Politblogo

I have shaken the hand that annoyed Tucker Carlson

I went on a trip to DC, and today a new era in world history has begun.  I have met Chuckles in person!  This momentous event sent a cataclysmic  of mystical energies through the ether, the magnitude and significance of which you may never comprehend---but they will affect you!  And it did involve eating delicious Ethiopian food.  Awaze tibbs, mmm mmm.

(My Canadian readers wouldn't know who I'm talking about or his significance to human history, so they might want to read the Coles Notes version here.)

Liberal Party bloggers, gaze upon the zombie rictus grin of your party!

Once again, we are back on the My Blahg treadmill.  It's rare that I link to or even pay attention to the foul miasma that regularly belches forth from Warren Kinsella's virtual mouth, but his column today in the Notional Pest obnoxiously outdoes some of the worst that his slavish imitators have accomplished.  And it's even more rare that I link to the Pest, which, for my American readers, is the Canadian newspaperly equivalent of Faux News.

And we do not have to look far for signs of verbal putrefaction:

National Post - The NDP's blog blow-back [alliteration, how creative of the Pest headline writers!]:  One month ago, at an Ottawa gathering of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), Ed Broadbent stood before the hundreds of Jews in attendance, and wept.

The former New Democratic Party leader was present to receive the first annual David Lewis Memorial Award on behalf of his deceased wife, Lucille. As current NDP leader Jack Layton stood by to give support, Broadbent cried, thanking CIJA for recognizing the work of Lucille on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jewry. He, and Lucille, received a long standing ovation.

It was an extraordinarily emotional moment, and one that signalled -- some hoped -- the beginnings of a rapprochement between Canada's political left and those who support Israel. In recent years, and as the National Post has reported many times, there has been an undeniable and yawning gap between Jews and the left. As prominent NDP supporter and lawyer Clay Ruby has observed, "Some critics of Israel conveniently focus on Israeli wrongdoings to mask their blatant anti-Semitism." Too often, these days, this sort of criticism has emanated from the left.

The emphasis is mine.  Take a look at the utterly dishonest slight of hand he demonstrates right there:  Lucille Broadbent worked laudably on behalf of oppressed Soviet Jewry.  She won a posthumous award for this.  To receive this award is presented without evidence is a sign that Ed Broadbent is reconciling with "supporters of Israel."    "The Left" is personified in the figures of Ed and Lucille. Since Ed and Lucille accepted an award for work on behalf of oppressed Jews, we are expected to indicate The Left is now "supporting Israel."

Of course, we can take this further, and in doing so, we see that this is merely a repetition of the Standard Calumny.  What is this "support Israel" thing, anyway?  Why, it presupposes, in the standard lawyerly have-you-stopped-kicking-cute-puppies way, that The Left, that great unified colossus, previously "opposed" Israel.  Of course, any rational person would recognize that one does not "oppose" or "support" a geographical demarkation, such as Israel---any more than one supports or opposes the North Pole.  Instead one supports or opposes a political position and/or state ideology.  So what could Mr. Kinsella mean by this obviously calculated presuppostion?

He means, of course, that The Left, this single nefarious body represented by Emperor Layton and symbolized in the Broadbent Caliphate, is a Nazi.  And in doing so, he delegitimizes any robust support of the Palestinians in their plight, a cause to which Lucille Broadbent's laudable work is more similar than to the cause of the Israeli state.

The rest of the article is a hatchet job on the Canadian left blogosphere, which Warren Kinsella has always hated, even as he promoted himself as an anti-racist activist and a punk rocker---hilarious given the fact that he helped Jean Chrétien, symbol of The Establishment, retain power by performing the hilarious but trivial task of squashing Stockwell Day like a bug in a wet suit.  What McLelland said was clearly offensive---abusing Holocaust imagery in the case of Jews---but Kinsella takes what is a heartfelt negative reaction to McLelland's words and mendaciously turns it proof that The Left is recovering from its previous evil ways and will henceforth cast the Palestinians under the bus.

Finally, he reveals the hatred that certain brands of political operatives have for self-publishing media like blogs.  First of all, he makes a snide reference to pseudonymous bloggers.  That's because Mr. Kinsella has a deep love of destroying people, and it annoys him when their identities aren't ready on hand to destroy.  And then he describes his desire for the blogosphere to be controlled by organizations (he is also clearly aware that most blogs aren't party-endorsed, but he loves to smear the NDP even more than he loves to smear the Reformatories):

The McClelland incident is a cautionary tale, for political parties and the media alike: Each of these cases testify to the need for increased reputational vigilance. As the popularity of blogs has exploded, many corporations and political parties have scrambled to ensure their presence in the blogosphere. But they have not been as watchful as they should be.

Finally, in case my American readers don't understand the ways in which him and his adoring groupies like Jason Cherniak (who repeats an old slander against Noam Chomsky) are a pustulent boil on the face of Canadian politics:

For example, John Edwards' presidential campaign recently endured a withering blow when two women who contributed to the Democrat's campaign blog -- Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan -- attacked Catholics, and referred to opponents as "Christofascists." Unfortunately, Edwards did not ask for Marcotte and McEwan's resignations, although both apologized.

So whenever I hear that well-intentioned people join the Liberal Party in the belief that they are assisting progressive politics in Canada, I mentally welcome them to a front row seat at Warren Kinsella's lower intestine.

Epithet ethics

I read a few American political humour blogs and have been doing so for some time.  Many of these blogs spend a lot of time often quite hilariously and skillfully deconstructing the American right.  They are often, yes, Standard American Liberals, although some of them are occasionally able to point out the structural deficits of American politics.  However, with anything that involves the ridicule of an opposing movement, it necessarily involves the ridicule of people in that opposing political movement, if for nothing other than what they say.

You can imagine that it bears some risks.  It can be a fine line and easy to trip up and cause collateral damage.  I have occasionally seen a joke that to which I myself am collateral damage, but I have a thick skin and am willing to overlook a lot.  I am also willing to forgive easily and laugh along with it, if it were clear that the individual making the joke is somewhat sensitive to the damage it caused. 

Lately, there's was a dustup in the American blogosphere when Sadly, No!, a low humour favorite of mine, mocked a conservative for his fat. A lot of American liberals, due to the social geography of the US, for some reason take fat to be a sign of moral and political turpitude in the way that others take poverty, and many of the Sadly, No! commenters and some of its contributors could not bring themselves to grasp the nature of the objection, and thence ensured a flamewar there and at Feministe (continued here and here, the comments on all these threads are very long).

In my previous post, I too might have fallen prey to this problem.  A lot of ridicule is based on disgust, and the things that are most evocative of disgust are physical things.  So it's easy to overlook or rationalize the collateral damage.  At the same time, I still find blogs like Sadly, No! and World O'Crap funny, even when there's collateral damage, because it's so hard to avoid it. I have even encountered some very---for example---radical feminist blogs who occasionally fall into the trap or, perhaps, cross their own line that way. It's also possible to avoid being a stubborn fool about it.   And ridicule is too useful a tool to set aside.

The point of this post?  I'm still not sure how far to rationalize away the collateral damage some ridicule can cause.  I'm not willing to give it up entirely, but that too may be a...lame? rationalization.

Progressive Bloggers moderators decide that something isn't progressive

Apparently, My Blahg was expelled from the Progressive Bloggers.  Well, I wasn' t following that dustup, so I can't comment on the merits of the case.  What I can do, however, is congratulate the Progressive Bloggers' moderators on deciding that something that may or not be anti-Semitic isn't progressive.  It's a good start.  What's next for our intrepid moderation team?  Will they decide that things that may or may not involve the kicking of puppies are also not progressive? 

After that, surely they'll graduate to larger subsets of racism and sexism!  Think of the possibilities!

(And it turns out that our old blogbuddy, Jason Cherniak, has his grubby little fingers all over this one.   Why am I not surprised?)

The Media Bloggers Association and elite blogging

One of the things I found out when I was liveblogging the Libby trial for a day was that a few of the bloggers who were there legitimately (as opposed to smuggled-in contraband like me) were affiliated with something called the Media Bloggers Association, which had obtained credentials for a permanent place in the Prettyman courthouse's media room.  Canadian bloggers may be more familiar with this concept than American ones---it is an aggregator similar to the Progblogs or the Non-Partisan Canadians, except it's primarily intended for American bloggers who comment on and participate in the media.  Aggregators are less prominent in US bloggery than Canadian bloggery.

Naturally, a person like me is going to wonder, especially with its apparent ability to obtain credentials at national events, whether it's an effort to create a tier of bloggers with privileged connections and access. The group's founder, Robert Cox, naturally protests otherwise.  Well, I am happy that he reconfirmed that opening rather than restricting access is part of his endeavour.  But looking around elsewhere on the site, I am still bothered.

Most worrisome is the group's membership rules page:

   Applicants must provide detailed contact information and complete all required fields in the application

[Note: As a general rule, the MBA does not accept anonymous bloggers as members. We are willing to make exceptions and have done so but this is done rarely and only when there is a clear and compelling reason for anonymity. Regardless, all member applicants must disclose their identity to the chairman of the membership review committee who will make a preliminary determination on whether to recommend the applicant to the board anonymously or under a pseudonym.]

...

The most recent posts should indicate whether the blogger is active. If the most recent post is weeks or months old that's a major problem. Also look for very long gaps between posts. We are looking for members who are committed to blogging and furthering the mission of the MBA. Members can't do that if they are not blogging or blogging only occasionally.

It should be obvious to my regular readership why I focused on these two issues, since they're the ones that apply to me most and hence raise my hackles the most.  To me, the possibility of a weak pseudonymy is what protects the little people and enables them to speak freely in a capitalist society where our well-being partly depends on the whims of our employers.  In my case, I also have multiple parts of my identity that make me feel somewhat vulnerable to blog in the open, even though it probably isn't very hard to dig deeply to figure out who I am (and I'm OK with that).  But that rule pretty much restricts membership to those who are either prepared to be martyrs or have the ability to feel liberated and secure in their blogging---especially people whose employers agree with them.  So I am deeply suspicious of the sentiments underlying the opposition to anonymity and pseudonymity, because to me it can't come other than from a place of perceived privilege.

The second one, well, I do go on long hiatuses from time to time, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of other "serious" (their word) bloggers do this too.  I go for quality over quantity, myself, and I can't generate quality without a certain amount of time, thought, and confidence, and there are periods in my life where I lack some of these.  Again, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of other people in the same boat as me.  If it is required to be a very frequent writer to be a "serious" blogger and gain the intended benefits of the prominance to which the MBA aspires, that seems a little troubling to me, particularly if they succeed.  (I am not, by the way, claiming that very frequent bloggers necessarily sacrifice quality.  It just takes some of us more time to muster up the wherewithal.)

In any case, when it came to the Libby trial, the MBA fortunately did not have the status of blogger gatekeeper.  Naturally, it was the court who was the gatekeeper, and the court staff have a sense of proportion and were very willing to accomodate me in the media room as a dilettante.  I wasn't "contraband" to the court, but, I suspect, to many of the journalists who had to go through the "real" process.  So in this case, it had a happy ending. 

And I don't want to thoroughly impugn the good intentions of Mr. Cox.  He promises an update to his article on these sorts of concerns, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  But I'm still finding it difficult to see how this isn't a putative attempt to subdivide the political/media blogosphere into tiers of access and prominance.

I got booktagged

I got tagged by AradhanaD at Leftist Looney Lunchbox.

The instructions:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

This was a little difficult.   I had three nearest books, and one of them was a dictionary.  I chose one of the other two.  Here's the quote:

Theorem 6.4 can be quite useful in conjunction with upper bounds on the binomial distribution, such as Lemma 6.1.

A bound on the right tail can be determined similarly.

Corollary 6.5
Consider a sequence of n Bernoulli trials where success occurs with probability p.

The book is the first edition of Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest.  This book should be familiar to anybody who has spent more than a couple of years studying computer science at a university level. It's a giant tome and one of the most useful "theory" books in computer science.  It was a little hard to pick out what was the "fifth sentence" because prior to what I quoted, there were several equations.

The quote comes from chapter 6, "Counting and Probability," which is one of the introductory chapters giving background/remedial mathematics.  (The book is about 1000 pages or so.)  It's basically talking about what happens at the far ends of the so-called "bell curve."

Anyway, I usually don't do this to people, but I'll make an exception: I tag skdadl, Craig, and Violet, since they are all so literate.

Liberal blogger engages in standard discussion-board troll whine

We're having a field day on Liberal bloggers here, apparently.  Jason Cherniak, another typical party hack and pipsqueak (these are disgustingly common in the Canadian blogosphere), has engaged apparently in a classic discussion board troll tactic in his bizarre war against someone named DiNovo who is apparently all the rage on the "progressive" bloggers aggregator site of which, inexplicably, Cherniak is a member.  Most of his credentials on the matter amount to the trivial act of opposing Stephen Harper and making use of whatever convenient politics permit him to do so.

It is very common on political discussion boards of one perspective or another for people of different political sympathies to engage in a crude and destructive tactic that generally goes like this:

1. Post a series of leading questions intended to divert discussion from the main focus of the site.
2. Watch as the moderators take corrective action to---imagine!---moderate the discussion.
3. Crow all over the internets about how one was censored! censored! on a limited-scope discussion site which one had transparently and obviously decided to troll.

This crowing in step 3 takes the form of a peculiar verbal orgasm, because the banning is a thing, for such individuals, to celebrate, as it enables them to lie about the situation to their intended audience, in front of whom (they think) the victims have little chance of defending themselves.  I say "lie" very consciously, because most effective lies contain a grain of truth to them: Cherniak was indeed apparently banned.   The lie is his description of that for which he was banned---which was being deliberately disruptive by asking questions that he knew his targets would consider to be leading and unfair in order to score a cheap point.

(And his questions are leading.  This DiNovo woman, an OntNDP by-election candidate somewhere in Toronto and erstwhile Christian preacher, has had some unusual but nontrivial ideas about drugs and Christian forgiveness.  His questions assume that she wants to give LSD to children and let pedophiles molest them, or something---I could hardly care what the substance of the issue is, really.

"Will somebody PLEASE think of the children? Since we were already on the subject of the Simpsons.)

I am a member of rabble's discussion forum, babble.  I was very active for five years there, or something.  An internal rift a few months ago, with whose gory details I shall not bore the reader, caused a large exodus of members to two other sites, and I followed one group of them.  Cherniak-types were a very common problem at babble, since sites with even a modicum of seriousness about social progress have always been subject to incessant attacks by pipsqueaks with agendas or nothing more interesting to do.  I am personally  acquainted in real life with the moderators and am glad that they continue to assert the primary purpose of the site, rather than let it become an instrument for vicious, politically empty hucksters who raise spurious charges of censorship against a single Internet site with a well-defined goal.

Jason Cherniak, on the other hand, has demonstrated himself in this affair to be precisely what I have described him above to be, little more than a cheap Internet troll whose ego has been so stroked by his elevation to a trivial campaign post by Stéphane Dion that he ostensibly believes that he has demonstrated to us something of greater significance than his willingness to twist and lie.  This, alas, is likely to be the very standard in Canadian partisan politics, and I'm sure the development of these habits will take Cherniak far.

Brief quasi-vacation; hello Pandagonians!

Hello, Pandagonians!  For those who don't know, this post has been added as a guest post on Pandagon right here.  So welcome to any new readers!

I have been on a reduced posting schedule due to travel and the preparations for it.  I'll try to get back in business when I get home again.

Quixotification

I have an exciting announcement to make.  I have accepted an offer from the good gentlemen from La Mancha to join their bloggery team. Yep, I'm joining Tilting at Windmills as an author. 

Tilting at Windmills is definitely higher-end real estate than Politblogo.  But I am sentimental about Politblogo, so I will still try to keep this site active as a playground for political cheese-lovers everywhere, never fear.  Naturally, though, I will be devoting some content to Quixotianity from now on, but I'll try to keep you guys abreast of that as I do it. 

Fame and fortune await!  But I probably won't post anything substantive there today, as I am trying to get ready to travel.

Peakzilla vs. the Holy Market

Ooops, I did it again!  Well, at least, this is the second time I've done it.  I diverted yet another Catallarchy thread into a discussion of Peak Oil.  (I didn't blog the first time.)

Thing is, philosophically and empirically speaking, free-market libertarians have the most to lose from the Oil Peak.  I mean, aside from the minor issue of the catastrophic human cost of a hard landing.  If the predictions of Peak Oil doomsayers are true to any extent, then it means that the natural world can generate events to which the free market cannot adapt in time to save itself.  Of course, this is not the same as a run-of-the-mill natural disaster, where it can be argued that the market can function to rectify the overall aftermath, given some period of time (I'm being charitable here, bear with me).  In that case, the market resumes immediately, one would expect.  In the case of Peak Oil, there would be no energy to sustain the market with, because it couldn't plan/signal far enough ahead to save itself.

Anyway, I bring you my customary sample comment from that thread in response to Micha Ghertner (his comments also quoted too):

Catallarchy:  Gas Caps - Mandos:

Further, the Peak Oilers aren’t claiming that there is tiny chance that we will run out of oil, but if we do the costs will be great, so great that we should spend money on prevantative measures which will cost less than the catastrophe multiplied by the low risk. No, the Peak Oilers claim that the chance is enormous, verging on the inevitable. And markets show why they are wrong, or at least not believable enough to be worth listening to.

Two problems with this:

1. This presupposes a belief in the ability of markets to use information efficiently to plan ahead for catastrophe, which is, if you restate the peak oil position, quite exactly what they are challenging. It’s worth noting that Matt Savinar’s (IMO too specific) Life After The Oil Crash scenario of collapse actually doesn’t seem to depend directly on the peak but instead on the what he believes will be the reaction of the market upon realization that the peak has arrived but that they didn’t plan for it. In other words, the market will realize too late and will act too drastically. I mean, the whole argument is specifically that the markets will not react when there is sufficient lead time to physically implement alternatives. So your response here assumes the opposite from the get-go—not logical.

Now why would someone claim that the market wouldn’t encode the correct information. Peak oilers have a panoply of explanations for this, from cultural factors to game-theoretic ones.

2. The fact is (and this may actually be positive news) is that information does appear to be percolating through the market about the problem. You may notice that the price of long-term futures was, a few months ago, much less than the price of short-term futures, as speculators seemed to assume that the high price was a temporary phenomenon. Well, now the market no longer believes the Saudi oil officials: long-term futures are now at parity with the high price of short-term contracts. The question is, can it reach a level high enough (but not too high), early enough, to create the transition necessary for the actual peak, whenever it comes, to have much less of an effect than it ordinarily would on the North American and Chinese economies in particular.