Networking
Get your red-hot 2008 Presidential Election returns right here.
With 12% counted, Hillary and McCain are doing well, but Vermin Supreme has five votes.
UPDATE: AP has declared McCain the winner.
UPDATE: With 42% counted, Hillary has a slight lead, due to Gloria Steinem’s whining.
In a desperate attempt to find an issue that might excite Democratic primary voters enough to overlook his youth and inexperience, Obama pledges Net Neutrality, Ewok Safety (The Register)
Asked whether he’d “re-instate Net Neutrality” as “the Law of the Land”, trailing Presidential Candidate Barack Obama told an audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa pledged that yes, he would.
He also said he’d protect Ewok villages everywhere, and hoped that Tony Soprano had survived the non-existent bloodbath at the conclusion of The Sopranos.
(So we made the last two up – but they wouldn’t have been any more silly than what the Presidential Candidate really said.)
Andrew’s in fine form, underscoring the fundamental deception in the network neutrality debate: there’s never been a network neutrality law, so there’s no question of “restoring” it.
Barney Frank puts the latest Republican gay sex scandal in perspective, urging the Larry Craig character not to resign:
“What he did, it’s hypocritical, but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes,” Frank told the Associated Press.
“I think people should resign when they have clearly done the job in a way that is dishonest.”
Frank went on to tell the AP: “It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself.”
Pressure has been mounting, particularly within the GOP, for Craig to step down, after he admitted this week to pleading guilty earlier this month to a charge of disorderly conduct following his June 11 arrest in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.
I’m not even sure it’s hypocritical, as the Republican attitude toward sex seems to be “women for duty, boys for pleasure.” Craig opposes gay marriage, not gay sex, so where’s the hypocrisy?
I’d prefer he not cruise public washrooms, for the sake of the children, so somebody should teach him about Craig’s List. And Slate is to be congratulated for coining the term “Craig’s Lust,” it’s awfully cute.
David Frum isn’t one of my favorite people, or even one of my favorite Republicans, but he understands Karl Rove better than anyone:
Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle…
Building coalitions is essential to political success. But it is not the same thing as political success. The point of politics is to elect governments, and political organizations are ultimately judged by the quality of government they deliver. Paradoxically, the antigovernment conservatives of the 1980s took the problems of government far more seriously than the pro-government conservatives of the 2000s.
The outlook is not, however, entirely bleak for Republicans. I notice that much of the Democratic party, and especially its activist netroots, has decided that the way to beat Rove Republicanism is by emulating it. They are practicing the politics of polarization; they are elevating “framing†above policy; they have decided that winning the next election by any means is all that matters — and never mind what happens on the day after that.
There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Karl Rove and Markos Moulitsas. They’re both in the business of exploiting emotional weakness and creating division, and they’ve both profited handsomely from this ability.
The Democrats will most likely elect the next president since Bush has made such a hash of things that he’s given them a free pass to the White House. But, to the extent that netroots fanaticism is instrumental in picking the Party’s champion, the nation and the Party will suffer.
Maybe that’s the secret to Rove’s search for a “permanent Republican majority:” get the Democrats to blow themselves up by embracing extremism and hysteria. If it’s a long-term strategy, it’s working, now all that has to happen is for the Republicans to abandon their irrational roots. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
I won’t be able to say that in New York if this law passes:
The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.
The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity†for all women.
Somebody should bitch-slap Councilwoman Mealy before she embarrasses her momma again.
This is a fine example of slippery slopes in action. The Council banned the use of the “n-word”, so why shouldn’t they ban the “b-word” as nearly as offensive? And then “fatty” because it’s nearly as offensive as “bitch”, and then “retard”, and then “dullard”, and then “not exactly a genius”. Why not ban all the words in the English language, on the grounds that each one can hurt somebody’s feelings if used in the right context?
Then New Yorkers, who used to be the freest people in the world until they started banning smoking in bars and fast food and hard words, will just sit in their many corners banging their heads against their many walls and moaning, almost imperceptibly, about the abject emptiness of their lives.
The bitches.
Ayann Hirsi Ali is a hero to many who want to see the war on Islamic terrorism end in a victory for the West. But every hero has her critics, and Ali is no exception. For some of the most mind-bending perverse logic you’ve ever seen, check the Newsweek article attacking Ali from the pro-Muslim and pro-feminist (!) point of view:
Other Muslim women interested in reform aren’t exactly in step with Hirsi Ali. “I wish people had been nicer to her,” says Muslim author and feminist Asra Nomani. “But I don’t blame Islam. I blame really messed-up people who’ve used religion to justify their misogyny.” As staunchly patriarchal strains of Wahhabi Islam infiltrate Muslim cultures outside the gulf region, many modern female followers are wondering how to embrace their religion without succumbing to its more sexist demands. And they’re coming up with answers that don’t require them to abandon either their religion or their culture. In the Middle East and South Asia, a strong majority of Muslim women recently polled by Gallup believed they should have the right to work outside the home and serve in the highest levels of government. Here in the United States, dozens of scholars like Ithaca College’s Asma Barlas, Harvard’s Leila Ahmed and Notre Dame’s Asma Afsaruddin have challenged widely accepted interpretations of the Qur’an. “They are Islam’s Martina Luthers,” jokes Nomani. “They are my heroes.”
It’s not clear what “being nicer” would have meant: no clitorectomy, fewer beatings, and a better arranged marriage, or not being disowned? Some people are just so hard to please.
Linklove to Roger L, Simon.
A couple of days ago, Professor Weinberger was complaining that the diaper-wearing nutcase feminist astronaut story was going to wipe out serious news for two weeks, but that cable news obsession will probably pale in comparison with what I expect to be an avalanche of fake mourning for Anna Nicole Smith, arguably the most worthless example of misspent protoplasm in recent history.
John Cole notes the irony:
I can not be alone in my observation that it is rather humorous that the person who most likely will rescue two feminists from public scrutiny is a stripper/turned Playmate who graduated into a full-fledged celebrity drunk, an addict and alcoholic through and through, as well as a terrible mother.
No dude, you aren’t alone.
Oh, by the way, there’s some sort of trial thing going on in Washington, but the tragic loss of America’s Princess depressed the prosecutor so bad he had to rest his case. Or something.
House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi’s endorsement of Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, the No. 2 position in the Democratic leaderhsip, has roiled her caucus. “She will ensure that they [Mr. Murtha and his allies] win. This is hardball politics,” Rep. Jim Moran, a top Murtha ally, told the Hill, a congressional newspaper. “We are entering an era where when the speaker instructs you what to do, you do it.”
But several members are privately aghast that Mr. Murtha, a pork-barreling opponent of most House ethics reforms, could become the second most visible symbol of the new Democratic rule. “We are supposed to change business as usual, not put the fox in charge of the henhouse,” one Democratic member told me. “It’s not just the Abscam scandal of the 1980s that he barely dodged, he’s a disaster waiting to happen because of his current behavior,” another told me.
As for Abscam, a recent book by George Crile, a producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes,” provides damning evidence that Mr. Murtha escaped severe punishment for his role in the scandal only because then-Speaker Tip O’Neill arranged for the House Ethics Committee to drop the charges, over the objections of the committee’s outside prosecutor. The prosecutor quickly resigned in protest.
See what happens when you vote? You only encourage the bastards.
Geoff Nunberg, the leftwing political activist and linguist who wrote Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, is upset with me for connecting George Lakoff with his former professor, Noam Chomsky:
Many people assume that there’s some connection between Chomsky’s politics and his linguistics, and a lot of them go on to conclude that linguistics itself is constituitively a leftish discipline. So when Lakoff emerged as an influential political figure, it seemed natural to blur both his politics and his linguistics with Chomsky’s, particularly if for those who didn’t know jack about linguistics. Whatever your political views, it’s a depressing reminder of how widespread the ignorance about the field of linguistics is (not that we exactly needed another one). But then it’s probably asking too much to expect people who find it expedient to conflate Lakoff’s garden-variety liberalism with Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism to take the trouble to learn the difference between Chomsky’s minimalism and Lakoff’s cognitive linguistics. Oh well, they have the sense they were born with.
Please. I called Lakoff a “protege” of Chomsky’s because one of the meanings of that word is “pupil”. I’m aware that Lakoff went on to develop his own school of linguistics and a set of political beliefs that differ from Chomsky’s at the margins. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Chomsky was the prototype of linguist-cum-lefty-activist, and Lakoff was a student who follows in the master’s footsteps along the broad program while differing in some of the details. Nunberg follows the same (by now) well-worn path, so (naturally) he sees distinctions that don’t matter to civilians. For the record, Lakoff’s linguistics are much less loony than Chomsky’s, but that never was the issue. I’m concerned about the use of the science of linguistics to mislead voters, and on that front Chomsky and Lakoff are strongly aligned.
UPDATE: A more accurate description of Lakoff is “Chomsky wannabe.” When you criticize linguists, be very careful about your terminology as they’ll pick you to death with meaningless distinctions.
A shocking new study reveals that people don’t process political information with their rational brains, but with their hysterical emotions:
The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.
Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”
Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.
The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.
The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.
“The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,” Westen said.
Duh.