micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Friday, December 19, 2003
Micah Holmquist on why he hates Bush but not Dean, amongst other things Like Jonathan Chait, I "hate" the asshole who is the current president of the U.S. of A. I don't know if his reasons and mine have anything in common because I haven't bothered to read the "THE CASE FOR BUSH HATRED." To me the case is real simple - Bush may or may not be an idiot himself but he talks to me -since I am a citizen of this great land and he often addresses such people- like I am an idiot who has no understanding of anything and he is in a position of power and has somehow used that position to not only carry out his agenda but also to convince other people that what he says makes sense. The president said we have to fight those evil meanies in order to not forget those who died in one of three general locations on September 11 and for freedom amongst the people who he says deserve freedom at this point in time. Do you hate freedom? Do you want to die? That's what would happen. Oh sure I don't actually believe the president when he said Saddam could kill us at any moment but Bushdamnit if we don't do something, the terrorists will win. Bush said that... No I don't remember the date. It was sometime after September 11... No I don't have his exact words. Have you forgotten what happened to us on September 11? And what about the tax cuts? Don't you realize that it is not the government's money but the people's money. It is a violation of our human rights to have our income tax by the federal government at a rate higher than President Bush says it should be! While the previous paragraph is an exaggeration from anything I have heard from anyone who I was in the physical presence of, it is only a slight exaggeration. Every time I hear that last part. I just want to say, "you know what, I have forgotten. Can you remind me what happened on that day?" See what would be funny about that is all the variations of the "have you forgotten" statements rely on the notion that people actually haven't forgotten and those who put them forward know that. What I think they are really saying is that the opinion they disagree with could not be held by someone who learned one of the "lessons" of September 11, 2001 that they learned. "If you responded to those terrorists attacks the way I did, you wouldn't hold that position" would be another way of putting it. Getting back to whatever exactly the point of this was and/or might turn out to be, unlike Chait, I don't have it in me to "hate" Howard Dean. Do I like Dean? Of course not. But I just don't have it in me to actively dislike him with the passion that I dislike Bush and his team. Dean is running for the nomination of a political party I don't belong to and have never voted for. Somehow he just doesn't seem so important. Sure he could get elected in November of next year -FWIW, I'm doubtful that he will but that is a gut reaction- but if that happens, I assume I will have plenty of time to shift gears and start disliking him. *** I'm now a graduate of the Cisco Networking Academy. Too bad the material covered in the courses -the basics of computer networking- isn't anywhere near as interesting as what comes up in Saskia Sassen's "The Topoi of E-Space: Private and Public Cyberspace" and Dante Tanzi's "Time, Proximity And Meaning On The Net." My not exactly shocking observation from my experiences in taking the class over the last year or so -I started in late January- is that my fellow students, and my instructor, were all very intelligent people who don't reject analysis or resistance so much they don't consider them. This is why I have a hard time believing Peter Lurie's argument that "the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left." These people were all highly cyber savvy and yet exhibited no qualities connected to "the left." For better or worse, they went along with what I contend is the dominant ideology of this time (at least in the United States) -that utilizing change is the only appropriate response to change. They probably don't even realize that they hold this belief. It is just natural to them. Any "radical" political movement to arise any time soon will almost certainly, if not certainly, need to have an ideology that is centered, at least in part, on a critique of this ideology. If "the web" isn't producing that now, there doesn't seem to be any reason to expect it to start doing so. *** I'm not bitter about not living in New York City. Or Los Angeles. *** In yesterday's Washington Post, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus write: David Kay, the head of the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has told administration officials he plans to leave before the Iraq Survey Group's work is completed and could depart before February, U.S. military and intelligence officials said.LOL *** Richard W. Stevenson of The New York Times reports on Bush's changed stance on the "threat" posed by Saddam Hussein's now deposed regime. While it is nice to see the legitimate media picking up on this, I fear it is way too little this late in the game. Before Operation Iraq Freedom, the press should have been hounding Team Bush on what the exact threat level was and why they had not been giving a consistent story in their rah-rah-let's-go-kill-oh-I-mean-liberate-some-sand-niggers rhetoric. |