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I cringe at the thought of putting anything related to Al Franken under the heading “politics.” Chomsky should stick to linguistics, and Franken should stick to comedy. But since on the one hand it seems likely that he may actually run for office, and on the other it is plain that he’s leveraged his comedic notoriety to position himself as a pundit, I suppose this post falls under the “politics” category.

There’s a well argued satire/critique of Al Franken on the web at LyingLiar.com. Among other things, this rebuttal to his chapter about Ann Coulter is worth a read.

Continue reading ‘LyingLiar (for Senator)’

I’ve been reading Benjamin Kerstein’s blog, diary of an anti-Chomskyite, for awhile now. Normally I’m not too keen on defining oneself purely on the basis of who or what one is against, but in Noam Chomsky’s case I’m willing to make an exception.

For those who may be blissfully unaware of Chomsky’s existence, he is one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of the extreme left. His more legitimate claim to fame is in the field of Linguistics, in which he is somewhat of a guru as well, but he has been successful in leveraging this scholastic notoriety to gain an audience for his extreme political views. Most of his quasi-supporters seem to conveniently forget that he is not a Democrat, but an anarchist, who said in his foreword to Daniel Guerin’s Anarchism, “Any consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and … wage slavery…” (the quote is from memory, I may have paraphrased marginally).

Getting to my main point, Benjamin’s latest is a long, interesting article about the extreme left’s view of Israel, in this case in an analysis of the writings of someone who is actually criticizing Chomsky for not being anti-Israel enough. Really interesting reading.

Continue reading ‘The Extreme Left, and Israel’

We are told to avoid cliché. Most of us forget that this is good advice; I’m not going to review recent posts now, but I’m sure I’d find a fair bit of cliché in my own writing. Avoiding cliché will help you think about what you are actually trying to say, and force you to come up with a plain way to say it, and ultimately make you a better writer.

You may say, I don’t care about being a better writer, I’m just communicating! People know what I mean. Yes, well, that is the reason to use a cliché; it is a sort of short-hand for conceptual expression. We use them precisely because we expect people to know what they mean. The problem is that they are so familiar it may weaken what you’re trying to express, or worse, make your writing seem a little boring.

In a few days you may see some writing about how I installed Arch Linux on my laptop, which I was writing just now. Near the start I began to say that I was going to overview the installation process, and I almost wrote something like “here it is in a nutshell.” Then I thought, you know, I wouldn’t mind going the rest of my life without reading about something else being in a nutshell. I figured that at this point, if I see the words “in a nutshell” in a text, there better be an O’Reilly imprint on the spine. Then I began to write something like, “here’s a whirlwind tour…” Whirlwind tour. Hmm. That sounds a trifle overused as well. I finally settled (pending revision) on calling it an “executive summary.” While this is also a common expression, it is not a cliche in the same sense as the last two; an executive summary is a concrete product, with a clearly defined meaning. It has a reason for being, and my overview matched the same criteria. If I were a really great writer, I might have avoided using any expression at all, and just written, “here’s an overview.”

Unfortunately, I’m just not that good. But maybe someday.

Continue reading ‘Clichés in a nutshell’

Regarding my laptop, which I had said I was loading the RHEL4… well, it turns out that disc 3 was unreadable, so I decided not to bother.

So I went and loaded Arch Linux on the box. I’m currently messing around with it a little, trying to decide if I’m going to keep it on there or try something different.

At the moment I’m messing with xorg.

(short pause)

Hmm. Just brought xorg up (for the non-Linux initiate, this means a windowing environment; in this case, plain old X with twm, an old, ugly, window manager). Maybe I’ll stick with Arch Linux and see how it goes.

I guess we can expect a more thorough review of Arch Linux on a Dell Inspiron sometime soon!

Continue reading ‘Decisions, decisions’

The title of this post has been my to-do list for the day. I went and bought some shelves at Home Depot, put them up in the garage, and proceeded to Make The Garage Look Nicer™.

Next on the list is money; the bank account needs balancing.

Last on the list is my laptop. I’m about to wipe everything off of it and start over, I think. I’m still debating whether to stick with what I know best and run Gentoo on it, or whether to try one of the many other fine Linux distributions on it. I may just test out Ubuntu again, but I’m not sure I’ll be content with that; Arch Linux, perhaps?

So many choices. More later.

UPDATE

I’ve noticed that I have a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 laying around, which I have never installed anywhere. I figure I’ll load it on the laptop and try it out for awhile because:

• I don’t have time to install Gentoo this weekend.
• Running RHEL4 on my laptop will give me an excuse to test it for more than a few minutes, and see how well it does.
• It will give me something to blog about.
• It’s handy.

The install, so far, is as slick as Red Hat’s installs usually are, but nothing greatly out of the ordinary. I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised… to find things that “just work,” and to learn a little more about RPMs.

Continue reading ‘Garage, Money, Laptop’