Last week, the national secretary of the College Republicans said the following about one of his college classmates (a Democrat) in a newspaper interview [bolding mine]:
I applaud Mr. Houx for his service, just as I applaud any other soldier who is brave enough to take up arms in defense of this country. I find it troubling, however, that one of the most vocal opponents of our president, our country and our mission in Iraq has chosen to fight for a cause he claims is wrong. Mr. Houx's rhetoric against the war on terror places him in agreement with the most radical fringes of the Democratic Party, and I am left to question his logic and motivation.
Yesterday, a contributor to the RedState blog wrote [bolding mine]:
We should not underestimate that "outing" Valerie "Undercover Brother" Plame was a bad thing. But, let's keep this in some perspective.
[…]
Next, let us just keep in mind that Valerie Plame was recalled from the field during the Aldrich Ames mess and she never re-entered the field. Let's also keep in mind that no one, no one, has been charged with outing an undercover agent.
Yeah, it may be a tragedy that Robert Novak's reporting will get Valerie Plame a great book deal and an appointment in Hillary Clinton's administration while undermining NOC's who help appoint their husband to go on visits to Niger and come back to beat up the administration by distorting the President's 17 words, but it would also be a tragedy if we did not deal honestly with this issue in the media.
Why make a pious proclamation, and then negate it immediately afterwards? Why not figure out your true feelings and thoughts, and then say something?
From a story in today's New York Times by Richard W. Stevenson and Robin Toner (italics mine):
After weeks of political turmoil, capped by the indictment of a senior administration official, President Bush will try to give his second term a fresh start by naming a new conservative nominee to the Supreme Court and intensifying his drive to cut government spending, White House officials and other Republicans said.
Intensifying his drive to cut government spending?
George W. Bush has been the most financially profligate president since Lyndon Johnson.
The 1952 [presidential] campaign also saw what [Earl] Warren considered his "betrayal" by Richard M. Nixon. [Nixon] had, like all the California delegates, signed a pledge to support [Warren] at the [Republican National] Convention. Despite this, Nixon worked, both in and outside the delegation, to obtain support for Eisenhower. Nixon joined the Warren campaign train in Denver, on July 4, the night before it was due in Chicago for the Convention. The train was in a festive mood, as the delegates had been celebrating in orange baseball caps, with the letter "W." Nixon and his supporters went through the train, shaking hands, and whispering that Warren did not have a chance and they should jump on the Eisenhower bandwagon.
-- Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court — A Judicial Biography, pg. 21.
I once read that translating a passage into a foreign language can be an excellent test of how well you understand that passage.
Something tells me that the following (from the Macedonian Press Agency) made no sense in the original Greek, either:
Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis in statements he made after the formal doxology at the church of St. Dimitrios in Thessaloniki today stressed that the morbid climate cultivated by certain circles will not stop the efforts underway and declared that the government will proceed with the reforms it has announced.
He stressed that the cries of those who want things to remain as they used to be will not have an intimidating or disorientating effect while he noted that the people condemn the practice of bulldozing everything.
Main opposition Socialist Party President Giorgos Papandreou stated that the people feel that Greece is stagnant in the rationale of political party interests, cliental relations, lack of transparency and vision.
Our favored [psychological] defenses become habitual mental manuevers. What has worked well in key moments, keeping anxiety under control with rewarding results, is likely to be tried again. Epstein, the novelist, found as a child that isolation fended off the sorrow of his father's death; that same cutting off of feeling offers itself years later when he confronts the horrors of Holocaust. Anna Freud's patient, whose feelings were damaged by her father's scorn, grows up to be a sarcastic, scornful woman.
Successful defense becomes habit, habit molds style. […] We set bounds on the range of our thoughts and feelings, limit our freedom of perception and action, in order to feel at peace.
-- from Vital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman, pg. 131 [italics mine]
When I was a teenager, I was an avid reader of George Will. I liked the style of his writing; a style that seemed learned, authoritative, and acerbic; qualities to which I aspired.
Reading those columns from the 1980s now, though, I see a different side of that style: peevish, obtuse, strangled.
The difference? When I read those columns the first time, 20 years ago, I was wound very, very tight. I feared. Feared everything. I circumscribed my life. I thought I needed to protect myself.
Will's style resonated with my way of living. If I could be confident in my grasp of reason and tradition, and ground myself in those, then I would not need the self-confidence I did not have. And, as a bonus, I could see myself as a better person than people without as strong a grounding in philosophy and history (i.e., everyone around me at the time).
Habit molds style.
Thank God it can re-mold it later.
How does your style reflect you?
Representative Sherrod Brown (D-OH) entered the race for Michael DeWine's Senate seat a short time ago. Many Democrats considered his entrance to be opportunistic, because Brown had shown little interest in contesting the seat when the GOP in Ohio was stronger. Such Democrats are inclined to support the other announced candidate in the race, Paul Hackett.
One of Hackett's strengths is the financial support he receives from blog readers. Upon entering the race, Brown sought to cut into that strength by making large ad buys with various widely read blogs. Some bloggers thought Brown was trying to buy their support, and at least one was vocally unimpressed.
So Brown changed tactics. Instead of asking bloggers for money for himself, he is asking them to contribute money to the eventual winner of the Democratic nomination.
This change in tactics serves three purposes for Brown:
1. He looks magnanimous, and gets some good press for himself.
2. He might convince blog readers to contribute to ActBlue instead of to a candidate, which would hurt Hackett more than himself.
3. He designed an ActBlue ad that makes him look good. The ad features an attractive picture of Brown, who looks at the viewer with a winning smile. It also features a bad picture of Hackett, who is looking not at the viewer, but at Brown, as if he were looking at his leader.
Sherrod Brown is clearly the candidate with more experience playing politics.
…who needs to be handled with great care.
Just ask Irish journalist Carole Coleman.
(The video of the Coleman's interview of Bush is here [SMIL format].)
I have never understood the point of polls that match an unnamed candidate from one party against a named candidate from the other party.
The most recent example comes from the Gallup organization, which says that an unnamed Democratic candidate would handily defeat President Bush in an election held today.
But if such an election were held today, it would be between Bush and another person, not between Bush and a generic Democrat on whom we can project our hopes and wishes. And that person would have strengths and weaknesses, and a particular public image that would work for or against him. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton might appeal to significantly different groups of voters, and those differences could decide the race.
So what is the point of these polls?
Paraphrased from "Logic and Conversation", an article by H. P. Grice:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required -- do not add any potentially distracting extraneous information.
3. Do not say what you believe to be false.
4. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
5. Avoid obscurity of expression.
6. Avoid ambiguity.
7. Be brief (avoid unnecessary words).
8. Be orderly.
Last night's Daily Show interview was a hell of a boxing match.
In the left corner, Jon Stewart: a jabber and a weaver, quick on his feet, doesn't pack a lot of power but can kill you with an uppercut.
In the right corner, Bill O'Reilly: powerful, intimidating; but slow, and helpless if he can't set his feet for that renowned roundhouse.
Stewart, in his home ring, had the advantage. He set the tempo, and never let O'Reilly roll. He kept the bigger man off balance — ducking, moving, faking, then a stinging left-right, and another, and ANOTHER!
No knockout. The fight was only two rounds.
But a clear winner: Stewart by unanimous decision.
Bush: It's 106 miles to Baghdad, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.
Cheney: Hit it.
Below is the warning sent out by the National Weather Service a day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
I'm not sure how they could have made it any clearer that the storm would be so severe that a massive federal response would be required.
URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGEThe Cincinnati Enquirer succinctly states the real problem with Bill Bennett's remarks:
The point, which Bennett refuses to understand, is that in his mind black people and crime are intrinsically linked.
The defenses of Bennett I have seen focus on the wrapper around this linkage: That Bennett had said he was talking about a hypothetical situation, and that he had explicitly said that that hypothetical was morally wrong.
What these defenses ignore is the linkage itself. It is clear to me that Bennett disavows the idea that fetuses carried by black women should be aborted in order to (as he puts it) lower the crime rate. It is not clear to me that Bennett disavows the idea that black people are intrinsically more likely than other people to be criminals. And that idea is the real scandal here.
(Thanks to Jeff Tindall for the Enquirer link.)
…inspired by reading and participating in blog and Usenet arguments over the years.
Let's stipulate that there is a Subject A, and that to fully understand that subject, one needs to know 1000 things.
If Person X knows 100 of these things, then he understands enough to discuss the subject at length with some detail, but not enough to really understand the subject. He understands the subject better than Person Y, though, who knows only three of the 1000 things.
Then there's Person Z, who knows 100 things about Subject A, but a completely different 100 than Person X knows.
Now, a potential pitfall of getting into an argument is that it can harden your position on the subject being argued. And once you've hardened your mind, you're more likely to doubt any evidence that challenges the position you've taken and believe any evidence that supports it.
If Person X and Person Y argue, clearly Person X is the more knowledgeable of the two of them, and will probably "win" the argument. But does that mean Person X is right? After all, there are 900 things about the subject Person X doesn't know. And if Person X takes his victory in the argument to mean that he is right, and as a consequence hardens his mind against learning the 900 things he does not yet know, then is that really a victory?
If Person X and Person Z argue, how can they find the common ground they would need to engage each other in a discussion? They each see Subject A from a completely different angle, and, although each knows as much as the other about the subject, they don't recognize it. In the usual case, these arguments end with accusations that the other person is dishonest, deluded, ignorant, or nonsensical.
I believe that these problems can be solved at least in part by humility about the limits of our own knowledge and a willingness to ask the other person questions that would help illuminate their point of view. It's a harder path, and God knows I rarely take it myself, but I do think it's the only way to make the argument give off light rather than just heat. (With people who argue like this, though — and they are out there — there's not much you can do.)
What do y'all think?
Most discussions in the United States about France and the French are more heat than light, which makes this enlightening book especially welcome.
The authors are two Canadians who moved to France for two years (1999-2001) in order to understand how the French are different from North Americans. Some of the points they made:
• Most North Americans (or our ancestors) moved to North America within the last 400 years, and altered the continent to suit our purposes. The French, on the other hand, are in large part descendants of the ancient Gauls. The idea of starting anew and making sweeping changes is natural to us; the idea of continuity and tradition is natural to them.
• A related point to the above: History is alive for the French in a way it is not alive for North Americans. The French still use 12th-century churches. Many of their roads were once Roman roads. The distant past is a part of their everyday lives.
• North Americans often get poor service in France because we don't realize that the French consider stores and restaurants to be the private space of the owner, whereas we consider them to be a public space. Walking into a store or restaurant in France is similar to walking into a private home: You greet the owner, and perhaps make small talk. To not do that is rude, and rudeness (as the French see it) begets rudeness.
• Eating is also different: In France, eating a meal is a public act that is expected to follow rigid rules of decorum; whereas in North America, eating is a private act that can be done wherever, whenever, and however each person chooses. The French don't snack.
• "Americans are definitely irked by the French habit of contesting the United States on every issue, but what really bugs the French is that the Americans seem to expect everyone to agree in every instance. […] Americans want nothing more than a perfect show of harmony among allies. The French think that if a relationship is strong enough, it should be able to withstand strong differences in public."
• French unions complain when the administration does not send out enough riot police to keep order during union protests, because it makes the union look as if it were too weak to make trouble.
• "The French expect people in power to run the country, not set moral standards."
Those are just a few items out of many in this fascinating book. If you have any interest at all in France, it's worth your time to read.
