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Comments by Transplanted Lawyer*

On “Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Struck By Container Ship, Collapses

Haven't seen the video until today. It's terrifying.

And really really makes me praise the police for getting the bridge shut down in time to minimize the loss of life. Which is no consolation to the families of the workers who died, of course, but that's the terrifying part: how much traffic was moving across the bridge until just seconds before impact and collapse.

On “Music Monday: Is This the Greatest Rock Instrumental of All Time?

Booker T & the MGs "Green Onions" demands at least a mention.
https://youtu.be/0oox9bJaGJ8?si=I1BBjqAFCrduMgQX

In more modern music (I guess this isn't really "new" music anymore) let me remind you of "You Wish" by Nightmares on Wax...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwDOa-lvizM

..and "Intro" by the Xx.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFq6nnw7xg0

See also about half of the corpus of Thievery Corporation's work, e.g., "Facing East":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSoBORS3KZE

Am I saying any of these are better than "Great Gig in the Sky?" Well, no, because the fact that they got "Great Gig" done on the first take with no real vocal rehearsals is damn near miraculous and means that piece will always deserve a mention in any rock instrumentals list. Which is a sign of a plausible claim to primacy. But these are pretty amazing pieces of music IMO, which fit within the now-very-broadly-subgenred category of "rock." (I might include, say, Peter Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme," but I feel like that's more properly classified as jazz.)

I might want to include "Sirius" but it kind of feels like "Sirius," though yes its own piece of music, still really feels like an intro to "Eye in the Sky." (This Alan Parsons project reference is included for all of my Chicago Bulls fan friends who deservedly remember the glory years.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_NNCNDYEpU

I am also affirming that "Great Gig in the Sky" and other pieces of music are properly called "instrumentals" even though vocals are included. Vocalizing is using the human voice as an instrument, and relying upon the tones and sounds of that instrument to convey emotion rather than articulated words.

On “Happiness, Ranked and Revealed

Happiness is not a state of existence. Pleasure or contentment may be states of existence, a sensation one might enjoy. Happiness is something different.

Those of who have read your 1970's science fiction will know the concept of the "wirehead," a person who has had a surgical modification to their brains to have the pleasure centers in their brains constantly at a low grade stimulation. While, definitionally, pleasant, we would recoil at saying a person with such a hypothetical device would be made "happy" by it. Indeed, we'd expect such people to sort of drop out of society and slowly waste away in their artificial bliss, and we should feel sorry for them. Because what they're experiencing isn't happiness.

Rather happiness it is an experiential process, a way of living, a relationship that you define between yourself and the world. I think it might be better say you "do" happiness rather than you 'are" happy, but such limitations in phrasing is a poverty of the English language. Perhaps the most natural phrasing to Americans is to be engaged in "the pursuit of happiness." Happiness is a life that is being lived well. I'd agree with Aristotle that a big part of living your life well is living your life virtuously.

Perhaps not so strangely, one of the virtues Aristotle discusses at length is, paraphrased, the ability to distinguish between things you have control over and the things you don't, and limiting the amount of anxiety you invest in a given thing to the degree to which you can affect it. Like a lot of virtues, it takes cultivation and practice before it becomes habitual and integrated into your personality.

It's easy to get anxious about stuff and hard to excise anxiety from your psyche. But doing that hard thing is probably essential to the experience of pursuing happiness. And that does involve putting the damn phone down and touching grass, because constantly staring at the phone and being anxious about stuff that is either going to happen, or not, is sooner or later going to pass from "staying appropriately informed about the world" and cross over to "making yourself feel shitty."

On “The New Right-Wing Leftists

Chris, I really appreciate your taking the time to respond like this. Cheers.

"

There's Hippie Jesus, who you're talking about here and who I for one kind of like. And then there's Judgey Jesus, who is a different sort of guy entirely. Christian Nationalists don't worship Hippie Jesus.

"

The internet space of which I speak is Bluesky as I am no longer on exTwitter. "Moral purity" is a condensation, a shorthand of what I see articulated there. It's a combination of revulsion at Biden's response to the war in Gaza and magical thinking that a Trump win in 2024 will somehow pull Democrats to the left such that a future Democratic party will become morally acceptable.

I've plenty of respect for someone who says "No, Biden lost me because of Gaza, so I'm not voting for him, or I'm voting third party as a protest vote." Such an opinion leaves plenty of room for "But Trump is still worse on other issues, which are less important to me, and I'm sure as hell not going to vote for Trump either."

Maybe that's what you're getting at your DSA meetings. It's not what's coming through on my SM feed.

What I get is moral condescension (e.g., "I see; after considering what's at stake, you chose genocide,") and I admit I react badly to that sort of thing. I'm not the guy who's out there in an IDF uniform shooting into crowds of starving kids.

I'm the guy who says "Neither party's candidate is going to break our multi-treaty alliance with Israel, so what else might be at stake?" and is deciding that Biden is, in those other arenas, a much less bad option than Trump.

I'm also the guy who says that the parties traditionally compete for votes in the center, and a strong showing by Trump therefore provides an incentive for the Democrats to move right and compete for those gettable votes. Debatably, that happened in between the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Further, people whose ideology is so far left that they can identify no material difference between Trump and Biden are, to phrase it much more charitably than my then-irritated self did a few days ago here, unlikely to be persuaded otherwise. There is therefore no incentive for the Democrats to reach out to such people at the expense of reaching towards the theoretically persuadable center.

Apologies, friend, if I insulted you.

"

Yeah, I knew that. We disagree often, but this was something else. Cheers!

"

Thank you, bobtuse. Do you know how long it's been since anyone on these pages explicitly agreed with me or said I was right about anything? I forgot what it feels like. You're my new best friend.

On “Hail to the Champs

"The moderate and independent voters who will decide the election aren’t paying attention yet, but they will. As the election nears and people start listening to Trump, Biden will sound better and better."

Ojala que, amigo. Ojala que. Because right now, Trump is leading in the polls by about 1.5% among likely voters (see page 6). And that's kind of scary because anyone who's paying a bit of attention or has a memory that includes J6 can see who and what Donald Trump really is, even if a handful of judges, politicians, and pundits publicly pretend not to.

On “Kacey Musgraves Does What Taylor Swift Hasn’t: Grow Up

That excerpt from "The Great War" is pretty moving to read just as poetry. I enjoyed reading the Musgrave excerpts in the OP too. It turns out to be possible that both Swift and Musgrave are good songwriters who can explore complex, ambiguous emotional territory.

On “The New Right-Wing Leftists

It's not about making a difference or effecting a change. It's about signalling their moral purity. Some of them are too morally pure to vote at all, which is just fine by me. It's the ones who are so clever they think voting for Trump will somehow advance a left-wing agenda that are really bothersome.

Alsotoo, there are actual anarchists out there in lefty-social-media-world, and their thinking about how to achieve their goals is as inchoate as the polities they want to create. Sometimes they're interesting, though, though often slippery interlocutors.

On “Saturday Morning Gaming: More Helldiving (now with Mechs!)

Still working on Starfield. Finally completed the main quest and was deeply pleased with the reward for doing so. It felt like a much more beneficent, explicated end to a well-known early science fiction movie. Am now on NG+ and recalling how tedious it was to build up a treasury gathing and re-selling trash guns back in the first go-round. But that's a Bethesda game for you.

(I have to note that there is no supply-and-demand engine to the prices, which again is Bethesda for you -- in Skyrim, the total population is 2,201 NPCs, and I think the last time I played through that I sold something like ten times that many swords, maces, bows, and especially daggers captured off of bandits and thugs, and the prices remained as constant as though Nixon's wage and price controls were in place. So it's no surprise that the price of the Grendel in Starfield doesn't drop despite the fact that I'm taking out enough pirates, spacers, and mercs that the Census would notice my activities.)

On “The New Right-Wing Leftists

Here I thought this piece was going to be about horseshoe leftists -- the ones so morally pure they see no difference between Biden and Trump (these days on the issue of "genocide") and intend to vote for Trump so that the Democrats respond to their incentives and nominate someone who is actually lefty enough for them.

I call these people "idiots," but YMMV.

On “State of the Union Open Thread

Hey, Marco Rubio recovered from his SOTU response not being well-delivered due to insufficient pre-speech hydration... [Presses earpiece to hear better] Oh. Well, anyway, let's get an update on today's sports scores!

On “Weekend Plans Post: Prep (Maybe) For The Eclipse

I got to see about 60% totality of the 2017 eclipse (I was still living in Southern California at the time). Eerie to experience, but one that I felt I understood and didn't experience, even as a light-hearted matter, the way an uneducated and superstitious pre-Copernican pagan would have. I could understand why such an event would be momentous to such a person, and I was moved by the grandness of the celestial event. But perhaps because of other things in my life, I didn't find it transformative, just novel. What was most interesting was seeing the shadows of things like leaves on the trees occluded from their usual shapes (as @fillyjonk describes above), and noticing the street lights activating.

I have failed to plan to attend this eclipse and when I fight thought about it about a month ago quickly found that my failure to plan has basically prevented me from traveling to see totality at all. So while I would certainly enjoy seeing it, I suspect the richness of my life's experiences will not really notice the absence of having been in the totality of a total eclipse of the sun.

Maybe I'll return to Iceland in 2026 and hope for clear skies. But it's too early to book that one.

On “I Blame Gerald Ford

Do not EVEN get me started on affect/effect.

"

All right. I've had it.

I cannot stand it any more.

The phrase is "REIN him in," not "REIGN" him in.

"Reign" is a verb, meaning to rule over or to govern, as would a king or an emperor.

"Rein," when used as a verb, means to control or restrain, as in using the reins of a set of tackle on a horse.

Trump is not daring America to "reign him in," because he does not want to be ruled by America. He wants to RULE America; he wants to REIGN OVER America. Trump is daring us to REIN him in, to put some kind of a restraint on the outrageous, awful, destructive, terrible, very bad things that he keeps on doing.

I've seen this mistake in many posts over many months now.

REIN.

On “Open Mic for the week of 3/4/2024

Sort of. Unanimous in the result, which is good. But it's 5-4 on the "Only Congress can pronounce" part.

Note that per the per curiam majority, a state official can pronounce disqualification for an office created by that state. If Trump wants to run for a seat on Colorado's Board of Education, he's screwed. But he can run for President.

Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson -- and separately, Barrett -- all said that "We don't need to proclaim that only Congress can do what Colorado's Secretary of State tried to do. It's enough to say that Colorado's Secretary of State lacks the power to do this on her own, and that's all we should be saying." They'd leave for another day the question of whether some other figure capable of issuing a national judgment -- say, a court entering a criminal judgment of insurrection or something similar to it -- could also pronounce disqualification.

A reporter has found metadata in the released opinion suggesting that the Sotomayor concurrence was once at least a partial dissent.

On ““Dune: Part Two” Movie Review

I saw a sneak preview too, possibly on or around the same time you did. This is a much more thorough vetting than I gave it in a note here, so let me underline agreement with your feelings about Timothée Chalamet occupying the role of Paul Atredies, gently diverge from your assessment of Rebecca Ferguson, and throw out an open-ended question I don't have a firm response to myself yet:

Are the great shots in Dune Part 2 actually earned? We earn the T-Rex roaring at the end of Jurassic Park, we earn the use of the James Bond theme at the end of Casino Royale, we earn the contemptuous "Get away from her, you bitch!" at the end of Aliens. Because the protagonists, and the audience along with them, go through conflicts before these signature moments get on screen, and because those memorable moments are related to the delivery of these deeply satisfying cinematic moments, they pack a great emotional punch. A criticism I have of the Marvel superhero movies is that they deliver these good-looking moments but a whole lot of them don't feel earned that way.

I intend to see the move again with some other friends who didn't make it to the sneak preview, so I may re-evaluate after next weekend. For now, I"ll let other fans go enjoy the movie and maybe sound off on my question here after they do.

On “Presidential Standards and Fitness

It may not always have been the mark the writers intended, but yes, professional actors do this.

"

Is there a book somewhere that compiles the profound weirdnesses, scandals, random chaos, and all-around self-parody that was the Trump Administration? If I wrote it, I'd call it "208 Infrastructure Weeks" but man I don't have the patience for something like that.

On “Mitch McConnell To Step Down As Leader, Retire After Current Term

Ideally the party's leader has a secure seat, strong fundraising abilities, and a good eye for political and parliamentary strategy. Not sure about the inside baseball stuff, but someone like John Thune seems ideal: that seat is his as long as he wants it, he has good petrochemical industry contacts for $$$ to spread around, and has been in the Senate long enough and quietly enough to have figured out its inner workings.

On “On Parenting and Divorce

Some people are like that, yes. I'm not a parent to know for sure.

But I do think the OP makes a powerful point that it's not doing your children a service to demonstrate that marriage is about unhappily fulfilling obligations. If you show your kids that thriving and joy are things that happen outside of the family, that's going to teach them that they ought not want to form families and have children of their own in the future.

This seems sub-optimal.

On “Open Mic for the week of 2/26/2024

The picture of Berlatsky makes him look like a slightly older Timothee Chalamet. Kind of freaky.

"

So I don't know if they're going to make a Dune Part 3 but if they want to they certainly could. And if you didn't like what they did with the Harkonnen in Part 1 I bet you're going to find the deeper exploration of Harkonnen culture even more annoying.

Having just seen a screening of the original Jurassic Park (with live symphony play-along!) the night before, the idea of exposition was really on my mind: better if a moviemaker can show-not-tell, but sometimes you have to tell-not-show because a plot point is super subtle or super complicated.

Dune Part 1 MOSTLY showed, rather than told, but I'm not sure that Dune Part 2 had quite so easy a time of it. You may recall that the book gets pretty mystical. It's super hard to show, not tell, a mystical experience.

There are more significant liberties taken with the story than re-gendering Liet Kynes. I don't want to spoil what those are, and I think that those changes from the book probably were aimed at telling a tighter, slightly easier-to-show overall story of the Saga of Paul Muad'dib Atredies.

But one of those decisions results in a LOT of telling-not-showing, and another of these deviances left me unsatisfied with the climactic confrontation between Paul and the Emperor (I know I'm not spoiling anything by saying that confrontation happens; you've allr read the book).

It's a feast for the eyes, especially both the action-packed battles and worm riding scenes (Paul's first worm ride is super scary looking, just like you want it to be) and some really beautiful shots of the sandy desert. Some (but not all) of those shots even have enough emotional build-up to them that they feel like payoffs rather than stills.

You will have to decide for yourself if Zendaya and Chamelet have the kind of chemistry necessary to tell Chani and Paul's love story. They certainly try and are certainly beautiful. I am still uncertain. I am certain, though, that despite his notoriety someone other than Christopher Walken should have been cast as the Emperor. There isn't enough dialogue for him to step out of the shadow of his personal persona, so he took me out of the immersion of the experience of watching Paul Atredies' story in a way that Timothee Chalamet was able to draw me into it.

I'm left afterwards feeling a bit hollow. Which may be okay, it may be a part of the story's point.

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