afongen

An organizer of yesterday’s “support our troops” rally at the State Capitol expressed frustration at the pro-war stance of many who attended. It’s frustrating, yes, but not surprising. I haven’t come across many who make the distinction.

It doesn’t help that “support” is so nebulous. Have you given much thought to what it means? I haven’t. Do I wish for our soldiers to come home safely? Yes. In fact, I wish they’d come home now. Am I saddened when I hear of soldiers dying in this war? Yes, deeply. Will I spurn those who return, angry at their participation? No, of course not. Does this mean that I support the troops? You tell me. Am I aware of and grateful for the sacrifices they’ve made in the defense of this country? Yes. Do I think this war in Iraq is in defense of this country? No. Do I oppose the war? Wholeheartedly. Does this mean that I don’t support the troops? You tell me.

I’m not going to write a whole lot about the war. It angers me too much for me to be rational about it, and there’s nothing that I would say that hasn’t already been said hundreds of times elsewhere. For now, let it stand that I oppose the war. I do not accept the Bush Administration’s rationale, and I fear the path that they are taking this country and the world.

I do not say that lightly: I fear this path.

If you don’t understand why, I suggest that you read Fareed Zakaria’s excellent essay, “The Arrogant Empire.” While you’re at it, Gary Kamiya’s elegant “Sleepwalking toward Baghdad is well worth your time, as are the remarks by US Senator Robert C. Byrd: “The Arrogance of Power.”

Oh, one more thing. If you didn’t read the whole article about the rally at the Capitol, you missed the closing paragraphs:

The only speaker who received a hostile reception was N. Ruby Zigrino, a Muslim from Minneapolis. She was initially cheered when she said she supports “ousting a tyrant regime.”

But she then read passages from the Qur’an, suggested that a new Marshall Plan will be needed in Iraq, and said administration officials should study foreign-policy failures to avoid repeating them.

Her listeners responded with boos and shouts of “Screw Muslims!” “Screw the Qur’an!” and “Go home!”

Reading this makes me physically ill.

Remember the Star Trek episode “Patterns of Force“? Kirk and Spock discover a Nazi-like regime headed up by Kirk’s old Academy professor John Gill. Turns out that Gill is being heavily drugged and used as a figurehead Führer, kept in a small room and forced to give speeches to rally the people of Ekos in a war against the nearby planet Zeon.

That’s what I’m reminded of whenever I see George Bush delivering a speech on television, especially when he’s speaking from the Oval Office. The expressionless, fish-eyed stare, the way his head doesn’t move, how he doesn’t seem to understand what he’s saying… it wigs me out.

Lest you misunderstand me, I’m not reacting to the war by taking personal jabs at Bush. Give me some credit. It’s just that I honestly have a hard time watching him deliver a speech.

Catching up on my weblog reading, I notice an interesting coincidence: iBooks don’t get thirsty and a cute picture gone horribly wrong. Ouch.

Fugu is a graphical frontend to SFTP and SCP for Mac OS X. It can even set up an SSH tunnel. Excellent.

I felt weird just now writing those in all caps.

I’ll probably raise the ire of more than a few by writing this, but I’m kinda glad that Farscape and Buffy are coming to an end. Both were excellent but have been on the decline the past year or two. I’ve enjoyed very little of either show’s past season. I’ve continued to watch because I have held out hope that things would improve, but in my heart of hearts I’ve just been wishing that the shows would end while they were at least moderately good.

Farscape in particular seems to have been suffering from jumpy, uncoordinated writing. On the other hand, the last couple episodes have been rather good, and although it hasn’t aired in the US yet, it seems the series finale was excellent. Too bad that it was supposed to be just the season finale. So maybe there was hope, but… oh well.

Seems the parent company for publishers Glasshaus and Friends of ED has been declared insolvent, so everyone’s shutting down. Damn shame. Wrox, too. Yikes.

It hasn’t appeared on their home page or available through Amazon yet, but it looks as if O’Reilly has published the second volume of the “Best of the Perl Journal” trilogy: Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk. Woo-hoo!

Among those critical of President Bush’s unilateral action against Iraq is the other President Bush.

In an ominous warning for his son, Mr Bush Sr said that he would have been able to achieve nothing if he had jeopardised future relations by ignoring the UN. “The Madrid conference would never have happened if the international coalition that fought together in Desert Storm had exceeded the UN mandate and gone on its own into Baghdad after Saddam and his forces.”

I was out sick on Friday, but it’s not like I stayed offline over the weekend, so I don’t know how I missed it. Larry Wall’s released his latest Apocalypse, covering subroutines in Perl 6.

My father refuses to connect his computer to the Internet. Not for email, not for the Web, not for anything. Because he’s computer-ignorant? Hardly, he was a programmer for many years. In that time, though, he developed a healthy paranoia about networking. Maybe because he worked on a lot of highly sensitive military projects, which skewed his perspective (or enlightened it, depending on your perspective). Donno. Either way, the only time we had his blessing for a computer in our house to connect to an external machine was when I was a little kid and he connected to the mainframe at work to do work-related things and to let me play games. (That, by the way, is how I learned to type, read, and play blackjack all at the same time.)

Mind you, we did it anyway. My younger brother ran a BBS or two on the sly (housed at a friend’s place), and I spent a whole lotta time on local BBS, Usenet, and Fidonet. We just did it with our own computers late at night, when Dad wouldn’t notice the phone line tied up.

All that was years ago, before the Internet exploded into public consciousness, and my dad still doesn’t connect up. Considering this is how I make my living, I view this with an odd mixture of bemusement and respect.

When I read this email message from Nathan Steiner’s father, I thought that maybe it’s a very good thing that my dad remains an Internet hermit. At least I don’t get email like this. Just the occasional weirdly erudite voicemail, quoting from Genesis to support or criticize something or other. Then I got to thinking that my dad would never write email like that. It’s more like something I would do.

Oh god. I’m going to write things like this to my son.