Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
– John Cole
”— Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » You’ll Never Get This 21 Minutes Of Your Life Back
“Euthanasia fluid”, as I understand it, is immediate: the animal has no notion that it’s dying. (The transition between the animal standing there, alert, and then on the ground, dead, is startlingly sudden. I was stunned, seeing it.) That’s not the case for US-style execution by lethal injection, which (as I understand it) involves extended-in-time pain, terror, *and* the inability to express either. It looks peaceful, but is not.
I think there’s a principled case to be made that such executions are justified. But:
- because the suffering of the dying prisoner is effaced, we should be aware that any deterrent effect is reduced. “You just go to sleep” deters less than “you die in terror, but don’t have the motor control to express it”. We should be honest that the point is retribution not deterrence.
- we should not pretend we’re doing something… restrained…, something more humane than we’d expect for a sick goat in a veterinary clinic. We’re not.
As in so many things in US politics, I wish proponents would just be honest: “yes, this is what I propose, and yes, it will have these effects, and I agree to own them.” But, instead (as in so much of our politics), proponents want what they want without having the guts to articulate what the real consequences are.
I myself have never formed a firm opinion about capital punishment, except that the standards (in Illinois, at least) are too capricious. However, Steve Earle’s lines in “Billy Austin” matter:
Could you take that long walk with me
Knowing hell was waitin’ there?
Could you pull that switch yourself sir?
With a sure and steady hand?
Those who could pull the switch deserve some sort of respect. Those who could not, should maybe consider what that says about the… reality… of their supposed convictions.
Beck [another of the three] has those rules for properly-factored code: 1) runs all the tests, 2) contains no duplication, 3) expresses every idea you want to express, 4) minimal number of classes and methods. When you work with these rules, you pay attention only to micro-design matters.
When I used to watch Beck do this, I was sure he was really doing macro design “in his head” and just not talking about it, because you can see the design taking shape, but he never seems to be doing anything directed to the design. So I started trying it. What I experience is that I am never doing anything directed to macro design or architecture: just making small changes, removing duplication, improving the expressiveness of little patches of code.
Yet the overall design of the system improves. I swear I’m not doing it.
— Ron Jeffries (personal communication)
”— Untitled
Duality of the Embrace -a joining as well as a confrontation- is what
we will explore in tomorrow’s tango workshop at Krannert (12-1pm,
preceding the milonga at 1pm).
Tango being a metaphor for life, the embrace between two people can
span a wide a range of flavors. Simply breathing even without any
steps -the pause- can constitute a dance. Sometimes, the dance is
manifested instead as a storm.
What Tagore said about love applies incidentally also to Tango:
”Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one
and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Bondage
and liberation are not antagonistic in love. for love is most free and
at the same time most bound.”
It is an illusion that there is a leader and a follower. This
Otherness is as artificial in the embrace as it would be in love. The
leader dances the dance of the follower. Those who arrive at an
embrace with preconceptions will only find their own foregone
conclusions, missing out on the discovery of their partner.
Conversely, even in the most intimate depths of a union there is
freedom of dissent: ‘Opposition is true friendship’.
I will conclude by having Lao Tzu argue with Borges on this issue:
“To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people
do not notice their existence. When the best leader’s work is done the
people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’”
- Lao Tzu
“To speak of the combative tango is not enough; I would say that the
tango and the milongas directly express something that the poets have
often wanted to say with words: the conviction that a fight can be a
celebration.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
— Richard Rorty’s Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists (Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism)
I liked Bleach in the first story arc and part of the second. The mythology was interesting. I liked some of the animation and use of backgrounds. I liked some of the characters, and they actually changed. It was an OK way to spend some time with Paul. However…
Since Ichigo got really powerful, it’s gotten really boring. Episodes are structured somewhat like Pokemon or Yuh-gi-oh: There’s a powerful guy who we know won’t fail. There’s a boastful opponent. There’s a big setpiece battle. This is all against a background of, well, nothing. Apparently no one ever does anything but prepare to fight, and then fight. (Doesn’t the Soul Society have things to do other than chase around after Ichigo and company?) What differs from episode to episode is pretty much just the weaponry: different sorts of monsters in Yuh-gi-oh, different kinds of zanpakutō in Bleach.
So are there anime that are somewhere farther away from Yuh-gi-oh, but with still enough blood-n-thunder for a 16-year-old boy?
Oh, and fewer of the really stupid bit characters.
Rene Hall and his band (instrumental)
Versions mentioned on Twitter:
Lear has given over his kingdom and his power to his daughters, retaining the services of 100 knights, who are, basically, old drunken comrades who have no particular value. After a time, Lear’s daughters try to talk him down from 100 knights to 50 to 25 to… Well, here’s the last bit, which I’ve always found gut-wrenching:
GONERIL
Hear me, my lord;
What need you five and twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN What need one?
(Read that last slowly, with pauses between the words, because you and your sister know this is not a question but an ultimatum that the powerless old man must accept.)
Lear replies (and goes mad), with a speech that’s relevant, I think, to today’s Regan-esque claim that poor people aren’t really poor if they have x-boxes:
O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady:
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags!
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!
“King Lear,” Act 2, Scene 4, lines 263-285
