I'm easily amused

Man. It's all evilcarp's fault, too. I have spent far too much of the past couple days playing around with Pandora.com, which is an online flash-based radio station. Except it's customized. You put in a band or song you like, then it plays music similar to it. And then you can add more music or bands, and mark ones it plays as songs you like or don't like, which influences what it plays later. It's a nice change especially since I've listened to almost all of the gigs of music I have on my computer. And Winamp's randomizer isn't.

I'm not quite sure how it works yet, if you add a new band to a station, if it just adds stuff like them, or tries to find stuff like all the things you've put in. Because I think if I tried to make one with all the kinds of stuff I like, I'd give it seizures. But putting in just one or two similar bands has helped me end up finding interesting things I like. And since it has room for 100 stations once you register, it's no big deal to make new ones. Now if I could just figure out how to get it to let me post links to the stations. It'll let me email them to somebody else, I guess I could email it to myself and copy/paste the link. Is that what you did, evilcarp?

And it's also revealed I have a weakness for shiny happy 80s pop. I feel a little dirty.

Understanding your enemy is only the first step

Recently, thanks to this discussion over at Obsidian Wings, I realized something about the Neo-cons and the Bush administration as a whole. Their goals aren't mine, and when they use words, they mean something completely different than I do. Oh, that's obvious, in hindsight, and I knew it, but I didn't understand what they meant, but now I do, I think. At least somewhat.

It's not just that they're incompetent (though that's certainly part of it). When they talk about National Security, they don't mean what I mean. When I talk about it, I mean protecting the American people, and what makes us America. Things that make it less likely we'll get blown up. By terrorists, by war, by accident. That sort of thing.

When they talk about National Security, what they're worried about protecting is American Power. And a specific kind of power. The power to do whatever we want. The power to blow shit up at will. If I'm being charitable, I can credit that to them figuring they need power to protect the American people. Which is true, to an extent. But their priorities are all messed up.

This is part of why they hate the UN, and hate international agreements that require that we do stuff. They see this as restricting American power. As restricting our Freedom. Even when these things do much to make us all safer and less likely to be blown up. They've even spelled it out in various things put out by their think tanks, like the batshit crazy Project for a New American Century and similar groups. Lines like not wanting any nation or group of nations to threaten American supremacy. There's a lot of similarity to the more extreme Libertarians. They're concerned with freedom FROM things, and don't pay attention to freedom TO.

Okay, that last sentence could deserve an essay of its own, but here's a brief explanation. Freedom's not a simple thing. Sometimes, having less freedom to do some things gives you more freedom to do others, or to do more things. Here's a basic example. Are you less free because the law says you have to drive on the right side of the road? (Except in England and other crazy places) Well, sure you are. You don't have the freedom to drive on either side of the road, or weave around through it. But by requiring people to drive only on one side of the road, you're free to not have to dodge everybody coming toward you on whichever side of the road. You're free to actually drive places in relative safety. That's what most of society is. It's little bits of freedom we give up, in exchange for other freedoms. Things we agree not to do, so we can all do other things. We agree not to run around randomly shooting people, so we don't randomly get shot and can walk around free of fear and armor. That's what civilization is.

And it works the same way between countries. But the neo-cons don't care, or don't see that. They're obsessed with fancy military power, shiny planes and boats and missiles. Which are only coincidentally phallic, really. And once you have those, it's such a shame to have them just sitting around, they really should get used. It's a temptation I can understand, even if it was just pixel tanks in Civilization. So a treaty forbidding us to build nuclear weapons is bad, even if it forbids everybody else from building nukes. We're "freer" to have nukes. And also "freer" to die in a nuclear holocaust or the aftermath. Or with Iraq. We're freer to invade countries at will (except, y'know, for most of our military being tied up there), but we as individuals are also less free to travel, because of the animus toward America. We're freer to bomb people, but also freer to get blown up by somebody looking for revenge for their friend/neighbor/parent/child/sibling who we blew up. That's stupid freedom. They're attacking the whole structure underlying civilization and making us all less safe and less free. Because when you don't have any security, the hypothetical freedom to do anything you want doesn't matter a damn bit.

And this is what makes them so dangerous. Because at least some of them believe they're doing things for the best for all of us. They believe they're doing Good Things. And they talk in language that people like, even though they don't mean the same things with it most people do. Which in no way makes them good. Evil isn't cackling villains with handlebar moustaches. It's people who're also convinced they're the Good Guys, and on the side of Mom, Apple Pie, and Cute Kittens.

The other thing that makes them so dangerous is they don't see any of this. They don't see that what they're doing is making us less safe AND making us weaker. They don't see their efforts as being counterproductive. They don't see how their actions are hurting themselves and their own goals. The best analogy is they're like the aristocrats who hate to see other people getting rich. They hate to see "common people" getting wealthy, even when they get richer too. They're not looking at the absolute quality of things, of everybody being better off. Just the relative differences. Like a medieval king who lives worse than a poor person today, but compared to the peasants... And keeps the peasants down, even when letting them get better off would help him too. Their vision is short and narrow.

But the real thing that makes them dangerous is they're in power, without any kind of effective opposition.