I just thought of a possible reason a smart person might be conservative: it's a world-view founded in bitterness and cynicism -- a desire or need to deal as harshly with the world as the world deals with the individual. A form of defense, if you will. And it's not totally unfounded, either; the world is a shitty place, and some fighting back is necessary, depending on what your priorities are.
Of course, there's a fine line between cynicism and realism, and indeed, liberals are often accused of being idealists, "barking moonbats," or simply of having their heads in the clouds. But on the other end of fantasies about the brotherhood of man is the sneer dripping from the pen of bill buckley.
Dumb people are conservative because they want a shelter of simplicity and absolutism from a confusing and uncertain reality. "we are talking about good and evil, right and wrong. A new world order. A new world order. A new world...etc"
Dumb people are liberal because it makes them feel like smart people, or if they're both poor and dumb, they recognize that it's a good way to funnel free money their way.
Smart people are liberal because it's what they're taught, but also because to varying degrees they've thought through altruism and consider it a priority.
It sounds like I'm arguing that conservatives have a negative view of the world while liberals have a positive one. This is confusing, because it's the liberal accusation of conservative candidates that they look at the world through rose-colored glasses and are unable/unwilling to see problems, whereas it's the conservative accusation of liberal candidates that they don't have a positive message. Interesting, eh?
I want to avoid going on all night about poltiical theory. Only pain and misery lie down that path.
I'm ripping my whole CD collection to mp3. Along with this, I've added all of my original mp3s, and some mp3s Peter burned several years ago, which I never copied from CD to hard drive. This all part of my massive data-consolidation onto my new hard drive.
The gracenote database is pretty amazing. When you put an audio CD, itunes compares electronic details on the CD with those in an enormous database, and can identify the CD immediately, naming the track titles, album title, and artist.
I was really shocked when I stuck in something like "suran song in stag," and the computer knew what it was. At first I didn't think anything of it. I thought to myself "yeah, that's suran song." then I started wondering how the hell the computer knew that, and I got a little bit creeped out. But then I read about gracenote on wikipedia, and was little less creeped out, and more just amazed at the technology. The power of the user-created database. Fear it; it will take over.
And yeah, there are noncommerical, comparable databases, blah blah, open source, power to the people, etc. That kind of shit gets old, and makes me want to use windows out of spite as opposed to out of convenience.
The challenge is to stick in a CD that gracenote doesn't know. I have a few contenders for this great honor. Of course, the possesion of CDs that aren't in gracenote makes one elite.
I was quite shocked that suran song in stag was in gracenote. They're the kind of band that sends out personal mailings to people who buy their CDs at concerts. They're from ann arbour, and I met them (all two of them). I guess they're more major than I thought. BUT YOU STILL HAVEN'T HEARD OF THEM HAHAHAAHHA I'm COOLER THAN YOU 2W98ESLK KLJ
OH MY GOD MY COUSIN'S BAND "RITUEL" IS IN THE DATABASE I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'm GOING TO DO MY WORLD VIEW HAS BEEN UPENDED. So, that's off the list of possible cool CDs. An artist has to be outside the database. But again, you haven't heard of rituel (unless you have), ergo I'm cooler than you.
Rituel are pleasantly interesting, if arty. Something like "frank zappa" meets "dead can dance." gracenote tells me that the genre is "unclassifiable," which sort of annoys me, just because EVERYONE says about X (where X is a musical artist), "you can't put X into a category, man...X is just music, man...man..."
That said, "rituel" comes close to being genuinely "unclassifiable." I guess I'd call them experimental jazz. If ornette coleman can get away with it, then so can rituel. I can hear my cousin shrieking.
I'm floored -- the SDF compliation CD number 1 (I'm in number 2) is in gracenote. At this point, I just don't know what to think.
Ok, I'm going to list the CDs I own that don't appear in gracenote, sparse and sad though this list may be. They're listed in ranking order, from most normal band-like to least nrmal band-like:
Suran song in stag sort of sucks. Say that fast, five times in a row.
Funny google search:
how many peop;e does it take to exhaust a roll of toliet paper
It generated only three hits. My site was at the top; specifically, my emails page, which tends to draw in the weird searches, the doc being some 140,425 words and 425 8.5" x 11" pages of sentences. I've really put a tremendous amount of work into this website over the years. It'd be a shame to suddenly lose it all.
Today, I did more ~*X-TREME GARDENING*~. By this I mean gardening so hard that it left me breathless, muscles aching, bloody-handed and with some bruises. This was all due to hardcore bamboo removal, ie, digging out root tendrils that stretched eight feet across and six inches under the earth.
Bamboo must be just about the toughest plant there is -- six inches or so into the ground one finds some main roots that are like steel cables. I've been borrowing tools from mrs. White, and came across an essential one: sort of a chopping spade -- a spade with a relatively sharp, flat edge. I wonder if sharpening it would bear some fruit. I'll have to try that.
When I drop it down full force, there are few roots that can withstand it. But dropping it down onto a nexus of bamboo cable roots is like chopping at a brick. The wad must be undercut at an angle, and then torn out of the ground with considerable force (enough to put me on my back when the chunk comes out of the ground).
I'm still upset at losing all of my digital camera pictures, so I'm a little bit shy about using it. But, I have to break through that psychological barrier, so I will. Specifically, I'll use it to take a photo of the massive piles of bamboo roots and shoots, covered in soil, that I've unearthed. And this isn't by any means all of them -- this is just today's efforts. The pile would be three times as big if it were to include everything. Maybe more. And, of course, this doesn't include the 25 foot-tall stalks themselves, which are in the woods along with everything else.
I can see why a contracter wanted $2,000 to take this stuff out; doing so has been a weeks-long project. But, I think I'm doing a pretty thorough job, certainly and necessarily more thorough a job than a contracter would do, just because he can't be working on the same yard for hours a day every day.
I might even go so far as to say that at this point, the bamboo system is irrepairably damaged, and won't be coming back. But just to be on the safe side, I'm going to dig and tear out of the ground every last root I can find. I'm the executioner.
Ok, here's that pic I promised you:
here's a big wad of it, wedged between the brick patio and a wooden fence. It's proving extremely resilient, but I'll get it eventually.
the cut cables, haha. The fat, double-cable is for starpower. The single cable is comcast, and was fixed. See that orange part? That's the splice! My neighbors have comcast, and hate starpower, so we're just going to leave starpower cut, I think. Well, it looks sort of crummy, so I might give them a call and suffer through their telephone-tree, just to be nice.
a smaller chunk, seperate from the mother-load. You can see it better.
this is the mother-load. It probably weighs 50 pounds or so. You can't see it all that clearly, but it's that huge wad of ambiguously-colored foliage and dirt in the middle of the other ambiguously-colored foliage and dirt.
I lost some data. This is always a painful thing, and a good way to help the healing process along is to write about it. You may have noticed that my site was down for about two days -- the cause of both the data-loss and the site-downtime was the destruction of my OS.
In a nutshell, windows was annihilated due in large part to some low-level ransacking recommended by some putz on a forum on the zonealarm (a firewall) website, and I had to re-install it. There was an elaborate plot to recover my data, involving a knoppix (a linux "flavor") boot cd and an external hard drive, but that basically failed. I blame linux and zonealarm for this whole fiasco.
I realize this is totally uninteresting, but I'm going to write about it anyway. You can do nothing.
Here's a full account of "How I Ruined Windows":
Zonealarm is now my enemy, even though I'm currently running it. It's supposed to be a good firewall, or something. Anyway, the firewall I had before (sygate) acted consistently funny. At one point towards the end of its life, it was preventing slashdot.org and maps.google.org from rendering properly in both ie and firefox (don't ask me why). It has committed numerous other infractions as well. So, I decided to get rid of it and replace it with zonealarm.
I copied (or at least it appeared that I copied) all of my data onto an external hard drive (the data was fine -- it was just the operating system that had gone kaput), using knoppix to boot my machine, since windows would only load 'till the "welcome" screen came up before restarting the computer.
Then, I re-installed windows, which takes a long time.
Of course, my new external hard drive wouldn't work with my newly installed operating system. So, I took it upstairs to check it out on my mac. The drive seemed to be working fine, except when I checked the files on it that I'd so painfully downloaded and burned using knoppix and over usb 1.0, which took 400 years, I found that huge numbers of files were missing. Basically everything that I had wanted to preserve. So, that whole thing was a huge waste of time -- I could have just re-installed windows and saved myself the time and intricate fiddling. I lost two pages of my blog, those railroad tracks photos, and probably some other things that I'm trying not to think about too carefully.
In retrospect, of course I should have waited until inspecting the copied files before formatting my hard drive. But, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, I am an idiot.
The drive working with my mac and over usb 1.0 indicated that the problem with getting the drive to work under windows was with the usb 2.0 card that I'd installed. Searching for drivers with the device manager didn't work. I installed service pack 2 (at least an hour of hard drive-humming and progress bars)), and tried the new hard drive again. Still didn't work. Finally, I searched for drivers again, and this time it worked.
On the bright side, I have a new drive on which I can now keep all of my important data, safely separated from the operating system. But, I still lost some stuff.
I'm not so devastated about it, because I've been obsessive about backing up my website for the past month or so, and had a really recent copy to restore from. But it's unreasonable to back up my blog after every friggin entry. Maybe. I dunno. I'm not going to do it, at any rate. The blog really doesn't take all that much effort to do, and because it's an evolving day-to-day thing, I don't really consider it a tremendous work to be preserved. Admittedly I'd be upset if I lost all 90 pages, but one or two isn't so devastating, emotionally or artistically.
I just need not to try and remember what was on them, lest I get upset. 0090.html and 0091.html, we hardly knew ye.
So, to recap:
I think I can squarely blame linux. And of course zonealarm, but that was really just the recommendation of some asshole on a forum. I don't know what the official zonealarm word was trying to convey with that spyware removal notice. I guess they didn't say "go into your registry and chop things out" -- that was my brilliant idea. So, zonealarm is (largely) absolved.
But that knoppix CD...grr. I really don't see any other possiblities, other than hardware failure, and clearly the new drive is functional, because it copied everything fine from my mac. So, I crap on linux. If an operating system works, then that's all you need consider. The real question is what sofware is available for it. And, I'm afraid, windows has both mac and linux beat out in that respect. Sure, mac and linux might have a better interface, look nicer, etc, but windows just has more software. I can do everything I want to do with it, whereas I wouldn't be able to with mac or linux. I have spoken. I forever crap on linux. It serves no purpose whatsoever. At least for me.
I won't presume to tell people what they like, what they should use, and what they need to be productive and enjoy their computing, but linux sure as hell doesn't do all of that for me, as I generalize sweeping ultimatums based on one short experience with a boot CD.
Whatever. At least now I have a nice new external hard drive, a nice new usb card, and I can put any amount of data I want onto this ~*~*~**~250 GIGABYTE~*~*~* drive and tote it about to various secret locations. I'm downloading "revenge of the sith" now, and I will store it with impunity on my drive, because I have infinte room. Well, not really. But I don't see myself ever running out. Who fills up these enormous hard drives, anyway? What are they putting there?
At least it's raining, and I don't have to water the lawn.
Everyone I've talked to who does creative work on the computer has experienced some data-loss. It's happened to me a number of times -- even with backups, you can still lose stuff. For one thing, you lose stuff between backups. One would have to backup after every...single...thing...one...does...on...the...computer in order to guarantee no loss at all. I dunno -- maybe this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
And of course there's always the fun situation where the computer crashes or fucks up during the backup, or something can crash while youre working on it. Is one expected to back up every single byte of change? Actually, I have a solution: work on the external drive. There. Now, unless someone sneaks in and drops a big magnet onto it, I'm set.
So. One of the penalties of doing work on the computer. Peter used to be against doing any work on the computer because of this, but now, something like ten years later, he's calmed down a bit and stores all of his photos digitally. However, he does make hard backups on CD, something I do as well with mjt.sdf.org. Of course, CDs might not turn out to be a preservation medium either -- those microscopic valleys and bumps could lose their shape after 100 years. What I need to do is print out my data in binary on acid-free paper, and store it in an airtight vault somewhere.
Oil paintings don't simply vanish while one is working on them -- I can certainly see the younger peter's point.