Saturday, July 31, 2004
More speculation on bunny suit spin
Following up my earlier derision towards a recent column by R. Novak, Digby points to a New Republic piece on GOP oppo research. Revealing quote (emphasis added):
Example A was the headquarters Republicans installed a few blocks from the FleetCenter to coordinate their response to the Democrats. At center was a so-called war room--a dozen or so computer terminals arranged around a pair of TV sets, at which a team of young GOP staffers pulled up research on Democrats and skimmed the Drudge Report as they watched the convention. For maximum partisan effect, the office's walls had been festooned with blown-up quotes of Kerry saying various foolish or purportedly revealing things ("I'm a liberal and proud of it"), images of a recent Boston Herald front-page headline declaring John Kerry and John Edwards "left of ted," and, by Tuesday morning, multiple images of Kerry in that absurd blue nasa space suit. (Republicans seemed to consider this a defining moment in the campaign. Several staffers promptly made this photo their computer desktop image, and the office distributed a flyer juxtaposing the Kerry photo with the infamously goofy image of a tank-riding Michael Dukakis.)
No wonder Republicans think (or claim to think) that this bunny suit b.s. is going to get traction. They've spun themselves into a totally insular coccoon consisting of their own fantasies and talking points. Novak, of course, is not one of these young staffers, but he is undoubtedly part of the propaganda distribution network for which the oppo research staffers are the advance scouts.
Free clue for Republicans: there are many silly pictures of politicians. It's the inevitable result of the continuous media blitz in which they live, and people know this. For a picture to get traction, it has to resonate with some larger theme. The reason the Dukakis tank photo hit home was that it reinforced the pre-existing perception of Dukakis as ineffectual, wimpy, and not a credible military leader. This contrasted with the perceived strengths of Bush the elder.
Yes, Kerry in a bunny suit (which all visitors to NASA clean rooms are required to wear) is funny, but what weakness of Kerry's does it draw attention to? That he wouldn't be a good NASA engineer? That he's not strong on the space program?
So, actually, my thinking on this business is changing. I think the smarter Republican strategists cannot really believe this photo's going to get any traction in the general public at all. It's more of a propaganda poster to rally the (receptive/gullible) junior troops --- staffers like the ones in the oppo research room, who must be feeling pretty demoralized after six months of almost nonstop bad news for Bush, followed by the Democrats' execution of a nearly flawless convention.
Friday, July 30, 2004
"Why the Dems Will Lose"
Humble prediction: this guy's going to look pretty stupid in four months.
One of the odd things about getting your news via Google is that you come across links to publications you would never otherwise read. Anyway, it's pretty funny --- or maybe just sad --- how Novak bloviates for half the column, working up his masturbatory fantasy of Republican triumphalism and Democratic dejection, and then finally gets around to giving six limp and laughable "reasons" that Kerry will lose. Kerry in a NASA bunny suit? Are you kidding? Do right-wingers seriously think that voters care about this stuff, or are they just desperately throwing random shit at the wall, praying that some of it sticks? (Why do I bother asking?)
Most laughable of all is the way Novak closes the column, attempting to deputize Tom Paine to prop up Novak's theory that God will guarantee Bush's win. This is wrong on so many levels I simply cannot do it justice, except by saying that it is fractally wrong.
Yankee insanity
In tight fiscal times, New York City would be insane to chip in $100 million for infrastructure improvements to serve a new Yankee Stadium. Plus, say what you like about the Yankees, but Yankee Stadium has a unique preeminence in baseball history. The idea of converting the existing Yankee Stadium into a parking garage is dumb, only slightly less idiotic than converting Wrigley Field into a shopping mall or Fenway Park into a driving range. I mean, even Red Sox fans would rather win the AL championship by beating the Yankees in Yankee Stadium.
To cap the irony, this story ran on the Times homepage today a few dozen pixels above Bob Herbert's op-ed on the deepening problems of American cities.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Stem cell reminder
Gina Kolata reports in today's Times about Ron Reagan's convention speech on stem cell research. At this time, it's worth reminding ourselves of Michael Kinsley's article "The Incoherent Embryophile", which points out that, in addition to being wrong, opponents of stem cell research are also hypocrites because they don't oppose the destruction of embryos for in vitro fertilization.
Labels: biology, hypocrisy, michael-kinsley, republicans, science
Minorities and anti-democratic features of the United States Constitution
Following up my prior post, today I ran across a random unrelated blog post, whose link I have lost, that defended the electoral college and the bicameral legislature as evidence of the founders' wisdom, a bulwark against majoritarianism, etc. --- all the standard b.s. that's always hauled out in defense of these institutions. Well, in my opinion, the United States could use more bulwarks against minoritarianism. Take, for example, the United States Senate.
First of all, many of the Founders were quite skeptical of the bicameral legislature. Schoolchildren have been propagandized to call it the "Great Compromise" between the large and small states, but in fact it was, as Hendrik Hertzberg writes, an odious "surrender to blackmail" by the smaller states. Luminaries like Madison and Hamilton --- possibly the two most brilliant Founders --- thought the Senate was absurd. Hertzberg quotes Hamilton's forceful argument at the Constitutional Convention:
"As states are a collection of individual men," he harangued his fellow-delegates, "which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or of the artificial beings resulting from the composition? Nothing could be more preposterous or absurd than to sacrifice the former to the latter. It has been said that if the smaller states renounce their equality, they renounce at the same time their liberty. The truth is it is a contest for power, not for liberty. Will the men composing the small states be less free than those composing the larger?"
Second, defenders of disproportionate representation might say that giving a modest boost to the rights of states does little harm and much good. Let's see how the Senate looks in practice. Did you know that the 26 less populated states have roughly 20% of the population? That's right: on the floor of the Senate, 20% of Americans can dictate law to the other 80% of Americans. The effect of this imbalance is worsened by the fact that House members are elected for two-year terms, and therefore operate in a state of continual insecurity, always hustling for money and recognition; Senators, by contrast, can afford to build a long-term legislative agenda, and have proportionately more influence. Critics of majoritarianism lose sight of a basic fact: in a government constituted by the will of the people, the only alternative to rule of the majority is rule of a minority, in this case a staggeringly small minority of 20%. Lexical nitpicking over whether we call such a government a "democracy" or a "republic" cannot change this. When you give 20% of the American population power over the other 80%, you are creating a structural geographical elite whose votes count more than the non-elite voters.
Third, even in theory, it is a terribly dubious proposition that geographical minorities need a disproportionately huge vote to protect their interests. We have many laws and institutions to protect members of minorities --- for example, the Bill of Rights, or the requirement of large supermajorities for structural change to the Constitution, or the separation of powers among government branches. What makes members of geographical minorities so special that, unlike members of any other minorities, they deserve overrepresentation in the voting process?
I propose we create a third house of Congress, in which Latino voters get to elect 60 seats, and all non-Latino voters get to elect 20 seats. After all, how do we know that the majority of non-Latino voters won't take away the rights of Latino voters? The Latino minority deserves structural protection via overrepresentation.
Try as they might, defenders of the Senate have no argument in defense of the Senate that is not also a defense of my Latino Legislature. But the Latino Legislature strikes us as absurd. Why does the Senate not strike most Americans as equally absurd? I submit that American citizens have been thoroughly and unrelentingly propagandized by their social studies classes. Such grossly disproportionate representation is an abomination. It is contrary to the principles of egalitarianism and representative government.
Labels: politics, united-states-constitution
Brilliant
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
The thriving democracy in Afghanistan
Médecins Sans Frontières are a fairly badass group of doctors. They've worked in chaos-stricken badlands and even active war zones all over the world. When they pull out of Afghanistan, it is a sign that the shit hit the fan long ago and has splattered spectacularly all over the fucking room. Thank you, Dear Leader!
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Time travel and computation
Today I came across Wikipedia's article on time loop logic. A mind-bending, yet elegant, idea. Be sure to read the linked article on the Novikov self-consistency principle as well.
Labels: computer-science, imaginary-technology, physics
Krugman on voting shenanigans; thoughts on the electoral college
Krugman writes today about (un)trustworthy elections, a subject that I've mentioned several times before (bonus link).
It occurs to me today that, aside from all the inherent awfulness of the voting machine companies and the officials who hired them, this whole business is yet more evidence that the electoral college is a crock. If we had a direct popular election, then the shenanigans of a few Florida election officials would matter much less. We've all become desensitized and resigned to the absurd notion of "swing states", but it's fundamentally undemocratic to allow certain geographical minorities such disproportionate influence over the electoral process. And it's dangerous, because such concentration of power provides a small number of powerful levers by which corruption or ineptitude can swing elections, rather than a large number of weak levers.
This betrays a basic system engineering principle: it is better to have many redundant subsystems than a few critical subsystems, because in the latter case the failure of any one part can bring down the whole system. The electoral college is sort of interesting because, at first glance, one might have thought that the electoral college would do exactly that: rather than one monolithic system with a single point of failure (the national election), you would have fifty smaller systems, each of which provides a "safety" against the failure of the rest. In practice, however, the electoral college has done the opposite. By vaulting a handful of states to disproportionately huge influence, it has introduced a small number of highly critical points of failure.
And, in retrospect, it's clear that a nationwide direct election would provide better redundancy --- because all the votes would get thrown into a single pool, every single well-counted vote would act as a bulwark against every single ill-counted vote. By contrast, in the electoral college, only well-counted votes within a single state can counterbalance the ill-counted votes in that state. A simple analysis of probability dictates that the electoral college is more vulnerable to being thrown by ill-counted votes than a national direct election.
Monday, July 26, 2004
The crucial role of PBS
Specifically in order to keep up with the Democratic Convention, I finally caved in and bought a television antenna today (this follows the recent purchase of the television itself to watch DVDs). So... there's probably about a hundred free channels of broadcast television bandwidth in the Seattle area. Only nine of them are occupied. Guess how many of those channels are rebroadcasting the Democratic National Convention right now, during Pacific prime time? One.
I guess that's enough to cover the main stage (although the main stage show is hardly the only thing that happens at conventions, and it wouldn't hurt if Americans got a chance to see the rest), but it still pisses me off that the publicly owned airwaves are currently broadcasting all kinds of trivial b.s. instead of one of the key events of our political process. Trivial b.s. is OK, sure, but we have the bandwidth to support both trivial b.s. and a lot more coverage of the convention.
Incidentally, what the fuck is with David Brooks being chosen to do the color commentary on PBS? Blech.
