Category: Current Affairs

IN-teresting . . .

Was checking my referrer log and found that we’d been linked from the SF (Speculative Fiction) Reader Forum, where a bunch of blue state folks are actually talking about secession.

Maybe this time the North will secede from the . . . well, almost everything else.

CHECK OUT WHAT THEY’RE SAYING.

Incidentally, welcome SFReader Forumers! We may tend to be red state on this blog, but we’re SF fans, too! (As you can see from several of the below posts. We also thought of the secession idea, as you can also see below–and above.)

Advertising Becomes Even More Evil

There’s a scene in the original, 1960s version of Bedazzled in which Peter Cook (the devil) is complaining to Dudley Moore about what a slump he’s been in lately.

“Take the seven deadly sins,” he says. “I thought those up in one afternoon. The only thing I’ve come up with lately is advertising.”

How true!

Well, the devil seems to have been tweaking the concept of advertising lately to try to make it imitate the infectious properties of a virus.

The idea is to give you something neat bundled with advertising so that you’ll become “infected” and share the infection with your friends and loved ones, allowing the advertisers to exploit your personal social network and infect those you know and love.

Things like this have been going on throughout the history of advertising, and I don’t mind in principle advertisers providing you with something entertaining or valuable in exchange for the chance to pitch their product to you. Heck, that’s the principle on which commercial TV and radio work. So individual viral marketing tools may be fine in and of themselves.

What I am annoyed by is the dehumanizing attitude displayed by the ad executives who have framed “viral marketing” in this manner. Advertising frequently involves a dehumanizing manipulation of the masses, and consciously modelling your techniques off of viruses is an expression of this attitude.

LEARN ABOUT “VIRAL MARKETING.”

AND LEARN ABOUT ONE VIRAL MARKETING TOOL: “THE SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN.”

Oh yeah, ALSO LEARN ABOUT “ASTROTURFING.”

Weekends Are Funny

You may not have noticed, but weekends are different from week days. For example, you aren’t at work on weekends (not if you’re like most normal wage-earners, anyway). You definitely go to church on the weekend (whereas you may or may not during the week–your choice). Your kids (if any) are home from school (if you don’t homeschool) and probably whining to have you take them places. There are also sporting events you may go to on the weekends. So, y’know, they’re different.

That’s why we have a special name for them.

I see the difference every week in my blog traffic. It goes way down on Saturday and Sunday and then snaps right back to its usual weekday traffic level on Monday.

This is a regular, normal, predictable cycle.

It also poses an interesting challenge for political pollsters. Everyone’s schedule is different on the weekends than it is on weekdays, with lots of people out of the house or otherwise busy doing something other than watching sitcoms when pollsters call. But does this tend to tip the direction of the polling more one way than another?

Think about it: Kids. Church. Sports.

Are the red state folks or the blue state folks more into those three things?

You got it: The red state folks are. As a result, the red state folks are less available on weekends to take pollsters questions and every weekend the polls tip blue state. Then, come Monday morning, the sampling snaps right back in place, just like my server traffic.

This is a story today because it’s Monday and the polls being released today are based on samplings taken over the weekend, when the polls get blue-shifted. Since today is the day before the election, though, that normal, predictable weekend tinting will get portrayed as Kerry “surging” and “closing the deal” and a lot of other similar-sounding thing among blue-ish pundits and spinmeisters.

That’s what I told a friend who called today who very much wants Bush rather than Kerry to win and who was concerned by Kerry’s apparent upward bump in the polls over the weekend.

I don’t claim to know who’s going to win tomorrow (or whenever), but I do know about the weekend polling effect that happens because red state folks are out with their kids, in church, and at sporting events. I’ve read the weekend blue-shift is as much as three percentage points.

Professional pollsters (as opposed to hungry blue pundits) therefore look askance at polls based on weekend data.

READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE.

Political Party Potpourri

This weekend I went to the registrar of voters to pick up a ballot so I could vote early (or at least avoid filling it out at the polling place this Tuesday).

Turns out that here in California there are way more than Bush and Kerry on the ballot. In fact, there are six different pairs of candidates on the ballot representing different parties.

Had to confess that I hadn’t heard of all of the individual parties they represented.

And there’s way more minor political parties out there in America than just these six.

HERE’S A LIST OF HISTORICAL AND PRESENT U.S. POLITICAL PARTIES, LINKED TO INFO ABOUT THEM.

HERE’S A CONSICISE LIST OF PRESENT POLITICAL PARTIES AND BASIC INFO ON THEM.

I had no idea many of these folks existed.

Most of them are nuts.

A few actually sound good (that’s sound good, you’ll note; I’m suspicious of what every party says about itself).

What Bill Clinton Hath Wrought?

AndorianYesterday the San Diego Union-Tribune published a very worthwhile editorial by Joseph Perkins on the impact that Al Gore’s decision to contest the 2000 presidential election had on the country, how it created the situation we are in now, and how it may do long-term damage to American democracy.

It’s a fascinating read.

READ THE EDITORIAL.

Now I’d like to carry his analysis one step farther.

Perkins traces the potential crisis in American democracy to Al Gore’s refusal to put his own personal interest in winning ahead of the good of the nation. That created a crisis where none should have existed and put the nation through a tremendous convulsion that, despite the interposition of 9/11, has left the nation in an extraordinarily divided and partisan state.

Fair enough.

But can the chain be traced back further than Gore? Is there a reason why he, at that moment in history, decided to throw the nation into a constitutional crisis? Was it simply his own volition or can it be traced to other causes?

It seems to me that a case can be made that the reason he did so may be that he had just spent four years under the political tutelage of Bill Clinton.

Now, I am not one to try to blame every evil under the sun on Bill Clinton. As evil as Clinton was, I am not seething with rage against him. To me he has become a joke–a self-parody–who occasionally turns up in the news and who I greet with little more than indifference.

But it strikes me that Clinton may have been a significant influence on Gore that either explicitly advised Gore to contest the election or who implicitly set the example that Gore followed in doing so.

As evidence for this, I would point to a moment that occurred during the impeachment brouhaha. As later reported by one of the participants, there was a meeting between Clinton, James Carville, and George Stephanopolous. This meeting took place at a moment when it was clear that the chief executive of the United States had lied under oath in a court of law. The fact that he had lied in order to cover his sexual misdeeds was a fact that members of his party would use to distract the public (“It’s all about sex!”) from the fact that the chief executive of the nation–a man sworn to uphold the laws of the land–had just violated one of the most sacred of those laws by offering false evidence to the judiciary.

At this particularly dark moment in the history of the Clinton presidency, George Stephanopolous was overcome with the magnitude of the problem, the fact that the president could well be impeached by the House and possibly even convicted in the Senate, which would result not only in the humiliation of Clinton himself but also in putting the nation through a horrible national crisis.

Moved by these considerations, he wondered aloud whether Clinton might ought to do the statemanlike thing and consider resigning, for his own good and the good of the nation.

This would not have been an unprecidented thing. When faced with impeachment President Nixon had mustered the statesmanship to resign and cut short the Watergate crisis that was tearing the country apart. Other presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson, had crises come upon them late enough in their terms that they decided not to run for re-election for the good of themselves, their party, and the nation. They willing let go the reigns of power for the greater good.

George Stephanopolous suggested that Clinton consider doing the same.

Clinton and Carville looked at him as if he had just transformed into an Andorian.

It was inconceivable to them that anyone would voluntarily give up power. They had been schooled in a political philosophy that involved winning at all costs. Power was something to be relinquished only when it was pried from one’s cold, dead fingers. (This incident also served to them as proof that Stephanopolous was weak and didn’t “get it.”)

And so Clinton didn’t resign.

And the opposing party fell into the “It’s all about sex!” trap and didn’t keep the public’s attention adequately focused on the fact that the chief executive had lied under oath.

And he wasn’t convicted in the Senate.

And the nation went through a huge, polarizing crisis.

This crisis set the stage for the bitterness of the 2000 election. It left both the Democrats and the Republicans out for blood, both seeking vengeance and payback for what had happened with the Clinton fiasco. This is indisputably one of the ways what happened in 2000 can be traced to Clinton.

But perhaps there is another way.

Perhaps that “win at any costs” mentality that shaped Clinton’s political outlook was something that he transferred to Gore. Perhaps he counseled Gore to contest the Florida results. Perhaps he had just mentored Gore long enough that Gore did it on his own. Gore was never an especially strong and decisive man, and whether by counsel or example, perhaps it was the influence of Clinton that pushed him over the edge in the decision to contest the 2000 Florida results.

From that, one domino after another fell, until we now end up with a still bitterly-divided nation, with countless lawyers lined up on both sides. If the vote is close come Tuesday, we may not have just one Florida, but six or seven, throwing the nation again into a Constitutional crisis and doing further grave and lasting harm to American society.

Bill Clinton is not the cause of every evil under the sun.

But he just may have been the cause of this one.

That, historians may determine, may be a key part of the Clinton legacy.

Open Society = Vulnerability + Daisy Cutters

In the weeks after 9/11, I found myself thinking like this:

It’s true that the open society we have in America made us vulnerable to the kind of infiltration-attack that the terrorists pulled off. In a xenophobic, totalitarian state, it would be much harder to get foreign sleeper agents in place to execute that kind of attack. People of potentially dangerous nationalities could simply be excluded from the state. That, after all, is a defensive tactic that has been used by many societies in the past (e.g., the Spainish expulsion of the Moors after the liberation of Spain from Moorish domination). But we’re not that kind of society, and our openness to other societies leaves us vulnerable to this kind of infiltration.

But in addition to the free movement of people, the openness of our society also means something else: the free movement of information and resources. We have all kinds of innovation in this country, both technological and economic, that is simply impossible in closed societies. That’s why our military and our economy are so much stronger than others. It’s the reason that we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union didn’t. The free flow of information and resources in America let us overmatch the Soviet Union, which as a closed society simply couldn’t keep up in the end.

So the openness of our society leads to both its vulnerability and its strenth.

The same applies to the situation we presently face with al-Qa’ida. Our openness allowed 9/11 to happen, and it allowed all of the really cool munitions we used to liberate Afghanistan (the supposedly geographically invincible country) in a matter of weeks.

So, as I put it at the time: “Our openness means that you get to take a poke at us . . . and then that we get to drop daisy cutters on your head.”

HERE’S AN ARTICLE from someone on the Muslim side of the divide who acknowledges something akin to the same thing.

Fascinating read.

He argues that a clash of civiliations is indeed afoot, but that it is a clash destined to be won by the West, that Islamic society is simply incapable of keeping up in the end. It is, from an American perspective, a hopeful recognition that 9/11 represented not the advent of a massive, unending clash between the West and Islam, but the last gasp of a dying Islamism against an unstoppable West.

Openness’ll do that for ya.