Odds and ends

I'm busy getting ready to watch The Sopranos' final episode, but wanted to pass along a link to an article about how lightening up roofing and highway materials is a vastly useful environmental technique, since much less heat is absorbed, especially in cities. All it takes is chalk dust. Apparently, the reason we don't do this is because it's too simple to sound impressive. From Mark Kleiman, via Matt Yglesias:

Of course, if we had political reporters who weren't pig-ignorant about science and technology, this wouldn't be as significant a problem as it is. And if politicians weren't in the habit of offering trivial pseudo-solutions to serious problems, journalists would be less cynical about things that seem too easy. But then if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a trolley car.

This is a case where simply repeating the idea until it no longer seems funny could make a difference. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the idea to five people until they stop laughing.

Stop laughing!

By the way, lest we ever forget this, people are morons. This is a fundamental truth of human existence. It applies to those in the tech world who would impose arcane limits on us, crazy warmongering politicians like Joe Lieberman, the same crazy guy agreeing with Barack Obama that the internet is dangerous, etc....though I'll note that, closing the circle, Obama does know how to deal with pig-ignorant journalists.

The wrong man was convicted

Just a quickie this morning, about last week's Repbulican debate, with actual content outsourced to the always good Paul Krugman (link is behind the NYTimes firewall, but if you have an e-mail from an .edu domain, you can see it):

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the night"?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit....

[I]f there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.

No Justice, No Peace

Before getting started on this morning's post, I should link to a great editorial in the WaPo from a counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the good guys), arguing that since filesharing is so incredibly easy, the RIAA and universities should just bundle in a music-sharing license in with preexisting fees currently paid by universities to musicians to cover various performances on campus. Anyway, I'll try to post some recent vacation photos tonight, but until then, onto the news of the day.

No Justice: For those not following it, or unable to figure out from the news coverage of the current scandals at the Department of Justice, here is a brief recap. Throughout the Bush administration, but more frequently during the period 2004-present, political posts throughout DoJ were filled with young lawyers lacking any proper experience who happened to be extremely loyal (and thus easily manipulable) conservative Republicans. This list could include Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and yesterday's Congressional hearing embarrassment, Bradley Schlozman (click on links for bios). Said employees seem to have made it their mission to try to politicize the entire justice department by preferentially hiring Republicans, even though this is completely illegal for career positions at DoJ. Why would they do this? Well, the primary offenses revealed so far were at the Civil Rights division, the Voting Rights division, and the US Attorneys themselves, who are responsible for prosecuting crimes involving those two departments. It doesn't take much to infer that the goal was to steer voting rights/voter fraud lawsuits against Democratic groups, and prevent such lawsuits against Republicans. About half of the US Attorneys fired had refused to indict Democrats who weren't guilty of anything, and the other half seem to have been involved in actually prosecuting guilty Republicans, which is an unforgivable offense to the administration. I should make clear of course, that "voter fraud" by minorities, which Republicans like to throw around, is largely a myth designed to suppress the minority vote, since it leans heavily Democratic.

One can further infer who is behind this affair. It can certainly be suggested that the reason so many youngsters were placed in positions of power is because their strings can be pulled by a puppet master, and so far all signs seem to point to Karl Rove. Recall before the 2006 elections, he claimed Republicans would succeed because he was entitled to "THE math" on the elections. Though he never stated such, one could suggest that carefully arranging the balance of who is actually allowed to vote might explain why one might be overconfident. Unfortunately for him, his dreams of a "permanent Republican majority" actually fell victim to the fact his party was perceived as vastly too corrupt to remain in power. Shucks.

No Peace: On the international front, it seems crazy to me that there are forces in the administration pushing for war with Iran, even though Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly going well. Who could be doing this, you may ask? Would it shock you that it is the Vice President, Dick Cheney? From Newsweek:

A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney's national-security team has been actively challenging Rice's Iran strategy in recent months. "We hear a completely different story coming out of Cheney's office, even now, than what we hear from Rice on Iran," says a Western diplomat whose embassy has close dealings with the White House. Officials from the veep's office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official who asked for anonymity because of his position. Since Tehran has defied two U.N. resolutions calling for a suspension of its uranium-enrichment program, "there's a certain amount of schadenfreude among the hard-liners," says a European diplomat who's involved in the talks but would not comment for the record. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the veep's team seems eager to build a case that Iran is targeting Americans not just in Iraq but along the border of its other neighbor, Afghanistan.

Lest anyone think this is just rumor, It seems to have been confirmed by a bunch of people:

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney's national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush's tack towards Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an "end run strategy" around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

What happens, one can ask, when the administration is basically at war with itself, not to mention a bunch of other countries. well, for one thing, you end up with a badly understaffed foreign service. Also, you end up with a bunch of people lying about various matters to all sorts of people. Should the former by Chief of Staff to the Veep, and the latter by a US Attorney, this is not always a good idea, and can end up with said Chief of Staff residing at the Crossbar Hotel for 30 months (can we now call it the Paris Hilton Hilton?).

Well maybe I am the f@ggot America, I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

First a followup from yesterday, and then the newer stuff, including a movie review for a very good film that I really should have heard about long before now.

The media blackout on Coulter basically continued today, but for a halfhearted effort from the NYTimes, which first compared her to Hillary Clinton (yes, they are both polarizing, Hillary for proposing a halfway decent healthcare plan and Coulter for being a bigot), and then attempted to apologize for all the speakers who preceded her at the CPAC meeting, failing to note that last year at this very venue she contented herself with just making raghead jokes. This was premeditated, no matter how dumb the media chooses to play it, when they play it at all.

I brought up Atrios yesterday, and today featured one of the best descriptions of his blog and methods from the also-excellent Ezra Klein. Discussing Atrios' world-famous "wanker of the day" award, Klein explains exactly what it does and does not represent:

Among other things, the lefty blogosphere was founded on a critique of the mainstream media that argued, contrary to popular belief, that the media was not actually liberal. The individuals who comprised it may have been tolerant on cultural issues, but years of sustained attacks from the right had cowed reporters into a hollow set of "objective" protocols that served to obscure truth rather than enhance it. Simultaneously, decades of sustained attacks on liberals had spurred "serious pundits" to underscore their independence by routinely attacking the left. The result was a media which may have voted Democratic, but was fairly hostile to progressivism.

"Wanker of the Day" is not an argumentative feature, it is a reinforcing one. It exists to repeatedly provide evidence for a critique of the media that is only now leaving the margins. Atrios's epiphany was that you had to actually prove it day after day, not merely argue it. Since this was a somewhat counterintuitive take on reportage, it had to be buttressed -- and not just once, but repeatedly. Now, you can argue about the language ("wanker") or even deny the feature's legitimacy, but it does have a point -- it's not simply rhetorical extremism or red meat.

And let us all say, amen.

BTW, in case anyone wondered about the US Attorneys reference I made yesterday, the same exact wanker media/good blogosphere dynamic is summed up perfectly here at Talking Points memo, which also has pictures of Mitt Romney with Coulter, and this little chestnut on the whole affair, sent in by a reader:

From TPM Reader RB:

As I read the reaction/fallout from Ann Coulter’s remarks at CPAC this week I’m annoyed by the entire progressive reaction to it and most of the many other outrages committed on a daily basis by the Republican Party.

Why doesn’t a progressive with an audience say something to the effect “This is who and what the once proud and honorable Republican Party has turned itself into. It is a party of hate, intolerance, incompetence, greed, treason, fanatical, hostile to science and reality, and totally corrupt. They have no honor and no shame. They’re fascists and a cancer on our great nation, plain and simple and this is just another example of that.”

You'll note the clever meta trick of publishing said reader comment on a progressive blog with an audience...and again, let us all say amen, brother.

So, on to the movie reviews. On the recommendation of one of my colleagues, I finally saw Idiocracy, by Mike Judge, the guy who created both Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, and wrote and directed Office Space. It stars Luke Wilson as a completely average American who is accidentally placed in hibernation for 500 years, during which time the stupid people in the world so completely outbreed their smarter brethren that the entire country is plunged into idiocy. This should not be taken as racist (maybe classist), more a comment on today's race to the bottom popular culture. Given Judge's past, it should come as no surprise that TV, along with global corporate greed, proves to be a popular target for Judge to parody. The satire is a bit loose, but the movie is sustained throughout by a clever and funny visual feel (everyone wears shiny clothing more littered with ads than your average NASCAR driver), and a selection of targets that few would want to defend (mostly corporate conglomerates and their incessantly stupid advertising, along with dreadful reality TV). It's certainly worth renting, and given its complete lack of notoriety should be easy to find in a video store.

One of the funnier points that the movie makes is that there is an unfortunate association made in popular culture between intelligence and feminization. Judge does this by having his idiots of the future call lots of things "gay", satirizing the same macho bullshit redneck culture attacked by Green Day in the lyrics giving us tonight's post title (from "American Idiot", just like last night) and personified by Coulter's remarks and her intended audience, who can think of few things funnier than a faggot joke.

One of the reasons I am proud to consider myself a liberal is that this shit does not fly with us. We don't make it a point of principle to constantly attack the "other", whoever they may be at the moment, and are willing to defend them, as Elizabeth Edwards, John's wife, did today:

Although her words did not hurt us, they may have hurt some in the gay community. We are all sick and tired of anyone supporting or applauding or introducing hate words into the national dialogue, tired of people thinking that words that cause others pain are fair game. And we are sick and tired of people like Miss Coulter thinking that her use of loaded words about the homosexual community in this country is remotely humorous or appropriate.

The same dynamic is always in play whenever homosexuality is brought up: idiots go on the attack against what they perceive to be an easy target, and those of us who aren't assholes are left to argue against them. In response to a former NBA player coming out of the closet, we had this lovely quote from former player Tim Hardaway:

"You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known," Hardaway said. "I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States."

Somehow, he perceived this as the proper Christian response, as would Ann Coulter as well, which is even scarier. The intelligent comeback came from former players Charles Barkley and Reggie Miller, respectively, and credit to them for saying it:

“I played with gay guys, I’ve got gay friends. I don’t care if a person is gay or not, only God can judge a person. But any jock who thinks he’s never played with a gay guy is sadly mistaken. Any team you’ve been on, at some point, you’ve played with a gay guy.”

“It’s a lack of education. For everything we’ve overcome as African-American athletes with a lot of the racial discrimination, I believe he needs some type of counseling or help to overcome his phobia. This is another black eye that David Stern has to deal with.”

I'll note that even though times may be changing slowly, they are changing. It may not men much to hear these words from someone randomly on the street, but these are prominent (hall of fame caliber) athletes, albeit in one of the two more liberal major sports (the NBA, because of the large African-American player percentage, along with Hockey, because of the European/Canadian influence). Even one of the most conservative institutions in America, the military, is seeing a change in perceptions. According to a 2006 Zogby poll:

Nearly one in four U.S. troops (23%) say they know for sure that someone in their unit is gay or lesbian, and of those 59% said they learned about the person's sexual orientation directly from the individual, a Zogby International poll of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan shows.

More than half (55%) of the troops who know a gay peer said the presence of gays or lesbians in their unit is well known by others. According to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, service members are not allowed to say that they are gay.
...
According to the new Zogby data, however, nearly three in four troops (73%) say they are personally comfortable in the presence of gays and lesbians.

Thankfully, with Democrats now in charge of Congress, Rep. Marty Meehan's bill ending the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy will likely come to the floor, even though the assholes at the Pentagon aren't pleased and say that it will be divisive. in a sense, they may be right. it will end up dividing the assholes and bigots from the rest of America, and about time. There is simply no place left in reasonable discourse for out and out bigots, and it's about time we started pushing this as strongly as possible.

Don't wanna be an American idiot, Don't want a nation under the media

To quote Atrios: Owwww! The Stupid! It BURNS!!!! Parental advisory: Today's stupidity will force me to curse repeatedly.

From today's Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmichdiscussing the new TV show "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?":

But as for what star is closest to the Earth? Get real. The average person does not need to know that.

Yes they do. It's the fucking sun! It's what powers the entire planet, and allows us to live. How big an idiot are you, first to not know, and then to mock people for not being more ignorant than your average kindergartner?

From today's Conservative Political Action Committee meeting, at which nearly every Republican presidential candidate spoke, we have Ann Coulter, who I'll note was introduced by Mitt Romney himself:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Audience members said “ohhh” and then cheered.

That's actually not the idiocy, since Ann Coulter is always like this. No, I'm talking about the complete media blackout. You may not have heard of this, since while it was mentioned on several liberal blogs and Editor and Publisher magazine, it literally wasn't mentioned by a single newspaper or news agency in the country, even though the NYTimes, Washington Post, and AP all filed stories on the day's meeting. From E&P, who seem to actually still believe in journalism:

The New York Times failed to mention the crack about Edwards in observing tonight: "The conference drew thousands of attendees, many of whom waited in a long line out the door for a late-afternoon appearance by Ann Coulter, the conservative author and commentator."

The Washington Post covered the conference but did not mention Coulter at all. Neither did the Associated Press, which also attended.

Seriously, what the fuck? John Edwards got a week of bad press for hiring two bloggers who have in the past taken on the Catholic Church for its support of pedophiles and backwardness with respect to birth control, and all of those news sources were more than happy to run with the story. A speaker at the biggest collection of Republican candidates to date makes a faggot joke in front of the assembled media, and they decide it's not newsworthy? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this country?

I could actually go on about several other idiocies tonight, given the continuing whitewash of the Walter Reed fiasco by the military (the guy they appointed to take over the facility, General Kevin Kiley, did nothing after being told that patients were sleeping in their own urine).
There is a story in the WaPo about the firing of 8 US Attorneys that completely misses the fact that many of them were fired because they were investigating higher-ups in the administration. Did you know that Carol Lam, the former US Attorney for San Diego who busted Rep. Duke Cunningham, is currently investigating the former #3 official in the CIA for corruption? You won't find that little tidbit anywhere in the newspaper tonight, needless to say, because John Solomon, their new "investigative" "reporter", turns out to be neither.

Seriously, I wish there was a God so it meant more when I say "god help us all"..

and now there's just no denying that you're an a$$hole...

So, we have a new national treasure on our hands. Conservatives, fed up with the "Neutral Point of View" policy of Wikipedia, decided to set up "Conservapedia", because let's face it, in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias".

Why Conservapedia, you ask? I'll let them tell you:

On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America.

Yes, a set of facts that explicitly favors one religion and one country...not that that should introduce some serious cognitive dissonance. From their more detailed list of complaints:

9. Edits to include facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored. [ed. note: That's because there are no "facts' that contradict evolution, and you, Conservapedia's founders, are flippin' wingnut idiots!]

13. Often key facts are missing from Wikipedia entries in favor of meaningless detail. Wikipedia's entry about Indentured Servitude is massive, but it omits any reference to Bacon's Rebellion, which was the turning point for the use of indentured servants in the New World! [ed. note: Then add it, dumbass! By design, anyone can do so! ]

18. Wikipedia's article on Feudalism is limited to feudalism in Europe and does not mention the feudal systems that developed independently in Japan and India. [ed. note. And your point is....what, exactly?!?!]

Of course, there is an obvious problem with this approach: anyone can edit pages. If you restrict only to members, you don't get enough content generated. Thus, liberals have been having a field day, and some Conservatives make things easier by being nuts themselves. Here are some amusing entries:

1984: "1984 was a book by George Orwell. 1984 describes an alternate history in which Oceania (Australia) is at war with Eurasia. It is a utopian book because it talks about a place where everyone is watched over by Big Brother, who makes sure people are doing what they are supposed to.

The protagonist is Winston Smith. There is something about rats at the end, but it is confusing. The end is probably supposed to be ambiguous. " (since changed, but that was fantastic!)

Islam: "Because Islam is an uncomplicated religion to live by, it is sure to continue in its popularity around the world." I like how this is now a verifiable fact.

Crusades: "It seems that the Christian armies lost sight of our goals to bring and spread love and Christianity along the way, got drunk with power and glory and decided to pillage towns and murder people (note that this is breaking many commandments “thou shalt not murder.” “thou shalt not steal”)

The Crusades went against our Christian teachings and the words of Christ, “love thy neighbor as thyself” “turn the other cheek” etc. " Umm, "our goals" and "our teachings". Again, I'll remind you, this is an encyclopedia.

Seriously, thank the Lord for wingnuts. As evidenced by Fox's attempt to emulate the Daily Show, they may not be funny when they try, but they certainly are most other times....

Got to keep the loonies on the path

I'll have a great deal to say tomorrow about my current University's decision to dump their racist mascot tomorrow. Needless to say, I'm in favor. For today, some good news on why we will actually win the science wars, if none of the current military ones.

Kansas is something of an interesting state, deeply red and somewhat famous for having something the matter with it. It's also home to one of the most impressive fossil beds in the country, one that proves that the middle of the USA was under water eons ago. Politically, the state has been undergoing an evolution. The governor, Kathleen Sebelius is a moderately conservative Democrat who has made a cottage industry out of convincing moderate Republicans to switch parties and run as Republicans, including the current attorney general (who soundly defeated the wingnut opponent described in the linked article), and the former chairman of the state Republican party. It went little noticed during the landslide election of November, but voters also elected a slate of Democrats and moderate Republicans to replace the crazy religious kooks on the state board of education. As a result, the infamous anti-evolution science standards adopted in 2005 are now history. From The Guardian:

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines.

The decision is the latest in a string of defeats for proponents of creationism, and its modern variant, intelligent design. It reverses the decision taken by the same authorities two years ago to include language undermining Darwinism - on the insistence of conservative parents and activists in the intelligent design movement.

This is very good news all around. It's been noted that the Republican party has both a long-term and short-term crisis on its hands. Going into 2008, they are squarely on the hook for the Iraq war, and unable to convincingly blame anyone else for their mess. Today's vote in the House of Representatives may have been on a non-binding resolution, but several Republicans just made their races in 2008 much tougher. Chris Shays, the last Republican Congressman left in New England, may have just created an all blue region of the country by voting for against the resolution, and thus for the surge. Ditto several Republicans in NY and PA. In the longer term, however, the R's may be just as screwed. They rely on an uneasy alliance between business oriented economic conservatives, who they've been pissing off by being generally as incompetent with regard to the economy as they are with foreign policy, and the religious right, who are basically the only people left in the country who still support the president and the war. Without business groups and their cash, you end up with a vocal group of lunatics running the show who will start to alienate a great deal of the American population. I'm not confident the Democrats are fully ready to take advantage, but at least they are now showing some sporadic signs of life, though they still could show more courage on some politically charged issues.

As an example of the wingnuts who will hopefully be Left Behind soon (it's a pun, get it?), we turn to some Republican state legislators in Georgia and Texas. Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges recently sent out this um, er, uhh, "interesting" FYI to his colleagues around the country:

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under Bridges' name. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

As these kind of screeds go, it's basically three-for-three. Anti-Semitic, as I can only assume that "Pharisees" means Jews in this context. Anti-science just on its face....and to top it off, as anti-English grammar as any document I've ever seen. Seriously, read that quote again. Amazingly enough, a Texas legislator, Warren Chisum, the Texas House Appropriations chair, decided this would be a good thing to forward along, and sent it to all his colleagues. From Talking Points Memo, the inevitable reaction:

The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he's "willing to apologize if I've offended anyone" if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape.

Reports the Dallas Morning News: "Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully."

No S#!t, Sherlock. It's generally a good idea to, you know, like read these things before you pass them along. Somehow, neither legislator managed to realize that the website from which the great Big Bang/Pharisee/Kabbala conspiracy theory originated has another rather..."fringe position"...

Barnes' memo [ed. note: the one forwarded by Bridges and Chisum] pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Yup, us crazy Jews and our embrace of the Heliocentric model of the solar system!?! My Sweet Lord, these people are absolutely bats#it insane, and these are state legislators in positions of real power. Just imagine the crazier people who are voting for them...

You don't have to be a six-footer. You don't have to have a great brain. You don't have to have any clothes on.

Sometimes, a headline manages to combine both the extraordinarily obvious and completely wrong into one convenient passage: Here's an example from MSNBC:

Catholics slam bloggers hired by Edwards

Group claims campaign tarnished by ‘two anti-Catholic ... vulgar bigots’

Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

For the backstory, John Edwards hired two famous bloggers to work for his campaign, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan, who writes under the pseudonym Shakespeare's Sister at the blog of the same name. Both of them have been rather harsh on Catholicism in the past, not that the church didn't in most cases have it coming, what with defending and protecting any number of priests who like to molest and anally rape young boys and doing their best to fight reasonable birth control throughout the entire world.

Because of their writings, the Catholic League jumped all over the Edwards campaign, especially their president, Bill Donohue. Is he an important Catholic clergyman, you ask? Not at all, he's just the president of a large organization of right-wing Catholics, famous for the following quotes:

"The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done."

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions."

He's a lovely fellow, isn't he?

What MSNBC totally missed is that the bloggers in question have offended any number of right-wing Catholics, right-wing Protestants, right-wing Jews, and right-wing atheists over time. Donohue speaks not for all Catholics, but for a particular right-wing organization. My wife's former boss is president of a left-wing Jewish organization, but it'd be ridiculous to claim that she speaks for "Jews"; rather she speaks for some Jews. If my wife and I get angry about the local grocery store in March/April, we don't get to claim "Jews slam Champaign supermarket over lack of Passover-related items" (this isn't a real complaint of ours, I'm just drawing an example). Donohue speaks ostensibly for his 350,000 person organization, who represent half of a percent of American catholics. He speaks in no official capacity for the Church itself, nor for the majority of American Catholics, who it turns out are a group that basically tend to behave like a broad cross-section of Americans, because they're a broad cross-section of Americans. Just as one can claim that the Catholic church is against abortion but a majority of American Catholics favor it's continued legalization, even more so may Bill Donohue have a problem with two bloggers while most American Catholics could give a flying one. It really isn't all that hard. The lesson, as always, is that way too many journalists are basically incompetent, and that bigots on the right-wing will always have a platform to launch ridiculous fake-outrage propaganda campaigns no matter how odious they happen to be. Thankfully, Edwards didn't cave, and now the left-wing blogs are launching attacks back on the Catholic league for their utter hypocrisy and misrepresentation of Catholic values. Serve it cold, people, serve it cold.

Transgressing the Boundaries

For tonight's post, we'll cover the death of a company, the death of an economist, and the death of certainty, news of the last of which may be greatly exaggerated.

The company in question is GM, who I've bashed before for their crimes against the planet, and will now bash for crimes against human decency. Their commercial from the Super Bowl, which can be viewed here (scroll down), featured a robot that dropped a small part on the assembly line, got fired, progressed through a series of ever worse jobs, and in the end prepared to commit suicide before waking from a dream. As pointed out by ABC News, among others, GM announced last year that they are cutting 30,000 positions across the country by 2008:

"[The ad] is absolutely disgusting," said Art Reyes, president of United Auto Workers Local 651 in Flint, Mich., and a third-generation UAW member. Reyes said Local 651's membership has been cut in half in the past 18 months because of job cuts throughout the U.S. auto industry.

"Their way of life was affected. Their way of life was destroyed. This just completely glosses over their hardships," said Reyes. "What General Motors has been doing by tapping people on the shoulder to get rid of them, whole plants at a time, it wasn't because of a dropped bolt … we have a qualified work force here."

Way to go, shitheads on GM's advertising team! Remember, you don't have to pay benefits to your laid-off workers if they throw themselves off bridges!!!

Next up is the death of an economist, the legendary Anatol Rapoport. Who, you ask? He's the guy who invented the classic strategy for success at the Prisoner's Dilemma known as "Tit-for-tat", in which you basically act nice to people who are nice to you, and punish those who betray you. For vastly more on the topic, check out Brad DeLong's economics blog, which has a thorough recap of some more recent work. I personally prefer the following quote from Daniel Dennett, quoted here:

The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Someday, I might have the patience to try this with ridiculous rightwing wingnut drivel, but don't hold your breath.

Lastly, the death of science, and how exquisite the corpse still looks. About a decade ago, Alan Sokal published an article in a postmodern cultural criticism magazine called Social Text titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which was quite intentionally composed of several pages of gibberish sprinkled with authoritative-sounding post-modern literature citations. Sokal, a physicist, was poking holes in the outlandish claims made by post-modern, far-left members of the academy who argued that since science was a social activity, it's results were inherently a product of culture and thus "subjective", rather than the objective truth they are often claimed to be. Scientists got very rightfully offended by many of the more extreme claims, in that we would argue that since experiments can be repeated independently in the physical sciences, there is an objective truth to the results, even if the interpretations and broader implications involve a human component. In other words, gravity works if you are male or female, black or white, young or old, and we're willing to drop any science studies professor who claims otherwise off a building to confirm who is right (we'll provide a landing pad so no one gets badly hurt). I would note that while the worst of the anti-science crowd were definitely on the left, they really were on the far left and never had much by way of mainstream representation outside of a few post-modernly inclined humanities departments at academic institutions.

Anyway, Sokal has now teamed up with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at The Intersection over to the right in our blogroll, to write an editorial on how these days the vastly dominant anti-Science trend is coming from the right. From the LA Times:

Such introspection on the academic left has been a heartening sign, and the pronouncements of extreme relativism have subsided significantly in recent years. This frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).

The potency of this combination has become apparent during the six years of the Bush administration, as many if not most scientific agencies of our government have become embroiled in scandals involving the misrepresentation or suppression of scientific information, gag orders on scientist employees, or other interferences with the processes by which science feeds into decision-making. Tracing these intrusions back to their source, we almost always uncover the same pattern: It concerns an issue in which one of the two principal constituencies of the current administration — religious conservatives or big corporations — has a vested interest.

As if to prove their point, a poll of Republican Congressmen finds that only 13% believe in global warming, down 10% from last year!?! In the end, science will win over anti-science, because we have the universe on our side...assuming that some fraction of us manage to survive. Here's hoping.

A certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled 'Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge'

In the past two days, two different liberal blogs I read have featured amusing links to manifestos written by conservatives. First, Lawyers, Guns, and Money linked to a "reactionary catechism" posted on Redstate. For those unfamiliar with it, Redstate is the conservative equivalent to Daily Kos, with DKos's small population of wacky bleeding-heart liberal moonbats replaced by a small group of wacky arch-reactionary conservative wingnuts, and the larger group of committed progressives replaced by an equally large group of wacky arch-reactionary conservative wingnuts. These gentlemen apparently wish we hadn't gotten rid of that whole segregation thing:

Tradition and custom need not constantly explain or justify themselves as practice or policy. The presumption is in their favor. To drag them before the bar of a rigid rationalism is profound impiety.

Men, and societies of men, are ultimately more apt to maintain loyalties among those who are like them. This is natural and not to be either deplored or extirpated, but rather disciplined by civic virtue.

Indiscriminate blending of cultures is thus undesirable, and more often than not an at least implicit act of aggression against the existing majority culture.

Next Matt Yglesias picked up on a manifesto by someone who apparently wants us going to war even more frequently:

When foreign leaders issue threats against us, we take them at their word and act accordingly.

Great, now we can bomb everybody else every time they make a hollow threat.

As a response, let me propose the following manifesto to counter all these manifestos:

1. The Talmud tells that a gentile came to Shammai saying that he would convert to Judaism if Shammai could teach him the whole Torah in the time that he could stand on one foot. Shammai drove him away with a builder's measuring stick! Hillel, on the other hand, converted the gentile by telling him, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it." Hillel set his standards too low: one should do what is pleasing for others, not just avoid doing harm. Libertarianism is for people whose moral scheme got fixed in the third grade.

2. No manifesto should have more than one item. It makes you look like a raving lunatic, and gets away from whatever you wanted your central argument to be. No manifestos more than one item!

3. Writing a manifesto puts you in some questionable company. Marx wrote one, along with a buddy. The Unabomber wrote a rambling one. More recently, a group of British "leftists" wrote one, and were joined by a group of American "leftists" who look a whole lot like neocons and Iraq war supporters. This is not the company you want to join.

4. If something is immediately obvious, you are wasting you time putting it in a manifesto, since everyone already knows it. If the point is not immediately obvious and you want to convinve anyone other than yourself, you'll need to explain you argument through logical reasoning, and are wasting your time by putting it in a manifesto. This point is of the former category.

5. Those that have just broken the water pitcher.

6. Those that from a long way off look like flies. Seriously, click on the link, it'll make you a better person...and encourage you to stop making stupid lists. This post is over, so click on the link damnit!