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News Archives - Posts #87-97, 6-15 to 7-25
#97
2004-7-25, 13:42 EDT
There are two new links on my front page - 2 + 2 = 5 and The Yorkshire Ranter. Both had linked to me, so I thought I should return the favor. I also deleted three links - Baghdad Burning, Talking Points Memo, and Candidate's Wife; the last is not updated anymore, the first is still officially active but was last updated a month ago, and the second I don't even remember when I last read. Here's hoping that inactive OSP members will finally get purged, probably halving the OSP blogroll...
#96
2004-7-24, 01:57 EDT
Lo and behold, there's a new article on this website. It's called The Story of an Indian, and details the life of Akash Raman, who gets screwed when the first world cracks down on outsourcing, going from a prestigious college straight to unemployment. The anti-outsourcing people who want to boycott HP and tell tales of laid off American workers would be wise to read the other side of the equation.
#95
2004-7-20, 13:00 EDT
I'm considering increasing the size of new archives. So far, I place an emphasis on making this site as dial-up friendly as possible; hence, the index page is 12.5 KB including the Iraqi flag, and I keep the news archives around 15 KB each. But I'm beginning to question this - Zompist's rants are archived annually, yielding a 60-post page in 2001, for example. One excellent argument for retaining light pages is that it's very hard to load them without increasing my hit counter ;-)... yet another is that, well, they're dial-up friendly, unlike OSP's 60-KB front page.
#94
2004-7-20, 12:30 EDT
You may have heard of Slate's red or blue quiz, which intends to say how Republican or Democratic you are based on whether you know answers to questions such as how often Rush Limbaugh is on the air, how close the nearest Wal-Mart Supercenter is, and how well you know the New York subway system.
This is utterly daft. Most importantly, the quiz is hopeless Ameri-centric (or Americo-centric, or whatever). A good analysis of one's political views should be based on definitions and labels that are as universal as possible, and at a minimum common to Western democracies (i.e. the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe, New Zealand, Israel, and the more democratic countries of Latin America). That's what Political Compass does - it asks you for your positions on legalization of drugs, the death penalty, etc. The result is very etic, that is, it compares you to absolute yardsticks rather than to the country you live in. This makes sense; after all, liberalism is liberalism, conservatism is conservatism, and the distances between the Democratic party and the mainstream left-wing parties of Europe (e.g. Britain's Labour, Germany's Social Democrats) on the one hand and between the GOP and the mainstream right-wing parties of Europe (e.g. the Tories in the UK, the Gaullists in France) are much smaller than they sometimes appear.
Now, I presume that it'd be okay to construct a good emic quiz, that is a quiz comparing you specifically to American presidential politics. But the Slate quiz falls far short of doing that. The Democrats and the Republicans are very similar in their philosophies, platforms, policies, and practice, but there are still some differences. Further, it's very easy to magnify these differences; the GOP and the Democrats are fairly close on abortion, for instance, but this shouldn't deter the quiz-maker from asking, "Under what circumstances do you think abortion should be legal?" and listing possible answers that are to the right of the Republican mainstream or to the left of the Democratic mainstream.
Unfortunately, rather than concentrating on issues, the quiz chooses to divide the United States into red and blue as used in the Pundit language (the blueprint, pun intended, is, "in red America, chruches are everywhere; in blue America, Thai restaurants are everywhere," IIRC said by George Will). The quiz could ask people whether they supported the Iraq war. It could ask people how they viewed the War on Terror (options range from "A clash of civilizations" on the far right and "an imperialist plot to control the Middle East and keep Americans in line" on the far left). It could ask people whether they supported gay marriage. But it doesn't - it asks people how often Rush Limbaugh is on the air, who sang some country songs, and what the acronym LIRR is.
I could say that this quiz reinforces my notions of American culture as ignorant, shallow, and ethnocentric. But I won't - at least not officially. I'm not sure that the content of the Slate test was a falsifiable test to the above statement, that is, that the statement would be weakened if the Slate test focused on real issues and used notions that non-Americans could understand. By now you probably realize that I eschew unfalsifiability.
#93
2004-7-18, 08:17 EDT
No, I'm not dead. I'm not busy, either - I'm just lazy ;-). There seems to be a positive correlation between how much I am busy and how much I have to say here...
The Democratic National Convention is imminent - on 7/27, IIRC. I know that a lot of left-wing bloggers (the term for the left half of the blogosphere, or at least the left half of the American blogosphere, is Blogtopia; the right half is Blogistan) are going to go to it to cover it. I'm not, although I'm geographically closer to Boston than anyone I know on the blogosphere. I personally don't know what the difference is between covering the convention on-site and reading about it a short while later at home. Plus, I don't care much for the Democratic convention - I'll probably scout thru Ronald Reagan Jr.'s speech because I've heard that he bashed amalgamation of church and state in his speech at his dad's funeral, but beyond that I'll probably just read about it on OSP and Pacific Views.
Some people are interested in what the Democratic party has to say about things, but I'm not one of them. Some people hook me with what they say - the most mainstream ones are Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman, in that order. Politicians don't break new grounds - they may utilize new ideas created by others (e.g. FDR's hands-on government approach), but they don't create things themselves. That's what intellectuals and think tanks are for. Politicians also speak with slogans rather than with arguments. Sometimes these slogans are backed by good arguments, such as Dean's "$200 vs. health care" slogan, but I'd rather read a rational polemic about why Bush's tax cuts are bad than hear a politician compress the said polemic to a 15-word exclamation.
I'm going to make a (falsifiable) prediction: the convention's speeches won't reveal anything I don't know already and won't say anything that hasn't been said before. For instance, I expect that many speeches will attack Bush on Iraq, but that as usual, Bush will be attacked for "not making America safer" and "bogging the military down," and that any mention of the dead Iraqis, whose number is probably in the 6 figures by now, will be very marginal compared to the previous quoted points, and probably will not make it to any of the speeches. Economic points brought in the convention will be the usual slogans, and detailed tax proposals will not be in any speech (Kerry will probably attack Bush's tax cuts, but won't say anything like "in the next five minutes, I'm going to tell you what tax structure, budget size, and budget distribution I will push for, if elected").
#92
2004-7-12, 16:48 EDT
I'm back. My laptop's been ill for just under two weeks - because of problems with Windows XP and connection to the Internet in internet cafes, I can't log in at all, and I need to reinstall Windows, which I'll try getting done ASAP. My regular computer's here now, however, so my Internet access is again normal :-).
I removed a few blogs from my links column, because their owners explicitly withdrew from OSP. Since none of these blogs is good enough or close enough to me for me to continue linking to it on my own, I killed all the links. It's highly possible that many other blogs will be removed soon, as long-time non-posters who don't respond to Kenneth Quinnell's emails may be purged, too.
About Kerry's choice of John Edwards as running mate... I frankly couldn't care less. I wasn't going to vote for him anyway, a decision I had made roughly a year and a half ago backed by predictions that have come true again and again (though to be honest, I revised the predictions half a year ago when I ditched Dean). If Edwards were not from the South, he wouldn't be running mate; the "son of the mill worker" demagogy is an extra.
#91
2004-6-26, 14:50 CDT
The New York State Supreme Court has declared the death penalty unconstitutional. This makes NY the largest state in the United States that has joined the civilized world (Michigan's the second largest). Pataki is saying that the death penalty reduces crime rate, although the opposite is true.
On a personal note, you can roughly tell where I am by the timezone above... I'm in Chicago, in case you're wondering. I'm going much more slowly than I originally thought. In other words, I'm still not really back.
#90
2004-6-16, 01:17 PDT
Tacitus again... Tactius blogs about the USA's enormous debt - 7.2 trillion dollars, ~70% of GDP. He says:
What meaningful efforts are we willing to make toward the application of those principles [of debt elimination] in terms of sacrifice of those expenditures? Such sacrifices would be, for the most part, sacrifices of programs predicated upon an explicitly leftist concept of American governance: namely, the entire welfare apparatus, from Social Security to Medicare to agricultural subsidies. The would of necessty constitute an attack upon the institutional legacies (though not, let it be noted, the legal framework of enumerated rights and mechanisms) of the New Deal and Great Society... A simpler way to put it is this: Would you give up the current framework of government in the United States in the interest of the long-term survival of the United States?
He's correct insofar that gutting welfare programs will reduce the USA's debt. What he doesn't say is that it's only one way, which is in line with what people would expect of a Republican administration, but is not the sole way to get rid of the debt.
First, raising taxes (at the very least, getting rid of tax cuts) will reduce the deficit, possibly even turn it into a surplus.
Second, the military proved on 2001/9/11 that its extraordinarily high budget was a waste. Reducing military spending from $400 billion per year to $100 billion will save the government the 7.2 trillion dollars it currently owes in 24 years. The war on terrorism requires intelligence and development, not big guns.
Third, making social security need-based (which is proposed in the post's comments) will save a couple hundred billion dollars annually, a saving that will get bigger and bigger as people have more time to save money not to need it after retirement.
Fourth, supply-side investments in technology pay off: the co-founding of the Internet (co-founding because CERN invented it, not the US government) paid off its original investment many times in terms of quality of life and budget surplus. Similarly, support for various research schemes is going to pay off in the long run, which is what we're concerned with, as at present a 7.2 trillion dollar debt means a relatively small (but rising) interest to pay, and is going to become significant only in the medium and long runs. I read a while ago about a scheme to build a solar power plant on the moon and beam energy to earth via laser... the person who presented this scheme to (I think) the Senate said it'd increase gross world product eight times.
Fifth, I agree with Tactius's plan about agricultural subsidies: they waste money and cause hunger in the third world.
Sixth, spending big bucks on development in parts of the third world will pay off in greater investment and less need to spend money on defense in the long run. Killing Al Qaida by throwing $150 billion on secular development in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan will pay off in purely economic terms in less than 10 years, not to mention the number of lives saved.
#89
2004-6-16, 00:54 PDT
Four announcements:
1. As you've certainly seen unless you're drunk, I created an eighth archive.
2. I'm going to be missing for some time. I'm going to graduate school, which involves moving roughly 5,000 kilometers east. I'm going to seize the opportunity to do a short coast-to-coast road trip, but it's not as if I'm going to have Internet access right when I get to my destination in Connecticut. Watch the time zones in case I write on the way... for readers who're not in the US or Canada, MDT is GMT -6, CDT is GMT -5, and EDT (in which my destination is) is GMT -4.
3. I withdrew my voter registry yesterday, i.e. on the 15th. Unless Kerry does something really splendid or Bush does something really terrible, I won't renew it. Registering without intending to vote is not worth the risk of getting jury duty (my opposition to juries is principled... I'm not going to exercise my right to trial by jury if I'm accused of something - I trust judges more).
4. Post #90 will be up shortly.
#88
2004-6-15, 22:53 PDT
Many conservative bloggers attack International ANSWER for being a communist organization. Fair enough. But then they decide that everyone who joins them in opposing wars is guilty by association. That's idiotic. If I vote for an ANSWER party, then it matters what govrnment practice under them will be, and hence it matters if they are communists. If I protest with them against a war, it doesn't matter one bit, because I don't have to support everything they say, do, or believe - I only have to support the goals of that one protest. If they protest against a war, I can come. If they protest against globalization, I can stay home. It's that simple.
#87
2004-6-15, 22:37 PDT
Unfuckingbelievable. The Supreme Court struck down Newdow's case on the grounds that he lacked standing to sue because he had no custody of his daughter, in whose name he launched the lawsuit. Earl Warren must be flipping in his grave.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that while the Supreme Court struck down Newdow 8-0 (Scalia had recused himself from the case), only 3 justices (O'Connor, Rehnquist, and Thomas) wrote that "under god" was constitutional, with the remaining 5 sticking with the sophistry about standing and custody. In other words, if another atheist parent *with legal custody* repeats Newdow's feat, s/he will probably win 5-4 or 5-3.
Meanwhile, on Tactius, the decision is compared to frivolous junk like the idiot who sued McDonald's because he got fat eating all these Big Macs. Yep, that makes sense - suing to remove a national symbol that violates common sense, two constitutional amendments (1st and 14th), and four democratic principles (freedom of religion, freedom from religion, non-discrimination, and freedom of thought) is the same as suing a corporation for product liability over something you had complete control of and should've had knowledge of.
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