culture
Posted at 9:56am on May 17, 2008 Re: California Situation
By Neil Stevens
Ben, it'd be a lot more respectable that the Governor wants to pass the buck to the voters, if he hadn't already once passed the buck to the Supreme Court.
Seriously. In 2005 the Democrats passed a bill redefining legal marriage to include homosexual couples. Schwarzenegger vetoed that bill on the grounds that he wanted the courts to decide. And now that the courts have done just that, he wants the decision to be made again?
There's no principle at all to how he handles this issue. He just lacks the courage to take a stand, is all.
Posted at 3:13pm on May 14, 2008 Splitting California
By Neil Stevens
Texas may hold the option of splitting into multiple states, but it's California that most needs broken up. Traditionally, the proposal has been a North-South split, but some of us have other ideas.
Via Paul Cella I came across this post by Jeff Culbreath reacting to a proposal to split California into three states. Both Culbreath and Phrelin.com focus heavily on geography in taking the traditional north-south split, but adding a third state, separating the northern coastline from the rest of the proposed Northern California.
I think this is a bit self-serving, and misses where the meaningful split is.
Read on...
Posted in California | culture | State Politics — Comments (14) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:49am on Nov. 5, 2007 Win the Long War in an Evening
By Neil Stevens
To much fanfare, Freeciv 2.1 came out this week. Freeciv is a game that tries to reimplement, and then improve upon, the classic computer games Sid Meier's Civilization and especially Civilization 2, with the improvements coming especially in multiplayer games over the Internet.
The game's been in development for years now but, thanks to the game only being worked on by hobbyists in their spare time, for years it has lacked polish and completeness. But now, with 2.1, I'm impressed with how far the game has come.
It feels just so comfortable, so at home for me, that I stayed up far, far too late last night leading Jake Featherston's Confederate States of America to world domination by taking a commanding lead in technology, then grabbing air, land, and sea superiority worldwide, in order to be safe against the world war against me triggered by my (eventually successful) launching of an Alpha Centauri-bound colony space ship.
You don't have to win by the space race, though. You can also win the game just by conquering the whole world, of course, but that can take even longer to play, and any Civilization win can take hours!
It's a great game for the imperialist, world-conquering, oil-stealing Neocon menace in all of us.
Posted at 9:55pm on Aug. 12, 2007 I Still Think He Won't Win
But then again, I don't think any of them should
By Thomas
Full disclosure: I have no dog in the 2008 Presidential brouhaha, am unlikely to develop a dog in the immediate future, and frankly, share a sentiment with a commenter/diarist whose handle rhymes with MeveFellBay, to-wit: None of the above. Part of this is because I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about political campaigns (yes, a great guy indeed to have a Director of RedState); part of it is because, with or without Fred! I'm underwhelmed by the current candidate pool, which ranges from a liberal New Yorker to a nativist to a crazy libertarian to some guy named Cox, with not a lot of improvement or fall in between; and part because, as I've said so many damned times, we are taking our eye off the ball of Congress, the State elections, and 2007, and royally hurting ourselves in the process.
Believe it or not, however, all of that was a digression. The point of this post was to say, for pretty much the only time in over a year, Mitt Romney blew my socks off (go to 9:30):
Now, the mandatory carping: I disagree with the old Mittster on a few things, not least of which being that if you're going to put faith in the public square -- an enterprise of which I'm an enthusiastic supporter -- you need to be prepared to discuss and defend it there. I'm fully aware of why Romney isn't interested in that conversation, but Catholics have had to do it for decades; I see no reason why this should be different. There's more, but it's just nit-picking.
With that said, Wow. If you could get him to drop the Ken-doll approach that he insists on adopting when the mike is on, I'd have been on this guy's team for a year now. That you can't concerns me in many of the same ways Al Gore concerned me, and the parallels are disturbing; but if this was how Mitt Romney was 24/7, I'd be a Romneybot too.
Posted in 2008 | bungee jumping | culture | Life | off-the-cuff | primaries | religion | Romney — Comments (96)/ Email this page » / Read More »
