Was thinking about another graph from Ehrenreich's Dude, Where's That Elite?.

Like the notion of social class itself, the idea of a liberal elite originated on the left, among early 20th-century anarchists and Trotskyites who noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a "new class" of power-mad bureaucrats. The Trotskyites brought this theory along with them when they mutated into neocons in the 60's, and it was perhaps their most precious contribution to the emerging American right. Backed up by the concept of a "liberal elite," right-wingers could crony around with their corporate patrons in luxuriously appointed think tanks and boardrooms — all the while purporting to represent the average overworked Joe.

I've always half-thought this without ever explicitly formulating it. It seems so obvious and so damning that I assumed that there must be another historical vector involved, a somewhat-convincing counter argument against the Trotskyite basis of the elite liberal stereotype. But things are often simpler. Perhaps no real counter argument has been made. But if not, what isn't Ehrenreich's argument made more often?

I'm about to watch the one of my all-time favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, the musical Once More, with Feeling. I'm about to watch it on the Season Six DVD. It will be the first time that I've seen the real, uncut version since it premiered, god, back when I had Tivo encoding analog feeds. This will be my first digital viewing.

Fear the bunnies.

Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes
They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses
And what's with all the carrots?
What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
Bunnies, bunnies
It must be bunnies

One of the guys at Tower Video downstairs says that Season 7 is coming out in October. That's better than I thought. Still, I might run become intolerably impatient and get it from Amazon UK. Hey, it's £50.02 (62%) off.

Was thinking about another graph from Ehrenreich's Dude, Where's That Elite?.

Like the notion of social class itself, the idea of a liberal elite originated on the left, among early 20th-century anarchists and Trotskyites who noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a "new class" of power-mad bureaucrats. The Trotskyites brought this theory along with them when they mutated into neocons in the 60's, and it was perhaps their most precious contribution to the emerging American right. Backed up by the concept of a "liberal elite," right-wingers could crony around with their corporate patrons in luxuriously appointed think tanks and boardrooms — all the while purporting to represent the average overworked Joe.

I've always half-thought this without ever explicitly formulating it. It seems so obvious and so damning that I assumed that there must be another historical vector involved, a somewhat-convincing counter argument against the Trotskyite basis of the elite liberal stereotype. But things are often simpler. Perhaps no real counter argument has been made. But if not, what isn't Ehrenreich's argument made more often?

Hmmm, unless I'm doing something wrong, if you are using SmartManila, you have to make certain that if you want to edit something already posted, you select the post and then click the edit button. If you just double click the post, it will come up in the editing interface, but if you publish it, it is publishedas a as new post. If all you were doing was correcting your frequent typos, you end up with duplicate posts.

Of course, this may well be by design rather than by accident (or by bug); you can blog to several different publishing services, so it may it may be setup that up that way so you can move posts around. Since I'm only using one, I don't really know.

Picture of cute dog, with radical proposal for immigration.

Tangentially, as you may be aware, many EU countries are facing a horrible population implosion that will certainly destroy their social service. It's happening now, demographically, in slow motion. The French ne font pas de bebes. The English, they do not make the babies.

They will have to open their borders just to keep the countires populated.

Ok, you've taken your prickly pear, but you're still worried. One if you feel sleepy? You have feeling sleepy.

Wakefulness Finds a Powerful Ally. Users call it a nap in the form of a pill. But is modafinil a cure for sleep? By By ANAHAD O'CONNOR. [The New York Times > Science] ...

"It was debilitating," said Ms. Coots, 46, who is from Los Angeles. "I couldn't give an effective presentation because I was always shaky and nervous from being amped up on caffeine and stimulants."

Then she found modafinil, a small white pill that revs up the central nervous system without the jitteriness of caffeine or the addiction and euphoria of amphetamines.

Prickly Pear May Be Hangover Preventative [Scientific American]

Overindulging in wine or spirits often makes the following morning much less enjoyable. Now there's some good news for people looking to avoid a dreaded hangover. Scientists have found that ingesting a particular plant extract prior to drinking may cut the risk of a severe hangover in half.

Now where in the world do I find prickly pear extract?

Ok, Holocan, PyCS, Userland, etc. What's the best comment host/system? Usually, I'd just play around with each of them, but, on a blog, it seems unfair to the people who've already taken the time to write comments.

(Ok, actually, you can keep the comments in your archeived posts, with one caveat: if you ever choose to republish your entire website — to retrofit a look, or to backwards-propagate some new javascript you want to throw in — you will blow the old comments away.)

So if anyone care to just give me the definitve answer and spare the blog from comment whiplash...

Update: from reading all the news about comment spam, I am very glad that I switched to a system that allows comment deletion -- even if I am still tempted by holoscan.

I've grown a little tried of J2EE — for the moment, at least — I thought I'd like to set up some PHP-based project. For that, I'd like to use some web-hosting company. This may be a pointless question, given the many thousands of those out there now, but does anyone have a suggestion for one I could play around on, developing web apps? IT has always set that up for me before... 

SmartManila seems to be churning its wheels on my huge rss subscription list, and it gets a little crashy when I try to get it to do anything else right now. I'll just wait till it's had its way through the initial setup.

Ok, it's up and running now. It will not give me access to any posts besides the ones that are on the home page right now, so I suppose it's not able -- or just unwilling -- to repopulate the previous its calendar view with previous posts. A minor annoyance.

Update: it actually does let you access old posts; you just have to naviagte to the month before it's popluated.

Nice interface, and I love the Save as Draft feature. Previously, if I wanted to save a draft, I'd publish my pages under some category like staging, then return to edit them, change the category back to home page, and publish. Nice to be saved the extra step.

And the spell checker, thank god, has the ability to add words to its dictionary. I was going mad telling it to ignore the word blog every time I invoked the thing.

There are still some features I'd really like to see. When writing a post, you spend so much time getting your links together. Often I have to switch between 10 different browser windows and copy from the address bar. It would be really cool to have some kind of URL multi-clipboard. (But, yeah, probably not worth the development effort, once you started to really prioritize your PRD.)

The team at SocialDynamics, by the way, seem to have it together. They're very responsive to their users and pay a lot of attention to what people have to say about their stuff.

Update: oh, something else. The tabbed browser is cool. I just wish you could store links on it the way you can in IE. (I can't use my BlogRoll It! button, and I'm utterly confused without a Google toolbar.)

Someone found my site by searching on Google with this string: gay - "how to cruise"

I really, really hope the poor guy found a site with better information on the subject.  

I came across this quote on Tim Worstall's blog from Chun the Unavoidable, who alas, I never read, and appears to have disappeared, and I can't seem to help myself from mindlessly reprinting it:

As a committed leftist, egalitarian thinker, in what way should I dialectically work through my feelings of alienation and, let's face it, complete and total superiority, when confronted with this unpleasant materiality? I can't aufhebung; I can't aufhebung it. Note that this transitive/intransitive dichotomy has an indissociable trace of didacticality--pedanticissimo, natch, which will always already sui generise this contact narrative, which is invested with the logic of my colonizing gaze (though countermanded by my decolonializing gangsta lean), and which is itself recircumscribed by my minatory subjectivity as an oppositional leftist, egalitarian thinker. In effect, we have an histoire de l'oeil without the fun stuff but with the massenpsychologie of the burn the earth to a clinker (Klinger?) crowd. "Let us roll," indeed.

I could swear I thought this guy as an undergraduate...

Dude, Where's That Elite? By BARBARA EHRENREICH:

Thus, last winter, the ultra-elite right-wing Club for Growth dismissed followers of Howard Dean as a "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show." I've experienced it myself: speak up for the downtrodden, and someone is sure to accuse you of being a member of the class that's doing the trodding.

Well, to be fair, we don't usually do all those things at the same time -- except perhaps in a future Volvo commercial where I'll get something pierced while eating Shusi, etc., to show off Volvo's smooth ride.

Like that old diamond-cutting commercial.

Ok, what's with the blank posts appearing while using Radio's multi-author blogging tool?

Pauline Kael, quoted in the Salon piece, The gay attacks on Pauline Kael:

"A minor problem in trying to take 'Victim' seriously even as a thriller is that the suspense involves a series of 'revelations' that several of the highly-placed characters have been concealing their homosexuality; but actors, and especially English actors, generally look so queer anyway, that it's hard to be surprised at what we've always taken for granted -- in fact, in this suspense context of who is and who isn't, it's hard to believe in the actors who are supposed to be straight."

Pity the poor straight English actors.

And from Craig Seligman in the same piece (a gay friend and defender of Kael)

The gay attacks on Kael are obviously painful to me, and not just because, as a gay friend of hers, I feel injured by assaults on her good name. To me they represent something far more destructive. They embody the same hopeless script that progressives have enacted again and again for the past century. Why does the left persist in exhausting itself by attacking its allies instead of its enemies?

That hits home.

Palmer:

The gym isn't all about losing weight or being fit; it is a place to be in the right mind. It's a place to be steady and slow and quiet.

Oh, lord, Palmer, tell it to all the jumping boys in the Castro gyms.

Although, come to think of it, "slow, steady, and quiet" does describe how some of them stalk you.