Following Noah Smith’s lead, I am simply copying John Derbyshire’s ludicrous racist screed to do my bit to prevent it from vanishing down the memory hole once he and his sponsors realize how damning it is. Distributed democracy for the win.
Racist nonsense below the fold. UPDATE: Smith has published some thoughts on the screed, which capture some of what I’d been thinking, so I figured I’d link to that too.
Recently, I and my fiancee signed up for a PNC joint account to manage our wedding expenses. Little did I know I was signing up for the positively worst online banking experience I have ever encountered, perhaps the worst online experience period. PNC drives new users into something they call “Virtual Wallet”, which is supposed to be clever and hip and fun. It’s a buggy, busy, clunky mess that obscures more than it reveals. It is slooooow, even on a big pipe on a new machine. Since it’s coded in Flash (yippee), it takes down my browser from time to time. In any event, the Flash doesn’t talk to the enclosing web page, so after fifteen minutes, you get booted for “inactivity” even if you’ve been using the site continuously throughout that time.
When I first wrote this review, PNC rejected it because I dared to mention competitors. Then they suggested I revise it — but provided no link and no obvious way to do. The second time, the site froze on my and crashed my browser. So I’m posting this on my blog as well as on the PNC site, so maybe the word can get out.
The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize. But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in. Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher Prep. Part of the process was to submit a statement of my “philosophy of education”. I’d never actually put down on paper my educational philosophy, so I had to write it fresh.
I didn’t win the prize 
but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing. That’s worthwhile. And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here. Enjoy.
TR had the Square Deal. FDR had the New Deal. Harry S has the Fair Deal. Barack Obama will have the Raw Deal.
So a debt-ceiling “deal” has been reached. Going in to this, the President was willing to compromise but had a few lines in the sand:
What did he get? None of these. None of them. What he got was a temporary extension of the debt ceiling, but he must take ownership of it now and again in six months. He got a “super congress” stacked against him with triggers that hurt only one side. He got an agreement that the hostage-taker would not shoot the hostage at this time, though he let the hostage-taker keep the gun and even gave him more bullets.
He got rolled. That’s what he got.
I am not a Tea Party default denialist. I fully understand that the scope of a default would be unprecedented and uncharted and very likely catastrophic. I just don’t see how surrendering the principle of democratic government is better. The Republicans know that their policies would be unpopular — fatally so, in fact. So they don’t try to enact them. Instead they manipulate the far-too-easily-manipulated Democrats into making the hard choices, doing the hard things, and then getting savaged by an electorate that doesn’t understand what’s going on and can’t be bothered to learn.
There are many who say the President should have stared down the Republicans and bluffed harder about using the so-called constitutional option, invoking the 14th Amendment. I’m not one of those; I don’t believe in bluffing. He should have stared down the Republicans fully intending to invoke the 14th Amendment if need be, He should have said, This far and no further. He would have looked decisive because he would have been decisive. He would have the public on his side. More importantly, he would have been right. And given the certainty of disaster implicit in the rise of the Crazy Caucus to power, a roll of the dice would have been preferable.
I’ve already called my congressman to find out where he’ll vote. (It’s Yes for surrender.) And I’ve implored him (or rather his intern) to reconsider. The best option for the country right now is that this abomination goes down to defeat in the House. (It seems assured passage in the Senate.) Then, with the clock ticking, the President can demand a clean bill to save the nation’s credit rating, with these tough choices made not under pressure from a hostage-taker. Sadly, on this, apparently the Democrats have found their message unity that they so often lack.
The best hope for the nation, then, is that the Crazy Caucus, having been handed literally everything it wanted, will find itself still congenitally unable to take “Yes” for an answer — that the Tea Party’s visceral hatred for that upstart in the White House will compel them to vote against a bill their own leadership has negotiated and is whipping hard.
Yes, our only hope lies in the rabid right. May Heaven help us all.икониПравославни икониикони на светци
And if so, what cn be done about it?
A study referenced in Discover has the provocative conclusion that seeing a small American flag while completing a political questionnaire can induce the respondents into being more Republican, even up to 8 months later. Is our society doomed by our optic nerves to surrender to the rabid right?
First off, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If the description given is accurate, this study doesn’t meet the bar. The sample size is smallish (worse for the followup) and the controls seem ill-defined. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course. There is also a danger in defining some policies as solely Republican, or pretending that the conservative position is monolithic. Serious replication efforts are called for.
But for the moment assume the causitive effect is real. Why would seeing a flag make one more identify more with Republican views? I would argue it’s because, since the 1960s, the Republicans have highjacked the symbols and language of patriotism. They have been aided in this by the tacit complicity of the media (which like simplistic us-v-them soundbites), the Democratic Party (which has been timid in defense of its country and of itself), and the American people (who have lazily accepted the sports-team approach to politics pioneered by Fox News and embraced by the rabid right).
What path of action is there for progressives and liberals, who perhaps might be driven to despair over the apparent psychobiological advantage this gives the Republicans? The same one as always: Fight back by reclaiming those symbols. The advantage comes from two crossed circuits in people’s brains: “flags = patriotism = good” and “flags = Republican”. This leads them to erroneously conclude “Republican = good”. Progressives must break the chain at the second link. If we concede owenership of the trappings of patriotism to the rabid right, we _will_ lose the public.
Granted, this will be a challenge. Firstly, a lot of time has been wasted and a lot of ground lost. People would have to unlearn their unexamined habits of thought, and no one welcomes that. More importantly, patriotism is more complex for progressives. The message of the rabid right is starkly simplistic: My country, wrong or right. America – love it or leave it. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. The progressive position is more abstract, more nuanced: I love my country, but I don’t always love what it does. I recognize its greatness but I also recognize the uncomfortable ugly truths that are part of its history. America is not the pinnacle of history; it is a path to a better tomorrow. That’s harder to sell. It’s harder to enforce message discipline. It’s harder to tweet. 
But it is no less a stirring vision of America. Indeed, I believe it is more so. I think that the American people are sleeping, and in their slumber, the rabid right have been whispering illusions of a center-right nation. But at root, despite it all, the American people are a smart and a good people who will not dream forever. They believe not in an America that never was but in an America that should be. That is a message that finds far more resonance in the progressive ethos.
Do people associate the flag with Republicanism? Has the rabid right seized the symbols of patriotism? Maybe. But that’s not reason to surrender them. It’s a call to take them back.
Rating: 3 out of 5 (meh)
Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a Michael Bay film. That pretty much sums up exactly what the movie is, and you don’t really need to know any more about it. It’s not a bad film, exactly, and it’s not a good film (definitely). It’s a film, a Michael Bay film.
Spoilers follow.
Rating: 3 out of 5
I picked up Perdido Street Station because I was looking for a good steampunk novel, especially after Dreadnought, and the reviews were strong. This book was supposed to b amazing, sweeping, and alluring – a detaile new world to explore. After finishing it, I felt the praise was overblown. The world is complex and involved, but the steampunk setting was wildly inconsistent. Though the book starts as hardcore steampunk, it eventually decomposes into low fantasy – all the trappings of industrial magic but no clear concept of what that would mean. Though much of the setting is explicit in using steam, there are “aetheric flows” and, for some reason, literally miles of insulated cabling in a society that seems to have very little electricity. There are zepplins, of course, and steam-driven automatons. But it all seems, well, lazy.
The story is OK but hardly epic. Its initiation and its resolution both depend on astonishing coincidence, of the sort that sinks high school writing. The characters have moments of depth and substance but never really take off. Character threads start and trail off to no resolution. The first part of the book is quite slow. The middle third is well-done and sets up situations and themes that offer much promise. Once the actual action starts, though, it all goes out the window and the plot lurches to its frenetic end a complete mess.
My overriding impressions is that China Meiville bit off way more than he coukd chew, and left us with the partly-masticated glop that was left over.
The 14th Amendment is more-or-less the Swiss Army amendment of the US Constitution. It defines citizenship, extends constitutional protections to state constitutions, and so on. Lately, it’s become popular to posit that it also holds the key to avoiding a default of US credit. Specifically, Section 4 reads
4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
That last bit is not particularly relevant right now. But the first part (in bold) — it is said — could be. President Obama could cite that portion of the 14th Amendment and direct the agencies of the United States Government to issue debt pursuant to the existing budget, regardless of whether that debt exceeds the amount authorized under the debt ceiling. Voila! Crisis averted! (See, for example, this piece by Jonathan Zasloff in the Washington Monthly.)
This 14th Amendment option is decisive, elegant — and completely irrelevant.
