Covering the Little Guy

Newsweek columnist and self-proclaimed sympathizer with third party causes Gersh Kuntzman, who provided us with that wonderfully germane diversion into the world of competitive eating in his last column dealing with third party candidates, is proving himself a stalwart fighter for the third party cause. "Because third party candidacies are considered such a joke, most of us would sooner vote for Oprah than for David Cobb," he explains. This week he does his small part by covering the Green Party candidate, David Cobb, on his campaign stop in New York City.

"This recruiting station is taking young people and turning them into fodder for an illegal and immoral war in Iraq! Support our troops—bring them home! We need to end our addiction to fossil fuels, which is driving us to war in the Middle East. We need to build schools instead of prisons. Health care is a fundamental human right! We need a living wage, not a minimum wage! And we need to repeal the Patriot Act!" Again, there was no applause. There was a guy making a cellphone call ("Can you hear me? I'm losing you"). And the beer bum was uninspired. Not even Roosterman, a legendary Times Square figure who crows and makes crude sexual gestures, slowed down to listen to Cobb. A family of four stopped to stay out of the rain. I asked them if they liked what Cobb was saying. They said they hadn't been listening. "We love George Bush," the father said. "Now, we have to get to Madame Tussaud's." (Hmm, isn't that a French name?)

Maybe a first step to making them less of a joke would be to stop writing irreverent, silly articles about them. Just a suggestion. Gersh Kuntzman is also a reporter for The New York Post which, if you don't recall, is the newspaper that brought us the early scoop (ed -- that's sarcasm) on Kerry's VP pick. Today's headline is slightly more factual, but only slightly: "Kerry Bashes Bush in Prez Race Kickoff." I saw Kerry's speech last night and from what I saw I thought it was remarkably free of Bush bashing, not to mention that the Democrats had a carefully enforced no Bush-bashing policy and emphasized an anti-negative campaign message.

Originally published 9/12/04

While reading through an article I was reminded why I don't like political science. For one, it almost always has an ideological agenda which, as a "science," it shouldn't have, right? And I always find the conclusions and deductions, to be very opinion-driven. Take this example, fleshed out below: constructing an argument that politician X, rather than politician Y, is the true heir to a political thinker. Yet there's only a slight difference, and in either case there's no real intellectual lineage - just a descriptive statement. What's the real purpose? If you're tracing the tangible intellectual roots of a political movement, then you're doing essential historical work, and that does have academic value. If the historical or philosophical background provides some insight, then you're helping to keep the public informed and better able to make decisions. But all too often, in contemporary academic work, I see tenuous, and tedious, ideological, agenda-driven comparisons and "analysis" that pass because they are obscure and intellectual enough to seem like scholarship. Take this article, by a political science professor at BC. It starts:

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher.

It then names two political philosopher contemporaries, Leo Strauss, who is widely credited as the forefather of the modern neoconservative movement, and Carl Schmitt, who I'm personally not familiar with. Strauss promoted a kind of authoritarian, and secretive democracy, administered by the elite. Schmitt on the other hand was nothing less than a modern-day Machievelli. He was also one of the founding thinkers of the European fascist movement and a member of the Nazi party to boot.

Schmitt ... joined the Nazi Party in 1933, survived World War II with his reputation relatively unscathed, and witnessed a revival of interest in his work, from both the left and the right, before his death in 1985 at the age of 96. Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi commitments, the left's continuing fascination with him is difficult to comprehend... ...Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics. "The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote

Between these two thinkers, which is closer to being the intellectual guru of the current administration? Schmitt, of course Why? I don't know:

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire."

Note that I'm talking about contemporary political science, not so much political theory and the great thinkers of the past.

Originally published 6/11/04

Why you don't want to become my email friend 2

Dear ______:
Yes, I get out before January. And one request: no museums. Take me to the museum of London streetlife and promiscuous, unholy Jordanian women.

... They've definitely got some work ahead of them with her, just like they did with me trying to get me to not talk with a British accent (the aristocratic kind).

In London, do they play basketball with the baskets on the wrong side of the court?
Adam  

Originally published 5/25/06

Gossip!

Here's something we're bound to hear more about in the future.

A photograph that flew around the Internet this week shows a boxy bulge in the back of President Bush's suit coat during the first debate, leading to widespread cyber-speculation that he was wired to receive help with his answers.

I doubt this was a prompting device. For one, I doubt the Bush team would implant it on his back where it's visible when there are so many other better places to put it. Secondly, Bush did poorly in the first debate. If Carl Rove was feeding him answers, would Bush really repeat himself so much and miss so many good opportunities? Salon suggests that some of Bush's untimely long pauses could be accounted for by listening to a prompter. I don't know. But I do know the bloggers will be all over this one.

Originally published 10/9/04

Quote Of The Day

“Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

(via Altercation)  

Originally published 9/28/04

A Seat Belt Legacy

A while back I predicted Nader was planning to drop out of the race before election day. More and more now it's looking like that won't turn out to be the case. One month ago Nader said to a newsweek columnist, "Kerry and Bush will drop out before I will … There’s no such thing as dropping out of a race like this. Once you get in, you’re in for the duration.” So ok, it doesn't look like he's going to drop out. There was also another interesting quote in the article.

"Do you think you’re spoiling your legacy, especially among former supporters?" Dryly: “I don’t think they’re going to start ripping out seat belts from their cars.”

Indeed, agree with him or not, I think this sums up the guy's attitude quite well. 

Originally published 9/28/04

Plagiarism Excuse # 22...

...It was for readability.

"My well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience through the omission of footnotes or endnotes -- in contrast to the practice I have always followed in my scholarly writing -- came at an unacceptable cost: my failure to attribute some of the material the Weekly Standard identified," Tribe wrote.

Should I plagiarize that the next time I need to come up with an excuse for plagiarizing?  

Originally published 9/28/04

It's Not Just Me

It seems that my objections to David Brooks' last article are widely shared. Here's the first complaint letter printed by the Times and it sums up all my main points:

Having earned a doctorate in electrical engineering at M.I.T., am I no longer allowed in the lab given that I apparently relate to the "postmodern, post-Cartesian, deconstructionist, co-directional ambiguity of Kerry's Iraq policy''?

It seems to me that the statistics show a correlation between education and political support regardless of numeracy or literacy. The fact that corporate chief executives and accountants are more likely to support George Bush is consistent with this observation: they are probably best educated that a third of his tax cuts go to the richest 1 percent.

a second letter:

At M.I.T., 94 percent of campaign giving was to the Democrats. What does Mr. Brooks think the people at M.I.T. do? Does he think that the electrical engineers, computer scientists, roboticists, biologists and economists run screaming from numbers and sit around reading Derrida?

Academia is full of very smart people earning very little money relative to what they could earn. They are curious people, dedicated to pursuing the truth and teaching others.

Business is full of very smart people whose sole responsibility is to make money, for stockholders and themselves. The first group supports Democrats. The second group supports Republicans. Draw your own conclusion.

This reminds me of something another blogger (I believe it was Grobstein) speculated about David Brooks a while ago to the effect that the editors must be so inundated with complaint letters following each of his columns that they usually print none, fearing it will make them look bad and perhaps incompetent. I suppose the response to this latest column was enough to overwhelm their letter censoring capabilities.  

Originally published 9/13/04

Tottering Campaign

A good Maureen Dowd article appears in today's Times. The usually punchy Democratic Dowd is expressing a sentiment increasingly common to even the biggest Kerry supporters.

It's a remarkable feat, but teeter-tottering John Kerry is even managing to land on both sides of the ambition issue. For his entire life, he was seen as so ambitious to be president, as so eager to consort with heiresses, that it was off-putting; his St. Paul's classmates played "Hail to the Chief" on kazoos when he walked by, and in the Senate, Bob Dole mocked the Massachusetts senator's love of cameras by nicknaming him Live Shot.

But this summer, when that lust for power should have been coursing through his veins, Mr. Kerry grew timid and logy. He let the Bush crowd and Swift boat character assassins stomp all over him and, for the longest time, didn't fight back. He stumbled into every trap Bush Inc. set.

Read the rest of the article here.  

Originally published 9/12/04

My Arm of the Media

This piece caused me to do a little reflection on blogging and this blog.

In the meantime, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Start your own blog and become a member of the media. It may be the only way to get your voice heard.

I don't think my voice is any more heard as a result of this blog. If profile views are any indication of my readership, the most fitting slogan for this blog would be something like "changing minds, one per day." Mostly this blog is just a way for family and friends to see what's going on in my head. There are two ways people do blogs as far as I can tell. One is as a micro media outlet, with original analysis, or links and quotes from online news sources. The other way is to post personal thoughts, ideas and opinions, like a homepage for your mind (pub -- that's not a bad slogan). I think this blog falls somewhere in the middle. For some reason, blogs have dealt almost exclusively with politics, though the best blogs in my opinion deal with all kinds of issues. Maybe that's because I'm not that interested in politics. I've often wondered about the difference between a blog and a live journal. The most satisfactory answer I can come up with is that if it talks about feelings, it's a live journal. But the line is skewed lightly by the motherlode of bad poetry on blogger.

New To The Team

A lot of people are now including an imaginary editor as a way to insert parenthetical comments into their blogs (ed -- like this). I've used an editor a few times already without formally introducing him. Already there are some original variations on this theme, like Oren Cass's "prof." Wanting to be original myself, I've decided to start using a "publisher" which of course is funny because it implies these entries are worthy of publication. So expect a publisher's comment from now on whenever I wish to inflate the importance of what I'm saying.

My Apologies

I'd like to apologize for not updating this blog for over a week and I hope it didn't disappoint too many people (ed -- you didn't). I was busy being host to reader Nate (ed-- he's not a reader. Ok, just Nate then. I've had some ideas incubating over the break, so expect a few good posts relatively soon. The future of this blog is still up in the air, since I'm not sure how the year will pan out Noah, our invisiblogger, told me he still wants to be on board for the school year. Whether that means he wants to keep at his current level of participation or perhaps step it up a notch and post every month or so, I'm not sure. So we'll be seeing more of Noah, even if that's only in the upper-right hand of the blog under the 'contributors' heading.

Googling for Grammar

I've come up with the worst (best) method for checking grammar ever. Take your grammatical phrase, google it, then take an alternative version of the phrase, google that. Continue indefinitely. The one that gets the larger number of hits is the correct phrase. Voila.

Spoiler Alert

Whatever Ralph Nader's goal is this election, it doesn't seem to be going very well. The Democratic convention is revealing the Democrats intend to position themselves farther to the right on a number of issues than they were when Nader complained about them, not that that's a bad thing. Ralph isn't doing too well on his quest to get on the ballot. And there doesn't seem to be any emerging movement to support Nader's candidacy on the philosophical grounds that he represents a third party. Meanwhile, the media is becoming more bold with its anti-Nader pronouncements. Take this news article from CBS, titled "Nader to Dems: Look in Mirror." It opens unassumingly with these two paragraphs:

Ralph Nader insists he is in the presidential race for keeps. If President Bush wins again, so be it, he says. Though Nader thinks he'll hurt Mr. Bush more than help him.

Democrats call Nader delusional. He thinks they’re hypocrites. For the independent candidate, his long-term goals trump any short-term repercussions.

That's the kind of reporting I expect from a trusted news source. Notice how the first two paragraphs clearly, objectively outline the nature of the conflict: Nader wants to run for president and doesn't care if it hurts the Democrats chances at office because he thinks they're doing a poor job, although he expects his campaign will hurt Bush more. The Democrats think he's delusional. Both perspectives are given coverage. The reporting is objective, impersonal, without value judgment. But move on in the article...

“If they want to pick up some of these issues, if they catch on,” Nader continues, he will accept the loss of his liberal supporters. “That’s fair play,” he adds.

Ralph Nader is mad. He wants Democrats to earn his liberal backers. He refuses to give them away. And although he appreciates a willingness by Sen. John Kerry to reach out to him, the party itself has betrayed its political left for too long, in Nader’s view.

Whoa! So Nader's running for president this year and he is mad? I double-checked the top of the page to make sure I wasn't reading an editorial, but this was in fact a news article.

If Nader had not been on the ballot in New Hampshire or Florida, both states would have gone to Democrat Al Gore. Instead George W. Bush won by the narrowest of margins: 537 votes in Florida alone.

Whoa, where are they getting that crazy idea from!? But actually, this is the first time I've seen the accusation that Nader lost the election stated definitively by a "responsible" member of the press. Before, it had always been "Democrats blame Nader for losing them the race in 2000." The simple reason for this is that the exit polls, which try show who a voter would have voted for as a second choice, don't all agree. Some show Nader's votes drawing very heavily from potential Gore voters, some show them drawing roughly equally from both campaigns. Nader's own nifty campaign site says:

A Democratic exit poll showed that Ralph’s votes came 25% from Republicans, 38% from Democrats...

CBS cites a different poll with different data:

In 2000, Voter News Service exit polling showed that 47 percent of Nader's Florida supporters would have voted for Gore, and 21 percent for Mr. Bush, easily covering the margin of Gore's loss.

Apparently, CBS has determined its poll is authoritative.

The other variable is, how many voters for an independent candidate would simply have stayed home? It seems plausible that many would, since an independent candidate's platform differs much more from the two major parties' than their platforms differ from each other.

The funny thing is that, despite all the negative attention and non-attention, Nader seems emboldened.

"It is more likely I will ask John Kerry and George W. Bush to withdraw before I'd withdraw," Nader said. “They are focusing on one-tenth of the vote they think they may lose and ignoring the nine-tenths of the party they must get."

Perhaps this doesn't bode well for my earlier prediction that Nader was planning all along to drop out of the race.

On the other hand, I have to admit that some aspects of this conflict make for good entertainment. From this CBS article on the convention entitled"Nader to Crash Dems' Party," Nader is quoted saying:"I would like to see the bazaar. I'd like to see the alcoholic-musical-political payoff bazaar of accounts receivable," Nader said. "I would like to be there at the convention to watch. I will try to get credentials… I may try as a syndicated columnist, which I've been for 35 years. Let's see if they are against reporters." That's just funny.

Searching for an Explanation

For some reason the google-sponsored search-generator on the top of the page lists a barbecue food product for its related search every few reloads. Reload the page a few times and see for yourself. Update: The source must be the editorial on eating competitions.

Poor Nader

It's nice when everyone can put aside their partisan differences and lend a helping hand, as a human being... Of course this story makes it to the front page of msnbc, but why don't we ever see any other Nader stories? Oh, you mean these? I think journalists have a rule that you're not allowed to mention Ralph Nader in an article unless "Al Gore lost in 2000" or "threat to Democrats" is mentioned in the same piece. Of course the press isn't cutting him any slack. Observe this silly column:

Now, I would’ve cut Nader some slack—hey, he’s still right on so many of the issues, even if he remains unapologetic for creating an administration that is wrong on so many of the issues—but for the fact that he is entirely wrong about his fourth sign of “social decay.” “Gluttony is rapidly becoming a competitive sport, in what its euphemists call ‘competitive eating,’” Nader wrote. “There is even an International Federation of Competitive Eating, which presides over dozens of events a year where contestants inhale hot dogs, matzo balls and chicken wings. What’s next—mayonnaise?” See? I told you Nader was out of touch: Mayonnaise is already a vibrant part of the competitive eating circuit. Oleg Zhornitskiy ate 136 ounces of Hellmann’s at the Glutton Bowl last year, a record that I think will stand for generations. Look, I have no equal when it comes to condemning American gluttony, from high-fat fast food to gas-guzzling SUVs. But Nader’s condemnation of the IFOCE willfully ignores the sport’s fundamental beauty (full disclosure: I am the Federation’s recording secretary—but only for the free hot dogs, I assure you). Competitive eating is the only sport entirely dominated by average folk like you and me (even bowling has celebrities nowadays). As such, it is our most democratic sport. Unlike the myth that any American kid can grow up to be president, any child who really puts his stomach to it can be a competitive eating champion. Ed “Cookie” Jarvis, the American hot dog, cannoli, chicken-fried steak, dumpling, ice cream and chicken wing-eating champion? He’s a real estate broker from Long Island. Eric “Badlands” Booker, the burrito, cheesecake, corned-beef hash and matzo ball champion? He’s a conductor on the 7 line of the New York City subway system. Hirofumi “The Kofu Consumer” Nakajima, who ushered in seven years of Japanese domination of the sport? He’s a furniture delivery boy. More important, competitive eating is constantly pushing our society forward. Sure, hot dogs and mayonnaise get all the attention, but the IFOCE just sponsored the first-ever turducken-eating contest last week in New York. (Turducken, for the uninitiated, is an ethereal Thanksgiving treat consisting of a turkey stuffed with a boneless chicken that’s been stuffed with a boneless duck breast. Order one at turducken.com.) “Turducken is the first real advancement in Thanksgiving since the Indians sat down with the Pilgrims,” said IFOCE president George Shea. “I’m so pleased that the IFOCE is playing a part in advancing our entire culture.” And the best thing about last week’s turducken-eating contest was that the winner was none other than 100-pound Sonya Thomas, the sport’s brightest rising star. Watching the svelte Thomas eat 7 ¾ pounds of turducken dinner while standing cheek-by-jowl with Jarvis and Booker (both about 400 pounds) was a sight of athletic majesty that Ralph Nader simply couldn’t understand.

Now, I didn't read the editorial this columnist is refering to, but I find it hard to believe that Nader identified "eating competitions" as his fourth sign of social decay. More likely, he had chosen gluttony as the fourth sign of social decay and was illustrating with an anecdote, which was the phenomenon of "eating competitions." Moreover, I find this guy's fervor for food competitions rather off-putting. Is he really helping to make his point and giving his opinion credibility by going on a five-paragraph rant displaying his intimate knowledge of the rising stars of eating competitions? And I love the half-hearted attempt to equate eating competitions with democracy. But really, this time Nader shows all the signs of wanting to help the Democrats. He displays an awareness that this time, his campaign is subordinate to theirs. For instance, for a long time he had been urging John Kerry to pick Edwards as his running mate. And one of his favorite defenses for his candidacy is that he's able to attack Bush in ways that are politically impossible for Democrats - like the political equivalent Islamic Jihad and Hamas for Arafat. Granted, this may be nothing more than a contrived defense - like his generally unconvincing attempts at defending his role in the 2000 election outcome ("Al Gore lost the election for Al Gore"). I still wish the press would give him some coverage. Because - and I am officially owning this claim - I predict that before election day, Nader will drop out of the race and strongly endorse Kerry. Nader's still an activist at heart (he's certainly not a presidential candidate), and this exactly the kind of thing an activist would do. Update: On the other hand, if Nader really believes everything he says about the political system being broken and the Democrats being failures, his real intention may be to elect what he considers the worst administration possible, hoping to create a backlash and eventually a reform movement that he would potentially lead. It's hard to say what he's really thinking. At times he says the Democrats are no better than Republicans, and other times he acknowledges that a Democratic victory would be preferable to a Republican victory. His website right now features a quote saying, "can you imagine if the Abolitionist Party was told not to run against the pro-slavery Whigs and Democratic Parties." I don't know what exactly is occuring in America that reaches the level of slavery (campaign finance, inadequate minimum wage, foreign policy?). If Nader truly thinks that the state of the country is broken beyond the scope of the two-party system to repair, then I think it's fair to say that he's out of touch. America has seen equal turmoil and internal strife to what it's experiencing right now, and was able to come to some point of concilliation without going full-scale revolution.

Supremely Ordinary

I went to see The Bourne Supremecy last night. It was more stereotypical than I would have expected. Let's see how well it fits the thriller mold:

• "The truth" is revealed gradually as the movie progresses: Check. To enhance the suspense and authenticity, Matt Damon is also suffering from memory loss about what happened in his past
• Multiple bad guys with surprise "bad guy" agents revealed as the movie progresses: Check. Extra typicality awarded for the fact that the bad guys are foreign. (Double award for the fact that they're Russian and German)
• Token McGyver-esque stunt: Check.
• Lots of chasing, in cars and on foot: Check. The movie very well could have originated as a two-hour long car chase, which they subsequently cut by several minutes to make room for a supporting plot.
• Implausible incident count = at least 10: Check. Thanks to the recurrent car chase scene, this movie has by far the largest number of successive run red lights and multi-lane highway crossings I've had the privilege to witness. (Note: this condition may be more applicable to the action movie genre)
• Lot's of law enforcement agents: Check.
• Conspicuous high-tech product placement: Nifty cell-phone. Check.
• Suspenseful phone conversations: On cell-phone. Check.

As I said, it was kind of disappointing for a Matt Damon movie. Then again I'm pretty sure that Damon was only a cast member.

Update: Nevertheless, Damon's career is still much more respectable than some of his colleagues'.

This Just In...

According to newsmedia, Ralph Nader is still alive and existent. In a shocking development since Nader announced his bid for the presidency and the national media went into a state of denial over his existence, it appears that he has resurfaced again to momentarily comment on John Kerry's campaign. Nader is not expected to exist tomorrow.

Reader Feedback Time

Reader Waseem has this to say about Ralph Nader:

Ralph Nader is the consummate patriotic American, a man that stands up for the purest values in this country, believing in free speech, a liberalized economy free from the shackles of such corporations as Halliburton and the like. Our founding fathers once defended this country as a refuge for radical thinkers, and progressive minds. Today is a sad day in American politics, where we are to select between candidate A, backed by corporate dollars and fighting for media and corporate interest, and his slightly less evil twin democratic opponent. Today we shun Ralph Nader for running in an election and probably swinging the vote in one candidate's favor or another. The true patriot in all of us would not accept a sure defeat of Nader at the hands of these so called "political conglomerates." A patriot would vote his mind and defend his principles at all odds not just vote for the lesser evil. This November election will mark yet another defeat in the democratic system that we once fought a revolution for and yet lost without a fight.

Thanks Waseem.

Surfing the Blogosphere

Are there people out there who actually spend their time repeatedly hitting the "next blog" button on the navigation bar browsing other people's blogs? In the last 5 minutes alone I've gotten two referrals from random blogs, which can only be accounted for by someone hitting the "next blog" button. Why is there is a "next blog" button? Do people use it? I mean, do I really care what some random person in Georgia (the country, probably) has to say about the time they went to visit their parents? (pub -- some people take a human interest approach to blogs. You should consider adopting a similar approach to life in general) What's the likelihood of finding someone with something insightful to say by chance? (pub -- touche!) That's why blogs are all about connections and word of mouth, or link rather. And that's why I strive to make sure this blog lives up to the high KrisKraus standard.

 Originally published 12/16/06