achilleselbow – Crasstalk

Notes on the Apocalypse

The madness has subsided. We’re safe and comfortable, which I realize is more than I can say for a lot of people in New Jersey, Queens, and elsewhere. We were far from the worst of it, I know. But I figured I might as well set everything down now before it washes away like so many trees and debris.

I would hope that those of my friends who thought it was ‘all a bunch of hype, just like Irene’ are now sufficiently chastened. But I don’t think even those of us who took it seriously expected something on this scale. As of Monday evening I was envisioning something like the following: staying in while drinking wine and eating all the snacks we’d stocked up on and playing Settlers of Catan by candlelight until the power went back on in a day or so, at which point we’d switch to watching movies until the subways came back in another day or so and I no longer had an excuse to stay home from work. Continue reading →

Is This the Dumbest Economist Article Ever Written?

Headlines from The Economist aren’t normally the sort to make you spit out your coffee, but every once in a while they still manage to surprise me with a masterpiece of political absurdity that stands in sharp contrast to their well-sourced (if nevertheless biased) economics and foreign policy coverage. This week’s edition opens with the amazing claim that Mitt Romney has, throughout his primary campaign, been pandering not only to the far right, but to the left as well.

If this left you scratching your head and wondering if perhaps you had blacked out on Ambien for a couple of weeks and missed the part where the “severely conservative” plutocrat showed up at an Occupy camp with a bongo drum, you’re not alone. But no: The Economist claims, with what I can only assume is a straight face, that Romney has been pandering to the left by criticizing China for alleged currency manipulation. Continue reading →

Academic Experts Discuss the Talking Pineapple Test Question

New Yorkers this week are increasingly perplexed by a reading passage appearing in a standardized state exam for eighth-graders that at first glance appears to be an Aesop’s fable haphazardly rewritten by a 12-year old with ADHD. Yet despite the best efforts of Jeopardy winner Ken Jennings to answer the questions, his analysis was woefully limited in scope and failed to consider the far-reaching ramifications of the answer choices in the context of all available knowledge. Thus, we asked our fictitious team of self-proclaimed legal and economic experts to address the questions in greater depth, let’s call them Bill and Ted. The following discussion did not ensue: Continue reading →

QOTD: What’s the Dumbest Thing You’ve Ever Gotten in Trouble for?

Reddit today has a popular post where users share the dumbest things that have gotten them in hot water with various authority figures. Note that “dumb” here can carry a double meaning – the infraction in question can be so trivial or harmless that the idea of someone bothering to discipline you for it is absurd, or it can be a genuinely stupid act on your part that you totally deserved to be in trouble for (but is still funny regardless). Continue reading →

qotd

Why Does Russia Support Syria?

Earlier this week news reports broke that Putin’s Russia had upped the ante from merely enabling the carnage in Syria through cynical obstruction to actively aiding it as a Marine squad of Russian “anti-terror troops” arrived at Tartus, home to Russia’s only remaining foreign naval base. The news should not come as a shock to anyone who’s been paying attention, given that independent Russian journalists on the ground have now for some time been reporting that groups associated with Russian special forces have been operating in the country as “volunteers” in support of the Assad regime, and the fact that Russia’s defense minister has even acknowledged the presence of “military and technical advisors.” Continue reading →

Santorum versus Plato on Sex in the Military

tumblr_l1f5lci7Pb1qzzf25o1_500 — I mean, other than Stanley Kubrick.

When Rick Santorum said last week that “any kind of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military” he gravely offended not only gay service members, but also straight ones who happen to be in relationships, and people who have watched Full Metal Jacket. But did you know that he was also contradicting one of the great founders of Western civilization?

One may be tempted to read Santorum’s statement as merely a deceptive facade of evenhandedness, where the gay-hating audience will get the intended target while everyone else ignores the implications for hetero service members because, really, who would be ridiculous enough to actually believe that? Presumably, the guy who uttered this gem on CNN: Continue reading →

Ten Tunes for Halloween: The Most Metal Holiday Ever

You know how Christian fundamentalists are always going on about how Halloween is an evil pagan holiday that glorifies Satan and tempts children toward the path of eternal damnation? The usual response from, you know, normal people is to be like “chill out, it’s just an excuse for kids to dress up and extort some candy from old people.” But my questions is: why would you want to deny Halloween’s badass nature? I mean, sure, we have a day honoring zombie resurrection, and a day that celebrates slaughtering a bunch of people and taking their land. But Halloween is the only holiday that’s based on an ancient festival named after Glenn Danzig’s second-coolest band and that encourages girls to dress up like slutty witches (who, as we know, were all about kinky devil sex). So the fundamentalists are actually right on this one: Halloween is evil, Satanic, and totally freaking awesome. Show our religious friends you agree by blasting these songs as loud as you can, preferably near a church.
Continue reading →

Crasstalk Book Club Discussion: A Dance with Dragons

For several weeks after George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was released, I debated over how to proceed with reading it. Should I go back over all the preceding books that I hadn’t read in five years? Or should I read it side by side with A Feast for Crows, attempting to match chapter to chapter in chronological order? Ultimately, I decided to just dive right in, with some help from the wiki to refresh particular names or details.

Structure:

The fifth book in the series was the result of a publishing fiasco where the sequel to A Storm of Swords was split into two books due to its unwieldy size. Rather than dividing it chronologically, the volumes were split by region and character, with Feast covering southern Westeros and Dance focusing on the events in the North and the Eastern Continent. Unfortunately this resulted in a rather lackluster fourth novel that consisted of mostly fruitless plotting and intrigue and devoted the bulk of POV chapters to unrelatable or uninteresting characters like Cersei, Brienne, Sansa, and the Greyjoys. Continue reading →

Is There a Secret NYPD Division Working for Wall Street?

There is certainly no lack of reasons for outrage when discussing the recent behavior of either the NYPD or Wall Street, but a story that has been making the rounds in the blogosphere is enough to cure the most severe case of outrage fatigue: the existence of a quasi-private “Paid Detail Unit” within the force that is directly employed by private corporations, including financial firms. The obvious implication made is that these officers have been acting in the interests of their private employers when dealing with the Occupy Wall Street protests and are responsible for the recent instances of escalation and deceptive tactics that have been observed and alleged. Can such cartoon-villain levels of corruption be real? Continue reading →

UPDATED: Crasstalk Occupies Times Square and Washington Square Park

Yesterday, I witnessed one of the most iconic images of the protests I’ve seen so far, as the massive ABC news ticker in Times Square scrolled the headline “Occupy Wall Street Movement Goes Worldwide” while throngs of protesters moved beneath it, the giant billboards and screens above bombarding them with a constant stream of the very corporate consumerism that they had gathered against. As I took it all in, I heard a fellow protester proclaiming, “here she is, the Whore of Babylon, her legs spread wide for all the world to see.” Continue reading →