fling93 loves fishies

A Culture That Rewards Inaccuracy

I know it’s been slow lately. A big reason is that I am very loathe to post anything until I’ve researched it well enough to know there aren’t any obvious weaknesses or holes in my argument and that I’m covering all the bases (and this post is no exception). This means it takes a long time for me to organize and write a post, so I always end up with several partially-completed blog posts stacked up.

This has a double-whammy effect on my traffic because: 1) my posts are much less frequent (if you want a lot of blog traffic, posting at least daily is a huge plus), and 2) a completely argued post is less likely to provoke responses in the form of comments and links from other bloggers.

Political Weakness or Ideology?

There’s quite an interesting debate going on. Virginia Postrel is chastising other libertarian conservatives like Jacob Levy and Dan Drezner for leaning towards Kerry just to be fashionable. Levy goes on to explain why he’s leaning Kerry instead of Libertarian Party candidate Badnarik and also responds to Postrel. Julian Sanchez also highlights a few amusing responses.

I’ve been working for a while on a rather lengthy post on Dubya, so I have no intention of spoiling it by jumping into the Dubya vs. Kerry debate quite just yet (and besides, the longer you wait to make up your mind, the more receptive you’ll be to information). I will mention that I pointed out Dubya’s support for the FMA was throwing a political bone to the wrong conservatives — he doesn’t really need to worry about the social conservatives, but the libertarian and fiscal conservatives, since those are the ones he ticked off. So Postrel should not be surprised at the libertarian reaction.

But Drezner says something I do want to respond to:

Tyler Cowen supplies a counterargument. Some of it is compelling, but this part baffles me:

I look less at what politicians say, and more at what kind of coalition they would have to build to rule. The high domestic spending of Bush I take as a sign of perceived political weakness (“we need to buy more allies”), rather than a reflection of Bush’s ideology.

Huh? This is an administration that controlled all three branches of government for a majority of the first term — and they felt confident enough in their political position to piss off Jim Jeffords less than three months into office. Compared to most post-war governments, the Bush administration had fewer constraints on its governing coalition.

I’m a much bigger fan of Tyler Cowen than Dan Drezner (and not just cuz I’m a big fan of Fight Club and think it’s cool that the name Tyler Cowen looks a lot like Tyler Durden, only with a Cow instead of a Durd — um, that didn’t come out the way I thought it would). But I think Cowen misstated his point.

Great Courses: Power Over People

Well, I finally completed the Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory on audio CD, part of the Great Courses from the Teaching Company that I blogged about earlier. I thought it was very enlightening and worthwhile, and I found Professor Dalton to be an excellent lecturer (although sometimes when his voice dipped, it was kinda hard to hear him when I was on the freeway, but note that ‘93 Saturns weren’t exactly known for their quiet ride).

I have to say the subject matter it covered wasn’t quite what I expected. I guess I didn’t really know anything about political science. I thought it would talk more about politics and forms of government, but I guess that’d be more civics than political theory. Instead, this course covered various theories exploring human nature to determine what kind of society would be ideal for humans. So there was quite a bit of overlap with philosophy, which surprised me. While I fully expected to see the lectures about Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hitler, and Gandhi, there were also ones on Thoreau, Freud, and “The Hindu Vision of Life.”

Third Party Handicaps

Kevin Drum links to a R. W. Bradford article on the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate this year, Michael Badnarik, who has some very unorthodox views that seem rather paranoid. For example, he refuses to get a driver’s license because he doesn’t want to provide his fingerprints or Social Security number, and he also eschews postal ZIP codes. Kevin’s reaction?

Man, that’s some crazy stuff. He refuses to use ZIP codes?

Read the whole story when you have a few spare minutes and need a laugh. And a note to libertarians: this is why everyone thinks you’re a bunch of loons. What else would you expect them to think?

Well, I won’t try and defend Badnarik on this. Not to imply his behavior is indefensible, but the real point Kevin is making is that this stuff is so way out of the mainstream. And he’s right.

The spoiler effect moves third parties to the margins (link)

But this is exactly because of the two-party system. I blogged earlier about the spoiler (splitting the vote) effect inherent in our plurality electoral system. Look at all the grief Nader’s getting from liberals who accuse him of trying to hand the election to Dubya by splitting the liberal vote. This is an obstacle that any third-party candidate has to face. Even if a potential voter likes you, they know that you really don’t have a chance to win, and furthermore, that voting for you is likely to hurt their second choice.

So if the voter cares at all about the eventual winner, they won’t vote for you. This means that the only way a third-party candidate can attract any sort of attention at all is to be out on the fringes of the electorate, close to voters who are so far out of the mainstream that they hate both major candidates and don’t really care which one of them wins (note that Nader’s views are similarly way out of the mainstream, and that he is similarly being mocked).

Vanity Blogging

I often find myself going through my own old blog posts and re-reading them. Occasionally, I find mistakes to fix, or think of a better way to word something, or realize I now have additional insights to add. After all, I do use this blog partially as a way to organize my thoughts (as I mentioned earlier), so it needs to be a living document. And indeed, sometimes it does remind me of something I’d forgotten, or re-clarifies a thought that had become hazy.

But generally, I don’t think this is the real reason I read my own stuff (and this is not the reason it’s been almost a whole week since my last post — I’ll explain that some other time). While I’ll occasionally cringe at something I wrote (and quickly fix whatever’s wrong with it), most of the time I’m generally pretty satisfied with what I’d written, if not outright proud. So I generally get a good amount of enjoyment from the experience.

This is not to say that I spend a lot of time reading my own stuff, especially since I’m a lot more likely to gain insights from reading other people’s stuff. But I wonder if this is a common practice among other bloggers, or whether I’m just unusually vain?

Well if I am, so be it.

On a side note, I’ve made some significant revisions/enhancements to my post, The Message, Not the Messenger. I consider it one of my better works, so I think it’s worth checking out, if my vain self does say so myself.

Review: I, Robot

Well, I saw I, Robot last week, and not really by choice, but due to a group outing. I wasn’t too impressed, although it did have a few pleasant surprises.

For the most part, the film is pretty much what I expected. Standard summer action flick stuff with stock elements, predictable plot twists, gaping plot holes, and the “bad guys” making ridiculously stupid mistakes. If you like action movies, you can probably look past all of that. But this wasn’t really my cup of tea.

And yes, I have read Isaac Asimov’s original short story collection that this film is (very!) loosely based on, but I think I was able to keep that from coloring my enjoyment, since it was pretty dang obvious just from the previews that the movie would bear very little resemblance to that work. And obviously, this was partly by necessity, as it was a collection of stories, not one unified work, and most of them were basically logic puzzles revolving around figuring out how and why a robot did something that seemingly conflicted with the three laws of robotics. Not exactly cinematic material.