Are you dressing up for Halloween?

When I was in highschool there were some baptist kids whose moms would come to campus and protest every Halloween about the un-Christian imagery. Guess they never met these folks:


In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?

P.S.> I bet they wish they had Palin's minister...

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Why Vote?

Because your neighbors ARE FREAKS:



This included the comedic script of writers from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the Daily Show. Is this public service?

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Suck on that, Grover

Here's a chart from the Economic Policy Institute, that shows how much economic stimulus you get for each federal dollar spent on different types of stimulus (please show it to anyone who espouses Grover Norquist-style corporate, capital, or estate tax cuts):



Ezra puts it best:

The basic way to think about this is that you get less stimulus when you focus on the ri[c]h, and more when you focus on the poor. That's pretty intuitive. If you don't have enough money to make ends meet, and you get some money, you spend it now. If you have ple[n]ty of money, and you get some money, you put it away, That's not very stimulating. As such, tax cuts which primarily focus on the well-off sit at the bottom of the chart, tax cuts for the working class are near the top (like the payroll tax holiday), and things like infrastructure spending and food stamps lead the way.

Notice that the bottom three are related to Shrub & Grover tax policy, while the top three are food stamps, unemployment insurance, and infrastructure spending. It's strange: things are so clear when you actually have research to back up opinion...

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Disharmony of the Spheres

Stanley Fish has an op-ed today, which he compares the rhetoric of McCain and Obama to two surprising antecedents:

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that McCain is the devil or that Obama is the Messiah (although some of his supporters think of him that way), just that the rhetorical strategies the two literary figures employ match up with the strategies employed by the two candidates. What Satan wants to do is draw Jesus out, provoke him to an unwisely exasperated response, get him to claim too much for his own powers. What Jesus does is reply with an equanimity conveyed by the adjectives and adverbs that preface his words: “unaltered,” “temperately,” “patiently,” “calmly,” “unmoved,” “sagely,” “in brief.”

Of course, he's not going to the original source here; he's drawing from Milton's Paradise Regained. But the famous Milton scholar doesn't say so. I wonder why not? Maybe he thinks those who know him will know this, or perhaps he figures that it broadens the demographic accessibility of his point. But how often do you have the opportunity to plug Milton in the NYTimes? I would think this grounds for expulsion from the Secret Milton Society.

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I Voted

I just got back from early voting. Didn't punch straight-Dem ticket (actually voted for one Republican, and a couple of libertarians, shockingly enough). But I did vote Obama, Noriega, and Skelly.

Then I went back to my car, and sat there for fifteen minutes or so. How amazing is this country? I've spent the last eight years insisting that the "average" American, those folks living somewhere between L.A. and N.Y.C., is neither a moron nor unfit to vote. I didn't realize, until today, how hard (emotionally, as well as intellectually) that argument had become. And suddenly, it's no longer an argument for me. It's fact.

What launched the last eight years was basic political cynicism -- you know, all the candidates are essentially equal, are crooks, our vote doesn't count, etc. Bush and the Supreme Court stole the election, but he was a passionate conservative, and didn't give speeches about lockboxes, so meh. Hey -- I was a political dilettante who wanted to vote for McCain in 2000 because he'd "shake things up." For me, this election has purged, permanently, that cynicism. President Obama won't turn water into wine, and he probably won't even give us national health care or a green economy. But he'll bring us closer, in every sense. It turns out that's not too much to ask.

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What the hell is McCain doing in PA?

A New Republic reader suggests:

McCain drew less than 500 people to a rally in suburban PA two days ago. Then he went to Western PA and flubbed the attack lines against John Murtha's comments so that the sound bite was completely incoherent. On Monday he drew crowds of about 2000, then 15 people at an airport rally (yes, that is correct--no zeros) ....

Now the Obama campaign is doing a major head fake in PA. They "accidentally" leaked an "internal" poll showing Obama up by only 2 percent in PA. I guarantee you that no such poll exists and that this was done both to motivate volunteers in the state (and maybe elsewhere) and prevent them from getting too complacent and also to sucker the McCain campaign into spending more time there. Ed Rendell has asked Obama to come back and campaign in the state-another major ruse. They know that McCain makes most of the decisions for his campaign and that they can goad him into spending more time in PA by pretending that it is close there. Let's see if Obama actually returns to PA before November 4th, but I sincerely doubt it. They are brilliant.

Ezra's comment: "It wouldn't shock me."

Well, it would shock me. There are two key problems with the idea that Obama head-faked McCain into PA. First, it's just too smooth and subtle for a major campaign to rely on it (leak one poll and get Rendell to issue one plea, and the entire McCain campaign will switch gears? Please.) It just gives too much credit (and affords too much power) to the campaign. It's like movies where they have the CIA tracking someone in the U.S., live, from multiple satellite cameras, while simultaneously tapping all of their twittering, debiting, and toilet paper consumption. If the CIA could actually do any of this, do you think 9/11 would have happened? Would the FBI still be struggling to identify the anthrax attacker? Hell, would the N.O. levies still be beaver-inspired shit piles? Campaigns, like govt bureaucracies, have about 1/10 the power that is credited to them. Mostly, they are large, unwieldy, and harder to maneuver than the Exxon Valdez.

The other key problem with the PA juke-out theory is that the Obama campaign has proved, time and time again, that they don't work this way. They don't worry about winning the week, or psyching McCain out, or quick-spinning the press. They keep their eye on the long game, and assume the short game will fall into place. McCain's campaign, which has done the opposite (c.f. suspending the campaign, "Joe the Plumber," and that twinkly flautist from Alaska), would be much more likely to try something like this -- and as his performance proves, while it's great copy and solid Hollywood scripting, it just doesn't work on the trail.

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On a somber note

Was listening to This American Life this morning during the pledge drive, and Glass had assembled some bits from Fresh Air: specifically, letters and recollections of Robert Kennedy, and his assassination. Kennedy's son was on, and he read Kennedy's speech the night he learned M.L.K. died, which he announced to a black and white audience in Indianapolis. I've pasted in the video below (for some reason, the best Youtube video has Italian subtitles). I think it's profound, and moving. I'm listening to it now, again, and my chest hurts. The next few years hold so much hope. But sometimes, I'm worried, too.



And, while I'm at it, an excerpt of the speech MLK had given that night.

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Wikipedia and Truth

An interesting article came out in Technology Review about Wikipedia and its standard of truth, "verifiability." As Simson Garfinkel puts it:

So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based?

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject.

As Garfinkel sees it, this practical approach is also a bit of a dodge, because so many of us treat the product of these standards as the truth on a variety of subjects. He concludes:

So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia's entry on the subject, "the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree." But in practice, Wikipedia's standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.

Garfinkel finds this standard of "truth" troubling -- especially when talking about something like LOTR or Dr. Who. But, not to get too armchairish, what other kind of truth is there? Traditionally speaking, it's only since the Enlightenment that we've begun to think of the truth as something directly accessible -- something "out there" that can be seen and measured, rather than an ideal that doesn't exist in the mundane world [EDIT: a shift only achieved by radically curtailing what would be accepted as truth]. To put this differently, truth is necessarily referential -- built of a network of associations, standards, and testimonies about what you're looking at, what you're using to look at it, and what all of it should be taken to mean. [EDIT: When "truth" looks simpler, or more transparent than that, it's only because you've lost hold of all those threads.] From this perspective, Wikipedia's standard seems a bit more direct and honest than, say, the absurd simplifications ofcollege textbooks, or even some scholarly articles. To work on a Wikipedia entry is to confront how unstable "truth" really is, in a manner not too far from that the experience of a scientist at his bench or an anthropologist in the field. Maybe "wikitruth" will help disseminate some healthy epistemological skepticism. (Or, from experience grading college essays, maybe not.)

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