Of fighting back and looking weak

Andrew Sullivan asks:

Could it be that in this election cycle, the tactics of the far right are beginning to turn around and bite them?

In order for that to happen, the Democratic leadership would have to make a counterpunch. I don't see that happening. They (still!) haven't learned: When you tell yourself you're being lofty and ignore gutter attacks, you allow those attacks to become accepted as fact. (Thus decorated veteran Kerry was painted as a wimp by multiple-student-deferment Cheney and a candidate who spent the war years keeping the skies of Texas safe from the Viet Cong, until he "talked to the army" and didn't finish his enlistment.) And when you don't speak up to defend yourself because you think protesting might make you look weak.... You just look weak. And are therefore treated with contempt by a party that respects only strength.

Is it a case of lacking the killer instinct, or just the effect of being beaten up by Republicans so badly for so long they've become too timid to assert themselves? I don't know. I do know their "Maybe if we're nice, the Republicans won't be so mean to us" strategy isn't working, has never worked. And if a Democrat had had the kind of week McCain just had, it's all we'd be hearing about from now to election day.

Personally, I would love to see the GOP implode on itself, not only as poetic justice but as a necessary corrective for the last several years. But it won't happen unless it's helped along by a vigorous opposition, one the current Democratic leadership seems unable or unwilling to muster and the candidate seems to be having trouble mounting. Reagan said of the Soviet Union: It didn't fall, it was pushed. Today's Democratic Party won't give the Republican Party even a nudge.

Who's the Elitist Here?

Remember, taking a nine-car motorcade to Starbucks isn't elitist if an ex-POW does it.

I just thought I should clear that up.

"Gee, ya THINK?" Headline Of The Day. Possibly The Week.

From today's Washington Post:
----------
Houses Snag McCain Campaign

McCain's inability to remember how many homes he owns may disrupt plan to cast Obama as elitist.

-----------

McCain went to Annapolis on the basis of his father and grandfather both being admirals. After distinguished service and time as a POW, he returned home to find his wife, who had been raising his children during his captivity, had also been injured in a car accident and was disabled. So, naturally, he divorced her and married a beer heiress worth over $100 million. Today he owns six (or seven, or eight, and today I saw one source that said 10) homes, wears $500 shoes, spent over a quarter-million last year just on domestic help, and says that in order to be rich you have to make $5 million per year--which, coincidentally, is about the expected return on his wife's wealth.

And the kid who grew up in a single-parent home, sometimes on welfare, who worked his way through school, earned the editorship of the Harvard Law Review and a faculty position at the University of Chicago (neither noted for being hotbeds of affirmative action) is the elitist.

That doesn't even pass the laugh test.

Update: USA Today now has McCain at 12 houses, worth over $10 million. And you gotta love the closing graf:

McCain, who has portrayed Obama as an elitist, is the son and grandson of admirals. The Associated Press estimates his wife, a beer heiress, is worth $100 million. Obama was raised by a single mother who relied at times on food stamps, and went to top schools on scholarships and loans. His income has increased from book sales since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention.

[h/t: AmericaBlog]

We have gone hopelessly astray

Kathleen Parker has an excellent column pointing out just how fundamentally wrong and profoundly un-American the Saddleback Church meeting with the candidates was. Rick Warren is trying to insert himself into public life under the guise of "it's all about worldview," which is a codephrase for "evangelical Christianity."

Of course, the next day, he said flat-out that no Christian could vote for anyone pro-choice. Which sends a pretty clear signal about how he thinks everyone should vote.

Neutral, my ass. And expecting candidates to go through this is undignified, demeaning, and pandering of the worst sort.

Warren used to be someone I may not have agreed with but could at least respect. That's changing rapidly.

And though I'm sure he'd call it "anti-Christian bigotry," I think his insistence on bringing religion, faith, whatever you want to call it, into the political realm and making it a political issue is wrong. And I'm sure he'd deny any such bigotry. While also saying he would never vote for an atheist, no matter what that person's policy positions are. So you see, it's only bigotry when other people do it. When he does it, it's just looking for people who share his worldview. In other words, at least pretend you believe in the same magic sky-fairy he does, or at least in some magic sky-fairy, and he'll condescend to pretending he respects you.

Go read Parker's column, it's worth it.

Why Evolution Must Be Taught

No, I'm not a biologist. But an anti-science, anti-evidence attitude is toxic.

Excellent column at the Times today explaining more about why we can't let the nitwits win on this one.

Life is strange dept.

I had the opportunity last spring to participate in the Oxford Roundtable conference on regulating cyberspace. I submitted a paper based on my presentation to the Oxford Journal of Public Policy.

Unfortunately, my journal article was turned down.

But on the bright side, a photo I took while I was out sightseeing got selected for an online travel guide. So I guess now I can add "published travel photographer" to my resume.

There might be a lesson in here somewhere, but I'm not sure I want to know what it is.

Quote of the day

God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power.

Robert G. Ingersoll, "Gods," 1879

[h/t: Pharyngula]

What went wrong

I've gently tweaked Andrew Sullivan a few times in this space (and not-so-gently blasted him in emails back & forth w/ a friend of mine). I read his stuff for the same reason I read George Will--he's usually wrong, but often in an interesting or thought-provoking way. And he occasionally goes completely off the rails, as in his latest contest, "Let's protest all the negative campaign ads by making our own negative campaign ads."

But when he's right, he's spot-on:

A critical part of what's gone wrong these past few years has been the tendency of a war president to bully opponents, distort their meaning, use base emotional appeals when we need far more rational discussion about how to counter a very complex, terrifying Islamist threat. The kind of campaigns Rove ran in 2002, 2004 and 2006 made all this far harder. It reduced important debates about priorities in the war, detention and interrogation policies, the wisdom of long-term enmeshment in the Middle East, the difficulties of securing loose nukes, the excruciatingly difficult calls on which allies to trust and how - into dumb-ass contests about who is the biggest bad-ass, who is a treasonous wimp and which opponent most belongs in a French hair salon.

Some Daily Mencken

I may make this a regular feature, I'd forgotten how good some of his stuff is:

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.

--HL Mencken

Stupidity as policy

Paul Krugman has a spot-on column today on how Know-Nothingism--"the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise"--has become accepted wisdom in the GOP.

Until we get over the poisonous anti-intellectualism rampant in this country, particularly our political discourse--the idea that those who think too much or learn too much are untrustworthy and deserve nothing but contempt, that "common sense" and childlike faith will always carry us through to victory no matter what--we can't hope to clean up the mess we've made over the last 20 years. Our economy is a mess, our standing in the world in tatters, and when a candidate points out a simple low-cost way to save as much gas as offshore drilling would gain for us, he's mocked for it, even though the numbers show he's right.

Given two choices, we keep opting for the stupid one, and then wonder why things don't get better.

Consumer issues

Followup to this post.

I received this email today:

Thank you for writing Crock-Pot ; a division of Jarden Consumer Solutions.

We do apologize that you have experienced trouble with our product. I have sent out a warranty replacement Crock-Pot, to replace the unit that was defective. Also, a pre-paid shipping label will be delivered separate from your new Crock-Pot. Please place the defective unit in the box and ship it back to us, free of charge to you.

Please write back if we can provide further assistance. You may also reach us at (800) 777-5452. We are open from 8:00am to 8:00pm, EST, Monday thru Friday.

Best Regards,

Danielle

Jarden Consumer Solutions

They misspelled my first name in the email, but that's a minor annoyance. But I posted a scathing review, I should also post that they responded by replacing the unit.

Now, if this one fails in the same way, I'm going to be, um, annoyed, to say the least. But they're at least making an effort.

But he's a nice guy!

Today's Post has a nauseating op-ed. The point of it seems to be, Ted Stevens' corruption indictment is a darn shame, and we ought to all just let bygones be bygones, because after all, he's really brought home the bacon and is a nice guy when you talk to him.

Disgusting.

This is the same entitlement mentality that argued that Scooter Libby shouldn't go to jail because, well, he shouldn't, because he's one of us. Baloney.

And the argument being made isn't the (quite legitimate) point that indictment isn't conviction, and we should avoid rushing to judgment. Rather, it seems to be, we shouldn't even ask the question, because he's one of us.

Disgusting, wrong, and a dangerous attitude.

Musical Break

Go watch these. They're worth it.

Quote of the day

The foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.

--T. H. Huxley

Definitionses

In my facebook profile, I call myself an agnostic. I recently got a question about it from a friend of mine, who noted that I used to identify with a particular religion. What happened? Here's an excerpt from my reply, with minor edits for clarity.

Well, for a start, I haven't practiced in years. I did for a while after my divorce, and considered myself religious for quite a while after that. As I drifted away from organized religion, my beliefs gradually shifted, becoming less and less denominational, less and less specific...and, as time went on, less and less theistic at all. Today I'm not even sure I'd qualify as a Deist.

Mostly , it was a process of "Do I really believe this? Not 'do the people around me believe it,' not 'do I get patted on the back for saying I believe it'--do I really and truly, deep down, believe this?" And more and more, the answer came back, no, I don't. And while I've never been a literalist (well, not past the age of 10 or so, but that doesn't really count, does it?) the more I thought about it, the more skeptical I got.

Partly, I think, because so many of the arguments in favor of belief are so awful. I'm enough of an intellectual and skeptic (and all-around horse's ass, at times) that anything I claim as a belief is going to have to stand up to some fairly rigorous scrutiny, and most of the arguments for belief don't come close. And heck, even if Jesus Himself Touched My Heart And Gave Me New Eyes To See, all that would prove would be that I'd had some kind of emotional experience. See any number of previous blog posts for deconstructions & fiskings of various stupid arguments for God.

So, I've pretty much given up on any idea of a magic invisible daddy in the sky who loves me as his very own. It would be a comforting belief, but "Believing it makes me feel better, so I believe it" isn't a satisfying argument. (Though if someone else says they believe something because it comforts them, well, I can't very well argue with that, and need only respect their right to be irrational. When they say believing something comforts them, therefore *I* must also believe the same thing and am a rotten commie traitor who hates Baby Jesus if I don't--that's when I part company with them.)

I went with "agnostic" rather than "atheist" because I'm also not convinced of the atheist position. There's a difference between I don't know what's there and I know for sure there's nothing there. There's no conclusive rational proof of God, but disproof is also impossible. The most you can say is there's no evidence for it, therefore we shouldn't assume it's there unless we have some other good reason to. That's my beef with the Intelligent Design nitwits: "God did it" is not the simplest, most parsimonious, least-assumption explanation. I'm willing to be persuaded, but haven't heard a convincing argument yet.

So how do I reconcile that with active participation in a 12-step program that puts emphasis on reliance on a Higher Power? Almost 20 yrs sobriety has taught me, sometimes painfully, that if I do certain things, life tends to go a little smoother; if I do certain other things, I get a little crazy, and if I keep doing those other things, I'll probably get drunk. Whether or not there's a deity behind them, following certain principles keeps me on an even keel. "God" is a useful metaphor for something pulling me toward those principles, and regular prayer and meditation has put me into the habit of taking a few minutes and calmly reviewing my day before setting out in the morning, and again at the end of the day, and promptly trying to clean up any messes or unfinished business before it festers. It's put me into the habit of thinking of other people rather than myself first (at least, not thinking of myself first all the time), and evaluating my actions by whether I'm living up to the values I'm professing--values that don't necessarily need a magic sky-fairy to be legitimate. Am I being honest with others and myself? Can I disagree with someone without being disagreeable? Am I treating others with respect? Am I meeting my responsibilities as an employee, as a family member, as a citizen? If not, what can I do about those things? If I can't change everything at once, what can I change today? At the end of a meeting, I don't need to go off on magic sky-fairies while everyone else says the Lord's Prayer--that would be rude and disrespectful to their beliefs, even if I don't share them, while maintaining silence costs me nothing.

At the convention last weekend, I talked with a woman whose (non-12-step, no need for one) brother works for Anheuser-Busch in St Louis. They just got bought out, and no word yet on who's keeping their job and who isn't. She asked if he was worried about it, and he just shrugged and said, no, nothing he can do about it either way, so he's just doing his job until he hears otherwise. And she (and I) were boggled--how do normal people do that? How do they get it that simply? We have to bang our heads against the wall several times before we remember the serenity prayer about accepting what we can't change and all that.

So, yeah, "agnostic" is about the most accurate description of where I'm at now. Further bulletins as things develop.

Don't buy this product

I don't usually do product reviews, let alone get all suzy-homemaker, but I'm sufficiently annoyed about blatant shoddiness that maybe someone else can be warned off so they don't make the mistake I did.

I recently bought a large Crock-Pot slow cooker, model SCVS600. This model has a glass lid that is attached at one side, with a hinge on one side and a handle on the other. The lid can latch down for transportation, which is the selling point, as it's allegedly "portable."

DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT.

The handle on the lid, and the hinge mechanism, are made of a plastic that gets soft when heated. (Oddly enough, the lid of a slow cooker can get a little warm, and stay a little warm for quite a while, particularly if you're using it for, oh, say, cooking slowly.)

Thus, when you lift the lid, the handle can snap off in your hand, sending the lid crashing back down, and dropping a few small shards of soft plastic into your food.

Or, if you decide it's still usable and use it again a few weeks later, and leave it on high for 2 hours (not a particularly long time as slow-cooker standards go), the plastic around the hinge itself can give way, thus spilling more plastic bits into your food and in this case, the bonus effect of sending a hot glass lid down onto your countertop, good luck stopping it without grabbing onto anything hot.

DO NOT BUY THE CROCK-POT MODEL SCVS600,
THE ONE WITH THE HINGED LID.

I have no idea how their other models are, but THIS one is definitely NOT recommended, because of the poor quality of the plastic used in making the hinged lid. It falls apart--literally--within a few uses.

Yes, I've complained to the company. No response as of yet. Further updates (if any) as events develop.

Addendum: Looks like I'm not the only one.

Update: The company has responded. Text of their email here.

"Well, duh!" Headline Of The Day

From CNN:


I suppose there's a market for unattractive sex... but I don't think I care to know the details.

[Yes, yes, different people have different ideas about what "attractive" or "unattractive" may be, in this context, I know.]

Incidentally, here's the full story, if you want the details.

Reality Explained

[h/t: PZ Myers]

Mars Pulls Ad

It looks as if M&M/Mars has pulled the obnoxiously homophobic ad they were running.

How many times will they make the same mistake, I wonder?

Memo to David Brooks

Re: this morning's hit piece

David: Yes, JFK & Reagan made much more hard-headed speeches in Germany. They were specific. They talked about what America could and should do.

But: they were already President at the time.

If Obama had loaded up his speech with policy prescriptions, with specifics about what should be done and how, you would undoubtedly excoriate him--and rightfully so--for making a campaign speech on foreign soil.

Is it the speech President Obama should have given? Absolutely not. However, for Presumptive Nominee Obama, it was about as specific as it could have been. He's one Senator out of a hundred, and does not set U.S. foreign policy.

Yet.

Really, is the idea of context all that hard?