another intelligent & well-reasoned article by chuck klosterman

He's right.

you left out the "(or anywhere else)" part. i also fail to see how what he said as anything to do with a) apathy, b) centrism, or c) pseudopopulism, whatever that is

um, no.

i don't know why i'm dignifying this douchetard with any sort of response, but it goes without saying that this alcolyte of rand and ratt has about as much a grasp of international politics as, say, a carrot.

right, and in this way Klosterman's kinda just another exemplar of the culture at large - I mean, bitching about how style gets more play than substance is never gonna make you look cool, but that's essentially what's at issue here, isn't it?

Enh, something about his woo-bachelor-party attitude and his casual borderline misogyny ("lol WNBA") kinda rankles me. On the other hand, he's a huge mark for The Wire so what can you do.

I like him mostly because, unlike other sports writers, he has a little bit of perspective and most of all DOESN'T HATE THE ATHLETES. He gets dumb sometimes (A-Rod, whining about Sox 'chemistry), though I think that might just be for his readers, but most of the time his columns are closer to the defending AI one from this week. He's also a pretty decent entertainment writer - like when he talks about the Wire or whatever.

Best thing about his weekly NFL picks right now are the Sports Gal mini-columns.

Reading in today's Observer about the Morgan Stanley/Goldman Sachs bonus jockeys and the service industries that cater to their need for $2000 rolls of wallpaper which is being identified as 'Marie Antoinette syndrome' - very apt. Natural disasters, war and the like don't start what we think of as overthrows or revolutions; what actually does is an egregious difference and distance between the very rich and the rest of us which manifests itself in very obvious examples of one rule for us and another for them.

-- violent j (jharvel...), December 17th, 2006. (later)

klosterfuck did it first!

chuck, if you're reading this thread (ha!), try reading up on other countries before you write about them:

December 17, 2006
Katmandu Memo
As Nepal Shakes Up Ancient Order, All Is Up in the Air
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

KATMANDU, Nepal — In a country that many outsiders might regard as ancient and unchanging, history is moving very quickly.

There is a new Constitution and a new national anthem. Citizenship rights have been conferred on millions of formerly disenfranchised Nepalese.

The very ground rules of nationhood are being rewritten here. In a sense, the Nepalese are making themselves into citizens of a nation rather than subjects of a king. In fact, the monarchy itself is an open question: a special assembly is to be elected next year to decide whether Nepal needs a king at all.

It is difficult to overstate how radically and quickly the ground is shifting in Nepal since King Gyanendra gave up his absolute rule in April and returned the government to an elected Parliament that was dismissed four years ago. Since then, government leaders and Maoist insurgents have been engaged in negotiations to end a decade-long civil war. The guns are quiet, but have not been put away. The rebels are slated to soon join the government.

More than that, the fundamentals of Nepali life are being reviewed. Under consideration now, for instance, is how many seats should be set aside in Parliament for women or for Dalits, those who were once considered untouchable on the Hindu caste ladder. The new Constitution is to determine whether Hinduism will remain the official state religion.

The so-called Madhesi ethnic group, which by some estimates represents as much as a third of Nepal’s population of 29 million, has been granted citizenship rights for the first time in the 50-year history of independent Nepal.

The physical landscape, too, bears the signs of radical churning. In the heart of this capital, where the king’s pronouncements used to be posted on tin billboards, there now hangs a banner, sponsored by a motor oil company, reminding commuters to fasten their seat belts.

[And in a move on Dec. 16 that would further strip King Gyanendra of power, the rebels and the governing coalition approved the draft of an interim Constitution that gives the prime minister complete executive authority and leaves the king with none, government officials said. In the spring, the king lost many significant powers and command of the military.]

Still, Nepal’s leaders seem not to want to revisit one area, and that is the question of what to do about the brutality of the past 10 years of war.

The Maoist insurgency, with the king’s crackdown, left a trail of human rights violations. An estimated 13,000 people were killed, primarily civilians. Scores disappeared, never to be found. Children were recruited to fight.

Mandira Sharma, who leads the Advocacy Forum, a nonprofit group that painstakingly documents rights infractions, wants prosecution of what she calls “gross” human rights abuses over the past decade. “Nepal’s problem is the culture of impunity” is how she put it.

The peace accord, which the government and the rebels signed in November, includes the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission. Yet neither side seems ready to commit to putting people suspected of wrongdoing on trial.

“We will try to make reconciliation in the country — only that much I can say,” the home minister, Krishna Prasad Sitaula, said recently in an interview. “Whether we will punish or not, I don’t want to say. It will be too hurried to say now.”

He promised that the commission, due to be appointed as soon as an interim government takes over, would investigate rights violations both large and small. “If we think reconciliation will come from punishing someone,” he went on, “then we will punish.”

Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoists’ second-in-command, issued a remarkably similar call: “First let the truth come out. Then we’ll see.”

He said he personally favored the notion of punishing those who had committed the worst offenses. But he was swift to add: “We can’t go for revenge. We have to go for reconciliation, for the sake of peace.”

An early version of the peace accord included a high-level commission to investigate disappearances. That was dropped from the final agreement.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, while praising the idea of the commission, has pressed the new Nepalese government to start holding people accountable as well. “The truth commission is a useful contribution to the peace-building process and should not be done in place of prosecutions,” said Kieran Dwyer, a spokesman for the United Nations human rights office in Nepal. “It’s a question of re-establishing the rule of law.”

Why, wondered C. K. Lal, a columnist for The Nepali Times, should his compatriots worry about that now, when there has never been a collective accounting of human rights abuses before? After all, he pointed out, in Nepal’s deeply stratified society, an upper-caste villager could always exploit the child of a lower-caste family. Or during the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s, a man like himself could be arrested and held for having a banned newspaper in his bag. Would justice really help his country move forward?

“My heart says this has worked. Why not forget?” he said. “My mind says no, there’s a better way. Maybe bigger crimes can be punished. Maybe then it will be better for my children. So I don’t know, really.”

You know what's really funny? Boise closed off roads all round the downtown capitol building after 9/11 so terrorists couldn't drive near it. They also encouraged everyone to get flood insurance after Katrina. In a high desert climate.

to begin with, the article suggests to me that he's more interested in 'revolution' than anyone who has posted on this thread.

We have enough privately owned firepower to instantly kill a billion grizzly bears, plus a few dozen prostitutes.

is pretty creepy, i mean has the "dead prostitute" joke totally entered the mainstream now? esp with this shit still going on and nobody particularly caring:

Sixty-one prostitutes vanished from the Vancouver area in the two decades after 1983. Early in 2002, police investigated the Port Coquitlam hog farm of Robert William Pickton, where human remains were found. Mr. Pickton has been charged with the murder of 26 women. A trial on six of the charges is to begin on Jan. 8.