Thursday, December 29, 2005

Creepiness from Berkeley's own Yoo

Via Crooks and Liars, this creepy quote is just creepy. See, it's not the illegal wiretaps per-se, it's the logic being used to justify them.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

When people start argueing that the president can set aside congressional law well... let's just say I start dusting off the word "fascist" and get ready to use it.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 12:46 PM
(5) comments

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Merry Christmas (or Merry Sunday)

For those readers who celebrate the birth of Jesus during this time, let me wish you all a merry Christmas. Yes, even the conservatives. Its easy to dehumanize and discount those with whom you disagree but we should remember that most everyone involved in politics is so becuase they honestly want to make the world better. Yes, even Bush and Cheny.

As for those who don't celebrate Christmas: I hope your year has been good and that next year is better.

So in general, though my online persona tends to be complainy, let me recognize what I'm greatful for: that we all live in indisputably the best time ever, in the best country ever, and that we have the opportunity to make it better - in personal and public ways.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:50 AM
(2) comments

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Should Bush be Impeached?

I want to tackle this question separate from the question of whether Democrats should push for impeachment in the house and senate. Clearly they should not. Politically, they could hardly go wrong by trying to mainstream the idea. The question of whether Bush *should* be impeached for his actions. Now, as best I can tell, Bush pretty much has no defense for his illegal wire-tapping besides "we told congress we were doing it" which is less a legal defense than a punch line. Personally, if members of congress were sufficiently informed and yet failed to act, they should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Some would argue that an impeachment hearing would be seen as a partisan witch-hunt and would contribute to heightened partisanship. They’re probably right. But that’s the fundamental adversarial basis of our government. Of course a president is going to be impeached by people who are doing it for political gain. Who else is going to do it? Centrists? Moderates?

Ok, now that we’ve all stopped laughing I can continue.

Impeaching George W. Bush would certainly do a lot to reassert the rule of law in our country. Had Bush backed down after being caught it might have been sufficient to censure him, but he has decided to shoot-the-moon and promises to continue breaking the law in the future. How can we accept that? How can we accept the illegal wiretaps going forward? The answer is we can’t. Our elected officials can certainly hold their tongues in acceptance of their limited power in the senate, but liberals should be able to say honestly and without moral ambiguity that when a president abuses the powers given to him, that president is not above the law.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 10:33 PM
(0) comments

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

In defense of hating

(also posted at partyline)

Conservatives have been pretty good about attacking anyone who suggests that Bush is unlikable or a bad person. “Bush hater” is thrown around like a four-letter word. Even when his administration accuses critics of treason or accuses McCain of having an illegitimate child or tries to dismantle the Social Security which keeps millions of old people out of poverty, critics are expected to act as if Bush is personally a nice guy with whom we just happen to have a policy disagreement with.

At the same time, it is respectable to hate Clinton. Hell, I’ve even had liberals look me straight in the eye and say they hated Clinton and found that he was an immoral person. Why? Well, not because Clinton abused his powers as president to illegally spy on citizens, not because he tried to impoverish millions with loaded tax cuts, no, that would be forgivable. Instead of lying about wiretapping citizens Clinton lied about cheating on his wife. And quite honestly, it’s clear which one is more serious and worthy of our scorn.

I do think that conservatives have a better media game that liberals do. It’s not because the “media” is conservatively biased (giving conservatives the awesome power to insert six or seven biased words into a New York Times article which get edited out), it’s because they’ve set up a parallel media with their own radio and television stations. Overtly conservatives, they present people who are willing to attack the opposition in personal ways, thus Kerry is unlikable and stiff. His wife is overbearing and power-hungry. Mrs. Clinton is a Machiavellian and personally dislikable. You get to hear all these on talk radio and to find out that Bush is a jerk who wants dictatorial powers you have to switch over to Air America (and of course, they’re all nut-balls, I know because I heard it on Hannity).

Now, this may not seem like a big deal but I think it is because personal animosity is a great political motivator. Many Americans have no idea of Bush’s policies, they just “know” he’s a nice guy. They have no idea where democrats stand on Iraq but they “know” Democrats are happy when things go bad there. They have no idea what Senator Clinton’s positions are, but they “know” she is conniving and mean. It’s bad enough when conservatives start internalizing this, its even worse when I have to hear liberals complain that “Sadly, I’ll just have to work for Hillary’s election in ‘08”.

It’s important to be *able* to argue honestly that Bush and other popular conservatives are not a nice people. In Bush’s case it’s not just true, it’s politically wise. With Bush’s popularity at an all time low it’s important to start engaging conservatives in the character debate. If we’re lucky we can turn disenchantment with Bush’s policies and leadership ability into an appreciation for the character flaws (and warped sense of morality) that gave rise to them.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 10:01 AM
(1) comments

Friday, December 09, 2005

Good Cheer

As part of my de-extremification regimen, I've been reading redstate.org becuase apparently it has a good reputation. A a sign of their goodwill they have even asked their readers to send the ACLU wishings of Merry Christmas!

It's time to wish the ACLU a Merry Christmas! No, not "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" or even "Kabbala Kwanzaa." And certainly not "Xmas." We're talking actual "Merry Christmas" here.

You can now send several E-cards a day to the ACLU as well as send your actual physical Christmas card to their national offices.
Send them some e-Cards. And don't forget to send an actual Christmas card to:

ACLU
"Wishing You Merry Christmas"
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004

With all the acrimony on the blogs today it’s really heartwarming to see people on the right extending a hearty handshake to the left on the issues we can all agree on: The right to proselytize whatever religion we want so long as we don’t use government funds to do it. Sure, the Christians at redstate (for indeed, they seem to assume their readers do not include any Jews, Muslims, Atheists or Agnostics) could have highlighted their disagreement with the ACLU by suggesting their readers entrusted with tax dollars use them to send these messages, but it is Christmas after all.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 6:42 PM
(0) comments

Monday, December 05, 2005

The Perils of Withdrawal (from Reality)

(This is being cross-posted from thepartyline)

The problem with Christopher Hitchens’ article is illustrated in its title: “The Perils of Withdrawal”. It contains the deceit that the perils he mentions belong only to the plan advocated by Murtha and those who believe that the American military have done pretty much all they can in Iraq. Since the US will have to withdraw from Iraq within the next two or three years (for political and logistical reasons) the real question is why does Hitchens expect the military headed by Bush and Rumsfeld to mitigate these perils in the time remaining, and is what little we can achieve in Iraq worth the extra risk. An interesting pro-staying-the-course essay would delve into these topics but for the most part this essay is an exercise in name-calling and avoiding the point.

First he asks why those who favor a shorter timeline for Iraq don’t also advocate one for Afghanistan. For one, Afghanistan is much smaller than Iraq so if we managed to get out of Iraq we would have plenty of troops free to continue multilateral defense of Afghanistan. More generally, they are two different countries and I find it is a gross oversimplification to say that the same logic apply to both. Also of course, the nation (especially the media) has a small attention span. If things are going as badly in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq its certainly not making the front page and thus there isn't popular support for a resolution. I have no problem with Democrats choosing their battles.

He then gets to Murtha.

If, as Murtha says, the presence of American troops is the cause not the cure for Islamist "insurgency," then the logic would be the same in all cases: withdrawal at least to a more distant point where (presumably) their presence would not incite mayhem. Leaving aside the question of what geographical point that would be (U.S. ships were targeted in Yemen before 9/11 and in the Jordanian Gulf of Aqaba after it), this argument does have its attractions.

This is flawed logic. Murtha argues that American troops are *a* cause of the insurgency. This is just one of many arguments Murtha makes for his timeline (the main one being that we’ve accomplished all we can). Here Hitchens is implicitly saying that Murtha believes the case for his timeline can rest entirely on this argument.

But there is another deceit here. This whole foray into an Afghan/Iraq metaphor is not argument against Murtha’s logic. Rather, it's just a charge of hypocrisy. There is value in exposing hypocrisy but here it serves to let Hitchens avoid making the negative case against t. (I’ve given up on seeing a positive case by now).

He then throws in some more insult our intelligence:

It was said even then that the attack would fail, because (remember?) if you killed Osama Bin Laden, then a thousand more would rise up to take his place. This line soon mutated into, "No war on Iraq: It's a distraction from the hunt for Bin Laden."

Look at the arguments he pulls to fabricate a charge of hypocrisy. The first “thousand more” argument would be advocated by an anti-Afghan war crazy. The second “distraction” argument is a mainstream one which even I have used. He offers no proof that any individual has actually held both of these positions, much less that many have.*

Finally we get back to Murtha:

There is some evidence that Murtha is wrong and that the Baathists and Bin Ladenists in Iraq are increasingly targeting civilian Iraqis—especially Kurds and Shiites—rather than those coalition forces who enjoy the benefits of "force protection."

This does not contradict Murtha’s claim that the insurgency is fueled in part by US presence. It merely underlines the horrible tragedy which is life in modern Iraq and that the situation is not improving even with US troops there. It is important to note here Hitchens is disagreeing not just with Murtha, but with General Casey who said in a September 2005 Hearing, “the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency.” To me, there is a heavy burden of proof which Hitchens makes no serious attempt to overcome.

The rest of the piece is just a wish list of what Iraq could be without any explanation of why he thinks we are going to get it. He says we should stay till asked by the Iraqi government to go but ignores their request for a timeline.** Murtha has a timeline. Is it to short? Should we pull out in one year or two? I don't really know. The factions in the Iraqi government haven't come to an agreement on the issue either. But instead of choosing and defending a timeline, Hitchens attacks those who have. Not with facts and logic, but with sloppy invective and caricature.

*Another deceit that jumped out at me here was this smear against MoveOn.org:

In spite of furious opposition from the MoveOn left and the Lindbergh right, and endless talk about a "quagmire" from many liberals, most Americans did back the intervention in Afghanistan because of the self-evident link between al-Qaida and the Taliban.

MoveOn did not oppose the war in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t be a member if they did. There has been a strong push by the right and to demonize MoveOn as being radical despite the fact that it focuses on popular liberal causes and explicitly stays out of intra-party disputes. MoveOn does a really good job raising money to counter the right though they may be a little inexperienced at running contests and protests (see the Hitler commercial which MoveOn did not produce but got tarred with anyways). It and groups like it are vital if liberals are ever going to be elected in this country.

** This technically isn't a contrdiction though I find it difficult to see why would should trust Iraq to tell us when to leave but not when they tell us to set a timetable.

Update: I've made some changes to since my first posting but I don't want to keep fiddeling with it. I could modify it endlessly but let me add only that I realize that Hitchens isn't obliged to argue about what I want him to. Still though, I feel my other arguments are valid.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 6:46 AM
(0) comments

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for many things:

• I'm thankful that I get to live in such a great country. I may nitpick the USA from time to time, but that's just how I show my love. Maybe I get that from my mom.
  
• I'm thankful for my good health (a little torn cartilage may literally slow me down but metaphorically I'm still going strong). My operation is in January.
  
• I'm thankful for the fact that I live in an age where expressing my half-baked political views for everyone to see can be accomplished with a few clicks instead of involving ink-stained presses and typesetting.
  
• I'm thankful that I have a job that doesn't bore me to tears. Whenever I get to employ a design pattern, my day is made. More broadly I'm thankful that I am in a position to participate in the economy in a way that doesn't leave me screwed over. (My girl-friend's a public school teacher.)
  
• I'm thankful for everyone fighting for us in Iraq and around the world.
  
• Lastly, I'm thankful to all my friends for putting up with my over the top political views. I mean, come on: Am I for real?

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 9:23 PM
(3) comments

Sunday, November 13, 2005

I *like* Coit tower

[I]f I'm the president of the United States, ... I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

Bill O'Rielly

My cubicle at work happens to have a great view of Coit Tower and I’m sure that if it blew up I’d have a great view of that too. But I think it’s fair to say it wouldn’t be in favor of any terrorist attack on San Francisco for all the normal reasons and for the reason that my great view of Coit tower is from a building next to the Transamerica Pyramid.

But I didn’t post so I could reiterate my disapproval of terrorism, nor to recap what a jack-ass Bill O’Rielly is, instead I wanted to talk about opposition to military recruitment. The official rational (and the legal basis upon which military recruitment can be limited in schools) is that schools don’t have to allow groups which discriminate on campus and that the Army discriminates unfairly against homosexuals. But lets be honest, this is probably only part of the story.

Personally, I favor allowing military recruitment on campus. But there is a fair amount of hostility toward recruitment from certain (small) sectors on the left. I’m no expert but I assume the bulk of these bans are on college campuses and are supported mostly by wide-eyed college activists. College is wonderful time to experiment. For most politically minded kids, experimenting leads to good old-fashioned idealism; the idea that one cannot possibly contribute to anything which is not 100% pure. This goes for lefties and righties alike though for obvious reasons there are more lefty kids on campus.

Usually idealism just leads to wasting one’s time. I remember learning about how the students of UC Berkeley NOW were going to protest a statue honoring women. According to them, the statue (which was a collage of various women throughout history) objectified women. Similarly, some college Republicans will patiently explain whenever you care to hear how Social Security, Medicare, and the Department of Education, are all actually unconstitutional.

I guess in the eyes of idealists, military recruitment is doubly splotched: one for discriminating, two for having done some not so good things in the past (even if they were under orders). This last one is particularly precient now as the Iraq war wasn’t such a good idea and the more soldiers we recruit for it, the worse it gets. I think it accounts for the banning of recruitment in ideological cities like San Francisco.

There are some other arguments I hear against recruitment. Some say it’s unfair to the poor since it sends them out to die while the rich stay behind. I don’t think that argument is operative since the average soldier is actually wealthier than the average American (probably due to the entry tests which filter out those who went to schools in poor areas).

This post is too long. In conclusion: O’Reilly is an idiot. Anti-recruitment people should get of their high-horse.

Update: BAD (and Rebecca outside the blog) explains that the "ban" isn't a band so much as a statement of intent to ban. I think the arguments still apply since it's still clear that many don't look on recruiting favorably.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 10:54 AM
(15) comments

Monday, November 07, 2005

Only punks don't vote

And by "punk" I don't mean a person who listens to a certain genre of edgy rock 'n' roll. I mean a person who's a big loser who wets his bed and lives with his mommy 'til he's 43 years old.

Tuesday is voting day. You have 8 referrenda on which to vote Yay or Nay. Don't know what they are? Look 'em up! Don't know where to vote? Look that up too!

Here's how I'm voting, in case my political persuasions were a mysterious enigma shrouded in a thick cloak of curiosity:

73-78: No
79-80: Yes

That wasn't so hard, was it?

I feel most adamently about 73. Unfortunately, I flew in from DC about an hour ago, and it's 2:14am to me right now, and I'm too tired and grumpy to write a tretise on how the passage of 73 helps no one and only promises to endanger girls' health.

On the bright side, I saw Tim Russert walk back from his lunch break last week! And I got to hang out in the C-SPAN control room and watch "Washington Journal" be produced!

By the way, DC is run by tools. More later.

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 11:06 PM
(15) comments

Thursday, November 03, 2005

The Anti-Tax Revolt

Or should it be called the Anti "Tax revolt" revolt? I don't know. What I do know is that the conservative tax "revolts" of the 70's and 80's which lead to travesties like prop 13 here in California are finally now being re-examined by citizens who appreciate that society costs money. Specifically, Colorado has finally done away with TABOR, an insidious little piece of legislation which limited the amount people could vote to invest in their public infrastructure. That's liberal-speak for limiting taxes.

Of course, the whole idea that the original tax "revolt" was anything other than a plot by Big Business to slip out from their obligations while making America less competitive is kind of silly. I realize that conservatives like to pooh-pooh framing when our side does it but you've got hand it to them for doing such a good job framing the issue. Calling it a "revolt" makes it sound like Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist stormed the Bastille instead of just pushing a plan with tons of money from special business interests.

Sure, when they passed prop 13 they talked a lot about little old ladies not being able to afford their property tax but the end result was that government shifted property taxes from business to people, specifically new home buyers. Since Prop 13 ensured that property taxes could never go up (more than a certain small percentage) once you bought the house, the only way to invest in California was to raise beginning tax rates. And since owning your own home is one of the greatest ways to get out of poverty you can imagine what that's done to our economy. Meanwhile, business unlike people could move out of a building in fractions (first moving out a third of your people, then another third etc) so as to not set off the property reassessment in Prop 13. The end result is the businesses in California don't pay nearly as much property tax as do people.

Hopefully, California can follow Colorado's lead.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 9:20 AM
(1) comments

Sunday, October 30, 2005

A response to RepBast1984 on Fascism

This response got too big for the comments section:

“why was fascism considered right wing? Because they opposed socialism?”

True, it’s not enough to simply point out that the fascists dismantled unions or opposed socialism. There are many reasons why Fascism is understood to be right-wing. They actively opposed liberalism and communism while forming coalition government with conservatives. Fascists (like Mussolini) were financially supported by wealthy industrialists and landowners. They did so for the same reason that they supported other conservatives: because fascists made were against progressive reforms and were better for the bottom line. The Fascists often had support from the religious community. They did so for the same reasons religious groups support other conservatives: Fascists believed in “traditional values”, and in strengthening the role of faith in the public sphere. Mussolini in particular had the support of the Vatican (which was even more conservatives at the time).

On a more basic level, if you look at the Lakoffian “frames” used by fascists, it’s clear that they were using a “strict father” frame in governing. The believed in strongly in reward and punishment to the exclusion of nurturance. They believed that strength came from the strong leader at the top (one of the more obvious trait of fascism). They idealized the past and framed their goals in those terms. I could go on but I think the analysis is clear.

“If you want to talk Italy, yes Italy was not industrialized untilt he 1930's”

Italy was industrialized as of 1930 at least in the north which is where the fascists had more power. Though it was still poor, industry and trade unions were a powerful political force. In the south (where my family lives) there was little industry and little support for fascism since the rich needed no protection against socialists.

“Italian Fascism is different from Nazism because of the focus on national unity as opposed to racial unity. Racial unity is not Fascism.”

This is just weird. Why is racial unity/ national unity a meaningful distinction when the nations in question are mostly racially homogenous? The Italian fascists were also against Jews and Roma, even the ones that had lived in Italy all their lives. German fascists identified a “greater Germany” which included places like Austria where ethnic Germans lived. Italy identified a “greater Italy” which included lands outside Italy where ethnic Italians lived. This is a distinction without a difference - and I don’t see why you are trying to make it.

“Stability was destroyed, their businesses were confiscated by the state and the fascists brought wars to their countries.”

True, but they hardly campaigned on this. I mean, by that standard, communism is right wing since it didn’t really help the poor.

“Interesting, communism was supposed to be a movement that did not include the agricultural poor.”

You are right in a sense. It is a great historical irony that Marx (and most other communists) assumed that their system would come about because industrialized workers would become exploited and overthrow the existing order. Instead, Communism took hold only in unindustrialized countries like Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam through agricultural peasant revolts.

“As we've found out from this year's electiont he agricultural poor are conservative reactionaries guided by religion.”

This is wrong on a couple levels. 1. Due to mechanization, the US doesn’t really have an agricultural poor anymore. 2. The poor vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. 3. Are you seriously trying to extrapolating the mindset of Chinese peasants from modern day election results? 4. Read a history book, bud. The communists came to power in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam with a powerbase of peasants. Not being industrialized, there was no other political base to launch a revolution from.

“The communists knew that no peasants were going to be involved in a revolution that would provide equity and abolish capital. Peasants who were poor (petty bourgeoisie), just wanted more money. this is why communist regimes fell. They never adhered to Marxist theory, mainly because Marxist theory would work nowhere.”

I have no idea what you are arguing here. Let’s get back to the Fascism.

Update: David Neiwert hits this issue hard in this post:

Of course, as I just got done explaining a little bit ago, the conservative charge that fascism was a leftist phenomenon is a rightist attempt at David Irvingesque historical revisionism. There is not a single serious historian of either fascism or World War II who does not consider it a right-wing phenomenon: its anti-liberalism and anti-socialism were its defining characteristics, regardless of the rhetoric adopted by early adherents and leaders.

This quote really doesn't do him justice though. Read the whole thing.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:46 AM
(24) comments

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Liberal Fascism... as opposed to the regular kind

The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg has come out with a new "book" called Liberal Fascism. To me it indicates the lack of ideas on the right, but more importantly, the lack of intellectual seriousness more than anything else. I mean, how divorced from reality do you have to be to compare Fascism – the international enemy of left-of-center movements of all types, from liberal to socialist to communist, universal friend of conservative movements (for that is who they invariably formed coalition governments with) – to liberalism, the ideology of pluralism? Answer: all the way divorced. That’s how much.

Author David Neiwert explains:

Mussolini was indeed an active socialist at the beginning of his political career. But he was remarkable for shifting his alliances and adjusting his ideology accordingly as he climbed the ladder of power; and by the time he had completed his climb, he was an outspoken and lethal anti-socialist.

Hitler's fascists, somewhat in contrast, only adopted a limited socialist rhetoric as a sop to its efforts to recruit from the working class. Hitler quickly jettisoned these aspects of the party as he obtained power, particularly in forming a ruling coalition with conservative corporatists. There was little doubt that Hitler and the Nazis were devoutly anti-leftist: their Brownshirts made a career of physically attacking socialists and communists wherever they gathered, and the first people sent to the concentration camp at Dachau in 1933-34 were socialist and communist political leaders.

Structurally, the fascists had to be anti-left. Their base was not the unionized workers and intellectual middle class. The Nazis disbanded unions the second they got the chance. They terrorized universities and destroyed the modern art and modern science that they gave rise to. Politically, their reason for being was that the left was a dual threat to society: Communists and Socialists were attacking society, and the flabby liberal government couldn’t keep people safe. This same line played itself out over and over again; in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and even the US (though thankfully the silver shirts didn’t get far in the US). Again and again the fascists came to power in coalition governments with other conservatives. Again and again they were bankrolled by the same corporatists that bankrolled other conservative movements. Again and again they instituted the same policies which left the rich richer and the poor poorer. Again and again they attacked liberal pluralism as “relativism” and tried to replace it with one true faith.

The left has often been accused of comparing Republicans to Fascists. Besides a few stoned out radicals from the 60s, I'm happy to say this is generally false. What’s true is that no respected liberal thinkers have made this accusation seriously (although of course we keep an open mind on the subject if new facts come to light). With this book, Jonah Goldberg, nationally syndicated columnist and an editor-at-large for the National Review, has stepped over the line. If he earnestly made this accusation, then he - and the conservative movement that backs him - is intellectually bankrupt; if he made it dishonestly, then he guilty of the worst kind of smear-campaign. Either way it does not bode well for the seriousness of the conservative movement.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 8:02 AM
(5) comments

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Why are feminists so hot?

I like to read the feminists blogs becuase well... because I like lefty blogs in general, but also becuase it's great fun to read their rightous ire at popular right-wing mysogynists. Case in point, Amanda Marcotte riffing on Leon Kaas and Harvey Mansfield:

The first and most obvious bit of misogyny is the assertion that the only reason men would get married is because they can't get sex otherwise. In other words, women better fall down on our knees and thank the lord for the pussy or else we'd have no bargaining chip to keep our social superiors from ignoring our foul, disgusting selves completely. To put it bluntly. Truly, the argument that a man has to be bribed into marriage assumes that men cannot find anything else about women to like enough to want to be with women, and on the flip side, it assumes that women are so debased and lowly that we are dying to touch the robes of the sex that would kick us out in the snow if we didn't bribe them with pussy. How the hell love factors into the cold transaction of men tolerating the presence of debased females in their lives in exchange for sex, I couldn't tell you.

The Mansfield/Kass argument is misogynistic on another level as well. O'Rourke characterizes their supposed concern for the well-being of young women as a cover story for them to wring their hands about the evil sluttitude out there, and I definitely think she's right but I also think there's something else going on there, something more sincere. I think on a certain level, these two men cannot conceive that women might have subjective inner lives that would create conflict between them snapping easily into the Mansfield/Kass sexual fantasy of the virginal bride and living their own lives. In other words, since they tend to think of women as objects to project their fantasies onto and nothing much else, they don't see why it would actually be unfulfilling for a woman to live out the fantasies being projected on her.

What's really weird is that men like Kaas and Mansfield manage to exist in our culture at all. I know that there are some pretty conservative areas out there but honestly, who hasn't internalized the idea that premarital sex should be a personal choice for women just like it has always been for men?

I realize that conservatives have been working on vilifying feminists since they started this whole "equality" thing but seriously, who can argue with the basic tenets of Feminism today? Who can argue with equal work for equal pay? Who can argue against sharing parenting duties (or dividing them in some other mutually agreed upon way)? Who can argue against letting women have control over their own sexuality? Who can argue against the idea that guys are responsible for their own sexual behavior and that they don't have to be tricked into marriage with promises of sex? The basic idea of feminism has already been absorbed into our culture (except in parts of Utah), the best conservatives have managed is to try and disassociate feminist social progress from the feminists who made it happen and co-opt it with idiotic anti-feminists like Ann Coulter.

Feminism isn't some PC crap foisted upon America by big brother, it's a choice made by our culture at large by men and women everywhere. Those who think themselves part of some anti-feminist cultural elite vanguard, well... They're free to argue their case if they want, but we've been there, done that, and we've decided we like this much better.

Also, check out the bloggers at Feministe and Feministing. They are very entertaining... and also
hot.

Update: Bonus story! Last time I was in San Diego I was driving somewhere with my little old aunt who grew up in Sicily and immigrated to the US in the 1950's (with two kids in tow). We were talking about women and divorce and she was lamenting her daughter's divorce years earlier. She said something like the following:

You know, in my day, we didn't have divorce... but you know… women also got treated pretty badly too. I hear people complain today saying "Oh I'm tired I've been doing the laundry today". Tired? The machine did it! When I was a girl we had to do it by hand and you had to take the clothes to the town fountain to do it. My dad and brother worked hard every day. Every single day. But when they got home, they were treated like kings! We had to keep working. No, things are better today...

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:14 AM
(26) comments

Harriet Miers Withdraws

Like a mormon having unprotected sex, Harrient Miers has prematurly withdrawn today leaving room for bush to nominate someone else to have a go. I want to write more but really I just wanted to use that metephor.

So will bush nominate a far-right crazy or play the safe course?

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 6:57 AM
(5) comments

Saturday, October 22, 2005

John Edwards at UC Berkeley

From a e-mail by MoveOn.org:

This Tuesday, Senator John Edwards will be at University of Californoa—Berkeley continuing his whirlwind national tour to galvanize young people in the fight against poverty. The last few events have been smash hits, and momentum continues to build.

The Senator has asked us to invite MoveOn members to join him when the "Opportunity Rocks" tour hits Berkeley. Here are the details:

WHO: John Edwards, UC Berkeley students, and MoveOn members from the community
WHERE: UC Berkeley -, Union Ballroom, Pauley Ballroom, Martin Luther King Student Union
WHEN: Tuesday, October 25th. Doors open at 5:30 pm
Seating is limited, so please reserve tickets today at:

http://www.opportunityrocks.org/tour-2005/tickets/moveon/

I have my tickets. See ya there.

Update: Just got back from the speach. John Edwards is certainly a good speaker and what he had to say about poverty in America was very insightful. I may have more thoughts on it later.

Update:I was certainly a good speach. I didn't have a good seat so I couldn't see his face most of the time but I feel like that let me concentrate on his words more.

What was interesting to me was that the whole speech was about increasing opportunity and the idea that we could help. But when he went to list the ways we could alleviate poverty his solutions were things like extending the EITC, mixed income housing, extending Medicare and Medicaid benefits (presumably leading the way for some kind of universal healthcare) and other things which are pretty much things politicians can only do.

Personally I think this is correct. But then that means the best we can do is work in the Democratic party to get people elected *and* try to convince people to join our cause through things like liberal blogs and think tanks. (Hey, like this one!) I don’t know what groups were there after the speech to recruit, but I’m glad liberals are getting away from the hippy-dippy flower power idea that we can fix systematic problems with what basically amounts to non-governmental charity programs.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 6:05 PM
(7) comments

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Blogging spree! (DDT Lies)

Via Crooked Timber I find this link to a page debunking yet another common anti-liberal myth. This one claims that liberals and environmentalists made DDT illegal and thus contributed to malaria world-wide.

What about the ban on using DDT to fight malaria? There is no such ban. DDT is banned from agricultural use (and rightly so because of environmental damage) but can still be used for disease prevention. JTFCSS pretends that there is a ban so they can hang malaria deaths around the neck of environmentalists.

…

Yes, the mosquitoes in Sri Lanka have evolved resistance to DDT. It doesn’t work any more. In fact, that is the reason why they stopped using DDT in Sri Lanka. It wasn’t because of any ban—it was because it stopped being effective. [Members of The World Health Organization] are sending malathion, which will actually be able to kill the mosquitoes there.

This slur plays right to the biases that conservatives have. Namely, it’s the common conservative belief that environmentalists want us to choose between the environment and man. As this story proves, the opposite is true: Environmentalists (like me) want to use our resources wisely so as to not squander long term economic health for short term gain. Environmentalists helped phase out the use of DDT as an agricultural pesticide in the developing world because the environmental damage it caused was unnecessary and so its use as an anti-malarial pesticide could be maintained.

It’s a pity that, having failed to find true arguments, anti-environmentalists have to resort to fake ones. Or maybe it’s not.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 5:22 PM
(0) comments

Friday, October 14, 2005

Hack

You know, I don't ussually double post like this but jesus: Could Glenn McCoy be any more of a hack? Look, if you think that Bush is so awesome that he can do no wrong, fine. Ignore the wrong he does. But does this comic even make sense if you think about it? Yes, newscasters also use scripts. Newscaster's however, generally write their own scripts since they *do* report.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 8:32 PM
(11) comments

Hate Crime laws: Anti-Terror legislation, not Thought Crimes

Consider the following scenarios:

1. A man you do not know kills you just to watch you die.
2. A man you do not know kills you for your money.
3. A man you do not know kills you accidentally while in a drug-induced haze.
4. A person kills you accidentally because they a knife slipped from their hand and flew across the room.
5. A person assists your suicide.
6. A person kills you with the intent of intimidating people who are like you.

The outcomes of each of these cases are the same: you are dead. And yet because the motivation is different, our criminal justice system recognizes them as different and may assign different punishments to each. This is why we have first and second degree manslaughter. This is why lawyers spend months proving intent and premeditation. The idea, as floated by some conservative writers, that a law that judges intent is equal to the legislation of a “thought crime” is unserious. Intent is obviously important.

So what of the hate crime? Does it actually warrant different treatment from the criminal justice system? I say it does. A person who commits a regular crime does not necessarily intend to terrorize the general population. A hate criminal doesn’t just commit a crime against a specific person – he commits the extra crime of purposely terrorizing a specific population.

Terror *is* what we’re talking about here. To commit a hate crime it’s not sufficient to merely kill a gay person or other minority. You have to pick out that group in your mind, go to where you can find members of that group, and purposefully bypass others as you head toward your goal. (That's the thing about minorities. They're harder to find.) Oh sure, some criminals may have decided to commit a crime already and figure that while they’re at it they might as well pick a member of some group they hate. Call it “killing two birds with one stone”. Well then, I say let them serve time for both birds when they come home to roost.

Of course we shouldn’t let recognizing the extra terror component of hate crimes lead us to extra penalties on just any crime against a minority. If someone beats up a lesbian without caring about her orientation that person would be an asshole, but I wouldn't call him a homophobe asshole without other information.

Update: changed "knowing" to "caring about" becuase that's what I really meant.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:14 PM
(31) comments

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Conservative tax plans

While engaging in all this artsy fartsy talk about taxes and all it's good to keep in mind what representatives voted in by actual real life conservatives do with tax code. Via Daily Kos we find a report that Republicans are eliminating the AMT, a tax that the rich can never get out of paying no matter how many lawyers they have. Granted, this tax will start affecting regular people (re: people who *earn* their money) soon so it should be reformed so it goes back to working how it should. But I guess Republicans know that they can use this opportunity to help the rich sneak out of their taxes yet again and the conservatives back home will keep voting for them. Aren’t conservatives grand!

But wait. Its gets better.

Apparently, the Republican congress has been reading DTI’s posts here on Caljunket because they’re going to offset the money lost from the AMT by simplifying the tax code! That’s right; they’re getting rid of deductions on mortgage interest and health insurance! You know, deductions that are small for rich people but which are a godsend for the middle class. Thank god conservatives managed to get their congressmen elected so that they could cut taxes on the wealthy and raise them on the middle class – oh wait – did I say that? I meant to say “get us closer to a flat tax”.

Congrats, DTI!

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 9:56 AM
(25) comments

Monday, October 10, 2005

Nowhere to go but up

Linked to from Andrew Sullivan today is this startling news: Adopting a flat tax (i.e. raising taxes on regular people and lowering them on the rich) leads to explosive growth!

I believe this is one of the biggest pieces of economic news ever. Milton Friedman's single-postcard flat-tax idea has finally started catching on (ten Eastern European countries, with four more in Europe close to adoption). 2004 GDP growth rates there averaged a staggering 8%, well over twice the industrialized nations' average of 3.4%. Of course these flat-tax rates vary widely, from 12-33%. Among the six lowest-taxed countries, growth rates are the highest: 8.6%. The lowest-taxed three have 9.5% growth.

Wow, that really is amazing! Clearly this person has not only discovered something about economics but he has also discovered that correlation equals causation. How else to explain the wild leaps of faith required to come to his conclusion. Poor countries, especially those joining the capitalist world for the first time, are due for high growth regardless of what silly tax policies they adopt. Just look at India and China.

Ah the flat tax. You know, the rich are always the eternal enemies of capitalism. They not only stand to gain personally from its disruption, but unlike stoned-out hippies, they have the means to affect it. The flat tax is the latest attack on the American capitalistic system. It’s yet another way to shift tax responsibilities from the rich onto regular folk while simultaneously eroding the funding for the governmental structures which keep capitalism alive. Sometimes I wish the flat tax would actually be implemented for a month. The public revulsion would be so strong and so immediate that whole elitist Libertarian structure would be overturned in a fortnight like shaking off a bad dream.

Now I’m just getting dark.

Update: Via Brad Plumber comes more information on the "Flat Earth Flat Tax". I think he's being unfair: Flat Earthers' beliefs are inconsequential. Flat Taxer's would pretty much ruin America.

Update: The orignal poster has retracted a bit of what he said here. Hat's off to him I say. If his tax preferences are a little eccentric, he is at least honest about the facts on the ground.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 1:16 PM
(16) comments

Friday, October 07, 2005

It's not his fault if he's overrated

Berkeley's own George Lakoff pens this piece in my favorite Magazine today. It does a lot to cut through the mumbo-jumbo framing crap people keep misunderstanding Lakoff as saying and applies his ideas to the real life case of Hurricane Katrina: A tragedy that proves the necessity of effective liberal government and the bankruptcy of the conservative governing ideology.

The tragedy of Katrina was a matter of values and principles. The heart of progressive values is straightforward and clear: empathy (caring about and for people), responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy), and fairness (providing opportunities for all and a level playing field from which to start). These values translate into a simple proposition: The common wealth of all Americans should be used for the common good and betterment of all Americans. In short, promoting the common good so that we can all benefit -- and focusing on the public interest rather than narrow individual gain -- is the central role of government. These are not just progressive values. They are America’s values.

Katrina shines a light not only on the failure of conservative values but especially on their fundamentally un-American character. Since the days of the colonies, when the commonwealths of Massachusetts and Virginia were formed, Americans have pooled their common wealth for individual aspirations.

Lakoff's framing ideas will only take us so far but it's important for liberals and progressives to recognize that the failures of the recent congress and administration are *not* caused by personal incompetence. Rather, a fundamentally unworkable hard-right governing ideology is setting us up for failure regardless of how competent any individual Republican is.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 9:21 AM
(5) comments

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

You Could Have it Moderately Better

The new Franz Ferdinand EP (released today!) is more enjoyable than their debut album from last year, which is a significant accomplishment. You should go listen to it. Then, if you like it, you should buy it. Help the brothers out. The Scottish economy needs it.

Goddamn those guys are good.

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 10:21 AM
(0) comments

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” syndrome

Ballon Juice is generally an enjoyable blog but today John Cole writes something that just makes me mad.

I am not so sure about the end of the ‘revolution,’ considering I don’t think [Tom Delay and other Republicans] have been behaving like Republicans for a while now.

Isn’t that great? To Cole, the definition of “Republicans behavior” is divorced from “the behavior that Republicans exhibit”. I think that’s pretty much sums up the standard line I keep hearing from Republicans: Don’t judge us by what we do, Judge us by our slogans.

Hopefully, this kind of denial is a stage in long trip to accepting that the conservative god has failed. A commenter on the post above made the parallel between communism and American Conservatism thusly: It looks good on paper, but it doesn’t account for actual human nature.

Sure, you can make a coalition between the Social Security haters and the tax dues haters and the fag haters and the worker’s rights haters and the diplomacy haters and the any-government-unlesss-its-usefull-to-me haters but you know what? When they get their guy elected it turns out that there’s nothing the conservative coalition can do without destroying itself. You can’t cut Social Security without upsetting the bigots, you can’t cut Medicare without upsetting the grannies (in fact you have to make it bigger though in the least efficient way possible!), you can’t cut farm subsidies without upsetting big business, you can’t actually pass a anti-gay-family bill without making the libertarians nervous that they may have to lift a finger to protect the rights of people who aren’t rich.

This isn’t something that’s going to be hashed out in some back room somewhere: Major parts of the coalition are going to have to be cut lose for the other ones to get what they want and that would cause them to lose elections. The Republicans were able to buy time with massive deficit spending but unsustainable borrowing can’t be sustained, nor can they fix it without destroying their coalition.

You know, we Democrats can be feckless at times, but damn, the Republicans bring new meaning to “ineffective”. This isn't a broken party: it's a party that never worked in the first place and can't be fixed.

Let me add that the whole idea of basing your coalition ideology on “government should be small” is silly. I might as well form a coalition to further the ideology of “the economy should be good”. If you don't have an agreement on how to achieve it, it means absolutley nothing. Both liberals and conservatives want to make government smaller, all things being equal. Both have government programs that they love and can’t live without. It’s just that conservatives have been duped by people like DeLay into thinking there’s a party that can provide what they want.

Just don’t get into the specifics.

Update: Matt Yglesias has a post with much the same theme. The Republicans are a party permenetly without an agenda... besides complaining about liberals that is.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 4:17 PM
(43) comments

Saturday, September 24, 2005

I'm a Liberal American: a Democrat!

You are a Social Liberal (76% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (33% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:06 AM
(9) comments

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Ignorance, Intellegence, and the Bell Curve

Check out FAIR on The Bell Curve.

JAMA can be forgiven for misunderstanding the point I was trying to make about the Bell Curve. He has probably listened to too many fools try to discredit SAT and standardized tests altogether. He probably assumed that when I said tests don’t measure innate intelligence that I meant that it doesn’t measure intelligence. So let’s go over this slowly so that if JAMA still doesn’t understand, we can be sure that it’s because he is dumb.

Standardized tests work. They are good at testing people’s intelligence. What they can’t do however, is measure how much of that intelligence is due to genetic factors, and how much is do to culture and upbringing. After all, if I took the world’s red-headed population and whacked them on the back of the head with a baseball bat, they might do more poorly on standardized tests than average, too.

Blacks in general do more poorly on standardized tests. But then, according to FAIR: “sociologist Jane Mercer has shown that supposed racial differences in IQ vanish if one controls for a variety of socio-economic variables”. (Have you read Jane Mercer’s work, JAMA? No?)

So let’s recap. If you take the average poor black person, and compare her to an average white person with the same income, they magically turn out to have the same IQ on average.

You are an intelligent person, JAMA. So you will point out like the authors of the book* that if you assume our society is perfectly fair than of course people of the same income will be equally intelligent. As a corollary, we can add that Black people are dumb and the proof is that they’re poor. QED. In return, I will point out that if your racial “logic” is based on that *assumption* there really isn’t much to separate you from a simple racist. And I’m not saying that to shut down the conversation. I’m saying that because I think it’s true and I look forward to hashing out this issue with you.

I have a personal connection to this old racist line because my great-grandfather, Gioacchino Sciortino, was a poor Italian immigrant and at the time Italian immigrants didn’t test so well on the standardized tests either. Neither were they rich. And the men who owned everything explained that since the standardized tests showed Italians were less intelligent, then it must be because Italians were genetically inferior. You should head down to the main stacks and check out the newspaper clipping of the time.

The punch-line is that as Italian-Americans got more opportunities (in part through things like turn of the century Affirmative Action in police hiring) and became more successful, their IQ’s went up. And it wasn’t because of some kind of amazing natural selection pressure - it was because good schooling, a stable home life, and good pre-natal care can do a lot to raise standardized test scores. I suspect that once Blacks get out of the poverty trap, you will find their test scores shoot up as well, just like the scores of those Blacks who have already succeeded. But there’s no hard proof one way or the other with the current information, so any book that claims to do so (unless they introduce some amazing new research) is clearly wrong.

I'm finishing up Harry Potter right now, but when I'm done I will be checking out The Bell Curve and I'll be going over it on my site. Many other sites have done so, but apparently, every one in the whole world will have to do it to satisfy JAMA.

* FAIR: “the authors [of the Bell Curve] reject her method because their theories assume that low IQ causes people to be poor, rather than poverty causing low IQs”

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 1:59 PM
(15) comments

Saturday, September 17, 2005

I'll blog when I FEEL like it!

[Stomps foot. Pouts lower lip.]

Yes, I've been off in my own little world as of late, and for some inexplicable reason haven't felt like posting or giving the internet any confirmation that I exist in the past many weeks. I'm healthy and mostly happy, but I'm still adjusting to the life of the full-time-working, food-and-wine-talking-about, college-existence-ignoring proto-yuppie.

The primary reason for my absence has been that I in fact do work at work these days. I've been integrated into my organization as a bona fide full-time employee, replete with benefits (that I've waived because I get better ones through my mommy), monthly business trips, and 5 weeks' paid vacation every year. I've also been saddled with what we in the industry call "responsibility," meaning that I have to remain self-motivated, and also meaning that I have very little free time while enjoying my office's T3 line to rant about whatever's on my mind.

I've also been increasingly turned off by internet-bound political discussion lately. It's fairly repetitive, and usually devolves into "liberals do this, whereas conservatives do this!" rather quickly. I'm not impressed with the few main characters who dominate the Berkeley blog comments, and recently have been favoring face-to-face political debates over cyber arguments.

This too shall pass, and by next week I will undoubtedly be spewing my wacky leftist claptrap all over the web for my colleagues to make fun of again.

When I do get back into the groove, however, I can promise you that I will almost never write about campus issues. The hibernation period of my interest in my alma mater hasn't passed yet, and for now I'm just annoyed at college students who dress cooler than I do and jaywalk across Telegraph when I'm trying to drive my shitty car. I haven't read CalStuff in ages, and the last time I tried to read the comments on that site I think my brain turned into chewy delicious nugat.

I don't care what CNN tries to convince me when they have nothing else to report on; blogging is not an amazingly wonderful medium that everyone should shit his or her pants over. Not yet at least. There are too many losers and ineloquent morons dominating it right now to make it my main source of entertainment.

Instead, as of late, I've become addicted to weekly advice columns and nerve.com.

I look forward to writing more productively as soon as I get my head out of my ass and remember what it's like to care about the rest of the world. I miss you guys.

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 7:53 PM
(1) comments

Friday, September 16, 2005

Student Newspaper Articles BAD doesn't have time for

I thought I'd help BAD out by picking a newspaper article to make fun of. This one comes from The Daily Tar Heal and seems to revolve around the idea that, if only everybody would talk about racial profiling, surely we would all agree with her when she says:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

Now, let's not get into the fact that she seemed to misrepresent herself to the Arabs she "quotes" as supporting her views. And let's not mention how she seems to conflate Arab foreigners, who already face higher security restrictions, and Arab-Americans. Let's actually talk about racial profiling and whether it provides any defense. I think Yglesias pretty much sums up my thinking on the subject:

Someone probably knows how to tell a Chechen from an Armenian, or a Malaysian from a Thai on sight, but it sure isn't me, and it almost certainly isn't your local cop, either. And if you can't see why the idea of law-enforcement personnel spending their times consulting old phrenology texts to pick up on the fine-grained differences, you must be brain-dead. Leaving 8-year-olds out of strip searches is probably a good idea, but in my experience, airport security personnel, at a minimum, do this to anyone.

You see, the problem isn't that we Americans have some kind of Victorian aversion to discussing race (Conservatives sure don't and some Liberals talk about it even when it doesn't make sense) the problem is that it's just an unworkable idea. Conservatives have done a great job pushing their ideas into the mainstream. Hell, thanks to Michelle Malkin we've discussed it to death. We've even discussed internment! (But of course Malkin would never suggest that for Arabs, she just wants to defend it in general for no good reason).

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 1:14 PM
(0) comments

Bad Arguement / Good Argument

A good argument requires that you understand your opponents views. Here we can learn from nagative example:

RepBast1984 says:

...

#2, for all you liberals out there not only is society objectifying a woman’s body but they’re making money on it in a very VERY capitalist way. It caters not to an indidvidual’s sense of beauty but what a male-driven capitalist’s view of beauty should be. If you’re any sort of progressive this should bother you just a tad bit.

You may be surprised to know that Capitalism doesn't bother Liberals one bit. It's an awesome way of distributing goods and services and though it oft doesn't work perfectly, there's certainly nothing inherintly wrong with it. That's why American liberals saved Capitalism under FDR.

And what's wrong with something being driven by "male capitalism's" view of beauty. Don't males want to look at porn? Why should we stop them? And unlike most of advertising which is also driven by capitalistic male impulses, pornography is honest about what's it's selling. There's certainly a lot of bad porn out there that is degrading to women, but it does no more to objectify women than football does to animalize men.

Did you mean to address this argument to communists perhaps? I have the phone number of the last one in the United States. He lived next door to me in the Co-ops.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 12:55 PM
(66) comments

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Propaganda vs. getting the message out

I wanted to respond to something the Thinker said in passing about why Republicans have had an edge in the last couple elections. I don't think it's useful to call the right-wing noise machine a purely propaganda outfit. Though there's certainly a lot of lying and misdirecting going on at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, that's not the reason why they've achieved so much. In short: they have done a good job of arguing for their conservative goals and ideals.

I don't mean to imply that they have good arguments - far from it- but there is something persuasive to having someone on the radio or television arguing for a policy or perspective every single day. People can relate to it and even if they don't agree with every little thing Hannity says, they tend to appreciate his perspective and subconsciously pick up the prejudices of the host.

From radio and television, people get a sense for that conservatism is cohesive and makes sense even if they don’t agree with it. This is especially important when you compare it to the Democrats main way of getting the message out: Candidates and office holders. While I appreciate Obama just as much as the next guy, politicians doesn’t have the freedom to take an unpopular stance just to be intellectually honest like a talk show host does.

I suppose this is all a roundabout way of touting liberal blogs, Air America, and vast Left-wing conspiracy. That’s one of the reasons I blog: to help people understand that liberals aren’t want Rush Limbaugh says we are, that liberals have an honest cohesive set of ideals and morals, and that we have a real plan for America.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 8:57 AM
(23) comments

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Where's Rebecca at?

As someone has asked Rebecca's taking some time off from the blog. I assume this is to focus on her job. I don't know when she will return.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 8:27 PM
(0) comments

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Conservatism isn’t innately bad

I do poke fun at Republicans and the conservative movement that spawned them a lot on this blog so many of you might get the impression that I think such ideology innately foolish. Far from it: there is nothing wrong with being “on the right” and under the right circumstances (say, if I lived in communist Russia) I would be myself. Hell, if I was alive during the mid 70’s even I would try to distance myself from the soldier hating hippies that seemed to have been ubiquitous.

Now, a lot of the commentors on this site seem to make a big distinction between conservatism and Republicanism. Though they certainly aren’t the same thing, that paradigm usually serves to let conservatism off the hook for Republicanism’s faults. The fact is, Republicans didn’t appear out of nowhere. George Bush and Tom Delay weren’t voted into office by a mysterious band of independents and flying monkies: conservatives voted for them. And trying to say that what they do should not reflect poorly on conservatism is like saying that Ford is a good car maker, even though every individual car that they make is a lemon.

And that’s the real issue: I think American conservatism, because of the odd histories of the parties – specifically how they only recently split into ideologically homogenous units with the demise of the Rockefeller Republican and the Dixiecrats –have been put in a bad position. This article which got me thinking about the issue explains better than I can. It’s difficult for them to get elected unless they 1) pander to the far religious right and 2) contribute big time to corporate cronyism and corporate irresponsibility. Both of these things are contrary to what American conservatives constantly claim their goals are: small government that gets out of people’s lives and the preservation of the free market.

So as I see it, American Conservatives (unlike their Christian Democratic cousins in Europe) find themselves in the awkward position of saying: Yes we want to be in power (of course) but no we don’t want to do it like the Republicans. This is like saying “Yes we want to drive off a cliff. No, we don’t want to hit the ground.”

Liberalism may have lots of faults (it does) but I agree with the policy prescriptions and observe that when they have been in power they have tried to follow through.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:34 AM
(31) comments

Friday, September 09, 2005

Self-fulfilling ideology

This kind of stuff is amazing. It's always been clear that Republicans don't believe in efficient government but it's really amazing when they start to take their own incompetence as proof. They are like the guy you have to do a class project with who keeps insisting that it's impossible and so doesn't do his part of the work and thefore ensures that it's impossible.

Well, what do you expect to happen when you vote for a president who puts a guy in charge who has no experieince and a resume thinner than than Dick Cheny's war record? (The kicker is, with all the resume padding he did, he still couldn't fake anything relavent to saving lives.)

Now of course there's a lot of things that government is bad at. Most things even. But history affords us lots of instances where disasters were handeled much better by government and lots of lessons about how private charities never manage to do as much. Not to mention the fact that coordination, which is vital in the early days of a disaster, is pretty much impossible without having someone with whom the buck stops. Ussually this is the president though modern Republicans seem to act as if lots of people who work in Bush's office (like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Micheal Brown) just kinda showed up without the presidents approval or anything. If only Batiushka, the little father, the Czar knew!

At any rate, I certainly wish the fine men and women of RedState would stop calling liberals "human filth" long enough to actually look at the issue and compare the federal response to other disasters. Disasters where people who believed in sound government were in charge. It's funny that conservatives didn't dare admit that government has no obligation to people that were dying by the thousands then. Probably becuase an idea so stupid wouldn't pass the giggle test unless the government had failed as badly as a only a modern Republican government can.

Oh! If we got government out of the rescue business does that mean that we get to turn down the offer's of aid from other governments too?

Update: This argument against privatized disaster relief is much better than anything I could write.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:05 AM
(28) comments

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act

Well, now that Arnold is the only thing stopping gay marriage from coming to California we should reflect on the legal issues raised thus far because, to be honest, I was misinformed. I was under the impression that the anti-gay marriage proposition passed a couple years back was an amendment to the state constitution when in fact it was, as Kevin Drum points out, only a statutory initiative. Accordingly, it could be found to be in conflict with our equal protection clause.

(This does a lot to retroactively defend the actions of Gavin Newsom a while back when he was handing out gay marriages: He argued that they were legal and since the issue hadn't been looked at by a court yet, you could argue that he was simply trying to execute the law to the best of his abilities. Now, I personally don't agree ith Gavin, but at the time, he was mayor and I wasn't, so it was best to defer to him... At least until a judge intervened.)

Anyhow, it's interesting to see how the conservatives are going to play this one: Arnold has been trying to make people's heads explode by arguing that this is an issue that should be left to the courts. I suppose that they'll have to have another referendum. But the last one which was vague enough to pretend to be not homophobic passed with only 60% and that was a while back. Anyhow, I hope it fails for the sake of Steve, Kurt, Michele and all the other people who can't get married to people they love right now because some other people are stuck in the middle ages.

Update: Title changed to reflect the name fo the bill in question.

Update: Socially moderate Republicans strike again: Arnold says he will veto the bill.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 7:52 AM
(38) comments

Thursday, September 01, 2005

The "Blame America First" Crowd

They just make me sick.

Update: And there's more from peope who are in sweet with the Republicans.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 5:53 PM
(27) comments

Monday, August 29, 2005

Terrorists at UC Berkeley

This article details how the mother of Cal's very own student group everyone loves to hate has in fact been labeled a terrorist organization. Now, let me be clear that Bamn in is ineffectual at best and creepy at worst, but unless Bamn has been up to something I don't know about they are most certainly not a terrorist organization.

This is a waste of law enforcement time. Here's a hint: if they're trying to get their pictures in the newspaper they probably aren't terrorists.

Beat you again, Calstuff!

Update: Tightening up my original post.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 2:18 PM
(9) comments

Saturday, August 27, 2005

UC Berkeley rejects scientific relativism

From the LA Times comes this article detailing how our very own UC is standing up to those who believe that biologists should get their knowledge from scientific process and not divine inspiration. (Which is not to knock divine inspiration, just to identify it with its proper sphere).

Basically, some religious right schools are trying to make-believe that students who took a “biology” class using an evolution denying textbook should get as much credit as students who attended bio classes that taught them facts that might actually help them make scientific advancements some day. The UC is putting its foot down and setting firm standards for what students need to know to succeed in biology. The Christian schools are taking the UC to court.

If only the left had a media machine as good as the right stuff like this would get more attention. Bill O’Reilly could stretch an issue like this out for months. Some day… some day.

*snark*I wonder if I this story will get a link from calstuff or if I they only link to stories from the cal patriot nowadays. *snark* Just kidding. I’ll always love calstuff.

Update: Via The Questionable Authority comes these exerpts from one of the books in question:

The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second...If...at any point God's Word is not put first, the authors apologize.

And this gem:

The same encyclopedia article may state that the grasshopper evolved 300 million years ago. You may find a description of some insect that the grasshopper supposedly evolved from and a description of the insects that scientists say evolved from the grasshopper. You may even find a "scientific" explanation of the biblical locust (grasshopper) plague in Egypt. These statements are conclusions based on "supposed science." If the conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.

Italics mine. I think I may have been hasty with the calls of scientific relativism. These people just seem to oppose the main tenets of science all together.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 4:12 PM
(11) comments

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Global warming consequences

A while back during a discussion on Environmentalism, BAD took the brave and original position that global warming wasn’t a big deal even if it did happen. He even argued that it could be beneficial because as certain places became to hot for productive farming, other places would be thawing out. So brave and different from the conservative orthodoxy was this that no less than Dennis Miller took a similar “Hey, if it gets 1 degree warmer every 50 years, big deal” position on the daily show while conservative New York Times editorialist John Tierney argued that global warming could help polar bears.

We really do have to hand it to these brave souls fighting against the evil liberal hierarchy while respectfully disagreeing with the conservative spin. Sure, they end up supporting the same policies as Republicans but they do so not with the same old crap we’re fed everyday on TV and radio, but with all new, different crap, which is so stupid that no one has bothered to refute it yet. This allows me to be the very first person to try to debunk the “replacement farms” argument. It’s not a very good argument, but I get to debunk it all on my own.

Forget for a second that the world is spherical and not tube-shaped. Forget for a moment the actual distribution of land on the surface of that spherical earth and how a lot more of it lies where we farm now than where we would be able to farm when it got hotter. Let’s focus merely on the portion of the earth where our country lies. America has been blessed with a wonderful farm belt that runs right through the middle of it. Now, let’s say that certain studies show that due to global warming “conditions for producing crops such as grain corn and wheat may become more favorable in Canada, Northern Europe, and in the USSR” while opportunities “in the midlatitude regions of the USA and Western Europe may diminish.”

Wouldn’t that be bad for our national interests? Would BAD really want to have to buy wheat from Russia and (awk!) those socialist Northern European states? What response would BAD give to those American farmers who, having worked the land their grandparents worked, now find it too hot and too dry? What do we suggest China and India do when rice becomes more difficult to farm? How about when it becomes hot enough in the south for malaria to spread up from the tropics?

Of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but why is BAD willing to risk the employment and industries of his fellow Americans? I can guess at an answer: The only other option is to agree with a liberal. And that is worse than all the beetles eating all the forests in all of Alaska (which they have an opportunity to do now that the winter frosts that kill them are much rarer).

I think that’s what South Park Republicanism is all about: You don’t have to adopt the Republican position to be accepted, you just have to be hate Liberals. If you absolutely must hold a position similar to that of a liberal like accepting gays, pretend it’s a libertarian position even if they don’t really care too much about it.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 4:13 PM
(11) comments

Sunday, August 14, 2005

The McDonald's Coffee Lady

Howdy y'all! Just got back from italy and boy are my arms not tired! Also, the rest of my isn't tired either becuase I have jet lag so I hope you all enjoy my 3 in the morning post.

Via Ezra Klien comes this article about how a lot of "wacky jury" court stories are really just urban myths. I say this as a starry-eyed defender of the jury system and a person who has personally argued for the the verdict of Stella Liebeck v. McDonald's against a bunch of Orange county conservatives on their own turf. These jury award tall tales are often used by conservative pundits to push objectivley bad policy. You always find these stories butressing conservative anti-jury anti-patient's rights policy proposals like capping jury awards. These in turn are often put forward as means to bring down medical costs.

No seriously, stop laughing, it's true.

I guess I can see how a political movement might grasp at that straw if their ideology prevents them from contemplating the same solution used in just about every other developed country in the world. That the premium spent on medical insurance doesn't really account for the inefficiencies in the system and that studies show that american malpractice insurance costs don't really go down when such caps are put in place should be enough to convince anyone of the stupidity of capping the amount given to people who have proved in a court of law that a doctor has been neglegent.

And just so we don't have argue with any trolls on this point: I don't think healthcare is a "right". I think we should implement it becuase it's more efficient.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 2:26 AM
(7) comments

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Let that be a lesson to the residents of Freeborn Hall

I'm sure it's the way he would have wanted to go:

A 28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours, South Korean police said Wednesday. ... Lee had been fired from his job last month because he kept missing work to play computer games, police said.

People like this make reading the news worthwhile. Oh, yeah, and people like the president or whatever. Shit, Peter Jennings' lung cancer is the biggest story in the papers right now, and Bush is on vacation, so can you blame me for gravitating toward novelty stories?

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 9:24 AM
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Tuesday, August 09, 2005

We have more old people, but not more really old people

When I complain that Americans' fattening diets and sedentary lifestyles are giving us cancer and heart disease, I'm often countered, even by incredibly knowledgable and intelligent people like my mother, that people get these ailments more often these days because people are simply living longer, and thus have a larger window of opportunity to become sick. My intuition of course told me that eating more processed foods and sitting at desks all day makes people unhealthy is quantifiable ways, manifested in, for example, cardiovascular disease rates over time.

So today I actually bothered to do some research on life expectancy and age distribution in the United States in the past century, and naturally I found what I was looking for. Thanks, Google.

This chart contains fascinating data (page 77 of the document, in case the permalink isn't working). Indeed, the US life expectancy at birth has shot up consistently since the McKinley administration. In one century, the aveage lifespan of Americans doubled, from 47.3 years in 1900 to 77.0 in 2000. No surprise there. Simple medicine - antibiotics, fewer deaths during childbirth, less life-threatening disease among children - makes people live longer.

But look down at the life expectancy after the age of 65, and then after the age of 75. From 1950 to 2002, the life expectancy at birth picked up nearly 10 years. In that same timespan, the life expectancy if you made it past 65 went up less than 5 years.

From 1980 to 2002, life expectancy at birth increased 3.6 years; after 65 years old that number is 1.8; and after 75 years old that number drops to 1.1 years.

The point of all this is that as time progresses and technology does too, the medical community is most talented at lowering mortality rates among pre-retirees. There have always been individuals in populations who live to be really old, and everyone past a certain very old age ends up living to about the same age, no matter how spectacular medicine is in their generation. (Hell, Plato lived to be 80; Archimedes croaked at 75.) The top end isn't going up that much over time.

This is relevant to the disease/age argument because most cases of those persistently deadly afflictions like cancer and heart disease occur after the age of 60. Check out page 14 of this report, or page 16 of this one. Cancer and heart disease rates take a massive jump at 60 and 50 years old.

Given that the percentage of the population over the age of 60 remains fairly consistent over the decades, any increase in these diseases among the entire American population is attributable only to environmental factors, and not the fact that there are more old people hanging around. Of course the aging Baby Boomers throw a wrench in this model.

But that blip is not applicable to the mind-blowingly massive increase in heart disease over the last century. Look at the first graph on page 8 of this report. Heart disease deaths go from almost zero in 1900 to roughly the current rate in about 1970, back when Baby Boomers were still hip grad students, but long after processed foods had invaded our diets.

I've never taken a course in statistics, so undoubtedly my analysis of these data contains some errors, but I think at the very least people who claim that more old people are suddenly cropping up in our population should re-examine the evidence.

That's right, Beetle, I'm talking to you.

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 9:27 AM
(5) comments

Friday, August 05, 2005

See, ladies? Cuddling KILLS!

Alright, so this guy is a nut shit.

A man who got angry with his wife because she wanted to cuddle after sex when what he really wanted to do was watch sports on television was sentenced to death for killing her with a claw hammer.
...
Christopher Offord wanted to watch SportsCenter to see clips of a Mike Tyson boxing match.

To be fair, Stuart Scott is really witty.

The irony now (besides the fact that Mike Tyson is also a maniac with no respect for women) is that Offord will have no choice but to cuddle after sex with his cellmates during his tenure in prison. This guy is totally bitch material.

Anyhow, as always, Florida's favorite pasttime of killing murderers solves nothing, nor does it anything to prevent crimes. But it makes people feel like something resembling justice exists, so who cares.

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 9:40 AM
(1) comments

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Droooool...

What's the feminine analog to "boner fuel"?

Chopping wood is so hot.

(My apologies to any grandparents of mine who just read that.)

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 10:43 AM
(0) comments

Friday, July 29, 2005

Busy at work, but obviously not too busy.

The National Park Service website has proved yet again to be incredibly fun and informative. Yesterday I discovered that I can spy on the Grand Canyon 24 hours a day. There's also a shot of Washington, DC, Teddy Roosevelt National Park, Point Reyes, and many more.

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 11:36 AM
(1) comments

Monday, July 25, 2005

Best. Two. Weeks. EVER.

I got back from my Epic Journey across two-thirds of the country last night, and though I don't have time to write about it now (for some reason my bosses expect me to actually work at work), I can safely say that it was the best vacation I've ever taken.

I will tell you about one fantastic stop, though. Next time you're in Mitchell, South Dakota, make sure to check out the Corn Palace. It's a-maize-ing.

Did I miss any news while I was gone?

posted by Rebecca C. Brown at 9:41 AM
(3) comments

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Going to Italy

I'll be going to Italy for a coulple weeks so I won't be able to post much. I will be trying to talk politics with my relatives in Sicily though. For that reason I've been trying to bone up on Italian politics and language of politics. One thing I have learned, the italian language scrimps on words a lot. "Politics" is "politico". "Politicial" is "politico". "Poitician" is "uomo politico".

Roberto Benigni is not a big fan of Burlusconi. Burlusconi owns a lot of media channels in Italy (condencing the Rupert Murdoch / Bush arrangment to one man). Burlusconi's political party ("partita politico") is named "Forza Italia" which means "Go Italy!" or "Italy Rocks". Other parties include everything from anti-immagrant northerners to full frontal communists. The communists apparently busy themselves with anti-corruption and anti-mafia stuff and don't harp on the "getting rid of all capitalism" stuff too much so that's good. I have seen no references to Italian Libertairans. Perhaps it would do the US and Italy good if we can export a few of ours their.

Lastly, Sicily will be hot this time of year. Boy-o-boy, will it be hot.

posted by Tommaso Sciortino at 3:56 PM
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