Book Meme:
+ bold the ones you’ve read
+ italicize those you started but never finished
+ add three at the end
My own comment: calm down all ye Terry Pratchett fans. Yeesh.
Author: Bryant
So the whole thing where Bush says “I’m going to say it one more time. In fact, maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law.”
That would be so much more comforting if the infamous memo didn’t argue that it’s not illegal to torture certain classes of people.
Juan Cole has an excellent essay on Sistani’s view of the ideal Iraqi government. Since Sistani more or less got his way with yesterday’s UN resolution, it’s worth reading.
Eric Muller may have somehow gotten his hands on the first 56 pages of the March 6th, 2003 memo on torture. I haven’t read it yet. Note that there’s no pedigree attached, so it should be considered suspect until and unless more evidence rolls in.
Update: MSNBC has the same thing. Except not exactly the same; it’s a different scan. The PDF MSNBC has looks like a photocopy of the version that was scanned to create Eric Muller’s PDF. Someone’s leaking those 56 pages all over the place.
Impending WISH deficit! But this week:
Pick three to five genres and name the best RPG for that genre. Why do you think it’s the best? What makes it better than others? What are its downsides?
Pulp: Adventure! This is a very close race, because Feng Shui has better core mechanics which are better suited to the genre. Feng Shui really gets damage and fighting and stunts right, which is important for a pulp game… but it’s an action movie game rather than a pulp game, and while the genres are similar they aren’t the same. So the detailed and comprehensive power list brings Adventure! ahead by a hair.
Action Movies: Feng Shui. That’s a freebie. Feng Shui is a really significant milestone for genre-specific rules and it’s aged (and evolved) well.
TV Adventure: Unisystem Lite, as presented in Buffy and Angel. I was watching some Alias last night and marvelling at how well Unisystem Lite would work for a campaign in that setting. You could use it for Xena. The key is a) how quickly play flows — quickly enough to make play-by-IRC viable for me, and I don’t usually like play-by-IRC — and b) the clever use of Drama Points to channel themes. It is amazing how much better Unisystem became when all the excess crap was carved away.
Conspiracy: Over the Edge. Ginger said best RPG, not best rules! Over the Edge is mostly setting, with a nice minimalistic functional set of mechanics. At first glance it’s not obvious how the mechanics support the wild surrealistic genre, but I think the pioneering lack of a skill list is absolutely perfect for the world of Al Amarja; it makes it clear how open the setting really is. And the GMing advice is superb.
One liner framework for an Adventure game:
“Huey Long’s Men of Action!”
The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration’s view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies.
This from the Wall Street Journal, on Monday. The full text of the article has been reproduced elsewhere.
It really makes those articles about our reluctance to employ torture seem naive, doesn’t it? “We don’t sanction torture, but there are psychological and other ways that we can get most of what we need.” Except right around the time Rockefeller said that, Bush’s administration decided that it was OK to sanction torture. Egg on his face.
Phil Carter discusses the difference between advice on how to stay within the law and advice on how to avoid prosecution for breaking the law. Bitter fruit.
Public service announcement: City of God comes out on DVD tomorrow.
It is so very good. Big-time recommended.
I’m normally not much of a Harry Turtledove fan. I found the Worldwar series to be incredibly long and dull with poor characterization and fairly uninteresting aliens. He clearly knows his history, but he wasn’t so good at getting the story across. For some reason I took a plunge on American Front anyhow.
Surprise, it was remarkably readable. I think this is perhaps because there’s a whole lot of populism in it, and I’m a sucker for populism at the moment. So I went ahead and read the whole trilogy, and then the second trilogy set in the same timeline, and now I’m waiting for the next one.
It’s an alternate history timeline in which the Confederates won because Lee didn’t lose his battle plans. A few years later, the South won again. Lincoln went over to the Socialists, marginalizing the Republicans and putting the Democrats solidly in power. Marxism became popular among blacks in the South. Utah is grumpy and rebellious. Etc.
In 1914, the CSA is allied with France and England while the US is allied with Germany. Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated in Serbia. Things proceed as one might expect.
Now, I’m not going to say it was smooth writing or anything. For one thing, it’s a multiple POV book, a lot like George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. The POV segments are, oh, maybe four or five pages at a shot, so there’s no way it’s not going to get choppy here and there. Not all the characters are as interesting as one might like — but there’s good variation among them; he’s not writing the same character over and over again.
And, you know. Marxist rebellions in Georgia. Heated debate about the appropriate role of the Socialist Party with regard to those rebellions. Upton Sinclair, Presidential candidate. Custer as a should-be-retired general. Neither the CSA or the USA depicted as good guys. Mistakes made on all sides.
Half of me wants to lasershark it and use it as the setting for an Unknown Armies game. Or a Vampire game. Or something. Even if I don’t, though, it’s fun reading.
Since I posted my pieces on the upcoming draft and Congress.org, I’ve gotten 687 hits on the first and 493 on the second. Total traffic: 1180 hits, most of which is probably not everyday visitors who saw it on the front page anyhow.
Over half of those came within the first couple of days; the counter-meme spread very nicely within LiveJournal. These days I’m getting hits from message boards of various stripes. I got few links from blogs outside LiveJournal, interestingly. I think it’s because the original rumor didn’t spread much in the blogosphere.