Truth in other words

The marketplace of shitty ideas

2011-11-01T02:44:00.000-07:00

You were probably directed here because someone, somewhere out in the internet, told you that a joke you made was misogynistic. And you're probably thinking that they are crazy - you don't hate women, it was just a joke, and they are making mountains out of molehills. Annoying!

Hang with me a minute here. This is all going to connect up.

You probably don't think that advertising works on you either. McDonald's keep playing their adds and flashing their logo, and playing their jingle, but it's not like it makes your eyes half close while you chant "must... have... McBurger" (though that would be pretty awesome). You see Coke ads, and don't immediately go running to the corner store. And yet top brands like Coke spend hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars a year on advertising.

So here's my foolproof get rich plan for you: All you need to do is get a job at some company, and cut their advertising budget to zero. Boom, free profit. Work up to one of the big brands, and you could save them a billion bucks overnight. Take, say, 1% of that as a bonus, and that's $10 million a year.

But if it were that easy, some ambitious young jerk would have done it already, and have the private jet to show for it. If Coke stopped advertising their brand image would slip, and then so would their sales.

Advertising works like this: You don't remember the exact Coke ads you see (seriously, what was the last one you saw?), but over time an image gets burned into your mind of Coke as warm and fuzzy. They constantly reinforce this image with hundreds of adverts, and repetitions of their logo. When you walk into a store looking for a drink, you see the Coke label, and it resonates with these stored feelings of warmth, somewhere in the deeper depths of your brain, and you find yourself reaching past the Pepsi and the store brand cola (even though it's much cheaper!). That's how a lot of advertising works.

A very similar thing happens in politics, except there it's called framing instead of branding. There's a right wing frame which talks about people as responsible for looking after themselves, and a left wing frame which talks about helping each other out when we're down. Right wing arguments seem way more sensible if you're all set up with a right wing frame ("reduce welfare, to get people to help themselves"), and vice versa for left wing ones ("protect welfare, as a safety net for when we stumble").

So brands and frames matter. A lot. They don't turn you into a zombie, or make you obey, but they give extra resonance to the world you live in, by making some options seem more reasonable and appealing and alive to you.

So what does that have to do with "misogynist" jokes?

Women are on the receiving end of a lot of bullshit that men aren't. If you switched your gender for a month you'd be surprised at how much of it. From petty harassment (common) up to rape (too common), there's a whole spectrum of bullshit that lands on you as a woman. Most of the guys who do this stuff (even the rapes) aren't psychopaths. We've got a handy stereotype that they're sick fucks who live in nasty basements, snatching women off the street, but it mostly doesn't work like that. Most of it comes from guys who are otherwise pretty normal, and most rape is date rape - guys who know the girl but get too pushy, too persistent, and take it over the line. And when it happens the guy is almost never thinking "hur hur, teh EVUL". Talk to them, and their language is distancing - she was a bitch, or acting like a whore or a cock-tease.

Ok, you aren't like that. But when you make jokes like the one you just got called on, you are putting out branding for team asshole. You didn't mean to, but you are referencing and reinforcing ways of thinking that resonate for assholes with sexist behavior. Coke has to pay billions of dollars to get to get message repeated in front of people, in whatever funny or whimsical or lighthearted or sincere way they can. Telling a joke that draws on negative stereotypes (whore, bitch, tease, etc) doesn't turn anyone into a rapist zombie, but it does reinforce a mental frame that is comfortable with seeing women as less than fully human - as objects that sexually gratify or don't, rather than free agents who pick their own destinies.

Yes, jokes are all about violating boundaries, it's part of what makes them funny. But before you tell ones like this, think about who you're telling it in front of - is it a world wide web full of anonymous people? Some of whom are going to be assholes? Is it something that those jackasses can read as making it look like it's ok to treat women as objects? Because if they can, they will. So unless you're 100% sure you've asshole-proofed the joke, it's better not to.

Bottom line: Quit giving free advertising to rape culture. Do a reverse Nike: Just don't.

Jesus is to the season, as this post is to christmas

2010-01-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

not at the right time of year.

This is an open letter to "reason for the season" types, who are upset about all the secular stuff they see as polluting Christmas's true religious identity:

Don't get me wrong, I like the religious imagery and carols and such - I grew up with it all mixed together in my home - but if you're going to start getting all jealous and possessive, this relationship isn't going to work and we're just going to have to split up. I don't want that, and i don't think you want that, but if you're going to be all abusive about this relationship every 12 months regular then I'm sorry, but you're entitled to leave.

Unfortunately, that means dividing the house we grew up in. Starting with the date. Historical Jesus was born some time in spring, and that's when his birth was celebrated for many centuries until the church decided to co-opt the big pagan party in late December. If you absolutely have to leave, you can take back your original slot in March or April and we keep the midwinter solstice.

On the pagan side we keep the trees (yule logs) the mistletoe (druidic), Santa (Coke), the good will and cheer (Dickens), the glitter and the presents (how much more worldy can you get). Religion, you get the star, the angels, St. Nick (minus the red and white regalia), the mangers and the midnight masses.

The songs we'll have to split. You get the messiah oriented ones, we get the jingle bells style ones - which, frankly, were mostly written by Jews so don't even think about it. Oh, don't kvetch, it's a clean win for you IMHO, you're getting most of the best ones - walking out with the sound track of my youth, darn you all to heck.

The only good news is that we both get to keep the drinking and eating. Recent protestant splits aside, the church has centuries of being pretty down with booze (ask Friar Tuck), and the pagans are practically famous for it too. On this we agree, even if it's not clear that either of us should be proud of it.

So those are the terms. I don't want you to leave - I ask you now, nicely, not to. But if we're going to be in this together, then we're going to have to start playing more nicely with each other. That means sharing our toys and not being so jealous or possessive. I'm willing, but are you? Please say yes. You know He would want you to.

If health care were the post office.

2009-06-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

Y'know, if we were debating starting up the post office now instead of health care,

1) Fed Ex and UPS would be donating millions to congressthings, who
2) Would be all up in our teevee's telling us that the goverment is so incompetent there's no way it would run a good service, which
3) would unfairly compete with our private sector delivery firms and drive them out of business!!!!11!!, which is socialism, and would be EXTRA terrible because
4) It would lead to government bureaucrats between you and mail to your loved ones!

And the TV people would nod and agree that these were very serious points, and anyone who suggested that a government post office might run well would simply not be invited to appear on the tube. And if someone suggested that for 65 cents the government would pick a letter up at your door, and the drop it off, absolutely reliably all the way across the country 3 days later, they would be laughed at out loud, because everyone KNOWS that the gov is always incompetent, the sky is blue, grass is green, the earth is flat, and Newt Gingrich is a highly reputable font of high quality ideas.

some patriarchal caveats

2009-04-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

A few posts ago I argued why I don't like the term "patriarchy."

Two caveats. Having watched a few more old movies, patriarchy clearly WAS an excellent term for North America 40 years ago. Women weren't supposed to work, were supposed to obey husbands, had to stay in their place, the whole 9 yards.

These days I think sexism has mostly just blurred into a general miasma of resentment of others.

The other caveat is supplied by right wing uber douche John Ziegler. As witnessed here.

He wants to date "someone who is... rational, which I realize is an oxymoron for a woman... [But] ideally you'd find someone with a manageable degree of irrationality. You're probably going to conclude that this is somehow mysogynistic but it's not."

It takes a special kind of person to say "I don't hate women, I'm just saying they're crazy."

This idea brought to you by the same people who thought up "I don't hate black people, but I can't help they're all criminals!" Funnily enough, not one of them has yet been spotted saying "I don't hate white guys, even though they're just all arrogant asshats with penis issues." I don't know, it's a mystery.

Is it torture?

2009-04-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Liberals say yes, conservatives say no.

Here's the question for conservatives:

If an American soldier was captured, would you be fine with him being beaten, slapped, slammed against a wall by a towel tied around his neck, waterboarded repeatedly, kept in a box not much bigger than a coffin with insects or rodents or snakes or whatever else he's phobic of.... after having been kept up for days at a time, shackled in stress positions, practically hanging from the ceiling?... If you're willing to visualize your crew-cut blue-eyed GI Joe having all that done to him, and you're willing to say "meh, fair game..." if you're willing to imagine your own brother being captured and having this all done to him (go ahead, imagine it), and you still insist that it's not torture... then congratulations, you're an asshole.

The finance crisis as explained for the benefit of 16 year olds

2009-04-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

A nifty Harvard Business School report explains the financial crisis in pretty readable form. But if even that is too scary, we fed it through the trusty ol' Analogizer, and threw in a few extra finance texts to boot. Here's what came out:

Maria is pressing her young beau Tony ("Tony the Stereotype" to his friends) to make good in life, become bona fide, and bring home some bacon (bacon bits, minimum). Tony figures he only has one useful skill, so decides he's gonna open up "Tony's Caah Shop." He figures he can make an ok living at that, only problem is that he needs a shop first... which means he needs to rent some space on Main Street, buy a car lifter, get some new wrenches, hire a pretty young receptionist whom Maria will hate... call it $40,000. But Tony only has $14.52 and a half tube of Bryll Cream to his name. He looks under both couches for spare change but still comes up 35 grand short.

So Tony goes to the bank, talks a good game to Michael the branch manager, reminds him that Mikey still owes him from that one time in Junior High. He gets a $30 grand loan, sets up his shop, and fixes a lot of cars, and in due time pays the damn thing off. Life is good, and he is now tha man, with all the bacon, fries, and cold brews he ever wanted.

Fast forward, oh, 30 years.

Tony is now his town's car repair magnate, with as much lite beer at his beck and call as Jane (wife number two) won't let him drink ("you're getting fat." "No I ain't" "Yes you are." Rinse repeat, repeat).

But the car repair business ain't what it used to be, as all the new cars have too many computers in them to be easily fixable... But ol' Anthony is a man o' the times (at least, when Janey pushes him hard enough to be), and comes up with a new better plan. He's going to convert people's cars from gas to electricity. Unfortunately, if he's going to convert enough cars for this to work out, he'll need more wrenches. A lot more wrenches. And some big machines. When he does the math on this (and Tony Jr. fixes the mistakes in it), he basically needs a small factory. Which costs, oh, let's call it 40 million bucks.

So Tony goes back to Michael the banker for another loan. "April first was last week." Mikey says. "Pull the other one. Forty million bucks, what are you thinking?" No amount of arm twisting is going to get this kind of risk past Mikey's bosses. But there's an answer. Tony's Caah Caanversion can get individual investors to give him the money instead of just one bank. An investor forks over, say, a grand, and Tony gives them an IOU (i.e., a "bond") that he'll get them back for twelve hundred bucks in two years. Sell enough "bonds" and he can get his 40 million, build his factory, and start rolling in the sales revenue to pay off all the bonds and their fixed amounts of interest. Play it right and he'll need fork lifts to get all his bacon back home.

In fact, Mikey the banker thinks he might buy himself some of Tony's bonds. He may only be a lowly branch manager, but by dint of living in a tiny apartment, and subsisting entirely on Ramen Noodles and Kraft Dinner (he's from Canada) he's managed to put Mikey Jr through college and still save up $30 grand. He figures a savings account would only pay him 1%, or so, but he could buy ten of Tony's bonds for $10 grand, and in two years he'd get back $12 grand. Boom boom boom, two thou new friends, just like that.

But Tony isn't the only person out there selling bonds. So is IBM. So Mikey thinks about this some. The problem with Tony's bonds, is what if the factory doesn't work, or the cars don't sell, and his operation goes belly up? If Tony goes out of business then Mikey doesn't get ANY of his nest egg back, he's just lost 10 grand. And let's face it, Tony is a good guy, but does he have it in him to run a whole factory? On the other hand, he's pretty sure IBM will still be there even five years from now, so it seems like a slam dunk to buy the IBM bonds instead. Or it would be, except IBM knows that Mikey knows that they'll still be there in two years. In short, IBM knows that Mikey likes their stability, so they know they don't have to sweeten the pot much to get him to bite. So their IOU bond offers only $1100 in two years, not $1200 like Tony's. So what's a wannabe investor to do? How can he (or she) figure out EXACTLY how likely it is for Tony and IBM to snuff it in the next year?

This is where credit rating agencies come in. These are companies like Moody's, and Standard and Poor. Their whole gig is to look at company's like Tony's and IBM, and judge what the exact chance is that they'll be able to pay back their bonds down the road. They work out what the percent chance is, and then, because some investors are afraid of numbers, they turn it into a pretty letter grade like AAA or A- or B+. And they're pretty good at it, having been doing this for a hundred years and change. The riskier they say that your company is, the more you're going to have to offer as a return on your bonds if you want anyone to give you money for them. If IBM is an AAA rated company, their bonds are considered as good as money. If they say they'll pay you $1100 in 2 years, then darn it you're going to get your cash. If they say Tony is a B+, then they're letting you know that he's probably good for it, but you're definitely taking your chances.

Now let's move a little further up the food chain. Mikey Jr.'s dad didn't just put him through any old college, he finagled him into Harvard. And nobody ever really fails out of the Ivy League once they are enrolled, so Mikey Jr. graduated and was hired by an investment bank. Unlike dad, he spends all day every day toying with stocks and bonds and similar.

When you're a bank you've got two types of clients. One type gives you money to look after, and the other type you loan money out to. Having these two types of clients is basically what makes you a bank. So in that first column, there's the pension fund that Tony set up for his employees. He pays a bunch of cash in now, and expects to get it back with some interest when his employees retire so they can afford properly negligent and abusive hospice care. So Mikey Jr has that money to look after. This is where his other type of client comes in. He can check out businesses, and lend to them if he likes whatever project they need cash to get going, demanding a big payback down the road. Or, if he doesn't want to do all the work checking this company out himself, he can ditch the boring world of savings and loan banking and just start buying bonds from these companies based on what Moody's says. And the best part of this is that if he has a bond that pays back $1500 in 5 years but he needs the money now, he doesn't wait, he can sell it for $800, and whoever buys it can be the one to sit around and wait for the big payout. He just needs to sit at his little computer, and he can buy and sell bonds all day.

From his point of view, buying a bond is just giving someone some money now in return for getting more money later, and a mortgage is exactly the same thing. You give someone money to buy a house now, and then they pay you back in little drabs every month for the next 30 years. Cash goes out now, and (more) cash comes in later.

But then Mikey can get even smarter still. Why bother holding on to all those bonds and mortgages when he can just sell them (for a fee naturally) to the pension fund, and THEY can hold on to the suckers themselves? But there's a problem here. Lots of pension funds, and other such organizations don't want to buy mortgages because they're too risky. Last thing they want is to buy up a bunch of mortgages (meaning they pay someone for the privilege of receiving all the monthly payments that will be made on it in future) and then have a bunch of those houses default on them (as home owners are wont to do), and then they have nothing for their people to retire on. A lot of these funds have explicit rules saying things like "we only buy things rated A+ or better."... but mortgages aren't rated by credit agencies. And even if they were, they wouldn't be rated that high.

Here comes the game changing wrinkle. This is the bit that this whole story has been leading up to. This is the big idea. What some overly smart person realized is that while any given mortgage (or bond, or whatever) might go bankrupt and default on you, if you take a whole bunch of them and pipe the incoming money into one bucket, then the bucket might not end up fill all the way up as high as it should if EVERYONE paid, but it's certainly not going to end up empty either. SOME of those payments are bound to work out. So here's the clever plan: You take this bucket into which all the mortgages are paying, and you label the bottom third of it the "senior tranche." That means that when it's time to empty the bucket, people who have bought rights to the bottom third get first dibs on whatever is there, and they are pretty much guaranteed to be in luck. Then you can call the middle third the "mezzanine tranche" and the top third the "junior tranche." If you buy the junior tranche, you're only getting paid back if enough mortgages paid in enough cash for the bucket to get filled up high enough. The junior tranche therefore sells pretty cheap. The senior tranche OTOH will cost you. It's like buying IBM's bond instead of Tony's, you pretty much KNOW it's coming through.

And when Tony Jr. takes a bunch of bonds or mortgages (or bonds or whatever) and does this, he has now "structured" them into a "structured investment vehicle." In this case, specifically, it would be a "collateralized debt obligation" (yep, the CDO's we hear so much about).

And what is so great about doing this? Well, those rating agencies who wouldn't touch mortgages were fine with putting AAA ratings on those super safe senior tranche's, and when those tranches have AAA ratings, pension plans and mutual funds and suchlike are now comfortable buying them. Tony Jr. has put himself on the gravy train.

But what does he do with those middle and junior tranche's? They are kinda risky because heaven knows SOMEONE is likely to default. But not to worry, another smart banker figured he could just pull the same trick all over again, and roll a whole bunch of junior tranche's into a new bucket, and label that new bucket with it's own tranches. So the senior tranche in this new CDO bucket (a CDO² if you will) gets first dibs on whatever money comes through from the bottom tranches of the original CDO's, and so on. And the innovative free market jumped all over these new opportunities with alacrity, pumping more and more money into these wildly profitable "instruments." And yea, did business ever boom.

Now in the bad old days a bank would give you a mortgage, and then live off the money that you paid them for the next 30 years. That meant banks didn't want to give you a mortgage if they didn't have a pretty shrewd idea you were going to pay it back. But with the advent of CDO's they didn't have to do that anymore. They could make a mortgage, and then turn around and sell the rights to the mortgage payments to someone else, take their cut, and wash there hands of it. Most banks would try and sell their mortgages to the quasi-government organizations Fannie Mae (FM) and Freddie Mac (also FM). But the FM's had standards. They wouldn't buy up a loan unless it was made to someone with a job and a respectable credit rating. But a few private investors would buy up loans that the FM's would turn their nose up at. These 'sub prime' loans were pretty dicey of course, but the magic of structuring them into a CDO made a whole lot of that risk go away. After all, even if half of them defaulted, your senior tranche was going to be basically ok.

And these CDO's became big big business, to the point that more money was being spent on trading them back and forth than was going into building the factories, and other "real world" activities that all of this was supposed to be supporting. And to feed this market, a bunch of private sellers got into real estate, writing mortgages as fast as they could talk people into buying a shiny new house. And who cared if these people even had any money down, an income, or a credit history, just so long as they could be signed up for a mortgage that could be packaged into a CDO and sold on to some investor. And the junior levels of these dicey dicey CDO's? Well, just roll a bunh of 'em into a CDO² and you can sell them for even more. And, of course, all this extra house buying meant there weren't enough houses to go around for all the people who wanted them, so the prices went up and up and up... which, of course, made real estate look like a fabulous investment ("prices have gone up 30% in 3 years!"), so people got into buying houses just for the rising values... This is what economists call a "bubble." Bubbles have two properties. They inflate, and they pop.

Now here's another wrinkle on the wrinkle on the wrinkle: Credit rating agencies normally consider companies separately when they rate them. Odds of them going bankrupt may fluctuate up or down with the business cycle, but the credit rating companies just give you the long term outlook, regardless of what other company's are doing. And for investors who are just buying stocks and bonds from individual companies, this is fine. But the thing about these CDO's is that for them it really DOES matter if something bad happens to the other mortgages feeding into the same bucket. If you bought from the middle level of a bucket, you might not care if any one of the mortgages goes bad, but you do care a whole lot if they all go bad at once. You only get paid if enough money pours into the buckt that it fills up to your level. But the odds of a whole lot of mortgages independently folding up are small, right? Like, it's possible to flip a coin and get 40 heads in a row, but surely it's a pretty safe bet that it won't.

But let's say those houses are all in the same town, and lets say that the factory closes which used to employ most of the people in that town. All of a sudden you really do have almost all those mortgages defaulting at the exact same time. Rating agencies didn't really think about this much, because they weren't used to considering systematic risk. Or what happens if the economy suddenly goes into a recession...

Now let's put these two things together. One, we've got people buying stakes in buckets of money that are filled up as mortgage payments pour into them. Two, we have a housing bubble where prices go up and up in a self-sustaining cycle... which makes people want to give mortgages to anybody possible so they can package the mortgages into a CDO bucket, which makes the price go up even more. Oh, and did I mention that income for middle class earners had been stagnant for a decade (thanks Dubya!), so families were piling on debt, and taking out second mortgages (now rebraded as "home equity loans," which sound way less threatening, right?) just to maintain their standard of living... So, all of those mortgages feeding into those CDO buckets weren't really as independent as rating agencies assumed them to be (as they assume about everything).

So... when people finally got to the point that they wouldn't pay any more for houses, the prices stopped going up. And that meant that all the people speculating in real estate lost money. So they stopped trying to flip houses. And then there weren't enough real actual home buyers to keep prices up at their astronomic levels. So house prices went down and when that happened, lots of homeowners found themselves with freshly bought houses on which they owed considerably more than they could ever get by selling it (they were "upside down" in finance speak). So a lot of them walked out and defaulted on their mortgage payments, and all of a sudden, the cash flowing into those CDO buckets suddenly slowed to a trickle. People holding mid level CDO tranches, who had thought that it was almost impossible for so many people to default at once, found themselves looking ashen faced at their books, wondering what just happened.

And it was even worse for people holding a CDO², because even the "senior" tranches were made up of the left-overs from the bottom levels of groups of other CDO's... and the bottom level of all those CDO's were disappearing wholesale. Which was bad news for sub-prime assets, and bad news for pension plans and middle class guys like Mikey who had bought in to them to provide income to retire on.

And banks, who had taken in lots of people's money, with promises to pay more of it back later found that a lot of the money that they had been holding as nice profitable CDO's was now pretty much worthless. These are the "toxic assets" we hear so much about. It's not that they're toxic per se (really, a bank could throw them out their window tomorrow, if they wanted, and pretend they never saw them before), it's that they took the money they were supposed to be looking after and bought magic beans that stopped being magic, and now they don't have the cash to pay out what they owe. As the old saying goes, "it takes money to make money." A bank without money is therefore in a whole world of hurt.

And now we're at the end of the story. But before you go read that Harvard report (which hopefully you're now even better positioned to understand), there's one last question to consider. Why were these CDO's so overpriced?

Well part of it was that credit agencies were only used to considering companies in isolation, and weren't very good at considering systematic risk, like we just discussed. According to these Harvard guys' simulations they only had to be a little bit wrong about how much the odds of one mortgage defaulting were related to the odds of other mortgages defaulting (or bonds or whatever) for the predicted default rates to go badly wrong (especially for the CDO²'s).

But another part was because nobody had really thought through how even the top tranches would be affected by recessions. Imagine you're Mikey Jr., and you're buying stocks and bonds. When the economy does well, you do well, and when it does badly you take a hit. But what you really want is for your wealth to grow steadily, rather than shooting up and crashing down all the time.

So what you really want to find are a couple of stocks that might not grow as fast in the good times, but that are pretty immune to recessions - maybe beer companies, or movie theaters (people need to escape from bad times, right). If a stock move the opposite way most other stocks move, then it's a valuable one to have, because it smooths out the peaks and crashes in your portfolio (in finance jargon, it's a hedge, because it hedges your bets). But CDO's are the opposite. They are pretty much guaranteed to do well when the economy as a whole is doing well (because companies don't default on their bonds, and people don't default on mortgages when it's easy to make sales and get hired). But they reliably run into a whole lot of problems when the economy does badly (companies run out of cash to pay bonds all at the same time, people get kicked out of their houses en masse). That should make CDO's less attractive to own, but because people just hadn't thought this through (CDO's hadn't been invented last time there was a really big crash - or at least, they weren't widespread then). This lack of thought helped hype up the market into a bigger bubble full of enthusiasm wild success--the pop from which is still hurting us.

Congratulations, on reading all the way to the end here. You have earned the fabulous prize of late-onset myopia :)

Proven disasters shouldn't get half the joystick

2009-02-16T14:37:00.001-08:00

The airplane of state has been repeatedly flown into trees, mountains, and other assorted terrains for the past eight years. Now the republicans, in the name of bipartisanship are demanding "look, you want to fly up, we want down. How about we be bipartisan here, and fly just one of the wings into the mountain."

Right wing America: The land where eight years of unmitigated failure and disaster means: "Well thank heavens we, and our wisdom, was in charge."

I declare this post hereby en-titled.

2009-02-15T22:03:00.000-08:00

Republicans and conservative "blue dog" democrats like to go on and on about "entitlement reform." Riight. All I know is that according to the American constitution, all men (and we presume women) are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it's hard to have any of those things when you are starving in a gutter, and dying of some uncured but curable disease.

Although it would be fun to start an entitlement program by which all registered Republicans are rounded up an thrown in prison. What, do they think they're just entitled to walk around wherever they like?

On a related note, their religion may say that gays shouldn't be allowed to get married, but mine says that Republicans belong in jail. If we are obliged to allow their religion to be freely enforced by the state, then so should mine be too.

What if you played Monopoly and the game never ended?

2009-02-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

The game Monopoly is a pretty good metaphor for capitalism (I, personally, am the unlaced boot), because it models the positive feedback loop. Once you own lots of property, it's easy to make money, and that money lets you buy more property off the cash strapped players. The upshot is that you usually get a slow start, then an energetic ferment in the middle of the game where anyone can win, and then a creeping inevitability at the end, as one person gets richer and richer, and everyone else get knocked out of contention.

That's a lot like real life, except here bankruptcy doesn't mean you now have time to grab a new bag of chips from the basement, it means you are at risk of becoming a street person. Also, the game Monopoly has to end when one person owns all the property, because nobody has any more money to pay them anything. But real life doesn't end. Instead, the winners keep sucking in wealth, trickle out a little charity, and hand to their kids ownership of the railroads and Park Avenue. This, historically, is how it's worked (see Robbers, Baron). And this is what libertarians and neo-cons don't understand. The best bit of the game is the middle bit, where everyone is the most engaged, and there is real space for eventual winners to move up.

It took us till the 20th century to figure out is how to make real life Monopoly keep on working. You need a government that progressively skims people's wealth as they get richer, and which takes a fat cut out of what they pass to their kids. Obviously you don't take everyone to zero, but the trick is to keep the game in its middle stages where there are winners and losers, but people are close enough that they can move from one to the other. That's where the action is, that's where the vigor is, that's where the liveliness is.

And hey, now you can use the tax money to help people, and to invest in things like education and research that aren't profitable in the short term, but that level the playing fields in the medium term, and pay off for everyone in the long term. It's win win win win.

More than you ever wanted to know about The Boss

2009-02-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

I watched the superbowl with several people who are grad students in poetry at one of the most elite poetry programs in the US. After this happened at half time:

... one of them reported: "Bruce Springsteen just tea bagged all of America."

Ah, poetry.

The enemy of their enemy makes discharge come out of people's whozits

2009-01-31T16:17:00.001-08:00

So the right wing is in a lather, demanding that attempts to fight STD's be removed from the stimulus bill. I've never thought of AIDS, syphilis, and gonorrhea as being unfairly persecuted before... But that's Republicans, always expanding our horizons.

Or perhaps it just hasn't occurred to them that spending money on fighting these things involves paying people to do their jobs, which involves putting money in the pockets of potential consumers, which enables consumption, which feeds retailers, which will help minimize the recession... and once this realization takes over their pro-business instincts will kick in and they'll get behind the measure. Or maybe not?

How not to make friends with the modern feminist movement

2009-01-30T19:08:00.000-08:00

I've never really liked the term "patriarchy". Before this is written off as exhibit Q of patriarchy in action let me add that much of my PhD was about the psychology of prejudice, and I don't think that a word like patriarchy really does prejudice right.

For one thing it's focused entirely on gender, but what about the other kinds of prejudice? Like 80 years ago it would be fair to say we were in a WASPiarchy, but these days jews aren't really resented in most of North America, and Irish and Italian Americans are no longer (by the bizarre logic of prejudice-land) "races" so much as flavors of whiteness. Plus there's a shifting miasma of other prejudices. Depending where you are there's a smartiarchy or a dumyarchy, and there is an omnipresent and exceptionally powerful cooliarchy (tied in heavily, but not exclusively, to the beautiarchy).

I'm not trying to be glib here - Gender based prejudice is almost certainly the most common form of prejudice in terms of raw frequency of occurrence, and leads to lots of Really Bad Things. The set of stats I found in a quick google search had Black men making a slightly higher median income than white women at all levels of education - though they were reasonably close, and both dwarfed by White men's income (1995 stats makes it slightly old data). And of course, the statistics on rape are just mind-bogglingly evil. But I don't think it's easy to compare suffering side by side. Women are at a far higher risk of being raped, Blacks are at a far higher risk of being imprisoned... I don't think you can even start to contemplate questions like: "how many years in jail would you trade for being raped once". It simply defies humanity to do so. Suffering on this kind of scale is just horrible wherever it is found. And it's not just gender and race. People with mental disorders, for example, can suffer social stigmas that put them at elevated risks of alcoholism and suicide, and poor people are basically screwed every which way to Sunday (especially in the States where they get lousy health care, if any at all). So we're living in a patri-whity-neurotypic-wealthiarchy for starters.

On a more philosophical note, as Wikipedia puts it "The English suffix -archy (from Greek αρχή, rule) denotes leadership and government." Prejudice certainly can be codified into, and enforced by government (see Crow, Jim) but most modern prejudice has little to nothing to do with government, and very little to do with leadership either. In fact, a lot of it takes place at non-conscious levels, merely shaping expectancies rather than directing commandments at people - and people's level of prejudiced actions (at least the non-overt modern kinds) seems to ebb and flow with their level of insecurity. That's not a governing principle, it's people just being shitty to each other when they're feeling defensive.

That isn't to say that prejudice doesn't shape society - the types of roles people get shunted in to, and how easy it is for them to flourish there matter (see the enormous wage disparities). And anything that encourages or excuses aggression can lead to physical assaults and their coverups. But that doesn't make it an "archy: any more than other strong social force are. People feel compelled to surround themselves with other people and have friends, and will massively rearange their worlds to get it, indeed will put up with massive amounts of abuse to get it, but we don't live in a sociarchy do we? Really?

Playing the game so hard you forget to win?

2009-01-30T16:38:00.001-08:00

Krugman says:

The House has passed the stimulus bill with not a single Republican vote.

Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?

Ok, but my understanding is that it still has to get through the senate, right. So it's not like the Dems could have just written ANYTHING they liked and zipped it through. Just because mom isn't paying attention doesn't mean you can get away with anything when it still has to get past dad (although it seems odd to be casting R's as the parental figures here, when a whole lot of them seem more intent on behaving like spoiled 12 year olds).

Plus some people smarter than me (e.g.,) argue that Barrack is playing the long-term optics here - he gets to come back and say: "we offer them compromise after compromise, and consultation after consultation, and STILL they don't even try to support the results."

Though, I guess at some point you have to stop playing politics for gain and using the gain that you've already bought... it's a tricky thing, no.

As they say in England,

2009-01-29T16:41:00.001-08:00

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Solving the myseries of life, one doo doo analogy at a time.

2009-01-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

Nate Silver wonders why precisely zero Republicans voted for the stimulus bill in the house. His best theory:

The House does not cast a secret ballot. It seems plausible that there were a dozen or so Republicans who were on the fence, waiting to see how their colleagues would vote --- and when those votes started to come in unanimously against the bill, nobody wanted to be the ugly ducking.

In other words, there was a lot of normative pressure not to, perhaps even some pluralistic ignorance by which the congrescritters all assumed they were the only one who didn't object... But you do sometimes get small numbers of Republicans voting against their party. As Nate himself points out, a few days ago 3 of 178 Republicans voted for the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

I saw a Republican congress guy on teevee last night when I was at the gym, and his claim was that the house R leadership told a bunch of their members to vote for the old TARP bank bailout, and were roundly ignored. This time the leadership just took their cue from anti-stimulus sentiment of the general membership, and agreed to say 'no'.

My guess is that the Republicans have had a creeping awareness for some time now that their brand was in serious doo doo, and when the doo doo hit the fan during the last election, they realized that they are up to their necks in it, and their world is a big frightening smelly place. They are now desperately huddling together, clinging white-knuckled to whatever vestiges of ideology they think might have any legs whatsoever with the general public, and "fiscal conservative" is all they've got. And so they are going to pull it out from under all the doo doo, and place it on their personal alter of political expediency and pray to it, with all the weak-kneed fervour they can muster. And the first item of business for them to pray for is that nobody notices the horrible slurping sound that comes from anything so well buried being pulled out from under that much doo doo, because if people realize that "fiscal conservatism" is something the republicans only really care about when the Dems are in power, then the doo doo might close in completely over their heads.

Of course, one of Nate's commentors has a wittier take:

Groucho Marx: From the 1932 movie "Horse Feathers"

"I'm Against it"

Music and Lyrics By: Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby

Song Lyrics:
[Groucho]
I don't know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I'm against it.

Your proposition may be good,
But let's have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it.

I'm opposed to it,
On general principle, I'm opposed to it.

[chorus] He's opposed to it.
In fact, indeed, that he's opposed to it!

[Groucho]
For months before my son was born,
I used to yell from night to morn,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
And I've kept yelling since I first commenced it,
I'm against it!

--

UPDATE: It seems someone at ObWi is thinking down the same lines as me. Thought they do so with a total absence of scatological analogy. Disturbing, no?

Academics are supposed to be the impractical ones, why are business leaders being the self-defeating idiots?

2009-01-29T08:03:00.000-08:00

Republicans want tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts (but not ones to poor people) as the solution for everything.

Here's why that's particularly stupid (recession edition): the problem is NOT that companies don't have enough money to build factories with. It's not like people are going to the mall and saying "I'm so frustrated, I just can't find enough things to buy. Won't somebody please give industry more cash so they can invent more products".

The problem is that consumers are looking at all the stuff on sale, and shrugging it all off because they can't *afford* any of it right now. Give more money to the inventors, and they're not going to risk it on R&D for big new products, not in this economy. Give it to banks, and they will sit on it, because they figure anyone they lend it to will just lose it anyway. Give it to rich people, and maybe they'll invest some of it (i.e., give it to banks and inventors, who will duly sit on it), or they'll stick it under THEIR mattress themselves.

What we need to do is to spend money building railroads, laying grass in parks, paying young people to be rangers for the summer... something, anything, to get cash into the pockets of ordinary Americans (particularly poor ones, who are pretty much guaranteed to go out and spend it post haste) so that they can go out and be consumers again. If American business leaders could remove their heads from their own behinds for just a minute they would see that lack of consumers is a far bigger problem than lack of investors right now, and they would get solidly behind heavy-spending stimulus bills, rather than trying to block them like they are.

Normally, business faces a collective active problem over wages - it is in their interest to pay their own employees as little as possible, while hoping that everyone else pays their employees generously, so that those employees have the money to buy the company's goods and services. But that constraint isn't even here now - if the money comes from the governments, why are the corporations so opposed? Answer: toxic ideology and stunning myopia.

The self-image of choice for business people is traditionally of a square shouldered, granite jawed colossus standing astride the flows of commerce, in a sharp suit. Okay, but lets add to that picture a Mr. Magoo squint, and two inch thick glasses. Now imagine he's just dropped the glasses. That's about right.

--

Update: Krugman says something similar, but in more technical terms.

"conservative" means you're supposed to want things to be consitent, right?

2009-01-29T07:51:00.000-08:00

Rush Limbaugh in the WSJ, via

Fifty-three percent of American voters voted for Barack Obama; 46% voted for John McCain, and 1% voted for wackos. Give that 1% to President Obama. Let’s say the vote was 54% to 46%. As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion—$486 billion—will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46%—$414 billion—will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me.

Yeah, because this is exactly how the Republicans governed. Bush got 51% of the vote, Gore got 49%, so Bush said "well, that means we get half the policies I want, and half the ones you want. I want to declare war in Iraq and drop taxes enormously on rich people. Name 2 policies of your own, or just pick one of mine and we'll nix it"

I assume that rush made this suggestion because he is a good bible readin' Christian (after all, Jesus was always talking about hypocrites, and why would he do such a thing if he didn't want us to BE hypocrites).

Corporations: Delivering value to nation state clients for 300 years

2009-01-29T07:45:00.000-08:00

Reading a book on the history of the corporation (it's good). So it turns out that the East India Company was given a monopoly on tea to America, allowing them to sustain high prices, and that this happened shortly before... you guessed it, the Boston Tea Party. 300 years later, the Americans, having completely failed to learn from their own history, put the company Blackwater in charge of much of the security in Iraq, under rules that let them shoot pretty much whoever they want without consequence.

Sometimes you don't have to make up analogies, the world just hands them to you.

Bush the not so stupid?

2009-01-22T16:22:00.001-08:00

I hear a lot of people thinking that Bush is an idiot. I think this is true only in the sense that he was an idiot not to realize that the presidency was beyond his abilities and to pass it over.

I think the reality is that he's a marginally bright guy (maybe even brighter than average), but he was put in charge of a very very very complicated thing. I think he did his best with it, but in the words of a novel I read once "he was like a competent Ford mechanic with a Ferrari on his hands." Except really he tended to screw up the normal businesses he ran too, so maybe it would be better to say that he was a competent bicycle mechanic with a Ferrari on his hands.

"Well I got the gas going to the cylinder tubes. That's what you gotta do right, a engine can't fire if you don't got the gas going to the tubes. Anyway, I did my best with it, history will have to be the judge. Heh heh."

And there's nothing wrong with being a bike mechanic. I like to tinker with them myself, but if you've got a beaten up stealth bomber that needs some work, I suggest you find someone else. And that, RIGHT THERE, is what makes me smarter than Bush.

Congratulations America

2009-01-21T15:50:00.001-08:00

on finally having an adult in charge again. And what an adult that!

Welcome back. It's been too long. You have no idea how much we missed you.

Kristol

2009-01-20T22:32:00.000-08:00

I posted a little while back about the legendary inaccuracy of the miraculously still-employed pundit Bill Kristol. Perhaps I was too harsh. Here he is on Fox "News," Dec 17, 2006:

"Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. I'll predict that right now."

Minor correction there Bill: PRESIDENT Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single democratic primary. Sorry, you were saying?

h/t huffpo.

eh

2009-01-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

life has been crazy, posts have been few...

but here's a pretty interesting video to keep the life support machine on this blog for the now

Problems with survey design

2009-01-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

AOL news asks:

Do you think Jeb Bush will seek the presidency? Y/N

and

Would you vote for Jeb Bush for president? Y/N

you can go there and vote. The problem is, they don't give the any of the right answers (for the record, respectively: "Dunno." and "Not ever EVER EVAR in a bazillion years if you torture me with rhino grade cattle prods. Unless, maybe, it was a choice between him and dubya. But all else equal there I'd take the cattle prods")

Holy Jiminiy God on a stick.

2009-01-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

British Atheists have scrounged together the money to put posters on 200 buses saying: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”(story w. pic).

“I think it’s dreadful,” said Sandra Lafaire, 76, a tourist from Los Angeles, who said she believed in God and still enjoyed her life, thank you very much. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I don’t like it in my face.”

To be fair, they're far classier in America:

Though also, sometimes, funnier:

source.

A tale of two scandals

2008-12-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

Scandal #1: State governor turns out to be corrupt bastard. There's no evidence whatsoever that the incoming president was in on this corruption at all (the investigators specifically declare this when indicting the governor), but coming from the same state they obviously knew one another and had had some political contact in the past.

Scandal #2: A Senate report reveals that the outgoing presidential administration was involved at high levels authorizing torture of prisoners.

Which do you think the press would cover ad nauseum? Would it help to say that the president in scandal 1 is a democrat, and the president in scandal 2 was republican? That's right, of course they obsess over #1 and ignore #2. Actual high crimes and misdemeanors (R) are way less interesting than the possible whiff of unlikely but maybe outside chance at impropriety (D).

But here's my offer for the people who say it's all just "harsh interrogations:" Undergo a week of "harsh interrogation"... y'know, just like America did, stress positions, days spent naked in unvaryingly-brightly lit very cold rooms, with maybe dogs being brought in to snap at your genitals at unexpected intervals. And some of the old standbyes like gaggind and blindfolding rolled together with sexual humiliation, dessecration of one's holy books, 14 hours of interrogation, extended exhaustion. And maybe just a tad of good old fashioned waterboarding now and hten. If the brave patriot can get through this without breaking and admitting that htey are being tortured, we'd all agree to drop the point. I'd give them 3-4 days tops.

A meek proposal

2008-12-21T16:20:00.000-08:00

It's a good thing there are God fearing Christian conservatives in the US or there wouldn't be a death penalty. But if there were more, then perhaps executions wouldn't be done by lethal injections or electric chairs. These methods, "humane" as the bleeding hearts call them, are nearly painless. What sort of punishment is that for the things criminals have done!

What happened to a good old fashioned crucifixion? If someone has gone and broken God's commandments, and murdered or stolen, or blasphemed, or borne false witness, then give them a nail in each hand and one through their feet, and let them meet their maker up on a cross, just as the bible describes. And if they've committed a particularly horrible crime, then I say jab them with something sharp while they're up there. You'd have to put it on a stick to reach, of course, but nothing modern engineers couldn't solve I'm sure. And just so they know they are being punished we should take a link of barbed wire from a prison wall, and form it into a little circuit - a prison wall in miniature if you will - and press that onto their brow.

If it's good enough for the bible, then it's good enough for America.

Advice to a friend who's going through hard times

2008-12-19T18:31:00.001-08:00

Dude, there's only one person in the world who's even supposed to be perfect, and they killed him years ago.

We all have regrets. All of us. Time is an impatient medicine though. Peace my friend.

Things that aren't always as fun as they sound: Irony

2008-12-18T00:29:00.000-08:00

sometimes irony comes in the flavor "tragic"

Humbug on Christmas exclusivity

2008-12-10T18:18:00.000-08:00

Every so often I see people getting a bee in their bonnet that "Jesus is the reason for the season," who are trying to make Christmas the sole preserve of Christianity. So ok, they've got a strong point on first appearances with the name thing, but...

I celebrate Christmas, because I was raised celebrating it. You can't raise someone up their whole life to have an emotional resonance to something, and then suddenly demand they stop celebrating it because they are doing so with the wrong theology in mind. Especially not when you went and appropriated much of its imagery and tradition from other groups anyway to start with (hint, Christmas trees, caroling, feasting, party time with the family, mistletoe, December 25th, are all pagan innovations that Christmas merely appropriated along the way).

In short, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the argument that non-Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas. In fact, such demands are downright Scrooge-ish, and being as Charles Dickens branded Christmas as the anti-miser holiday (no, that part isn't an ancient Christian tradition either), I say humbug to all who would want me to take my tree down. The irony is satisfying :)

pencil industry to disappear now pens invented

2008-12-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

Far be it from me to rain on anyone else's Detroit bashing high, But Thomas Friedman's latest ode to the big 3's short sightedness contains the following silliness:

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.

I guess I'm pretty behind the times, but our house still gets quite a lot of mail-order catalogues, the world still seems pretty well populated with HMV's, and Barnes and Nobles hasn't exactly gone under either.

All of the industries he's mentioning are facing some new challenges, true... in fact, there are even better examples he could have picked, such as print newspapers vs. the internet... but even there, people used to predict that paper books would fall completely by the wayside once personal computers spread - remember the "paperless office"...

All in all this is a pretty horrendous case of pundit fallacy #642773: "Any sexier form of technology will inevitably entirely displace the older, less sexy form from the market."

If "great president" Ronald Reagan was Hollywoods gift to historical revisionism, what happens when still-alive conservative actors talk?

2008-12-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

Some idiot is starting a new web site for all the poor conservatives in Hollywood, and is duly and amusingly mocked.

This reminds me of a clip I saw of John Voight leading some ra ra in the audience at a Sarah Palin rally. A reporter asked him about the bailouts or tax plans or some such, and he said words to the effect of "oh, I don't know about any of that stuff go ask one of the politicians. I'm just an actor." So... uh... if you don't know anything about what thse guys are promising to... you know, do... if they get elected, then why are you running around trying to gin up support for them?

Clearly being a Republican is basically a tribal thing for some of these people - it literally doesn't matter who is running or what they promise to do, but the Republicans are us, and us are the good guys, so goooo us! I mean, Republicans! Seriously, I think the Republican candidate could have been the slack-jawed son of a plutocrat, who was only running because he'd already run everything else he'd been handed into the ground, and he would still have vo... okay, bad example.

Truth karma: Making up for lies with extra strong truths

2008-12-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

In an ABC Nightline interview set to air tonight, Bush is asked about evolution. He is pushed into admitting that maybe you can have evolution AND divine creation, then says (in part):

"You're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president."

Sweet holy understatement.

"I'm just a simple tome," says the 4th grade colouring book...

glasses are too expensive, but who needs to see anyway

2008-12-08T13:10:00.000-08:00

Sullivan writes about the trouble that newspapers are in.

The economics of this are brutal. Print and paper and delivery by lorry are immensely cumbersome and expensive compared with a modem – or even with a mobile reading device that you can take on a train or bus in the morning. A single blogger in his bedroom can reach as many readers as a big paper, with no overheads and no staff and no product costs except band-width. That kind of economic competitive advantage is entirely a function of technological change and it is unavoidable...

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy.

I've been thinking about this lately too. And it's not just the newsprint that is expensive for newspapers, it's much of the original reporting too. Somebody has to go to interview the locals in the worlds contested spots to find out what really is going on. And that someone isn't going to be Sullivan or Kos or anyone at NRO either. "Real" journalists are already struggling with this, and not always doing a great job, and if the business model that supports them collapses, we're all in a serious dose of trouble. Journalists, whatever their flaws, basically serve as human intelligence for the general public.

Now that I have you worried about this hit, here's the shoe coming to whack you from the other side: The lower cost analysis machine (i.e., blogs) that is currently cannibalizing the more expensive "research and analysis" machine (i.e., news) still requires "facts" to run on. But where will they come from? Blogging is not profitable enough to support much primary research, so there's only a few major possibilities.

Perhaps there'll be a big market for free lance reporters to build personal reputations as news gatherers, selling their info to the blogging world. But Bloggers don't really have the money to pay for that now, and even if they did, there'd be nothing to stop everyone from 'free riding' off the first other people to announce the info. So perhaps we'll manage to assemble distributed networks of private local citizens all over the world, who will post their local intelligence onto the web, but good luck getting much of that out of, say, Myanmar. More ominious, and perhaps likely, is that people with deep pockets and profit making agendas on their minds will realize that there is a niche open to them to control the public discourse by financing the fact gathering, and then manipulating what is released. Want to know if there are still bloody diamond wars going on in Africa? DeBeers will be happy to pay for reporters to go cast light on the situation, and who is there to contradict them? If you think that political and corporate kleptocrats are already directing too much of the feed into our news-dissemination machines, just imagine what happens when journalists aren't just too lazy/stressed to do good work, but are out of their jobs entirely.

It's been dangerous enough to see what happens when a third to a fifth of the US public are completely unplugged from the reality based world, insulated in a bubble of talk radio madness, but what happens when that mooring is cut for the rest of us?

The more things change, the more they aren't the same

2008-12-06T21:34:00.000-08:00

As I recall, the knock on Obama was that he was all lofty sentiment, no details.

Silence is golden better than a kick in the groin

2008-12-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

So William Ayers finally talks in the NYT. It seems he thinks all the attention to him in the election and breathless descriptions of him as a terrorist were dumb and overblown because he tried not to kill any actual people. To be fair to him, he's completely right, but don't expect the right wing noise machine to start being fair to anyone any time soon if they think there are points to be scored.

The real debate, of course, comes over his assertion that he didn't try to say any of this in the actual election because he didn't think it would make any difference in the sound bite culture. Would it have? I don't know, possibly not. Obama wasn't in a position to say "but he just damaged some property, he didn't try to kill anybody, that's stupid but it's not terrorism, there's no intent to cause terror," because it would have completely ceded the grounds of the debate. Instead of talking about all the policy issues he was winning on, or even how he had no connection whatsoever to the acts in question, he would have been bogged into a debate about whether the acts officially crossed the line into terrorism, which a) sounds like he's being an apologist for them, which b) makes it sounds like he doesn't think they were actually so bad, and maybe even like he kinda agreed with them. Obama had to avoid this ground like the political plague it was. But would it have raised these same problems if Ayers himself had published this same column 2 months ago?

Probably. If swing voters would have read this article (or heard some bastardized sound bite of it) and gone "oh, he wasn't killing any real people, that's obviously not terrorism, why are you still going on about it then?" that would be one thing. But if his acts fill an ethical gray zone in the minds of politically moderate Americans then it would have framed the issue as "was Obama's guy a terrorist or just a criminal," which is way worse than the more realistic framing of "hey, Obama barely knew this guy, and guilt by association is a skeezy strategy anyway." So, I'm thinking, on balance Ayers did the right thing.

flipping ballots

2008-12-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

I've seen it argued that if the Minnesota recount between Norm Coleman and Al Franken are within the statistical margin of error for ballot counting (which is small, but the gap between them may be even smaller), then they should flip a coin to decide who gets to be senator.

This just seems like extra work - if the ballot count is already within the margin of error, then it's already random which of them is winning, so why not go with the millions of ballots already flipped, rather than a single quarter? Is it just to acknowledge that the outcome is random so that whoever goes to Washington can't claim they have a mandate? But since when did anyone ever let that affect their votes anyway?

Flipin' 'eck.

The Great Rudderless North

2008-12-04T13:33:00.000-08:00

It's an international emergency, markets are exploding, people are being thrown out of work en masse, plutocrats are being forced to cut back to mere single silk linings to their napkin holders, and Canada's minority government is responding so badly that its radically disparate opposition have managed to find enough common cause to turf the bastards... And Rick Mercer, Canada's native genius gives a witty summary, yaaay.

So now still-prime-minister Harper has persuaded the GG to carry out a legal hijinck to suspend parliament for 2 more months so it can't be used till then to depose him. Which doesn't seem so bad (2 months to plan for how to handle being prime minister in the midst of an economic crisis may even be a good thing), except that... you know, the economic crisis is hitting NOW, and it might be a good idea to have someone steering the ship more... what's the word I'm looking for... 'nowish'. And the GG signed off on this move why? Because saying 'no' would have made waves she was probably scared to deal with. Some day they will make a "profiles in courage" series, about someone else.

So the ship of state has busted into a field of icebergs, the hull is getting bashed and scratched, water is leaking in left and right, and a fist fight has broken out in the cabin over who gets the steering wheel. And what has the captain done? With steely preschool-honed instincts, he has locked everyone out of the cabin for the next 2 months so that nobody can take the hat away from with all the fancy braiding on it. Oh Canada, you inspire ~~such confidence~~ Rick Mercer.

Wheeeeeeeee!!!

2008-12-04T10:12:00.000-08:00

I think I've just figured out some research stuff that is a) totally central to what I've been studying for ages now, and b) has been bugging me for ages.

It's like I've been wandering around for the past 6 months, waving a cone around folornly, and I just found the double-deep freezer of mint chocolate chip cookie dough lemon sorbet. Wheeeeeee!!!!!!

business jargon, is there nothing it can't do?

2008-12-03T21:31:00.000-08:00

Tapped report that:

Today's great blog debate: Is "soft power" really an appropriate term for describing non-military power? Matt Yglesias thinks it needs to be retired. Kevin Drum suggests some alternative terms. Steve Benen recalls Ezra's observation earlier this year that it's the second term that's really the problem, not the first. Perhaps it's best to use "influence." After all, that's what we're talking about, right -- the ability of the United States to influence others without the threat of the military?

I can't believe they're trying to rebrand their political jargon. But if you want to go that route, what about "influence equity."

Prop 8 the musical.

2008-12-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

Funny or die made a funny. Which is lucky because while it might have been worth it for some of the other celebs here, it has Neil Patrick Harris in it, and if he died, the loss to western civilization would be incalculable.

They have more Jack Black videos too

Seriously, you couldn't calculate the loss.

H/T First Draft

I'm not sorry I robbed you. Let's just not talk about it

2008-12-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Republicans are insisting that their various crimes (spying on Americans, torturing prisoners, gutting habeas corpus, politicizing the justice department, etc) not be investigated now they've lost power, because doing so would be "divisive."

That's 100% backwards. Committing crimes is divisive, sunshine and investigation of those crimes is healing. It's time for them to grow up and take responsibility for their actions and at least some of the damage that they have caused. I thought Republicans were supposed to be in favor of people paying the price for their crimes. They're practically famous for it.

Overthrow your government! (Canadian style).

2008-12-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

Attention Americans! There is a situation north of your border. Power may be changing hands 2 weeks AFTER people thought an election had settled everything. Here's the deal:

step 1: Firearms!

Make sure you have them all registered, you don't want any potential criminal marks on your record before you start this

Step 2: Get enough peeps elected.

See, in Canada you don't vote for a president or a prime minister (even though we actually have one of the latter), you just vote for your local MP (Member of Parliament - y'know, boring... let's call it 'Masta Pimp'), then all the elected MP's go to join up with their parties (heck, gangs) in Ottawa. Whichever gang has the most MPs gets to make their leader the PM (lets say, Pimp Masta). Sometimes MP's change gangs mid-season, sometimes they declare they selves (hey, I like this) independent. Shit happens, and it's all wild and cool until the next election comes and they have to go back to their riding (honestly, that's what we call electoral districts, the name comes pre-pimped) and kiss some ~~ass~~ babies to get re'lected.

Step 3: Work the (strictly non-freudian) levers of power.

So right now the blue gang (aka "Conservatives," aka "party of unmitigated evil") are the biggest of the lot, and their leader, a dork called Stephen Harper, is the PM. But everyone else is ~~upset at their failure to handle the economic crisis~~ sick of their weak ass shit, and the two next biggest gangs - the oranges (aka NDP) and reds (aka "liberals"... yeah, it's not considered a dirty word in Canada. In yo face biatches) - who have more ~~MPs~~ playas between them than the conservatives, and are getting together to take things over.

Step 4: Blow some shit up...

which in Canada we do with some hard ass, heavy hitting... eh, voting. Yes, this is a country where the revolution comes not stealthily in the night, but is announced well ahead of time so it can be properly scheduled in the correct legislative body. Word!

So once the gummint loses a vote of no confidence they are officially out on their ~~lily~~ executive branch asses. The GG (Governor General - who job is to stand in for the queen when she ain't in the hood) gets to decide what happens next. See, it's good to be the queen: you get pretty much complete power to do anything you want, at all, without anybody being able to stop you, on the sole condition that you never use any of that power. Yeah.

So the blues plan to tell the GG that she should call a new election (2 weeks after the last one just ended!), but the red and orange gangs will tell her, "yo, queen substitute biatch, we now be a alliance. Maybe, tha "Mitigated Good Alliance". Ya, good name. Anyway, we has tha most playaz, so make us da PM now." Not in those exact words, obviously, but close enough. And if the GG agrees, then the new PM will probably be the red gang's leader, a dork called Stephan Dion.

Step 5: Rulez baby!

Sweet! You are now the boss. And it ain't just passing votes (which you coulda done anyways), you're appointing senators, you're making your pet iguana ambassador to Denmark, you're issuing executive orders, hiring and firing watchdawgs, and cruising the mean streets of Ottawa Ontario like it ain't no thang. It's a paahtay on parliament hill, yo, and who bringing tha mineral water?

Update: So now the Conservatives (aka Tories) are claiming that this whole move is undemocratic. Yeah, because all those people who elected that majority of non-Tory MP's *totally* did so hoping that their party wouldn't get into power. :headdesk::headdesk:

How I stopped worrying and learned to love paying for the scalpel

2008-12-01T17:49:00.000-08:00

In the third presidential debate this year, the candidates were asked if health care was a right or a responsibility. Obama went for the former, McCain the latter.

My acid test on this had been:

"Can you imagine a situation in which a person has been so careless in socking away money that doctors should put their implements aside and just let them die?"

If your answer is 'no' then you see health care as a right, and if your answer is 'yes' then you are a psychopath.*

That's what I used to think, but after all these years in the States I've changed my mind and come to see the beauty in the "best health care system in the world." Yes! I've come to realize that the market is the only truly efficient means of distributing precious resources, and what is the care of expensively trained doctors if not a precious resource?

So to prove the point, I'll put my money where my mouth is. I've saved up a bit of cash of late, and have decided to splurge on a cancer! Not a really expensive one, obviously, like a brain cancer, but something affordable that can still deliver solid consumer value. I've shopped around a few of the local quacks (ha ha, medical humor!), and have been quoted some very affordable rates for extracting a tumor from my foot, or maybe an arm. One surgeon who, I must say, had a particularly warm and friendly staff (and the most beautiful waiting room I've ever seen) offered me an excellent deal on an excision off the back of a hand. I'm not sure I'd feel great about a scar there, but he had a far more comfortable air than some of the other doctors I talked to, and say what you will, but service is important. I feel like I could really have a beer with that guy, or something.

My fiance says we should spend the money on getting cable TV instead, but, as I always say, if you don't have your health care you don't have anything at all. It's a toughie, but I feel more efficient already. Anyway, I'll let you all know. And heck, maybe I'll have a great experience and will be able to recommend it as a way to spend your nest egg too.

* American health care apologists will point out that their emergency rooms are legally obliged to treat anyone who walks in their doors. But nothing prohibits them from charging said person, at their moment of life-and-death distress, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. And charge they do. So does it change your math if instead of "die," I substitute "ruin financially for the rest of their life"? I still hold that only a psychopath could agree.

Ship of fools

2008-12-01T10:52:00.001-08:00

What wondrous sights and sounds are to be beheld when a journalist plunges into the secret hidden world of a cruise ship trip organized by a conservative American organization? read it all:

They rush through the Rush-list of liberals who hate America, who want her to fail, and I ask them – why are liberals like this? What's their motivation? They stutter to a halt and there is a long, puzzled silence. "It's a good question," one of them, Martha, says finally. I have asked them to peer into the minds of cartoons and they are suddenly, reluctantly confronted with the hollowness of their creation. "There have always been intellectuals who want to tell people how to live," Martha adds, to an almost visible sense of relief. That's it – the intellectuals! They are not like us. Dave changes the subject, to wash away this moment of cognitive dissonance. "The liberals don't believe in the constitution. They don't believe in what the founders wanted – a strong executive," he announces, to nods. A Filipino waiter offers him a top-up of his wine, and he mock-whispers to me, "They all look the same! Can you tell them apart?" I stare out to sea. How long would it take me to drown?

h/t Balloon-juice

born to run skate

2008-11-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to figure out why my fiance gets misty eyed at Bruce Springsteen songs. She gets all revved up to "born to run," and "thunder ~~alley~~road," (my bad) and shakes her hair around like a terrestrial spaghetti monster, and apparently so does much of the rest of Western civilization. But I can't get much further in than tapping my foot vaguely at the better guitar licks.

There are plenty of other songs that turn my crank, so why does uber rock god, The Boss, leave me so tepid? I think, maybe, the music and lyrics conflict for me. The music is upbeat and edgy, but the lyrics are just kinda sad - they're about a lonely lunkhead who likes to drive around fast, and uh, drive around fast, who is staving off imminent Al Bundydom for a night. How? By talking a girl into joining him for an exciting evening of flirting with wrapping his engine block around a lamp post (or, if he's less lucky, smashing it through the neighbour's kid). It's like a romantic invitation to play chicken on the highway, or to stand right on the edge of a very tall building or something, just to feel some thrills. All of which is just... sad.

So what am I not getting? I think it's the cultural meaning that cars have in the states as the (not) living incarnation of freedom. If you're 16 and don't have a car, you're a caged victim stuck at your parents house, while those with wheels can explore the whole world*. I understand that, but as a guy who grew up on public transit, who has literally never owned a car in my life, only in an intellectual way. It's like how I understand that some South American tribes think it's pretty tough to paint themselves red and poke a stick through their bottom lip - I get the meaning, but not the vibe.

I try to think of my equivalents. I figure I could get myself a bit worked up about the freedom of hockey blades, how you can cut on them, carve and coast, how you can take off and reverse direction without even slowing down, all with the wind blowing through your hair - and most Americans wouldn't even get what I was talking about on that intellectual level...

So I guess that until someone writes a good song about life on ice, I'm just stuck with Arcade Fire, Pulp, and Billy Joel. Only The Good Die Young, now THERE'S a seductive song :)

* Operationally defined by most ~~Americans~~ people as: "my town and environs."

What if SerialKiller McRapist switched places with a Bush appointee?

2008-11-26T20:31:00.000-08:00

Greenwald makes some excellent points. Highly worth a read, and it inspired me to think: What WOULD the world be like if a regular criminal were to trade places for a little while with the Bush administration?

"Critics argue that Mr. McRapist should face sanctions for the aggressive seductions he carried out, which they term 'rape,' and the strong executive actions he took in terminating the living privilages of troublemakers who had caused offense - or as the extreme fringes of the liberal world term it 'cold blooded murder'. But really, why pursue the divisive policy of further investigating and punishing him for such hotly contested actions? Already he has suffered name calling and finger pointing, and any investigation would surely take up valuable court time that should be devoted to real problems. There are government officials who have planned and carried out torture, war profiteering, and killing of (often innocent) prisoners who were held without due process - and all this in direct contravention of a constitution which is the last, best, barrier between any of us and government tyrany. We can't afford to be soft on these crimes, as other governemnts waiting in the wings will only be tempted into further and worse crimes against humanity. So, please, drop the partisan divisiveness over McRapist's aggressive property gathering techniques. Ranting and shouting and calling it 'armed robbery' and 'theft over $10,000' does nothing to heal the wounds of a nation that should be getting past such rancorousness."

A personal victory in an abstract war on the personal.

2008-11-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

In the news a Florida court allows a 47 year old gay man to adopt 2 children (4 and 8) that he has been caring for for several years, finding no evidence that gays in any way make inferior parents or that children are harmed.

Many lament that the struggle for gay rights in the US has largely consisted of court victories and referendum losses. There are obvious reasons for this (i.e., gay rights win in court marraige because there is no rational case for banning gay marriage, and referendum losses pile up because we are still waiting for the older generation who were raised in a more blanketly homophobic climate to shuffle off the voting coil), but there's maybe a more subtle reason too:

It's a lot easier to deny someone the ability to do something so intensely personal as getting married or adopting children when you consider them from the emotional abstract distance of a voting booth. Pulling a lever for an idea when you are standing, anonymous and isolated, is pretty easy. It's the same way that it's pretty easy to shrug off headlines about starvation when we pass them in a newspaper box on the street. It may suck, but what's it really to do with you.

But in court you are face to face with a real human being who eats and breathes and sleeps like you, who has a mom and a dad, friends, likes and dislikes - who is a real person, and not just an idea. And it's much harder to tell someone to their face that they, personally, cannot marry the person that they love, whom they have lived with for twelve years, who they kiss each night, and celebrate each birthday with, that they two cannot marry each other because I have philosophical qualms about what it represents to my idea of 'family.'

It is easier to put a check mark on a ballot next to the word "war" than it is to personally kill someone with your own hands.

Lieberman: Debacle, or short man on end of stiff plank with point object at his back?

2008-11-25T01:10:00.000-08:00

So the bloggers are bellyaching about whether the netroots got kicked in the pants by Lieberman getting to keep his plush job. The highly recommended Whiskey Fire thinks that it's nothing to do with the bloggers, but it's the liberal congress things that got screwed.

The way I see it, Lieberman only looks like he's holding any cards. Sure he seems to have got what he wanted, and sure he's unlikely to get yanked in the middle of a session - that would just be embarrassing. But the house showed that it was willing to boot a member with higher standing when it shunted Levin out in favor of Waxman, so Lieberman knows that there's a recent and ready precedent for a strong challenger to cut him off at the knees in 2 years, and he knows that he has at best fair weather friends over on the Republican side, who agree with him on almost nothing but Iraq... So now has to chairmanate like he's actually worried about losing it, and he can't afford to make any enemies along the way among the democratic ranks who may soon depose him.

There's nothing like a senator who is starting to feel the burn under his little tosies to produce a delightful display of jumping back into line with alacrity.

Good boy Joe. The memo on "how high" is on its way.

"Coercive interrogation" is a destructive euhpamism

2008-11-23T18:37:00.001-08:00

Read Sullivan's whole post... but here to get you started:

"Under coercive conditions". Excuse me, but what does that mean in English? Try: Because they got intelligence from torturing people. Coercion means force. It means they forced "information" out of them. Not coax, trick, lure, force. That means the victims had no choice. And the only way in which human beings can seriously have no choice at all is by subjecting them to such severe mental and physical pain and suffering that they have no option as human beings but to tell their torturers something.

This is the defining line of torture: not some arbitrary comic book technique, but a psychological and physical fact: pushing another human being to the point where choice becomes unavailable to him or her. You can do this in any number of ways; it can take three seconds of electrocution or it can take two months of sleep deprivation, hypothermia and darkness. But the line it eventually crosses is the same line. Throughout human history, human beings have known what that line is, and the West was constructed on a disavowal of ever crossing it again. Why? Because a society that endorses torture commits itself not to limiting, but to extinguishing human freedom. And a protection of human freedom in its most minimal form is what our entire civilization is premised on.

Once that force is unleashed - and it is pure evil - it is almost impossible to stop it destroying your entire system of government. Maybe Europeans like me, who grew up in a land where torture was practiced by government widely in the distant past, and had that history dinned into us, understand this more acutely than those who have never known anything but a New World. But trust us Old Worlders passionate about the New: America and torture are mutually exclusive as ideas and realities. You can have one or the other. You cannot have both.

So when I read an American use the meaningless euphemism - "under coercive conditions" - as if force can be a condition that hovers in the air without anyone accountable for it, I shudder. When I read him tiptoe around what we are actually talking about, and express sympathy for those who tortured, illegally and secretly and against their oath of office, I shudder some more. Because we are numbing ourselves from moral responsibility and the only true protection we have from tyranny: the rule of law.
Even the word "torture" can be too vague and abstract a term. So let us state in plain English...

Read the rest here

Libertarianism & communism: similar opposites

2008-11-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

There's a weird triangle between fascism, communism, and libertarianism over the absoluteness of social control they lead to. Stay with me here a sec. Fascism says control comes from a "benevolent" dictator, communism says it comes from collective action, and libertarianism says it comes from individual contracts.

That last one may not sound like social control - and it isn't, when all parties involved (and not just the contracting ones) have symmetrical information, and (nearly) equal power. You can surely contract with your supermarket over Kraft Dinner without control being a major issue, but there are many places where these conditions are not met.

For example, there's a classic ethical dilemma that goes like this: Mr. Smith's wife is dying of a terrible illness. The pharmacist has a drug that would save her life, but refuses to sell it to Smith at a price that he can afford. Smith pleads and wheedles, and tries to negotiate barters or extended terms of payment to no avail, and resorts to stealing the drug to save his wife's life. Were his actions correct?

Those with moderately advanced moral reasoning, researchers claim, see Smith as justified in his action, as a human life is a higher good than mere possession of objects; the demands of saving a life outweigh the demands of protecting property.

Pure libertarianism fails this test. The libertarian would construe attempts to compel the pharmacist to offer the drug at an affordable price as a form of taxation that impinges on freely chosen action. In doing so it holds contracts to be more important than the very lives of the people who would hold them.

This placement of abstract rules above human life and suffering puts it in a league with doctrinaire communism. As much as it would be nice to believe that we are all islands, connected only by the contracts that we choose, this is just as wrong as believing that we are nothing more than a component in a collective. It shouldn't be rocket science, but libertarians seem and communists alike tend to forget that basic humanity requires we take an interest in the welfare of our fellow travelers, weighting carefully the complex trade offs between personal and collective interests. There may be ironclad cases to be made for each pole (person and collective), but sometimes ironclads clash, and we have to put aside the pleasures of dogmatic certainty in favor of pragmatic balances.

But there is a greater rub still: Libertarianism is a self defeating system. It may only fail badly when there are extreme power imbalances (say, between a South American villager, and a multinational corporation who dumps toxins into his drinking water as a side effect of producing goods it profitably sells to Europeans), but, if run long enough, will create these power gaps, even where they didn't exist before.

Unfettered laissez faire capitalism tends to be good at creating wealth, but lousy at distributing it. The turn of the 19th century (and to a lesser extent, the Bush years) saw turns towards libertopian economic freedom. It saw enormous wealth disparities created, with robber barons hoarding vast amounts of wealth, and the poor becoming poorer. A rich person has many options in a negotiation that a poor person does not. Only one of them can be placed in a position of NEEDING the other, for a job that provides food and shelter and care for vulnerable relatives. And when only one party needs the other, you have the very definition of a strongly power imbalanced negotiation that invites abuse.

Lest you think I'm making this up, on this great page of libertarian-relevant quotes, there is the following gem:

23- And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years.
Author unknown

I assume that God is the merchant here. Now think about the powers involved. God: infinite. Us: not so much. God, as a good capitalist, should try to get the best possible terms She can. If She can make us give up everything we have for free, that would be entirely rational... And let's face it, She pretty much could. If God is a libertarian then we are all very much screwed.

Footnote: Now even Bill Kristol is down on the Libertopian vision. Yes, THE Bill Kristol I was mocking just a few posts back. Reality has come a little loose, my head hurts.

Role model Bush changes the world for the better

2008-11-14T11:12:00.000-08:00

It seems, (via)

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government...

The Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked.

“Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”
Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?”
Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.

The phrase "Well that's the Bill Gates way" has a similar effect on programmers.

The future of the GOP

2008-11-13T18:03:00.001-08:00

Lots of people are bellyaching over who will lead the GOP in the future. Right now the important thing, though, is whether they'll ever figure out that the trick to government is not how big it is, but what you do with it. They aren't going anywhere till they've gotten over their size fetish.

America: guns are defense. Canada: guns are offense

2008-11-13T02:02:00.000-08:00

When I was a young and earnest Canadian I met some real live Americans at a model UN, and was able to put it to them that "it is insane that in the States you can legally own a gun, which represents the ability to instantly kill anyone at a whim, but if you show them your nipples you will be put in jail, but only if you are a woman". They acknowledged that this sounded weird but insisted that it had to be right because it just was, and what sort of a jerk was I for pressing such an unreasonable comparison at them. Cultural truisms are disturbingly resistant to logic.

Having lived now in both countries, I think the reason for this difference is that in America there is a far greater sense of floating imminent threat than in Canada. People here seem far more worried about crime and being attacked, and sometimes seem surprised at how unconcerned I am. I've had to soothe Americans, when walking through urban Toronto late at night, that there was absolutely nothing dangerous or silly about what we were doing.

So in America there's a greater sense that you have to defend yourself against facelss threats, for which purpose owning guns makes a lot of sense. In Canada, though, guns don't make you any safer because you already feel quite safe. To a Canadian (and quite a lot of urban Americans) the only real use for a hand gun is for making trouble, so they naturally regard it as crazy that you would want to allow many people to have them.

Now, American fears are somewhat justified by the staggeringly higher murder rate south of the border. But from a Canadian point of view this is extra irony, as the higher murder rate stems entirely from elevated rates of handgun deaths (mostly between people who know each other - statistically strangers don't often kill strangers), thus apparently confirming that guns are good for nothing but making lots of very deadly trouble, and banning trouble makes perfect sense.

Sarahead revisited

2008-11-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

Governor Palin clears up all the confusion about whether she knew Africa was a continent:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

Well sorry. Allow me to amend my analogies:

The once putative Goldman Sachs boss explained that she does know what liquidity is, because her mom bounced a check once, "and Safeway didn't have the office for paying of behind amounts, which was hard too on many aunts and uncles, which is relevant to cheesesteak and barbecue sauce, because paydays were Friday, also."

And the formerly erstwhile heart surgeon candidate? "Well it's great to be here speaking without a filter from the mainstream medical textbooks that say the heart is on the left side, when those of us in these more patriotic here regions kind of know that it attaches closer to your right wing, which is relevant for Alaska's position on the left of America's map, which is wrong also, because Alaska is America's heart unlike those city parts which are veins."

Oh Sarah, it's so great that you're rehabilitating your good name.

Defending marriage (and democracy and golf)

2008-11-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

California passes a law to "defend marriage." What does that mean?

So one man and one man is not a marriage. Hm. But I guess that's ok, because gays can still marry an opposite gender person if they want. Fair enough.

Let's try it elsewhere. How about the traditional definition of democracy:

Ergo, one woman, no vote. But don't worry, it's still fair, because a woman can still influence elections by persuading her husband or brother. Heh.

How about our long standing and important sporting traditions?

Don't be swayed by modern fads, Tiger Woods can perfectly well still hit balls at home... uh, with sticks... if he, ah, wanted...

Wait, maybe there's something wrong with this argument...

---

Analogies aside, a Q&A for conservatives:

Q: My Religion prohibits gay marriage:
A: So don't gay marry.

Q: I should have the religious freedom to ban it if I want.
A: But my religion says gay marriage is fine. Tell you what, you can ban that bit of my religion if I can ban other bits of yours... How about, say, wearing crosses. Deal? Ixnay on the gay marriage in return for ixnay on the crucifix necklaces. Isn't freedom grrrreat?

Q: But my religion says gay marriage is a sin.
A: And it also says that blasphemy is a sin, right? But I don't see you trying to vote cussing illegal. So either gay marriage is more important to you than the 3rd commandment (2nd for Catholics), or you have already accepted that your religious beliefs should not be imposed wholesale on everyone else.

Q: Gay marriage is really about justifying weird sex acts.
A: No, it's about being able to marry the person you love. If it was just about freaky sex then gays wouldn't want to get married would they? They'd just have freaky sex and not worry about promises of forever.

Q: The whole point of marriage is go have kids.
A: Hey, great point.

Oh.

And on second thoughts, gay people often are fertile, can have kids, and do a wonderful job of raising them too. So I guess this argument isn't so good after all.

Q: But being gay is a choice!
A: How would this conversation with yourself work? "Hm, a lifetime of persecution, marginalization, and violence? Sign me up!"

Look, I couldn't be attracted to my own gender if I tried. Not even for a minute. To me, men hold the sexual thrills of boiled cabbage. If you find that you are capable of feeling romantic love towards same gendered people, then I hate to break it to you but you aren't completely straight. I suggest you come to peace with it in your own personal way.

Q: Ah, but then if gay marriage is banned I won't be tempted into that sin!
A: And if cheeseburgers were banned you wouldn't be tempted by those either. Actually you would, remember how well prohibition worked?

Q: But all those other things, gender and race are genetic. Homosexuality isn't. Says defendmarriage.org:

There is clear evidence that people are not born homosexual. For example, studies of identical twins have found that when one twin is homosexual, the likelihood of the other twin also being homosexual is only 50 percent or less. If homosexuals were "born" that way, the incidence of homosexuality among identical twins would be 100 percent since they share exactly the same genetic material.

A: About 5% of the population is gay, so that means that your odds of being gay are literally 10 times higher if your identical sibling is gay. Gee, that *totally* doesn't sound like a genetic influence at all. :headdesk: Do they even think about this stuff before they post it?

Anyway, the point is that you can no more decide who to fall in love with than you can where lightening will strike. If you could custom order the people you love, and then love them on command, our lives would all be a whole lot easier.

Q: Homosexuality isn't natural.
A: Neither are cars, televisions, or pretty much anything on the McDonalds menu.
Though, really, gay sex is found in almost all the species of animals that nature has to offer, so, yes, actually it is natural. Who knew.

Q: But if you can marry same gender, then why not children or animals too?
A: Can animals knowingly, and with full understanding, pledge their entire life to remain with you, to love and honor, to join body and soul? Can children? In fact, can either of them form any kind of legal contract whatsoever? Nope. So there you go.

Q: But gay marriage is just wrong because, ugh... well it is.
A: That's the price of freedom I'm afraid. You have to let people do things that make you go "ugh," unless you have a spectacularly good public safety reason why they shouldn't. And there is simply no such good reason to ban gay marriage.

Q: But... But...
A: "America, sweet land of liberty*

* offer applies only in Massachusetts and Connecticut."
Doesn't fit very well does it?

Q: But it's my right to vote to ban anything I think is bad! That's what democracy is about!
A: And what constitutions are for is to protect unpopular minorities from the tyranny of squirmy majorities. They stop us from, say, suspending the right of women to vote, or of Jews to not be arbitrarily thrown in jail, or the left-handed to marry the right-handed ("what, we're not saying they can't get married at all, just not to right-handed people!") - no matter how many of us vote for it.

And hey, you'll be glad of it some day when whichever minority you (or your loved ones) belong to ends up on the short end of some majority's stick. You don't even have to speak out for other groups now, before anyone comes for yours, you just have to support the constitution's regular ability to protect us all. And that includes the right of consenting adults to marry the one that they love, whether or not you approve of their particular combination of races, genders, or religions. You don't have to like it, you just have to think how you'd feel if I had a power of veto over your choice of spouse.

Bill Kristol: Lex Luthor minus the super villain powers

2008-11-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

Bill Kristol, NY Times columnist, and erstwhile New Republic editor, has been getting a lot of flak for being wrong about... well, everything. He was catagorically wrong about every aspect of why it would be a good idea to invade Iraq, he was a champion of Sarah Palin as VP, before she was selected and (with regularity) after it was clear she was a punchline in a dress. He was boosterish of McCain's chances on the eve of his atomic electoral wedgie...

So he should be fired, right? Don't be silly, the news is an entertainment industry. There's a reason they're called news "stories." Sure 'reality-based' is a key part of their appeal, but that's (even more) true of OECD reports, and nobody reads those. No, the media require drama, and drama requires conflict, mistakes, and surprise. How boring would it be if Clark Kent wrote in his Daily Planet column that "superman will obviously defeat Lex Luthor given his combination of flying, super strength, super reflexes and X-ray vision," and Lex pens an opposing column saying "Yes, that's probably true actually." Our real world heroes are generally non super powered, so the punditocracy needs to supply exceptionally non-super villains to keep moving paper.

gold star for excellence in jeeogerafy

2008-11-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

Via Balloon-juice, Via GOS:

Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent.

It's like Goldman Sachs narrowly turning down a CEO candidate, only to find that they believes a balance sheet is something you practice on at the gym, that liquidity is what you get from too many beers, and that a financial instrument is a device for playing Finnish folk music. It's like someone nearly making head vascular surgeon at John Hopkins who turns out to believe that "veins" is what bitchy people call you, that "arrhythmia" is a variant of the lambada, and that "ventricle" is what octopuses have eight of.

30% of the American population still regard her as savior incarnate.... at some point, analogies fail.

conservative communication?

2008-11-05T21:28:00.000-08:00

We're starting to see conservative bloggers fretting about why they lost the election. Some think they just have to communicate with the voters better. The voters would fly back from the democrats deranged clutches if only the sanity of conservatism could just be explained right. Y'know, in a way they identify with...

Analogy: JoeCon Plumbers have been convincing clients for years, with ruthless effectiveness, that their program of whacking pipes with monkey wrenches is the bold manly plumbing that a real house needs, not any of that namby twisting and twidling that those LeadLib incompetents are always mincing on about, with their girly talk of adjusting, and spreading pressures, not to mention their dangerously effete crack-busting habit of wearing belts.

JoeCon now find themselves having had 6 years of exclusive access to the house, with an additional 2 years of lead executive access. Flood water gushes from crude holes in the walls, swirling up past their knees, toilets are blowing one after the other, in an unholy progression of domestic geysers. Fecal matter is dripping from the ceiling, springs are flying out of mangled water meters impaling anyone who stands too close, and the angry cheapskate neighbors are getting all upset at the raw sewage that has been piped into their living rooms for the past 5 years (hey, ain't Joe's fault that he had to kick in their door and start bashing pipes for them when the old jerk in charge refused to get his pipes up to code).

Now LeadLib have been awarded the next four years' contract, leaving JoeCon standing out on the curb, hefting his paint-chipped monkey wrench forlornly, thumbing the adjustable spinny bit in frustration, and wondering: "perhaps I just didn't communicate clearly enough..."