Krugman wins Nobel

Sadly, I'm way more excited about Krugman winning the Nobel than I ever have about any sports team winning anything. I've long been a fan of Krugman, read his blog, recommended him to people, etc. And best of all, he drives the Right nuts. :)

The solution to all our problems: Copyright Czar!

The financial industry is collapsing, the stock market is tanking, and this is what the Senate does with its time?

For fuck's sake...

Obama to McCain

"Bend over, and take it."

Nice speech...very nice speech. I'm not sure how you respond to that if you're a Republican. I'm sure they'll come up with something that I think sounds stupid that resonates with Republicans for some reason. :-/

DNC speeches

Mark Warner
Warner is a bad speaker. Not a terrible one, but not good. He is just not inspiring. That's unfortunate, because his message was a good one: we can embrace our problems as an opportunity for innovation. Bring outsourced jobs to rural communities. Spur growth in alternative energy industries. Etc. Too bad I think the message got lost in the poor delivery.

Bill Clinton
Bill's speech was good, though not as good as Biden's. It started slow, but got to some satisfying hammers against McCain and Bush by the end. It did feel a little weird though, especially at the beginning, in a reverse psychology kind of way. He kept explicitly mentioning the perceived weaknesses of Obama. I know there's an argument for directly addressing such concerns, but it felt like it kind of reminded people to think about them, which I think is counter-productive. I was really surprised when he talked about how McCain diverged with his party on some important issues. Huh? I mean, nevermind that it's basically false (he's one of the most conservative members of the Senate)...why are you saying that during a DNC speech?? Weird.

Joe Biden
Biden's speech was the best of the lot. He's a really compelling speaker, and he hammered McCain hard. He had passion and energy, and he really still feels like a working-class kinda guy despite his years and years in the Senate. I hope that translates into bringing more blue collar voters into the fold.

DNC nausea

Ugh. I'm already sick of the DNC Convention. The ridiculous flag-waving, "pick yourself up by yer bootstraps!", "The American Dream is still alive!" narrative is making me fucking nauseous. It's absolutely what they have to do, but it's such pandering bullshit.

DNC schedule

Courtesy O. :)

Thoughtful political commentary: Fuck Critical Mass

Yes, it's kind of a bit far to go to piss off people who, well, piss you off, but I do deeply appreciate the irony here. This is exactly the kind of result I expected out of those retarded Critical Mass protests. You pissed off a guy enough to get injunctions against bike lanes, and you got in an all-out brawl with a driver in downtown Seattle; well done, guys! You're winning hearts and minds!

Gitmo

Do you know what the youngest age of someone at Guantanamo was when it opened?

11.

They were holding an 11-year-old at Gitmo. And I think he's still there.

God this country is fucked.

Gay rights: mostly about money

Honestly, this is why I've never been too pessimistic (unusual for me) about the prospects for gay rights in the long term: it doesn't make economic sense. Quick summary of the history of Massachusetts since gay marriage was legalized: "DOWN WITH GAY PEOP...oh, wait...they have money?! Fuck, why didn't you say so?!..."

Never forget money makes the world go 'round. :)

Want to be depressed?

Read this. Lays out very succinctly what a failure this administration has been in dealing with terrorism.

Continued Ayn Rand

I've been having more fun with the Ayn Rand thread on Digg (instead of working, of course). Philosophy is far more interesting than virtual machines at the moment...

Ayn Rand rant

In a fit of procrastination, I succumbed to my impulse to post on Digg, and I actually came up with a fairly concise description of my objections to Ayn Rand and Objectivism:

"There is a certain irony in Ayn Rand's philosophy in that she held "reason", which she defined roughly as "an objective view of reality," as the ultimate goal of life, and yet psychological studies prove time and again that people, when viewed objectively and scientifically, are fundamentally irrational. Animal training, conditioning with rewards and punishments, is a far more accurate model and effective guide to molding human behavior than any of her nonsense.

Rather than providing a guide for improvement, Rand's philosophy has served mostly as (ironically) a rationalization for discrimination ("if they're poor it's their own fault", "black people are incapable of the same kind of civilized reason that white people are", "women can't be trusted with anything important because they're too emotional", etc.), and consequently a blinder to the inadequacies of capitalism and free markets that arise from humanity's basically impulse-driven nature."

"I'm voting Republican!"

Huffington on "balance"

You know, Huffington may have a slightly batty, schizophrenic history, but it's nice to hear someone finally saying in a public forum what I've been complaining about for a while (i.e., the idea of "balanced" media coverage is stupid).

Standards

Okay, seriously...if we somehow agree that it's not okay for 16-year-olds to vote, why the fuck can't we agree that it's not okay for retards to vote?

...and before you object, remember that not only do they believe that Obama is an anti-American Muslim, they also _said so to a reporter_.

Fuck Clinton redux

Okay, I now officially hate Hillary Clinton. What utter, pandering, anti-intellectual, Republican horse shit. This is exactly the same kind of "Fuck the 'experts' and their 'knowledge' and 'intimate understanding of all the relevant details'" crap that turned Iraq into the shit-storm it now is.

I never thought there would be anything that would cause me to not vote against a Republican, but this is getting _very_ close...

A deep thought

Fuck Hillary.

That is all.

Bad McCain

No biscuit.

Superstupid Superdelegates

Okay. I admit it. In this one instance, the Republicans got something right that the Democrats fucked up.

I refer, of course, to the Democratic institution of "superdelegates." You can read all about it here in Wikipedia, but basically superdelegates were a mechanism to maintain the power of the party leadership. Period. These Democratic leaders decided they didn't like, you know, democracy. So, being all-wise, they decided that their vote should count more than the Democratic electorate. You know...all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. That kind of thing. Orwell would be proud.

There are many ironies here. The first and most obvious is that the Democratic party is un-democratic. The second is that the rules were changed in response to the results of the 1980 election. In the 1984 election, the sage leaders of the party overrode the popular vote to nominate...Walter Mondale. Who, as we all know, went on to great fame and fortune having soundly defeated the re-election attempt of Ronald Reagan.

.....

Right.

And now, it's looking like there's a strong possibility that superdelegate support for Hillary Clinton is going to override popular support for Barack Obama. Yet again, the superdelegate system is going to prop up the entrenched aristocracy of the Democratic party in the form of Clinton party loyalists. The same people, let's remember, who managed to cede Congressional control to the Republicans in 1994 and orchestrate spectacular losses to George W. Bush. Twice.

Allow me to reiterate that because it's important: They lost to the dumbest and most corrupt Republican figure in modern history. Twice.

It was only when Howard Dean took over party leadership that they managed to barely scrape together a majority (with no small amount of help from spectacular Republican implosions).

Now, that system has worked so well that they're going to wave their hands dismissively at the first Democratic figure in my lifetime who has traditionally Republican voters considering supporting him in favor of the one figure in America whose name alone can reliably raise the blood pressure of half the country by at least 30 points.

God, the ineptitude of the modern Democratic party is staggering...

Obama vs. Hillary

Well, it seems to be coming down to this: will the Democratic party continue its long and distinguished history of choosing a fundamentally unelectable candidate by nominating Hillary Clinton, or will they actually go with a centrist who has momentum and can pick up independent voters and voters who don't usually come out for elections (by nominating Obama)?

The more I listen to Clinton, the more her voice grates on me. It just _sounds_ insincere. I heard her on NPR talking about how she's sat down with people and had delicious local microbrews with them, and I wanted to gag. She's simultaneously a political panderer and yet, at the same time, reviled by much of the country. It's like she has the worst of both worlds: she says what she thinks people want to hear, and they still hate her. Bleh. I can think of no better way to rally conservatives than to nominate her. And it depresses the hell out of me to think she might just get it.

As for Obama, I admit preferring him not because of any of his policies (in fact, I think Clinton's health care plan, which includes mandated coverage, is a better idea, though admittedly harder to sell) but simply because he's "new guard." I feel strongly that anyone who voted for the war resolution ought not to keep their job, and they sure as hell don't get to be promoted. Pragmatically, I think Obama's right that McCain will be able to nail Clinton on this point. She voted for the war. Period. As much as she tries to wriggle out of it, she voted for the fucking war. She rubber-stamped Bush. She went with the political winds, and that's not a quality people gravitate to in a potential President.

Yes, I know, "it's the economy, stupid." But on some level, it does come down to personality. Hillary really is unlikable, and she will continue to be unlikable no matter how much crying she does or how much she spins herself.

And speaking of the crying, it will backfire. It will gain her a certain portion of the female vote who will sympathize with her, but there's no way the American machismo will allow itself to vote for a girl who cries during press conferences. And frankly, I don't think that's necessarily something to condemn it for. Yes, machismo goes too far when it engages in "bring it on!" testosterone-laden cowboy diplomacy, but I'm sorry, stoicism is something you want in a leader. People don't follow leaders who visibly break down. We don't want leaders who are human. We'll vote for Sarah Connor, not Bridget Jones, for fuck's sake.

Is this really the kind of candidate you want to have? When you can have this?