(no subject)

Can someone please point me to another decent rebuttal of that horrible "Terror in the Skies, Again?" piece that isn't on the ad-heavy salon.com?

Here's his account of how difficult it is to debunk this sort of paranoia:

On Tuesday morning I appeared as a guest on a conservative, drive-time radio show in Philadelphia, and Jacobsen was the hot issue. The host, without much else to go on, proposed the Syrians had choreographed a "dry run" for a future attack. (At one point he referred to the involved carrier, Northwest Airlines, as "Northeastern.") When I dared express doubt, and noted that investigators from the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI had confirmed the men's identities and motives, I was mocked, ridiculed and eventually hung up on. The very suggestion that the men could have been innocent musicians seemed, in the eyes of the host and callers, preposterous. They had to be terrorists. Disagreeing got me called "a frickin' idiot," and a caller demanded to know which airline I worked for so he could be certain never to ride on a plane with a traitor like me at the controls.

Close to the end, he concludes:

That her story concludes in such a painfully boring anticlimax ought to be the very point, and in the final few pages she still has time for a constructive moral, the clear lesson being not the potentials of global terror, but the dangers of our own preconceptions and imagination. Instead, she pulls a vile U-turn and chooses to bait us with racist innuendo and fearmongering. Nothing happened, but something might have happened, and so it serves us to remain frightened and draconian at all costs, furthering our nation's pathetic embrace of maximum paranoia.

And after this conclusion, he leaves us with a "kicker" that lacks in one important way:

acobsen's kicker: "So the question is ... Do I think these men were musicians? I'll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?"

Excuse me? She concludes, as did the radio host Tuesday morning, by insinuating that the men were terrorists, despite every shred of evidence, not to mention common sense, arguing to the contrary. And with that her article, and her credibility with it, plummets from merely sensationalist to inexcusably offensive.

Umm... "credibility"? What planet are you on? Our media told us with a straight face that Raelians might have cloned a baby. Nobody gives a shit about credibility; I sure wish we did, because so many of our nation's problems stem from our population's willingness, nay, eagerness to happily eat any spoonful of bullshit someone wants to feed them.

I sure wish that there were a way to win with facts, but facts are invisible to people blinded by paranoia, prejudice, and propoganda. If you listen to right-wing radio, you've been told thousands and thousands of times that Bush is a golden god, and that the only way to save us from daily terrorist attacks on our playgrounds is to give the Republicans a blank check on our liberty, and also perhaps a literal blank check. I'd love to know how to bring such people back to reality.

(no subject)

I'm going to skip Classic Gaming Expo for the second year in a row.

I don't see Warren Robinett in the guest list, and I don't see Videlectrix in the exhibitors' list. So I can't get my Adventure cartridge signed by my favorite developer, and I won't be seeing the Homestar Runner RPG there. And I can't pop into the casino for a little blackjack after I've visited all the booths and gotten my five minutes' worth out of all the games, like I could at the ones in Vegas.