Periscope Depth

Let’s talk more politics.

Democrats: I barely understand the primary system but, if I read this right, odds are pretty good that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. She already has a 105 delegate lead over Obama right now and only two states have held primaries (apparently a number of “superdelegates” have already pledged for her). All she needs to do is stay within 2 votes of Obama in each subsequent state – which she’s done so far, and I see no reason to suspect she can’t – and it’s hers.

I have a hard time seeing how Clinton would be much different from Bush^*. She supported the bill that declared Iran’s uniformed, identified army a terrorist organization. She not only voted for the PATRIOT Act in 2001 (which, to be fair, every serious candidate did), but she voted to renew it in 2006 (which Obama did as well). She was the first lady to the President who sent troops to Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 (and she openly endorsed all those at the time, and when asked later). She’s collected the most donations from the defense industry – more than any Republican, in a development that’d make Reagan spin in his grave. And she’s been explicit in her rhetorical defense of a strong unitary executive: “I want this President, or any future President, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations or in war.”

Obama’s not much better in my eyes, but he at least gives lip service to the notion of bringing the troops out of Iraq. I wouldn’t start endorsing him all of a sudden: U.S. troops will withdraw from Germany before they withdraw from Iraq. I know that preferring one candidate over another for their rhetoric, rather than their (largely identical) voting record, is pretty feeble, but you’re asking me to distinguish between apples and apples here.

Republican: It amazes me that Ron Paul is called the “crazy one” in the Republican race, where the lead candidates are a Mormon who wants to ‘double’ Gitmo^**, an open and avowed creationist and a senile old man who no longer knows what he thinks. Yes, Ron Paul is either a racist or carries water for racists. But I have a hard time believing that, if Fred Thompson or John McCain heard someone say “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began” behind closed doors (say, at a fundraising dinner, two to five Scotches in), they wouldn’t nod their heads and smirk.

Of course, I’m not voting for Dr. Paul, or any Republican, or any candidate at all for that matter. So the question of whether Paul is as racist and crazy as your typical Republican presidential candidate or slightly more racist and crazy is probably academic.

So that’s what we’ve got to look forward to until November.

^* Could I have said the same thing 16 years ago, I wonder? Hmm …

^** Double what, the complement of troops there? the number of enemy combatants held their without trial or recourse? the square footage enclosed by walls?

Could anyone here who (1) owns a cat and (2) puts up plastic sheeting over their windows to block drafts tell me how to keep #1 from colliding violently with #2?

Frankly I’m amazed ours survived a whole week, but Tomas has finally managed to shred both sheets in the living room. I have replacements, but I’d like to hear your cat management strategies.

Mine: pick him up (gently), carry him over to the window, press his nose against the shredded portion and say, “NO” in a stern voice. I’m not convinced this will do anything.

It’s good to know that time, new ideas and exposure to different people can change my outlook on life.

This is an odd point to make, I know, since most people hold up ironclad devotion to one’s declared ideals as the highest good. Is there any easier attack on a political candidate, for instance, than to call him a “flip-flopper” – someone who changes his mind on the issues? If I told you that Ronald Reagan used to be more conservative when he was married to Jane Wyman than when he was married to Nancy, would you respect him more or less for having altered his views?

But I’ve come to believe that being able to shift your mindset proves a greater rationality than sticking to it. You wouldn’t put much stock in a scientific theory that hadn’t changed from a hundred years ago (or even ten years ago). And if our goal is to be as scientific as possible with our philosophy – to adapt in order to explain the evidence, in other words – then why shouldn’t our philosophies change?

All of the above is prologue. The meat of the matter: a post made about sexism. The conservative of eight years ago, or maybe even five years ago, probably wouldn’t have given that much weight. But having known Christine for the past four years and having talked these things out with her at length, my opinions on the matter have changed (viz). She explained her point of view to me and, in doing so, changed mine.^*

This is the sort of thing Eliezer Yudkowsky talks about all the time at Overcoming Bias. You don’t measure the strength of your philosophy in your ability to rebuff attacks; that just tells you how good you are at rhetoric. Even “internal consistency” is not a sufficient test, in and of itself – a canny debater can find consistency between just about any two viewpoints.

You measure the strength of your philosophy in how accurately it reflects the real world. And sometimes, as you’re exposed to new pieces of the world, this means changing your damned mind.

Five years ago, I might have read a post like that and said, “Pfft – feminism.” Today I read a post like that and say, “Y’know, I think she’s right.”^** The virtues of a rational mindset, people!

^* The obvious rejoinder to this is “hurh hurh, changed his politics to match the girl he was sleeping with, no shocker there.” But Christine can tell you that I’m no less the hardcore markets-and-free-exchange advocate than I was when we started dating. Or since our break-up. Hell, our opinions on legalized prostitution – an area where my forte of economics and hers of feminist philosophy clearly overlap – would probably spark a fire in a dry season. So suck it, haters.

^** I don’t have much to add to the discussion itself, except to reiterate earlier points. ‘Offensive’ humor, when it’s funny – Dave Chappelle, for instance – is funny because it still hits the criteria for being funny: the reversal of expectations, the highlighting of the absurd, etc. I don’t find Sarah Silverman funny at all, but I can see where people do: the juxtaposition of a cute woman with a sweet-sounding voice saying filthy things. But just leaning on the ‘crude’ button? The hell’s funny about that?

I don’t know why I expected Semagic to save three consecutive drafts as separate files, but I did. The long post I spent most of yesterday working on has since been et. That’ll teach me.

To sum up: my younger brother Kevin came up to visit this past weekend. He’d only been to Boston once before – when the family dropped me off at BC my freshman year, my dad blinking back tears in the lobby outside the McElroy bookstore – but had been promising to visit for a while.

Points of interest:

• Kev’s ears didn’t fully decompress on the flight down, so his sinuses were still at about 2 atmospheres while we were chugging along at 1. Every now and then on the drive out of Logan he’d clutch the side of his head and swear briefly.
• If you could get either of us to stand up straight, you could definitively say which of us were taller. But Kevin’s always slumping a little, just chilling straight back in the cut. Nothing to get worked up about. Conversely, I’m always slouching a bit, bending over to catch the conversations of shorter people, apologizing for my height. What was that? Sorry? At best you can say we’re of a height.
• The Celtics game pre-show entertainment: a bunch of middle school kids playing half-court basketball. Seriously. Some of them had white T-shirts and some of them had green T-shirts and one poor kid, who clearly forgot the Very Important Instructions that his coach repeated, like, three times, huffed around in a red shirt.
• The Celtics game itself: exciting. The Celtics were outhustled in the paint for the first half but came back strong, thanks to the lesser of two Allens. The addition of Garnett transformed the Celtics this season: he’s a phenomenal player and an incredible presence on the court. During warm-ups he went over and gave each of the Grizzlies a pound. Hey, how are you? Welcome to my home.
• Special Celtics v. Grizzlies sub-highlights: making fun of Miller’s hobo haircut. Whenever Milicic makes a play, pumping your fist and swearing, “Darko!” Watching them lose to the best team in the NBA.
• Kevin and I went to Razzy’s in Somerville afterwards, to hang out with Joanna, David C., Katie S., Trisha, Chris B., Tim H, Emma et al. He had water; I had two beers. We saw two drunk guys try “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” No matter what city in the world you’re in as you read this, if you’re asking, “oh hell, was it those same two guys?” the answer is “Yes.” Dave C. and I talked Ravens talk. Someone put popcorn in my beer.
• Saturday Kevin got his first glimpse of the MBTA in action. We stood at the Somerville and Stone bus stop, waiting 15 minutes for a bus to slowly crawl through Union Square traffic. Then he watched as I determined, through a rigorous trial-and-error process that excluded all but the courtliest swears, that every CharlieCard machine at Central Square had at least one fatal error. We made it to Park Street intact, thankfully.
• Walking tour of Boston included: Downtown Crossing, Chinatown, Boston Common, Back Bay. I pointed out things I recognized (“I used to work down there for three terrible months,” “I used to do improv here; now it’s a gay nightclub”; etc). Kevin wasn’t dressed very warmly but aside from advising him to buy a jacket or a hat or something I didn’t nag him too much.
• Kevin didn’t feel like hitting up Will L’s birthday party, so we stayed in and watched football. A line judge got accidentally clotheslined during the SEA/WAS game. “So long as Ed Hochuli’s still okay,” I said, “I don’t care who else gets hit.”

  “Please,” Kevin said. “Hochuli would have just stuck his fist out. WHUMP.”

• Sunday we had lunch at Flat Patties in Harvard Square. I then gave him a brief tour of a college I hadn’t attended. “There’s a library,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s a science center.”

  “Cool,” he said.

And that’s the Kevin experience.

Updated Nerds on Sports. I review my football predictions from 2007 and see how they turned out. I weigh myself very objectively.

God damn, but it’s a fucking gorgeous day out.

Someone forwarded the following image to a mailing list I’m on through ImprovBoston:

… to which I responded:

The “Restore the Republic” byline makes me want to see a bunch of Star Wars themed stickers for other candidates.

“GIULIANI ’08: Fear Will Keep Them In Line. Fear Of This Battle Station.”

A bunch of others soon followed:

CLINTON ’08: Before the dark times, before the Empire.
OBAMA ’08: The dark side of the Force
HUCKABEE ’08: A strong influence on the weak-minded
ROMNEY ’08: Quite the mercenary. He doesn’t care about anything or anybody.
CHENEY ’08: He’s more machine than man now. Twisted and evil.
MCCAIN ’08: Aren’t You A Little Short For A Stormtrooper?
EDWARDS ’08: Never Tell Me The Odds!
KUCINICH ’08: They’d Be Crazy To Follow Us, Wouldn’t They?
GRAVEL ’08: Who’s Scruffy-Looking?

Your turn.

It may be time to bring back the Worst Writing of the Year series. We’re kicking the series off with a bang with Ezra Klein’s revivalist paean to Obama in The American Prospect:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

As a conservative satire of an excited liberal, this would be pristine genius. “Obama’s finest speeches [...] do not inform.” But no, Klein thinks he’s paying the man a compliment.

Add to that the use of rhetorical touches best meant for an audio speech in a piece of printed text (“… just for an instant”, “over color, over despair”).

Finally, just the purple turgidness of the adjectives should make even the most enthusiastic supporter of Obama gag. “The triumph of word over flesh” (oh I get it!). America “glittering” and its “honored inhabitants.” The act of standing and listening to a guy talk about an election is “sharing in [...] transcendence.” Calling this ‘saccharine’ would be an insult to food additives.

Hold on, there’s more:

In the days to come, just as in the days that have passed [... and in the day that's happening right now, and yeah, I think that covers all the bases], I’ll talk much more about Obama’s policies. About his health care policy, and his foreign policy, and his social policy, and his economic policy [again, a repetitive list sounds a lot better when delivered in an oral speech than when read on a flat screen]. But so much as I like to speak of white papers and scored proposals, politics is not generally experienced in terms of policies. It’s more often experienced in terms of self-interest, and broken promises, and base fears, and half-truths [see above re: lists]. But, very rarely, it’s experienced as a call to create something better, bigger, grander, and more just than the world we have. When that happens, as it did with Robert F. Kennedy [not to make light of RFK's tragic assassination, but it takes a rare kind of fantasist to get excited about a man who never actually served in the Presidency], the inspired remember those moments for the rest of their lives.

Deep breath; there’s more:

The tens of thousands of new voters Obama brought to the polls tonight came because he wrapped them in that experience, because he let them touch politics as it could be, rather than merely as it is. And for that, he deserved to win. And he deserves our thanks. The politician who gets the most votes merits our congratulations. But the politician who enlarges our politics and empowers more Americans to step forward into the public square deserves our gratitude. And we, in turn, deserve to permit ourselves to feel inspired, if only for a night.

It seems churlish to lambaste a political blogger for speaking abstractly about an abstraction, as, really, that’s all that political bloggers do. But note the jarring comparison between “the politician who gets the most votes” – a clear and vivid image – and “the politician who enlarges our politics and empowers more Americans, blah blah.” When a campaigning Senator “enlarges our politics,” what exactly is he doing? What’s the expression on his face? What words come out of his mouth? What exactly am I, the reader, supposed to be visualizing?

The answer, of course, is nothing. I’m not supposed to be visualizing or imagining any concrete thing. The words “glittering,” “transcendent,” “inspiring, “elevating,” etc aren’t supposed to convey a thought or feeling. It’s just that Ezra Klein felt really, really good listening to Barack Obama speak and he doesn’t have the words to describe it. And that’s fine. Just say “I felt really, really good listening to Barack Obama speak and I don’t have the words to describe it.” Hit Post. You’re done.

Downloaded Semagic so I could update without having to open up IE. I think it’ll be easier to collate my thoughts with a little window sitting on my desktop all day.

(Oh, neat – it vanishes from the open programs bar when you minimize it)

The lock on the driver’s side of my car froze earlier this week. I can get the key about 3/4 of the way in but not far enough to engage all the tumblers and turn it. So I usually unlock the passenger’s side, reach across to unlock the driver’s side, then walk back around to open the door and get in. Considering the issues I’d been having with the driver’s side lock for a full year already – in warmer weather, even – I may take it to a mechanic in a week or two to get it looked at.

I devote so much space to my friends’ entertaining exploits because I hope they’ll do the same for me. My vanity’s pretty absolute. So it’s always a treat when, instead of recapping Monday (New Year’s Eve) and Wednesday (karaoke), I can just link to relevant entries. And a relevant pictures page. If this isn’t enough incentive to get out of the door more often, I don’t know what.

Other incentives: my frigid house. I bought two boxes of insulating plastic last night and taped up my bedroom window and two of the living room windows. Why only three? Many compelling reasons, thus: (1) it was quarter to eleven at night and I’d just been kicked in the midsection an hour earlier at jiu-jitsu; (2) I can’t cut in a straight line to save my life, or the life of anyone I care about, like a dear friend I need to perform an emergency appendectomy on in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; (3) I’m waiting to see if the cat screws with the sheets I’ve taped up so far. The room at least felt warmer once I finished.

The news tells me Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee cleaned up at the Iowa caucus last night. Obama’s the Democratic candidate I dislike the second-least, and Huckabee’s either tied for my thirdmost-hated Republican or fourth behind McCain, depending on what I’ve just read. So my only response is “… interesting,” with the casual stroke of the chin that that implies.