Sentential Links #227

Lnikage. Likange. And linkage!

:: Of course, it's worth appreciating the fact that we know the Bush/Cheney tax policy Republicans are desperate to continue didn't produce the intended results. Indeed, it was abject failure -- it didn't create jobs, it didn't generate tremendous growth, and it didn't keep a balanced budget.

In other words, the one economic policy Republicans will fight for, no matter what, is the one economic policy we know didn't work.

:: It’s almost as if the tea party isn’t really a libertarian minded grass roots uprising calling for more personal freedom, fiscal conservatism, and limited government, but actually might just be a slick re-branding of the lunatic wing of the GOP by wealthy billionaire businessmen to be used to propel the GOP back into power.

:: Thing is that most of these people had a certainty that God supports their particular take on the word because they believe – at least the non-slaves – in the notion that the United States is uniquely blessed by God. Interesting, one person in this period was less certain about God’s will, and that was President Abraham Lincoln, a man with a good Old Testament name.

:: I deserve some kind of compensation though so I have decided to make this a Mozart day. I’m listening to nothing but Mozart for the rest of the afternoon - light, fluffy early Mozart, nothing later than K200 or so. (Awww, that seems a bit limiting! I can think of few pieces of music more sunny in nature, more optimistically life-affirming, than the ever-wonderful K364.)

:: What happens when the language you use is not comprehensible to all readers? Do you adjust? But if you adjust your language to make it easier for those who don’t understand, then are you not cutting yourself off from your own history? This has giant implications.

:: I understand why people don't participate in the process, I really do. When it feels like your vote and your voice don't matter, that things are going to go a certain way regardless of what you think or feel or do, and moreover they're always going to go that way, well, what's the point?

:: But there's a dark side as well. We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It's the world that bequeathed us the adjective "Dickensian", that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next). (Sorry for linking an entire paragraph like that, but I couldn't figure out how to distill it down without destroying it. So there it is.)

:: “You can’t do that!” Wesley says, “Lando doesn’t know how to fly spaceships!” (Interesting post about the current generation of Star Wars fans...albeit with some of the usual "George Lucas sucks!" stuff in the comments, as per usual.)

:: Tomorrow I will bury the bunny in my backyard and say a little blessing for it. And if after that I feel up for another bike ride I will, regardless of the wind, most definitely go the other direction. (I'm so glad I found this blog.)

More next week!!!