"What is it with these people? Can they not see you as an individual, utterly separate from them?"

actually cary, they can't. my parents (especially my mother) are exactly like this. i'm not a lesbian but i am the dreaded POOR. and even worse, i harbor no strong desires to be incredibly wealthy. this is a travesty for my mother. she once suggested that i should do her a favor and go to law school. she's asked me on several occasions why i like being poor so much.

it took me a long time to understand that it wasn't like she didn't know that i had career goals beyond "whatever makes a lot of money," she just didn't realize that i was my own person with my own goals and desires outside of her own. i'm not sure why she has this problem. sometimes i think it's because we're from the former USSR where material lack translated (for her at least) into an urgent desire to be financially secure at all costs (we were always the family with the atomic-war stocked pantry). but lots of russian folks came to the US and aren't like that at all. then i thought maybe it has to do with people of a certain age who are used to parent-child relationships involving the child doing whatever the parents want. that too is part of it, but then again lots of parents of her age (even russian parents of her age!) are quite free-spirited in their parental duties. so i have no idea what it is. i know that my mother used to listen to led zeppelin when she was young and it drove her mother crazy so it's not like she was always like this.

maybe it just happens when you become a Parent without much else going on to drive your identity. if i find myself in my 50s in another country unable to find a job in the career i built for myself over many years (my mother was an engineer in russia), maybe i would also have some pretty strong feelings about what my children need to do lest it reflect poorly on me. hopefully i'll never end up like that regardless of the situation i find myself in many years from now...

i love how the video had lots of people saying that the root of "blogger" dissatisfaction with brennan was his CIA involvement and then had no actual bloggers or quotes from bloggers indicating this.

it was also pretty awesome that rendition was framed as the only way to capture VERY DANGEROUS TERRORISTS (twice!). in effect what was left unsaid (but implied) was that the evil bloggers would prefer that dangerous terrorists be left to roam around doing their thing.

in conclusion, LOOOOVEE IT.

also the letters were great. moar plz.

"don't forget that the obfuscation is many levels deep. In this segments definition of rendition, only terrorists are rendered, and terrorists like the 9/11 mastermind with the scary picture. It could mean either taking them to the US or maybe to perhaps other countries. No mention there of being taken to countries that employ torture. And as always, the pre-supposition is made that those captured/detained by the US are bad bad terrorists, every last one of them."

that's what makes it so hard to talk to people who believe this kind of thing. there are several levels of assumptions in a simple statement of myth like "rendition means capturing terrorists and taking them to the US or other countries" (they had a picture of a disheveled captured guy and right after that a picture of a prison door swinging shut and being locked!) so it's fairly easy to refute with 4 points:

- the blanket way that the american military seems to round up a bunch of dudes in a given location and pack em off involves lots of bystanders getting captured

- extraordinary rendition is actually exclusively outside the US

- the places where they send them are torture-using places

- rendition is by no means the only way to capture terrorists

but when my mother tells me that she doesn't understand why africans are so poor, we have to have a 2 hour conversation about the history of colonialism. or when an acquaintance told me in early 2002 that we had a right to the oil in iraq, i just sort of stared blankfaced because i wasn't about to launch into a several-hour long discussion about american exceptionalism, self determination, colonialism, resource wars, human rights, preemptive wars, and national sovereignty.

as the right moves further into their own historical narrative and understanding of reality these assumptions will become even more buried and difficult to unravel. it's already hard to talk to diehard conservatives about reality because their perception of what it is is so radically different from the world the rest of us seem to inhabit. i imagine it will get even worse. not entirely sure how to deal with that whole thing :P

""They were part of that whole feeling that you could make money by buying and selling companies, rather than by selling books."

isn't this basically what happened with the trib company? where you replace books with newspapers?