| |
Thursday, May 29, 2003
What's So Bad About Feeling Guilty?
That's what Michelle Cottle wants to know.
To which I can only respond: Exactly what the hell is so wrong with a little liberal guilt--or guilt in general, for that matter? In recent years, personal guilt has fallen tragically out of vogue as psychotherapists and self-help quacks have implored us to love ourselves just as we are, regardless of the hurtful, selfish things we do. Come to think of it, it's odd that "liberal guilt" has emerged as such a common slur since Republicans in particular profess disgust over the "If it feels good, do it" mentality. Moreover, the Judeo-Christian belief system that conservatives so adore is all about guilt. We're supposed to feel bad about the terrible things we do--or those that we sit back and watch others do. Without guilt, there can be no redemption.
Of course what she misses here completely is that Howell Raines does not feel guilt (as far as I know) for things he actually did. That is NOT part of white liberal guilt. White liberal guilt is about what others did, and not just stuff that they allowed to happen, but stuff that happened before they were born. White liberals feel guilty about slavery, they feel guilty about stealing the land from the Native Americans, lord knows they probably feel guilty for the Spanish Inquisition and the Dark Ages if you press them on it.
The New York Times is reporting a story " Linking Guns and Gun Violence" from a couple days ago. It's a classic liberal bias piece, lazily reported by Eric Nagourney. Although it's only 7 paragraphs long, it's brimming with startling factoids like "people with guns are 16 times as likely to commit suicide using guns". (And people with sleeping pills are 20 times as likely to commit suicide using sleeping pills).
But what really made me swallow my gum was this floater:
The study also found that women were significantly more likely than men to be victims of gun homicides. "This likely reflects the singular danger faced by women in abusive relationships," Dr. Wiebe wrote.
This is nonsense. In point of fact, women are FAR less likely to be murdered than men. In 2001, for example, over three times as many men (10,503) were murdered as women (3,214). An estimated 8,719 people were murdered with firearms in 2001. Unfortunately, the FBI does not break out the data by weapon and gender, but even if we assume that 100% of the women murdered in 2001 were murdered with firearms, that leaves 5,505 people murdered with firearms in 2001 who were NOT women. Since we can generally assume that those who are not women are men, that means that even under the most generous assumption, women make up about 37% of firearm murder victims, while men account for 63%.
This is a classic Liberal Media Bias error--one that suits the prejudices of the New York Times. Mort Sahl used to joke that if the world was ending tomorrow, the headline in the New York Times would be "World To End: Women and Minorities Disproportionately Affected". New York Times' readers now believe that women are more likely to be victims of gun homicides.
Note: I have assumed for the purposes of this argument that women=females and men=males, so children are included in each category. However in all probability if we excluded children the effect would be that men are even more disproportionately killed by firearms than women. For example, although females make up 23.4% of murder victims, women over 20 make up only 23.1% of murder victims over 20. Using 17 years as the baseline figure, women over 17 make up only 22.1% of murder victims over 17. However, the FBI does not provide a breakdown of murder victims by age and weapon, so we cannot do the calculation I used above.
Saturday, May 24, 2003
The Chris Hedges speech continues to make ripples. The conservatives who feel the need to be consistent have mostly been disapproving of those who shouted him down, remembering the situation in the 1980s when the left did that to virtually any speaker of the right.
That's a legitimate point, but suppose in 1999 a Republican speaker had stood up at a graduation, and said "Today I want to talk to you about why Bill Clinton should have been convicted in the impeachment trial", is there any doubt that he would have been met with a chorus of boos? Is there any doubt that his mike would have been turned off well before he got to, "Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broddrick; this we know."
And I would say that's totally appropriate, as was the reaction to Hedges.
Annika Update: As predicted she did not make the cut, or finish last. Her finish was about the best result the LPGA could have hoped for. They didn't want her to be totally embarrassed, but they certainly didn't want her up there on the leaderboard either, because then the LPGA would be just for the women who can't compete with the men. Still no word on whether the LPGA will allow men to compete in their events (hah!).
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Tigers Update: The Tigers are now on a 9-game losing streak. Their current record is 9-35. In order to lose more than 120 games (the record, held by the 1962 Mets), the Tigers would have to go 32-86, for a .271 winning percentage.
Annika Update: Although CNNSI gushed about Annika's round of 71, calling it "One Over on the Guys", the fact remains that as of this moment she's tied for 63rd in the tournament, and that ranking will probably decline before the end of the day as there are still players out on the course and they are shooting under par on average.
Listening to Chris Hedges' idiotic speech at Rockford College. It's bad on so many levels that it's really hard to believe this guy won a Pulitzer.
Early on, he says "we are embarking on a occupation". It's "an" surely?
As usual he blames terrorism on low wages. "and this rage, in a world where almost 50% of the planet struggles on less than $2 a day". However, Atta's father was a lawyer, and Bin Laden's was a billionaire contractor.
There is an air of pronunciamento about the whole speech, almost as if the heavens had parted and Chris Hedges was there, letting us know the word from on high.
"And remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem". Gee would you include yourself in that statement?
He compares war to a "vast video arcade game". Of course there is still very little evidence of this, unless you want to make the claim that bombing targets from the air has a video game feel. Personally I think real video games are NOTHING like war--they are much cooler.
"War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause..." A more perfect summary of how the left feels so superior to the rest of society would be hard to imagine.
He talks about suddenly not feeling alienated. Of course this was the "two-week liberal patriot phenomenon". For two weeks after 9-11, the left felt like Americans. Since then of course they have gone back to hating America.
BD
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Predictably, there is a dust-up brewing over Vijay Singh's remarks about Annika Sorenstam. Here's my take. It's bad for the LPGA. There is NO way Annika can compete against the men from the back tees. Women cannot hit the ball as far as men, which means they are playing 3 irons from the fairway while the men are playing wedges. Annika is the best women's player in the world. That means that there are thousands of men better than she from the back tees.
Prediction: Annika fails to make the cut. She will probably not have the worst score (somebody will blow up), but she will be close.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Baseball musing this morning. Although the focus for the last few days has been on Palmeiro's breaking 500 home runs, A-Rod has managed to set the record for a major leaguer for most home runs by the age of 28. A-Rod has 309 homers as of yesterday. The prior record holder was Mel Ott, with 306 dingers, with Eddie Mathews and Hank Aaron close behind at 299 and 298 respectively. Here's the best part: A-Rod is NOT yet 28, in fact in terms of baseball age he won't be 28 until next season.
Some of this is certainly due to the juiced ball, lack of pitchers, or bandbox ballparks, depending on which reason you believe has caused the sudden upsurge in home runs in the majors over the last decade. But how can we adjust for this?
Fortunately, there is a reference source which contains every baseball statistic since 1871 in Microsoft Access format, so you can create your own queries. I decided to take a look at the home run rate in Aaron's time versus that which applies today. Aaron played from 1954-1976; during that time hitters (excluding American League pitchers, who have not been hitting in A-Rod's time), averaged 1 homer for every 45.6 plate appearances. A-Rod has played since 1994; during that time hitters averaged 1 homer for every 35.1 plate appearances. This indicates that about 23% of A-Rod's homers are due to current conditions, which would be about 69 homers entering the 2003 season, knocking him down quite a bit from the top at age 28. Still all he has to do to get it back would be to hit 75 homers over the balance of this season and the next, a task which he seems quite capable of achieving.
Note: I am not really suggesting that we do this sort of adjustment for everybody's stats like this; God knows if we did Roger Connor would probably rank as the greatest home run hitter ever. Just pointing out that even if you do make these adjustments, A-Rod still ranks up there near the top. It's not all an illusion, just some of it.
There has been some comparison of the NY Times' Jayson Blair scandal to the infamous Janet Cooke story. Cooke, a reporter for the Washington Post, concocted a story about an eight-year-old junkie in 1981. The initial story caused a sensation, with Cooke winning a Pulitzer Prize. However, eventually it was discovered that she had made the boy up and she was fired and had the prize rescinded.
The interesting thing to me is that if the story had been written in the mid-late 1980s, there would have been no controversy at all about it. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine by then that the story about an eight-year-old junkie would have been passed on by editors as the equivalent of dog bites man.
Monday, May 12, 2003
An interesting and generally favorable review of Sid Blumenthal's new book in the New York Times today:
"Sidney Blumenthal, journalist turned Clintonist, has written a deeply reported, deeply partisan book about his time as a senior White House aide. Scores are settled, both petty and portentous, and the book is being passed around Washington, samizdat-style, so the various players can check the index for their names."
I confess to not understanding the "deeply reported" bit, but the "deeply partisan" seems obvious. Samizdat refers to "The secret publication and distribution of government-banned literature in the former Soviet Union." It's a current political buzzword, and seems poorly applied here. I doubt very much that there's a secret cabal [aren't all cabals secret?-- ed] of Washington insiders passing the book around.
"The book... evokes a dangerous, salacious political epoch that has been obscured by a period of terrorism and war."
Lord only knows how the reviewer thinks the late 1990s were "dangerous". "Salacious" of course is the word that David Kendall used to describe the details of Clinton's sexual activities with the hired help contained in the Starr Report.
I could Fisk the rest of the review, but it's not worth the effort. The reviewer manages to get quotes from people who both like and despise Blumenthal, but his objectivity ends there. About the worst he can say about Blumenthal is that he is partisan. On the other hand, he uses words like "exhaustively annotates", and "to his credit...", "comprehensive", "history will no doubt find Mr Blumenthal's account useful", and similar blather.
More important is this bit noted in passing:
" In the book Mr. Blumenthal takes particular satisfaction that after his own subpoenaed appearance in February 1998 before the independent counsel about his contacts with the press, Mr. Starr's "favorable rating sank to 11 percent, one of the lowest ever recorded for any public figure."
That may have had something to do with the fact that Blumenthal appears to me to have LIED to the New York Times' Anthony Lewis about some of the questions he was asked in front of the grand jury. Particularly, Lewis reported two questions that Blumenthal was never asked, according to the grand jury transcript: "Does the President's religion include sexual intercourse?" and "Does the President believe that oral sex is sex?".
A hat tip to Drudge for pointing this out on his webpage. The Times is in the middle of a controversy about a lying reporter, but apparently it has no problems with helping to promote a lying source's book.
Note: I was unable to come up with independent confirmation of the two questions mentioned above, or a complete transcript of Blumenthal's grand jury testimony. In contemporaneous accounts of Blumenthal's press conference after the testimony, the focus was more on Blumenthal's claim that he had been asked about his contacts with the media. Other sources have concluded that Blumenthal was at best exaggerating this claim.
Later note: It is not surprising that the media would focus on the aspect of Blumenthal's charges that applied to THEM. The navel-gazing media always think they are the story.
Saturday, May 10, 2003
Ruy Teixeira and John Judis published a book last year entitled "The Emerging Democratic Majority". The title echoed Kevin Phillips' 1969 bestseller, "The Emerging Republican Majority", as well as Lanny Davis' lesser-known 1974 opus "The Emerging Democratic Majority".
Davis at least had the advantage of seeing his book published in a watershed year for Democrats. Teixeira and Judis had the misfortune of being published just before the 2002 midterm elections, in which the Democrats were pretty soundly trouced. Fortunately, hope springs eternal, and Teixeira has written an article for the Washington Monthly to show that the Democratic majority is still emerging despite the fact that for him, the 2002 election "wasn't my ideal outcome".
Teixeira throws a fair amount of percentages at the reader in the hopes that nobody will bother to look at them too hard. However, he makes no attempt to put these numbers into real context. For example, he says:
"The Denver-Boulder area as a whole voted for Democrat Strickland by a 6-point margin; that's larger than the 3-point victory Gore won in 2000, which in turn improved on Michael Dukakis's 1-point loss in 1988."
That makes it sound like a pretty straight line of improvement from Dukakis' 1-point loss to Gore's 3-point win to (US Senate candidate) Strickland's 6-point win. But of course it does not mention that when Dukakis lost by 1 point in Denver in 1998, he was losing by about 7.5 percentage points nationally, so that his 1-point loss in Denver was about 6.5 percentage points better than he did overall, while Gore's 3-point win in Denver only bettered what he was doing nationally by about 2.5 percentage points. That sure does not sound like an area getting more Democratic, and the inclusion of the Senate candidate is clearly a red herring.
The rest of the article contains oodles of the same sort of proof:
"Arapahoe voted for Reagan in 1980 by 39 points, for Bush I in 1988 by 22 points and for W. in 2000 by only eight points. In the same period, Jefferson favored Reagan by 34 points, Bush by 15, and his son by just eight."
Arapahoe certainly does seem to have gotten more liberal by the stats provided... but Bush II still won it by eight points, which hardly makes it a Democrat bastion. Jefferson however seems to have stayed about the same from Bush I to Bush II despite the slide indicated in the results. Bush I won by 15 points, which was about 7 points better than he did nationally. Bush II won by 8 points, which is about 8-1/2 points better than he did nationally.
"Maryland's gubernatorial election is an even stronger refutation of the exurban thesis. To begin with, Democrats picked up two House seats in the 2002 election, and Gore beat Bush by 17 points in the last presidential election."
Well, yes, but more to the point in 2002, they lost the governorship. To cite that gubernatorial election as a refutation of the exurban thesis (that as suburbs become more Democratic, as they have, that simultaneously exurbs are becoming populated disproportionately by Republicans) is pretty silly. And in fact, notice that he immediately tries to divert attention from that loss with two completely unrelated issues--the individual election results in congressional elections, and Gore's vote total in 2000.
"So the GOP was clearly the turnout party in 2002. But it's unlikely to be able to repeat this. To begin with, Democrats won't be caught napping again. They've launched their own version of the "72-Hour Project" called "Project 5104"--shorthand for winning 51 percent of the vote in '04."
As usual, an explanation for 2002 that does not require admitting that the voters preferred Republicans over Democrats. Instead, the Democrats were just caught napping, but they've got a plan for '04--to get 51% of the vote.
Now that may not sound like an ambitious plan. That is, until you look back over the last 14 presidential elections and realize that the Democrats have managed to achive that 51% goal exactly ONCE. That's right. LBJ got 61% of the vote in 1964. NO other Democrat candidate for president has gotten 51% of the vote. Carter in 1976 got a bare majority with 50.06%; he was the only one to break 50%. Truman in 1958, Kennedy in 1960, and even Clinton in 1992 and 1996 were NOT majority presidents. In that same period of time, Eisenhower (twice), Nixon, Reagan (twice) and Bush I have all gotten more than 51% of the vote.
Friday, May 09, 2003
Break up the Tigers! After a four game winning streak, the team is now batting .207. They have closed to within a game and a half of the Cleveland Indians. They aren't quite reminding people of the 1961 Yankees, but they're also bearing less resemblance to the 1962 Mets.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
The State Department is reporting apparent good news in the war on terrorism--the total number of terrorist incidents was at its lowest level since 1969.
This appears to be a generous reading of the statistics at best. As someone else pointed out, having a better year against terrorism than 2001 is not exactly setting the bar very high. I went to the State Department's webside and checked the data for myself. Although the paragraph above cites deaths from terrorism, I was not able to find that statistic. I did find casualties, which clearly includes the wounded, and there the numbers were not positive. There were 2738 casualties in 2002. While that was down substantially from 2001's 5,431, it is higher than 2000's 1,391 and 1999's 940.
All these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt of course. For example, the report lists 1,440 Americans killed by terrorists in 2001 (I guess the rest killed on 9-11 were citizens of other countries?), but only 90 wounded, which seems an extremely low number to me.
And a higher casualty rate in 2002 as compared to 1999 and 2000 is not necessarily unexpected or a negative. When you go after the terrorists they frequently move their plans up, so it may be that we have taken casualties that would otherwise have been taken in 2003 or 2004.
|
|
