nancylebov | Jun. 19th, 2010

Jun. 19th, 2010

There was some discussion of "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

There's a quote I can't track down-- I thought it was from Burke, but it's to the effect that a man should go about revolution with the same care he'd bring to doing surgery on his father.

I believe that violence is sometimes necessary, but a lot of people are much too light-hearted in the way they talk about it, and possibly in the way they think about it as well.

I've heard both that BP is the only organization which can deal with the spill, and that it's unusually negligent as oil companies go.

Anyone have information about the latter?

Even if no government knows as much about oil spills as oil companies do, BP is possibly the wrong company for the job.

I can see financial and political reasons for making BP do the clean-up. It's the only way to make sure BP will be stuck with the bill, and it has a certain aesthetic simplicity.

However, everything I've heard about BP is that it tried to do everything on the cheap. This presumably includes hiring, training, and paying its experts.

I believe Americans have a naive faith in the efficacy of punishment.

Just because someone fucked up and you're angry at them, it doesn't mean they will suddenly become competent. Oh right, it's that damned anti-intellectual, "just do it" feature of the American character. The only reason people aren't doing the right thing is lack of motivation.

Motivation is important, and one of the things can do is motivate people to get the information and skills they need-- but in the case of the oil hemorrhage, I'd rather start with people who know what they're doing if such are available.

From New Scientist:

Matthew Longo and Patrick Haggard of University College London asked volunteers to point to the tips and bases of the fingers of one hand while it was hidden beneath a board. The researchers used an overhead camera to record the guessed positions, then compared these with the dimensions of the real hand.

On average, volunteers estimated that their hands were two-thirds wider than in reality, and their fingers a third shorter (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, abstract

Unfortunately, the abstract doesn't describe the number of people studied, or who was included.

Is this a cross-cultural pattern? Do people with unusually good dexterity have better than average representation of the size of their hands?

From New Scientist:

Matthew Longo and Patrick Haggard of University College London asked volunteers to point to the tips and bases of the fingers of one hand while it was hidden beneath a board. The researchers used an overhead camera to record the guessed positions, then compared these with the dimensions of the real hand.

On average, volunteers estimated that their hands were two-thirds wider than in reality, and their fingers a third shorter (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, abstract

From

webofevil:

In the movies, a highly trained assassin does not turn up on his target’s doorstep, have a crisis of confidence, confess all and then hand himself over to the police, knowing that a long prison sentence will follow. No cinema audience would ever tolerate such an implausible plot but in real life this has actually happened—and what is even harder to believe, two assassins from the same intelligence service did exactly this, in back-to-back operations.

In fiction, top spymasters do not take handwritten notes saying “do not mention the word assassination” during a meeting with their political masters. In real life they do. In the best thrillers, silencers are essential gear for any modern assassin and they always work brilliantly. In real life, one highly paid trained killer threw his away because it burnt his hands.

No Hollywood scriptwriter would construct a scene in which a group of hardnosed killers decided to assassinate a political leader, agree that they have to cover their tracks and that no mention must be made of their plans—and then write a detailed minute of the meeting for the files and circulate it widely. But again, in actuality they did.

In films, the bomb always explodes as the hero runs away from the building. No studio would tolerate a script where a truckload of TNT fails to go off because the evil terrorist gang forgot to attach the detonator. But it happened.
--Terminate with Extreme Prejudice

Has anyone else read Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist? I should probably reread it, but it includes a semi-bungled bit of terrorism-- and the motivation for the bungling is unspeakably British.

Spoiler:

An incompetent member of the group gets to set the explosives because its her turn.

What I caught on the first pass was the amount of havoc the main character causes with seemingly small impulsive actions, and how much of her fucked-upness could be traced to specific things about her childhood.

However, the end of the book is about the professionals showing up, with an implication that they'll be more capable than the amateurs. Maybe that's reasonable, but it's a low standard.

Link thanks to

andrewducker.

From

webofevil:

In the movies, a highly trained assassin does not turn up on his target’s doorstep, have a crisis of confidence, confess all and then hand himself over to the police, knowing that a long prison sentence will follow. No cinema audience would ever tolerate such an implausible plot but in real life this has actually happened—and what is even harder to believe, two assassins from the same intelligence service did exactly this, in back-to-back operations.

In fiction, top spymasters do not take handwritten notes saying “do not mention the word assassination” during a meeting with their political masters. In real life they do. In the best thrillers, silencers are essential gear for any modern assassin and they always work brilliantly. In real life, one highly paid trained killer threw his away because it burnt his hands.

No Hollywood scriptwriter would construct a scene in which a group of hardnosed killers decided to assassinate a political leader, agree that they have to cover their tracks and that no mention must be made of their plans—and then write a detailed minute of the meeting for the files and circulate it widely. But again, in actuality they did.

In films, the bomb always explodes as the hero runs away from the building. No studio would tolerate a script where a truckload of TNT fails to go off because the evil terrorist gang forgot to attach the detonator. But it happened.
--Terminate with Extreme Prejudice

Has anyone else read Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist? I should probably reread it, but it includes a semi-bungled bit of terrorism-- and the motivation for the bungling is unspeakably British.

Spoiler:

An incompetent member of the group gets to set the explosives because its her turn.

andrewducker.

I'm very tired of hearing "America's love affair with the car" and "oil addiction" as though, if only we had better sense, we'd immediately be living differently.

At this point, some of what we're up against is going to be hard to change. Choices about zoning guaranteed that people would be living far from both work and shopping. The zoning laws didn't fall on us from the sky-- they were shaped by the culture. On the other hand, I haven't been hearing a lot of call to permit mixed use suburbs or smaller lots.

Also, jittneys-- there's tremendous resistance in the US to small, privately owned buses. I don't know if it's a love affair with the car, or a belief that people who charge money for that particular service are so dangerous that there's no way get enough safety by licensing them.

Last I heard, permission to run a taxi in New York city is tremendously expensive-- I don't know if it's like that in other cities.

Also, in the comments to this piece about street harassment, I noticed a few which said that being in a car equaled peace of mind because it was it meant not being harassed.