digamma.net - notes

Wow.

DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia provided the day’s highlight when he used the traffic engineering term “pedestrian interference” in describing how a street’s “Level of Service” is calculated. What a priceless glimpse inside the mind of the man who, essentially, owns and operates New York City’s streets. The next time you’re almost hit by an aggressive SUV driver while crossing the street, think of yourself not as a victim but as “pedestrian interference” impeding that motorist’s Level of Service. As for all of the activities that Danish urban designer Jan Gehl refers to as “public life?” Turns out it’s actually “pedestrian interference.”

Matt Yglesias, January 14:

Suffice it to say, however, that the Bush administration wasn’t the first one to fib a bit about Iraq’s WMD programs.

A test of my premise – that “netroots” criticism of the Iraq war has been vociferous but conceptually narrow – will be the reaction to a Democratic-sanctioned military assault on Iran, North Korea, Syria, or some other fool place.

I look forward to be proven wrong.

That said, with the United States and Israel drifting in the direction of a disastrous Iran policy Edwards is rather clearly choosing not to push against the drift. How much of this is political expediency and how much is convictions?

We’re about to see a big reshuffling in domestic politics. A lot of the Democrats who were perfectly fine with Clinton’s dishonest bombing of Iraq (because the real outrage was the special prosecutor) and outraged by Bush’s Iraq war are going to have to pick sides in what Bob Dole might call a “Democrat war".

My fear is that people on the left who join with Republicans to oppose such a war will be declared “Wanker of the Day".

Like Sawicky, I hope to be proven wrong.

Sam Adams writes:

[Children of Men]’s thematic clumsiness is all the more stark in contrast to its dazzling visual sophistication. Shadowing his progressively engaged protagonist into a series of increasingly dangerous encounters, Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki stage the movie as a succession of virtuosic long takes which are indisputably among the most breathtaking in the history of the medium. I hesitate to say too much about them in specific, since they tend to occur at key moments in the plot, but it’s worth saying that they’re as graceful as they are purposeful. Technique-minded viewers will count the minutes without a visible cut (a few edits are camouflaged by CGI or whip pans), but it’s surprisingly easy to get swept up in the graceful bob and weave of Lubezki’s camera movement. Even when he’s not following Theo into combat, as he does in the most elaborate and outright jaw-dropping of the movie’s sequence shots, Lubezki treats the future like one big battle zone.

Right. I think the key to Children of Men is that it doesn’t really have anything brilliant to say about society. Anti-immigrant paranoia is bad? We knew that. Y Tu Mama Tambien suffered a little from this too - I got the sense that it was saying something about Mexico at the turn of the last century, but the statement itself went over my head.

Viewed as an action/adventure movie, however, Children of Men is a genre-redefining masterpiece. The action sequences might be the best since Saving Private Ryan. A scene of a guy in a motorcycle trying to shoot some people in a car that’s driving as fast as its reverse gear will allow doesn’t sound like something for an “arthouse” film, but it turns out that if you apply “arty” quality to it, it’s a lot cooler.

Atlas Shrugs, the worst thing to come out of New York since Saturday Night Live stopped airing Molly Shannon’s “ah love it” sketches, links to Dahlia Lithwick’s Washington Post op-ed which asks:

Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?

Why is Washington still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have been held out to be?

And Atlas actually has an answer to these rhetorical questions.

Because we are at war, stupid. WaPo has become the mecca of moonbattery.

She doesn’t even argue with Lithwick’s premises. She accepts that Padilla is innocent, as are most detainees at Guantanamo. And she thinks that’s just fine.

Here’s David Fromkin, from the chapter “Could It Happen Again” in his superb Europe’s Last Summer:

At least one thing has changed greatly between then and now. In 1914 the coming of war was an almost complete surprise to the public. In the open world of today we would be likely to have at least some sort of advance warning. In turn, that would give peoples and parliaments at least a chance to make their views known. How much of a difference that might make is difficult to foretell.

One would like to think so.

But we still don’t know what happened in July of 1990. Did the US diplomat April Glaspie tell Saddam we would remain neutral in his conflict with Kuwait? Brad Plumer writes:

Still, it would have been valuable to at least try and get a fuller picture of this story from Saddam himself. I suppose people could still ask Tariq Aziz, since he was at the April 25 meeting too, and he hasn’t been executed yet.

I want to know. But our world isn’t “open” enough yet that I can ask Aziz. I have to rely on bigshots in the government who are, for their own reasons, neither asking nor telling.

Fromkin’s optimism may be misplaced in this regard.