Right Thinking Girl: Defunct
Looks like the site belonging to this blog's favorite fascist conservative ditz is no more. Google is not helping me learn what happened to bring about this long overdue untimely demise. Anybody know?
Quote of the Day
On witnessing a hedge fund collapse in his office building, Sean-Paul Kelley writes:
All I can say to the manager of the hedge-fund is, "Welcome to the reality-based world the peasants have been inhabiting for the last several years."
Indeed.
The standard is quite clear
In all fairness to obscenity bureaucrats, though: she is kinda cute.
I guess the computer age ended... thank God.
I never knew intellectual monopoly could be so much fun!
I like the rapper's title: the D.P. That's a pretty honest way to express intellectual property privilege.
Go Sheldon!
An excellent interview about genuine free market economics with Sheldon Richman.
Political Economy Matters
God bless Google Video - they have a wealth of interesting documentaries that aren't broken up into ten minute segments like YouTube. This movie is Maxed Out, the documentary on credit cards and debt in America. Some truly heartwrenching stories in there.
The biggest tragedy of the financial changes we've gone through in this country, where debt has been used to make slaves out of the industrious or vulnerable classes, is that people are being blamed, and blaming themselves. They think that they've failed in a market where the game is fair and they simply did not have the inner fortitude to cut it. They couldn't live up to the challenges; they'll never get ahead like others who were able to cope just fine. The debt becomes spiritual as people let their sense of self-worth, which is decidedly not under the authority of the banks, suffer.
Libertarianism is not intended to be a convenient source of polite dinner conversation topics
Logan Ferree on William F. Buckley:
Buckley's conservatism may have made some traditions of libertarianism respectful, but not those advocated by either Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand. Milton Friedman made the cut, but if his negative income tax, school vouchers, and privatized Social Security accounts are all held up to be the standard of libertarianism, there should be no debate in calling Barack Obama a libertarian Democrat.
Sheldon Richman makes a similar point:
The primary consequence of his long career (which included a stint in the CIA) was to seduce budding radical libertarians into an insipid "hip" conservatism that functioned largely as a defender of big business and the intrusive national-security state. We are eternally grateful.
Buckley was a genteel and penetrating master of rhetoric. More than any other political movement, libertarians thrive on debate, so it does not surprise me that Buckley garners the respect of many. But it does demonstrate the problem: too often, libertarians wish to be accepted by the establishment and admired for their thought. When libertarians fail to recognize the radical nature of their beliefs, they are quite succeptible to the call of the status quo.
Should I promote the linkblog?
I hope all my readers, to the extent they enjoy reading my posts, also check out the linkblog on the sidebar (or on its homepage). There is so much information on the net, but I can't write about all of it. Linkblogging gives me a way to share information with you without necessarily adding my two cents - since I don't always have something to add.
However, I'm seriously considering taking the linkblog out of "special" status on the sidebar and figuring out a way to incorporate it directly into the flow of posts in the blog. I'd be interested in your thoughts, on this blog and in general:
- Do you pay attention to the linkblog?
- What's your opinion of the linkblog? Is it more or less interesting than the regular posts?
- How would you feel about links going into the regular blog flow?
Wherefore the state?
Over at the Attack the System group, Peter Bjørn Perlsø has posed a great question:
If the state is as harmful to human society and reprehensible as anarchists usually say it is, why does it exist at all in the extent that it does today and have done throughout history?
This question isn't just perceptive; it's essential to answer when formulating the anarchist alternative. Dain Fitzgerald offered an explanation which I think is sound:
- A kind of institutional, non-ideological scenario takes place in which the "natural monopoly" of defense consolidates itself.
- Perhaps ideological, or even pre-ideological, people want to "escape from freedom" and desire the security of the state.
Here's my take:
I couldn't agree more, Peter - thanks for bringing this up. Anarchists do well to have an explicit answer to this question in order to better understand their own strategies and principles. As much as we may despise it, the state is a human phenomenon - if you don't start there, your anarchism is likely to resemble the plot line of the Lord of the Rings.
I think Dain has it right, essentially. However, I don't think the two reasons he gives are really different reasons. People associate for defensive purposes, but there comes a point where people decide they do not want defense and mere "holding the line" to be a day-to-day concern. Violence in defense of one's self interests is correctly seen as a horrible necessity, but eventually individuals want to distance themselves from this necessity. The perfect freedom of the unencumbered human is seen as fearful and dangerous and requires moderation; ideally, by principles of law and sound, elite judgment; in practice, by a class of people who decided to assume the terrible burden of engaging in violence.
It's 11:00 pm; do you know where your model methods are?
So the other day I was implementing what I considered a simple Rails association helper to make my life easier:
has_many :unapproved_posts,
:class_name => "Post",
:finder_sql => "SELECT posts.* from posts " +
"INNER JOIN users ON posts.user_id = users.id " +
"INNER JOIN groups ON users.group_id = groups.id " +
'WHERE (groups.id = #{id}) and ' +
'(posts.approved is NULL)'Yeah, it's a little clunky, but I needed a quick fix.
Perhaps I should have spent the time on a refactor, because this code put me in Rails hell. When displaying unapproved posts in my controller, my code iterated over a collection of Post objects. When I'd first start the server, the action would grab the association with no problems. However, every subsequent time the action runs, the Post objects I got back were missing the methods I defined in the Post model. All the attributes were there and accessible, but any methods had disappeared. Note that this only happened when accessing the posts via the association helper through the controller; doing the exact same stuff in script/console gave me no problem.
After a few hours of troubleshooting and abject frustration, I came across this ticket which seems to describe the behavior I was seeing. Note that this is a 1.2.6 application I'm working on, so the lack of resolution makes some sense. However, I needed a fix, and my friend Jon suggested I just write a method that returns the collection rather than using the helper. So running the same query with Post.find_by_sql worked fine, and since I merely needed a read-only collection, this serves my purposes.
A Frank Discussion of Race, featuring J-Roc
* you know what I'm sayingYou got degrees of black, y'nawmsayin*... all kinds of different motherfuckers that are a different kind of black, y'nawmsayin*... T's right here, y'nawmsayin*, and, like, Lionel Richie's right here, 'cause he ain't that black, y'nawmsayin*, especially after the Commodores, he's practically not black at all, y'nawmsayin*... you got your Michael Jackson, who's a white-black, which can be shortened to "whack"...
Rhymesayers vs. Uncle Sam
Great anti-government rhymes from Brother Ali. If you like his style, check out other Rhymesayers artists like Eyedea, Atmosphere / Slug, and Blueprint.
Hat tip to Francois Tremblay and David Gross
