a href equals: August 2005

runaway oil rig driven by katrina

Cold calling doesnt work!

there's a blog that says so!
i found it in the google ad bar, incidentally.
yay google ads.
with the seven pence worth of clicks i've earned i may just be able to afford to buy that chomp i've had my eye on.
and links i like too?
dude!

Fascism?

hiroshima and nagasaki - the depths we can plumb

dropping those bombs on japan was one of our most disgusting lows.

as media lens points out, when president truman's chief of staff, admiral william d. leahy, wrote that using the "barbarous weapon at hiroshima and nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against japan. the japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons".
so what point was there?
(i am reminded of bill hicks talking about the gulf war as testing ground for all the recently developed military grade toys for boys, but to believe that it was a test and a show of force is just too disgusting)
the admiral lamented that the US government "had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages."
(Quoted, Anthony Gregory, Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6, 2004, http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408b.asp)

so how the blithering fuck do we get to here?
60th anniversary of humanity's greatest single crime against itself, and we have stupid fucks like matthew pribek telling us that our enemies are not our "moral equals," and our adversaries always deserve to lose. no, he wasnt talking about something else.
he was talking about the dead civilians of nagasaki and hiroshima, and talking about the necessity to see the accidental members of the political construct that is your home country as better and more valuable than those accidental members of another.
clearly he is a wanker.
but he is not alone.

the daily mail ran an article on the 30th of july this year wherein andrew kenny said

Was US President Harry Truman right to drop it? I have no doubt he was. However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese. All British combatants in World War II that I have ever spoken to, including my parents, described the same reaction when they heard of the Hiroshima bomb: tremendous relief.

i wonder; if we destroyed half the planet in the future would the other half be given pause enough to do something about being the best humans we can be?
or would there just be the usual shit-flinging until we can build something worth blowing up again?

its not that i abhor violence.
hell, i like a bit of violence.
i just happen to believe, like henry rollins, that fighting should be like fucking; consensual.
(i'd go further and say it should involve informed consent, but then that isnt as snappy a catchphrase.)
fucking and fighting are two of our most basic urges, and i dont think we are going to get rid of them anytime soon. i think it would be nice if we could learn that "can i" and "do i want to" are only two of the three questions you should be asking yourself before doing any FnF.
"is he or she up for it" is the other.

have you ever wondered?

i love you

SWAT nail underage drinkers at legal rave

i was directed to a video of swat taking down a legitimate rave in utah by one of the barbelith people.
read the full story here
or indymedia's version here.

anonymous messages

and urls...
whack one in, and the next person to visit the site who does the same gets to see yours.

secrets of the rich and powerful

why?
who knows why.
i can only imagine the many arcane secrets of the assumption of power that have led him to this point.
the reality is that george bush likes to touch bald heads.

workin hard to make tags compliant.

black metal dialogues
may be old news, but i still laugh.

minipool
dude.
its minipool.

Fundamental attribution error

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (sometimes referred to as the actor-observer bias, correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior. In other words, people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what "kind" of person he is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person. This default assumption leads to people sometimes making erroneous explanations for behavior. This general bias to over-emphasizing dispositional explanations for behavior at the expense of situational explanations is much less likely to occur when people evaluate their own behavior.

The term was coined by Lee Ross some years after the now-classic experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris. Ross argued in a popular paper that the fundamental attribution error forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology.

More recently some psychologists including Daniel Gilbert have begun using the term "correspondence bias" for the fundamental attribution error and the two terms are often used synonymously. Jones wrote that he found Ross' term "overly provocative and somewhat misleading" (and also joked "Furthermore, I'm angry that I didn't think of it first").

cheers to the trunk-wielding Doctor for the link.