Inter Symbol Interference

Clift's Big If.

2008-04-25T20:59:00.000-07:00

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift drools over the prospect of post-Clinton-victory headrolling:

I'm beginning to think Hillary Clinton might pull this off and wrestle the nomination away from Barack Obama. If she does, a lot of folks—including a huge chunk of the media—will join Bill Richardson (a.k.a. Judas) in the Deep Freeze. If the Clintons get back into the White House, it will be retribution time, like the Corleone family consolidating power.

So there's her thesis, all predicated clinging bitterly to this opening 'if.' I submit that she's awful wrong-headed in thinking Sen. Clinton might pull this off. Her closer:

Now the burden is on Obama to win the next round of primaries on May 6. He has said publicly that Indiana could be the tiebreaker, a prediction he could come to regret. If Clinton can win Indiana, hold Obama to single digits in North Carolina, and then run up a big margin in Kentucky on May 20, where she's leading in the polls, she could overtake Obama in the popular vote.

Emphasis mine, because that's just a lunatic excuse/reason she's come up with to write the column. You really have to chain a bunch of if's together here for this to be anything but rank fantasy. If Obama underperforms, Clinton might overtake him in the popular vote. Except the nominee isn't selected by popular vote. Clinton would, presumably, still be behind in the pledged delegate count, and would have to use her popular vote lead (a lead that, I'm fairly sure, would disregard the uncountable and Obama-friendly caucus goers) as a tool to woo superdelegates. If that actually worked, and superdelegates piss off the black vote for a generation by overturning the pledged delegate lead Obama put together, Clinton would still have to, you know, win the election before this Corleone enforcement could commence. (I paraphrase an old Atrios post when I say that if either Democrat winds up losing this in the general, s/he'll instantly become the most hated person in the party, and that's hardly a position from which one can take down one's new enemies.) Since step three involved losing your black vote, step four here is no dunker, even despite the otherwise-all-important fundamentals.

All four conditionals fall into the 'unlikely' category. Chain them together and you're so disconnected from reality that those seven paragraphs are just about as serious as "Who would win, The Hulk or The Thing?"

OHHHH The Humanity

2007-01-09T21:06:00.000-08:00

Charming ad for Visa's Check Card:

The whole thing creeps me out. You couldn't ask for a better example of why certain types see conforming to the mainstream is dehumanizing. Especially the choice of score: that tune, "Powerhouse," is what the old Looney Tunes would use for conveyor-belt type scenes. The whole message becomes "You, too, can be a cog in the machine, with a little help from your friends at VISA!" Goosebumps.

I originally wanted to tie this into some comment on the state of the public domain (like my man Matt Yglesias), thinking "Powerhouse" fell into that, thus explaining by economics the questionable choice. Turns out it don't, which just means they're stupid.

The Martian Microbe Multiplex

2007-01-08T17:22:00.000-08:00

Blogs is great at the aggregatin', so here I am bringing you links to twin Martian posts.

From Slashdot yesterday, we have this -- there's bubbling speculation that we maybe made First Contact with life on Mars in '76! Except the life was protozoan, and the contact was fatal. Our probe unwittingly killed the poor dears, goes the hypothesis. This is mostly good for sadly funny irony with a law-of-unintended-consequences bent.

Then I see from Scott Adams today the headline Life On Mars. Lampooning managed failure being his bread and butter (and also being the kind of guy you can find on Slashdot), I just kind of assumed he'd seen the same story and was going to talk about That. Instead, he's independently come up with a horrific twist: even if those Martian microbes were intelligent, we'd still kind of not care about their deaths beyond having some fun at the expense of another botched NASA operation.

Dismal Scientist

2006-10-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

New study out (warning -- Canadian):

[A] University of Manitoba researcher suggests women with disabilities may be up to 40 per cent more likely than other women to be abused by their partners.
Douglas Brownridge with the department of family social sciences based his research on more than 7,000 Statistics Canada interviews.

He says disabled women reported higher rates of being threatened, pushed, slapped, choked or sexually assaulted over the five years before the interviews were conducted in 1999.

Here's what makes me a sociopath: this is good news to me. Men are more likely to hit a woman in a wheelchair, a woman with obviously heightened levels of dependence. I read this, and I picture a society where abusers respond to their environment rationally. There's a cost-benefit running through their mind, and the economics dictates, "Yeah, it's okay to hit this wife. She's way less likely to leave or cause trouble!"

Which is to say, this is evidence that the laudable feminist goal of increasing the cost side of the wife-beating equation should work! Increasing women's agency through increased access to better education, the workplace, support systems -- these all move a woman further from the dependent/disabled side of the spectrum. Stiffer penal codes for domestic abuse, zero tolerance policies, etc -- great ways to make a dude think twice. And this helps prove that there is a thought process behind it all, which is a much better society to be in than one where the certain guys who beat up women will continue to do so no matter what.

Denny Hastert Makes It Too Easy

2006-10-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

As Foleygate continues to blaze a trail through the House GOP leadership, folks is starting to pick up on the Gay angle. At first it was mostly referred to inappropriate contact with "a minor" or "a page" or any number of genderless references. That lasted about 36 hours. Now, it's pretty much SOP to bring up that Foley and the page are both dudes. (This coincides precisely with my exposure to right wing takes on the scandal.)

So the gay-baiting shoe's dropped, and folks is starting to make with the funny and all, so I'm left wondering: how long into the scourging of Hastert will it take before someone remembers Denny was a junior high wrestling coach? Used to coach the world's most homoerotic sport. Cute little butts bouncing in the air, and all that. This seems like an untapped goldmine.

More kvetching about Slate

2006-09-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

You can take this post from C. Pierce, replace references to "Dana Milbank" and "television" to "John Dickerson" and "Slate," and suddenly have a very real idea of my opinion on this article. Basically, a new slew of journos working the political beat are engaging the "torture debate" without troubling themselves with actually recognizing the disgusting ramifications of legally sanctioned torture. Maybe I'm looking at it all wrong, and maybe it's important for Dickerson to refrain from making value judgements in the pursuit of cold, clinical analysis of politics. But does anyone work that way?

Even the dismal economists recognize the human costs of policy A vs. policy B on top of presenting the straight-up calculated and abstract results. Why can't Dickerson's conclusions not only involve "The torture debate is a political winner," but "Torture is a terrible affront to our values with a track record that shouldn't be trusted and consequences that leave us less secure"? I mean, jeez, even if he doesn't agree with that assesment of Geneva violations (making him barbaric!), he could at least take the time to sell the opposite position, where torture is magick and life is like an episode of 24. Torture has, sadly, emerged as a defining question for our time, and Dickerson is too wrapped up in the horse-race aspect to honestly weigh in. That don't make me feel good.

Comparing Abu Ghraib to Oranges

2006-09-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

From Jacob Weisberg:

Strategically minded Republicans expect that soon after assuming power, the Democrats would launch a partisan jihad against President Bush, and that the hearings and harassment would backfire. Right-wingers also hope Democrats will initiate impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush, repeating the very mistake Republicans made with Bill Clinton in 1998.

Here's something to think about: Bill Clinton's approval rating prior to, during, and following impeachment was solid at 60%. George W. Bush's have hung tough at 40% for a long time now -- and let's assume he'll stay that way (America knows what his governance is all about, and he's not one to change course even in the face of obvious failure). Initiating impeachment proceedings against popular Clinton is widely accepted as a mistake. Even if initiating impeachment proceedings against unpopular Bush proves a mistake, it's improper to characterize it as the very same mistake. This without even going into the relative merits of the two cases for impeachment, which would only make more ridiculous any claims of equivalence between the two scenarios. Lying about breaking your marital vows is different from lying about breaking the fourth amendement.

On a different note, I recognize Slate gets off on being contrarian across the board, and this article continues the aggravating tradition. More on this later, but allow me now to simply confess: I pray to God no one in power of the Democratic party actually buys into this "Losing Is Winning!" meme. Losing means the country signing up for another two years of jeopardy. Just to take a subset, I'm confident that risking future OTC contraception hold ups, reduced stem cell funding, crony corruption, propaganda payola, and legalized torture aren't worth a 2% greater chance of winning in '08 -- or is it half a percent? Or is it a 2% greater chance of losing? You don't know. Go for the sure thing and make the country a better place.

UPDATE: Forgot the title.

BACK IN THE GAME

2006-09-20T00:40:00.000-07:00

Baby steps, Louie. Been awhile since you helmed one o' these blogs....

From the Atlantic:

"[I]f a baby is crawling toward an area that might be dangerous and an adult makes a horrified or disgusted face, the baby usually knows enough to stay away."

Emphasis added. All I really have to add at this point is that some social scientist out there has the world's greatest blooper reel on her hands. "Usually." That cracks me up.

OTHER PEOPLE ARE HELL: Chapter One

2006-07-21T00:58:00.000-07:00

By Louie Fakes

I'd like to preface this post, which I hope will be the first of many, with a quote from Sartre:

Hell is other people.

Allow me to showcase exactly how this is the case. Sometimes, I see a guy. This guy: he's got places to be. This much is apparent. It's apparent because he's really hoofing it. He's pushing himself across the scene at an unhealthy clip. He's racing to an unexpected extent. Not running, exactly, but Walking With Determination. Fast like! Dig?

A situation presents itself. A bottleneck. I can see it coming, and I know I'll get there first. The hallway narrows or some such. Now I'm in front of this guy, who is so harried and hurried, except in a way I can tell he's always going about his day like this. He's always darting around, every step. Like his errands are just so much urgent the rest of us poor sinners. So here's what I do. I decide I'm gonna walk slower than usual.

He can't get by me. He just has to sit there, moving at my pace. OH GOD IT EATS HIM UP INSIDE. Except he can't do nothing about it. Not without having to be a dick about how fast he wants to go! Uncomfortably squeezing by me is totally unacceptable. (You know how these types skew neurotic and socially anxious.) He's suffering, all because I think I know the real speed a man should walk, and I'm trying to get him to regress to the mean. The bottleneck clears, and now he gets to hustle on past me in what he hopes will be the least awkward way possible.

This is how other people can make life hell. I love doing this. It's a way to fuck with this person without the slightest risk of comeuppance! And I can always play dumb about it: "Oh, I'm sorry! Didn't realize how slow I was going, when you were clearly in a unique state of rush! Mea culpa!"

I challenge Charlie to come up with any habit he occaisionally indulges in that has half the misanthropic glory as mine does.

RE: ground up animals

2006-06-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

by Louie Fakes

Finally, a chance to engage Charlie on the issues! Except, I mostly agree with him on this one. The way we treat animals is pretty shitty. Thinking about it too hard or too often will ruin your life. I mean, drive you to veganism. Or, if you've got a thing for principle, fructarianism. Not only do you not kill animals for food, but veggies are spared as well! Only eat things that let the larger organism live on -- fruits, nuts, etc. They fall naturally, you see; it is as if they are being offered unto us. I wonder, though, if a fructarian would drink gin or wine (beer's right out, as are vodka & whisky, what with needing to KILL to get the base mash) -- does the exploitation of the fermenting protozoans cross the line?

I used to think fructarianism was making fools of those hypocritical vegans, but then I started thinking more about the Property M meme. Eating stupid, brain dead carrots is clearly a different act, morally superior to chowing down on Mr. Fluffywuffycloudywouds. The key is sentience! This is why some of us feel shitty about eating meat (or veggies); the flip side to not caring about week-old foetuses or frozen zygotes.

Let's not even get into the more asinine sides of the subject. Salami slicing and slippery slopes have no place on this blog, let me make that clear right now. The perfect is not the enemy of the good: Yeah, innocent animals die, but at a way lower ratio of casualties to calories than with meat eating. It's not even close. Veganism and vegetarians aren't full of shit just because they run the same cost-benefit analyses as everyone else (albeit with different values on each side). I do want one of those shirts, though, because I think it's clever, and would irritate in a clever manner those ruder vegetarians, like that girl Charlie mentioned.

Time to address Charlie's questions:

...somehow in History it was decided that my evening-time hunger as a human being overruled his lifelong dream of living...

There's no mystery. "Somehow"? "Decided"? BAH! You eat meat because your parents did, and I'm talking genetics here. I paraphrase the Simpsons when I point out that given half a chance, a cow would eat you and everyone you love. They just weren't bright enough to pick the right genes, the ones that let them play Carnivore. It really is the natural thing, eating meat. Cramming animals in little cages for seven years, without daylight, because that is how one generates 3 cents of additional profit is nnnooottt quite so natural.

Does eating fake meat undermine not eating real meat?

Even if eating real meat is a sin, there's no chance eating fake meat is. There's nothing wrong with hiring a maid to spruce up your house just because it dovetails with the olden days of slavery-driven cleanliness. I cannot imagine how exactly I would treat someone who berated me for choosing a vegan option that wasn't vegan enough. I think Harshly would be close.

If a vegetarian loves animals so much, why isn't he a vegan?

I can imagine a situation where veganism is viewed as a bridge too far. I don't think Amish Country butter is such a bad deal. It's not the same as factory-farmed butter -- the cow gets a pretty sweet life. Think of domestication as a form of symbiosis (interesting and LF-discreting fact from seventh grade: parasitism is also a form of symbiosis). The cow is born, nurtured, and raised to a substantially cushier degree than if it were fending for itself "naturally." Veganism would foresake that foodstuff for no good reason. So maybe we have vegetarians who buy organic. The vegetarian who eats Kraft Singles, though: that guy either has to admit he hates thinking through the ethical ramifications of his cuisine as much as the rest of us, or that his vegetarianism is a healthy-lifestyle thing.

In conclusion, it's pretty rough to both eat meat and think about how exactly it is you've come to sit at a table and eat that meat. It's maybe cognitive dissonance, the feeling? I don't use that term too often to know if I used it right there.

You could take an absolutist approach and recognize that cows aren't people, and people therefore get to treat them worse -- as worse as we want. If pigs had got their shit together and invented useful tools of enslavement like the lasso and the invoice before we had, maybe the situation would be reversed, and God only knows how much mercy they'd be willing to show us. It's a cruel, biodiverse world out there, and we're only gonna make it if we run our game as us vs. them. Like how we take on infectious disease! There's no Ethical dilemma there. But now we're just back to property M -- lambs can be reasoned with enough (I'm thinking as an example of barbed wire reminders to keep them off our lawns) that they can be contained without commiting a wholesale extermination of their lot.

The best way I've seen meat-eater seek to overcome our wanting to eat meat with feeling bad about murdering & abusing animals is through the lab-grown-meat movement. But that feels a little too techno-futurist-utopian to me. I would certainly sign up to chow down as soon as it were cheap enough. I feel like it's exactly the same as my Gardenburgers and Silk: animal-free ways of getting me my favorite foods.

But "real meat" will always be on the menu, I think. Our best bet would be to hope that the in-vitro solutions become so overwhelmingly cheap that factory farms can't operate any longer out of a mismatch between how many "real" burgers people want and how many their infrastructure has to produce to break even on maintenance, etc. Then maybe they get closed down, and there will be much rejoicing amongst the public-health and labor-liberal and animal-rights sets. We'll get back to less intense operations, where the animals we eventually slaughter are first provided decent lives. Real ranching, the way America always wanted it! And we'll stay that way, because I would certainly continue buying murdered animal flesh, especially at fine restaurants or to celebrate special occaissions like Sunday dinner. It'll be a less everyday thing, but it'll still be there. (I should say that I think even this scenario is too generous by far to the "fake" meat industry.)

This will leave us with no resolution to many of the cognitive-dissonance issues we currently grapple with vis a vis our furry friends (no, I do not mean the cosplayers. They don't have friends, that's why they're cosplaying furries). Right now, it's against the law to rape a dog, because it's immoral and unethical. "The dog can't consent! It's rights are therefore unduly violated," say the objecting moralists who don't want to rely on the "ick factor" complaint. I think it's illegal, or at least Frowned Upon, to rape a cow, for exactly the same reasons. But -- I mean, if we're gonna kill the cow the next day anyways, without its consent, how much can we really say the cow has violatable rights in the first place?

Douglas Adams solved all of this in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe: we need to breed cows that want you to eat them, and say as much at the dinner table.

ground up animals being put in our mouths by ourselves: pros? cons?

2006-06-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

Mr. Fakes is a son of a bitch. I, also, am a son of a bitch, for a very related reason. Oftentimes we as of late find ourselves embroiled in the following:

LF: "Post on the goddamn blog"
ME: "give me a minute"
GOTO 10

While I am certainly in the wrong for not posting on this here blog, M. Fakes reminds me of this, and therefore I must despise him, as we all despise those who point out our flaws most worthy of correcting. And thus our topic: meateatery.

See this adorable lamb?

I ate this lamb, or at least one quite similar, at a Moroccan restaurant several weeks ago. Rhetorically-necessary revision: I ate a slab of meat in a Moroccan restaurant several weeks ago, a slab of meat that once belong to little Mr. Fluffycloud. I'm sure he made ample use of it, but somehow in History it was decided that my evening-time hunger as a human being overruled his lifelong dream of living, and thus the lamb was coerced into my belly. Did I feel regret? Possibly! Was it impressed upon me by my staunchly vegetarian girlfriend who was sitting not two feet away? Also quite possible.

How can one reconcile the knowledge that a lil' animal that would't hurt a fly was tossed in a cage and was put to the permanent sleep a while later just so i could eat a little meat? Does eating fake meat undermine not eating real meat? If a vegetarian loves animals so much, why isn't he a vegan? Can a meateater be said to feel for these animals while eating them, or is she naught but a trashy liar, likely to be stricken to the eigth circle of hell? And some other stuff. But not now! In the future, in the future.

Debut

2006-05-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

First things first: a quick introduction to our title. ISI is a communications phenomenon where the electromagnetic pulses you send smear into each other thanks to an echo or two. If only you'd slow down, your bits would make it through just fine. But if you recklessly spout off at the speed of your own thoughts, the echo from info-carrying symbol N winds up being received at the same time as info-carrying symbol N + 1, and you've prevented effective communication of your own signal. SO. Take the time to make sure our arguments and inquiries are thorough, well-posed, and understood. I really doubt we will actually do so here, and thus our title.

I'll be posting here as Louie Fakes instead of my real name, because the internet, she never forgets. I'd like to avoid taking any kind of responsibility for my comments! This blog is going to be a back-and-forth between myself and my buddy. We're both recent graduates of the University of Virginia. I've gone West to pursue a graduate degree in electrical engineering, and my boy's held it down back East working nine-to-five doing web design for a popular domain name registrar.

I'll throw out a couple of potential topics for our virgin diablogue, and let him pick which one we go with. I'm confident we'll run through them all soon enough! In an unbiased, alphabetical ordering:

Bankruptcy
Credentialism
Infidelity
Net Neutrality
Patriarchy in the Internet Age
Vegetarianism/Veganism

Over to you, my good sir!