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News Archives - Posts #1-15, 2-6 to 2-19
#15
2004-2-19, 10:16 PST
As a quick glance at my main page will show you, I did in fact write that article on Dean.
It ended up being a bit too mild, I think, partly because it is to be published on OSP.
I'm not talking about the part at the end - the thing about my support of what Dean used to be is genuine.
Rather, I'm talking about my attacks on the grassroots movement, which in my opinion were not strong enough.
#14
2004-2-18, 18:56 PST
Dean dropped out. I can't believe it. He actually fulfilled a promise...
But then again, he promised he'd stay on - in other words, he flip-flopped twice within a span of two weeks (first it was first in Wisconsin or bust, then it was go on anyway, and now he dropped out).
Hopefully I'll think of something long enough to write about Dean and the grassroots movement (warning: it won't be pleasant) later today, both here and for OSP.
#13
2004-2-18, 00:38 PST
February 5th: Dean intends to drop out if he doesn't come first in Wisconsin.
February 18th - Dean finishes a distant third in Wisconsin, getting only 18% of the vote.
The man's ability to ignore earlier statements and promises is astonishing. If only he won the primary, he could become a better flip-flopper (typo corrected 2004-2-18 18:58 PST) than even Clinton.
So, where is your statement of dropping out, Howard? My guess is that Dean will now pin his campaign on Super Tuesday, and after he realizes he can't come in first on a second-place finish, and then when he comes third on the post-S.D. states, and then on the convention... The possibilities are endless.
I remember the good old days, exactly one year ago, when Dean could speak five sentences without contradicting himself...
So far, my reasons not to vote are:
- Elimination: Kerry and Edwards supported the invasion of Iraq, Edwards is also anti-trade, Dean turns out to be anti-trade and his positions on guns, the death penalty, and welfare leave much to be desired.
- Inconsistency: Dean, Kerry, and Edwards are all expert flipfloppers, roughly in this order (Kerry's a close second but Edwards' a distant third).
- The laws of democracy: the three weak laws are that a) your vote doesn't affect the outcome of the election, b) the outcome of the election doesn't affect government policy, and c) government policy doesn't affect government practice; the resulting strong law, which as far as I know has never been violated, holds that your vote doesn't change government practice.
- Negativity: the candidates (including Shrub) are too focused on attacking one another, leading to not nearly enough time given to policy and issue statements.
At least politics allows us to watch a pretty entertaining circus without paying money...
#12
2004-2-14, 01:45 PST
My to-do list above says I'm writing a book. I am, kind of - at a sluggish pace, though (so far I've written two articles totaling 24,000 words in almost 10 months).
So, I'd like to expand on it more. I call it IDOL - In Defense Of Liberalism - and intend to lay a foundation for ideas that are broadly liberal but are mine more than they are anything else.
The Liberal Manifesto and The Rape of Freedom are the first two and so far only articles in it.
The idea in planned article #3, Combating Totalitarian Philosophies, is to explain the various totalitarian ideologies and philosophies (with specific reference to the greatest killers of the 20th century, communism and fascism, and what seem to be the greatest threats in the 21st, Christianity and Islam).
Specifically, the first part will explain what's so wrong with those philosophies, why people believe them anyway, and how they are all grouped in the same category of totalitarianism.
Then, I will show how the totalitarian regimes they sprout all inadvertently retard human progress and quality of life in a lose-lose situation (as opposed to a win-lose one, e.g. reduced civil liberties with greater economic growth).
And finally, living up to the article's name, I'll show what can and should be done to eliminate them, and what will probably happen after they vanish.
Speaking of the to-do list, please pretend that the Iraq article doesn't exist and is only an illusion my enemies at the media have created to reduce my credibility.
#11
2004-2-11, 03:01 PST
Why do so many people think they're persecuted?
Organized groups almost always think that they're persecuted, kept down, harassed, etc.
The main debates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict basically take the form of "who is hurt more?" or even "who gets the shorter end of the stick from the media?".
Conservatives and liberals alike in the USA love to blabber about how the media is so biased toward the other side.
Socialism is based on the idea that workers are being screwed and that one day the revolution will change everything.
Libertarianism and anarhcism do the same thing but to a slightly lesser degree (at least with libertarianism), and with the enemy being the state rather than the capitalists.
Christian fundies insist that they're being harassed and persecuted; so do Muslim fundies.
I think that the best way to find a person's political beliefs is to ask them what they think CNN's bias is; that person's beliefs will then be the diametric opposite of the answer.
#10
2004-2-11, 01:09 PST
Reread post #4 please. Dean said he wouldn't drop out even if he lost Wisconsin. How surprising.
Turns out he can contradict himself within a span of two weeks.
Also, Clark's dropping out. Whether he endorses Dean or Kerry will make the difference between a Kerry victory with 70% of the delegates and a Kerry victory with 73% of the delegates...
Given Dean's post-Iowa speech, I shudder to think what he'll say after the convention.
Or maybe I shouldn't shudder that, because it'll be terribly funny...
#9
2004-2-9, 09:39 PST
Two ramblings:
1. A lot of anarcho-capitalists love to decry the existence of a state as force/fraud, coercion, and so on.
This leaves me wondering: is the capitalist method any different?
Orwell, I believe, said that in Emmanuel Goldstein's book in 1984: when everybody has a decent quality of life, wealth loses its distinction and capitalism starts breaking down.
Capitalism in a sense depends on scarcity, on competition, on deprivation.
If housing and food and medicine are so abundant that a person can work 20-hour weeks and enjoy a good quality of life, who will work 40-hour weeks? Barely anyone.
"Well," you may say, "in a situation like this, productivity will be high enough for a 20-hour-week to be sustainable."
No, I say. If no one needs to compete in order to thrive, no one will compete.
Take Brazil for instance. I had a rather heated discussion with my father on the phone a couple of days ago about the FTAA - Free Trade Area of the Americas.
I came against the agreement on the grounds that "medicine will become unaffordable to many."
To my surprise, he considered that a good thing because "in a society where stealing is acceptable, no one will produce anything."
He then started rambling about international relations, quite understandably because he understands IR much better than he does economics and ethics.
But he made a pretty strong point: capitalism depends on putting property rights above survival, money above people, production and productivity over life.
It is based on deprivation, because without deprivation, society can't advance.
This, by the way, is capitalism's second offense against humanity, the first being the fact that waged labor makes work a good in itself rather than a necessary evil.
Flame away, my nonexistent readers (actually I shouldn't say nonexistent because AFAIK I have had two hits on this page).
2. Unrelated: am I the only one who thinks that "I was young and naive" is a rationalization?
People never like to say "I was wrong." So when they can get away with it, they blame their relative youth, perhaps so that their present credibility will not be tarnished.
I know that in 20 years' time this site will almost certainly be gone, but I still promise not to say "I was 18, and I had no idea what I was talking about."
#8
2004-2-8, 21:06 PST
Well, my newest Constitution proposal is up.
As promised, it is annotated, though my principle was of one annotation per Article, which means that some Articles are annotated redundantly (particularly in the part about the Judiciary), whereas some may have unresolved issues that are not annotated.
Still, you can let me know what you think. That is, if you're reading this, which my site statistics (which you can access simply by clicking my hit counter) show that you don't.
#7
2004-2-7, 21:45 PST
The AFSCME has decided to withdraw its endorsement of Dean and endorse Kerry instead.
Long live principled commitment and anti-opportunism...
The AFSCME is the second largest service union in the USA, the largest being the SEIU (which for now still supports Dean).
In November or December - I don't remember which - when Dean's star was only on the rise, the AFSCME and SEIU put aside their differences to jointly endorse Dean.
Now Dean's candidacy is tanking, so the AFSCME is bolting to endorse Kerry.
At least I ditched Dean during the last days of December, when he seemed invulnerable.
This, by the way, is a confirmation that my news page is a blog in all but name and software. Now I just need to get a page on Blogger...
#6
2004-2-7, 09:55 PST
Right now, the hardest thing in writing the third version of my constitution proposal is not the annotation, but rather the part about the Specialized Legislatures.
There're 32 of them (I chose to drop the SL for Religion), and each needs a two- or three-line description of its powers and responsibilities; that adds up to about a page and a quarter on M$Word.
So far I've done 9 SLs out of 32, which figures as Article 31 out of 56.
#5
2004-2-7, 00:31 PST
I'm trying to think of an occasion on which voting changed something.
It's not enough for the government to change its policy for that to happen.
Rather, three conditions need to be fulfilled: one, the election must be close enough for a single vote to have a reasonable chance of making a difference; two, government policy must change; and three, government practice must change.
For example, Bush's "election" was close enough, and Bush's policy of unilateralism is different from Clinton's policy of international cooperation.
However, government practice remains the same: Clinton was far more pro-war and pro-nationalism than he touted himself as, and even if Bush wants to do what the neo-conservatives want him to do, the military can only invade so many countries in 4 or 8 years.
With FDR, government policy as well as government practice changed with the New Deal: it was only from 1933 onward that the government has taken a hands-on approach to the economy.
Yet, the election was a landslide, which not only means that a single vote, or even the combined vote of a group, had no chance whatsoever of making a change, but more importantly, that FDR's election was the result of a structural change in the people and in culture, caused obviously by the Depression.
I do not know of any occasion on which voting really mattered.
#4
2004-2-6, 11:31 PST
About Dean's Wisconsin strategy... It seems that he's just postponing the grand defeat, on and on.
After Iowa, he bet everything on New Hampshire. Right After New Hampshire, his supporters tried betting everything on the Mini-Tuesday states on the grounds that "Kerry was financially strained," but to no avail.
And now this. Will he really drop out after he loses Wisconsin, which he will? I'm not sure.
I don't know if his remarkable talent for throwing things he said earlier into memory holes (the 2003 Sellout article documents a few of the alterations of the past) extends also to contradicting himself within a span of two weeks.
Probably not.
While I still think he's better than Kerry and Edwards, whose names are almost synonymous with zigzag (especially Kerry), I am left to wonder whether he's anything more than a drag on the primary election.
He's sure far from good enough for me to waste 30 minutes of my time and vote for him on Super Tuesday.
#3
2004-2-6, 00:55 PST
The numbers, in case you're wondering, are there so that it's easy to keep track of posts here.
I find referring to something as "Post #340" much easier than "that post from 7/15."
Anyway, as you can see, I've moved my to-do list here. Even though it's here, it's for this site's articles, not for news posts, which I do immediately and usually without any plan.
I'm also playing with formatting now... maybe I'll remove the horizontal lines soon. But then again, maybe not. Who knows.
#2
2004-2-6, 00:48 PST
Four days ago, shortly after Vince Whitacre dropped out of the race in WI-5 and endorsed Bryan Kennedy, I wrote this in the main page:
I removed the link to Vince Whitacre's site, because he withdrew from the race :-(.
The candidate he chose to endorse, Bryan Kennedy, leaves much to be desired - for instance, he talks too much about "middle of the road solutions," and he injects religion into his platform.
By the way, am I the only one here who thinks that this site is becoming more and more like a blog, with a blogroll, a page layout whose code I stole from one of Blogger's layouts, new articles posted in reverse chronological order, and now updates?
The only thing I need now is a comment section, which I am willing to bet with odds of 10 to 1 will just not be used.
I guess I was right about this becoming almost a blog...
#1
2004-2-6, 00:38 PST
Okay, this is the place where I post snippets, site news, updates, and various other things that are more appropriate for blogs than for real websites like Redeye's Corner.
So far there're no archives, but I might add them if this page really gets bloated with posts.
I can only hope that this area enables me to post shorter stuff, things I don't bother with except on forums, where in my experience writing is much easier and more liberated than on websites.
While this may nominally look like a blog, it really isn't, so don't expect a hoard of links in every paragraph. Plus, I don't use software like MovableType or Blogger. Also, there's no comments section for now, so if you feel like responding, do it in my forum.
This site has gotten
hits since 2003-12-25.