I kept wanting to sing that Chesterton poem to "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes." It looks like it'll work at first, but it doesn't.
One chocolate manufacturer around here had a discussion of that in their FAQ: is their dark chocolate vegan? Well, it turns out that it depends on what you mean... They don't put animal products in the chocolate. On the other hand, some sugar refining uses charcoal, and some charcoal is manufactured from bones. Does using an animal product as part of the manufacturing process make it non-vegan? Depends on which vegan you ask.
I care about Prop 8, and I've made my no-on-8 donation and put up my no-on-8 yard sign, but it's not the only California race that matters. On the statewide side the other two initiatives I care a lot about are Prop 4 (unfortunately, I've heard it's likely to pass) and Prop 1A.
I also live in Anna Eshoo's district, and I voted for her, but I'm not at all worried about that race. She'll win, and it won't be close. The local races whose outcomes are less certain are Palo Alto Measure N (library bonds) and Santa Clara County Measures B, C, and D (three public transportation measures that interact in a complicated way and that may or may not affect which projects get built over the next few decades).
And then there's the Santa Clara Board of Education. I wish I knew enough about local schools to have a strong opinion about that race, but I don't.
If you are planning to frisbee them into a McPalin HQ, I'd recommend destroying them first so that they can't just turn around and hand them out to someone else.
If you don't already have a favorite DVD destruction technique, I second Bill's suggestion of microwaving them. Very pretty indeed! (And if you haven't yet read Jon Singer's microwave page, you should.)
The numbers on that page you link to are piddlingly small! It's not physicists that you want to consult if you want to learn about really big numbers, but theoretical computer scientists or likeminded mathematicians. Some places to start are Ackerman's function, or Knuth's arrow notation.
But yes, I suppose I should be grateful that our fine friends in the Bush administration haven't heard of such things.
Look on the bright side. Before the neocons fixated on bombing Iran, they were spoiling for a Cold War with China. Some of them clearly still are.
As disastrous as a US attack on Iran would be, we should be glad that it's distracting the neocons away from things that would be even worse.
Peter Watts's web site is entertaining, and I was especially amused to see that he quoted James Nicoll as a prominently featured blurb: "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
Lizzy's assessment in #108 is pretty similar to mine.
I'd also remind people to ask themselves a question: when was the last time we had an actual liberal President? Not Clinton. Not Carter, certainly -- think back to the campaign of 1976, if you're old enough, when he very explicitly ran as part of the Democratic Party's centrist/conservative faction, or to the campaign of 1980, when he had a primary challenge from the left. So that'd be LBJ, if you count him as a liberal. (You can make a case either way.) If you don't, then you have to go back well over half a century.
Obama probably won't be the President of my dreams, but he'll probably be the most liberal President to be elected since I was born.
You'll probably be less surprised if you think of Obama as what he is: a centrist Democratic politician, much like Bill (or Hillary) Clinton. The long and contentious primary obscured an important fact, which is that the policy differences between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards were always pretty small.
So a pretty reasonable baseline assumption for how Obama will govern is what Clinton did: disappointing in some ways, but far, far better than what we have now. A reasonable guess about what kinds of people Obama will appoint is that they'll look a lot like the people Clinton appointed, and a lot like the people Obama has in his campaign. In the case of judges that means people like Breyer and Ginsburg: not the far left of mainstream American legal thought, but quite different from people like Scalia and Thomas, which is what we could reasonably expect from any Republican President.
It's possible to make things over-complicated. Party affiliation, and affiliation with a particular faction within a party, is a pretty crude measure, but to a first approximation it gives an awfully good prediction of how a politician will behave in office.
And party affiliation, by the way, is also a pretty good indication of how an Obama administration will differ from the Clinton administration: Obama will have a different group of Senators to work with. I'm pretty optimistic.
It's true you can find polls showing that the US public is more liberal on issues than elected politicians of either party. And a lot of liberals (including me) tend to see a lot of hope in those results. It's important not to ascribe too much significance to those results, though. You need to remember some important facts about voter behavior.
First, most people don't vote on "issues". It's easy to construct a model of how people should vote: they should reflect carefully on their policy preferences, study candidates' policy proposals, and vote for whichever of the candidates is a better match. That's not how people do vote, though--which explains much of the seeming mismatch between policy preferences and voting behavior. People vote based on group identity, self expression, broad political philosophy, their assessment of the candidates' characters, and many other factors. Even people in this comment thread have been arguing in favor of some of those criteria. And even when people do vote based on "isues", some are much more important than others, and some are mostly used as windows into the candidates' philosophy or character.
Second, one reason most people don't vote on policy preferences is that a lot of people just don't have well thought out or strongly held positions. You can see that if you ask the same question in slightly different ways: a small change in wording, or a sentence or two of context before the question, can give you wildly different results. Cherrypicking the most favorable poll numbers is a good way to fool yourself.
One instance of a poll result we've all seen, showing the US public consistently to the left of both parties, is the result showing large margins in favor of single-payer health care. This means that our elected representatives aren't representing true public opinion, and that an initiative where voters can directly vote for single payer would surely pass, right? Well, no. California voters had that opportunity a few years back, and single payer lost. It wasn't close. (3-1, IIRC.)
These sorts of polls aren't useless, but they're just one piece of information. Public information is a complicated thing, and it's a mistake to think that these sorts of polls are a higher source of truth than voting behavior.
Politicians know that.
One additional minor point, by the way, which nobody seems to have made explicitly explicitly yet: when people in this discussion have objected to being called monkeys, it's not because of some kind of romantic "Oh what a work is man" thing. It's just that it's wrong. We (those of us who are homo sapiens anyway---most of us, as far as I know) aren't monkeys. The last common ancestor of humans and monkeys was a long time ago. We're apes.
One thing to bear in mind is that while while someone who reads blogs might think that an American left exists, there is no left to speak of in American national politics. There are far-right conservatives, staunch conservatives, center-rightists, and old-style centrists. Go back to news reports from the 70s to see what liberal American politicians were like. (And go back to 60s rhetoric to see what the real left thought of liberals.)
One reason that it appears there isn't much difference between left and right politicians is that a lot of the politicians who are called left aren't.
Not voting may be sending a signal, but there's no guarantee that the signal you send is the same as the signal that gets received. There are too many possible signals consistent with that non-act.
By not voting, are you trying to send the signal "none of the candidates are acceptable", or "I'm content with the system as it exists now, so my input isn't required", or "I don't know enough to have a meaningful opinion", or "politics is boring", or "the entire system is corrupt, and nothing short of armed revolution could improve it", or "elections are meaningless because I don't believe my vote will be counted honestly", or "I'm too busy"?
Whatever signal you intend to send needs a bit of disambiguation.
I didn't say that I thought that he was a moderate technocrat. I said that I thought that this was his image in the national press.
I might have added: I think that the national press is extraordinarily shallow in its narratives and character judgments of candidates--the judgments are based on mannerisms at least as often as they're based on policy proposals and records. Giuliani is not the only politician who has been the victim or beneficiary of this shallowness.
I also think it's very hard to change the press's narrative about a candidate, once the narrative has started getting used as the basis for stories. That's one reason we shouldn't count on Giuliani losing.
My first suggestion about what Wikipedia should do different is acknowledge that they have a power structure, that they have a system of authority, and that some people's views are taken more seriously than others. Once they've acknowledged that fact and made their system of authority and credentialing explicit, it will be easier for them to talk about whether it's the system they want.
This ought to be a lesson that's familiar to people on this blog, since it's also one of the important lessons in This Dispossessed. Decision-making systems can exist even in a formal anarchy, even in a system that's committed to their absence. The trouble with unwritten laws is that it's hard to argue against them and even harder to change them.
The answer to #95, can you be sued for..., is yes. Anyone can be sued for anything.
Would the AACSLA win that hypothetical suit? Nobody knows. The DMCA forbids circumvention devices and it is not clear whether the courts would hold that a single number counts as a circumvention device and, if so, under what circumstances. If that suit went to trial, and if it got all the way up to the Supreme Court, then maybe we'd find out.
My assumption about the politics is: for some reason, politicians don't feel that they're able to say "You know, I don't really have a favorite book. I just don't think about books that often." Ditto for favorite movie, favorite philosopher, favorite gin, favorite twelve-tone concerto, favorite colonialist hat, whatever. I don't know why they feel they can't say that, but that's the observed reality.
And given that they have to say that they have some favorite, they probably also know that it doesn't matter very much what they say. Romney wouldn't have gotten any more or less votes by naming Battlefield Earth than he would've gotten by naming Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. So why not just say the first thing that popped into his head, maybe the book he was reading on the airplane the day before? There's no downside, and it saves the trouble of thinking of a better answer.
So maybe it shows that he's shallow, and maybe it shows that he doesn't read much or doesn't think much about what he does read, but other than that it probably doesn't show much. As others have observed, it's not as if I would've voted for him anyway. It's not even the stupidest thing he's said on the campaign trail in the last couple weeks.
The other important difference between the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books is that the latter is primarily not about reviewing books. They run essays (and occasionally other things), sometimes but not always inspired by recently recent books. It's rare that more than a couple articles in any NYRB issue are anything I'd call a book review.
I'd also say that NYRB is one of the US's best magazines. It has published more than a few articles that are still worth remembering and reading years later. I learned more about the Arafat/Barak/Clinton negotiations from the NYRB's articles than from all the other coverage I read combined.
The other plausible theory about Gingrich's hypothetical nefarious purposes is that he doesn't give a damn about the welfare of the Republican Party any more than he gives a damn about the welfare of the US, and that he's increasing his publicity level so get gets leverage to bargin for more money in his speaking fees, consulting fees, and book advances.
That's the theory I'm hoping for, anyway. I don't particularly like the idea of a venal Gingrich throwing rhetorical bombs to enrich himself, but at least if this theory is true he probably isn't doing much real damage.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 12 |
| 2007 | 7 |
| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 1 |
Total: 33 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Matt Austern:
Show all comments by Matt Austern.