Well, I'm planning to be here today, putting in an appearance at the protest. I don't know if it'll be a decent anti-war protest or not (and I never enjoy them anyway) - it looks like it may be shoddily organized - but what the hell, it won't hurt to go and be supportive. (I'll be way late, but if the protest is over after only an hour or so then it wasn't any good anyway).
By the way, I have absolutely no idea if ANSWER is involved in this protest or not.
After the protest, I've got to go to work tonight (sometimes I think I'm the only blogger who doesn't blog from work), so there'll be nothing more from me today. But keep checking out the three comments threads mentioned below - the Nader discussion, in particular, is very active.
Update: I never made it there, alas; I got distracted by other stuff on the way, and then had to go to work. My housemate Bean and frequent comments-writers Amy and Aaron went together to the Salem protest, though... read the comments to this post for Amy's and Aaron's description, and click here for Bean's report..
Estrada Filibuster: It's all about Bush v. Gore
I've been meaning to blog for a few days on how, in my view, the Estrada nomination fight in the Senate is all about Bush v. Gore. But now I don't have to, because Philippe de Croy (over on the insanely great conservative blog The Volokh Conspiracy) has described the connection perfectly.
The Estrada Filibuster gives me more hope for the Democratic party than anything has in ages.
American Corporations arming Iraq
The incredible Trish Wilson has pulled a lot together from various news sources, including a German newspaper (since goodness knows our press isn't paying attention to this story). Check it out. (Via Body & Soul).
No thanks, I'm stacked.
A reader who identifies as "a friend" has emailed me a few times assuring me that I can enlarge my breasts in an inexpensive and convenient manner. I appreciate your concern, but as it happens, I'm already pretty well set in that area.
Discussions going on in the Dorm - I mean, in the Comments
There are a few really interesting discussions in Alas, the Comments right now. (Jeanne just described the comments here as "like a college dorm in the shape of a blog," which is exactly what I hoped for when I added the comments. Thank you, readers - I wuv you all!)
There are other good discussions too, those are just the three that seem to be most active at the moment. Hey, and this is a good moment to again thank Jenn Manley Lee for hosting the Alas comments on her server. Thanks, Jenn!
For Christ's sweet sake, why would you vote for her? Unlike Sharpton, she never led a race riot in which people were killed. However, she is a crook and a fool. I wouldn't trust her with $10 of real money. What conceivable qualification other than skin color does she have for the Presidency? This isn't a game, you know. When Presidents make mistakes, actual human beings die.
Honestly, dude, since I'm not a registered Democrat (and thus don't get to vote in the primary), I don't feel obliged to take the question of "which Dem candidate to vote for" seriously. (Right now, not having given the matter any serious thought, Moseley-Braun and Dean look the best to me.)
If I do register as a Democrat before the primary election, then I'll take it more seriously.
Maybe.
Then again, maybe not. I live in Oregon; by the time the polls close here, the real race for the Democratic nomination will all-but-certainly be done. In that context, voting for the black woman simply because I'm tired of the Democrats offering all-white, all-male slates seems perfectly legitimate to me. That's she's relatively lefty and intending to run on a firm anti-war platform doesn't hurt, either.
I don't live in a meaningfully democratic system, when it comes to primary elections; the decision is made long before I cast my vote. Asking me to take that system in dead earnest is, in my opinion, treating politics like a game; as if it were only the play-acting of voting that mattered, rather than whether or not my vote had any consequences.
For what it's worth, when I do think my vote has consequences, I agonize over the decision. I even sometimes vote for Democrats I hate (I voted for Oregon's current governor, despite having campaigned against him in the primaries). But until the Democrats see fit to rearrange their primary schedule so that ALL Democrats have a chance to cast a meaningful vote, don't ask me to take the ridiculous mockery of democracy that they call a "primary" seriously. I take democracy seriously, but judging from how they've designed their primary, I don't think the Democrats do.
(Of course, the same could be said of the Republicans. And maybe even of the Greens. Feh.)
Yours,
Ampersand
Update: The same reader emailed again, arguing that I have influence on primaries that really do matter, insofar as what I write here influences my readers. I don't think my readers would really vote for CMB based on an offhand comment I make here, but in general it's a good point. I do think we should act as if our actions mattered, even if it's likely they don't matter. But on the other hand, if I started taking myself and what I write here too seriously, I'd freeze up entirely.
Bean pointed out this Reuters article to me (thanks, Bean!). A study has found - no big surprise - that chivalrous men also tend to be sexist men:
"On the surface, you would say these are really polite gentlemen," said study author William Altermatt, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in Flint.
But women may not find their underlying beliefs about the opposite sex very considerate, he said.
At a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Altermatt reported research showing that men who supported chivalry also generally believed that women are not as competent and powerful as men and that their place is in the home.
In one study, 201 college students (66% male) completed questionnaires about their beliefs on chivalry and attitudes toward women.
Responses revealed a clear association between chivalry and sexist beliefs, a link that is based on stereotypes, Altermatt and colleagues found.
The belief that women are less competent and powerful than men explained both chivalry --that women must be protected and provided for by men--and sexist beliefs that women are not qualified for high-power positions, the researchers concluded.
This reminded Bean (and me) of my post about door-opening a couple of weeks back. Feminists never did object to having doors opened per se; what's objectionable is the idea that it must always be men holding the doors and women having doors held for them.
Given the mainstream's inability to find and promote a non-white candidate for president they would take seriously, it's more than a little ugly that when a black candidate does run for office, they fall all over themselves with mockery. It's particularly sad in the case of Democratic pundits, who sometimes seem to forget that without blacks, their party wouldn't exist anymore.
(And yes, I realize that Ambassador Moseley-Braun is now in the race, and if I was a Dem I'd probably vote for her in the primary; but my impression is that the Democratic leadership encouraged her to run to spoil Sharpton, rather than because they take either a woman or a black running for president seriously.)
Jason's post also links to this interesting article about Pepsi's PR problems, which I hadn't known about. It seems that "last year, Pepsi cancelled a television spot featuring hip-hop star Ludacris because of complaints that the musician's lyrics were profane and sexually explicit." But now - as anyone who watches TV has noticed - they're running a commerical featuring the famously foul-mouthed Osbourne family. From the article:
HSAN has announced a "national mobilization effort asking all artists and supporters of hip-hop culture to refrain from supporting Pepsi and PepsiCo products." The boycott starts this week, and will continue through the upcoming National Basketball Association All-Star Weekend in Coca-Cola's hometown of Atlanta. The group claims it will not call off the boycott until Pepsi donates $5 million to the rapper's charity and begins re-airing the Ludacris spot.
This standoff is a significant blow to Pepsi's urban and ethnic youth community efforts. [...] By not aligning mainstream and urban/ethnic marketing initiatives and corresponding pressures, Pepsi has undermined its own efforts and will find it hard to recover. Other large corporations must take note. Targeting the young and ethnic consumers demands 360 degrees of consistency, longevity and commitment.
In other words, "ethnic consumers" aren't so stupid that they can't spot a racist double-standard when it's shoved into their face. (There is an argument, by the way, that Ludacris is significantly more misogynistic than Ozzy. But that's not the reason Pepsi dropped Ludacris - if it were, I'd respect them a lot more.)
The boycott has apparently now been called off (that was quick), but it's still an interesting issue.
Calpundit links to an LA Times article speculating about future technologies which will enable parents to "improve" the genes of their unborn children.
The option to alter the genes that enhance desirable characteristics will almost surely be available, at least initially, only to the wealthy, creating what Silver calls the "GenRich." They will use technology to ensure that their children have significantly more advantages than the random mix of the gene pool, widening the gap between rich and poor.
Kevin doesn't think this is anything to worry about:
Gene therapy will be initially available "only to the wealthy"? Maybe, but if the next Einstein or Shakespeare is born to wealthy parents, that's OK with me — we'll all benefit.
I don't share Kevin's lack of worry.
Right now, a prime argument against discrimination is that it is wrong - not just morally wrong, but factually wrong. That is, programs that prefer wealthy - or white - people due to an assumption that such people are superior are mistaken. But what would happen to anti-discrimination arguments if the children of the wealthy were "objectively" superior - genetically modeled to be smarter, more athletic, and with more stable personalities?
It's not just a matter of class; class is intertwined with race. The poorest racial groups in America would be largely left out of the alleged "genetic revolution." Are we ready for a world in which racists would be able to argue, correctly, that whites on average are "objectively" superior to blacks, Mexican-Americans, and native Americans?
In today's political discourse, eugenics is a discredited idea Would it remain discredited, in a world in which part of the population has had access to "superior" genes for 20 or 30 years? What rational argument would there be against eugenics, in such a world? It's not too wild a speculation to imagine some congress or court deciding that "reproduction is a privilege, not a right." And really - taking Kevin's logic a step further - wouldn't all of society benefit if all new children born were "smarter, more compassionate, or better problem solvers"? Think of it as improving the population's signal-to-noise ratio.
In a discussion on the Very Very Happy blog (whose proprietor seems to more-or-less agree with me on this subject), Kevin apparently assumes that price won't be a barrier for long enough to matter:
Once the price of genetic tailoring comes down, wouldn't everyone benefit? I mean, just for selfish reasons, if it's cheap to do this wouldn't it be to everyone's advantage to make sure that everyone's babies turned out to be good citizens?
But why assume that the price of genetic tailoring would ever come down enough to let "everyone benefit"? In the US today, it's not the case that the cost of medicine and medical treatment has come down enough for everyone to afford. And, of course, the people getting substandard medical care aren't randomly distributed throughout the population: it's overwhelmingly poor people and certain racial minorities getting the shaft. As long as medicine in the US is distributed by the marketplace, that'll continue being the case - which means that "genetic tailoring" will not be available to all.
Am I saying that genetic tailoring is necessarily bad? In and of itself, no technology is bad; but everything that happens, happens in a context. In the context of a market-driven, racially segregated society, genetic tailoring has the potential to be horrifying.
* * *
Another disadvantage: If this technology really did become universal, I suspect the result would be fewer Einsteins and Shakespeares, contrary to Kevin's expectations. Parents choosing from a menu of traits for their unborn child would surely favor stability and propensity for happiness while avoiding "bad" traits like schizophrenia and manic depression for their future children. But a disproportionate number of the world's greatest artists and creators have such "bad" traits.
This isn't surprising; being a truly great artist requires being driven to work at and refine skills far beyond the level that anyone sensible, or anyone with a balanced personality, would generally choose.
Imagine if we had only had this technology a century or two ago. No Bobby Fischer. No Dave Sim. Goodbye, Virginia Woolf. We won't have any new Irving Berlins to listen to, nor Kurt Cobains or Glenn Goulds; no more damn Emily Dickenson poems to read, no more Picassos on the wall, no more Peanuts and Pogo and Krazy Kat in the funny pages.
But everyone would be awfully good-looking. And we'd still have Meg Ryan movies to enjoy, new Thomas Kinkaid paintings, and a new installment of Marmaduke to look forward to every day.
There will be a lot of anti-war events and protests this weekend; nwpeace.org has the info, for folks who live in Portland. (They also list some other events happening in the Pacific Northwest). Via Portlandweb.net.
Eric Sten (see previous blog entry) is the loudest person to complain about Portland Business Alliance CEO Kim Kimbrough since the city's business outbid St. Louis' for his services, but not the only one. From The Oregonian (6/25/02):
Former employee Bo Larsen, a supervisor in the street-cleaning program that hired the city's homeless, said Kimbrough seemed intent on bringing in ideas from St. Louis that did not fit Portland's needs.
"I just think he's got a five-year mentality," Larsen said. "What (the association) needs is someone who loves downtown Portland."
Larson has a point - Kimbrough's first action on arriving in Portland was to fire half his local staff (he brought in cronies from St. Louis shortly afterward). And many of his big ideas for Portland's downtown appear to have been dug out of St. Louis' recycling bins.
For example: At the heart of Portland's downtown is Pioneer Square, a much-needed open, public space. Naturally, the Portland Business Alliance hates the Square (an inch of space dedicated to the public good, rather than profit? The horror!) and has quietly been pushing a new plan to erect a $10.3 million dollar ice skating rink on the site five months of the year. I did a search of St Louis papers, and what a surprise - a skating rink was Kimbrough's big idea for helping downtown St. Louis, too. (AP wire story, 11/29/2000).
Portland residents shouldn't trust developers who say the ice rink will only be up part of the year, either. In St. Louis, Kimbrough used the success of a "temporary" rink to justify plans to leave the rink in place year-round.
Via Alliance Watch (an interesting new blog specializing in news about the Portland Business Alliance), I came across an article in the Portland Mercury about the Portland Business Alliance. Here's a passage from the article:
The Portland Business Alliance may not be widely recognized by name, but their actions are well known and maligned by many in social service and activism circles. Housed in two separate offices, the organization that represents downtown businesses is as big as a mid-sized business itself. Its intentions are broad: According to its mission statement, it is “the primary advocate for the business community and [is] active in all aspects of public policy which could adversely effect [sic] that community.”
Last spring, claiming that the homeless and street punks populating downtown were bad for business, the PBA drafted and lobbied for a sit-lie ordinance, a law allowing police to move along any person loitering on streets or sidewalks.
Over the course of several months, Mayor Katz sponsored roundtable discussions with representatives from both the Business Alliance and homeless advocacy groups like Sisters of the Road. Then, suddenly, in August, Mayor Katz swiftly enacted modifications to the city code—changes that reflected suggestions solely from the Business Alliance and rejected pleas from homeless advocates for compassion. Moreover, these changes to the city code were announced not in a public forum, but during a closed-door session; a meeting in which the mayor’s office failed to invite representatives from the Sisters of the Road. Members of the Business Alliance, however, were in attendance. [...]
The Business Alliance has become so powerful that they are regarded as a de facto governmental agency. In December, without hesitation, a representative from the organization was guaranteed a seat on the board overseeing the newly formed Children’s Initiative, the $50-million fund generated by a voter-approved ballot measure last November. [...]
This begs the question, “Why is a representative from an organization whose primary concern is invigorating downtown commerce, directing where and how $50 million in taxes are spent for local youth programs?” [...]
Our tax dollars at work
The Business Alliance has two primary sources of income—they have the power to tax downtown businesses within a 212-block area; they also have a staggering $9 million contract with the city to manage the six Smart Parks and run a downtown marketing campaign.
Council member Sten calls the Smart Park and marketing contract a “sweetheart deal,” which essentially subsidizes the Business Alliance. “Literally, the government is sponsoring an organization to use those funds to ban homeless people and stop the council from taking on a peace resolution,” he says.
Portlanders should read the whole article - it's pretty scary stuff.
Another Portland weekly paper, Willamette Week, has a profile of Portland Business Alliance head honcho Kim Kimbrough. Best bit:
Kimbrough's public behavior is equally unusual. As president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance, he's supposed to market the city to the rest of the world, yet he has spent most of his two years here talking about what a terrible place Portland is to do business. "When you start a mantra that Portland is anti-business, you're helping to make that reality," says City Commissioner Erik Sten. "It's a strange message for a group that we're paying to market the city." (More than 80 percent of Kimbrough's $11 million budget is public money.)
Over on The Oregon Blog, Emma is decrying the "blame Nader" security blanket that is still being clutched so firmly by many democrats. Here's part of what Emma said:
We're invading Iraq because nearly every donkey in Washington was waving a gun in the air and screaming that we needed to INVADE. Is that Nader's fault? Is it Nader's fault that the Dems, by virtue of fantastically weak leadership, managed to be the only group ever to LOSE the congress during the off-year elections? At some point--and reasonable people can draw this line--you gotta give up the Nader excuse.
Two: Nader didn't lose the election for Gore. If you gotta finger someone, start with Gore. He ran the worst Presidential campaign in history, fighting at every turn to demonstrate that he wasn't as exhilarating as his opponent--who had trouble with words and admitted not having any idea where foreign nations were or who led them.
I partly agree, partly disagree with Emma.
Part one: Blame the Democrats
Of course, I agree with Emma that the state of the country is in large measuret the Democrats' fault. What the Dems have failed to understand for 20 years is that part of their job isn't just bending themselves to the dominant discourse, but trying to set that discourse.
Whatever I think of Republican leaders, I can't say that men like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush are cowards. On the contrary, they've got audacity leaking out of their asses; over years they've driven the Republican party much further to the right than anyone imagined possible. Meanwhile, the Democrats - led by the DLC - spent those years in dogged pursuit of "the center," taking on Republican values and compromising whenever politically possible.
What happens when the Democratic party leadership (in the form of the DLC) and the Republicans move simultaneously rightward? The center moves right as well. The DLC Democrats, lacking any vision beyond chasing the center, abdicated setting a national agenda to the Republicans. It is only because the Democrats have capitulated on so many issues that the Republicans have had the political freedom to move so incredibly far to the right. Why shouldn't they? Whether Republicans pursue a needless, pointless war with Iraq, or budget-busting tax giveaways for the wealthiest, they can be confident that resistance from important and powerful Democrats will be no more than token.
The Democrats, in short, are the Republican right's enablers.
And what have the Democrats gotten for their lack of principle? Party loyalists claim we must chose between being principled losers or capitulating winners, but those aren't the only alternatives. Paul Wellstone showed us that there can be principled winners. And as the Democrats demonstrated in 2002, sometimes all capitulation does is make us unprincipled losers.
Part two: Blame Nader
Emma, like many Greens, says that Nader shouldn't be blamed for Gore's defeat. And there are certainly more likely candidates: a press corps that loathed Gore and never hesitated to show it, Jeb Bush's magic act (watch The Amazing Jeb makes black votes disappear!), five traitors to Democracy on the Supreme Court, and of course Gore himself, who was dealt a winning hand (great economy, popular administration) and still folded.
All of that is true.
But it's also Nader's fault, in the simple sense that if Nader hadn't run, Gore would have won.
I'm not talking about comparing Nader's vote total to Gore's losery margin (which presumes, wrongly, that 100% of Nader voters would otherwise have voted for Gore). I'm talking about a neck-and-neck campaign in which Gore wasted advertising dollars and precious candidate appearances in Democratic "safe states" - or, rather, states that would have been safe if not for Nader. Suppose all those pro-Gore commercials broadcast in Oregon - not to mention Gore's appearance here in the final weeks of his campaign - had been in Florida instead?
It probably would have made the difference.
But then again, wasn't that the whole idea?
Seriously. By 2000, the Democratic Party had finally moved further to the right than many of us could stomach. In effect, the Democrats had decided that they no longer needed the left in their coalition. So a small part of the left - but the part that was good at organizing rallies and finding hundreds of volunteers in the pre-election months - threw their (our) support to Nader.
It was a desperate move, but one we felt we had to make, because we could see that the Democrats were blowing it. We could see that the Democrats - ever-compromising, ever-abdicating - were enabling the Republicans to move the national discourse further and further to the right with each national election. As I wrote in 2000:
A vote for Gore isn't just a vote against Bush. A vote for Gore is a vote for the Democrats to continue moving further and further to the right. Liberals who vote for Gore/Lieberman are sending a message that, no matter how awful Democrats get, liberals will vote for them, so there's no need for the Democrats to take liberal views into account.
Bush and the Republicans have been a horror - even worse than I expected. But that doesn't prove to me I was wrong; that shows me I was righter than I knew. By refusing to take a stand, by compromising at every opportunity, and by being the party of no principles, the Democrats have enabled the Republicans to move further right than ever before.
Part three: 2004
It's nice that left and liberal bloggers are getting along fairly well... for now. I wonder if it's just temporary, though; the conflict between leftists and Democrats hasn't gone away, it's just submerged for a while. I remember in 2000 and 2001, it seemed to me that Democrats hated Greens far more than they hated Republicans. I suspect we'll be in that place again 15 months from now. I suspect that I'll be listed on many fewer blogrolls when November 2004 rolls around.
The basic conflict is that you Democrats think that we Greens are throwing away - oops, sorry, "spoiling" - elections in the name of abstract moral principles. And we Greens think you Democrats are trading the long-term viability of everything we believe in, in exchange for short-run electoral victories (victories that might not ever come about in reality).
Assuming the Greens run a presidential candidate, Is there any way Greens and Democrats can get through the 2004 elections without returning to our stations at each other's throats?
Update: There's a new Nathan Newman post criticizing the DLC.
Update 2:Mark Kleiman responds in a not-unexpected manner.
Update 3:Nathan Newman makes a solid argument in response to me and Emma.
Like a lot of bloggers, one of the main benefits for me of keeping a blog is to store links I might want to find again later. In that spirit, I've been reading a lot of anti-war stuff today...
The Financial Times has the full text of the French proposed alternative to invasion, translated into English.
Emma Goldman - who I'm familiar with from her excellent The Oregon Blog - has written a good general summary of the anti-war case, On the Invasion of Iraq.
The magazine Foreign Policy has the essay An Unnecessary War, presenting the case for containment and deterrence rather than war for dealing with Saddam. Really good stuff - although not enough to persuade the Saddam-is-Satan-on-Earth crowd, of course. (Via Goblin Queen).
Znet's Iraq Watch section has a number of good articles for folks interested in a principled leftist (as opposed to liberal) case against the war.. This Antiwar Questions and Answers piece, by Michale Albert and Stephen Shalom, is an intelligent outline of the leftist (as opposed to liberal) case against invading Iraq. The "Iraq" section of 45 Questions, by the same authors, is also quite good.
Electronic Iraq is another source of left-wing anti-war news and analysis. Among other things, their current links include newsstories quoting ordinary Iraqi civilians (who may not be free to speak honestly, of course) and considering the humancosts of invading Iraq.
Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, most famous for his graphic novel Maus, has resigned from The New Yorker to protest the magazine's political timidity. Electroniciraq has translated an interview with Spiegelman from Italian publication Corriere della Sera into rather stilted English (but hey, better imperfect than not at all!).:
SPIEGELMAN: From the time that the Twin Towers fell, it seems as if I've been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident confined to an island. I no longer feel in harmony with American culture, especially now that the entire media has become conservative and tremendously timid. Unfortunately, even The New Yorker has not escaped this trend: [New Yorker editor David] Remnick is unable to accept the challenge, while, on the contrary, I am more and more inclined to provocation.
QUESTION: What kind of provocation?
A: I am working on the sixth installment of my new strip, 'In the shadow of no tower,' inspired both by memories of September 11 -- on that day, I had just left my apartment, a few steps from the tragedy -- and a present in which one feels equally threatened by both Bush and bin Laden. The series was commissioned by the German newspaper Die Zeit, but here in the USA, only the Jewish magazine The Forward has agreed to publish it.
Q: For what do you reproach The New Yorker?
A: For marching to the same beat as the New York Times and all the other great American media that don't criticize the government for fear that the administration will take revenge by blocking their access to sources and information. Mass media today is in the hands of a limited group of extremely wealthy owners whose interests don't coincide at all with those of the average soul living in a country where the gap between rich and poor is now unbridgeable. In this context, all criticism of the administration is automatically branded unpatriotic and un-American. Our media choose to ignore news that in the rest of the world receives wide prominence; if it were not for the Internet, even my view of the world would be extremely limited.
I don't have anything to say about this just now, except that I'm worried that this is one of those stories that, a year from now, we'll all look back on and feel horrible to not have paid more attention to at the time.
Ivory Coast death squads sow terror
James Astill in Abidjan
Wednesday February 12, 2003 The Guardian
Death squads linked to Ivory Coast's government are murdering opposition leaders and supporters in Abidjan, where rising ethnic tensions are drawing comparisons with Rwanda on the eve of its 1994 genocide, investigators for the UN's high commissioner for human rights have warned.
"Death squads and militias made up of autonomous elements have been sowing terror and carrying out executions and abductions," they said in a report to the security council.
"[They] appear to be made up of elements close to the government, the presidential guard, and of a tribal militia of President Laurent Gbagbo's ethnic Bete group."
Ethnic tension has grown since the rebellion in the north begun by disaffected troops in September.
The UN team said television and radio stations were broadcasting "messages of incitement to hatred [which] have been compared to the xenophobic radio broadcasts which transmitted messages of hatred in Rwanda".
According to the Ivorian Human Rights Movement, at least 300 people, including many migrants from neighbouring Burkino Faso and Mali, have been murdered in Abidjan since the war began.
Three million is an insult! I've heard a lot of fuss about Bush giving "only" three million to investigate 9/11, without knowing what that figure really means. Now PLA has come to my rescue, by looking at how much was allocated for other investigations. Investigating Waco, for instance, cost over $11 million; investigating Flight 800 cost over $40 million.
Greenspan Sees Shadow
"With members of Congress gathered in front of his Washington DC residence, Alan Greenspan emerged from his home this morning and saw his own shadow, thereby predicting six more weeks of low interest rates." Defective Yeti has the rest of the story. (Be sure to scroll down and read the other stories, too. I especially liked the protest photo.)
Body and Soul: You can't pick just one.
(It's true, you can't; without a soul, you're just a vampire with funny hair and a great body. But without a body, you're stuck being the Original Evil.)
(If you're not a Buffy geek, my little joke at the start made no sense. Life's like that sometime.)
I hate those quizzes, and yet... Julia, who is 0%, links to this quiz: How Republican Are You? Totally unfair, but good for a giggle. (I'm 15% Republican).
It's not all about economics
I found this short post from Charlie Chan's Revenge very interesting. A sample: "If, when discussing asian Americans, people only use economic hardship as a proxy for determining whether asian Americans have suffered discrimination, they will miss the more significant and universal discrimination against asian Americans--that of being treated as perpetual foreigners."
Think carefully before buying Nicodee flowers
My fellow Oregon blogger Coitus Interruptus is musing about Valentine's Day: "I take it as a personal affront if my partner goes all out for me on V day. I mean hello....! So you're trying to say that i'm less lovable on March 13th? In my opinion, if you're gonna fall victim to the V day madness, then you'd better plan on keeping the madness up the remaining 364 days! Rose petals on the bedspread at least once a month (not only on V day), flowers at least every other week; cards for no special reason, chocolates every darned day!"
Jazz and Ex-Presidents
The Road to Surfdom reprints a really wonderful anecdote about Wynton Marsalis from The Atlantic Monthly, and also quotes from an interesting Bill Clinton interview (also from The Atlantic Monthly).
It's But a Scratch!
Dorethea at Caveat Lector is wishing for a roleplaying game mechanic that will allow injuries to be role-played well. I sympathize, but I also think the best mechanic already exists: it's called "trust," and if you have it going on between the gamemaster and the players then it's not a problem for the gamemaster to say "sorry, Black Knight; you can't stab King Arthur with your sword arm cut off." Contrariwise, if the trust doesn't exist, will a mechanic really help that much?
Have you thanked a cheerleader today?
If I was a better human being, this post from Leftbanker probably wouldn't have cracked me up so much. I can't even describe it, and if you get offended easily don't read it, but here's a quote: "I think that somewhere between 1 and 200,000 [cheerleader] deaths is an acceptable amount of casualties to raise team spirit."
Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over'
I hate to admit this, what with voting for Nader and all, but sometimes I miss Clinton (but really - did anyone dream that Bush's economic planning would be this awful?). Which is as good a reason as any to link this Onion article from two years ago, written with impressive foresight. From the article: "On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts..." (Via Matthew Yglesias' comments section.)
Well, golly, this is a happy surprise - Senate Democrats, having apparently found their spine hidden somewhere, are more-or-less staging a filibuster to prevent Miguel Estrada’s confirmation to the US Court of Appeals. (Read this post by Sam Heldman if you don't know why this is a good thing.) I'll be checking out How Appealing and Ignatz for updates on this story.
Word of the tape first surfaced when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told a Senate panel earlier Tuesday that he had reviewed a transcript of the message.
"(Bin Laden) speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq," Powell said at the congressional hearing. [...]
"This just reinforces that bad guys hang with other bad guys, that they swim in the same cesspool," a senior Bush official said.
It does not hurt that in the current circumstances, the interests of Muslims coincide with the interests of the socialists in the war against crusaders, taking into account our belief and declaration of the apostasy of the socialists.
The socialists and these rulers have lost their credibility of their rule a long time ago and the socialists are infidels wherever they are - whether in Baghdad or Aden [Yemen]
A real link between Bin Laden and Saddam's government - one that showed either that Iraq knew about and supported the 9/11 attacks, or that Iraq is putting Weapons of Mass Destruction in al Qaeda hands - would be justification for a war on Iraq. That the administration is desperate enough to try and pass off this tape as proof of an real link suggests that they have no actual evidence to offer.
Update: For the best analysis of the tape I've seen in Blogtopia, visit Body & Soul.
In case you're wondering how I live on such a low income, it's mainly because I live in a communal household, with two commune-mates (plus a room rented out to our friend Bean). The three of us pool our incomes (one person earns more than me, the other earns less) and squeak by.
Today there was a new twist; my commune-mate Charles' parents came into a large inheritance, and will be giving $50,000 of it to us to help us buy a house. Which brings me to this blog's new and exciting feature: Readers Answer My Questions about Home Ownership! Here's how it works: I'll ask questions, and if you have an answer, leave it for me in the comments. I know that at least four of my regular readers are homeowners, so what the heck. (Don't worry if you know what you're talking about or not; I'll take everything with the appropriate gains of salt.)
Question One: We owe about $25,000 in one member's student loans, which we are paying back at a rate of $270 a month, and paying about 8% interest on. In the current housing market, we could get a better interest rate than 8%. So it seems to us that we would save money by paying off that student loan completely and having less money for a down payment (in effect, transferring that debt from the 8% student loan to the lower-interest home-ownership loan). Plus, we could afford a higher monthly mortgage if we didn't have that $270 a month student loan to pay anymore.
Does that seem like a good idea for you, or am I missing something?
Question Two: So when we figure out what we can afford, we have to account for mortgage plus property taxes plus home repair. Anyone got a guesstimate of how much we should budget a month for home repair?
That's it for today's installment... but there will probably be many, many more installments in the months ahead. And if you have any general advice you feel like sharing in the comments, please do.
Okay, so in 2002 I had an "adjusted gross income" of $12,209.83. Of that, I paid $1046 in income taxes ($453 to the feds, $593 to the state of Oregon) and $932.94 in payroll taxes ($756.11 for social security, $176.83 for medicare). Since I live in Oregon, I don't pay sales taxes (not yet, anyhow).
In total, I paid $1979 in taxes, which is 16% of my income; 3.7% as federal income tax, 4.9% as Oregon income tax; and 7.6% as payroll taxes. And I've got to say, it didn't seem like that big a deal to me. People who whine about having to pay taxes are weird.
Okay, for this post to make sense, you might want to first read this post by me (rebutting something said on Donahue by men's rights activist Marc Angelucci), and then Marc's reply to me, which I posted yesterday. This post, alas, is therefore a rebuttal to a rebuttal to a rebuttal.
First point: funding. Marc correctly points out that I didn't discuss past funding; to tell you the truth, it didn't occur to me to fact-check something someone said two months ago by looking up what the stats were in 1997. But I think that looking at the funding over time actually supports my point. Let's look at some data, shall we? This table shows Natioinal Cancer Institute (NCI) funding for research on breast and prostate cancer. (NCI funding isn't 100% of all federal spending on cancer research, but it's the largest chunk of it, and as far as I can tell is fairly representative of the whole).
National Cancer Institute Research Funding (in millions)
So what's been happening? Breast cancer research gets funded much more than prostate cancer research does, just as Marc says. But the level of funding for prostate cancer has been going up a lot faster. Why the difference? My guess is that the higher level of funding for breast cancer is due to decades of work and activism by women's groups. But in the past few years, men's rights groups such as Mr. Angelucci's have been getting active as well, resulting in a huge increase for prostate cancer funding.
If I understand him, Marc thinks any disparity in funding is unjust and sexist; the lack of even funding is, in Marc's view, an example of discrimination against men. He feels the diseases are equally deadly (or perhaps prostate cancer is worse), and thus should get equal funding:
The figures I'm looking at published in Men's Health from the American Cancer society show that in 1996, 317,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 184,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer. But in any case, they both kill about the same number every year.
But in a world without sex discrimination, would breast and prostate cancer research really be evenly funded? I doubt it. Marc's data is just plain wrong. Here are some correct figures (all of this data comes from the NCI Factbook 2002 (pdf)):
According to the American Cancer Society, there are about the same number of new cases of breast and prostate cancer a year (193,700 vs 198,100 in 2001).
In 2001, 40,600 people died of breast cancer, and 31,500 of prostate cancer.
Five years after diagnosis, 97% of white prostate cancer patients will be alive, compared to 87% of white breast cancer patients. (For black patients, the survival numbers are worse: 92% and 72%).
The average years of life lost to breast cancer is 19; for prostate cancer, 9.
Breast cancer is the number one cancer killer of women age 15-54; prostate cancer is not the number one cancer killer of men at any age.
I think prostate cancer research was until recently underfunded, and perhaps still is; and I certainly don't resent men's rights groups lobbying for more research dollars. But given the many ways breast cancer is deadlier than prostate cancer, it's just strange to call the funding disparity an example of discrimination against men. Breast cancer is deadlier and strikes younger; there probably should be a funding disparity.
And I think that Marc's refusal to acknowledge the elephant in the living room - breast cancer is deadlier - is a classic example of what's wrong in so much "men's rights" thinking - the belief that everything is always worse for men. Marc's ideology means that he has to always see men as "the worse victim" - and if that means bending statistics backwards until he can convince himself that prostate cancer is worse than breast cancer, then that's what he'll do.
There are some other minor points I disagree with, but I have limited time and energy. Let me thus skip over the many, many examples Marc comes up with (labor laws of the 1930s?) to concentrate on just one: disparities in prison sentencing.
[This is an email I received from Marc Angelucci. I'll respond to it in my next post. - &]
Dear Ampersand,
Someone recently showed me your criticism of the comment I made while on the Phil Donohue Show that the government spends four times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research. I would like to briefly respond.
First, you cite data showing that the government spends two times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research, rather than four times more. However, you left out data from the past decade. The government spent four times more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research at least from 1991 through 1999, and probably even beyond those years. The September 1997 issue of Men's Health Magazine exposed this same 4X disparity and even looked at different government agencies. For example, the Department of Defense spent $20M on prostate cancer and $455M on breast cancer from 1993 to 1996. How do you justify that?
For the future I will say "multiple times" instead of "four times. But any recent increase in prostate cancer spending does not in my opinion change the huge, lengthy disparity that has taken place. And the myth women were excluded from medical testing has not only been repeatedly refuted - but it wouldn't justify the disparity that took place even if it did happen, especially with current mortality rates being equal.
Second, you mention other factors to explain the disparity, such a higher diagnosis rate for women, a younger average age of the victims for breast cancer, and less activism on the part of men.
On the diagnosis rate, I'm not sure who is right. The figures I'm looking at published in Men's Health from the American Cancer society show that in 1996, 317,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 184,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer.
In any case, the mortality rates are indeed about equal. Even if the diagnosis rate were higher for women, that would arguably indicate that prostate cancer has been a lot more deadly for men. And the argument about younger victims can be seen as a form of "ageism" whereby older people are assigned less value. Regardless, differences in diagnosis rates and victim's ages may justify *some* disparity, but in no way does it justify the enormous disparity that has occurred, especially with equal mortality rates. The fact is that no difference is more marked than the gender difference. Men make only 1% of breast cancer victims and 100% of prostate cancer victims. That is the main reason behind the disparity.
The difference in activism rates is a good point. Men and the women who love them have been less active on men's issues than women and the men who love them have been for women's issues. That can be attributed to a number of things, such as the male breadwinner role, men working 17 hours more per week than women outside the home, men being taught to not complain and to be silent suffering, and the overall societal inattention to male issues. I believe this too reflects the societal belief that male lives are less valuable than women's and that men need to protect women, letting women into the lifeboats first and addressing their own needs only after women's have been met. Our efforts to create even one office of men's health compared to the seven federal offices of women's health have met a great deal of opposition, both subtle and overt, and from both feminist groups and from chivalrous, "protect-women" folks who think men don't need any help. This problem does not refute my point. It supports it, especially since judges and politicians listen to their constituency groups and to money more than anything else.
Well, I'm sure publishing this will lose me any credibility I ever had among "serious" bloggers, but what the hell, someone emailed me this and it gave me biggie giggles.
Gas in car to go to groomers: $4.50
Cat carrier: $32.99
Grooming fee: $80.00
Getting the look from one seriously pissed off cat: Priceless.
"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness,
the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
- Woody Allen
"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'" - Charlie Brown
"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Contrary to what you've just seen,
war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the
following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you'd like
to learn more about war, there's lots of books in your local library, many of them with cool, gory
pictures." - Bart Simpson
"What to do if you find yourself
stuck in a crack in the ground
underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of
rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to
you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so
far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely,
consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much
longer." - Douglas Adams
"If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn." - Dorothy Parker
"I can tell just by looking at you not only
how thoroughly and capaciously and meticulously
you have been prepared for matriculation, but also
how fantastically lively you all are, you are radiant,
each and every one of you, your parents are schepping major
naches at how radiant and formidable you have become,
they're maybe not entirely sure why this effect was
so expensive to produce but looking at you robed and
mortarboarded and aflame with vision ambition and hope,
they are certain it was worth every penny and each
drop of spilled blood and they look forward to long years
exacting their subtle and exquisitely costly vengeance."
- Tony Kushner, from a commencement
speech.
