Well tie me up, throw me in a prison with a little dress on and call me Shirley.

Some Rather-isms Dan Rather has some of the most colorful colloquialisms ever... I still remember his call of the 2000 election where it would be "Shakespearian" if Gore lost TN (he did). My thought about this blog is why do they consider NPR liberal? I'm not trying to stir up anything, but they never have a piece on without both sides of the discussion... and I do not care if they're talking about whether or not the Earth is round, they always have SOMEBODY in there who thinks the other side. Isn't that balanced? How should they be less "liberal"?

INCITE: The Carnival of the Capitalists

INCITE: The Carnival of the Capitalists I was going to go on a big rant about how blogging may or may not be journalism, and I still may, but I was particularly pleased with the posting at INCITE today... it's an interesting look around the blogsphere at a whole set of issues addressed with an economic/capitalist eye. They're a bit on the free market side for my taste (though I'm a huge fan of free markets, I have recently started backing off totally unregulated behavior because the free markets are corrupted by the exceptional marketing of the participants), it's a great look at some very smart people. Enjoy!

One small follow up

As a follow up to the last post, I'm kind of curious about the following equation:

Largely disagree with Bush + Largely don't know/understand Kerry's positions = Vote for Bush?

This American Life had a great piece right before the election on something like this... you do not agree with a given candidate on nearly everything, but at least you know where he stands, so you vote for the one you understand. Love to understand this more...
D

I want your vote

Open Letter To The Democratic Party: How You Could Have Had My Vote<o:p>
</o:p>

What a wonderful essay. This goes to forward my friend's comment about how close the two sides are and further exhibits my naiveté. The most interesting thing for me is that I totally agree with her on nearly every point, and I came down to being a Kerry supporter. For the points we don’t agree on, allow me to elucidate:
<o:p></o:p>

  • I make a lot of money… a lot more than her anyway. Yet, I would be more than willing to give up some of it to the government to get other people off of poverty or help the middle class. I did not see Kerry’s view as demonization… just pandering to the majority, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
  • I do not view terrorism as a major concern. It’s like being concerned about a meteor strike. Yep, it could happen. Yep, if we spent enormous amounts of money we MIGHT stop it. But the organizations were already in place to stop it (and did) before 9/11. And now that 9/11 has happened, we’ll be that much more sensitive to it. But ultimately, I look at countries like the <st1:country-region st="on">England</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region st="on">Israel</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Spain</st1:place></st1:country-region>, who have had to deal with far more attacks for a far longer time and I see more logic in the way their government works than we are showing. Basically, I think we need to make sure our internal forces (FBI, police, etc) are strong and well-funded, and then put it out of our mind.<o:p>
    </o:p>
  • Without terrorism, the environment and science become my two biggest issues. This is not really a point of difference; more a prioritization difference. Nontheless, I had to go with a candidate who supported my positions on these two issues more closely.

If it’s any help, I want your vote for candidates who support my issues first and foremost. I want it in 2006 and 2008 and 2010 and every election thereafter. Help me understand how to make you happy to give it to me.

D

Election result maps

Election result maps I guess I'm wrong. We're not living in a red, blue or purple country. We're living in a freaky misshapen country which is slowly growing and taking over everything it sees. Run!

I got in an interesting discussion last week about my comments about the election. I'm paraphrasing here, but the person who disagreed felt like I was exacerbating small differences between the two halves of the electorate. This could very much be the case. Also, I do not want, in any way, for my comments to say that I think I'm smarter than the people who voted the other way. Not at all! I don't, and I do not think ANYONE will, know the rationale for people voting the way they did for some time if ever. Yes, "moral values" were highlighted by the polls, but so were terrorism, Iraq and so on, and no one trusts the exit polls anyway.

If there was one thing that this election continued to highlight for me, it is that we live in an irrational country. I do my best to follow reason, but time and again I see the vast majority of people choosing to behave irrationally (some would say emotionally). People probably chose on this election based on terrorism and Iraq as much as anything, yet these are hardly the most concerning issues of our time (I would say heart disease and/or cancer would be greater threats by orders of magnitude). Yesterday, I wandered through the auto show in Seattle, and you have these enormous trucks for people who never use them. "But my grandmother flies in once a year and we need the extra room to drive her around!" God forbid you rent a car that one week. Marketing certainly helps push us in this direction, be it election or not, but we can all do a lot better. I wonder what long term effect this will have on market forces and the ability to predict market forces? Since irrationality is non-quantifiable, how do you evaluate a population’s ability to do trade offs?

Nyx: Get your flexible display jacket on - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Nyx: Get your flexible display jacket on - Engadget - www.engadget.com



If you have something to say that is so important that you have to get it out on your jacket, YOU HAVE TOO FUCKING MUCH TO SAY.

"Wait, wait let me type a message in witty response to your comment ... hold on... ok, let me turn around and get set... no stand there I'll turn... don't move or else you won't be able to see it... There. Booya, you got served!"

Peggy Noonan on how the mainstream media lost

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan Well, she's a Republican, so I guess I should default to simply disagreeing with her on the issues. But, in fact, I much more disagree with the conclusions she comes to.

First, though Bush's win was substantial, he also had more people vote for his opponent than had ever voted for a candidate in history as well. Any country where 49% of the people do not think you are the candidate who should win seems pretty deeply divided to me.

Second, as much as people love to paint the mainstream media as biased and wrong as many times as they were right, this is just a statistical aberration. Bloggers very rarely generated stories on their own; it was much more facilitating the quick transit of information and allowed the many eyes of the readers to do the deep analysis that reporters are normally responsible for. Second, the CBS memos were wrong, but how many times was CBS right? Being wrong 1% out of all the stories covered is not bad... it's probably not even new. People have been wrong since newspapers began; it's just now we have a thousand fact checkers at the ready. I absolutely believe the mainstream media will have to change to accommodate the phenomenon of having fact checkers at the ready but there's an inherent fallacy here that I do not think people who think that the mainstream media are doomed really understand. Does Ms. Noonan really think that at any time the press put on a story that they thought was false and expected it to pass? Does she think that people held stories for any reason other than for maximum publicity? There’s a sense of malice here that Ms. Noonan attributes to these news organizations that I do not think exists. It is this attribution of malice (or greed or stupidity or any number of other things people think their counterparts on the other side subscribe to) which is probably the biggest cause of the partisanship we live in today. Trust me; the other person is fairly rational; your demonizing them does not solve anything.