From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V12 #116 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Thursday, March 27 2003 Volume 12 : Number 116 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Donna Fargo [Miles Goosens ] Re: Rickenbackers... [gshell@metronet.com] Re: Heh heh ["Stewart C. Russell" ] Mercury Lounge ["Maximilian Lang" ] Re: Wonderful Merchandise ["Stewart C. Russell" ] 17 cents Gotta Let This Hen Out! [brian@lazerlove5.com] Shock and Awe having subsided, Fegmania explodes ["Rex.Broome" ] Re: Watching the war [Jeff Dwarf ] Re: rumours of war/ch [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] Re: rumours of war/ch [Christopher Gross ] Re: Errata and apologies to Ms. Sarandon [Tom Clark ] Re: Wonderful Merchandise [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:27:07 -0600 From: Miles Goosens Subject: Re: Donna Fargo At 01:05 PM 3/27/2003 -0800, Glen Uber wrote: >Once upon a time somebody say to me -- this is Miles Goosens talking now -- >what is your conceptual continuity? > >> She'd go on that show hosted by Jim Ed Brown and Helen Cornelius > >Wow! You're busting out all the B-List country stars of the 70s. > >Next, I suppose you're going to bring up Johnny Carver or Billy "Crash" >Craddock or Dave and Sugar. Or the Kendalls, or John Conlee... I was about to mention Mel Street too, who I guess was B-List in terms of notoriety, but he was a superstar to those of us in southern West Virginia, since he was our homeboy. He'd frequently play gigs on a flatbed trailer in the parking lot of Hill's Department Store in Bluefield, and he knew practically everyone by their first names, including little kid me. Back home, it was practically an official day of mourning when he OD'd. I actually don't remember Johnny Carver, though I'm sure my memory could be refreshed. Whether I want it refreshed is probably another question. later, Miles ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:21:15 -0600 (CST) From: gshell@metronet.com Subject: Re: Rickenbackers... On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Rex.Broome wrote: > Oooh, guitar-tech nerdery. Do I get to start asking for amp recommendations > now? i use the only combo that should be available on earth, the JC-120. gSs ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:40:40 -0500 From: "Stewart C. Russell" Subject: Re: Heh heh Miles Goosens wrote: > > However, no choice is required for "Go go > Mozilla!" yea verily, it is the 1TB. All others are becalmed in the mighty Ocean of Suck. Stewart (living about 1km from that SARS oubreak -- should I phone in sick tomorrow for a 3 day weekend?) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:41:06 -0500 From: "Maximilian Lang" Subject: Mercury Lounge Hi, Anyone know what the Mercury Lounge security is like as far as recording goes? We are seeing Bettie Serveert there tomorrow night. Thanks in advance, Max _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:52:08 -0500 From: "Stewart C. Russell" Subject: Re: Wonderful Merchandise FS Thomas wrote: > > Vietnam and Korea, you had to > haul your film out of the bush, ship it to > process, and then ship it to > editing, where it finally aired after five days > to a week. mind you, the stills guys souped everything as close as possible to the news sites, and had the wonderful analogue picture wire to beam out photos to the waiting world. Maybe I've just been reading "Page After Page"* too recently... Stewart * Iain Glen, who played Tim Page in the miniseries "Frankie's House" based on 'Page After Page', has the same birthday as me. I think that says something. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 17:55:45 +0000 (GMT) From: brian@lazerlove5.com Subject: 17 cents Gotta Let This Hen Out! http://www9.gemm.com/c/search.pl?sid=360441855&key=41959&a_refno=GML481625529 I promise no pop ups. .17! Worth it just for the artwork! 12 vinyl copies. Oh and $4.50 for shipping in the states... - -Nuppy ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 14:07:59 -0800 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: Shock and Awe having subsided, Fegmania explodes Kay: >>Im the person who who thinks >>ellipses at the end of sentences should be done this way: ... . I like that, actually. Evocative of Morse Code. Must be two letters... anyone here know what it means? >>While emoticons are the opposite. They are what they look like within a set of >>styalized conventions, like secular hiroglyphics. Oohh, Secular Hieroglyphics... there's an imaginary band if I've ever heard of one! ________ On Michael Moore (oh, God, here we go again): Really. Far more vexing than Moore having the balls to simply express, in however syntactically tortured a form, what most of the people in that theatre believed, was the fact that his reaction was booing and shrugs of "Oh, there he goes, that wacky guy, heh heh, look away quick, let's pretend it's not happening, oh man, they're gonna call us all a bunch of godless pinkos tomorrow, he's ruining it for everyone, la la la la la." From where I was sitting (a few miles away from the Kodak Theatre) it looked like they were in an awful rush to compound an already grievous image problem. But that's me. I still do Susan Sarandon in a second, and my wife would let me as long as she got a crack at Tim Robbins. (BTW "Screw Moore", pun aside, could just as easily refer to Julianne, which... although crudely stated... has... a certain appeal...) But if you think Michael Moore is a "Republican mole", you gotta give mad props to Democratic operatives like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and hell, possibly Bush himself... ________ Me then Miles: >>>>-Rex, narrowly avoiding deployment of his "Dick Butkus tried to kill my >>>>dad's drummer" story >>Not fair to drop that line and not explicate... :-) Alright, distraction corner: Dad's band used to play the annual "Winterfest" at a ski resort in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. They would co-headline with a few sports celebrities who were there to basically sign autographs, show up on stage briefly, and eat & drink on the festival's dime. One year it was Butkus (sp?), and he was up onstage with Dad's band, for whom bawdy humor was part of the act, and they were used to taking good-natured potshots at the celebs and vice versa. The drummer, most likely a bit tipsy, made some kind of crack about Butkus's sexuality (probably had something to do with his unfortunate name) and Butkus flew into a rage. By my dad's account he would've throttled the drummer if not for the barrier of the drum kit-- the quote everyone remembers is "You just played your last tune, drummer boy!" They probably jumped right into the obligatory cover of "Country Roads" and got the hell outta there. But a lotta people wanted the strangle that drummer at one time or another, so who knows. And back when it was often said that believing OJ to be guilty was racism, this story reminded me that *I* thought he was guilty because people who have been paid and become famous for utilizing brute force could be a little scary regardless of race. On Donna Fargo: >>Country Music Strolloping Road Whore 'Nother good imaginary band. I don't believe I've ever seen the verb "to strollop" before. But I like it. >>Rex, you got any memories of her, or is this one of the very few times that our >>slight age difference, well, makes a difference (in your favor in this case!). I think it is one of those cases. I have vague memories but she had gone out of fashion before my folks got their introductory package from the Columbia House 8-Track Club. By then it was all Outlaw stuff (which was where Dad was stealing all his songs for the band, Texas having replaced Tennessee) although my mom still held with Ronnie Milsap and some stuff like that. My folks still have that big fake wood 8-track/radio/LP player in their living room. It's like six feet long and three feet tall, and not a single component of it works anymore. I've checked. Its sole function, as far as I know, is as a thing my mom puts a big bubble-light menorah-looking thing on top of around Christmas time. ___ Fair Sally (isn't that what FS stands for?) writes: >>Now have signal providers tap boxes and dishes and you would have accurate >>data. A Big Brother society, too, but accurate data. Civil liberties would be a small price to pay for accurate marketing data. I mean, the data would stimulate the economy, right? Keeping rich people rich enough to be free. Cool. Doesn't it sound oddly plausible that this concept might be advanced, with a straight face, soon? (Yakov Smirnoff impersonation) What a country! - -Rex "but I'm tapped-uh" Broome np. more war... ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 17:25:48 -0500 From: "Stewart C. Russell" Subject: Re: footnote to previous message FS Thomas wrote: > > IMHO musicals are, on the entertainment ladder, > only a rung or two above > potty humor and several below sarcasm. so I should stop working on my potty-humour sarcastic musical then? Stewart ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 14:38:55 -0800 From: Glen Uber Subject: Re: Shock and Awe having subsided, Fegmania explodes Once upon a time somebody say to me -- this is Rex.Broome talking now -- what is your conceptual continuity? > (BTW "Screw Moore", pun aside, could just as easily refer to Julianne, > which... although crudely stated... has... a certain appeal...) Agreed. Wholeheartedly. And other parts, too. > the quote everyone remembers is "You just played your last tune, drummer > boy!" That's an awesome line. Almost as good as a Troggs' outtake on which the producer muttered, "Fuckin' drummer. I'll shit him!" > But a lotta people wanted the strangle that drummer at one time or another, Definitely been there, definitely wanted to do that. My brother is an outstanding drummer, but he and I just can't play together because he doesn't like being told when and how to play, least of all by his older brother. There's a certain competitiveness that creeps in when we try to play music together that just completely precludes us from accomplishing anything other than bickering and calling into question our blood relations. It's not as bad as the Davies's or the Gallaghers or the Robinsons but it can get pretty bad. Come to think of it, drummers have been the bane of my musical existence. I play several instruments (keys, guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo and several brass instruments) but I never learned to play drums very well. Hindsight being what it is, I could have saved myself a lot of time, money and cancelled shows if I had just learned how to play the damn things myself. >>> Country Music Strolloping Road Whore > > 'Nother good imaginary band. I don't believe I've ever seen the verb "to > strollop" before. But I like it. I do too. I say we do our best to use it as often as possible in everyday conversation with the hope of having it find its way into the OED. - -- Cheers! - -g- "The flowers of intolerance and hatred are blooming kind of early this year, someone's been watering them." --Robyn Hitchcock ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 11:47:29 +1200 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: Re: rumours of war/ch me, then the Quail, then the Chris: >> > Journalists >> > are only being allowed into Iraq if they are 'embedded' with the coalition >> > forces. >> >> I'm not entirely sure this is true. I believe that there are many foreign >> journalists who are not attached to units -- particularly Middle Eastern >> journalists. > >You're correct, Quail. Journalists (including Americans) don't *have* to >be embedded to enter Iraq. For example, Terry Lloyd, the British reporter >who was accidentally killed by coalition fire last week, was non-embedded. >And I believe the Washington Post has at least one non-embedded reporter, >Keith Richburg, wandering around southern Iraq. He's still alive, last I >heard. I'm only going by what has been on news here (so take that as a caveat), but there have been several interviews with reporters turned back at the Kuwait-Iraq border because they refuse to travel 'embedded'. One Norwegian party of reporters and cameramen tried unsuccessfully to sneak past three times, and after the last attempt were escorted to Kuwait City airport. The policy is more lenient for reporters from one of the main coalition partners (US, UK, Aus), but everyone else has to be embedded, according to the reports received here. > > My daughter thinks Bush and Saddam should just have a duel and > > let everyone else go home. I kinda like that idea. > > No -- not enough! Jeb, George Senior, Uday and Qusay need to be in on it, > too! wars would be a lot better - and a lot less frequent - if it was compulsory for members of the government of warring nations to be in the vanguard of the troops. Who was the last president/king/prime minister to lead his troops into battle? Napoleon? - --- >> "ch", as heard in German, Yiddish, many Slavic languages, Hebrew, is >> probably considered a glottal fricative. > >Don't forget Scots ... with the adjunct: >>And let's not forget the Welsh "ll", as in Llan fair (pron. Chlan vyer) Thlan-vower is closer. The Welsh and Cornish both have a 'ch fricative. It varies a little between all these languages, though. I hear variants from a hard 'kh' to a more flowing 'voiced h' among the German 'Macht', Scottish 'loch', Yiddish 'chutzpah', and Welsh 'ydych'. The Welsh 'll' has more of a 'thl' feel to it that 'kh'. Uvular fricative. Good band name. James James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= .-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= You talk to me as if from a distance =-.-=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 12:05:40 +1200 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: Re: Emoticons/war/montserrat >Subject: Emoticon 2003, registration this way now that threw me. Yes indeed, this year's New Zealand national science fiction convention - Emoticon - takes place in Auckland in a couple of weeks time, at Easter. for more info. >The core difficulty is that we are using two different sorts of systems. Im >relying on the other high geeks here to tell me the proper descriptive >phrase for both of them. One, punctuation, is based on abstract signs that >supposidly(tell that to your unconsious)have no purely visual meaning, their >meaning is in what they signify, not in what they look like. While emoticons >are the opposite. They are what they look like within a set of styalized >conventions, like secular hiroglyphics. Thus the difficulty of intuitively >combining the two systems with correctness and prescision for both systems. ideograms and pictograms, respectively, ISTR. - --- >Last night I found a TV station that was playing the news from Ireland. The >big story there was whether to allow the US to use Irish airports for >refueling. After that, not much mention of the war. That was an interesting >corrective to US outlets in and of itself. yeah - how much of the news in the US is the war? Here in NZ it's now the first 20 minutes of the main hour-long news programmes. About the same in the US? Less than 20 minutes? More? - --- >While moving over to www.msnbc.com yesterday I accidentally entered after >typing only www.ms ...and I must say, I think I enjoyed whiling away the >half-hour or so on the history of Montserrat infinitely more than the how the >same time would have been spent on news. No mention of Mick Jagger, though. > >Michael "how do you feel about active volcanoes, anyway?" Wells been up one, been up the lot ;) James (luckily, Ruapehu had been quiet for three years before that) PS - in answer to your unvoiced question: a British blue ensign flag, with, in fly, a shield showing a woman holding a harp, with her arm around a full-sized Christian cross. No, I don't have this flag. James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= .-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= You talk to me as if from a distance =-.-=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 12:23:59 +1200 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: Re: wonderful merchandise >Just today Hans >Blix is saying there's no evidence they exist. If they aren't found, Mike >will have been correct--the fiction of the wmd was created as an excuse to >drop bombs and kill innocents. Don't know if you received this news a couple of days ago, but tension between the US and Russia has taken an upturn in recent days. Bush telephoned Putin to ask for an explanation as to why two Russian firms had been supplying weapons to Iraq. That's according to the US government's official version of what happened. According to the Russian government, Bush phoned Putin, who said he'd investigated UN rumours that Russian firms had supplied arms to Iraq - but the only overseas buyers for those particular arms had been (through middlemen) the CIA. Now, I'm not saying who is telling the truth here, but who bought any such weapons that may be 'found' in Iraq? It makes for a good conspiracy theory anyway. >I don't know the details behind that, but in a conflict where you've got >"embedded" reporters sending live satellite transmissions and a completely >biased Al-Jezera (sp?) willing to play mouthpiece for all things radical >sending images of dead and captured soldiers out, it's no surprise that the >Gov't can't keep up. let's not forget that the first news agency to send pictures of captured soldiers in this conflict was the BBC. >Rumsfeld said that it violates the Geneva >convention for Iraq to film and broadcast the images of dead soldiers and >POWs so surely that would apply domestically, too?? actually, the person who first raised the issue of this breaching the Geneva convention was Iraq's envoy to the UN, who asked all sides to desist from the practice. - --- >> History shows again and again how Java points out >> the folly of man. > >JavaScript, surely ...? maybe, or maybe the island. Indonesia's been cleaning up its act recently, though, even if their president has a name which sounds like a unit of electricity. >Rex, who figures that at minimum he'll end up with a King Crimson album or >two before it's all over, what with having so many records featuring members >of Crimson already, but dammit, he's not quite ready to throw in the towel >yet go for "Red" and "Thrak". James James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= .-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= You talk to me as if from a distance =-.-=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 12:24:17 +1200 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: polls >> answered some questions right, though, because they never >> followed up on it. Small (or relatively small, by comparison) >> statistical samplings are inevitably skewed and that's what >> you're dealing with when looking at Nielson. > >There's a margin of error deals with market research, although I don't >know if Nielson publishes a one with their ratings. rule of thumb - if you know how many people were sampled, take the square root, then divide 100 by the result. That's your margin of error. Or, working backwards, if you know the margin of error, divide 100 by it, then square the result to find out how many people were polled. A lot of polls have a 3.2% margin of error because 1000 people are sampled: Sq rt of 1000 = 31.62. 100 divided by 31.62 = 3.16. Therefore margin of error = 3.16%. >This is also accounted for by the likelihood that another Nielson family >also didn't answer questions accurately, but in a manner that >compensated for your wrong answers. So if you're a 30 year old guy who >said he was 60, there's probably a 60 year old guy who said he was a 30 >year. I'm a little sceptical that this works all the time, but that was >one of the premises that we worked under at the Harris Poll in my youth. statistically, that makes perfect sense. >Then again, Julia Roberts' appeal has always eluded me. you're not alone there. Halle Berry, though... mmmm... maaan, you guys said a lot of stuff worth replying to overnight! Don't you ever sleep? ;) James James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= .-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= You talk to me as if from a distance =-.-=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:32:40 -0800 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: Errata and apologies to Ms. Sarandon I said: >>I still do Susan Sarandon in a second, and my wife would let me as long as she >>got a crack at Tim Robbins. And, umm, I meant I still *would* do Susan Sarandon in a second. You now, theoretically. No actual "doing" or "having done" was meant to be implied. Also it would hopefully take more than a second. The second is more like how long the decision-making process would take. That's what I get for writing about typos on the list. - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:28:46 -0800 (PST) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: Watching the war Glen Uber wrote: > Timothy Reed wrote: > > Then again, Julia Roberts' appeal has always eluded me. > > You and me both, brother. > > -- > > Cheers! > -g- > > "Half the world's starving and have the world bloats; half the > world sits on > the other and gloats." --Robyn Hitchcock ===== "Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies." -- F.M. Cornford "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt . Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:30:10 -0800 (PST) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: Watching the war Glen Uber wrote: > > Then again, Julia Roberts' appeal has always eluded me. > > You and me both, brother. That's just cuz y'all (and I) have never had the desire to fuck an emaciated horse. ===== "Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies." -- F.M. Cornford "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt . Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 18:32:18 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: rumours of war/ch Quoting James Dignan : > wars would be a lot better - and a lot less frequent - if it was > compulsory > for members of the government of warring nations to be in the vanguard > of > the troops. Who was the last president/king/prime minister to lead his > troops into battle? Napoleon? Among many other brilliant things this week, _The Onion_ addresses this issue: http://www.theonion.com/onion3911/bush_bravely_leads.html ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: we make everything you need, and you need everything we make ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 19:33:12 -0500 (EST) From: Christopher Gross Subject: Re: rumours of war/ch On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, James Dignan wrote: > >You're correct, Quail. Journalists (including Americans) don't *have* to > >be embedded to enter Iraq. For example, Terry Lloyd, the British reporter > >who was accidentally killed by coalition fire last week, was non-embedded. > >And I believe the Washington Post has at least one non-embedded reporter, > >Keith Richburg, wandering around southern Iraq. He's still alive, last I > >heard. > > I'm only going by what has been on news here (so take that as a caveat), > but there have been several interviews with reporters turned back at the > Kuwait-Iraq border because they refuse to travel 'embedded'. Hmm.... I still haven't found anything to indicate non-embedded ("unilateral") journalists are *officially* banned from Iraq, and plenty of unilaterals are certainly known to be in the country. Maybe there is some little-known rule banning unilaterals from non-coalition countries, as you suggest; or (perhaps more likely) some military commanders are, on their own initiative, keeping out unilaterals they think will be too critical. I just found two articles compare-and-contrasting embeds and unilaterals, one before and one after the fighting started: (Sorry for the horrible URLs!) - --unembedded Chris ______________________________________________________________________ Christopher Gross On the Internet, nobody knows I'm a dog. chrisg@gwu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:34:27 -0800 From: Tom Clark Subject: Re: Errata and apologies to Ms. Sarandon on 3/27/03 4:32 PM, Rex.Broome at Rex.Broome@preferredmedia.com wrote: > I said: >>> I still do Susan Sarandon in a second, and my wife would let me as long as > she >>got a crack at Tim Robbins. That reminds me - Tim Robbins was a panelist on Bill Maher's HBO show last week (he wore a "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" tee shirt). Anyway, the musical guests were Grant Lee Philips and Jon Brion. Figured someone would've mentioned that. Is it the weekend yet? - -tc ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 18:58:03 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: Wonderful Merchandise The GQ (hmm...) is being needlessly thoughtful with my intentionally exaggerated, Dadaist protest post - but still'n'all... Quoting The Great Quail : > Jeffrey with one J writes, > > > Aside from that, there's something deeply surreal and disconnected > > about "rules of decency" during wartime, approximately along the lines > of > > someone getting upset because the rapist didn't say "please" before > > attacking his mother. We're killing people, and then complaining about > what > > pictures should and shouldn't be shown? Why not not create the corpses > in > > the first place? > > War is indecent, that's a given. But your analogy is faulty, as it covers > a > criminal act -- which may be an element of war, as when civilians are > killed, but is not a correct metaphor for the totality of war. On the > battlefield, the distinction between rapist and mother is somewhat less > clear. As with any analogy, this one has its limits. However, I'm doubtful whether many wars have been confined to "battlefields" (and professional soldiers) since the 19th century. > There are two basic reasons for the so-called "laws" of war. First and > foremost, there's the general idea of minimalizing civilian casualties. > Certain acts of war may be seen as increasingly less descent when they > fail > to discriminate between civilians and combatants. The Iraqi habit of > using > human shields, for instance. (They have been known to actually tie women > to > tanks.) Gassing towns, dropping A-bombs on cities, carpet-bombing, these > may > reasonably be seen as less decent ways of waging war. Or, in the present > case, storing munitions in hospitals, schools, and religious buildings. And with the exception of the Iraqi atrocities (and dropping the "A-" from "bombs"), every one of these has become common warfare practice. And during which recent war was minimizing civilian casualties truly a priority? Not Vietnam - not WWII (Dresden, Nagasaki - and of course the Nazi genocide)... Modern warfare almost can never meet any of the classical definitions of "just war" - aerial warfare alone, inevitably involving as it does civilian casualties - and quite typically, *intentionally* doing so (RAF in Middle East in '20s, Churchill's coining the term "terror bombing") - and this war, as evidenced by the considered opinions of most other nations in the world, and most the peoples of the earth, certainly does not. > Secondly, and this may not sit well with you, there are ideas of > "decency" > among the combatants themselves. There are even notions of chivalry, > grace, > and honor. (If you don't believe me, read some accounts by those who > fight.) I don't doubt this - and I also don't doubt that quite often, the heat of battle overthrows these boundaries. But really, I'm talking more about the conduct of those running the war - not those forced to fight it. (I take a flexible definition of "forced to fight" as well: certainly conscripts, and quite plausibly those who swallowed the military's rhetoric about careers and money for education and now find themselves in an actual war. Sure, enrolling under such circumstances is naive...but that's why it's the young who are targeted: they lack enough experience of the world, in many cases, to see through such rhetoric.) The point I'm making is that there's something insidious about adherence to such niceties: it tends to whitewash the underlying brutality, no matter how much it might also serve to mitigate it among combatants. > > Actually, I think everyone in favor of the war should be mailed raw > > body parts from the battlefield, and be forced to carry them around > with > > them: wouldn't W. look grand covered in rotting viscera on national > TV? > > There are those who support the war because they believe that Saddam is > a > greater threat in the long run, and though you may disagree, it is a > credible and defensible position. Sorry - I should have been clearer: I mean those who are *conducting* the war (Bush, Rumsfeld, etc.). And of course, we've exchanged 50k words on why the potentially good reasons to support this war do not apply to those bastards. Wishing them draped in the gore of > their consequences cuts both ways, and it does little to promote > rational > debate. No - but that wasn't my point... Better to try an understand *why* people support the war, and > counter these reasons without hysteria. See Jan-Feb, previously referenced 50k tome... ;) > Just for the record, this war makes me utterly depressed for very many > reasons. But not all of these reasons reside with Bush, Rumsfeld, and > dead > Iraqi civilians. I pray that it ends as swiftly as possible with the > destruction of Saddam's regime, that we use the UN to build a more free > Iraq, and that we do not let greed of oil corrupt what could be a > vibrant > society once again. My depression on these issues relates to the utter lack of credible endgame theorized by what the media is so pleased to call a "coalition" (yep, and the street wino can call his fleas his "entourage" if he wishes). Even taking into account Saddam's atrocities, will those directly stemming from the war, and those following in the chaos of its aftermath, including resistance to whatever puppet regime we prop up and then abandon, including any terrorism that results from (as The Onion calls it) Operation Piss Off the World, etc., be less or more than a policy of containment, a regime of inspections, etc., would have done? Of course, we'll never know...but (caution: very broad analogy ahead) to the extent that WWII was made more possible by the humiliation and impoverishment imposed upon the defeated Germany under the terms of WWI's ceasefire, well, it's a legitimate worry. (Actually, a not-very-fun-at-all parlor game would involve tracing the chains of causation forward from WWI to how many wars of the last century...it seems it never truly ended, in fact.) ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: it's not your meat :: --Mr. Toad ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V12 #116 ********************************