The outburst of emotion was disturbing ... the experience of 20th century totalitarianism should make us wary of any charismatic leader capable of producing such devotion, and such emotional outcry.
Another friend took a screencap of MSNBC's super-size headline quote from the Obama speech: "ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE" and wrote to our group of friends:
Having harnessed the power of the Obama Jugend, nothing can stand in the way of our Glorious Leader.
I find this amusing for a few reasons.
I've always been sort of agnostic about the Great man theory of history. But Conservatives aren't. A (the, actually) conservative Party of the YPU last week passed the resolution Resolved: Our leaders should be heroes - and the entire Right side of the room started pounding in approval. Conservative concepts like "service through leadership" and power as burden sow the seeds for exactly this sort of thing. If the problem is that people are getting really excited about bad ideas, that's one thing - but in this case, the central critique (as it was during the campaign) is that people are getting excited about a person. I'm not sure what a world in which leadership is idealized but leaders aren't looks like.
My second point. One of my (least) favorite speeches this year was when on the resolution Resolved: Flee the Ivory Tower, the argument was made that since academics didn't stand against Hitler, this shows they have no spine. (A little bit of a strawman, but I'm summarizing.) Saying group/concept/thing X has done Y tells me nothing unless I am provided theoretical reasons about why I can expect X to keep doing Y, or you show me a pattern across cultures that X consistently leads to Y. Of course the 20th century gives us cause to be scared of countries with strong leaders that also fit lots of other conditions, like being deeply in debt or having a substantial amount of the population in poverty and unhappy. The conservative anxiousness about a strong leader as an ingredient in fascism rather than anxiousness about the actual material consequences that cause the people to be desperate only throws into sharper relief the extent to which conservatives view history through the lens of great men. Through that same positive lens that also holds leadership normatively above all else, I'm not sure how the picture above can be rejected on face.
So I have a random but important opinion to ask everyone and anyone interested in answering: by what criterion should someone give primacy to in a given election for their vote: their ideology or their identity? I ask this question for now with no specific reason attached to it for now, though many of you probably have a good idea for me to what I am referring in this election. Without getting into specifics, the more I've read/watched/listened to each of the 2 candidates for the presidential election, for example, along with one other candidate, I get the strong feeling that one is best for neither my ideology or my identity, one is clearly better toward my ideology, and one is clearly better for my identity (or at least a strong part of it). I don't want to go into too much detail both because I don't have time (and will happily therefore go into more detail next week after midterms are over) and because I don't want to disrespect you all by contributing a post here that quickly devolves into a trashy empirical debate about Obama/McCain/Nader and the like. However, the answer to this question I know will not only impact my vote, but will probably affect the votes of the many hundreds of people some of my friends have been phonebanking/canvassing/etc in battleground states in the past few weeks, and additionally, even if this elections seems already over anyway, I think it's still an important question to answer in general, so I think it bears some airing out: in what way ought a person to vote? With preference given to their identity and issues associated with it, or to their ideology and the individual who better matches it? Or is this a bad way to look at one's own individual vote in general (ie a different mechanism other than identity or ideology should be used, or there should be a combination, or they're intertwined anyway, etc..).. which do you all go with: identity or ideology? Just a random thought/question..
In accordance with my out-of-my-ass speech last year at the R: Power to the people! debate with Mike Gravel, it turns out to actually be true that direct democracy leads to drastically lower government spending.
Can anyone explain to me why the title of the failed bailout bill was
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes
As far as I'm aware, those $700 billion weren't for soldiers, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers.
As for the bill failing itself - I have mixed emotions. Glee mixed with fear about what happens if the whole economic system does collapse on itself.
Evidence (as if we needed it) that America is falling short:
Studies of escapees from North Korea show that those born after the partitioning of the Korean Peninsula in the North were consistently about two inches shorter than their counterparts in the South, according to a 2004 report in Economics and Human Biology.
While the conditions for North Koreans are troubling, Americans have a similar height gap to worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly reported that Americans are, quite literally, falling short of Europeans. In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.
The height gap between Americans and Northern Europeans can't be explained by an influx of short immigrants. Experts say the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity, and the height statistics cited in the article include only English-speaking native-born Americans, and don't include people of Asian and Hispanic descent.
The real answer may be that Northern European countries do a better job of spreading the wealth and taking care of their children.
"We conjecture that perhaps the Western and Northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy," wrote John Komlos, professor of economics at the University of Munich.
Not that I think this is worth covering, but if you need to feel better about yourselves for some of the crap blogging and journalism on the left, here's a fantastically out of touch and naive example from the (I assume?) right:
The full article isn't up, but to tease out the difference between the Left and the Right a natural experiment was run. The abstract:
A long-standing issue in political economics is to what extent party control makes a difference in determining fiscal and economics policies. This question is very difficult to answer empirically because parties are not randomly selected to govern political entities. This article uses a regression-discontinuity design, namely, party control changes discontinuously at 50% of the vote share, which can produce "near" experimental causal estimates of the effect of party control on economic outcomes. The method is applied to a large panel data set from Swedish local governments with a number of attractive features. The results show that there is an economically significant party effect: Left-wing governments spend and tax 2-3% more than right-wing governments. Left-wing governments also have 7% lower unemployment rates, which is partly due to that left-wing governments employ 4% more workers than right-wing governments.
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