I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (FEBRUARY 2013 EDITION)

Damn, I read a lot of books this month. So that’s a lot of book reports for you, then.

JUST FINISHED

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

I like Sarah Vowell as both a writer and commentator, and having enjoyed The Wordy Shipmates, I thought I’d try her latest book about the history of Hawaii’s annexation to the US in 1898 (not least because I was supposed to go to Hawaii in January – though that fell through due to illness). Stylistically it’s similar to The Wordy Shipmates in that it’s essentially a book-long essay (with no chapters), and is written from the perspective of Vowell as museum nerd/tourist. Some people have complained that her breezy, snarky style isn't suited to the topic (given that some people in Hawaii are still sore about annexation and what Christian missionaries did to their culture). Maybe, but my only real criticism is that it does seem a little rushed at the end. In any case, it’s well researched, and I got a lot out of it as an entertaining, entry-level history of the 50th state. So for that alone I’d recommend it.

JUST STARTED

Tales Of Pirx The Pilot by Stanislaw Lem

I’ve read Lem before, with mixed results, but the positive tends to outweigh the negative, so I’m reading this, a collection of stories that follow the career of Pirx, a space cadet top-loaded with self-doubt who somehow manages to get through one misadventure after another, often involving faulty technology and bureaucracy. Sounds right up my street.

( AND THE REST: Asimov! PKD! Rajaniemi! Stark! Harris! And Pirates! )

Have a beer with fear,

This is dF

I DON'T THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS (SENSIBLE VIOLENCE EDITION)

“Or, “How To Write The Worst Column In The World And Then Dig Yrself In Deeper Than You Already Were”

Or, “How To Write Flame Bait”

Or, “Why Troll In The Comments When You Can Do It In The Actual Post?”

Or … well, I got a bunch of ‘em.

I’m referring, of course, to that opinion piece by Eliana Johnson at the formerly respectable National Review – the one where she criticizes Presidente Obama for describing the Holocaust as “senseless”.

Yes.

I hate to spend much time on this, as I’m partly convinced she intentionally wrote it as flame bait to generate a lot of hits for NRO. But it’s worth passing on as a textbook case on how NOT to try and make a half-assed point in a way that will cause readers to draw a completely different conclusion than the one you intended.

Johnson’s point – such as it was – was that Obama (and the left in general) is wrong to call the Holocaust (and most mass murder) “senseless” because the Nazis – and everyone who supported their party – knew full well what they were doing. Therefore it wasn’t senseless.

It’s kind of the equivalent of really annoying people who think they're clever when they argue with counter staff at Starbucks that “venti” means “twenty”, not “large”.

Anyway, as you can imagine, a lot of people took her piece to mean that she was defending the Nazis. So she wrote a follow-up column defending the original column, in which she complained that everyone totally missed the point.

To be fair, this is technically true. Her objective wasn’t to defend the Nazis, but make some obscure point about how liberals always describe violence as “senseless”, which is bad because it encourages people to ignore the “politics, ideology, and human nature” that create monsters like the Nazis and al Qaeda and sanitize the atrocities they commit. (Judging from the throwaway comment near the end, Johnson’s objective may actually have been just to make some half-assed point about how Obama used the same word to describe what happened at Benghazi, and we all know how he doesn’t want people to know what motivated the attackers because … well, I don’t know why he doesn’t want people to know about it, but obviously he doesn’t.)

Judging from the comments section, the second column seems to have only made the problem worse. Not only does it show how bad the first column was (rule of thumb: if no one gets the point you were trying to make to the point of drawing a completely different conclusion than what you meant, you’ve written a bad column), but it also expounds what was already a bad argument in the first place.

First of all, the term “senseless violence” gets used by people on both sides of the political spectrum all the time. It’s not used exclusively by The Left, a fact easily verified by spending all of ten (10) seconds on Google.

And even if it was, almost no one uses it to mean, “Murder is completely unexplainable, so the reasons it happens don't matter”. Even when it’s applied to ideologically-driven killings, describing it as “senseless” isn't the same thing as saying, “The ideology that led to this is of no consequence.” What it means is, “The reasons given for this make no sense to reasonable, sane people who believe killing to be wrong and immoral.”

But you know this.

Eliana Johnson apparently doesn’t. Which is why, I suppose, she seems genuinely baffled that almost everyone missed the point she was trying to make.

Anyway: I give Eliana Johnson an F-minus. 

Stop making sense,

This is dF

SAY KIDS, WANNA BUY A WATCH FROM THE DARK LORD OF THE SITH?

There’s something very NOT bad-ass about Darth Vader appearing at Wal-Mart to sell Stars Wars watches.



[Via The Cult Of Ray]

Say thank you to Mr Vader,

This is dF