Month: May 2008

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Posted on | by Ed | 3 Comments on THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END

We Americans are not renowned for our attention spans.

Needless to say, this primary season has gone on too long. Way too long to be helpful to anyone. I no longer buy it being helpful to McCain, because it's exhausting what limited attention for politics most Americans have.
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It will be harder for him, as well as the Democrat, to get people to pay attention in the general election. Eleven straight months of attentiveness is simply too much to ask.

After our 10th "super Tuesday" and another day of primaries that will "finally settle everything," nothing is settled and this is just going to drag on. Hillary Clinton simply isn't going to quit. Ever. As soon as the Democratic National Committee manages to bring the situation to some resolution (likely with Obama as the nominee) she's just going to start filing lawsuits. She and her surrogates just won't shut up about Florida and Michigan, the states the DNC is trying to disenfranchise.

Let's get one thing straight: MI and FL disenfranchised themselves. 48 states managed to follow the rules. Fuckin' Guam managed to follow the rules. Since Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan (non-Hillary candidates boycotted the race) there's simply no way that the delegates can be seated based on that election. In Florida, no one campaigned. Short of a monumental DNC conspiracy to hand her the nomination, those delegates are not being counted as is.
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That point has been made by people smarter than me. What hasn't been noted in the media is the illogic of Clinton's "I'm doing so much better in rural areas" argument. I have so many problems with that, I don't know where to begin.

First we have the borderline racist (yet incredibly common) implication that it somehow matters more what "good ol' salt-of-the-earth" rural Americans think. Like those are the voters that really count. Fuck everyone else….what does the guy in the flannel and John Deere hat say? The media continues to put that forward as the Average Man irrespective of the fact that 80% of the US population now lives in an urban metropolitan area (not a guess. I have the data.) Rural America has plummeted in every Census since 1940. The claim they keep making is that Obama's only doing well because those colored folk in Gary and Indianapolis like him. Maybe that's true, but what are those people? Do they not matter? Are they not American voters?

The simple fact is that the Democratic Party isn't even competitive in any recent election if they can't bank on A) urban voters and B) black and hispanic voters. There are about 3100 counties in the U.S. and Al Gore/John Kerry only won about 500 of them. Only one out of every six counties. Yet Gore won the popular vote and Kerry came very close. Republicans (and Hillary Clinton) do very well where no one lives. Democrats win by turning out en masse in places where people actually live.
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Picking up the support of 10,000 stragglers spread across rural Indiana could not matter less in the big picture.

You don't need to be much of a cynic to see through her latest argument in favor of the inevitability of her nomination. "Rural white people like me, and that's more important." Don't even get me started on the electability.
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Let me tell you what hypothetical general election poll questions from March and April of an election year is worth….well, actually, I don't think it's sturdy enough to wipe my ass with.

Watching Lanny Davis on CNN last night (although in fairness any of her surrogates are just as bad lately) was enough to make me puke. The shrill, whiny desperation and entitlement of their demeanor and argument explains everything about why people dislike her. This whole thing is just unfair and a conspiracy against her and the nomination is hers and she deserves it and Obama is some interloper who is stealing it.

I'll say this one last time: the DNC and the superdelegates need to put a stop to this now. It's gone beyond the point where it's hurting the party; now it's simply hurting the entire process. Hillary is not going to stop, ever, until she gets what she believes is hers. They need to do one of two things: relent and agree to give it to her or stop her. We're beginning our fifth month of this process and no remaining primary is going to resolve this. It's time to shit or get off the pot. This can't be left up to the voters. The voters are split. It can't be left up to Hillary, because Hillary is perfectly happy to destroy her party and bring the voting public to a level of disgust that even Bush-Gore couldn't reach. It's time for someone to be the grown-up.

RATIONAL NON-VOTING

Posted on | by Ed | 12 Comments on RATIONAL NON-VOTING

Political scientists widely accept that individuals have no tangible, rational reason to vote. If the decision was made from a pure rational choice perspective, we'd all stay home. A rational choice voting model looks like this:

V = PB – C

V is your net benefit from voting, and you only vote if V > 0. P is the probability of your vote deciding the election, while B is the value of your expected difference between the parties (i.e., if you are a fervent Democrat and loathe the Republicans, B is large). C is the costs of voting – time, information, attention, and so on. Here's the rub: in any reasonably sized electorate, P asymptotically approaches zero. The P*B term, for all intents and purposes, is zero (something like 0.0000000000000001). Since C > 0 (voting is never without some costs) a rational person would never vote.

But people do vote, even though the rational choice model makes sense. This is what political scientists call "the Paradox of Voting." No one should vote, yet lots of people do. The answer lies in Riker and Ordeshook (1968), who revise the model thusly:

V = PB – C + D

It's the same model, of course, with an additional term representing the "expressive" benefits of voting. In other words, you vote because it makes you feel better. D represents a sense of civic duty, the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from supporting someone you like, or the psychological conviction that your vote is helping determine the outcome. D also represents, among more sophisticated voters, an understanding of the free rider dilemma. That is, you recognize that if everyone approached the decision rationally and stayed home, turnout would be zero and therefore one or two individuals could decide the whole election. Translation: you realize that if everyone else is being rational and staying home, it is rational for you to be irrational and vote.

Tuesday was primary day in Indiana, and I did not vote. My "D" term is negative. Not only do I not get a jolly feeling from voting, I actually feel sick when I do it. Psychologically, voting implies that I think this process has any legitimacy or that I accept it as valid. Neither of those things are true. There's an anecdote attributed to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was stopped by a poor woman while traveling through the city with his entourage. He told the woman "I don't have time for your problems," to which she replied "Then you have ceased to be Emperor."** I guess you could say all of these people have ceased to be my emperors.

The phrase "rational non-voting" always cracks me up. All non-voting in the American context is rational. Hell, unless you really get a kick out of it, staying home is far more rational than voting. Given the paucity of parties, the universally unappealing candidates, and the oppressive, naked media editorializing which hammers viewers with the reality that Big Money and Big Media and Serious Experts have already decided the outcome, it's a miracle that anyone shows up.

**Suitably chastised, he stopped to talk with her.

ED vs. LOGICAL FALLACIES, PART 20: SLIPPERY SLOPE

Posted on | by Ed | 13 Comments on ED vs. LOGICAL FALLACIES, PART 20: SLIPPERY SLOPE

My research isn't exactly scintillating to the average person.
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It's an application of concepts from a physical science (geography) to a social one (political science) in an effort to expand what we know about things like partisanship and voter turnout. Oh, but the last sentence of my dissertation is really interesting: "In conclusion, fire up the gas chambers and start killing people."

According to some people, this is the inevitable conclusion of science. It's also one of the most bleedingly obvious examples of a slippery slope argument that you're likely to see.

Slippery slopes are technically a subset of non causa pro causa fallacies, but they're unique in their incremental approach. A standard NC argument asserts (wrongly) that A causes B.
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The slippery slope asserts that A causes B, which in turn causes C, D, and E, which ultimately causes F. The trick is to get the listener to accept the argument by presenting plausible arguments (banning assault rifles opens the door for other kinds of weapons to be banned) contained in an implausible larger argument (banning assault rifles inevitably leads to a ban on all gun ownership).

Cue Ben Stein. Is he ready? I know I just used him last week, but I think he's rested.

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

And there we have it. "Science" leads to killing people. We start with a harmless idea about the evolution of bacteria and, some indeterminate number of steps later, we're gassing people. The argument leaves many questions unanswered, most likely because Mr. Stein is not very good at making arguments. For instance, can we clarify what "science" is?

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Does geography count? Sociology? Library Science? Second, how many steps are between Librarianship and Genocide? Is there any possibility for intervention before we get to mass murder?

Anton Scalia, dissenting in Lawrence v Texas, approves.

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

There you have it; if a ridiculous, unenforceable "sodomy" law is repealed and we let teh gays butt-fuck with impunity, it's only a matter of time until incest and man-on-llama are legal.**

The implied undercurrent of every slippery slope argument is "Where will this madness end?" It disregards the human capacity to understand subtle differences (i.e., consenting adults having sex versus someone ass-plowing a barnyard animal) because the authors of such arguments likely lack it. In my experience, the best way to destroy a slippery slope is not by pointing out the illogic (too much effort expended on a dunce who probably won't accept your argument anyway) but simply by turning it around. The next time you hear "If gay marriage is OK, why not polygamy or man-on-dog?" feel free to respond with "OK, if you want to play the slippery slope game, if it's legal to ban gay marriage, why not interracial marriage?

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Or inter-religious marriage? WHERE DOES IT STOP?!?!?"

You'll feel dirty, but you did it for the greater good.

**Google image search failed me, but this is where I wanted to post a picture of a very worried-looking llama. Turns out they're relatively unflappable.

AMERICA'S WELFARE QUEENS

Posted on | by Ed | 24 Comments on AMERICA'S WELFARE QUEENS

In my extensive domestic travels behind the wheel of a car, I've noticed something rather curious about small town rural America. The kind of places one finds in, say, rural Alabama or Middle O' Nowhere, Kansas uniformily look like they hit a peak in the 1950s and have been disintegrating ever since. Driving down their depressing "Main Streets" and counting the fire-damaged, boarded-up, and vacant buildings is sobering, and the overall effect is reminiscent more of an abandoned theme park (Idealized Americanaland) than an actual human settlement.
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Here's the curious part. There are inevitably two buildings in the town that aren't decrepit: the Post Office and another building housing a rotating cast of Federal agencies (Bureau of Land Management, USDA, and so on). These neatly-kept, nondescript brick buildings represent the only stable employment and the last remaining reason for the town to exist at all. In other words, if not for Federal dollars, the rural bastions of knee-jerk lower-my-taxes-at-all-costs conservatism would blow away at the next stiff breeze.

It's amazing how largely conservative rural America seems unable to make the connection between tax-and-spend Big Government and their farm subsidies. Or between paying taxes and having a job with the USDA for 40 years. Or between taxes and Air Force base. As these wayward New Deal Democrats ("I was a Democrat until they got all liberal!") have trouble getting the picture, I have made the picture for them:

This image represents the Lower 48** states color-coded by the ratio of how much money they receive in Federal spending to how much the Treasury collects in taxes from that state. For example, Tennesseeans pay 53 per capita in taxes (including all sources of taxation, not just individual).

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But the state receives $8107 per capita among all sources of Federal spending annually, giving it a ratio of 1.15 (a buck-fifteen received for every dollar paid in taxes). Tennessee, like 34 other states, is a Welfare Queen.

Using data from 2005*** only 15 states give Uncle Sam more than Uncle Sam gives back. Minnesotans and Delawareans (?) get back less 50 cents of each dollar they pour into the Treasury. On the far opposite end of the spectrum, some states receive three dollars in Federal spending for every dollar contributed. Anyone want to guess what the 15 highest-ratio states tend to have in common?

Yes, many of our nation's backwaters of right-wing hot air are limping along thanks to massive Federal subsidies, both direct and indirect. I shudder to think how bad Mississippi would be if it wasn't getting our cash at a 3-to-1 ratio. Then again, thanks to Trent Lott's mastery of the fine art of pork-barrel politics hidden beneath a shroud of anti-government rhetoric, I'll never have to.

Our national conception of what is "welfare" or a government subsidy is badly in need of revision. The straw man argument claims that welfare is Uncle Sam handing someone a check for doing nothing. Conceived more broadly – not to mention more accurately – government subsidies include every farmer whose lifestyle is supported by taxpayer dollars and every town whose main sources of employment and dollars circulating in the economy are Federal. The angriest invectives often come from towns that would blow away like a tumbleweed without the Air Force base, the Federal prison, the USDA station, the National Park Service regional HQ, or the USGS office. Oddly enough, John Doe seems to define welfare as tax dollars spent subsidizing someone's lifestyle……someone else's lifestyle, that is.

**AK and HI were excluded to simplify the ArcMap image, which needed to be of a manageable yet legible size. Suffice it to say that both states are huge sucking sounds which gobble up tax dollars and send precious little money to Washington in return.

***Source data: 2005 Consolidated Federal Funds report and Current Population Estimate (US Census Bureau), 2005 Total Tax Collections (Internal Revenue Service). Analysis done in ArcMap 9.2 using TIGER files provided by ESRI.

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NPF: THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

Posted on | by Ed | 9 Comments on NPF: THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

(Note: This week was subpar on account of finals, and I will be making it up next week. Promise.)

What's the quickest way to meet 500,000 Missourians?

Visit Brooklyn.

If you have a lot of friends between 21-30, tell me with a straight face that you do not know the person I am about to describe (or possibly a few dozen of them). It never fails to amaze me how many people consider moving to the latest 21-30 mecca (after they hung a "Sorry hipsters, we're full" sign on Brooklyn in 2003, there was a brief infatuation with San Diego.

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It's currently Portland.) to be a complete plan virtually guaranteeing unending happiness. I can't say I blame anyone who wants to get the hell out of Indiana or whatever, but the illogic of moving wherever happens to be trendy escapes me. What could possibly work out better than moving somewhere "hot" (read: ass-breakingly expensive, as in $900/month for a closet sized apartment with three roommates) and sitting back to enjoy unadulterated happiness?

Some places are better to live than others.

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But your life is your life, and you can't use a U-Haul to make yourself happy.

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The "I'm so unhappy, but when I get to Brooklyn everything will be awesome" theory makes very little sense. No, when you get to Brooklyn your life is not going to be like Sarah Jessica Parker on that show I refuse to name. It's going to be expensive as shit, there will be three times as many identically-aged and -skilled people as there are jobs, and your neighbors will be a bunch of dipshits who just moved in from Dayton.

New York is cool. I like visiting. Portland, while wildly overrated, is nice too.
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But please, shut the fuck up about how great they are and how you're just about to move there and how great everything will be when you do.
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It does nothing but give me greater pleasure when you end up homeless, living under a tarp on someone's roof, and stealing wireless so you can blog about how great Brooklyn is (true story. seriously.) It ensures that I get a bigger kick out of it when you slink back into town because the best job you could find in Portland involved migrant farm labor (true story. seriously.)

When Chicago was "the" city in the late 19th Century, Mark Twain said "Chicagoans think they are the finest people on Earth when they are merely the most numerous." It applies broadly to any geography-based superiority complex. My life is imperfect and I'll probably be happy to leave southern Indiana, but not so I can become one of the sheep prattling on about how cool it is to live above a bodega that offers the privilege of paying $2.99 for an apple.

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD

Posted on | by Ed | 7 Comments on GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD

What does John McCain's dick taste like?

I don't know, ask Chris Matthews (or Brian Williams, or any other anchor who makes the joke work for you).

As we get deeper into this election it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are wasting a whole lot of time, money, and energy. If the media's behavior for the past three months continues for the next six, then the election is going to be a foregone conclusion.

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The status quo – every single word Obama says, every person he's ever met in his life, and every square inch of his past is put under a microscope and blasted with both barrels while McCain parades around in a halo – means that the outcome in November is predetermined.

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As you try to restrain yourself from killing someone the next time you hear the phrase "Reverend Wright," just try to imagine what the media would be doing to the Democratic candidates if they had John McCain's 2008.

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Imagine what they'd do to Obama if he said he didn't know dick about the economy. Imagine what Hannity would say about Clinton if she didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia, Iran and Iraq. Imagine the temperature of the coals over which they'd be raked if they blathered on about fighting the influence of lobbyists while being one of the biggest hookers in Washington.

People essentially receive no information about the election that doesn't come from the media.

If they persist in the pattern of giving overwhelming skepticism and scrutiny to one party while responding to the other with slack-jawed credulity and stenography, I am more than dubious that average voters will take it upon themselves to ask skeptical questions and research the answers.