day off!

[jazzfish]

With apologies to Brad Delong, I'll stop referring to this administration as 'Orwellian' when they stop using '1984' as an operations manual. (see also dglenn, here.)

To balance that out, there's Cute Overload ;), which is exactly what it sounds like only with more OMG and *squee* involved.

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Yesterday was rather pleasant. Thanks to the ice on the roads rendering Sage Lane nigh-undriveable*, I got a day Off. Sat around and vegged, read some of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green-Sky trilogy (Below the Root, And All Between, Until the Celebration; YA sci-fi books that I adored in about the sixth grade and are still pretty neat), played Runebound with J. and Maureen. Ran almost entirely out of food (I think I still have a handful of goldfish, a pack of pop-tarts for breakfast, and some peanut butter. Oh, and a Cadbury egg), so a big thankyou to Maureen for feeding me dinner.

Applied for an associate developer position at Fantasy Flight Games. I've got roughly no experience designing games so the chances of my getting the job are slightly less than those of a Certain Individual at work behaving like a human being. Still, it felt good to apply. Made me realise that yeah, I can do this whole jobsearch thing if I have to, I can write coverletters and tweak my resume for each individual opening.

Comments

[jonny-law.livejournal.com]

I like to think of this administration as more Nixonian than anything else. After all, some commentators have painted this domestic spying scandal as COINTELPRO II, after that shining example of secret police brutality.

[jazzfish]

There's definitely some truth to that.

So what's Bush's China moment going to be?

[jonny-law.livejournal.com]

Teaming up with Communist collaborators in Afghanistan to root out terrorists and anti-Communist religious fundamentalists that the U.S. supported when Soviet Russia was trying to invade. That's sort of a stretch, but it does mirror the U.S. withdrawal of support for Taiwan's ROC in favor of normalized relations with the Communist PRC. However, it has the virtue of being literally true, because Afghan Communists are used to dealing with bureaucracy and Westerners, and that makes the U.S. military more comfortable dealing with them than with tribal leaders and warlords.

In a more figurative sense, it was invading Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 rather than pursuing a false case against Iraq, because overthrowing the Taliban meant wrecking any deal Cheney's secret energy cabal made to drive a gas pipeline through Afghanistan and a likely resumption of heroin production. It was sort of an unrealpolitik, where what was right and moral was done rather than what was practical and enriched White House cronies.

Any time I hear about Orwell I think of the recent memoir Finding George Orwell in Burma, which provides a yardstick for the term Orwellian against which any regime may be measured. Thank goodness the U.S. is not in the business of invading countries to spread democracy, otherwise we'd be in Burma fighting to install the democractically elected Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to power.