Moment, Linger On

Confused about censorship

2006-04-09T09:49:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan is supposedly a conservative intellectual. I say "supposedly," because for a conservative he doesn't seem to have a very good understanding of the concept of free enterprise and for an intellectual he doesn't really seem to understand censorship. In his latest broadside on the Danish cartoon controversy he writes:

Comedy Central still won't let Matt and Trey include an image of Muhammed on South Park, despite the fact that they have done it before. In the battle between religion and free speech, Viacom is against free speech.

Um, no. Viacom isn't taking sides in a supposed battle between religion and free speech here. And if they were to take sides, I'm pretty sure that they would assert that they had the right to broadcast graven images 24 hours a day if that is what they wanted to do. What they are doing is saying that needlesly offending people just to prove a point isn't in their business model. Just like it isn't in Andrew's business model to tick off the people at Time who sign his paychecks by posting the cartoons himself, even though it is perfectly within his power to do so.

And that's their right. They own the station and so they get to choose what goes on there. That's what free speech is all about. If you want to see images of Muhammed then buy your own damn cable channel.

Celebrating Ignorance

2006-02-18T06:05:00.000-05:00

It all started with a young woman who dropped out of school. Supposedly she left because she failed algebra six times and was frustrated. This could be seen as evidence that our math education system is broken and never mind the fact that she was absent for two thirds of the classes during the sixth semester.

Well, we all know that the way we teach math in our schools leaves much to be desired. Even people like me who had an extremely successful experience agree on that. We can argue about why this is and what needs to be done and whether things are getting better all day long. As an aside, I think the main problem is elementary school teachers. If you have ever taught a "math for primary educators" class, you know that the people going to teach your first graders are, by and large, both unproficient in and hostile to mathematics. Nothing like your teacher hating math and being no good at it to inculate a love of the subject in students. Instituting math education by math specialists with degrees in math at all levels (and also paying them more) would probably go a great distance in improving math education in this country.

But then...

Richard Cohen, a Washington Post editorial writer, picked up on the story of this poor truant girl and framed the issue in a different way, claiming that mathematics is useless and should not be a requirement for a high school degree:

Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know -- never mind want to know -- how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later -- or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note -- or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.
Gabriela, sooner or later someone's going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers. Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not. The proof of this, Gabriela, is all the people in my high school who were whizzes at math but did not know a thing about history and could not write a readable English sentence. I can cite Shelly, whose last name will not be mentioned, who aced algebra but when called to the board in geography class, located the Sahara Desert right where the Gobi usually is. She was off by a whole continent.

Wow. There are so many downright stupid things written here that I hardly know where to begin. Perhaps I was learning the wrong things when I was wasting my time learning how to actually write proofs, in the mathematical sense, but Cohen's friend Shelly is just an anecdote. Not only is it not a "proof" of anything, but it is not even compelling evidence in support of his assertion. Learning mathematics, of which algebra is one part, does impart analytical skills. A different sort of analytical skills than learning to write, but valuable ones nonetheless. Evidence of this, for instance, is that of all undergraduate majors, mathematics majors score the highest on average on the law school proficiency examinations. Of course, law schools also require a writing sample, but clearly they value both types of reasoning ability and even probably see them as correlated.

But learning mathematics also helps you get by in this world in tangible ways. Knowing mathematics, even at the level of high school algebra, allows you to figure out your taxes (without using the tables, even), compute a tip, evaluate a credit card or loan offer, compute the tax break you would get from a home loan, and figure out how much you should be saving for retirement, just off the top of my head. Having a feel for mathematics allow you to evaluate risk, which is something we all need to be able to do and something that a lot of people seem to be terrible at. Understanding mathematics at a higher level is a prerequisite for programming a computer, working with money in any meaningful way, becoming a scientist, or practicing medicine. All enterprises that Cohen clearly values less than writing op-ed pieces.

Well, whatever. This wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't such a prevelant sentiment among people who otherwise claim to be educated. Would they be so proud of admitting that they didn't know how to read? Why are innumerate people so proud of their ignorance?

As always on these subjects, PZ Myers makes much the same points more eloquently than I do.

NCLB goes to College

2006-02-09T05:00:00.000-05:00

Not satisfied with ruining our public primary and secondary education, our President apparently wants to institute standardized testing in colleges.

This is the Bush administration in a nutshell. It combines bad policy that destroys class mobility with crony capitalism. One of the members of the commission proposing this is Jonathan Grayer, the CEO of Kaplan, who would, of course, make a pile of money off of this.

As it says in the article:

Part of what is driving the demand for accountability is money.

Spot on.

Frist's killing ground?

2006-02-03T06:55:00.000-05:00

Apparently there were hundreds of lost pets found brutally murdered in West Virginia. Was Bill Frist spotted anywhere in the vicinity?

Joyeux Noel

2005-12-25T14:32:00.000-05:00

I suppose this should count as the latest salvo on the war on Xmas, as this is a perfectly secular holiday for me. Nonetheless, as a sporadically practicing Jew I can (and do) enjoy joining the rest of the Western world in this orgy of feasting and consumption.

Happy Haunnikah, Merry Christmas, Good Solstice, or whatever other benediction is appropriate for you on this day!

The intellectual bankruptcy of J-school graduates

2005-05-17T06:10:00.000-04:00

Looking at the headline White House refutes UK Iraq memo, one might believe that the White House had offered some information that, you know, actually refutes the allegation that the Iraq war was planned in 2002. So what did Scott McClellan say?

McClellan insisted the process leading up to the decision to go to war was "very public" -- and that the decision to invade in March 2003 was taken only after Iraq refused to comply with its "international obligations."
However, McClellan also said he had not seen the "specific memo," only reports of what it contained.

So, the White House might have "denied" the veracity of the memo, but I don't see any evidence of a "refutation" here.

Having seen the doofuses who major in journalism at any large university, this doesn't surprise me. The number of so-called journalists who can actually write and edit seems to have dwindled as media employees have come to study "journalism" or "communications" rather than major in some area of the liberal arts where they actually have to learn how to read and write.

Pushing that rock

2005-05-14T06:34:00.000-04:00

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Man is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.

Existentialist

75%

Cultural Creative

69%

Materialist

63%

Idealist

63%

Postmodernist

56%

Modernist

56%

Romanticist

19%

Fundamentalist

What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com

Yeah, I knew this

2005-05-07T09:33:00.000-04:00

I am:
0%
Republican.

"You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)"

Are You A Republican?

The matter with Kansas (and why I'm not a Republican)

2005-05-07T09:22:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't been following the doings over in the flat state, the Kansas State Board of Education is attempting yet again to abolish science.

This is yet another example of why I'm not a Republican. (As if I needed another reason.) If I really bought into all this (you're on your) "ownership society" crap I could think of this as a good thing. I could rationalize all this away by focussing on the fact that my eventually well educated kid will be at an advantage when he has to compete for jobs with these flat earthers. Which is true. But the fact is that his well-being will depend on living in a society where everybody has a basic understanding of science and so raising a generation of ignorant Kansans is not something to celebrate.

Could someone explain this one?

2005-05-01T06:26:00.000-04:00

What, exactly, are the grounds for awarding a woman $7M because her husband happened to be an agent of the Cuban government?

Messing with my life

2005-04-23T08:09:00.000-04:00

Laura at 11d complains about non-Catholics holding an opinion about affairs in the Catholic chuch:

I just don't get why non-Catholics give a crap about the church's position on women clergy, abortion, or birth control. Nobody is dragging you up the aisle to receive Christ's life blood.

If only that were true. The problem is that the church isn't just taking positions on these issues with regard to Catholics, but rather working to institute their positions in civil law and society. And that does affect me and is my business.

If Catholics want to quibble about which circle of the inferno you will reside in if you use birth control, that isn't my affair. But when the church tries to make it difficult or illegal for anyone to obtain contraception, it becomes my business. And the same goes for abortion or gay marriage or anything else for which the church has decided that non-Catholics are obliged to live by their standards.

So am I saying that Catholics are obliged to withdraw from the political arena? Not at all. Individual Catholics should be informed by their faith and vote according to their moral principles. But when the church as an institution starts getting involved in politics, as when Ratzinger issued a directive that pro-choice politicians should be denied communion last year, for example, or when he issued an instruction yesterday that Spanish Catholics working in the government should obstruct gay marriages, then this becomes inappropriate meddling in secular affairs that I have every right to be concerned about.

This is true, by the way, for issues that I agree with the church on as well. I admire the Vatican position on the death penalty, for instance, but I don't think that their position as an institution should have any influence on the legality of capital punishment.

As long as the Catholic church messes about in my political institutions, I will continue to allow myself opinions about their leadership.

Republicans endorse terrorism and political assassination

2005-04-05T07:00:00.000-04:00

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who in his previous life as attorney general of Texas was responsible for upholding the laws of that state, yesterday endorsed the assassination of judges that he doesn't agree with:

SENATOR JOHN CORNYN: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence." [Senate Floor, 4/4/05]

Over at Red State intellectually dishonest mental lightweight Josh Trevino eggs him on:

the notion that the people might reject -- and might violently reject -- a judiciary that does not follow their collective will dates back in American history to the 1790s...[s]et against this strain of American history... Cornyn's musing, while impolitic, is hardly [a] danger to Constitutional governance...

Josh, who wants people to think him smart just because he knows who Tacitus is, would say that Cornyn should be absolved of blame just because he appended the following to his remarks:

Certainly without any justification but a concern that I have that I wanted to share.

Well, of course Cornyn is going to say that. He has to give himself some political cover, after all. Can't be going around explicitly endorsing terrorism and political assassination. Cornyn thus moves himself into the class of Yasir Arafat and Marawan Barghouti and all those other Palestinian leaders who preface their cheerleading of suicide bombers with such phrases as "While we don't condone such violence..." But appending such a qualification is meaningless. What matters is the substance of what he said, which is that assassination of judges is a logical conclusion, in his opinion, to decisions that are unpopular with the theocrats and racists among us.

The next time an Eric Rudolph blows up an abortion clinic or a Tim McVeigh blows up a federal building or a Nazi follower of Matthew Hale shoots a judge, remember that Senator Cornyn implicitly endorsed such a course of action and supposedly mainstream Republicans like Josh think it is part of a grand American tradition.

Say what?

2005-03-29T08:45:00.000-05:00

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard on how voters decide on a president:

The main rap I've heard on Cheney is that he lacks the charisma to get elected. This is nonsense. So what if he can be characterized as Bush without the pizzazz? Cheney has what's far more important--gravitas. He's a man who's taken seriously as a national leader by everyone here and abroad. Voters aren't stupid. They know that gravitas trumps charisma in choosing a president in a foreign policy era.

That's right. That's why President Kerry, the gravitas candidate, soundly defeated one-termer George W. Bush.

To reality based conservatives

2005-03-28T07:14:00.003-05:00

This is who you make common cause with:

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney, a conservative Christian activist who has become a prominent figure in the protests over Schiavo's case, said he will go to Washington to plead with congressional leaders and the Bush administration to enforce a subpoena issued March 18 by a House committee for the 41-year-old woman to appear before Congress.
...
Mahoney said the fact that Schiavo has survived nearly 10 days since the removal of the tube that has supplied her with nutrition and water indicates that she wants to appear before the House Government Reform Committee.

My opinion is that someone with an intact, functional brain would seriously consider death as opposed to having to respond to a congressional subpoena.

My favorite holiday

2005-03-27T18:06:00.000-05:00

Today is Easter, which for me has never been much except an inconvenience because I always need to remember to shop on the Saturday before, as all the shops will be closed on Sunday. And, like Jule Saltman an excuse to eat chocolate. (Although, unlike Julie, I tend to confine my chocolate eating to after Easter, when I can pick it up for thirty cents or so on the dollar.)

But in the same post, Julie extols the virtues of my all time favorite holiday, Guy Fawkes Day. What? Never heard of it?

Rembember, remember the fifth of November.

The gunpowder treason and plot.

There is no reason the gunpowder treason

Ever should be forgot.

In case you haven't spent much time in England, Julie gives a fairly good description of the festivities:

For those not familiar with it, Guy Fawkes Day is a deliciously pagan feast falling on November 5, which involves building large bonfires, burning clumsily-constructed human effigies voodoo-style atop them, toasting the carcasses of marshmallows over the embers, and then attempting to set off soggy fireworks in the British drizzle. The whole affair is in remembrance -- get this -- of a guy named Guy who in 1605 attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament because he was pissed that the new king, James I, was a Protestant. Acting on a tip-off from an unnamed source, the police arrested Guy Fawkes in the basement of the building the night of the plot, where he was found sitting next to a pile of gunpowder the size of the Lusitania, getting ready to light the blue touch-paper and retire. (Fawkes of course was only the patsy. The real culprits were a consortium of disenfranchized Catholic nobles, who were also intercepted and shortly afterwards parted company with their heads.)

For the record, the fireworks are often set off before the bonfire.

Can we stop perpetuating this myth now?

2005-03-23T06:04:00.000-05:00

Mark Shields cites the example of Bob Casey being denied a speaking slot at the 1992 Democratic convention as evidence that the Democratic party is hostile to pro-life voters. Except that what he says never happened. Casey was denied a slot not because he was pro-life, but becaue he refused to endorse Clinton. This is an important distinction and it is intellectually dishonest not to draw it.

This isn't to say that we don't have our own 'big tent' problems, but can't people find evidence for them that is, well, true?

Well now

2005-03-22T07:39:00.000-05:00

Apparently the federal judge ordered to take on the Schiavo case has refused to reinsert the feeding tube.

The ones that aren't stupid...

2005-03-22T06:23:00.000-05:00

Howard Dean, on why we lose elections to Republicans in spite of our undeniably superior positions:

One major reason his party lost the 2004 race to the "brain-dead" Republicans is that it has a "tendency to explain every issue in half an hour of detail," [Howard] Dean told the semi-annual meeting of Democrats Abroad, which brought about 150 members from Canada and 30 other countries to the Toronto for two days.

Conservative law professor (and contributor to the Bush campaigns to the tune of several thousand dollars) Eugene Volokh's response:

Hey, how's this for another possible major reason: Might politicians who assume their adversaries -- and tens of millions of voters -- aren't just mistaken but "brain-dead" not be very effective politicians?

He has a point there. Dean ignores the fact that many of the Republican voters are not stupid, but rather completely corrupt and utterly lacking in common decency. I'm not sure what political strategy I would advocate, if any, to appeal to them, though.

Policy vs Politics

2005-03-16T08:58:00.000-05:00

Rana at Frogs and Ravens rants about her unhappiness with the view of politics as a popularity contest. She appears to equate attempting to be popular with abandoning one's core beliefs and principles. With all due respect, I must disagree. Taking this position, it seems to me, is incorrectly conflating politics with policy.

Let me start with what to me is an obvious premise: Our (which is to say liberal) ideas are, by and large, better. And, when put to the general public and accurately represented, a majority of the people agree with the left on a majority of the issues. So why are we so completely disenfranchised?

One of the reasons is that we start with the deck stacked against us. Our electoral system is heavily biased towards small and rural states, with the result that you have 55% of the senators representing fewer than half the population. (And the wrong half, to boot, from my perspective.) But that isn't the whole story.

A greater contributing factor, IMO, is our confusion of policy with politics. Many on our side seem to think that, since our ideas our superior, we need only adequately inform the voters and the voters will naturally choose our candidates. And this might be the case if only our positions could be assured a fair representation in the marketplace of ideas. But, as the last few election cycles have demonstrated, our adversaries won't let this happen.

Knowing they will lose on the merits of their positions, the Republicans have distorted and obfuscated our positions and theirs to win electons. Then, having won, they govern as they please in a manner that is often contrary or orthogonal to the way they campaigned. Did Bush actively campaign to scrap social security? To incur ruinous deficits? To go to war in Iraq? To decimate the clean air act? To give away public lands to corporate interests for pennies on the dollar? Of course not. He either barely mentioned these things on the campaign trail or distorted his positions on the matter. And yet these things either have happened, are happening, or are on the verge of happening. How do they get away with this?

The answer, it seems to me, is that they differentiate between politics and policy. Politics is what you do to get elected and policy is what you make after you are elected. And we do a poor job of separating the two. We make our sound policy proposals our political strategy. And we trust that our opponents will allow the voters to honestly evaluate them. Since our opponents won't let us do this we end up losing. What to do?

One thing we shouldn't do is change our positions to be closer to the Republicans. But our politics are another question entirely. We could learn something from the Republicans in this area. Not that we should emulate their example of corruption and ruthlessness. (Well, maybe a little bit of their ruthlessness.) But their idea that you win elections first and then govern second, rather than the other way around...well, that is a concept that we might be well served by embracing.

This shouldn't be construed as abandoning my core beliefs. I want a progressive tax system, single payer health care, more care for the environment, and a more enlightened foreign policy (among other things) as much as Rana if not more. Where we disagree is on how to go about getting them. Rana concludes:

We need a paradigm shift, not another popularity contest

I could agree with that. But how do we get there? Absent this paradigm shift (and Rana doesn't explain how to make this happen) we are left with the hard, dirty business of winning elections. And after we win, we can try for some of the things that we want.

Well, I'll say it

2005-03-13T08:34:00.000-05:00

Via Crooked Timber we read that researchers in the UK and Canada have come up with a promising approach for curing Type I diabetes. Does this settle the question as to whether having a single payer health care system stifles innovation? Daniel at Crooked Timber is unreasonably charitable in his reply:

The temptation is almost overpowering to speculate that the reason this particular procedure was developed outside the USA might have something to do with the fact that curing a disease with a single operation doesn’t produce a lifelong dependence on patented pharmaceuticals. But this temptation probably ought to be resisted; it’s only a single case.

Well, I don't feel the need to equivocate. There are certain aspects of providing health care that are poorly suited to a free market approach and finding cheap cures for diseases is one of them. The sooner we recognize this the better.

I hate Illinois Nazis

2005-03-11T08:40:00.000-05:00

Apparently Matthew Hale and his lackeys are demanding an apology because someone else tried to kill Joan Lefkow before they could.

As Bill James once said, I don't know if that qualifies as chutzpa or chutzpidity.

On the other hand...

2005-03-09T06:23:00.000-05:00

Joe Biden better not be counting on my vote for president in 2008 after his role in pushing through that abomination of a bankruptcy bill. I would rather see 8 years of a Sam Brownback presidency than reward him for this betrayal of all that the Democratic party stands for.

I don't understand

2005-03-09T06:18:00.000-05:00

The one bright spot for the Democrats in 2004 was Colorado, where we took a formerly Republican senate seat, a formerly Republican house seat, and both houses of the legislature. Not happy with this result, the progressive side of the party has tossed out Chris Gates, the party chair who engineered the whole thing.

They are apparently unhappy because Gates refused to put Mike Miles up against Coors in the senate race on the losing end of what would undoubtedly been a 65-35 blowout. You would think that they would enjoy being on the winning end for once, but no. They would apparently rather lose with purity.

Read this

2005-02-28T20:30:00.000-05:00

A couple of eloquent and relevant posts at The Gadflyer on wooing Southern voters and the conservative tax gambit. Go read.

Accidents happen

2005-02-28T19:06:00.000-05:00

Profgrrrl writes today about how she accidentally fell into a top-tier academic job..

This story actually rings true with me. I never made big plans to go into academia. In fact, I can trace my decision to October of my senior year in college. I was sitting in a class after lunch, mind wandering, and I thought suddenly "This time next year I won't be here. I wonder what I will do? I know. I'll apply to grad school." Not that I didn't work hard to shape the direction of my career once I was already there, but the fact remains that it was basically apathy and inertia that drove me in the first place.

And then I left. Maybe my lack of a lifelong dream to be there made it easier to walk away in the end. I do know that it would be hard to envision going back now. I still go to professional conferences and am left with a feeling of gratitude that I am no longer one of my academic colleagues.

To Howard Dean

2005-02-28T18:55:00.000-05:00

I'm already on board with your sentiments that Republicans are evil. I don't need to be reminded of it. It's probably the case that every single person willing to pay $100 a head to hear you speak is on board as well. So why give your detractors something to distract us from the very important party organizing that needs to be done?

At least she has a sense of perspective

2005-02-27T08:12:00.000-05:00

A friend of Paris Hilton's, commenting on the hacking of her Sidekick:

"She was pretty upset about it," someone told MSNBC. "It's one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy."

As an aside, why are conservatives so against the estate tax? Paris Hilton is the poster child for why we need one. You would think that the family values crowd would agree with me here.

80s Music

2005-02-26T20:12:00.000-05:00

Even as I write this, I am listening to 80s alternative streaming audio. The current track is "Something About You" by Level 42. Quick, can you remember who they were or what that song sounds like? Thought not.

The funny thing is that at the time I thought that Level 42 was banal noise. Now, well, I guess they are still banal but I am actually enjoying the sound. Nostalgia, or has popular music regressed?

Now it is Aztec Camera. Yet another resident of the "where are they now" file.

Fun with Hannidate

2005-02-25T18:40:00.000-05:00

Via the incomparable TBogg, we discover that Sean Hannity has set up an online dating service for Conservatives. If you are a "good conservative Christian woman" and are into "assperations" then perhaps this guy has a place in your future.

Unlike most reputable dating services, the email addresses of the participants are available to the whole wide world. Good thing that nobody would think of taking advantage of this, right? Right?

Strange

2005-02-19T07:34:00.000-05:00

I had a post and it disappeared. Is this one of those Blogger things that people seem to complain about?

Well, you get what you pay for.

Tired of hearing about it

2005-02-18T06:42:00.000-05:00

Republicans go on and on about how we are in the minority and need to get on board with their short-sighted, destructive, bigoted ideas. And I'm tired of hearing about it, because they are just 100% flat out wrong.

Austrian Subtraction

2005-02-18T06:18:00.000-05:00

Clancy at Culture Cat writes about Austrian versus American subtraction. And she's right. The Austrian method is, at least to me, much more natural.

In fact, despite the fact that I was never taught it, I use a form of it when doing hand calculations. Besides being quicker, you get an estimate of the result immediately, which is often quite useful.

New Home!

2005-02-06T08:19:00.000-05:00

After laying low for four months, I've decided to move from Typepad. I'm just not enough of a fanatic about posting to spend a measly five clams a minth for that which I can get for free.

Eventually I'll try and move my old posts over here. Maybe. If apathy doesn't take hold and if I am up to date on my latest self-improvement project: learning Danish. Until then, you can view my old writing here.