Explaining his exasperated voicing of a desire to shut down his blog, Dennis Perrin writes:
This fucking election is killing my mind and stomping my soul. American political reality is as bad as I've ever seen it, and I suspect we haven't reached bottom yet. Maybe we never will. Maybe we're destined to float down the shit stream indefinitely, splashing, sinking, swallowing mouthfuls of sewage. Hard to tell. All I know is that I'm sick of the rancid taste, and would much prefer a healthier diet, or at least something with a fresh lemon scent.
I kind of feel the same way, and I'm not evening watching TV coverage (don't even have TV) or reading mainstream news. I read 2 articles in an Ohio newspaper this weekend and nearly went crazy. Everything said by politicians is full of lies, and all coverage of political events is full of lies. It is truly disgusting, and it kills my mind and stomps my soul.
In one hour my first class starts, an undergrad course that I'm TAing, Evolution and Human Behavior (here's the syllabus if you're interested). I'm taking two class as a student, Contemporary Problems in Psychology and a Statistics course, which start next week. I kind of hope that maybe I'll just tune out the entire worthless world for a semester and just focus on study and research. I doubt it will happen but it is kind of a nice idea.
The weather here has been rather cool the last few days, with highs in the low 70s and chilly evenings dipping into the low 50s or lower. It is starting to feel like fall, which still triggers back-to-school feelings for me despite it being 7 years since fall actually meant that I was starting classes. But this year I am, and I'm excited. The undergrad course I'm TAing, Evolution and Human Behavior, starts one week from tonight, and I think my classes start the week after that. I've been filling out all the forms and all that administrative bullshit while peeking ahead at some of the things I'll be reading.
I didn't believe I was done with school when I graduated in 2002, but I wouldn't have guessed at the time that my next class would be in 2008 in a psychology department in Canada. Funny how things happen, eh?
They're giddy that it might soon be their turn to order the bloodshed. They'll be doing it more efficiently than those Bush guys!
Seriously, this is what I'm supposed to support? I'm supposed to line up and cast a vote for these lunatics? This is the "lesser evil" offered to me by the system? Doesn't this kinda make you think that maybe a system where this is the best available option is hopelessly broken?
I just want to fucking scream and then puke and then weep for humanity. I don't know, maybe this is what we deserve.
Fuck you, Biden. Fuck you, BO. Fuck the Democrats. Fuck this election. Fuck the system.
I know, I know, the other guys are going to cage their protesters in 15X15 razor-wired pens and sprinkle them with flesh-eating acid, so the 20X20 razor-wired pens are clearly deserving of our support. I wonder how much I have to donate to the BO campaign to get my name as a sponsor on one of those cages?
Fast food joints are brightly-lit opium dens -- funhouse mausoleums juiced by deforestation and massive animal suffering. We'd be much better off without them, but the national addiction runs too deep, and too many lobbies stay rich from the fat. Dennis Perrin
It has been over a year since I last ate McDonald's food, or Burger King, or Wendy's. Hopefully I never will again.
Trakker at Neon Gods recently accused me of using "dishonest tactics" by saying that government is an inherently violent institution in the comments on one of his posts. He says that my comments "insinuat[ed] that this violence is the norm in this country and that we as citizens have no recourse." He goes on to say that government functions without acts of violence 99% of the time.
It may be the case that the vast majority of government action proceeds without the use of violence, but only in the trivial sense that there is no "violence" committed when you escape injury by giving your wallet to a mugger without resisting. All government action is backed by the threat of coercion. I would say this threat is an act of violence, as is the mugging where the weapon is never used. The point remains that government is an inherently violent institution because violence is the government response to not getting its way.
Watch these videos, in which passive resistance to very mundane and common government action is quickly escalated to the use of physical force.
I saw these videos at Anarchy in Your Head, which went on to post some important thoughts about them. What is the point of these videos? Of the woman's resistance?
It’s that government as we now know it is violence, through and through. The source of it’s authority is nothing more than a persistent threat of violence. A majority may consolidate power in the form of a government, but can’t ensure that it’s moral. A broad consensus, e.g. a vote, or an elaborate proclamation on a piece of paper can not create truth or morality and hence can’t create authority. Government isn’t just violent when it engages in aggressive wars. Every order it issues is backed by the threat of serious violence. Why rebel against something seemingly minor like a driver’s license to point this out? Should we pick our battles more carefully? Because it’s part of the hard truth that people aren’t ready to accept. Any order you resist, from a seizure of private land to a parking ticket, can ultimately escalate to serious violence including incarceration or even death if you continue to resist the orders or the punishments they impose on you. All punishments by government are for disobeying. The so-called little things demonstrate this particularly well. When the authority of government ultimately rests on nothing more than the threat of violence, any deviation from strict adherence cannot be tolerated or the illusion is threatened. By simply remaining passive in a seemingly small matter, Lauren causes them to show their true nature.
Trakker's criticism rings quite hollow:
Characterizing the coercion powers given to the state by the people as "violence" is dishonest. If you examine the laws that govern our law enforcement agencies you will see that the use of violence is rarely allowed and when it is, it must be justified. In fact every day we read of law enforcement agents being punished for exceeding the laws that govern their activities.
That there are rules on paper that say you can send armed men to forcibly arrest and imprison someone for smoking marijuana doesn't make that arrest any less violent, nor does it justify such acts. And a few cops getting docked a paycheck or put on administrative leave doesn't make the shootings, beatings, taserings, or any of the other less sensational daily acts any less violent. Trakker says "because this is a democracy, and many Americans believe the use of force IS the answer to many of our problems, we won't always have a government we (liberals) approve of" in the same essay where he claims that characterising the government as violent is dishonest. He appears to be arguing that if 51% of the population approves of brutal use of force, such force isn't violent.
The only one using dishonest tactics in this debate was Trakker. His arguments were incoherent, and never came close to justifying his accusations of dishonesty. Trakker is a good guy and a friend of this blog, and I think he generally thinks through what he writes. So why has he fallen short in this case? I think the last paragraph of the Anarchy in Your Head post quoted above offers an explanation.
People do not casually abandon a deeply held belief. Irrational beliefs provide comfort even while causing us to engage in irrational behavior. How do you softly tell a child that Santa doesn’t really exist and prepare her for the cold reality that a mythical character is not bringing her presents Christmas morning? How do you gently convince someone their God doesn’t exist and that they won’t be going to Heaven when they die? How do you tactfully explain that the government they’ve trusted all their lives to provide their security is actually enslaving them under threat of violence? I’m not sure there’s a soft way to convey a hard truth, a cold hard truth that rocks the foundations of deeply held lifelong beliefs.
I'm convinced our current system of government in the United States is basically sound.... It is time to set some guidelines for commenting here. NEON GODS is a blog about improving our system government, not abolishing it. I am convinced that the system of government envisioned by founding fathers, and the Constitution they wrote and the amendments added later have resulted in a safe, stable, vibrant, nation and I would like to see the same for my kids and grandkids. To this end, NEON GODS is a blog that encourages liberals to become more engaged in the government. This blog also believes that there are times when voting for a mediocre candidate to block a bad candidate makes sense. Thus, comments that advocate giving up and dropping out of politics, and comments denouncing liberals who plan to vote for Obama to prevent McCain from becoming our next President are not really welcome and will be ignored.
I've enjoyed participating in conversation on that blog and put a lot of time and effort into my comments, so it hurts to see my position mischaracterized as "giving up and dropping out of politics" and my participation swept aside based on the argument that the US is a "safe, stable, vibrant" nation. I've argued only for dropping out of (national) electoral politics, but strongly encouraged other political action. This isn't "giving up." It is recognizing a failed system, refusing to endorse it, and advocating for positive change from outside the system. America has violent crime rates dramatically higher than other first world nations, and more people in prison than any other country. Our national infrastructure is crumbling, leaving bridges and roads and water pipes in frightening shape. Our meat and produce and other foods are laced with a diverse array of contaminants. Our government refuses to address the impending disaster of climate change, in fact it actively worsens the threat. This is safe? We spend more on military the the rest of the world combined; We've launched 2 overt wars of aggression in the last several years, following decades of covert wars and terrorist campaigns throughout the world. We threaten to use nuclear weapons against Iran, we send troops to support a belligerent Georgian dictator after he initiated conflict with the nuclear-armed Russians, and both Presidental candidates want to increase the size of the military and send even more troops into Central Asia. The soldiers participating in this violent insanity are coming home with a terrifying medley of mental disorders, and many of them joining heavily armed private mercenary armies that operate with legal impunity in the US and througout the world. This is stable? Our public school system is rotting from the inside out, our citizens are driving further to work, working longer hours, sleeping and exercising less, dying younger, and going deeper into debt to pay for it all. This is vibrant?
And the idea that the state just might be the problem can't be discussed? The only worthy response to our slow-motion train wreck of a country is to keeping working within the same failed system? I hope Trakker reconsiders his views and his policy.
Leroi Moore died yesterday. He was a founding member of my favorite band, The Dave Matthews Band, and it was probably his saxophone and jazz experience that first turned me on to the group. I've seen Leroi in concert over 20 times, collected hundreds of his live shows with the band, and listened to their albums over and over. I really love the music he made, and I'm very sad that he won't be making any more. I'll have to think about some of my favorite Leroi moments and figure out a way to share audio on this blog.
Looking beyond these feelings about the tragedy of his sudden death, it will be interesting to see how the band moves forward without him. It has been years since I obsessively read everything published about them, so I won't even try to speculate how his loss will effect the personal dynamic among the other four members and their regular supporting cast. But from a musical perspective it could be an opportunity to inject some fresh creativity if they choose to bring in one or more new woodwind players. It must be pretty hard for those guys play the songs they've been performing together for almost two decades (seriously, 17 years? how did that happen?) without being able to look over and see Roi wailing from behind his sunglasses, but they actually played what must have been an intensely emotional show last night in LA, featuring the amazing Jeff Coffin from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones on sax. So I can't really imagine the band doing anything other than moving on together, trying to have fun and keep playing.
A North American power currently occupying two Asian nations (and with both current presidential candidates pledging escalation in Afghanistan) gives Russia pompous moral lectures and demands it reverse course and repent. We are the world's pedophile priest.
John McCain may be a lousy candidate and shitbag of a human being, but he's certainly a timely literary device.
Here we have a nation [the US] that has stripped its own industrial base, brutally neglected its educational system, allowed its physical infrastructure to rot, and driven its small-holding farmers from the land, dispossessing its own citizens and degrading their communities, all for the short-term profit of a moneyed elite -- and, what's more, has based its prosperity on the profligate and disproportionate use of a finite resource which it cannot produce in sufficient quantities within its own borders.
In an imporant sense, there is no such thing as 'evolutionary psychology' because there is no such thing as non-evolutionary psychology (after all, scientific psychologists cannot be 'creationists'). Evolutionary psychology is likely to be a temporary discipline, which will exist only as long as it is needed. As psychologists of all stripes come to make explicit their currently implicit hypotheses about human nature, past selection pressures and environments of evolutionary adaptiveness, evolutionary psychology will wither away as a distinct field and all psychology will be 'evolutionary' - for precisely the same reason that all biology is evolutionary. Psychology is, after all, a branch of biology.
Salmon C & Symons D (2001). Warrior lovers: erotic fiction, evolution and female sexuality. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
While I don't go so far as to predict the future, the theory here seems right to me. I usually feel a little silly when I say I'm going to study evolutionary psychology for exactly that reason - all psychology should be evolutionary. I want to study human behavior, and I expect that study to be informed by and compatible with evolutionary theory, as all study of human behavior should be.
In a somewhat related note, I'll continue using this "grad school?" tag despite "grad school." or grad school" being more appropriate now.
Bothreviews I've read of this book take swipes at evolutionary psychology that seem unfair, but the book sounds quite fascinating. I can't seem to find it in the libraries here though.
McCain told more than 2,000 voters in York, Pa., that he spoke Tuesday morning with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to make sure he knows "that the thoughts, prayers and support of the American people are with that great little nation as it struggles today" for independence.
"I told him that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians," McCain said.
Technically I'm an American, and I'm not a Georgian, today or any other day. Furthermore I don't give my support to dictators who slaughter civilians for political gain, whether they're named Saakashvili, Bush, Clinton, or Washington. And that that list includes you, John McCain, you fucking piece of shit. You don't speak for me, and you never will, even if you manage to hack your way into office.
I'm paying very little attention to the Olympics. I haven't cared much about them since I was a child, and I'm getting more turned off to them every time. The commercialism and nationalism are pretty gross. And this year there's a variety of human rights controversies because of the authoritarianism of the Chinese host government.
I wonder if anything could make me like the Olympics even less?
What About the Black Community, Obama? On Friday, August 1st I led a contingent of the Uhuru Movement into Barack Obama’s town hall meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida to raise the question, “what about the black community, Obama?” Without the benefit of a big media budget, our organization attempted to bring the serious issues experienced by African working class people across this country into the national political debate.
These issues include the targeting of African and Latino communities with predatory “sub-prime” mortgages – a scheme that has made millions for people like Obama’s chief financial advisor Penny Pritzker, while stripping black families of billions of dollars, the greatest loss of wealth our community has suffered since being brought in chains to this country. We also challenged Obama to take a stand against the police shootings of unarmed African people, and explain why he has publicly defended the judge’s acquittal of the NYC police who murdered Sean Bell.
He has said that he cannot speak out on behalf of those who have been historically oppressed for fear of offending other people. Yet in Miami, he promised the Jewish community, which considers itself a historically oppressed community, that he supports turning all of Jerusalem over to Israeli control, despite the internationally enforced sharing of that city with the Palestinians. When Obama speaks to black audiences, he attacks us, attributing our community’s poverty, not to systemic oppression, but to bad culture and lack of work ethic.
Barack Obama has criticized African fathers for abandoning our children, although a recent study showed that black fathers stay more involved with their children after a split from the mother than white fathers. And Obama says nothing of the unjust imprisonment of 1 in 9 black men of child-bearing age, the overwhelming majority of whom are locked up on minor drug or other non-violent economic violations stemming from conditions of desperate poverty. He has failed to achieve any meaningful program of economic development for the African community. In speaking to a group of black legislators, Obama said “a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars.”
Barack Obama wants to increase military spending and praised Clinton for abolishing AFDC and welfare. He has reversed his position opposing the death penalty and speaks out against reparations. He wants to escalate the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and has threatened Venezuela and Iran with military aggression. He has upheld the FISA, supporting wire-tapping and government spying on citizens. He receives unprecedented financial backing from Wall Street. His close advisors and potential cabinet members include war criminal Richard Clarke, Tri-lateral commission founder Zbigniev Brzezinski, Madeleine ‘it’s worth the price of 1 million dead Iraqi children’ Albright, and Free Trade advocates Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee.
Some argue that we must support Obama or else we are supporting McCain. We in the Uhuru Movement don’t believe our community should restrict our political options to a choice between one white ruling class party or another. In fact, the black community’s most recent experiences in the U.S. electoral arena have resulted not only in the Republican Party’s theft of our votes, but prior to that we suffered some of the worst attacks on our community at the hands of the Democratic Party administration of William Jefferson Clinton, who put 100,000 more police on our streets to murder our people, privatized the prisons to exploit our unpaid labor, and discontinued the public subsidies for impoverished children and families that had been won by African people as a concession to our movement of the 1960s.
African people’s experiences with these last several elections and the desperate conditions facing our community have created a willingness by our people to seek independent political alternatives. In response to this crisis, the white rulers put forward Barack Obama – a pied piper taking African people back into clutches of the Democratic Party. If anyone looks seriously at the positions, programs and advisors of Barack Obama, they will see that he does not stand for any kind of real change, but for the defense of the same old status quo, with a new face. America is in an economic crisis and the white ruling class hopes to save itself by deepening the exploitation of African people in the U.S. and on the continent of Africa, where the world’s biggest reserves of oil and precious minerals lie. How better to do it than with an African face at the head of state?
Our success as a people requires that we achieve our own independent political agenda. African people’s votes should be contingent on the willingness of a candidate to support and fight for that agenda. The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement has invited Barack Obama, John McCain and Cynthia McKinney to attend our annual convention on September 27-28 in St. Petersburg, Florida to clarify their position on the question, “what about the black community?’ Based on their response, we will consider endorsement of a U.S. presidential candidate.
BF: Your book is really an antidote to the dominant Chicago school of free marketeers. What is the meaning of “free market” these days, as understood on Wall Street?
MH: It's exactly the opposite of what Adam Smith, and Ricardo and the classical economists defined as a free market. Classical economics defined a free market as one that is free of overhead charges, free of unnecessary charges of production, free of watered stock. Today a free market means that predators are free to extort any price from the public, they are free to deregulate, free to lie to consumers, free to exploit, free to load any company they want down with debt, and basically lead (us) to a world of debt peonage... So the whole concept of freedom has been turned upside down by the Chicago school and by the Bush administration.
BF: Why is today's understanding so different?
MH: Because hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to mislead people and to endow business schools and universities to stop teaching the history of economic thought, to stop teaching the classical economists, and essentially to brainwash students, so that those with a sense of realism simply drop out of the field of economics and go into some other field.
And I should also have mentioned earlier that Al Gore's running mate was Joe fucking Lieberman, who never saw a war he didn't like. But we're supposed to believe that Gore was fucking Gandhi.
"My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices." Thanks BO!! The US puts more carbon into the air than any other nation, 22% of the world total despite having just 5% of the world's population, but BO's interest is in making sure we have cheaper gasoline. Such bold leadership! Such vivid change!
In linking McCain to the unpopular President Bush, [BO] struck a theme from Ronald Reagan's successful 1980 campaign against President Jimmy Carter by asking a town-hall audience in St. Petersburg: "Do you think you are better off than you were four years ago or eight years ago? If you aren't better off, can you afford another four years?"
Just like in 2006 when we took over Congress! Republicans had been in charge, but you marched to the polls and voted for Democrats because you knew they'd make everything better! Remember how great things were after that? BO supporter Glenn Greenwald will remind you:
Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:
Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- Jim Webb's bill to increase the intervals between deployments for U.S. troops;
Defeated -- at the White House's insistence -- a bill to restore habeas corpus, which had been abolished by the Military Commissions Act, enacted before the 2006 election with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support;
Overwhelmingly approved the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman Resolution, to declare parts of the Iranian Government a "terrorist organization," an extremely belligerent resolution modeled after those which made "regime change" the official U.S. Government position towards Iraq;
Deleted from a pending bill -- at the direction of the House Democratic leadership and at the insistence of the White House -- a provision merely to require Congressional approval before the Bush administration can attack Iran;
Overwhelmingly enacted -- at the White House's insistence, and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support -- the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008," to vest the President with broad new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, all but putting an end to any chance for a real investigation and judicial adjudication of the Bush administration's illegal NSA spying program;
Stood by passively and impotently while Bush officials flagrantly ignored their Subpoenas and refused to comply with their investigations.
BO and the Democrats are fucking filthy slime, and you just can't get enough. He'll punch you in the face and you'll ask for more. When someone mentions that he just punched you in the face, you get mad... at the person who mentions it... as you crawl back to Obama and kiss his feet.
Hooray! Glorious freedom bombs dropped on different civilians! But dropped by a President who might actually know how to pronounce the name of the towns he destroys, so that makes it better!
It has been over 2 weeks since we've heard from Arthur. With his bad health, that is scary. Hope he's ok.
On Sunday I saw Romeo and Juliet for the first time. I think I read it in high school but never saw a production. It was ok. Those two sure are a couple of stupid little kids.
I got my bike a couple weeks ago, and use it for my 5.4 mile round trip daily commute. I love it. I plan to do that until it is too cold or icy, then I'll have a free bus pass when I need it. Not using a car is great.
Softball is fun. I can't believe I never bothered to play softball before.
Beerfest at the grad student pub is fun. I can't believe I never went to beerfest before.
No limit hold'em is fun. I can't believe I never played it very much before.
This structure is fun. I can't keep it up much longer.
I've been meaning to do some kitteh blurghing but I can't find my camera and I feel like any kitteh blurghing must have photographic accompaniment. So I should get around to that eventually.
Canada is sweet, yo.
I'm going to the theatre this weekend to see Romeo and Juliet, which I'm pretty sure I've never actually seen. That's probably against some rule about being a cultured white person, so I guess this is all part of the deal.
Despite being non-plused with the preview, I want to go see Dark Knight, but I don't want to pay $11 (x2 for the wife) cause that seems excessive.
Speaking of the wife, she just got a very cute haircut. Very cute. She donated most of her hair to cancer kids or something nice like that, so it is very short, but in a way that really works for her. So now the hair she sheds at German Sheppard pace will be much shorter.
I can't wait until Kira experiences the 1-2 punch of a nice compliment about her hair then comparing her to a dog. That should be fun. I ruin everything.
Charles Darwin was a nifty fellow, or so I hear.
Fresh local produce is the only way to eat. At least in the summer.
During the Gore/Bush/Nader presidential election, while the entire nation was hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while the passengers and crew concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck.
In our election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world - war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of everyday life for huge numbers of people - is swept out of the way while the media covers every volley of the candidates. Thus, the superficial crowds out the meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want citizens to look beyond the surface of the system. Hidden by the contest of the candidates are the real issues of race, class, war, and peace, which the public is not supposed to think about.
That's the opening of a Howard Zinn essay included in his book A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. Here's the closing.
The ferocity of the contest for the presidency in recent elections conceals the agreement between both parties on fundamentals. The evidence for this statement lies in eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, whose major legislative accomplishments - destroying welfare, imposing more punitive sentences on criminals, increasing Pentagon spending - were part of the Republican agenda.
The Demacrats and the Republicans do not dispute the continued corporate control of the economy. Neither party endorses free national healthcare, proposes extensive low-cost housing, demands a minimum income for all Americans, or supports a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge gap between rich and poor. Both support the death penalty and growth of prisons. Both believe in a large military establishment, in land mines and nuclear weapons and the cruel use of sanctions against the people of Cuba.
Perhaps when, after the next election, the furor dies down over who really won the tennis match and we get over our anger at the referee's calls and the final, disputed score, we will finally break the hypnotic spell of the game and look around. We may then think about whether the ship is slowly going down and whether there are enough lifeboats and what we should do about all that.
This analogy is pretty fucking good. So fuck Gore and Bush and fuck the 2000 election. Fuck BO and McCain and this stupid election too. All the candidates are the same. Stop wasting your efforts on this bullshit.
As BO's supporters see their list of excuses shrinking hourly, they increasingly hide behind "but... Iraq!!" Apparently BO's expressed desire to shift a small percentage of our machinery of death to focus elsewhere is some kind of improvement, one of his impressive examples of change. That's like using your VISA to pay off your Mastercard balance, and citing the improved Mastercard situation as evidence of your financial accumen. Except instead of redistributed credit card debt, it's redistributed slaughter of innocent brown people. But... different brown people!!
Canada has deported Robin Long, a US Army deserter who fled the country rather than accept deployment to Iraq. The majority of Canadians wanted to let such soldiers stay, and Parliament passed a non-binding resolution saying they should be able to stay, but the conservative Harper government deported Long anyway.
It has been over two years since poker was my primary income source, but I've played occasionally in that time. I haven't keep nearly as good records as I used to, but I think I've lost in the low four figures. I don't like that I've been a losing player for two years, and I recognize that there are a few adjustments that I was slow to make.
I think the biggest mental adjustment is that playing a lot less means my variance over any given period of time is going to be a lot higher, and I need to adjust my expectations accordingly. Grinding out hands at a modest win rate fosters a mentality of not taking short-term swings too seriously, but when I only play a thousand hands per month, it extends the weird emotions associated with variance without the return to the grind as a release. And part of me is tempted to want to try to make something interesting happen rather than wait 5 years until I reach my mythological long run expectation. What I really ought to do is just look at every session as profitable leisure time, not as pure gambling, which means I need to derive pleasure from making good poker decisions, not from the bottom line.
A mental adjustment that I've been pretty good about making is recognizing that I'm just not as sharp as when I was putting in lots of hands. Practice matters, and rust can lead to bad decisions. Also I hardly ever read poker strategy any more, so I'm spending a lot less mental energy on improving or maintaining my poker skills (which is a good thing for my life generally, just not for my poker results). I've been playing fewer tables simultaneously, which gives me more time to think about each decision and replay hands in my head. Still there have been situations where I was too quick to add tables when I thought I was playing well and I probably should have been more conservative.
The poker world has been changing while I've been away, which just means that I can't assume that a given game is going to be the same as it was 2 or 3 years ago. I think the limit games are much harder now, even taking my rust into account. I stubbornly tried to stick with familiar limit games even once it should have been obvious that no-limit was the way to go. Lately I've been playing a lot more no-limit, and it has been fun and easier. I think switching to more no-limit also is good for facilitating the first adjustment I mentioned, because the variance is lower compared to win rates. I think the 6-max no-limit games are a lot different than they used to be, which more people increasing their aggression for the shorthanded games, whereas the same stakes full tables seem passive and easier. (That's just my impression; I have no idea if anyone would agree with those comparisons.)
As a last catch-all point, I just need to stop thinking like someone who is playing for a living. Something about sitting in this chair with Full Tilt or Poker Stars loaded up puts me into the old mindset. About a month ago I was trying to quickly clear a reload bonus, so I decided to play limit, and at higher stakes than I would have chosen if not for the bonus. I played well though, and felt very comfortable. Then towards the end of clearing the bonus I was at a table with a terrible opponent who I was crushing. I followed him to a new table when he left, and continue that pattern for a while, to a nice profit. Then suddenly he sat at much higher stakes, but I decided to follow him there too and give it a shot. I played one round and without any marginal decisions I gave back 6 times the profits I had made off the bad player. The bonus made back only a fraction of the loss. There was a time where taking a shot at a bigger game when I'm feeling good and know I can sit with position on a terrible player would have been a risk that I'd have been happy with either way. But today there was no reason to push it like that. And furthermore, there's no reason to force myself into weird situations just to chase a bonus. (I should also add that I don't know how I feel any more about chasing a player around to take his money. If I knew he was some bored rich lawyer blowing off steam I wouldn't think twice about the ethics of it, but what if it is some guy with a gambling problem? This moral ambiguity bothers me now. And no, "he's going to lose it all anyway, might as well be to me" isn't a satisfactory resolution.)
All of this analysis is really only specific to me and my situation; I'm not putting it out there as advice anyone else should follow. I don't make much money, and I don't want to gamble for entertainment. I want to play profitable poker for fun every once in a while, at stakes that are within my means and where the swings won't be worrisome. These are different circumstances and goals than I've had for the vast majority of my poker experience, and so I need to keep reminding myself of the big picture when I make game selection decisions.
Everyone who justifies their support for Democrats with the logic that they might not be great but they're better than Republicans really ought to read this kind of thing. Democrats do all the exact same things as Republicans, they just do them more discretely. Bush isn't unique for the kinds of things he's done; he's unique because he's so open about it. Obama will do all the same basic things, only he has half the country under his jedi mind shit so they'll support him to the bitter end. Good little liberals express bitter amazement that middle class people would ever be so stupid as to vote decidedly against their own interests for the Republicans, while they vote decidedly against their own interest for Democrats. Kiss the boot that stomps on your face forever. It is the American way.
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.
One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution."
Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice".
The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it.
Concluding the three-day event, leaders from the G8 and developing countries proclaimed a "shared vision" on climate change. However, they failed to bridge differences between rich and emerging nations on curbing emissions.
If I could pick any imaginary superhero power, I think I'd choose the ability to peacefully destroy every television in the world. Liberate some minds and whatnot.
Seriously y'all, get rid of your fucking TVs. Everything is better.
I have 2 degrees from the University of Maryland. I have a bachelor of arts from the school of behavioral and social sciences, for my economics course work. And I have a bachelor of science from the business school, for my finance course work.
Now the reasons that I think so little of my undergraduate degrees are numerous and probably require a great deal of explanation, but there's something so simple in just noting the absurdity of the nomenclature. The dismal science seems to be exercising some surprising humility by handing out arts degrees, which I guess is fair enough because undergraduate economics isn't especially scientific. But it is a fuck of a lot more scientific than anything the business school has to offer, and yet somehow they're handing out science degrees?
This of course isn't uniquely a Terp thing. Everybody's doing it, which must mean it makes sense somehow, right?
My graduate supervisors were nice enough to give me a job for the summer, and they were even nicer to let me use much of my time to pursue my own interests. (I also contribute to ongoing lab research, mainly finding economic statistics and trying to make sense of them. If you're interested, here's an overview of the general area I'm investigating; the papers mentioning economic/income inequality are the most relevant.) So far that pursuit has been mainly an attempt to identify, or at least narrow down, what my own interests are. So I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking, which is pretty much what I spent the last year doing, only now I have more resources at my disposal and I'm getting paid for it. Not bad for a summer gig.
In regards to pursuing my own interests, I'm to figure out what kind of project I want to be doing for my graduate work, research that would (most likely) become a Master's thesis. It seems that most accepted students already had a much better idea what theirs would be, but my supervisors were willing to take a gamble on a less conventional candidate. I feel like I'm making progress, although now that I'm thinking about writing about it here, I'm worried that it will sound like pretty much everything I've ever written about my interests, and then I won't feel like I've made any progress. Nevertheless...
I'm starting by thinking about what motivations I have, and I think there are a few interrelated high-level reasons why I'm going to be doing what I do over the next 2 to 6 years. I want to foster a world with more "rational" behavior. That probably being an unrealistic goal, I at least want to understand what rational behavior really means, and seek to understand why it might seem so elusive.
A specific kind of behavior that I think is rational and that I want to encourage is subversion. I think that many if not all of mankind's power structures are morally illegitimate and make the world worse for the vast majority of the population, and thus I'm motivated to contribute towards the disruption or dismantling of such power structures.
I tend to want to mention all that shit about trying to make the world a better place first, but perhaps a more important motivating factor is that I want to try to understand myself better. Understanding the world around me is a big part of that, and so is understanding human nature. I think I'll also learn something about myself by being in new situations where I can interact with lots of smart people who have a variety of specialized knowledge. This blog has more or less chronicled what has felt like a very rapid and radical change in my outlook, and I'm curious to see what that will mean to me when I'm back in a school environment again. I guess maybe I'm just highly self-absorbed, but I put a lot of energy into trying to make sense of myself, and in a way that's a big part of what this whole grad school thing is about for me.
Reading about evolutionary psychology was the first time I remember thinking that there was a satisfactory explanation for a feeling I'd had for many years, which is that I felt like I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole in the world. I remember learning the word "Procrustean" and thinking it was the Best Word Ever. The insight I gained from reading about evolutionary psychology, which I've noted here before, is that humans really are built for a different world than this one. We're all strapped into this Procrustean bed, not just me. As such, evolutionary psychology has already helped me understand myself better, and understand some of the underlying caused of the seemingly irrational behavior that I'd like to discourage.
So those are my high level motivations and inspirations. With that as background, I'll move on to other considerations of my interests in research areas in a future post.
The latest TomDispatch argues that the attack against Iran urged by the Cheney faction of the Bush Regime is looking less likely, largely due to the tremendously negative consequences of likely Iranian retaliation strategies. Notably, the price of oil would explode beyond its already stratospheric level. The piece is shaped by the idea that eventually reality catches up to people who act as if they can create their own reality, which certainly applies to Bush and Cheney.
Jesus Christ, people cream their shorts for military leaders. The link is to ESPN's pro basketball blogger, Henry Abbott, drooling over NBA commissioner David Stern's decision to hire retired General Ronald Johnson to the newly created position of VP of Referee Operations.
I guess it is the exact right move the way Abbott is responding, too blinded by the uniform to realize that this guy was the leader in an organization of tens of thousands of trained killers, a manager in a war crime responsible for the deaths of over a million people. I guess genocide and frenzied looting and war profiteering make fixing games and starting fights seem like less of a big deal. The article mentions that in Iraq, Johnson oversaw billions of dollars of reconstruction. As far as I know, the reconstruction has been little more than a sloppily run corporate boondoggle, with billions of dollars missing and completely unaccounted for. Not sure exactly what role Johnson played, but "oversight of Iraq reconstruction" isn't something I'd highlight on a resume.
I keep trying to write a post about how pessimistic I've gotten about the prospects for our species. But I keep getting too depressed by it to continue writing or putting effort into adding some good research to my points. I'll try again today.
The bottom line is that as far I can see, everything is fucked. The "Western" world's way of life is devastatingly unsustainable, which as a recent TomDispatch piece points out, is linked to three related impending crises: energy, agriculture, and global warming. And furthermore through NAFTA and the IMF and various other fucked-up neoliberal globilization efforts we've forced the impoverished part of the world to restructure their societies to meet our needs, destroying their way of life so we can maintain ours, the continuation of which is certain to result in suffering and death on an unimaginable scale, threatening the existence of human civilization and maybe even human existence.
I just don't see how there's any hope that any of this will be happily resolved. The leadership structures we have in place are incapable of addressing these matters; it simply isn't what our failed institutions are built to do, and it isn't what the people who occupy leadership positions are interested in doing. Rather than address these problems that are certain to devastate us without systematic changes in our day-to-day life, they continue to escalate the problematic policies (continuing to subsidize terrible agriculture practices, half-heartedly pursuing retarded alternative energy strategies, continually delaying meaningful carbon emissions regulations, advocating more oil exploration and resulting environmental damage) , and instead invest massively in genocidal resource wars.
It is hard to predict what the exact form of the impending devastation will be. (Somewhere in this doomsday rant I feel like I ought to mention that I'm obviously distinguishing here between death and destruction on the usual scale and on an even larger scale. Presumably the functional distinction is that the latter actually personally touches privileged people like me.) We're already watching the US economy crash as oil price soar. Tens or hundreds of millions of impoverished people are being driven the edge of starvation by rising food prices. We're seeing unprecedented natural disasters on a seemingly regular basis, but nobody is willing to explore the connection to global warming, yet alone use it as motivation to restructure our fucking societies around sustainable food and energy practices. And the ruling class in the US is threatening yet another war, this time with Iran, and belligerently mentioning nuclear weapons all over the place. Wars could well destroy everything before those other things get a chance to. Shit, we have nuclear arsenals in the hands of insane fanatics in North America, the Middle East, all over Europe and Asia.
I read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed a few years ago, in which he documents how over and over in human history, people have been unable or unwilling to change their unsustainable ways to prevent the collapse of their own societies. I was thinking about rereading it. But maybe I shouldn't bother. I can just watch it in real time.
I chimed ina bit on Crispin Sartwell's video commentary on "the new atheism" but overall I've kind of lost interest in writing much about atheism advocacy and the associated criticism of religion and theism. I was writing a lot on that for a while, but with all the other bullshit in the world, it just seems like less of a priority. This is based only on my own attention span; there are too many other things that I'm pissed off about to spend my outrage energy on pious fools.
This isn't to say I don't think atheist crusaders are doing something important. Many religious people are victims of repressive ideology. And it could well be the case that clearing the religious nonsense out of people's heads helps free their minds to then start dealing with other problems in a productive way. Atheism could well be the key to the whole fucking mess. And if it isn't, there's still nobility in fighting for reason, and fighting against lies. I'm just more motivated lately to fight against other lies than the one about the magical sky daddy.
Perhaps this shift is because I've come to terms with all the bullshit that realizing my own atheism caused in my personal life. I'm not talking about a crisis over lost faith; I never really had any to begin with. But variouspersonal relationships were shaken up as a result of publicly announcing my own atheism; some improved, many deteriorated. But all that turmoil has settled down and I know where everything stands now and I assume it is all for the better. But there's new turmoil of course. After opening my eyes to the sham of religion, I then opened my eyes to the sham of politics, government, and popular history. That awakening has also shaken things up in my life, much more severely I think. I'm still working through it, and using this blog as a way to help accomplish that.
Well I don't imagine that when I started this stupid blog 3.5 ago that I'd still be doing it, and I certainly wouldn't have imagined I'd be saying some of the crazy ass shit I'm saying these days. I wouldn't have imagined I'd actually make a little bit of money off of it (thanks to online poker companies with more money than they know what to do with), and I wouldn't have imagined that I'd get over 50,000 hits.
Actually fuck all of that, who cares what I imagined. I didn't imagine anything. I was just writing shit cause it I had shit to say, and I didn't imagine too much of anything in regards to the medium itself. And I've said some shit and it has been fun. But everything has to come to an end, and for me that time is now. I'm declaring independence on July 4, 2008.
After a lot of reflection, I've decided that I'm going to stop calling Barrack Obama by his name (Barrack Obama) effective immediately. He will henceforth be referred to here as BO, for reasons of the implication that he is like body odor. Which he is. Why else would he have those initials? I'm free of using his full name, hooray!
Here is a picture of me celebrating the new stinky nomenclature while my mother-in-law looks trepidatious/sassy:
Sorry for the false setup. I had you all worried, didn't I? I actually have thought about ending this blog from time to time. I'd just start a new one though, so what would be the point?
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
...
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
...
The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to hear only his accusers!
In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and in diabolical intent this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book.
...
Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation-a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world, and are understood by the world to declare that you "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.
Fellow-citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad: it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. it fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!
I don't know how I even manage to work up any outrage any more, but I just did. As Mahatma X Files quotes:
Dear Discover America,
I find via the Financial Times that the US government has a plan to "launch a tourism charm offensive in the UK, to persuade holidaymakers to take advantage of sterling’s strength against the dollar and make the US their next holiday destination".
I first visited the US in February 1995. I stayed two weeks, visiting friends in Baltimore, California, and Washington, and had a wonderful time. Between 1995 and 2004 I visited the US multiple times, and enjoyed each visit very much. I've been to California, Arizona, Illinois, and New York: I've loved the country and enjoyed meeting Americans.
I haven't visited the country since US-Visit was set up in 2004, and I will not be back. I will not even change planes in a US airport when I make a long-planned visit to Canada next year.
The US government's tourist campaign was especially badly timed: on 30th June a federal Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that no crime was committed when U.S. officials arrested a non-US citizen changing planes in a US airport, locked him up for a fortnight, refused to let him have access to a lawyer and a court, and then sent that non-US citizen to Jordan and then to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured for nearly a year.
If the US government claims the right to arrest any non-US citizen, lock them up, deny them due process, and ship them to another country to be tortured, then the US government must be insane to think that any non-US citizen should take the risk of entering such a country.
I loved visiting the US. I'll never go back.
The case he references is that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar. Read about Arar's ordeal and think what it says about our country that 1) we did that to him, and 2) our courts refuse to grant him any recourse.
I still use first person adjectives, "our" and "we," when referring to the United States but I don't know why. Whatever this monstrous entity is, it isn't mine any more. If you think the government represents you, think again.
So claimed the magnificent Diderot: "Two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despotism... is one of the great misfortunes of any free nation."
Sound to you like the possible pending Obama anni mirabiles? Recall that the three consecutive terms of the New Deal saved corporate America to march triumphantly under the victory arch of world war two right smack dab into the heyday of the American century.
Is this why, on some tacit, crumbling-infrastructure mind level, we rads fear Obie's success far more than his failure? Is this why we root for dismalitude? Why are we so fond of spoiling the ballots of Lady Liberty -- while she remains on the limited liability plan?
I am not quite there yet, but I am seriously considering the following. Depending on how this campaign develops, and depending on how Obama conducts himself and -- very significantly to me -- how Obama's most devoted supporters act, I may conclude that, if you vote, you should vote for John McCain. Unbelievable, I realize, but I may have no choice but to think that the alternative is far too dangerous to countenance.
In the last year or two we've made some major changes in the way we live.
We used to have 2 cars that we both used for long daily commutes. Now we have 1 car that is used as infrequently as possible. I walk 5.5 miles round trip between campus and back (I'll be getting a bike soon), and Kira drives about 9 miles round trip and hopefully will soon be sharing that with a carpool buddy.
We used to spend $85/month to each have cell phones, plus another $10 or $15 for a house line. Now we just have a house line and no cell phones.
We used to have a huge HDTV in our living room and a small crappy old TV in our bedroom. We had satellite service, premium channels, and Tivo. Now we have just the one crappy TV out in the living room, and no cable or satellite service. We pretty much only use it when we borrow DVDs from the library. I suppose I might get a cheap indoor antenna, but probably not.
I've given away probably a third of my clothing. I haven't bought any new clothes (though I have received some as gifts).
We used to regularly eat out or order take-out food. Now we prepare almost every meal ourselves.
We used to own our own home, but now we rent a modest apartment in a high-rise building.
We used to live in the US. Now we live in Canada.
I've made less and less money each of the last several years, really only having a "regular" full time job for about 8 months in the last 3+ years. Now I'll be a full time student with a tiny annual stipend. Now that Kira has completed her bachelor's degree, she's starting a job making half of what she made before she went back to finish.
This trajectory is in many ways the exact opposite of the conventional idea of "success," at least as far as I was concerned for the first 20-some years of my life. But I've gotten happier each step of the way.
Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.
The war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.
Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed, but that the Bush Administration has struck down. Finally, if the war was ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60% of all countries on the planet.
Just the $600 billion that Congress has allocated for military operations in Iraq to date could have built over 9000 wind farms (at 50 MW capacity each), with the overall capacity to meet a quarter of the country’s current electricity demand. If 25% of our power came from wind, rather than coal, it would reduce US GHG emissions by over 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year – equivalent to approximately 1/6 of the country’s total CO2 emissions in 2006.
In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.
US presidential candidate Barack Obama has committed to spending "$150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure." The US spends nearly that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.
An idea that I've encountered (most recently in an email conversation with Trakker, but other times as well) in response to my stance against voting is that if only Al Gore had won in 2000, we never would have invaded Iraq. And somehow this proves that voting, and voting for Democrats specifically, is a very important obligation. I don't get the logic, but I don't think logic is really the point with this argument. Nevertheless I'll respond to it.
First of all, Al Gore did win the election in 2000 and the votes didn't matter because the Supreme Court said the son of the guy who gave them their job was the winner. And, as I've mentioned before, Al Gore in his role as Senate President blocked the attempts of a few Democrats from the House of Representatives to contest the election. So the votes didn't matter, and even the guy who won the election agreed that the votes didn't matter.
But more to the heart of it, was there any reason in fall of 2000 to think Gore would advance a less destructive foreign policy than Bush? Specifically in regards to Iraq, Gore had just been part of 8 years of the Clinton regime that imposed brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people. When it was pointed out to Secretary of State Madeline Albright that these sanctions caused the death of over half a million Iraqi children, her response was "we think the price is worth it." I think it is reasonable to assume that "we" includes Gore, and as far as I know Gore never spoke against those sanctions as a candidate.
So Al Gore was part of an administration willing to kill over 500,000 children on the theory that starving the Iraqi population would cause them to overthrow Saddam and enhance US access to Middle East oil. But at the time of the 2000 election, even if everyone could have magically known that a group of fanatical religious fundamentalists with no connection to Iraq would fly planes into U.S. buildings, we were supposed to be quite certain that Gore would be less inclined than Bush to respond by killing more Iraqis in an effort to overthrown Saddam. Decisions must be judged by the expected outcomes at the time of the decision, and I don't see any way that it would have been possible to forecast the Iraq outcome.
And so now here were are, worrying about the 2008 election and how McCain will be more of a disaster than Obama for some reason or another. And who is the headliner of Obama's national security advisory group? Madeline "worth it" Albright. As far as I can tell, the decision available to voters is between Republicans, who drop bombs on brown folks, and Democrats, who prefer to starve them to death.
a few years ago, in which he documents how over and over in human history, people have been unable or unwilling to change their unsustainable ways to prevent the collapse of their own societies. I was thinking about rereading it. But maybe I shouldn't bother. I can just watch it in real time.
