Robert Fisk has the most poignant things to say. I don’t know what I could add to what he wrote. An observation, perhaps, that this is a deeply apoliticial column. Frustrated? Oh yes. But not political. (Via Making Light.)
Population: One
For the first time in years and years, I’ve registered for Gen Con. That’d be the Indianapolis version, not the London one, although if anyone wants to pick up my plane ticket I’ll certainly hit the latter. In a surprising display of competence, I even preregistered for events. Woot!
The buried mobile labs we found last week weren’t chemical weapon labs after all. It’s unclear whether or not these are the labs Powell was talking about in his UN speech — from the CNN article, it looks as though they’re cargo containers rather than actual vehicles, but those are designed to ride on flatbed trucks. I’m thinking they’re at least the same type of lab. Well, maybe Iraq had 18 mobile chemical weapons labs plus 11 mobile labs that had nothing to do with chemical weapons and it’s just a coincidence and we’ll find the chemical weapons labs later.
Or maybe we were suckered, just like we were suckered on the nuclear materials sale.
Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why? If you GM, do you like to have players bring in existing characters? Why?
I don’t ever reuse characters… wait, that’s not true. I’ve used Mange (half-orc barbarian) more than once, but that’s because I intentionally use him as a test character for 3e games. Any time I don’t want to burn a “real” character concept on a game before I know if I’ll like it, I’ll trot him out. He served as my NWN character as well.
Hm, and you could say I’ve reused Constantine as well, if you again count computer games. But there’s not much roleplay per se in those. Still, OK: I’ll say I reuse characters for the purpose of coming up with computer game avatars. And now that I think about it, those two games are the only computer games I’ve played for extended periods of time. Maybe there’s a reason for that; I’ll have to experiment.
In pen and paper games, however, I don’t generally reuse characters. I do reuse concepts; I went through half a dozen iterations of the bright young noble before I went on to something else. In some ways, my travelling backwoods feng shui master from Rob’s UA game is very similar to my cleric of Mercury in Carl’s 3e game. I reuse (and remix) concepts, but not characters.
Kevin Drum catches the BBC changing articles on the fly. Add another reputable news agency to the list of those who do this. There was a small tempest a year or so ago regarding bloggers who adopted this practice; it’s odd that fewer people seem to care when it’s journalists. Or maybe I’m missing something, dunno.
Whoops, I forgot to natter on about Bend It Like Beckham. Well, let me fix that.
It’s a cute little romantic comedy about a cute Sikh lass who wants nothing more than to become a football player. (It’s British, so not the NFL.) There’s love, there’s an improbably attractive football coach, and there’s a remarkably sexy best pal. Family concerns get in the way of our heroine’s needs but all is resolved in the end. I’d call it a sterling example of the genre and recommend it.
Why does Bush have to find weapons of mass destruction? Because that’s how he justified the war.
Exhibit A: the State of the Union. There is a sequence of 19 paragraphs directly discussing Iraq, beginning with the line “Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq,” and ending with “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”
Of those 19 paragraphs, 18 of them refer to the threat Saddam poses and/or the weapons of mass destruction he possesses. 4 of them discuss Saddam’s brutality towards his own people.
Exhibt B: the Iraqi Threat speech, which admittedly aimed at discussing the threat Iraq poses. Still, it’s significant that he chose to discuss the threat, rather than the need to bring freedom to the citizens of Iraq. Surely if the issue of rights and freedom were his primary concern, he’d have discussed those?
In any case, out of 48 paragraphs, 4 paragraphs discuss the repression of the Iraqi people. You can probably guess what the other 44 deal with.
Exhibit C: the ultimatum, delivered on March 16th. 27 paragraphs; we’re 14 paragraphs in before we hit any comments on the oppression of the Iraqi people. Sum total of discussion of said oppression: 3 paragraphs, maybe 4 if you’re inclined towards a liberal interpretation.
Exhibit D: the Iraqi Freedom speech, which was delivered on March 19th as the bombing began. It opens with the statement, “My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Two out of three motivations relate to the weapons of mass destruction.
Later, he says “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly — yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”
If you can’t take the President’s word on what the purpose of the war was, whose word can you take?
None of this should be taken to imply that I’m not happy Iraq is potentially free. I say potentially because anyone who says they know what the place will look like in a year is lying; a lot depends on us and a lot depends on whether various Iraqi groups decide to work towards democracy or not. Regardless, I’m quite happy that Saddam has been overthrown.
However, when my President tells me we’re going to war for a purpose, I expect that purpose to be fulfilled. I expect his rationale to be justified. If we do not find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq (not predicting we will, not predicting we won’t), I expect Bush to get up and say “We were wrong; there wasn’t so much of a threat after all.”
Why is it so important? Well, it speaks to trust, you know? I really want to know if our President’s claims about threats can be relied upon or not. Is that so much to ask?
The first round of talks on the new Iraqi government ended today. The largest Shi’ite group decided to stay away; not an entirely good sign, but not a disaster quite yet.
In Nasiriya, there were protests over American presence in Iraq: “No to America, No to Saddam.” Under the logic that I should recant my opposition to the war because the Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam, I’m assuming that anyone who believes we should maintain a presence in Iraq should change their minds because there’s a significant number of Iraqis who’d be happy for us to leave.
No? You mean there’s more to the morality of politics than just seeing who cheers for what? Damn, didn’t realize it was that complex.
Paul Reynolds has a nice BBC piece about chemical weapons and so on. His only conclusion is that it’s important for both the US and the UK to find the weapons we claimed Iraq had, and I think this is precisely accurate. More on this in a moment.
Best line about the French evah:
“It’s not true that the French are ungrateful for what the Americans did in WW2. In fact they’re so inspired by the American example that they plan to wait two years until they personally are attacked, then join the coalition and pretend the war against Saddam was all their idea.”
So I’ve given the new Safari beta a quick test-drive.
It still doesn’t support title attribute tooltips. On the other hand, the nicetitle trick looks gorgeous now, so that’s something.
My MT bookmarklet still needs the tweak found way down in the comments of this post. Basically, you chop out everything before “void(window.open” and you’re good to go. Dunno about Blogger bookmarklets but I bet the same kind of approach would work.
Some sites look like shit. I don’t remember Tacitus looking this bad on earlier versions of Safari.
The XML support is not entirely satisfying. I’m spoiled; I like IE’s outline display format for XML.
Still, pretty nice stuff. I’ll give it a run as my primary for a while and see how I feel.