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People who've talked to me about the economic crisis have probably heard my take on home-buyers who bit off more house than they could chew. To wit: Think of your high school class; try to imagine how many of them understood compound interest at the time; recall how many years have passed since the tenth grade. Morally you can say whatever high-minded things you like about signing a contract and responsibility and blah blah blah, but on a practical level, expecting the median American to understand home financing to the point of being able to think critically about loan offers is just a losing proposition. If you don't want people to leave the thinking to the experts, you're gonna have to ditch the ideal of homeownership for the common man.

So: I think my attitude is about as sympathetic to the mortgage-screwed as you can get. And even still, there are people out there, apparently, who make me wonder: What on earth were you thinking?
eirias: (Default)
Two prongs of computer advice needed.

  1. My computer has gotten incredibly unstable -- it freezes constantly, the pointer freaks out and moves with random velocity, and tonight it developed the charming behavior of taking >60sec to respond to any button press. I am typing this now from safe mode, and am having no difficulties, which tells me that a large chunk of my problem is software. What should I do? It is a just-past-warranty Dell (how many of you are surprised?) running XP Service Pack 3. It has antivirus software (Norton?) with automatic updates, IIRC.

  2. Obviously, it will soon be time for a new machine -- probably a laptop given all the travel I'm still doing. I will probably not get another Dell -- their service is (mostly) exemplary but their hardware just isn't. At the moment my main needs are word processing, spreadsheet, Internet, and some random proprietary programs. I am somewhat committed to Windows because of some software I used in grad school, but as that world fades my need for the software may fade, too. However, it would be nice to publish the dissertation first. I am very open to a suggestion that includes Windows XP as a second system, if such a thing exists.
eirias: (Default)
So I have a dreamwidth account now. Not sure what I'll do with it yet, but a number of my friends have made accounts here. And it does seem likely that LJ's lifespan will be limited -- I'm not angry with them, per se, just aware that they've made a number of missteps in the last few years. So it seemed worth staking out my territory now, mindful of the fact that sometime in the next couple of months, it may become home.

I really like that they've made it very easy to differentiate between granting access and reading. This is doable in LJ's interface, too, but not as straightforward.
eirias: (Default)
I want you all to go read a fantastic blog post by linguist Mark Liberman. It will explain in very clear terms, if you didn't already know, why mass-media reports of scientific findings about group differences are so frequently misleading in a way that engenders and supports stereotype. It is THE most important statistical fact I know and I never learned it in school even though I have a PhD. I learned it from Mark Liberman.

Go read it now.
eirias: (Default)
In this very space:

Haiku2 for eirias
ever tempted to
say you know what never mind
the united states
@
Created by Grahame


More silliness under the cut. )
eirias: (Default)
So I am reading this book, which my in-laws kindly got me for Fake Christmas (so long had passed since Real Christmas that I'd forgotten I asked for it). The book is about the effect of, as an economist friend put it, low-probability, high-cost events: things whose impact dwarfs the events we can predict, making prediction itself a fool's errand. I am so far really blown away by how he's taken a topic and ideas that are very exciting to me and encased them in a book that deeply annoys me.

  • The author is, simply put, a jerk. This is his attitude: "Look at me! I'm a Real Intellectual! Not one of those effete morons who have tenured professorships and publish in peer-reviewed journals, oh no, that's not for me! Tenure is for charlatans! Peer review is for sheeple! Editors enforce mediocrity! The mark of truly Novel and Important ideas is that you develop them on long walks with brilliant people and then publish them on an ugly website!"
  • Ahem. Anyway, while discussing most of the social sciences in a way that veers past provocation into simple bad manners -- for instance, liberal use of scare-quotes, as when describing economics as a "profession" -- he inexplicably spares psychology. I genuinely don't understand this; I think that to the extent that the criticisms he levels at social science are apt, the judgment and decision-making world he loves has to cope with them also. I'd love to ask him to clarify, but see exhibit A, and also it appears from his site that he's getting a lot of email.

Perhaps I will flesh out my thoughts more thoroughly when I have finished the book, but I just had to vent a bit.
eirias: (Default)
Because I needed cheering up, and maybe you did too:



Courtesy of the National Zoo -- and also [livejournal.com profile] littlepurple.
eirias: (Default)
Or so you'd imagine. But so far he's doing fine.

Me, on the other hand? I'm a puddle of blissed-out confusion. Since when have leaders been concerned about abuses of power once the power is theirs alone? Since when has a president spent his first week in office keeping campaign promises?

I voted for this man with muted hopes and in three days he's done more to fulfill them than I thought he would do in a year. I read about the Guantánamo closing at work and I actually cried.
eirias: (Default)
Recent conversations prompt this poll!

[Poll #1321348]
eirias: (Default)
Two insightful recent posts from Bruce Schneier: one on the Internet and freedom of assembly and one on ephemeral communication.
eirias: (Default)
Nobody does cynicism quite like Fafblog.
eirias: (gay)
Okay, so I am totally thrilled about the presidential results. I have to get that out there. This victory was all the more wonderful for its unsurprisingness. I could have gone to bed at eleven but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

But the night wasn't all victories. It looks like Prop 8 is going to pass in California. I don't want my frustration about this to be lost in the joy today. I remember two years ago when the anti-union amendment passed in Wisconsin and part of the reason it was so awful was that none of my friends seemed to understand that even though the Democrats had won in Congress, I lost.

I want to state publicly: the success of these amendments does not protect my marriage; it makes me feel less secure in it. When other people get to set boundaries on who we can and cannot love, we are all diminished in power and possibility. I do not cherish the feeling that my marriage is a contingent thing, dependent for its existence on the consent of others. That's not the reality, of course. We would love each other even without the tax break. But government-sanctioned marriage is so entrenched in this culture that when they parade their ability to deny it to people for no good reason, I feel naked and vulnerable and small.

If Massachusetts has the right to go one way, California has the right to go the other (legally speaking). But make no mistake: California, you deeply, deeply suck, and I will hold this against you until you make a change.
eirias: (bluebird)
Bush's approval ratings, 2001-2008

The trajectory is kind of fascinating. I want to see what other two-termers' ratings look like over time.

The blog post that goes with the image makes the broader point that McCain's campaign has been crippled by the long-term trends in sentiment toward his party. A man who spoke at our orientation about his presidential prediction business noted similarly that voter behavior, in aggregate, is rational, and responds primarily to long-term rather than short-term information. If the incumbent party has been doing well, by certain measures of "well," the incumbent party gets reelected; otherwise, the main challenger wins. If he is right (and he has correctly predicted the popular vote in every election since 1980), this race would have ended up being a tough one for the Republicans no matter who was in the seat.

But, of course, it's not over yet. Tonight I've got a date with the TV, some pizza, and some beer to take the edge off the nerves. Tonight is one night where I wish I had cable.
eirias: (Default)
Reading Obama's memoir, you learn that as a kid he was called Barry. As a young adult he reverted to using his full name. That's not all that striking; a lot of young people change their self-presentation in this way. But I think it is a fairly striking choice for anyone with political ambitions. I think a lot of people would have switched back to the more "American" (more on that in a later post, I hope) -sounding name on entering Harvard. Obama's success with the other route is a reminder, I think, that squashing your identity is no way to get elected.
eirias: (Default)
Tales of a term-paper miller

One thing that's interesting about this business is that it gives the lie to typical moralizing about plagiarism. Ordinarily, teachers equate plagiarism with theft: use of a person's words without attribution is implied to mean use without permission. But the whole business model here is that the student pays the author for rights to an entirely new paper, which the student may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with his own name. The original author is undeceived. Theft is not the true nature of the crime.

In other fields, of course, this is common practice: everything produced by the government is either ghost-written or has no author, and nobody comments about intellectual dishonesty there. But it also exists within academia, specifically in rec-letter culture, where it is not uncommon for teachers to ask their students to write their own letters, which the teachers may then modify (to some unknown extent) and sign with their own names. I don't see much difference between this and the above, but I've seen professors go to strange lengths to defend the one practice and not the other. (Fortunately, none of my own mentors has ever been this crass.)
eirias: (Default)
Catbus, anyone?

Link courtesy of roommate-in-law [livejournal.com profile] gomi_no_sensei.
eirias: (Default)
A poll!

[Poll #1276034]

In other news, once I register, I am totally hitting you guys up for donations.
eirias: (Default)
The financial crisis this fall has made me wonder, for the first time, whether major-party presidential nominees are ever tempted to say, "You know what? Never mind."
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The United States... of Awesome

Every year, Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation holds a fall contest in which she asks readers to donate to one or more projects at Donors Choose. Donors Choose is this awesome charity-giving-clearinghouse where classroom teachers get to propose small-dollar projects and individual donors can page through and donate money to fund anything they think is important, or practical, or just cool. They ask you to contribute money to the Donors Choose overhead as well, though I believe this is optional. Some time after you donate you get a little thank-you packet from the teacher with pictures and letters from the students. It's really cute.

Anyway, this year's fall contest is on. Vote with your wallet!
eirias: (Default)
Pursuant to a conversation elsewhere, a poll!

NOTE! For the purpose of this poll, "foreigner" refers to someone who is foreign in several ways:

1. he has no familial claim to the culture (no relation by blood or marriage);
2. he does not and has not lived in the culture;
3. he has no deep knowledge or understanding of the culture, and/or does not speak the language.

Use the comments to clarify anything you like.

(Note: I submitted blank answers but that's only so I can easily see poll results without changing them; one should not infer from that that I think all the options are inappropriate.)




[Poll #1267976]
eirias: (Default)
Strangest wiring I have encountered: My bedroom in my (very new) apartment has one light switch that triggers two outlet panels, each of them on a wall fairly distant from the switch. What's weirder is that it only triggers the top outlet from each of these outlet panels. The bottom outlet from each is not linked to the switch.

Anyone ever encounter this before?

ETA:
From comments I see this is actually common in places that are younger than I am, in which, you may infer, I have never actually lived before now. It is totally logical -- it's just not what I'd been used to doing, which was "figure out which outlet is the switched outlet; use that one for big lamps; do not use that one for anything else." Consequently, when I found one that did "the lamp thing," I assumed the other outlet set would be happy if I plugged the laptop into one slot and the hard drive into the other. And then I would turn the light switch off, hear the downwhirring of the HD, and get very confused.
eirias: (Default)
Happy anniversary, Andrew. :)

Prize quote:
Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.
eirias: (Default)
I have read some very good books this summer, and as if to prove to myself that other sorts of books exist, I just finished an awful one: Eleanor Rigby, by Douglas Coupland. It had every kind of misguided drama in the book, and then some: Teen pregnancy! Mysterious visions! A dead transvestite! Life-altering illnesses! The import of heavenly events! Love at first sight, with an international man of mystery! I sort of expected better from Douglas Coupland; his brand of whimsy worked well in Microserfs (geeks can actually be pretty whimsical people), but when trying to write a fat, lonely middle-aged accountant, he just got stuck in a wall of stereotypes with which the whimsy clashed horribly. Don't read it!
eirias: (Default)
Hey Madison friends -- anybody got running shoes to loan me in either a size 9.5/10 womens or a size 8.5 mens?? I put my running shoes on the truck and realize now that I don't have any for frisbee tonight. Will travel to borrow...
eirias: (Default)
After a heated discussion last night about tipping points and the choice/need of women to work for pay, I decided to look at data on inflation. One person had asked whether there was an uptick in inflation during the years that women began to enter the workforce en masse (I'm talking middle-class women here; I know that poor women in cities have never actually had much choice).

Anyway. That's just backstory; the point is, I found a site that lets you graph a bunch of different US economic indices back to the earliest days of the republic. I figured the consumer price index would show me what I wanted to see, so I generated this graph (1800-2007).

The graph shows a few things I expected -- war related upticks, relatively higher growth in the fifties and sixties compared to what preceded it; and then it also shows this inflection point circa 1970, where you start seeing massive inflation that is never reversed. (You can see it in charts of yearly inflation, too; before 1970 there were years with positive and negative inflation; afterward, it's always been positive.) Yes, yes, the stagflation of the seventies is legendary, but why has the CPI continued to increase substantially every single year since then, when it didn't before? Did the rules of the economy change in some fundamental way? What's going on and what am I missing?
eirias: (Default)
So I'm listening to this Belle & Sebastian song about vampires, and I'm thinking about vampire mythology, about drinking their blood and rising in three days to life eternal, and I'm wondering, how did the evolution of the mythologies surrounding vampirism and Christianity dovetail?
eirias: (Default)
There is a pigeon horntail crawling around our kitchen window in confusion. It's outside, but somehow got to the inside of the screen (our windows are effed up; don't ask). It's a pretty scary looking bug, but as with the last scary bug to grace our yard, the long poky bit is an ovipositor; these guys don't sting.

Even knowing that, I find myself a little creeped by the idea of letting it crawl on my hand, like the guy in the photo. If it were some color combination other than "dark with yellow stripes," however, I don't think I would feel as strongly about it. Is this evidence for biologically-prepared fear triggers, or just a learned response to that color scheme? Either way I think it's kind of neat -- this gut reaction that I can examine, but not easily change.
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One of my favorite series of Language Log posts has to do with bad machine translations from Chinese to English. Click the links below to see how certain Chinese meanings were mistranslated:

Loose dried fruit
Dry seasonings section
Canada Dry
Dry foods price counter

The folks at LL explain the origin of the problem, and its pervasiveness.

Today there was a new post containing a gold mine of like mistranslations, but also a more novel one. Also, [livejournal.com profile] ukelele pointed me to this amusing image, presumably the fault of someone who translated the wrong text in the first place.

FISA, again

Jul. 9th, 2008 08:09 am
eirias: (Default)
Important political message of the day, via [livejournal.com profile] cos:

"If the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
When Richard Nixon said that, it was an impeached ex-president who resigned in disgrace speaking.

But now, Congress is intending to pass a bill that effectively declares Nixon's statement true (while pretending disingenuously to do otherwise).

Nixon said it to justify his spying & wiretapping without warrants. FISA was the law Congress passed in response to the Nixon / Watergate scandal. It established a secret court that could issue warrants for for surveillance related to "foreign intelligence" in the USA, and made clear that any domestic surveillance without a warrant was illegal - something that should've been obvious to begin with. It made it illegal not only for the government to do it, but also explicitly made it illegal for phone companies to cooperate with illegal surveillance requests from the government.

The Bush administration broke the law. Major telecom companies in the US cooperated with this illegal surveillance. AT&T built a special secret room to collect all the data passing through their data centers and siphon it to the National Security Agency. Because the White House asked them to.

When the president asks companies to do something and the law says it is illegal for them to do so, and they do it anyway...

... it's time for Congress to pass a law declaring that the companies who colluded in the illegal spying conspiracy should be excused, that the cases against them in court should be cancelled. Even after some cases have gone far enough that we know the courts have ruled that this stuff was in fact illegal.

If this law passes, it is a declaration from Congress that if you break the law at the request of the president, you have legal immunity; you will be excused. In other words, "If the President asks you to do it, that means that it is not illegal."

"FISA" sounds like some obscure thing you don't need to care about, but this bill is a precedent set by Congress favoring a government by king, instead of rule of law. It also attacks the concept of checks and balances by allowing surveillance without court warrants, but that's a minor problem in comparison. If we don't have rule of law, checks and balances can't hold anyway.

It CAN be stopped. This winter, a similar law passed the Senate and was considered nearly sure to pass the House, but the House declined to pass it because of the volume of phone calls they received against it. Now, we have a supposed "compromise" that still gives everything away, and the House passed it. The Senate plans to vote today (though they may delay it). It has enough votes to pass. Can we generate enough phone calls to block it? Call your Senators (numbers are here).


* Barack Obama is in a good position to help block it. He opposes telecom amnesty but recently said he'd vote for this bill even if they don't remove the amnesty portion. Join the "Get FISA Right" group on his web site, and/or the Facebook group, and call his campaign office: 866-675-2008.

* Get someone else you know to call both of their Senators. Repost this information this morning.
eirias: (Default)
Candidate for strangest contextually-appropriate utterance ever:
"If you don't hear from me in a few days, I've either been eaten by a bear walking the poodles on the mountain or killed in a freak art accident on my way to the bathroom."
eirias: (Default)
From The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America:
"Observers should beware of using jizz as a substitute for careful study and thought."

Well, there's a sentiment for the ages.
eirias: (brain liposuction)
Fascinating op-ed about bananas. I am dying to know what the Gros Michel variety tasted like. Stupid extinction.

I believe in buying locally-produced stuff when it's reasonable (read: available and not grossly more expensive). But I can't say no to bananas, even at a stupid price. Especially when I hear that they may be gone in a decade or two.
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So my plan while in Boston has generally been "be a tourist while normal people work, then hang out with folks in the evening." This worked well yesterday (the Arboretum is very pretty; and then I learned to play mah jongg!) and I figured it would work pretty well today, too, since usually when I come to Boston I am not primarily doing touristy things, so clearly there should be plenty of things to see. But, er, looking at the "things to do in Boston" page, it turns out I have seen rather more of them than I realized! At various points in the last ten years, I have visited the ISG art museum, the science museum, the public garden and Boston Common, the markets at Faneuil Hall, and the shops on Newbury Street. It'd be nice to walk the Freedom Trail, but it looks sort of wet today. What else should I see? (If anyone wants to come along, bonus!)
eirias: (clover)
People who know me in real life, which I presume is most of you reading this, have probably asked me why I'm not on Facebook, and have probably heard my stock answer about how the real-name thing creeps me out and I'm not sure I want random people from my past being able to find me. About six weeks ago, I decided to try an experiment: I'd sign up, but not tell anybody, and see how quickly I was found. This is what I learned:

  1. My best friend from elementary school found me within four hours;
  2. Then one person from Case found me, a few weeks later;
  3. Then came a couple people from high school;
  4. Then a cousin, which led to a bunch more cousins.

Notably, all of these were people in one of two categories: I keep in touch, but irregularly; or I haven't talked to them in years. Not one person from my Madison life, for instance, found me. Also no DaPper types.

So my conclusion is that the only people people search for are the ones for whom they wonder, once in a very long while, gee, whatever happened to X?

Anyway, this is my way of saying, hello, I have joined the cult. If you know my real name, which, again, should be most of you, you can find me if you wish. I still do not really know what to make of the service*, but someone I met on this roadtrip, who is nifty and worth keeping track of, started a game of Scrabble with me; and there have been rather a lot of nifty people worth keeping track of on this trip; so it can't be all bad.

* Evidence accumulates that I am an Old Fart.
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I have a new best friend! [livejournal.com profile] ukelele introduced us. We share the same values, and she just knows so much! Plus she's really into maps... I dig those people.

Meet my new best friend. Maybe you'll love her too.
eirias: (gay)
Andrew Sullivan on why marriage matters to him.

Saturday marked the fourth wedding anniversary for a number of gay couples out in Massachusetts. If any of them should find this: I hope your love has only grown stronger over the last four years.

And of course -- now California! I have been smiling all weekend, and it hasn't just been the graduation festivities.
eirias: (Default)
Catching the NYT Most Emailed list out of the corner of my eye, I blended #5 and #6 to wind up with "Trees Block Solar Panels, and a Feud Ends in Orgy."

OTOH now that I actually read the real #6 title I'm not sure it's less bizarre. It even brings in the Nazis.
eirias: (gay)
Overheard in my coffee shop:
Woman 1: "Napa Valley is the widest place I've ever been... it's also the whitest place I've ever been, and wealthy -- really wealthy. No normal people, you know, like us."
Woman 2: "No Hispanics?"
Woman 1: "Well, yeah, there were Hispanics, but they were all in the fields... and you know I always think of Hispanics as white."

Later, on further thought, Woman 1 noted "and you know now that I say that, I look around in here and everyone here is white, too." Well, you know, try Wisconsin some time and see how that compares.

In other news: Obama speaks on race
It's beautiful, not perfect, but beautiful; and it reminds me why I fell in love with his mind when I read his memoir. Of course, the converted aren't the people he's preaching to. I hope it does what he needs it to do.
eirias: (Default)
We saw the Magnetic Fields in Chicago last night. The experience was just about perfect (and you just see how long it is till I say that about another show that starts at 10:30). They played at the Old Town School of Folk Music, which is my favorite place in the world to see music: a small, intimate theater with beautiful sound, where one of the school's students gets on stage before each show to introduce the act. The audience was so hushed you could hear a few people quietly chuckling at some of the lyrics. (If you're not familiar with the Magnetic Fields -- well, first of all, you should change that -- but second, chuckling is totally the right response. Stephin Merritt, the leader and lyricist, has been aptly described as the heir to Cole Porter.) They did surprisingly few songs from my favorite of their albums, 69 Love Songs, but basically every song was beautifully done. Merritt sings in this otherworldly bass that's captivating enough when you hear it on a record, but to see him live is surreal, because it's hard to believe the voice comes from that man -- this small, unassuming fellow in a baseball cap. The female vocalists were incredible, too.

Some good Magnetic Fields, for those who haven't heard them before -- pardon any crappy visuals:
Papa Was a Rodeo -- nicely shows off Merritt's voice
California Girls -- features Shirley Simms singing -- I love her voice too.
All My Little Words -- from 69 Love Songs, this is the best YouTube example I could find of their lyrical style.
Reno Dakota -- this is Claudia Gonson singing; I totally have a crush on her now. Please ignore the hideous fan video.

At concerts I make it a habit to check out the audience beforehand, to see whether I fit in or not. I'd say the audience here was a little hard to classify; everyone looked modestly hip but pretty ordinary, really. Very few people had personal styles that looked like an affectation. The same went for the band, too.
eirias: (Default)
You know, when Graham and I went to vote this morning, I thought, huh, it's a little brisk today. Just checked the weather: turns out it's -3. Yes, in Fahrenheit. With a windchill of -15.

I voted for Obama. People keep asking me my reasons and they're hard to verbalize. Here are a few.

  • Of the two remaining Democrats, I think he's got the best chance of respecting the rule of law and executive restraint. My reasons for this belief:
    • One of his key victories in the Illinois Senate was passing a bill requiring videotaping of police interrogations. This is important because it strongly limits police ability to coerce confessions out of people (which I hear is a distressingly common practice otherwise). This is a hard type of legislation to pass, but not only did he get it passed, he got it passed unanimously.
    • Many of the lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees support Obama.
    • On the flip side, I don't think Clinton can afford to do anything that puts White House power under further scrutiny, because she's beholden to protecting her husband.
    • I also think Clinton's campaign strategies are suggestive of a desire for power that is not particularly restrained by respect for rules. I say this because of the controversy she's courting regarding the party-invalidated primaries in Michigan and Florida. I want to emphasize: the desire for power is not a problem for me, but her apparent willingness to fight dirty to get it is, because I think it's indicative of what she'll do with the expanded powers now available to the White House: keep them, because it's more convenient.
  • Obama is a good communicator. I've addressed this before, but I think that's a major part of leadership at this level.
  • He's really smart. Okay, this does not particularly distinguish him from Clinton ;). But gosh it's nice to have the chance to vote for someone I respect intellectually. In particular I respect him because when he tells a story about his own thought process, he's willing to show off the messy bits where he changed his mind: see his memoir for a good example (written in 1995, so no, it's not a political hack job -- and dear God I just noticed that first printings of this book are collectors items going for hundreds of dollars on Amazon). This trait is a differentiator between the two leading Democrats: as far as I can tell, when Clinton changes her mind she sort of pretends she hasn't really ("we have always been at war with Eurasia"). This is still better than Bush's refusal to change his mind at all, but it's not intellectually honest and I don't like it as much.
  • Above all, his message actually strikes me as really practical. This will probably surprise those of you who are turned off by his words about hope. I think the point of his rhetoric is to try to melt the cynicism out of people, liberals in particular, because cynicism is not useful. Oh sure, it's a good painkiller when you're trying to stanch a wound to the Constitution, but it won't actually repair a damn thing. For repair, you need a message that's a little more motivating than "Bush is an asshole and this country blows goats!" Obama gets that, and while I don't think he's the only one at this point, I think he's done the best job crafting a good replacement. The best idealists are also practical people, and my gut tells me he's one of them.
eirias: (Default)
People who think Obama is all style and no substance should read this, and look at this comparison of the legislation-proposal records of the three leading candidates over the most recent two US Senate terms (the ones during which all three major candidates can be compared). The argument I'd make is not that he's more substantial than Clinton or McCain, but that they probably don't differ significantly in that regard.

Where does the perception of Clinton's greater substance come from? I have two suspicions.

1. Many people have an unstated and unrecognized assumption that oratory and managerial skills are in a trading relation to one another, where in order to have high marks on one, you must have low marks on the other -- as if rhetoric and competence were a zero-sum game. (Maybe this is related to the strongly negative connotation the word "rhetoric" has in America?) But in fact, good communication skills are part of competence for a major leadership role like the Presidency. Perhaps you can be a decent president despite being a poor communicator -- recent history shows that such a person can at the very least get reelected -- but other things being equal, better communication skills will make you a better president.

2. Ah, you say, but other things are not equal in this case, because Clinton has more experience. I've been puzzling over the "Clinton is more experienced" meme (which I believed myself until I gave it some thought) -- it is not true, or at least not decisively true given Obama's eleven years of legislative experience to her seven, and in point of fact the two of them are two of the *least* experienced politiciansa who ran for the Democratic slot this year, which tells us something about what political experience will buy you! I think I've found the answer: the recognition heuristic. Clinton seems more experienced, because her name has been in the national news for sixteen years to Obama's four (and I'm betting most people didn't notice his name until much more recently). But her eight years of being, bluntly, a President's wife either should not count, if she was not substantially involved in the President's duties (since when does being married to a CEO count as a relevant qualification for becoming one?), or should count against her, if she was (see my earlier post about dynasties).

(a) Major political experience of failed Democratic contenders, according to Wikipedia:
    Joe Biden: 36 years (US Senate: 36)
    Chris Dodd: 34 years (US House: 6, US Senate: 28)
    John Edwards: 10 years (US Senate: 10)
    Mike Gravel: 16 years (AK House: 4, US House: 12)
    Dennis Kucinich: 15 years (CLE mayor: 3, US House: 12)
    Bill Richardson: 24 years (US House: 14, UN ambassador: 1, US Sec'y of Energy: 3, NM governor: 6)
eirias: (Default)
Your favorite candidate sucks.

"What on earth could possibly the danger in placing all of our eggs of hopes and dreams for a better life for ourselves and our kids in the basket of a single American Politician? Whenever has one of those people failed us? My favorite candidate, clearly, may be safely trusted to carry that basket into a Better Tomorrow. Your favorite candidate, who sucks, will likely drop the basket, break the eggs, and then fuck the shells."

links

Feb. 12th, 2008 09:19 am
eirias: (Default)
From a schmaltzy fan video to a totally hilarious attack ad. I gotta say, I kinda love what YouTube is doing for politics.

On the use of "like".

ETA (11:34): Another good political link: Chris Dodd's stirring FISA rant. Thanks, [livejournal.com profile] trygve, for passing it on. Also, a related rant from Glenn Greenwald.