Chilling Effect

I generally don’t do this kind of thing, but in light of this (see also here) I’ve removed Feminist Law Professors from my blogroll. I regret this, since it’s a good blog, and I’m mystified about why Bartow is engaging in this kind of behavior–I would hope that liberals in the blogosphere could leave this kind of thing to the Jeff Goldsteins and Josh Trevinos of the world. Anonymity is a crucial tool for many people who don’t have the privilege of being largely exempt from repercussions from their employers, and threatening frivolous lawsuits also has the effect of inhibiting speech among those who can’t afford the legal fees necessary to get the suit dismissed. I simply can’t promote a blogger who would do this.

…this is encouraging. But I still don’t understand why she would even mention a lawsuit, or why she did all her communication through third parties.

Friday Interspecies Love Blogging

Lester (my brother in law’s cat) and Sophie (my mother in law’s dog). What would Rick Santorum think?

Catblogging postponed

So I’m constantly getting emails from readers saying “Thanks so much for the constant stream of insightful and timely commentary, LGM would be nothing without you! Just one question, though–why don’t you participate in Friday cat blogging?” The answer is not for a lack of cat, but for a lack of a camera. So the silver lining, I thought, to having my phone stolen was that my new phone came with a camera. Oddly, I’ve never owned a camera of any sort before, and I’ve never really missed owning one, but I did want to give the other Henry the audience she so clearly desires and deserves. I rather surprised myself by how much I was looking forward to this.

Problem is, as far as I can tell, while my phone is just dandy at taking pictures, and pretty good at storing a few dozen of them, it doesn’t seem to have any mechanism for transmiting them to other electronic devices. It only came with one cord, which is for charging and nothing else. Like all sensible and sane people, I steadfastly refuse to pay for internet access on my phone, so emailing them to myself isn’t an option. Indeed, my camera phone is profoundly useless. It allows me to attach pictures to certain callers, so I could literally see who is calling me. Of course, I actually know what my friends look like, so that seems rather pointless. My camera phone has served the following purpose: I start every day by taking a picture of hte first cup of coffee I drink, and setting it as my phones visual background image. I can’t explain why I do this, beyond the generic explanation that I’m rather obsessed with coffee and I’ve also long had an appreciation for well staged images coffee mugs. It’s a good thing this phone only cost me 10 dollars, or I’d be quite annoyed. I expect there’s some sort of cord I might be able to purchase to move the images from phone to computer, but I lost the manual within a few hours of the phone’s arrival, which has inhibited my pending investigation into my options.

Friday Cat Blogging…Nelson

Why Does Jonah Goldberg Hate America?

The only way to enjoy Jonah’s objectively pro-Islamofascist essay is as high comedy. While deconstruction and analysis might yield some mild entertainment, I think it’s better just to accept that it is what it is; a monumental tribute to narcissicistic self-delusion. It’s telling that the disaster that is Iraq is so evident that it makes even Jonah’s strawman caricatures of antiwar arguments look good compared to the case he’s been making since 2002.

More from Billmon.

ABD

Congratulations are due to my younger brother, who completed his preliminary exams in sociology yesterday; assuming the large mid-atlantic state school he attends never finds out that he actually spent the past week playing Grand Theft Auto and watching LonelyGirl15 videos on YouTube, he will soon enter the purgatorio of the dissertation, a phase of human devolution about which I have absolutely nothing positive or inspiring to offer. For much of the 3.5 years I spent working on mine, I greeted each morning with a millstone of despair hanging around my neck, the weight lifted only slightly by the realization that I might be flattened at any moment by a city bus or a plummeting aircraft. However small that chance might have been, it offered me a reason to shuffle out of bed. One day while I was staring numbly at the walls, a group of marginally literate gnomes broke into my apartment and wrote 314 pages of prose, which I promptly submitted under my own name to the University of Minnesota.

If the opening section of my brother’s preliminary essays is any indication, he’ll have a much easier go at this than I did:

In a press conference two days after winning the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” True to his style, Bush embarked on a national tour promoting the strengthening (privatization) of Social Security, a social insurance program established to protect against downward mobility. During one of his admission-by-ticket-only town hall discussions while on tour in Nebraska, the following exchange occurred:

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, but nevertheless, there’s a
certain comfort to know that the promises made will be
kept by the government.
MS. MORNIN: Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: And so thank you for asking that. You
don’t have to worry.
MS. MORNIN: That’s good, because I work three jobs and
I feel like I contribute.
THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?
MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean,
that is fantastic that you’re doing that. (Applause.)
Get any sleep? (Laughter.)
MS. MORNIN: Not much. Not much.

Working three jobs in itself is probably not “uniquely American.” What is uniquely American is, in comparison to other rich nations, the large degree of income inequality, high rates of absolute and relative poverty, and the low amount of non-elderly cash and near-cash social expenditures combined with a high percentage of low-wage workers earning less than 65 percent of median earnings. And so we all have a good laugh when the president asks the woman working three jobs if she gets much sleep.

My brother added in an e-mail that “I really wanted to then include a line like, ‘When Bush asks that question, why do people laugh rather than [ask for something that I'm not going to reprint on this blog because I geniunely think we might all get in serious trouble for it -- d]? One, because that would be rude. Second, because of the prevailing belief in social mobility.’ But i’ll just stick with what I’ve got.”

Anyhow, best of luck to my brother. If David Horowitz put together a list of the 101 Most Dangerous Graduate Students in America, I would gladly nominate him for inclusion. He once ate three Hardee’s Monster Thickburgers in one sitting, so I’m pretty sure he can finish a Ph.D.

Game 7

Is Oliver “Clothesoff” Perez (3-13, 6.55 E.R.A.) having the worst season of any pitcher ever to start a seventh game? Not that I think Randolph is wrong–Perez had a 139 ERA+ just 2 years ago, and in an all-hands-on-deck game it makes sense to start the pitcher with the highest upside, since nobody’s going to let a pitcher stay out there and get hammered.

Still, this is the one upside to the fact that I will be stuck giving an undoubtedly epochal lecture about Congress during the initial innings today…

…Rob Neyer, the man responsible for my first writing gig on the internets but nonetheless a fine man and writer, confirms that Perez is the worst game 7 starter evah. (“There are 94 pitchers in the study. Perez won three games this season, which places him 94th on the list. His winning percentage this season was .188, which is 94th on the list. His career winning percentage is .411, which is 94th on the list. His career ERA is 4.67, which is 93rd on the list.”)

By the way, is Tony LaRussa, Super Genius (TM) hitting the beyond-shot Edmonds cleanup again? I certainly hope so…

…or, hey, Juan Encarnacion hitting cleanup, even better!

…regrettable to see Wright strike out on that 5-0 pitch.

…my sentiments exactly. Well, a classic game, congrats to the Cardinals, and all that. And because of my professional responsibilities, I’ve only had one whisky.

“Oh Krusty, you can be so cruel when you’re sober.”
“I’ll fix that!”

"And When Christopher Walken Died In My Arms, I Knew I Could Never Oppose A Senseless War Again."

There are obviously a lot of signs that Senator Man-On-Dog’s remaining tenure can be measured in weeks, but I’d have to say that “citing Michael Cimino movies as evidence” has to rank near the top. Next: George Allen cites Year of the Dragon to justify his positions on race relations.

Lying for Misogyny

The forced pregnancy lobby in South Dakota really is a piece of work. It’s becoming less common to to see campaign ads have outright lies in them (rather than just being cleverly misleading.) The claim that the bill has a health exemption is the most bald-faced (and telling: even in South Dakota, they don’t think a more principled abortion bill could get majority support) lie, but ema points out the claim about “96% of abortions” being for birth control is also nonsense:

Sen. Napoli asserts that, if voters allow the women of SD to make their own medical decisions when it comes to pregnancy termination they are actually voting for…abortion as a means of birth control.

The South Dakota Department of Health, Office of Data, Statistics, and Vital Records (.pdf) report contains no data on birth control use in women obtaining an abortion in SD (a glaring omission, in my opinion). Unless Sen. Napoli is privy to information not available to the South Dakota Department of Health, Office of Data, Statistics, and Vital Records, his statement to the voters of SD that they are actually voting for…abortion as a means of birth control is a lie mistruth.

An aside. The official statistics do contain some data–percentage of patients reporting that they had no previous spontaneous/induced abortion–that might shed some light on birth control use in women having an abortion in SD. [Since we're going to look at the available evidence and make some assumptions, the best we can do is come up with an informed guess.]

From the report, we note that the majority of patients–86.1%/75.9%–reported that they had no previous spontaneous/induced abortions. Now, assuming that these patients were sexually active, and that the reason they had no history of abortion is because they either 1) didn’t become pregnant because they were using birth control, or 2) did become pregnant (planned or unplanned) and decided to continue the pregnancy, there is no evidence that women in South Dakota are using abortion as a form of birth control.

If Sen. Napoli has any data to the contrary, I invite him to present his evidence and defend his claim. I will be happy to provide the forum, and will publish his defense in full.

Yeah, I think she’ll be waiting for a while on that…

Axis of Waterboarding

The BBC asked 27,000 respondents in 25 countries to briefly evaluate these two statements:

Most countries have agreed to rules prohibiting torturing prisoners. Which position is closer to yours?

Terrorists pose such an extreme threat that governments should now be allowed to use some degree of torture if it may gain information that saves innocent lives

Clear rules against torture should be maintained because any use of torture is immoral and will weaken international human rights

And here are the results:

Allow me to be the first in the blogosphere to note that the BBC, in publishing these results so close to the American mid-term elections, is clearly attempting to guide the outsome of our democratic process. More importantly, the methodological failures of this survey are glaring. Indeed, my vast knowledge of statistical methods tells me these figures could be dissected by a kindergartener (e.g., if so many Americans support torture, why aren’t our hospitals filled with injured people? Where are all the fresh graves? Why hasn’t the media seen and reported on all this torture? Why have the authors of this survey not responded to my mighty stream of non sequiturs?)

Our Responsibility

Riverbend reflects on the Lancet study:

The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis…)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower… oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that is undeniable. And yes, they are dying as a direct result of the war and occupation (very few of them are actually dying of bliss, as war-supporters and Puppets would have you believe).

For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported. As for getting reliable numbers from the Ministry of Health or any other official Iraqi institution, that’s about as probable as getting a coherent, grammatically correct sentence from George Bush- especially after the ministry was banned from giving out correct mortality numbers. So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.

The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?

Billmon has more.

Purge the Experts

Dave and Gary both have both commented on Yglesias’ post on George Kennan and the appreciation of foreign policy expertise at the beginning of the Cold War. I’d like to further note that the situation that developed in the diplomatic and intelligence communities regarding China at the end of World War II is quite similar to what holds regarding the Middle East today. Although the story is a little more complex than this, essentially what happened was that knowledgeable experts on China repeatedly indicated that a Communist takeover was likely. Such warnings were ignored by policymakers, political appointees, and Congress (this was rather a bipartisan situation, although in fairness the Republicans tended to be worse than the Dems). When the Communists took over, the experts were blamed for not doing anything, and were purged as commie simps. Thus, for the first ten years or so following the establishment of the PRC, government expertise on China was in desperately short supply.