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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: May 2003 (page 3 of 10)

Red vs blue

There’s much talk everywhere lately about the demise of the Democratic party as a force in electoral politics, and indeed, I’m somewhat worried about it myself. I think that the problems stem mainly from a lack of leadership and the lack of a message for people to rally behind. Not that Republicans have a great message either, but let’s face it, they stand strongly in favor of looking out for yourself, your family, and your country — that’s the Republican message on just about everything. So in the absence of a compelling cause for more magnanimous action or attitudes (which is what liberals should stand for), Republicans win by default. They also have the anger thing going for them. Republicans and, more accurately, conservative entertainers, do a good job of misleading people so that they become outraged about conservative issues and then exploit that for votes and dollars. They’re better at it than Democrats.

That said, having spoken with my family in Texas about Bush, I’m seeing people start to see both he and the Republicans for what they really are. All of the people I’ve spoken to are definitely red staters — generally socially conservative and pretty strongly pro-Republican. All of them voted for Bush twice for governor and once for President. One of them works in public schooling and only after going to a big seminar realized that one part of the Republican agenda is to destroy public education as we know it. One other has said that they will not vote for Bush regardless of who the Democrats put up against him, because he scares them. These are voters who I would have said could not have been won over to the Democratic side in the next election or in any election. So I think there’s more going on than the cursory analysis reveals.

Update: as an astute reader rightfully pointed out, the people mentioned above have not been won over to the Democratic party. In fact, chances are they won’t be. However, the point is that even among the most loyal Republicans, George Bush and others can give away votes through their behavior. To be honest, I would be much happier if the Republican party shifted back toward the New England wing than if a few Republicans bailed on the party and voted Democratic in the next election cycle.

Strange days indeed

I never thought I would read of Ariel Sharon saying this:

It is not possible to continue holding three and a half million people under occupation. This is a terrible thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy. Today 1.8 million Palestinians live thanks to support from international organization. Do you want to take responsible for them yourselves? I do not think that it is right to control Bethlehem and Ramallah.

I have no idea what the implications are, but the fact that Sharon said it is stunning.

Remember Afghanistan

In this Economist story about the state of things in Afghanistan, they mention that CNN has shut down its Afghanistan operation. Hopes for America seeing things through in Afghanistan seem particularly bleak to me — we weren’t very committed before we invaded Iraq, campaign season will soon go into full swing, and there’ll be even less attention avaiable for the luckless Afghans.

Microsoft’s anti-spam proposal

Microsoft has submitted its thoughts on spam to the Senate Commerce Committee. No brilliant ideas are contained within. Larry Lessig comments on one specific part, a safe harbor provision for spammers who join self regulating industry groups or something along those lines.

If you’re curious about Annika

ESPN is recapping every single one of Annika Sorenstam’s first shots today, for those of you who are curious about how the first woman to play in a PGA Tour event in 58 years does.

Nobody should have to care about this

Ben Edelman, an economics grad student at Harvard, has published a study of how Gator actually works. I have never had this abomination installed on my machine, but I imagine plenty of my friends and relatives who have yet to escape the hinternet probably do.

Al Jazeera had a scoop

Fred Kaplan read a Defense Times article in which military brass openly talk about bribing Iraqi commanders before we invaded Iraq. Al Jazeera was running stories about this right after the fall of Baghdad, and it wasn’t picked up at all in the US media. (Perhaps they didn’t think that Americans would be interested in the fact that we blitzed through Iraq in record time because Iraqi soldiers were paid not to show up for work.) He also picks up the thread of recordings of the Iraqi officers talking about banned weapons that Colin Powell played during his February 5 UN speech, wondering about the same things that I did back on May 7.

Hijacking .NET

Slashdot posted a review of Dan Appleman’s ebook, Hijacking .NET, which explains how you can utilize private members in .NET classes even though you should theoretically prevented from doing so. For once, the comments are more interesting than the review, as a pretty good discussion about whether access levels in declarations should be used for security purposes breaks out.

EZ-D

Ed Felten has some interesting thoughs on the soon to be introduced self-destructing DVDs from FlexPlay.

Resume scoring software

Business 2.0 has an intersting article on how big companies use software to score r

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