"HypocrisyLine" comments continued

This is continued from comments on IsThatLegal? concerning the post HypocrisyLine.

I would like to refocus the discussion to the main point that I'm interested in. I may get to some of the others later if I have time. Anyway, the point is the difference between Kerry saying foreign leaders supported his candidacy and Kerry's opposition saying that foreign enemies support his candidacy.


Support from allies/enemies

I said: “Back to the original post, Mr Thorley, isn't there a difference between saying, "Our mutual allies would vote for me." as Kerry did and, "Our mutual enemies would vote for Kerry." as these bumper stickers and suchlike do?”

Thorley Winston said: "Not really, it seems more of a case of Kerry picking a fight on an issue (or non-issue if you prefer) as he did by trying to drag our country through the Vietnam War (again) and not liking it when someone actually has the temerity to challenge him on it and when what he thought would be a winning (non)issue ends up becoming a losing one for him."

The only part of your answer I'm interested in is the "Not really" part because the rest of it is immaterial to the question I posed. I'm really not interested in whether this is a case of someone picking a fight they can't win. I honestly just want to consider the difference between the two statements and their relative propriety. I don't know quite enough about historical elections to evaluate the propriety of Kerry's statement in comparison to other campaigns. I can, however, more justifiably consider Kerry's statement vis a vis the comparable statement from his opposition to arrive at an opinion of their relative propriety. So, the fact that these two statements are being considered in more or less a vacuum is an admitted weakness, but one I can't avoid for right now.

A pretty reasonable assumption I'm making in my argument:
Kerry had allies in mind and not foreign leaders like Kim Jong Il.

If you can't accept this assumption there's probably not much use in reading further. It gives a hint of what I can accept as reasonable and if our ideas of what is reasonable aren't at all compatible then discussion isn't really an efficient use of my time.

And a limitation:
I'm not concerned with the truth value of the statements because I'm interested in what the speaker is trying to say with these statements and the propriety of that attempt.

My view, obviously, is that there is a profound difference between appealing to the opinion of allies and the opinion of enemies. The difference is between convincing and coercing. One appeals to an ally for the same reason that Coke hires Michael Jordan. You have certain feelings about Michael Jordan and Coke wants you to associate its product with those positive feelings. You like ally; ally likes me; you should like me.

On the other hand, when one appeals to an enemy's opinion the intention is different. The enemy is someone who hates us and has killed our citizens out of that hate. He would kill you or me if given a chance. He is dangerous and holds the polar opposite of our values. His thoughts are preoccupied on killing people and when he has opinions they are bent on bringing death to you and people like you. His opinion about the presidential candidates is support for John Kerry. Enemy hates you; enemy likes John Kerry; you shouldn't like John Kerry because he would only be supported if it was useful toward your death; people who do support John Kerry are supporting the same thing as our enemy, namely, your destruction and, unwittingly, their own. That, it seems to me, is what people are trying to do when associating the enemy with Kerry. That's why I called it intimidating. I said: “Saying the enemy would vote for Kerry is intimidating in a way that saying traditional allies support Kerry's candidacy doesn't even approach.”

To which Thorley Winston replied:"If it’s intimidating, it probably because there is a bit more than a grain of truth to it. During the Cold War, Kerry was almost always on the side of the doves and voted repeatedly to gut our military capability, against supporting anti-communist opposition during the Cold War and post-Cold War voted against removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. On North Korea, for some strange reason he seems determined to make the same mistakes of bilateral negotiations that Carter and Clinton did which incidentally is what the North Korean regime wants. With the exception of Afghanistan and the second phase of the Iraqi conflict, he has pretty consistently voted against authorizing the use of force whenever there is a US interest at stake and IMO it’s fair game to point this out."

I've again colored purple the portion of your response which is irrelevant to my initial point. There was apparently a misunderstanding of what I meant by intimidating. You seem to think that I am using intimidating as a rough synonym for daunting or discouraging, as a description for the way the object of intimidation feels. But in fact I'm using it as a description with negative connotation of the behavior of the subject. I mean that the statement is intended to intimidate, "to coerce or inhibit by or as if by threats." (Am. Her.) In this sense the statements are intimidating despite the fact that I'm not intimidated by them. The problem is that the statements by Kerry's opposition are meant to intimidate whereas Kerry's are meant to convince.

I realize I didn't really respond to almost anything of what Thorley Winston said. This mostly is a clarification of my own views because they apparently weren't clear enough to have been responded to earlier. Hopefully I've fixed that and there are points in his above responses that, though completely unrelated, are also interesting and warrant some discussion. Such as, he has pretty consistently voted against authorizing the use of force whenever there is a US interest at stake and IMO it’s fair game to point this out. I agree that this is fair game, but it's also quite different from equating someone with the enemy.

Good news, I think

I'm not an idiot. I'm not the one being referred to in the comments that I talked about in the last post. Funny how my arrogance in thinking that everyone is talking about me has shielded my arrogance in thinking that my remarks were valuable.

Nothing like being mistaken for a straw man to kill your pride

So I'm just cruising through the blogosphere, minding my own business, leaving some comments at IsThatLegal? (a really good blog with a cogent shredding of Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment") which I think are brilliant and point out the significant difference between saying, "Foreign leaders support me."(-paraphrasing John Kerry) and "Foreign terrorists support John Kerry." (-paraphrasing Bush campaign). You can decide for yourself here (just click on the comments in the "HypocrisyLine" post). Anyway, there's another guy on there whom it seems fair to characterize as a Bush supporter and he and I post back and forth and then one of the regulars at the blog seems to think that this Bush supporter is using my name to set up a straw man for himself. Apparently my arguments are so weak that they can't be taken seriously as coming from someone who actually disagrees with said Bush supporter. Who knew?

I put a link to my blog in the comment thinking that the brilliance of my arguments would lead many people to see what else I had to offer so this post should go some way towards proving that, no, no one is using my name; my idiocy is my own product and I won't have anyone else laying claim to it.

I'm still hoping somehow this is a misunderstanding and the brilliance of my arguments is being recognized far and wide as I post this. I've emailed the guy who seems to think that I'm a straw man to ask him if that's what he really does, unbelievably, think. Standby for confirmation.

If I'm correctly understanding that I'm being called a straw man there is yet more to the story because if I am the student in question I am also, unbeknownst to me, under some manner of court order.

Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda

Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda This was linked to by Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly. A map from the State Department entitled "Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated"

The portion of the list of countries from G-J illustrates the point equally well.

Germany
India
Iran
Ireland
Italy
Jordan

Defending the Constitution

Obsidian Wings: "We can debate whether we should suspend central parts of the Constitution in the name of security when we have exhausted every other means of keeping ourselves safe, and found them inadequate. But even if we conclude that we should, scrapping habeas corpus and the right to counsel should, I think, be an absolute last resort, not the first thing that leaps to mind. And one of the things that bothers me about the Bush administration is that there are so many other things they have not done to keep us safe. They have left tons of fissile material unsecured in Russia, a country which is disintegrating before our eyes. They have, as far as I can tell, no serious plan to deal with other nuclear proliferation threats. Outside aviation, they have not made anything like an adequate effort to secure our transportation, our infrastructure, our borders, and our nation as a whole from terrorist attacks. And these are not subtle, difficult-to-think-of steps: they are completely obvious steps to take if one wants to secure our nation."

German election results

My post from a couple days ago turned out to be somewhat relevant to current events (insert stopped watch jokes here). The author writing for the Guardian in the article I talked about seems yet less credible. It doesn't pay to exaggerate.

Far right fuels German angst

The National Democratic Party (NPD), once compared to Hitler's Nazi party, achieved its best result since 1969 by winning 9% of the vote in Saxony.

But they're kind to dogs and children, I hear post at A Fistful of Euros good at keeping perspective that Germany is not sitting on the edge of fascism while promoting pro-active response against Nazis.

Posting will be rather limited until at least the end of the month while I do my utmost to force my nose onto that--oh so painful--grindstone working on my final papers. German papers aren't double spaced, but rather use 1.5 spacing. Who knew?

Babies with Grown-up Brains

Babies with Grown-up Brains:
This is a really interesting post about the growth of the brain and how its gradual development in humans might be an important factor allowing language.

"It's likely that this growth pattern evolved as a solution to a paradox of pregnancy. Brains demand huge amounts of energy. If mothers were to give birth to babies with adult-sized brains, they would have to supply their unborn children with a lot more calories in utero. Moreover, childbirth is already a tight fit that can put a mother's life in jeopardy. Expand the baby's head more, and you raise the risks even higher.

Extending the growth of the brain obviously gave us big brains, but it may have endowed us with another gift. All that growth now happened not in the dark confines of the womb, but over the course of years of childhood. Instead of floating in an aminotic sac, children run around, fall off chairs, bang on pots, and see how loud they can scream. (At least mine do.) In other words, they are experiencing what it's like to control their body in the outside world. And because their brains are still developing, they can easily make new connections to learn from these experiences. Some researchers even argue that only after the brains of our ancestors became plastic was it possible for them to begin to use language. After all, language is one of the most important things that children learn, and they do a far better job of learning it than adults do. If scientists could somehow find a marker in hominid fossils that shows how their brains grew, it might be possible to put a date on the origin of language.

...

A single battered braincase still leaves plenty of room for uncertainty, but it's still a pretty astonishing result. At a year old, this Homo erectus baby was almost finished growing its brain. It spent very little time developing its brain outside the womb, suggesting that it didn't have enough opportunity to develop the sophisticated sort of thinking that modern human children do. If that's true, then it's unlikely it could ever learn to speak. If these researchers are right, then future CT scans of younger hominid skulls should be able to track the rise of our long childhood."

Memorials and Memory Holes

The building on the left is the back of the Neue Wache, a memorial with a winding history. Here is an excerpt from page 884 of Alexandra Richie's great "Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin" which I was kindly given last summer:

The Neue Wache has already served as the Kaiser's guardhouse, as a war memorial for the Weimar Republic, as a memorial for the Nazis and as a shrine for East Germans guarded until 1989 by goose-stepping soldiers. In 1993 it was renamed the 'Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny' and the long inscription now commemorates resistance fighters, homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, soldiers who fell on the front, people killed in the bombing raids - indeed all those who were victims of war and terror. It reflects Helmut Kohl's view that there is a 'community of victims', all of whom should be remembered together.
It is right for Germans to have a place to mourn all those who died tragically during the Second World War; however, the idea of a 'community of victims' glosses over one very important aspect of the Nazi past: it implies that a young man who was forced into the army against his will and then died on the front can be compared to a young man killed in Auschwitz, or that a Berlinerin who met her death in a bombing raid can be compared to a young Russian woman burned to death in a barn in 1942. There is a difference between those who were victims of the 'horrors of war' and those who were specifically targeted, hunted down and murdered by the Nazis themselves - not only victims of war, but victims of the Germans as well.

She's very tough on the Germans, like an angry mother trying to force a child to look at what he's done. If this is necessary in parenting it is even more necessary when a nation tries to annihilate another people. The author is a generation older than I am and knows immeasurably more, but my experience is that Germans of my generation carry an immense amount of guilt still and haven't forgotten why. They don't talk about it a lot, however, and a friend of mine thinks that the next generation, kids in school now, is and will remain completely unaware of this guilt and the necessary reflection it entails. He doesn't believe that nationalism is dead.

This article in the Guardian (via Al Daily) entitled The loneliness of being German makes an argument that the Germans are in love with Ireland because it represents a national identity that they are no longer able to have. He goes on to suggest that Germans are the first truly internationalist people, an identity bolstered by their resistance to the Iraq war. The article overreaches on almost every point, but there is a kernel of useful truth in there.

The emotional attachment to home, to the land, to the place in which you are born, is something hereditary that lies deep in the human psyche, which is why it could be so abused by Nazi ideology. The result of this abuse is the systematic denial ever since of any feelings of belonging, a denial that has become so pervasive in German consciousness that it has erased these human instincts almost completely.

I think it's worth mentioning that the disconnection with any one place is not a specifically German phenomenon. And I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with a "systematic denial...of any feelings of belonging." People simply don't stay where they were born any more. Here in the US this has been true for a long time. My family history is probably typical. My great-grandparents emigrated from Denmark at a young age, settling in southern Nebraska. My grandpa grew up there and married my grandma, but when my dad was seven, I believe, their nuclear family moved to northern Iowa where my dad grew up and married my mom. Half of the next generation grew up there, my three older brothers and I, but my younger siblings and mother moved a few hundred miles and my younger brother is growing up in yet another different place. I'm just not buying his assertion that attachment to land is buried 'deep in the human psyche.'

Of course the Germans have feelings. They fall in love, they have desires like everyone else, they feel passionate about football and you can hear the odd person proclaim "I love Berlin" or "I love Bavaria". Of course they feel sadness and grief, compassion, friendship, the entire spectrum of human emotions. But there was always something missing too. They had no dream-life, at least not until the Wim Wenders movie Himmel über Berlin came out. Or maybe it started again when the Berlin wall came down, with people crying and embracing each other on the streets.

Statements like 'They had no dream-life' kind of get to me. Sweeping generalizations may be appropriate, they're certainly ubiquitous, but one can't make them and then say it was all swept away by one film. His contention that the German love of Ireland is due to one book is equally tenuous.

Up to now, Germans have trained themselves to feel no pain, no sense of loss, no compassion for themselves. Nowhere in the world was the father and son gap so wide as it was in Germany. From the late 60s, young people prosecuted their parents and reshaped the German conscience. All this was essential for German renewal, but it also led to a dislocation, a kind of orphaned state. In the process of exorcising the Nazi crimes, generations of Germans also denied their own heritage and severed an emotional link with their own people.

It is right that Germans have turned their back on the arrogance of nationalism. They are the only people in the world who have so comprehensively examined their own past. They have been to hell and back with guilt, and their overriding sense of duty towards their victims is unheard of in any other society. Remembering the Holocaust has replaced the crucifixion of Christ as a leading icon in our society. Memorials have become religious sites that provide a new kind of holiness and guide us towards a fair and racially tolerant society. If there is such a thing as absolution, it is only by remembering and revisiting these sites.

It's worth noting here that Richie notes a little later in her book, while praising a memorial that sought to remember and face the Holocaust wrote, that, "of the 1 million people who came [to the memorial] in 1993, half were foreigners." Many, probably most, people here in the Midwest still go to church every week. It's another overreach to call these 'religious sites.' To suggest that these sites, so infrequently visited and thought about, can 'guide us towards a fair and racially tolerant society' is a superficial, kitschy pipe dream.

On a visit to Dublin some time ago, Bernhard Schlink was asked if he could explain what was so special about the German concept of Heimat, or home, to which he answered simply that he was born in Hamburg and went to school there. Maybe it is not a priority for German writers, and his extraordinary book The Reader demonstrates this contemporary German view best of all, a book in which the main character's parents are unseen.

One final point, more petty than the others. Bernhard Schlink's book (Der Vorleser) is one of the worst I've read in recent memory. I'll wait for a request before I give it a book review.

Word of the Day-Ted Yarmulke

koppel-A skullcap worn by male Jews, a yarmulke. (OED)

spiked-life | Article | Generation whatever

spiked-life | Article | Generation whatever

An interesting article if a bit superficial. I've been thinking a lot about my willingness/unwillingness to go to war and would like to return to this again. I'm afraid though, that I'll end up merely trying to justify my comfort to try to make myself feel better, which is doubly selfish when you think about it.

I'm numb to my eardrum

I love the feel of root canals in the morning. Not really, but as the rank smoke wafted off my tooth I thought of that line from Apocalypse Now. Mmmm napalm.

My dentist:

"You'll probably wanna close your eyes. There might be some pieces [of your tooth] flying around."

"Don't worry about the smoke. I'm not going to start your mouth on fire." I thought he was kidding, but was mistaken.

It wasn't bad actually. What's worse than a root canal? A dentist with bad breath.

Where is North Korea?

On the national radar screen, I mean. What the heck is going on?

I might be turning into a cynic, but I had a hard time accepting the initial explanation, which confused as it was seemed to be this is not a nuclear test. That may be true, but it should be easy enough to confirm with seismic measurements and I didn't see any nor read about any mentioned by name in print, none. Now it didn't even happen? This is really starting to get unbelievable. There was a mushroom cloud. The explosion was apparently too large to be consistent with making a hydro dam and now it didn't happen. I hope I can start believing people again after the election. I can't believe I'm even saying that. I don't want to say things like that. What's going on here?

South Korea: No big blast in North Korea (Today)

Mushroom cloud was dam demolition, North Korea says (Sept. 12)

Word of the day

relâche-A period of rest, an interval; a break from something. (OED emphasis original)

pronunciation-rhymes with 'flash'

This is a cartoon from nearly two years ago. Now neither Iraq nor North Korea comes into discussion in any depth because of the preoccupying election.

The Chronicle: 9/10/2004: Violating 'Sovereignty': Questioning a Concept's Long Reign

The Chronicle: 9/10/2004: Violating 'Sovereignty': Questioning a Concept's Long Reign: "Yet too many participants in public debate fail to scrutinize sovereignty, just as they fail to dissect most political concepts more abstract than an oil pipeline."

Thought it couldn't get worse?

Via Passion of the Present

Syria tested chemical arms on civilians in Sudan's Darfur: Press

It said that witnesses quoted by an Arabic news website called ILAF [www.elaph.com] in an article on August 2 had said that several frozen bodies arrived suddenly at the "Al-Fashr Hospital" in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in June.

According to Die Welt, the Syrians had suggested close cooperation on developing chemical weapons, and it was proposed that the arms be tested on the rebel SPLA, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, in the south.

But given that the rebels were involved in peace talks, the newspaper continued, the Sudanese government proposed testing the arms on people in Darfur.

Update: There are also a couple of parts that don't seem to have been translated from the original article so I've done a quick and ready translation of those parts with the German for anyone who would like to improve them.


At least five aircraft from the civilian Syrian Arab Airlines flew from Damascus to Khartoum with specialists from the Syrian ~institute~ for chemical warfare together with technical equipment.

...

They [the frozen bodies] exhibited strange wounds on the whole of their bodies. Shortly thereafter Sudanese soldiers alledgedly closed one wing of the building. According to the witnesses entrance was only permitted to a Syrian team of doctors after that. Days later Sudanese forces had done away with the bodies.

Military experts have had information for some time about Syrian-Sudanese cooperation in the area of chemical weapon research. Syrian dissidents have repeatedly given reports of chemical weapons being tested on prisoners.

Dazu seien mindestens fünf Flugzeuge der syrischen Zivilfluggesellschaft Syrian Arab Airlines von Damaskus nach Khartoum geflogen, an Bord Spezialisten der syrischen Hochschule für chemische Kriegsführung samt technischer Ausrüstung.

...

Sie hätten am ganzen Körper merkwürdige Verletzungen aufgewiesen. Nach kurzer Zeit sollen sudanesische Soldaten einen Flügel des Gebäudes abgesperrt haben. Glaubt man den Zeugen, wäre der Zugang danach nur noch einem unbekannten syrischen Ärzteteam gestattet worden. Nach Tagen hätten sudanesische Kräfte die Körper weggeschafft.

Schon seit einiger Zeit besitzen Militärexperten Informationen über eine sudanesisch-syrische Zusammenarbeit auf dem Gebiet der Chemiewaffenerforschung. Auch werden immer wieder Berichte syrischer Oppositioneller bekannt, die von Testeinsätzen chemischer Waffen an Häftlingen berichten.

For my German-speaking readers, the original article: Syrien testet chemische Waffen an Sudanern

Wann der Einsatz in Darfur begann, lässt sich nicht genau feststellen. Allerdings berichten sudanesische Augenzeugen in einem Artikel der arabischen Website "Ilaf" vom 2. August von sonderbaren Vorgängen in Khartoums Al-Fashr-Hospital. Im Juni seien urplötzlich mehrere Dutzend eingefrorener Leichen ins Krankenhaus gebracht worden. Sie hätten am ganzen Körper merkwürdige Verletzungen aufgewiesen. Nach kurzer Zeit sollen sudanesische Soldaten einen Flügel des Gebäudes abgesperrt haben. Glaubt man den Zeugen, wäre der Zugang danach nur noch einem unbekannten syrischen Ärzteteam gestattet worden. Nach Tagen hätten sudanesische Kräfte die Körper weggeschafft.

A Short History of the Passive Voice

maisonneuve :: eclectic curiosity: "A Short History of the Passive Voice"

2004 -- “It’s also important for the people of Iraq to know that in a democracy, everything is not perfect, that mistakes are made.”

President George W. Bush on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.


1986 -- “Mistakes were made.”

Former president Ronald Reagan on the Iran-Contra affair.


1940 -- “Vodka was enjoyed, bloody purges were committed.”

Stalin on human atrocity and casual drinking.


1815 -- “Syphilis was contracted and Russia was invaded.”

Napoleon, from Elba, on his “me complex.”


1536 -- “The Incas have to realize that not all conquistadors are perfect. Natives were massacred. Staggeringly large shipments of gold were expropriated.”

Francisco Pizarro, winning Incan hearts
and minds at Caxamalca.


40 AD -- “Wine was imbibed, infant cousins were invited, Bacchus was invoked, ‘monstrous orgies’ may or may not have occurred.”
Caligula, on the Roman orgy scandal.


Paleolithic Era -- “Blunt sticks gathered, skulls bashed. Ugh.”

Stig, defending the use of his newly acquired
“opposable thumbs of mass destruction.”

Book recommendation

I recommend this book that I'll be using extensively in my paper "Democracy as a Human Right" (in German) for anyone interested in ethics.

The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy by Hilary Putnam (link is to Amazon and also includes a couple reviews)

Response to "It's better to be fighting the terrorists over there" argument

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: September 12, 2004 - September 18, 2004 Archives

Gregg Easterbrook, in The New Republic, embraces this concept in a new article even today. "What if the invasion of Iraq is having the unintended consequence of drawing terrorists and killers to that country, where our army can fight them on our terms?," he asks.

The only thing complicated about this argument is calibrating a hierarchy of all the levels of foolishness it embodies. Logically it is nonsensical; strategically it is moronic; morally it is close to indefensible.

The key fallacy, as so many have pointed out, is the notion that there are a finite number of 'terrorists' who we can kill and be done with.

The importance of words

Props to Secretary Powell and the Bush administration for describing the Darfur situation as genocide and taking on the responsibilities that entails.

For Sudan refugees, a long hot wait for world action - Christian Science Monitor

The naming is likely a signal that the administration is going to increase the pressure. Colin Powell talked about using 'calibrated' pressure so as to make the most use of the people inside the Khartoum government who are sensitive to international pressure. Sounds good.

Time dilation

400m at 14 y: 61s
400m at 23 y: 73s

Meet the al-Qaeda archetype

Meet the al-Qaeda archetype

Terrorism expert Marc Sageman made waves at an international conference in Washington last week, when he presented his findings on 382 suspected terrorists who have direct or indirect links to Osama bin Laden's network. Sageman found that the terrorist stereotype - of poor, young, single men from the dusty backstreets of the Muslim world brainwashed into committing fanatical acts - doesn't stick when it comes to al-Qaeda. Rather, most of them are well-educated, well-off, cosmopolitan and professional, with good jobs, wives and no history of mental illness. 'Some people at the conference were…a little taken aback', Sageman says. 'I could have been describing them rather than bin Laden's men.'

He found that 'traditional theories of terrorism' offer few insights into the lives and motivations of these new terrorists. Where terrorists are usually seen as being ignorant and immature, as coming from a poor background and a broken family, with no skills and no family or job responsibility, little of this is true for al-Qaeda members and supporters. According to Sageman, even traditional theories about terrorists being 'evil' and 'religious fanatics' do not work for the new lot, a majority of whom had secular upbringings and schooling and some of whom adhere to few strict religious rules. 'I think it's comforting to believe these guys are different from us, because what they do is so evil', says Sageman. 'Unfortunately, they aren't that different.'

Sageman found that, for all the simplistic claims made recently about poverty breeding terrorism, a majority of his al-Qaeda sample were middle or upper class and well-educated. Of his sample of 382, he had information on the social status of 306; he found that 17.6 per cent were upper class, 54.9 per cent middle class, and 27.5 per cent lower class. The highest number of upper- or middle-class individuals was among the Core Arabs (from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen and Kuwait), and the highest number of lower-class individuals was among the Maghreb Arabs from north Africa. Even among those who seem most closely to fit the terrorist stereotype - the Southeast Asians - Sageman found a bias towards being middle class. Out of those for whom he had information about family background and social status, 10 of the Southeast Asians were middle class and two lower class.

Who the Zell was that?

See post for yesterday "easy one to duck out of for the Republicans. They'll be able to disavow him and point out that Zell Miller isn't even from their party if it gets too rough"

I am surprised that it happened so quickly.

From MSNBC

the Bush campaign — led by the first lady — backed away Thursday from Miller’s savage attack on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, insisting that the estranged Democrat was speaking only for himself.

Late Thursday, Miller and his wife were removed from the list of dignitaries who would be sitting in the first family’s box during the president’s acceptance speech later in the evening. Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Miller was not in the box because the campaign had scheduled him to do too many television interviews.

There was no explanation, however, for why Miller would be giving multiple interviews during Bush’s acceptance speech, or what channels would snub the president in favor of Miller. Nor was it made clear why Miller’s wife also was not allowed to take her place in the president’s box 24 hours after his deeply personal denunciation of his own party’s nominee.

...
The Bush campaign stepped backed from Miller’s comments Thursday after it was received with almost immediate criticism, including complaints from prominent Republicans like Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

...
A senior White House official, speaking to reporters before Bush’s address Thursday night, said, “Senator Miller was speaking on behalf of himself and obviously on behalf of himself.”

I wonder how lonely Zell Miller feels now.

Brennan-don't hate me because I'm Canadian-Debbo and I

Reaction to Zell Miller's Convention Speech

I didn't see it, but I might try to catch it on C-Span's website because it sounds pretty interesting. Here is the transcript from All American Patriots. Update: I've seen it now. The tone of this reaction may have been inappropriately measured.

It's going to be a pretty easy one to duck out of for the Republicans. They'll be able to disavow him and point out that Zell Miller isn't even from their party if it gets too rough, but I don't think it will get too rough because people love caricature. The damnable effect of caricature is that when permitted as real commentary it tends to become the actual view or at least influence the perception of reality in the direction suggested by the caricature. This makes subsequent judgments less objective and further from reality. Interprestortion. I just coined that. I think it describes what is going on here. Interpretation is necessary. There is a fine line between interpretation and distortion. Making it easy for people who are trying to make a judgment about where something lies, Zell Miller chose to cross the line into distortion and straddle the line between distortion and lies.

I did catch most of Vice President Cheney's speech. Cheney was, with the exception of a few lines that I will let go because it is a party convention, safely in the realm of interpretation by my judgment. The two zingers (paraphrasing: America sees two Kerrys just as he sees two Americas; Kerry said he wants to fight a more sensitive war on terror as if Kerry thinks al-Qaeda would be impressed with our softer side) were notable. The first one because it is quite clever and the second because it is one of the distortions in a mostly interpretive speech and tries to take away one of the definitions of 'sensitive' (Having quick or intense perception or sensation [OED 3b] as in this citation by P. G. Wodehouse "Living by his wits had developed in Percy highly sensitive powers of observation." ) and distort it only to an emotional term (Very susceptible or responsive to emotional, artistic, etc., impressions, possessing delicate or tender feelings, having sensibility; [OED 3a]). One of the reasons that Kerry has to explain himself and is being painted as indecisive is because he uses words that are perfectly appropriate and oftentimes preferable, but happen to be less used. To have quick or intense perception or sensation in the war on terror would be a decided improvement. Admittedly Kerry has sausage-finger dexterity with connotation.

Links to a handful of reactions at The Washington Monthly's Blog

Imperial President: Opposing Bush becomes unpatriotic

But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.

In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.

Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled tonight against Bush's critics.

Funny from Talking Points Memo which also has some good links to follow for more commentary

"Our tribe will attack their tribe. And then we will kill their men, make their livestock our own and take their women to mate."

This, I'm told, is from the draft version of Zell Miller's speech, before word came down that Zell really shouldn't hold back.

St. Nikolaikirche in Stralsund. I like this one because it looks almost like a negative exposure.

Deserved criticism of the Arab states' position on Darfur

Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions

On July 29 Egypt's government newspaper, Al-Ahram, published an article entitled "The Key to the American Voting Booths Is in Darfur: The Plot which Is Called Oil." An English translation of the article can be found on the Middle East Media Research Institute's Web site at www.memri.org.

Al-Ahram is probably the most important newspaper in the most important and populous Arab country. The article is typical for the kind of hatred and paranoia that pervades much of the wider Arab Muslim world. Given the tight control the Egyptian state has over the media in general and Al-Ahram in particular, the paper's views must also be seen as reflecting the views of the country's ruling elite. "Bush is awaiting his fate in November and the U.S. is planning to make Darfur an easy path towards its major plan to transport the (Persian) Gulf Oil and the African oil to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, so that Washington can meet its needs in the next decade," the article said.

...

This is what remains, in the perspective of many Arabs and Muslims, of European and American reports in the press and media, of the fundraising campaigns, of our disgust, anger and astonishment at the fate of hundreds of thousands of Islamic victims in Africa. It is unimaginable that we infidels might be inspired by compassion. Because an unbelieving crusader or Jew could never be inspired by compassion. After all, unbelieving crusaders and Jews are too busy ensuring the diabolical downfall of the ummah. While the crusader and Jew may seem compassionate, in fact they are cunning conspirators.

Put my name down on the list of conspirators.

When optimism becomes subjective Berkeleianism

A person waking up from a three and a half year coma just in time to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech last night could be forgiven for not understanding why other Americans are being persistent in their criticism of the current state of affairs. Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, however, cannot be forgiven. Arnold's speech went beyond the attitudinal difference of optimism versus pessimism. An optimist and a pessimist look at the same thing and see things differently; the interpretation can vary so much that the pessimist will contend that there is barely a drop in the glass while the optimist will say that it it is close to being full. What Arnold did was deny that there was a glass. Only effeminate males would even talk about not having enough water. Reality matters to the millions of people who have lost their water over the last few years. The Democrats will inflate the problem and Republicans the opposite. Interpretation is important because the facts usually don't speak for themselves (people who say this are interpreting and trying to shape interpretations as much as anyone else), but denial of the existence of any kind of problem(s) is not acceptable.

Text of Arnold Schwarzenegger's speech

Balanced article from The Motley Fool-I Am an Economic Girlie-Man