Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

21 March 2003

ARGH. I had bought lunch, brought it up to my office, and taken exactly one bite before remembering it was Friday---and it was a ham and turkey sandwich. Had I remembered before I got up here, or even just before I'd unwrapped it and taken a bite, I could've just given it to one of the homeless folks that reside on Thayer Street, and gotten something else. But as it was, I would've had to throw it out, and I hate being wasteful. So I ate it. And it didn't even taste good, then. Why couldn't I have remembered after I'd eaten it? :P

(For those unfamiliar, not eating meat on Fridays during Lent is a suggestion/command for Catholics. Some take it more seriously than others, obviously, but I've been trying to follow it. And no, to forestall the inevitable objection, I don't think I'm a bad person or going to hell or anything so cliché now, but it's still really annoying.)

"All punishment is arbitrary, or has the potential to be arbitrary... and with the death penalty, you can't take it back." --Janet Reno

Posted 12:18 PM [+]

Recap:

• Serbia had its prime minister assassinated, and is turning into a police state with over a thousand arrests connected to the murder
• Central African Republic was taken over in a coup by a top general, possibly with assistance from neighbouring Chad
• North Korea has stepped up its threats, done missile tests, and generally tried to beat its chest and scare us
• Zimbabwe had a national strike and threats of a repeat, and nearly half its population goes hungry from famine
• Venezuela is finally off-strike, but the overall situation continues to degrade
• Israel's economy continues to suck, they continue to do nasty things to Palestinians, and we continue to bail them out with billions of dollars in aid
• Hong Kong has been hit with a new and deadly... something... that the doctors can't even explain, which is spreading in a big way to Vietnam and Guangdong province, and has been detected in Canada, US, and UK
• The UK's governing bodies are having a rocky time of it as top ministers resign and the prime minister tries to fight an unpopular war
• The US is facing huge war protests, some turning violent and leading to the arrests of thousands
• And, of course, Iraq is being invaded and its civilian population is dying, so that W can get his hands on more oil.

Not exactly a good couple of weeks, huh?

"The most difficult balance to strike is the balance that must be struck in time of war or time of peace, the balance between liberty and security." --Janet Reno

Posted 3:43 AM [+]

20 March 2003

My laptop is on its way to Boston right now, to assist Dave in giving his presentation. Apparently Shriram's is on the blink, crashing randomly, and we don't have any department laptops for this sort of thing. So I set him up on mine and sent him off. Being away from my laptop for so long is scaaaaaary!

"Ladies and gentlemen, we can protect our security at the same time as we protect our great blessings of freedom for posterity, and it doesn't have to be either-or if we do it right." --Janet Reno

Posted 1:01 PM [+]

19 March 2003

And awaaaaaay we go....

"If the war's supporters can't stand the fact the people of Europe have their own minds, how much more contemptuously will they regard the will of the people in the Arab world? Am I supposed to believe people who want European leaders to defy 80 and 90 percent of their populations are concerned about democracy?" --Brian Rainey

Posted 11:35 PM [+]

I'm not a militarist---that is, I don't know much about military deployments, and what you might call the technical details of war. So I can't verify that what the BBC reports in this article is true, but it certainly sounds plausible. In which case... what are we doing? It's bad enough that we're going to go to war, but how much worse that we might manage to bungle the job! The silver-lining part of my brain is telling me that a badly-run war might finally burst Bush's weird popularity bubble, but the rest of me cringes in horror that it might come to that.

"We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat." --Robin Cook

Posted 9:44 AM [+]

17 March 2003

"DO NOT DESTROY OIL WELLS"??? Does he even care how transparent he sounded? This statement was greeted by raucous laughter by the 500 or so people... hm, I should back up.

Tonight, Janet Reno gave a lecture here at Brown. There was, predictably, a packed house to hear her, and the line when I arrived at 6:15 (the talk was at 7:30) was already a couple hundred people long. Just before she was to speak, they announced a format change: instead of an hour-long talk, she'd just give a half-hour speech, then they'd display the President's speech live on the screen there in Salomon, then we'd go to fifteen minutes or so of questions.

It was a frustrating talk to listen to. She may once have been an excellent public speaker, but she seemed to have a lot of difficulty tonight; she clasped her hands or gripped the podium most of the time so that they wouldn't shake, and her speaking was definitely suffering as well. She kept losing her train of thought in mid-sentence, putting emphasis on strange parts of the sentence, totally forgetting details like Yaser Hamdi's name (which must have been in her notes, but she went off-notes a few times, and I wonder if she was having a hard time reading them). She also repeated herself a lot. She certainly had the strength of her convictions, though, a passionate belief in freedom of speech, privacy, and the importance of an informed populace.

At 8 we broke for W's little speech. It was good to watch it with a crowd---there was a palpable air of "did he really just say that?" A few times there was nervous laughter as he said something that was just too outrageous to be believed (of which "do not destroy oil wells" was but the most egregious). Predictably but depressingly, he lied to the populace several times, as when he claimed that France had declared its intent to veto any resolution that asked Iraq to disarm, when of course it had done no such thing (it was rather only going to vote against a resolution to send the US to go "peacekeep", or whatever we're calling it these days). He moved on to the second half of his speech, which was purportedly to the Iraqi people, who were listening "in a translated radio broadcast"---as if the Iraqi government would translate his subsequent remarks accurately, or at all---and gives instructions on what to do when we invade their country, namely that they should let us. This was, of course, propaganda directed at Americans, who can now feel guilt-free about the war: "well," they can say, "Bush told them we wouldn't hurt them if they would only throw down their weapons and follow our instructions." Of course, we've been there before, and the Iraqis would be stupid to believe us this time around (assuming they could even hear).

Perhaps he had some hope that they would actually hear what he said, hence the "do not destroy oil wells" command. Where some other statements got some nervous laughter from some of the audience, this was greeted with loud, raucous laughter from all present. Simply unbelievable.

I would like to warn the world of the consequences of letting Bush get away with invading Iraq, but someone else said it better:

The cause of peace requires all free nations to recognize new and undeniable realities. In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.

I suppose I should maybe cite the speaker of that quotation. That would be W, towards the end of his speech, about an hour and a half ago. Funny how that works.

After the speech, there was a dull shock and dead silence for a moment. The dénouement was bound to be banal, but I have to say that Ms Reno did a lot better with the off-the-cuff questions. One of which, I'm proud to say, was from me: I commented that a lot of government groups---and their records---had been merged under the Department of Homeland Security, and I asked her whether that was a net plus or minus, what the privacy implications might be, and generally what she thought of it. She said that she was particularly concerned about the role of the CIA in the new Department. "We are a nation that doesn't like to be spied on," she said, "especially by our own agencies." She further commented that we, the people, need to be vigilant and ensure that the DHS doesn't abuse its powers.

And that's about all. I still can't believe he said "do not destroy oil wells."

I don't care
if you really care
as long as you don't go. --The Cardigans, "Lovefool"

Posted 9:54 PM [+]

Like rats from a sinking ship...

"God forgive me, but Isaac was really a bit of a schmuck." --Fr Henry Bodah

Posted 2:18 PM [+]

We tend to think of South Africa as a relatively backwards, bigoted place sometimes---apartheid wasn't that long ago---but then they go and do something like this. The US still has much too much prejudice floating around to do anything similar, at least as a whole country (individual states are another story, of course).

Oh, and it looks like the war with Iraq is going to start any minute now. I've got my black armband made and ready to go; do you have yours?

"'Satellite' is like my favourite song ever, except for a few other ones." --Rebecca Santoro

Posted 9:48 AM [+]