mermaidradio offers this link to the same old left/right/authoritarian/libertarian political spectrum test you took when you first logged on to the ‘net in 1997.

I took it again, and it ended up being as erroneous as ever, again. It put me in about half way between center and left on the economic scale, which is BS. Prominent figures who share this longitude with me, according to the site: Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe. It’s nice that the test puts me closer to Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama than those other two, but the model is still flawed, no matter how flattering. To say that the only real difference between the political views of Nelson Mandela and Saddam Hussein is that one is authoritarian while the other is libertarian seems to totally miss the point.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about while watching too much CSPAN on cable TV is this: Where do I sit on the political spectrum, and why does it matter?

I’ll answer the second question first: It matters because you have to take sides. In order to get anything done, you have to find an audience and/or a consituency and/or a consensus. This is a real problem, because if you want to be taken seriously, you can’t just put the tip of your toe in the water. You have to dive off the diving board. The problem is that the process of partisan politics shears away anything interesting from those involved. For instance, no partisan neo-conservative will give an inch on the fact that Bush lied out his pie-hole during the state of the union address. And no partisan Democrat will admit that there’s any value in occupying Iraq (there are a couple of valid reasons to be there, but none are being pursued by BushCo).

The point being that to change minds you have to quit being yourself, and you’re not going to change any minds anyway.

Politics is such an intellectual and spiritual dead end, but if you want anything better for society, you have to take sides.

So to approach myself from the point of view of political taxonomy, I’d call myself a liberal libertarian. I guess I’m a fan of individual liberty, and not a fan of power and priviledge ending up in the hands of legal entities like corporations. This makes me a ‘classical liberal,’ which means that in modern parlance, I’m a conservative. Except that in present-day useage, the term ‘conservative’ also carries a whole set of cultural baggage.

I’m a fan of Wendell Barry’s ‘agrarianism,’ as it applies to local and sustainable economies. Berry has put these ideas into their most eloquent forms, and somehow manages to poetically tie his economic vision into the mythos of the American breadbasket. He cuts to the chase: If you don’t know where your food comes from, then you don’t know how you’re staying alive. And if you don’t know where your money goes when you buy your food, then you don’t know how your community is staying alive.

I’m also a fan of natural capitalism, which seeks to use technology and the profit motive to, in the short view, solve environmental problems, and, in the long view, bring about another industrial revolution, with greater profitability and higher standard of living.

Being a fan of these two things means that conservatives call me a liberal, and that liberals call me a conservative. That’s just one example of how screwed up partisan politics are right now.

Woo. Shoney’s for lunch again. Woo.

I’m in a hotel in a complex full of hotels. It’s like a business park, only it’s full of hotels. Really. It’s not merely an exit off the interstate where there are some motels, though it is an exit off the interstate. There’s a whole development full of hotels here. AmeriSuites, Radisson, Best Western… a few others. There must be a dozen hotels in a half-mile radius.

They’re mostly identical buildings. It’s like being in the suburbs where all the houses are alike, but instead of houses, it’s hotels. And none of them have restaurants.

The food is up on the main road. There are as many places to eat as there are hotels. McD, Wendy’s, KFC, Waffle House, etc. And Shoney’s.

Shoney’s claim to fame is their buffet. You go in and keep piling on the food, and with tip it’ll end up costing a tenner.

I’ve been here a little less than a week, and I’ve eaten at the Shoney’s about 5 times. Back when people were arriving for grandma’s birthday party, there would be as many as three trips to the place in a day. I walked in today and a few members of the waitstaff recognized me. “Heya. I’m not your server today, but I thought I’d say hi, since I served you on Saturday.”


I’ve been having trouble with my diet while I’ve been here. I haven’t been exercising at all, so I’m kind of, well… Not so regular. And the stress of meeting new people has made me not want to eat. And the prospect of walking up the hill to eat crap food at a fast-food joint has kept me eating out of the vending machine. After all, it’s crap food either way.

And then someone gave me a box of Godiva chocolates. They were to be a gift to grandma, but my uncle Jere intercepted it since she’s not supposed to eat sweets like that. Of course, no one’s supposed to eat sweets like that, which is why they ended up in my room. Where I got sick off them, such that I couldn’t go to visit my dad’s cousin Betsy, one of the people I was looking forward to seeing on this trip.

I suppose the lesson here is that AmeriSuites will suck your soul out if given half a chance. Or perhaps that one should try and be careful about what one eats while travelling. I like the soul sucker story… More mythological.

From a number of sources:

Operation Oil Immunity

[..]

Executive Order 13303 decrees that “any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void,” with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and “all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein.”

In other words, if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco touch Iraqi oil, it will be immune from legal proceedings in the United States. Anything that could go, and elsewhere has gone, awry with U.S. corporate oil operations will be immune to judgment: a massive tanker accident; an explosion at an oil refinery; the employment of slave labor to build a pipeline; murder of locals by corporate security; the release of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The president, with a stroke of the pen, signed away the rights of Saddam’s victims, creditors and of the next true Iraqi government to be compensated through legal action. Bush’s order unilaterally declares Iraqi oil to be the unassailable province of U.S. corporations.

Here’s the full text of EO 13303.

I’m in a hotel room in Nashville listening to a discussion on CSPAN-2 about judicial activism.

I love the judicial activism debate, because it’s basically hypocrisy by conservatives. They say that judges are too busy making laws instead of ruling on them. The proper response is: Yes, of course, as in Bush v. Gore.

But as I’m sitting here watching this discussion, with as much rapt attention as I can muster, all I can think about is a guy on usenet who is always harping about judicial activism. He says that, for instance, the recent Supreme Court ruling about Texas sodomy laws was an activist ruling. There was much back and forth for a while between him and some others, and myself, and finally it occurred to me: The court wasn’t okaying sodomy against the wishes of the Texas legislature, it was okaying the social activism which has occurred since the stupid laws were enacted. The court was not activist, society was. I said so, and the discussion ended.

And as I’m listening to Judge David Tatel of the US Court Of Appeals talk about ‘results-oriented assessment of judicial ruling,’ my observation is still missing from the debate. The argument is framed as a constitutional one; if something isn’t in the constitution, a judge shouldn’t rule that it is. This is a no-brainer… Of course judges shouldn’t rule outside the law. (Again, I bring up Bush v. Gore.) The only counter-argument is that conservatives are hypocritical in their application of their criticism, and this has been the thrust of the counter-argument presented on CSPAN. This completely ignores the fact that judges don’t rule on rules, they rule on things that happen, and then decide whether they’re illegal/constitutional or not.

So say I have oral sex with my wife in Texas. I’m breaking the law, according to the ‘sodomy’ law that was in force there, before the court reversed it. If oral sex is seen as a normal part of American life, which should be protected by a right to privacy (activist view) or right of assembly (structuralist view), then the Texas law is clearly unconstitutional. Unless, of course, there’s some harm that comes from blow jobs, which there isn’t, except perhaps for needing to clean up afterward. We’re told that the blow job is immoral, to which any reasonable person replies… “So what? Why should that make it illegal?”

This CSPAN thing is mostly from the point of view of the process of appeals. It has a couple appeals court judges and some law professors on the panel. What I’d be interested in hearing them discuss is the proper role of juries. Juries are told that they must rule based on the law, even though that’s not the case. Juries can find laws to be unjust, and thus find guilty defendants innocent based on their moral assessment of the law itself. This would count as ‘judicial’ activism, and I’m all for it. Such a decision would likely be overturned on appeal, but a message would have been sent, and this is very important.

The real problem here is that conservatives have taken the offensive, and are very willing to paint a reasonable libertarian stance as ‘activist,’ and thus something to be opposed. Unless, of course, it’s a stance that benefits their constituency. The argument is a political weapon; there’s no way to address what’s been put forth without essentially calling the accusor a hypocrite, because they are. However, this doesn’t play well in the realm of politics, which is the realm for which the argument is designed.

Just some thoughts.

Clint Arthur is running for President as the Love Candidate in order to sell porn.

It’s nice to see this kind of transparency in the electoral process. We know from the outset that Arthur speaks for the horndog who can’t get a date.

That’s a segue into a book that hasn’t been released yet, called ‘The Middle Mind‘.

My main problem with ‘The Middle Mind’ is that I’ve been saying this all along, but someone else wrote the book.

In this groundbreaking and incisive exploration, acclaimed social critic Curtis White describes an all-encompassing and little-noticed force taking over our culture and our lives. White calls this force the Middle Mind — the current failure of the American imagination in the media, politics, education, art, technology, and religion.

The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the right’s narrowness, and incredulous before the left’s convolutions. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way how that very SUV spells the Arctic’s doom.

There’s an excerpt from a chapter over at boingboing.

Andy and the river, South Harpeth River, TN

Submerged log, South Harpeth River, TN

Echo Lodge is a ubiquitous ‘blog subject for me. For instance, this one, and this one.

I’m in Nashville. Tomorrow’s my grandmother’s 100th birthday party, and 95 people will be there, including me. Catherine Cobb Mitchum. Maybe you’ll see her on the news or something.

Went to Echo Lodge yesterday, with my sister and her two sons. We wandered around on the banks of the South Harpeth… My sister and I reminisced about going over there most summers, while the boys mostly hinted (maybe not so subtly) that they wanted to leave.

I have to admit that the Lodge (a log cabin on a hill by a river) is somewhat spooky. The upstairs in particular always creeped me out as a child, and I never went up there before I was a teenager. I think a big part of it is the steepness of the stairs, the dark corners and recesses, the mounted fish heads, the silent and dusty spinning wheel… There’s even a decrepid reed organ up there, to complete the haunted house archetype.

It’s odd to me how a place that’s simply dark and old can be transformed into the set for a haunted house movie so easily. It’s also odd to me how the family tradition of keeping the place creepy is still in tact. No one will ever move or even touch the spinning wheel. We could probably get a bunch of money for the organ, too, even in its’ state of disrepair. But no one will take the time or make the effort; the place is frozen in time. Those things have always been there, and always will, until they’re dust.

It’s owned by a generation of the family that moved away. That is, no one lives near enough to make use of the place on any regular basis. The political situation is such that no one dare change anything. There’s a caretaker who keeps the weeds from overtaking the place, and keeps the river access road maintained. But that’s all.

That’s how our memories are. We want to maintain them, but really we’re just putting them in formaldehyde. We want them to be a certain way, to reflect a certain something. My dad and his brothers spent whole summers there, their father being a gentleman farmer. They want to remember those times, and hold on to the times their children played in the river and hiked through the woods. The place is pinned to a stretch of time when they were growing up, being raised, and a stretch of time when my generation was growing up.

One of my nephews was trying to express his annoyance at being there by shocking us. He said that by the time he inherited the place, he’d sell it and make a pretty penny. His intent to shock aside, he has a point: It’s a money hole on a hillside to anybody whose childhood isn’t linked to it. A beautiful money hole, but a money hole nonetheless.

My childhood is linked to it. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of being there. 8 years old, amazed that my uncle Bill could cut watermelon with a string (you saw it, as with a garotte), chasing my cousins around, capsizing a canoe in the river and swimming up under it… Gathering rocks, plants, insects. We’d get fireflies and put them in a jar and take them back to my grandparents’ house, and use them as a night light.

I told my sister that my interest in travel and the outdoors no doubt stems from summers at the camp. She agreed, and said it was the same for her. I think we’re both incredibly lucky.

I wish there were a way for Echo Lodge to be a dynamic memory, instead of a static one. It just sits there and decomposes, like childhood memories as we get older. Maybe that’s it’s lesson; that you can’t go back, can’t really revisit. Childhood is for remembering, not reliving.

Nashville is growing. The area around the camp is more gentrified, ever more suburban. Property values are going up. It won’t be long.

And maybe that implies another lesson: Things fade of their own accord, unless you make the effort to keep them vivid.