David Sucher @21 (et al): Sure, here is an example of what I mean by Alan Grayson "misrepresenting our opponent's hidden agendas as much as they misrepresent ours":
"The Republican health care plan is this: 'Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.'"
I believe it to be misrepresentation to characterize your opponents' plans as so callous that they would have to be inhuman to pursue them. It sounds like a very bold indictment and resonates well with people who were already inclined to doubt the humanity of their opponents, but I don't support it. I've heard the "homosexual agenda" chorus for decades now, to give another example of the device's use, and I don't believe that has ever convinced anyone who didn't already want to be convinced. And, of course, we're smarter than they are (better looking too), so we're even less likely to be swayed for long by pretty half-truths.
I do support the argument that the current health care system makes sub-optimal medical and economic decisions that force people in making agonizing decisions between the care they need and the care they can afford, and I support the many who carry that argument. It doesn't have the zazz of Grayson's comments, but it doesn't have the Achilles heel that your opponents can truthfully respond "No, that isn't a part of our plan." (Except, of course, that the Republicans don't have a plan, I know.)
The other advantage is that any response to my argument is focused on health care and not dragging the spotlight over to how rude or awesome Grayson is and how much we need to either support or defeat him in the next election. This circus has enough rings as it is, and my appreciation of the polling is that too few people already are paying attention to the center ring.
Well, at least now I know that my Dreamwidth profile hasn't gone unread. Yes, I am both of those people. I'd confess to containing multitudes, but in fact I do not contradict myself.
The progressive movement has a lot to get done, and not as much time as I'd like to do it in. Marriage equity is one of those things, and commonsense health care reform is another. In a pluralistic society, we get those things done by talking TO people we disagree with and forming consensus with all but the most intransigent of the minority factions. It doesn't get done any other way. And I agree with you that winning matters, and I agree with others on this thread who make the point that the stakes are high.
As I have not yet failed to say in a comment in this thread, I respect that Rep. Grayson champions a point of view that has a following. And I would appreciate the tactic much more if I thought misrepresenting our opponent's hidden agendas as much as they misrepresent ours improved our chances of winning. But has it? My mind hasn't changed, neither has yours, and I can't imagine that it has moved any equally fervent conservatives who know that they're also not into killing the elderly. The only difference I can foresee is that now my dear Fox-addicted grandmother gets to play the "Everyone does it" game instead of her normal state of being too righteous to repeat the lies that she forces herself to listen to.
I apologize if I come across as so virtuous as to be ineffective. I will say that I have played dirty when I thought it was necessary to achieve a victory in a matter that is important to me, and I would do so again without reservation. What I will not do is to play dirty when all it does is make me dirty.
Patrick: On the contrary. The diversity of liberal expression is why we're winning. I know that we wouldn't carry the day with 300 Democratic representitives as awesome as Louise Slaughter (my most awesome and high-minded and most liberal member of the 110th Congress harumph) because there are parts of the country where "I know you are but what am I?" is a stunning debate tactic. Just like it would be a mistake to ignore my intelligence and idealism just because playground taunts are useful tools to influence critical policy in someone else's neighborhood.
The problem is that there are so few thoughtful conservatives and that they aren't sufficiently telegenic to rip the microphones from their rabble-rousing colleagues. But I'm not sufficiently noble to shift my own brain into neutral just to make it a fair fight.
@1: Thank you. I was wondering if Stuart Rothenburg was a woman or if this was a truly unworthy rhetorical device to discredit the opinion of someone you disagree with. Do not want.
As far as Grayson, I can go either way. I heartily believe that you do not defeat your enemies by becoming them, but the people of Florida's eighth district are entitled to choose their own representative.
Abi @9: I agree that there does have to be a cutoff. But eight months srsly? I can see how it might have legitimately taken that much time to research five international nominees in 1901, but today? If they could collate their forms into a list of 200 then wheedle that down to five finalist and one laureate in two months instead of eight, then that increases the chance that someone can actually be leveraged out of jail before the world has forgotten about her. There will be the potential justice delayed no matter what, but at least then the news story will only be fourteen months old instead of twenty.
Ulrika O'Brien @12: I wonder. Nobel's mandate was to select "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". The Committee seems to have broadened the definition over recent years to include environmentalism and poverty abatement as legitimate vectors of peace, and of course they overlooked the fact that President Obama has doubled down on his land war in Asia and scaled back his plans to shut down a prison that is in violation of international law. I don't have enough facts, but it seems possible that the Committee is more in charge of the vision of the prize than Nobel's estate.
The drawn-outedness of the process does seem like a legitimate problem anyways. There has been a lot of peacemaking and a lot of struggle for democratic justice since February that evidently the panel is not allowed to consider. I'm not saying that the parties involved in the end of the Sri Lankan civil war or the Iranian election protests were more deserving of the 2009 award, but it seems like a failure of the system that they weren't even considered.
Don't get me wrong, it's their award and they can conduct it any way they want. But if they want to be perceived as authorities on world peace then they owe it to themselves to have a process that maximizes their relevance.
Oh, come on. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gives the Peace Prize to someone who couldn't even wrangle an honorary doctorate from Arizona State!
I'm glad that five guys in Norway like my president and all, but it doesn't move my day one way or the other. I'm far more influenced by this weeks' news that Obama snubbed the Dalai Lama to appease China. Maybe an apologist would argue that that's fostering international dialog or whatever. But I'm seeing over and over times when Obama will make principled pledges and then compromise them away. I'm sure he'll give a lovely speech in Oslo, but I am also sure that there will be many times in the next seven years that the Committee will be heartbroken by Obama's actions in a way that Martti Ahtisaari never will.
Six months ago, I sat on a jury that convicted a guy for CPW (which was discovered when he accidentally shot himself). After the trial, the judge revealed to us that it was his third strike and he was looking at 15-25. It's not my call as a juror, but as a citizen I'm choking a little.
It's all a matter of framing. If a judge and a DA say "We got a habitual offender sentenced to 25 years behind bars," I am relieved. If they says "We consigned the state to spend a million dollars holding a habitual offender," I'm going to ask just how dangerous the guy was because I can think of things I'd rather spend a million dollars if it isn't absolutely necessary. I'm sure that the cost-benefits analysis works out some of the time, but I'm just as sure that we really don't have a rational understanding of the value of incarcerating someone who committed a specific crime, and "three strikes" laws remove even what little rationality had been built into the system.
Chris Lawson@32: There are two separate issues in my mind. Apart from the issue of whether incarcerated prisoners should be allowed to vote (which I suppose I support), I don't think that it is a sufficiently fundamental right that it would be my place to question the UK's right to self-determination. Perhaps I feel equally strongly that a free society shouldn't have even the vestiges of a monarchy, but that doesn't mean that the UNHCR should be calling nations out on it. The newspaper is full of evidence that there are plenty of "democracies" where *nobody's* vote is counted, and I would argue that our efforts would be better served there. Of course, if you feel that suffrage should be extended to prisoners in *your* country, then rock on.
Of course prisoners contribute to the census count where they're incarcerated. We count lots of people in the census who either don't or can't vote based on where their places of residence. The alternatives are to not count them and to count them somewhere that they don't use public services, and I don't see the benefit of those ideas.
I can go either way on voting. I suppose that it would be nicer if they could vote absentee in their "home district" like soldiers do if they care to register, but it's hard to get uptight at a state that reserves the right to strip prisoners' suffrage if one admits that the state has power over liberty. Mostly I'm curious as to why the UNHCR thought that this was a sufficiently pressing issue to justify their investigation; if this is the worst human rights violation that the UK has then they should feel good about themselves.
dr.hypercube@16: I commend you, but lot of people wouldn't want to see media coverage of rational churches, as that would be promoting religion. I have confidence that they are a part of the traveling circus even though they don't get to perform in the center ring.
My only suggestions to @4 is that it can be a pleasant change to let the dough rise a second time after it has been rolled out, and that pizza pans are evil and wrong. Get a pizza stone* and a peel and your crusts will always be fully baked. Some people are fans of using semolina or something like that to get the raw crust to slide off the peel into the oven, but I find that a sheet of foil is much more reliable and doesn't hurt the heat transfer from the stone to the bottom of the crust at all.
* And when I say "pizza stone", I mean a $3 unglazed ceramic tile from your local home improvement store, not a $30 unglazed ceramic tile from your local kitchen supply store.
Lorax @82: You can't use plaintext in place of a randomized one-time pad and expect security. That way leads to the running key cipher, which is very easy to identify as they all have the same letter frequency table assuming that the key and message both tend towards ordinary plaintext. (That is to say that Vigenere with a running key, Porta with a running key, and ASCII-bitwise-OR with a running key would all have different signatures, but all Vigenere with a running key ciphertexts would have the same signature.) Once you recognize the signature and know which individual letter operation is being performed, it is an fun puzzle to untie the two messages simultaneously, but one that is easily within the power of a motivated amateur with a Python script or even someone with pencil and paper and a Concordance. Just for lulz, here is a sample ciphertext so encoded that people might enjoy working out:
SLTWH XRWJJ ASMTA WTLER CENRR FXISN YMMYA LBNDC XOAEI LXKBE PBVLH YJOHJ ZBURZ RJKOG WOCHR TXEWG ZHVPR RDSQR HLLJI IELAO TIFLH KTMOC TGAWL ZERBN MFXYI QIYXE WBZWD VVVPT YWLWY RHRTA CQCEZ XOILX YIRVK UFVGB FIFLX WCGRK JITUS UFGLR LCPJY RIMQO GIWLQ QWMKS GMVIG LXBFF BUKDS ROLMP KTHUI QXNWW NRCLS YVHUW LZWMU YWZVI FHYXI IRILS LTNMU MWUND TBMFK CYPIR RYYWG VRQDM NVCTT GKBVT CMFHA TSMHM CRRZG XFSLZ MYXEH WJZJM GAXVP CK
(FWIW, I second the clarification that the school is located in North Augusta, South Carolina even though it is a suburb of Augusta, Georgia.)
I think this guy gives a bad name to private school administrators (or perhaps maintains their already bad name), but I don't think there's anything particularly unscriptural about it. The church in the first century was full of instances of Christians who were expected to yield some of their secular rights in order to voluntarily live in a religious community. Acts 5:1-11 is a particularly chilling story about Peter striking a couple dead for attempting to conceal the percentage of their wealth that they were tithing. By contrast, if I were a judge in Christian Ethics court, I would laughed out of my court the claim that the principal was coveting his students' social networking passwords. There are plenty enough secular reasons why this is a bad policy.
And I won't defend Dr. Marten as a Christian leader, as he obviously did a very poor job of researching the issue before making a draconian and ineffective ruling that affects his students. He has stewardship over their educational and moral development, and in a real sense I think that he is providing an example to his students of how they should exercise Christian dominion when they become good Baptist husbands (sic) and parents.
I agree that Spitzer's actions were far more heinous. When you decide to bust THIS prostitution service as Attorney General while frequenting THAT one, hoo boy. I know that he wasn't indicted on any charges, but the whole thing still stinks.
Still, I wonder if part of the reason that Sanford might survive is that South Carolinians are checking out David Patterson and deciding that their lieutenant governor has the same lack of political base and no common sense to boot (from what I've heard, anyways). No matter how morally outraged you are, when you don't have a good backup how enthusiastic can you get about invalidating an election just because a guy went AWOL for a long weekend?
And, since you all are so smart, what is the name for the principle that someone is a moral crusader on an issue precisely because he is plagued by that specific temptation? It's so much more interesting than hypocrisy; it's that and self-hatred and secretly forcing the community to save him from himself. And there does seem to be no lack of it in the world.
Teresa@7:
It does seem vaguely troubling. I mean, if you were wearing the shoes with a skirt and the Blessed Virgin were to open her eyes, well that might be a view that even she couldn't unsee.
Terry Karney @80: Jefferson expressed the opinion that the Constitution should be re-written every twenty years. AFAIK, he was an outlier in this belief among the founders, and perhaps it should be factored in that Jefferson didn't have a hand in its construction, being our minister to France at the time. But I'm certain there are more fully informed scholars among us than I.
albatross @79: You make a fair point, but I am concerned that we would still be waiting for desegregation or a repeal of anti-miscegenation laws if we waited for social enlightenment to come to a majority of every political structure in the nation. Justice delayed is justice denied. Plus, I'm not prepared to accept the solipsistic argument that people in opposite marriages are losing any rights here. We need to slightly rework marriage licenses and create a few new generic wedding cake toppers and you might need to book the best caterer in town further in advance, but that's pretty much all of the actual impact from liberalizing the marriage pool.
I think that the judiciary absolutely has a role in affirming social justice, even if (especially if?) it is revolutionary. If the People wrote marriage rights and an equal protection clause in their state constitution, then the courts are exactly the place to analyze how to balance those rights.
Indeed, it is public referendums written to deprive a class of citizens from their full rights that is contrary to the American system of government. The United States does not (and do not) adhere to the principles of pure democracy, and we went to a lot of trouble to thwart the tyranny of the majority.
David Bilek @160: No, a print ad stating that John Romero was about to "make you his bitch", and ordering you to "suck it down" didn't prove to be a good marketing strategy. What are these people thinking?
Given the reaction in the forums at WatchmenComicMovie.com, he was thinking that his fanboys would be all "You tell 'em, Solid Snake. Woooo!" And that all of us liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers (perhaps homosexual?) who don't glorify Rorschach's and The Comedian's methods aren't the sorts who can be goaded to watch a movie again anyways.
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|---|---|
| 2009 | 26 |
| 2008 | 3 |
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