Map of Iraq, courtesy of CIA World Factbook
Our political climate faces two defining attributes: 1) Prejudice and 2) Dumbing down.
1) People forget that there’s more to prejudice than just racial prejudice. There’s religious and political prejudice as well. When Susan posted a picture of her and President Bush and people wigged out, that was political prejudice. When she posted a caption, “Support our troops” and people wigged out on that, that was prejudice, too.
When people assume that all Republicans are racists or that all Democrats are atheists, that’s prejudice. Finally, when someone posted on Susan’s site about Arabs/Israel and called this a “jewish site” that was prejudice.
The political blogs are even worse. Sadly, when I first looked into the current state of chess politics, my first thought was, “what is Susan Polgar so unhappy about? This is the way the real politics in Washington is done.” Prejudice seems to be the main driving force in politics today.
2) I think of this as “the American Idol Effect”. People go on “American Idol” and think that because they can sing they should be treated equally to everyone else. Some people can sing better than others. Some people try harder than others.
When it comes to politics, the same attitude occurs. Your opinion is equal to mine. No it is not. If you have studied the issues and I haven’t, then your opinion is better than mine. And just like Simon will tell contestants, “you don’t know what you’re doing” so the same could apply to me.
The Constitution gives everybody the right to speak; it does not impose upon you the duty to listen. Some opinions can be and ought to be rejected outright: (a) holocaust denial; (b) Bush is responsible for 9/11; (c) giving brain-enhancing drugs to kids.
Too many people seem to think that because the subject is politics, they can have any opinion they want and are entitled to equal respect from society.
The two of these attitudes together are what makes politics today so bad.
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Picture is from clipart collection.
Hemingway once wrote, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." This was his entire story and is said to have called it his best work. So, can you write a story using only 6 words total? Recently a number of famous writers tried this for Wired Magazine.
Here are a few I liked:
A science fiction story:
TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! … nobody there …
- Harry Harrison
A suspense thriller:
Easy. Just touch the match to
- Ursula K. Le Guin
A political story:
Bush told the truth. Hell froze.
- William Gibson
A romantic tale:
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood
Can you write a very short story? I’ll try a few:
A chess story:
1. e4; c5. Oh, no! What now?
A report on the TV Show “Beauty and the Geek”:
Chuck meets Richard. See Chuch strangle.
A personal journal:
Drove downtown. Car got hit. Whoopee!
Here is my contribution to Susan Polgar's Chess Blog.
I can’t resist just sharing with you my best PERSONAL chess moment. I discovered Susan’s blog. In order to explain its significance to me, I need to give some background.
Back in the 1970’s chess was all I did. I was President of the Seattle Chess Club. I was Business Manager of “Northwest Chess Magazine”. I played chess in every tournament and studied books all week in between. Because there were never enough tournaments for me, I organized and directed my own. Then I got married and I moved on.
To tell you the truth, it wasn’t my wife’s fault. I was pretty disgusted. The top players had nothing but disdain for the rest of us. Their only relationship to the organizers was to complain.
My most bitter memory was every meeting night of the Seattle Chess Club, Yasser Sierawan would show up with his entourage to draw people away to the basketball court. (It was located in the same building as the club.) Now I tried to explain to them that access to the basketball court was part of the deal that the club had worked with the church wherein the whole operation was located but their attitude was that it was not chess therefore it had nothing to do with the club. As for actually JOINING the club or otherwise supporting it, I will never forget the sneer that Yasser gave me. In those days, chess clubs were for patzers and suckers and were just objects to be squished underfoot. I remember there was actual glee when Robert A. Karch’s Seattle Chess Center folded. (Some of you old timers may remember him – he was Secretary on the USCF Executive Board.) A year later the Burien Chess Center folded. Serves them right! That was the attitude.
I had thought there would be a turn for the better when John Donaldson became Editor of the NWC Magazine (as the mag’s Business Manager, I had had a hand in that) but then he did an issue or two, got tired, and lit out for tournaments in Europe.
So anyway I married, dropped out and the years passed. I was a Life member so I’ve received that monthly Chess Life all these years. I have always liked chess; it was just chess PLAYERS that I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t stand the chess culture. And why did every rated tournament, even the smallest, have to be about winning prize money?
Now I detect just a little of this down-the-organizer syndrome in some of Susan’s rhetoric but there is a difference here. She produces a blog that is quality work. She operates her own chess club and keeps at it. She actually DOES things. And it is more than just the typical write a book, make an appearance, take your bows stuff that has characterized chess master pseudo-promoter that has been what we’ve seen all these years. Most significant, her work does not carry immediate benefits to herself but does benefit the game as a whole. This is such a change from any chess master I have ever heard of before.
About a week after I had made my first entry in this blog (about 3 weeks before right now) an old friend from Seattle wrote me. He had seen my entries on Susan Polgar’s blog. Lo and behold, he lived in Atlanta, too! He was planning on playing in the weekend chess tournament and so I came – my first chess tournament in at least 20 years.
Anyway, thanks Susan! And here’s hoping that things get better from here on.
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Artwork from Susan Polgar's Blog. Used with permission.
You Know You're An Internet Addict When:
* You spend more time on your girlfriend's home page than with your girlfriend.
* You didn't know that Firefox was also a movie starring Clint Eastwood.
* Your bookmark takes 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
* There's a permanent hineyrumpus-groove in your computer chair, but you haven't noticed.
* You've said "no" to sex in order to view Internet porn.
* You've rationalized installing a mini-fridge, microwave, and port-a-potty at your workstation.
* You go shopping every week, but you've never been inside a mall.
* You don't believe anything you read in a newspaper unless you verify it on a news site.
* You think that 404 is the number of the beast.
* You refuse to go outside because of the sun: "it burns! IT BURNS!!"
* Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.
* You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using a word processor.com
* You refer to going to the bathroom as downloading. And you have an ethernet connection right next to the toilet paper.
* You step out of your room and realize that your parents have moved and you don't have a clue when it happened.
* You crank up your surround-sound whenever leaving the room so you can hear if new e-mail arrives.
* All of your friends have an @ in their names.
* When looking at a pageful of someone else's links, you notice all of them are already highlighted in purple.
* You've already visited all the links at Yahoo and you're halfway through Lycos.
* You can't call your mother...she doesn't have IRC, ICQ, or Instant Messaging.
* You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check it again.
* You have commandeered your teenager's phone line for a secondary net connection in case your ADSL goes down, and even his friends know not to call on his line anymore.
* Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.
* You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL.
* You don't know the sex of three of your closest friends, because they have gender-neutral nicknames and you never bothered to ask.
* You name your children Eudora, Mozilla and Dotcom.
* Your husband tells you he's had the beard for 2 months.
* You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop and check your e-mail on the way back to bed.
* You tell the cab driver you live at http://123.elm.street/house/bluetrim.html
* You actually try that 123.elm.street address.
* You tell the kids they can't use the computer because "Daddy's got work to do" and you don't even have a job.
* Your wife makes a new rule: "The computer cannot come to bed.". So you file for a divorce...online.
* You are so familiar with the WWW that you find the search engines useless.
* You get a tattoo that says "This body best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher."
* You forget what year it is.
* You start tilting your head sideways to smile.
* You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to call 200 hours per month "unlimited."
* You turn on your computer and turn off your wife.
* Your wife says communication is important in a marriage...so you buy another computer and add her to the network so the two of you can chat.
* You refuse to go on vacation where there's no electricity, phone lines, or hotspots.
* You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a data-enabled cel-phone, and a wi-fi PDA.
* You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap...and your child in the overhead compartment.
A nice quiet day at home with Kathy. We watched movies on TV. I also surfed the net.
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