hospitals, which increasingly are spread over the globe. Donations of video games, money, and miscellaneous toys have increased every year since its inception and they're currently shooting for $800,000 raised this year and over $2 million since the first year. Another neat facet of the charity is that they take absolutely no administrative fees or charges from the donations; every dollar goes to the hospitals. If you're thinking of making a donation this year, there are worse places to send your money to.

Incidentally, they just had a dinner/auction and there are pictures up.

Link dump

Before I take off for my desperately needed month-long break (during which time I will write a paper on infinitesimals, because that's just how much fun my life is), I thought I'd clear out my rather large `To blog' folder. Evidently it's been a couple of months since I've done this, because the first post is dated September 20.

1. Pandagon on Gore's proposal to eliminate payroll taxes and replace them with pollution taxes. The idea is that this would be revenue-neutral for workers and most businesses, and would encourage the largest businesses to reduce their pollution output.
   
   
2. sinister girl argues that prostitution is anything but a victimless crime.
   
   
3. Barry Lynn argues that Wal-Mart's most pernicious aspect is the power it enjoys as a monopsonist. For more on monopsony, check out Alan Manning's recent book, Monopsony in motion: Imperfect competition in labor markets.
   
   
4. Jenn: The GOP is the real party of death.
   
   
5. Feministing with a link to a report arguing that, rather than `opting out', many of those homemakers with the $120k educations the NYT periodically gets all breathless over aren't actually so traditional after all.
   
   
6. sinister girl, with some great advice on how to prevent rape: by not raping people.
   
   
7. Elayne Riggs gives a great table of contents of the series Goodbye to comics. Comic fans who haven't read this yet really should.
   
   
8. Amanda thinks about lefty guilt and what the world would be like if, somehow, we actually managed to win.
   
   
9. Jenn surveys the racist reactions to Rosie O'Donnell's racist non-joke last week. All six reactions make for excellent illustrations of the same point: through the eyes of privilege, `the problem with racism is not about the victim of the racist action, but the perpetrator and their intent.'

See you all in a month!

Sony Is Sneaky

Sony just can't get a leg up. The PS3 is having supply problems on top of not having a great launch lineup and being mega expensive. The PSP is getting trounced by the Nintendo DS. A year ago they tried to drum up support for the PSP by hiring graffiti artists to do tags supporting the machine. Now they've hired a company to make, among other things, fake You Tube videos from "fans" pledging their love of it.

This past Monday was the swearing in ceremony for the New Jersey Bar. I'm a real lawyer now! Hire me! 

Jonathan Coulton

I'm not sure if you all know about Jonathan Coulton, but if you don't, check out Code Monkey and the video for Flicker. He's got lots of free songs to download, but I'm honestly considering buying some stuff from him just to throw some support his way. Here's his main page.

Yeah, I'm pretty much posting this so I can find it at some later date, but you really all should check his stuff out.

Edit: Some lyrics for the holidays:

"Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime, where we’re working in a mine for our robot overlords. Did I say overlords? I meant protectors. Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime."

Good To Know

There have been scattered reports of faulty straps on the Wiimote since its release. Evidently these strap failures have been responsible for more than a few broken TVs as the Wiimote flies from the sweaty hand of a gamer not used to moving quite so much. Seriously, people have accidentally broken their expensive HDTVs by essentially throwing the Wiimote at the screen.

Anyhow, whethere there's a design flaw or not, here are some more things to avoid when using your fancy new Wii.

Next-Gen Wars!

Here's a new Halo 3 trailer. Not a ton of gameplay, but it's enough to get me excited.

Also, NextGen Wars is finally a useful site to watch the battle for console supremacy develope.

End of the semester hell

is, well, hell. I should've made this official weeks ago, but my blogging will be on hiatus until I get back from California mid-January. Unless I give you a blog dump sometime in the next few days, which is quite likely.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Shorter NYT: We love us some gender essentialism!

A fascinating article this morning in the NYT on positive changes in the attitudes of parents, educators, and child psychologists towards very young transgender kids. Unfortunately, the writer seems completely ignorant of the issues surrounding transgender, and spend the first third of the piece forcing the entire issue into a cisnormative framework. Here are some highlights:

`Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.'

How could anyone display a predispostion to wear certain clothes over others? That's like having an predisposition to speak Italian instead of English, or a predisposition to be an atheist.

`The prospect of cross-dressing kindergartners has sparked a deep philosophical divide among professionals over how best to counsel families.'

Transgender people are not cross-dressers. The whole point is that they aren't easily classified as either gender. The first part of this sentence is as fundamentally mistaken as saying intersex people have the wrong genitals.

`Is it healthier for families to follow the child’s lead, or to spare children potential humiliation and isolation by steering them toward accepting their biological gender until they are older?'

That is, is it better to enforce strict dichotomies of sex and gender just so we don't have to challenge them?

The latter two thirds is much better. It's probably no coincidence that this part is almost entirely composed of quotations from parents and progressive educators and the like.

An Untackleable American Hero

I'm sure most of us have seen that Madden '07 commercial with the guy getting tackled (in the game) over and over and over again. Well, the guy getting tackled is Dallas Clark and he didn't take too kindly to being destroyed over and over and over again in a nationally syndicated commercial. Fearing the wrath of a gynormous pissed off pro football player, the guys over at Rooster Teeth (the funny lads behind Red vs. Blue) decided to make amends with an apology and "director's cut" of the commercial to show Mr. Clark's true skillz. Funny stuff.

It's like a post, only easier

First read Hugo on Peter Singer (the professional philosopher most prominently associated in the contemporary imagination with the animal rights movement) coming out in favour of certain kinds of research on non-human animals. Then scroll down to my comment on the post, on Singer's consequentialism.

A Match Made In Heaven

Don't get me wrong, I *loves* me some Spiderman. The comics, the movies, it's all great, fun, comic book stuff. While I still love those classic characters of the Marvel and DC universii, it was more artsy stuff that got me back into comics after a decade sabatical brought on by the mediocrity of mainstream comics in the 90s. And, as any fan of Watchmen, Y: The Last Man, or Sleeper will tell you, a major motion picture just really isn't the best vehicle for the more serious dramatic series. Watching Supes punch guys can be fun for a couple hours, but you're not really going to get much of Sandman's depth without a series of Peter Jackson proportions and few, other than perhaps myself and a few other uber nerds, want to watch a 3-4 hour talkey movie.

So really, the announcement that Garth Ennis' landmark Preacher series will be coming to HBO as an original show was something of an inevitability. Hopefully the more serious, more adult comics on the Vertigo line (as well as those on Wildstorm, Mavel's Max, Image, etc.) will get the HBO treatment down the road. Yorrick Brown on the small screen. My fingers might break, I'm crossing them so hard.

Terminally In Iraq

Terminus is back kids! Well, those of us who knew Drew knew that it was only a matter of time, but it's still nice to see him back at his own place, under the old moniker.

His most recent post is his attempt to get back into the political side of things and, well, it seems like as good a time for me to wade back in as ever. He's talking about Iraq and what the hell we're supposed to do with the debacle that it's become. As he's said for a while now, he thinks we should pull out immediately. He dismisses the moral argument that we owe it to the Iraqi people to fix the mess we've made and dismisses even more readily, and rightly so, the President's argument that we can only lose if we leave. The latter is utter foolishness that wouldn't even be considered a serious position if it weren't the official position of the President. At this point I'm pretty sure he thinks the country is Ed Norton in Fight Club and he's scarring our hand with lye to show us how awesome pain is.

I'm not completely convinced that the former argument is as easy to dismiss. I know this is close to what so many self-important "serious centrists" have been saying for a while now, but what if we pull out and it gets much much worse. Darfur worse. It's entirely possible that the country could turn into, if it isn't already, a massive human rights disaster. Will we go back in then to stop an ethnic cleansing? Will the global community be willing to help? Putting aside whether we would be able to muster the political will to send troops back, is that something we'd be morally obligated to do? It's certainly hard for me to argue that we wouldn't. I've certainly condemned our lack of involvement in Darfur and I don't think I'd be able to weasel my thinking out of finding an obligation to get involved in a similar situation in Iraq, even if we just left. That being the case, is it better to stay if we would just have to come back?

All that being said, at this point it's mostly guilt talking. I never supported the war, but hey, we're all in this mess together and nobody should be above the guilt over what we've done. Still, it certainly doesn't look like we're making any headway on this problem and staying forever just isn't an option. An important issue in "sticking around" is the fact that we have, last I heard, built several large, permanent military bases in Iraq. Now, I didn't pay much attention to it at the time because it was just one ridiculous idea among a sea of ridiculous ideas, but I was under the impression that the US had closed down its bases in Saudi Arabia amid pressure from their citizenry and opted to make Iraq the military staging ground for US troops in the future.
Does pulling out mean eliminating those bases? If so, pulling out seems increadibly unlikely if that would leave us with no strategic outpost in the region.

If, on the other hand, we're just talking about troops patrolling Iraq it's also important to not that leaving "immediately" doesn't mean people drop what they're doing and run for the nearest chopper. It takes quite a while for a force the size of ours to pull out of the country; it just meanse we start preparing to leave now and do so as quickly as possible.

This has been an awfully rambly post, but hey, I'm just getting back into the swing of things. I've also been pulled away from writing this post at least four times which tends to unfocus things. I don't think the guilt over what we've done will ever go away, which increasinly makes me feel that my guilt is a bad basis for letting President Bush dump lye on us.

Oh, the Angst!

 

A Bit Late

It seems like everyone's gotten over the election hoopla pretty fast, but I'm still feeling that warm sunny glow from finally winning a major election. In that spirit of ass kickery, here are two posts:

1) Found through Dan Brottman, a promise from Michael Moore to discouraged conservatives.

2) Found through Atrios, a band who seems to have completely missed the election. Granted, this was probably filmed and possibly released before the election, but these guys don't even seem to realize that Bush is on his way to having the least popular presidency of all time. I'd love to think this was satire, but it just doesn't have any moments of winking at the camera to let me know it's all a wonderful joke. Still, a catchy, if simple, tune.

Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of justice

You can read my review of Martha Nussbaum's latest book, Frontiers of justice, here (PDF).

Thinking about property -- Aquinas

I've been thinking about private property and moral obligation lately. We (by which I mean Americans, or possibly citizens of affluent countries in general, but not philosophers) tend to think that our moral theory needs to keep fixed the system of private property at the bottom of our system of production -- helping out the poor is all well and good, but unjustified taxation is theft, and so on. (Yes, your socialism alert should have just gone off.) Some Libertarians -- Nozick is a good example of this -- actually try to base a theory of political justice on our property system quite explicitly, talking about how every individual owns themselves. (Though doesn't Nozick also say that you're not allowed to sell yourself? It seems like nonfungible property is a contradiction of terms in our system of private property.)

But, of course, our private property system -- like our system of production -- is a relatively recent development. And it certainly wasn't taken for granted throughout most of the last century. If we (ethicists and political philosophers now) purport to give more-or-less universal standards of justice, it seems weird to think that we have to take the economic system of one particular historical epoch as fixed.

Here's a nice quotation from Aquinas, via Peter Singer:

Now, according to the natural order instituted by divine providence, material goods are provided for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore the division and appropriation of property, which proceeds from human law, must not hinder the satisfaction of man's necessity from such goods. Equally, whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: ``The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you buy in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.

That's ST II-II, q 68, art 7, trans by Dawson.

Friday Random Ten!!!!!!!!

Wow, it's been a looooong time since I did one of these, especially actually doing one on a Friday. So to refresh our memories, here's the deal: Load up itunes or your Rio MP3 player or whatever it is you use to listen to MP3s, set the thing to shuffle, random or whatever randomizes the songs, and then post the first ten songs it plays in the comments to this post. The only real rule is that your list be truly random and therefore you're not allowed to omit songs your embarrassed of or artists who inexplicably turn up more than they should. Most of the fun is seeing what weird tastes we all have and how crazy obsessed our computers are with Abba.

(Artist - Song)
1. Pink Floyd - Run Like Hell
2. Maker - Counter Earth
3. B.B. King - You Upset Me Baby
4. Colin Hay - Beautiful World
5. MC Chris - MC Number 2000
6. John Williams -Return of the Jedi Finale (editor: Whoo hoo! Vvvvvrrrrooowww vrrrrrrrwwoooooow...Fffffkkwwwiissshhhh!)
7. Quasimoto - Real Eyes
8. Prefuse 73 - Storm Returns
9. The Beatles - Come Together
10. The Allman Brothers Band - Jessica

Feel free to offer commentary on either my list, your own, or someone else's. I'm pretty stoked about my list. I mean, it's got Star Wars in it. Given the huge Library this is pulling from, it's weird that half the list is actually singles. Let's see your stuff!