hivelogic

You could feel small things moving, sliding past your fingers beneath the surface. Drawing your hand back for examination, you noted numerous species of insect crawling upon and investigation your hand and arm. Small creatures with pincers on both ends, like vicious centipedes, strode bravely across the length of your palm. Something with spindly legs clambered onto your sleeve. A slug was working its way along your other hand, supporting you in the dirt…

trixie

but then it started raining. i heard thunder first and couldn’t quite believe it, but it wasn’t a far-off airplane. it was a little rain coming. i stayed outside awhile, smelling the wetness & washing the dirt off my skin with the hose. i felt like a kid on the hill in the house where i grew up. always staying outside too late, losing my shoes and getting dirty. and here i am, back in the hills, still in the city where i grew up, still dirty & hanging out with the bugs that scare me & pretending they’re not there.

I entered the Truth Laid Bear new weblog showcase. Anyone in the ecosystem can vote for zota by linking to this post . And I get to vote for my three favorites:

The S-Train Canvass – Haters, the whole lot of you!
This one is amazing: hard talkers, soft lives:

Some of you have been hard talkin’ too much. What I mean by hard talkin’? Saying things like, “I’ll eviscerate a terrorist if I see one”, “You want some of this France”, and the classic “Bring ‘em on”. Some of you have never experienced violence up close and personal, live soft lives, yet are the hardest talkers. Let me tell you something: YOU NEED TO HARD WALK A LITTLE.

Oni Blogger – Weebl and Bob do hentai
A Doris Mitsch flower scan and the meaning of hentai.
(Turns out the disturbingly recurring tentacle theme is a reference to traditional Japanese images of perl divers — get it? — being attacked by octopi.)

Intellects – Stalin
Also a nice post on blogging:

When we think of examining our life, modern people usually think of analyzing their problems, setting goals, and coming up with solutions. To which, I dare say, “A boring life, even examined is still boring.”

The same person also has a site on how to build your own thought screen helmet.
(There’re not made of aluminum foil — it’s 6 mil Velostat.)

Chris Lawrence — “a libertarian political scientist wanna-be” — withheld judgement about the Jost study of conservative psychology [discussed here] until actually reading it. Then he declared it a pile of crap, largely on a variety of methodological points. Fair enough.

Relentless decades of the “humanities” have buffed my scant knowledge of social scientific statistics down to a soothingly dull little nub, so I happily defer on these issues to the trained experts, like Lawrence and the American Psychological Association. They’ll have to duke it out with each other over the failure to integrate previous hypotheses and exceptional cases in the meta-survey’s research design. That is what peer review and journal publication are for.

As an exercise, it might also be useful to take some of Lawrence’s objections and set them alongside “well-published political psychologist” John Ray’s extensive work on leftist psychology (particularly his more recent unpublished work, which he tends to cite in most of his arguments). Especially since Lawrence cites Ray as an authority, and Ray cites himself as an authority, and then… well that’s about it. Ray cites himself.

And he has been citing himself up a storm over this “Berkeley” study, I tell you what.

He’s also letting some of his readers get a non-academic word in. One of Ray’s “Midwestern” readers responded by dismissing the Jost meta-study as a nothing but a stacked deck… but then went through the things it claimed to say about conservatives and agreed with almost all of them:

“being intolerant of ambiguity,”

Midwesterners would say “Call a spade a spade…”

“high on the need for closure, “

Midwesterners would say “Shit or get off the pot…”

“might be associated with such generally valued characteristics as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty,”

Midwesterners actually think these characteristics are IMPORTANT.

Right. So that would mean that this person actually agrees with the study. A study done by people in California?? (Hey, it mighty be best if you don’t spread that fact around in the Midwest… I hear they tend to call a spade a spade out there.)

And to really confuse people, in a post where Ray was accusing liberals of projection, he posted this witty and subtle reposte by another of his readers:

Elite Liberals are beyond being “Mean Spirited” – they are truly evil. Only an evil person would want to tear down a great country like ours – that so many young men and women have died for – just to make big government jobs for themselves.

Now the logic here is like a delicate filigree of rhetorical grace, but try follow it if you can:

• Liberals say conservatives prefer black-and-white dogma.

• Liberals are projecting — they are the dogmatic ones.
• Not only are they wrong, they are Truly Evil.

In a way, it really is genius. How can anyone even respond to that?

At least one thing is certain — man alive, does that John Ray hate Adorno! Who would have thought that the Frankfurt School would still be pissing off the culture industry all the way in to the 21st century? Let’s hear it for the boys!

Guardian:

Fifteen minutes later, a Toyota Corona being driven by a man called Mazin, who was disabled and walked with the aid of a frame, arrived in the area. His wife was in the passenger seat and his teenage son in the back. If he had turned left out of the small lane that led to their house, they might all still be alive.

Instead, Mazin made the mistake of turning right towards the roadblock. A bullet from the volley of shots fired at the car passed through the windscreen and blew off the right half his head, according to Ahmed Ibrahim, who runs an optician’s shop opposite the Al Sa’ah restaurant.

Nobody on the street yesterday seemed to know what had happened to his wife or teenage son, only that they had been injured and taken away by the Americans.

news.com.au:

Kazutaka Sato, 47, was held in an arm-lock, thrown to the ground and kicked by several US soldiers Sunday when he was filming the bodies of Iraqis being removed from a car which was shot up in the raid, the reports said.

Sato suffered slight injuries to his face and hands, the Kyodo news agency and the newspaper Asahi reported from Baghdad. He had his hands tied and was detained for about one hour.

When members of the Western media approached, Sato was released and his camera, which had been confiscated, was handed back to him, the Asahi said.

US News

Much of the negative press, Chalabi argues, is due to translators who have their own anti-American agendas and give American and other reporters their version of what is going on rather than what the Iraqis being interviewed are saying.

In subtle, moving language, Charles Eicher at Disinfotainment expresses his feelings about the passing of beloved entertainer Bob Hope: “I spit on your grave.”

Why this outpouring of warmth? Well, Bob Hope’s development company La Mancha can take at least some credit for making southern California what it is today — they built the first mini mall and followed it up with thousands more.

Eicher also points out that the USO scion was the “golf buddy” of Nazi collaborator and presidential progenitor Prescott Bush. (This is a strange piece of trivia for the Internet Movie Database to highlight since Hope was actually the golf buddy of every president, even if it was only the Republicans who invited him to stay at the Lincoln bedroom).

Back in May, Couch Pundit discussed an episode of This American Life with a segment on Bob Hope. [real audio -- the part on Hope is about 35 minutes in]. It focuses on his role in the USO as a particualry shrewd business move, with each taxpayer-funded special getting sold to NBC. The recorded interviews by Margy Rochlin were from 1986, so at one point Hope runs through his “Iran-Contra” bit:

“I dunno who the White House aides were, it was either Curly, Larry, or Moe.”

[beat]

“I can’t understand selling arms to Iran. That’s like Johnny Carson selling jokes to Joan Rivers.”

[beat]

While discussing the Viet Nam war, Hope proudly tells a story of someone who criticized his supporting role:

Hope: I had a couple a people that, ah, called me a warmonger. And I gave it to the FBI and the sheriff here and they found these guys over on Santa Monica Boulevard. And they chased ‘em outta town.

Rochlin: But who were these people?

Hope: They were some bums. That were, you know, probably guys that, uh, were defectors or something.

Bob Hope — a man before his time.

Two months ago a study was published in the APA’s Psychological Bulletin called “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” It took a set of scientific studies from the last 50 years and attempted to parse out some of the motivating traits of a “conservative” worldview. Although the shorthand descriptions of conservative traits are definitely unflattering, it didn’t really make any outrageous claims (conservatives tend to be intolerant of ambiguity. Yeah, that’s a stretch.) And when it was published, nobody outside academia seemed to care much.

Until last week when Berkeley Media Relations put out an inflammatory press release, one sentence of which directly linked Hitler, Mussolini, and Reagan — something the study doesn’t actually do. They put the press release on the web and sent it far and wide, and that finally got some attention.

But only for the press release. Which is now described as the study itself on a wide array of conservative websites. There’s reposting of the full press release even though it’s already online. There’s tedious line by line insulting of the press release. There’s Rush Limbaugh ranting and flapping about the press release. There’s cosmic pronouncements about the fallen nature of Man and how this differs from the press release. And in almost all the responses there are torrents of gibbering, howling, frothing hatred of Berkeley, who put out the press release… even though the lead author of the study is at the Stanford.Business School and has a PhD from our “president’s” alma mater, Yale.

The full study itself is online at Stanford [1.7 MB pdf]. And since it was published in a reputable academic journal, there’s a response to problems in the study, with a counter response by the authors [also online, 1.7MB pdf].

The commie swine at Berkeley Media Relations didn’t provide a link to their cross-town rival, so it’s a pity that conservative bloggers couldn’t figure our how to Google any faster. Cause the paper itself includes a handy graph so you can attempt to understand the inner machinations of conservatives in the wild:

[full image - 84k]

Glenn Reynolds almost made one insightful point about all this:

What’s most amazing to me is that the Berkeley PR office thought that trumpeting this study to the nationwide media would be a good idea, and that doing so would somehow enhance the school’s reputation.

The study itself is actually, well, conservative. What’s amazing is that Berkeley decided to put out a press release that was clearly intended to piss off every conservative they possibly could. Why? No such thing as bad press? Or, being deceptive Marxist scum, is it something more… sinister?

William Kristol recently hypothesized that Bush ordered his subordinates to deliberately screw up their explanation of his State of the Union misspokenings and thereby drive the liberal media into a tail-chasing frenzy. I assumed that this suggestion was either a ham-handed rhetorical device, or (more likely) just batshit crazy. But then again… maybe it’s just batshit crazy enough to work.

Maybe Berkeley has done the same thing with conservatives — putting out a “sexed-up” press release! Now we have Rush Limbaugh attacking a single sentence while the study itself gets lots of attention but remains basically unassailed. (How clever you are, Kathleen Maclay. “Media Relations” — is that a title they gave you in Havana?)

Not only that, conservative bloggers are now providing a fascinating source of annecdotal evidence for the study itself. Especially Dr John Ray at Dissecting Leftism. Here he is exhibiting what might be described as the existential motive of self-esteem:

But perhaps the best indication of how “motivated” their own cognitions are is the fact that they cite only two of the more than one hundred articles I have had published on the subject. I am clearly one of the major authors (if not THE major author in terms of number of articles in print) in the field that they purport to survey, but they ignore 98% of what I have to say.

Unfortunately Dr Ray is apparently the only blogger who seems to have even attempted to read the study itself (although he’s still mostly worked up about the press release). Not coincidentally, he’s the self-proclaimed number one worldwide expert on conservative psychology — namely that it doesn’t exist. And even if it did, then there’s no way in hell that liberal academic so-called scientists would be able so say anything meaningful about it.

Oh but liberal psychology? You can be damn sure that exists. And John Ray will TELL you all about the DANGERS of LEFTISM. For example this piece at David Horowitz’ Front Page Magazine:

As the quotations already given show, Hitler shared with other Leftists a love of constant change and excitement — and what could offer more of that than war?

So, um… all “Leftists” are pro-war? Like Hitler?
Cause they love excitement?

And Tony Blair was inspired by Mussolini ?

And this guy is the only person trained in psychology who responded negatively to the study itself?

Riiiight.

So if a group of psychologists spend years looking at scientific surveys and publish a peer-reviewed paper suggesting there’s a relationship between certain personal traits and a politically “conservative” worldview, then that is a scandalous example of junk science.

And if a single lapsed psychologist simply feels in his heart that “Leftism” is universally tied to various poisonous beliefs, then… he starts a blog. And Glenn Reynolds cites him as a reliable authority. And lots of other conservative bloggers attack a press release.

I think we’ve all learned something today.

UPDATE
Fixed the link to the study PDF.

So much for Cruz.. Recall and replacement on same ballot, Oct 7.

And Bill Simon might run again (dear god, why). But now there’s a rumor that Schwarzenegger might not run? Then who? It only takes 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot for free, and it only takes a plurality of votes to get elected…. Maybe everybody on Friendster should all run each other for governor. The biggest slut with the most testimonials would surely be better than the current array of choices.

Meanwhile Davis is trying to squeeze in to his old “democrat” costume that used to fit back in high school:

In San Francisco, a Democratic bastion he has visited three times in the last week, Davis appeared with Mayor Willie Brown at a day-care center where Davis sat on the floor in a circle of children for an awkward rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.”

Doesn’t look like Gray is going to fit in to those pants by October.
Prison food goes straight to your ass.

On the bright side, this whole election is starting to resemble a very trying episode of Twin Peaks.

Hey. wait a minute…

The recall of Gray Davis is going to a vote. No doubt.
So that means Arnold….

Oh but wait. Cruz Bustamante the lieutenant governor is choosing not to put the replacements for Davis on the ballot, leaving that decision up to a “Commission on the Governorship” and the Supreme Court. That might mean Davis getting recalled but being replaced with the next person in succession — Cruz Bustamante.

Clearly none of this is clear, but it is possible that the right-wing recall drive won’t work out anything like it was planned.

As Kos writes, if the courts back the lt. governor’s interpretation:

Then Issa will have spent millions to allow Californians to replace one corrupt, sleazy Democrat (Davis), with a popular, Latino, and far more progressive Democrat (Bustamante).

And that, my friends, would be what a happy ending looks like