Sentential Links #172

Linkage for the weary:

:: Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly.

:: Libertarians actually have an entree into the debate. But because they generally act like jerks, freaks, or both, their ideas are generally rejected by the people. (Alan decided to poke some Libertarians with a stick, which is always a fun thing to do. I especially love how Libertarians think that the way to convince people to support them is to start lecturing on how our problems today are all Woodrow Wilson's fault, because when someone's struggling to keep a job, find a job, make a mortgage payment, or get health care, they're really keenly interested in learning how everything is the blame of the guy who was in charge a hundred years ago.)

:: This a website promoting hitchhiking. (Wow, I thought hitchhiking was gone. I haven't seen a hitchhiker in years. Decades, perhaps. "Cool Tools" is a nifty blog, by the way.)

:: What a computer would need to compete in Diplomacy is the ability to read human beings' intentions (which is no doubt coming) and the ability to mimic human behavior by convincingly lying its ass off, which one hopes is a little further down the road.

:: Not only is the car a mistake, but the Renaissance notion of tidy, regular street geometry is an error. The use of paper to plan cities, which also originates in the Renaissance, is also an error. The notion that architecture is an art form, not a craft, is another crucial error in thought about urban design.

:: Thank heavens aliens and their flying saucers are so thoughtful! As reported by Fox news — yeah, imagine that — a Russian scientist claims that an alien spaceship crashed into an incoming asteroid in 1908 to save the Earth.

:: One can be an environmentalist and a humanist. The key is to make this planet habitable, sustainable and humane. It is this last crucial point that the Gainists and deep ecologists have failed to grasp, and in so doing, have come to represent a dangerous and misguided ideology.

:: It hurts me to read that. No. It's not hurt. It's fear. I don't want to go back there.

But I do want to write about it.

I want to write about so much.

Nothing is wrong. Everything is going according to plan. I just can't see the end. The conundrum of the writer. Neither could Fitzgerald. But he wrote it all down anyway.