Shots Across The Bow

I'm Back!

And so is Chris Muir! Purely a coincidence I promise.

Did you miss me while I was away? Did you even notice I was away? On second thought, don't answer that.

As you've no doubt noticed, there have been some cosmetic changes around here, with more to come. Let me know if you like them, or if you like the old look better.

I finally got around to going through my links and deleting the bad ones and updating the ones that had moved. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of these folks are still actively posting, considering that many of these links are almost 3 years old. It a medium that sees a huge burn out rate, it was nice to see so many of the folks who first noticed me when I started out still going strong.

Before I go any further, I want to single out one link on my roll and that's Basic Training It's written by TJ Buttrick, another early blogger and one of the first ever commenters I had here at Shots. TJ is a remarkable person, not because he's a blogger, but because after 9/11, when so many folks talked a good game, he acted on it and joined up. He went through training, and is about to deploy to the Middle East after completing his training in Arabic. His blog covers each week of basic training and while recent posting has been spotty, undoubtably due to higher priority items like training and nubile young females(check his blog; you'll understand), once he finished training, he promises to post more regularly. I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, not all the changes here are just cosmetic. I upgraded Moveable Type, removed a bunch of accumulated garbage from my templates, installed MT Blacklist to cut down on comment spam (Over 1600 blocked in 3 days!), and added a biography page since I just realized I didn't have one. There's still a ton of behind the scenes stuff to do, like finishing putting all my past posts into catagories, (of course, fist I have to finalize the catagories, and some other housekeeping, but a deadline is a deadline, even if it's self imposed. I promised you content by today, and by golly, I delivered!

So, whether you missed me or not, I'm back and ready to play some more.

I plan on a few new additions to my standard topics of conversation. For one, I just started keeping a nano reef, so you can expect regular updates on just how expensive 12 gallons of salty water can be. Also, I have a couple of woodworking projects on tap, the first of which is to rebuild a squirrel box my mom commissioned from some guy who clearly had no business calling himself a carpenter. I'm sure I'll have plenty of stories about that to pass along. I'm reading several differnt books right now, and I'll let you in on whether they're worth the price or the time.

The last few months have been very intense, leading to all politics all the time, and while I'm still a political junkie, there's more to life than that, and I want my blog to reflect that, hence the new subtitle, "A Reality Based Blog." Obviously it's also a not-so-subtle dig at my liberal buddies, but it's more than that.

Several decades ago, a group of fairly nasty people appropriated the COnfederate battle flag and distorted its meaning to serve their own ends. At the time, nobody stood up and did anything about it so now, if I have the desire to fly the 3rd National Flag of the Confederacy, I'm forced to defend myself against charges that are more correctly leveled at those who perverted my southern heritage.

In a way, something similar is going on today. Many prominent liberals and liberal bloggers are referring to themselves as part of the "reality based community." While they're playing off the faith-based initiatives that President Bush is backing, they're also implying that reality excludes a conservative viewpoint. So, rather than wait 2 decades, or allow them to frame the debate, I'm drawing the line in the sand now.

I'm saying that reality has room for liberal and conservative ideology, that the facts are there to support a range of opinion, that binary logic is inadequate to describe human affairs, and that it takes a multivalued approach to even com close to capture the complexities of our society. The difference in the two sides comes from assigning different values to the same variables, resulting in different solutions. I tend to weight conservative values higher, leading me to one set of solutions; liberals do the opposite.

The only way to determine the proper weighting is to try different solutions and see what works and what doesn't. There's no way that anybody can make the case that conservatism is an abject failure just as nobody can make the case that liberalism is an utter failure, although there are those on either side who will try. The reality is that each philosophy has areas of strength and weakness, and it is a synthesis of the two that is required.

This is not to say that there won't be conflict; it is conflict that leads to synthesis. But when either side holds the other as totally without value or meaning, then trouble soon follows. Right now there are those on either side who believe that way, but fortunately, they are in the minority. As some have pointed out, we aren't red states and blue states, but purple states, magenta states, and violet states. And that's a good thing.

That's reality.

UPDATE: SKB let me know that I'm at least partly off base in this post. Ron Suskind wrote an article for the New York Times in Oct (reg req). which has the following passage:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That's outrageously arrogant, and I really hope that it's not reflective of the attitude of the administration, although Suskind builds a good case for just that thing. That makes it even more important that I stick to my guns; reality comes from us, the people, right, left, or lost somewhere in the middle.

However, the thrust of Suskind's piece is to set up the false dichotomy between faith and reality, which dovetails into my reasons for using the term in the first place. The arrogance of the administration spokesman just gives me another reason to use it.

My thanks to Bubba for pointing out the real origin of the "reality based community."

Posted by Rich at December 1, 2004 1:29 AM | TrackBack