Bill's Notes

I've recalled why I'm still a registered Democrat. Took yesterday's voting fiasco to jog my memory. Some of you may recall that I was a lifelong Democrat — and a committed one. I was a poll watcher for the Democrats in 1995. For a long time, I referred to myself as a conservative Democrat, probably since 1990. In 2000, I voted for my first Republican, Dubya.

Still, it was a difficult decision in the voting booth — surprisingly difficult considering I had every intention of voting for Bush for months beforehand. At the last minute, I had qualms. The GOP? I couldn't really go over to the dark side, could I?

Well, now I recall filling out my voter registration form prior to the election. I figured I was in Pennsylvania, and the Democratic Party in PA boasts the legacy of the great Bob Casey, the pro-life Democratic governor. That's closest to my position on things. So I figured the Dems were still friendly in the commonwealth to a conservative Democratic position.

Well, in the past four years, I'd have to say, no, the Dems aren't friendly to conservative ideas. I still hate the idea of going over to the GOP. I mean, when the woman at the polling place told me I was registered Democratic, it seemed right. To a certain extent, I'll always be a Reagan Democrat. I have no illusions that those who are very rich share my interests: The point is they're much less interested in damaging my interests than many Democrats, who in many cases don't share my interests.

Until the Dems stop demagoguing on various social issues and get serious about national security, crime, education and tort reform, I'll have to remain in exile in the GOP. Hell, maybe all the exiles will eventually take over the party, and drive the old mainline plutocrats somewhere else.

Bill over at INDC has completed a fascinating, neck-risking study of moonbats up close.

Outstanding field work. He was able to capture many species of moonbat, including several rare ones. Very exciting for the professional anthropologist -- or just laymen like myself.

I've been de-blogrolled by one of my favorite sites, Doctor Horsefeathers. Don't know when, don't know why. I just hope they didn't find an excess of folly, ignorance and cant on the Web site (see their banner).

I never changed my voter registration. I am still a registered Democrat. Still. A Democrat.

While I'm far from the most conservative Republican, I wonder if I am in fact the most conservative Democrat in the U.S. right now.

So I had to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary. (I picked John Edwards.)

There it is. I'm still a Democrat. People lied! Bush's snide!

Saw School of Rock over the weekend. Had some very funny moments. (I was a little horrified when the lead character assigned odious 70s pretense-rock band Yes to a student, and specifically mentioned 70s pretense-rock-crap song Roundabout, but that aside, it was pretty good.)

The funniest to me was right in the beginning, when Jack Black has just been nagged by his roommate for back rent money at the behest of roommate's hot-but-shrewish new girlfriend: "Look, I've been mooching off you for years. And it was never a problem until she came into the picture." Jack Black then suggests the girlfriend needs to be dumped. Talk about best defense is a good offense.

The second funniest was when Jack Black is finally given his costume to wear for a performance that serves as the movie's finale, and it's a postal uniform, a la Angus Young.

Trivia question: Angus Young's brother George Young fronted what band?

My take on the 1971 medal-tossing incident: Kerry may have merely forgotten what he did in 1971. Memory does that. And Kerry's not alone with the memory thing. Most Americans can't even remember what America was like in 1971 because:

1. Too young or not born yet.
2. Too stoned at the time.
3. Too old NOW to remember.
4. Too stoned NOW to remember.
5. Out of the country at the time.
6. Out of the country now.

Seriously, who remembers that day in 1971 clearly? Vietnam was a big, long clusterf---k and if we have any hope as a community, we need to admit that. And then move on. And most of us have long since moved on.

The bottom line is John Kerry put himself in harm's way by going to Vietnam. Then he came back and put himself in harm's way again by protesting the war. Every account I've heard of that time shows Kerry as a thoughtful young man, concerned about his country and wanted to reverse what he sincerely thought was a serious error by his country. And from all accounts I've read he repeatedly distanced himself from the more extreme elements of the anti-war movement.

Anyone could easily remember throwing ribbons, but in fact he threw medals. Whatever. Memory plays tricks.

Vietnam is one of those subjects that we have to admit the U.S. government made serious, grievous errors -- errors not just of strategy and tactics, but of morality. Two successive administrations, LBJ's and Nixon's, lied to the American people about what was going on overseas, then lied to the American people about the final result of the peace negotiations.

We were not given a straight story, repeatedly. People were asked to make sacrifices based on bad faith. We created, propped up and then abandoned an ally. We were not trying to win but trying not to lose. It was a total effing mess, start to finish, and thank God it's over.

To drag the Vietnam era into the present seems extremely foolish. Both the anti-war and the pro-war side had legitimate arguments at their disposal. Yes, Vietnam was fought to stop the spread of communism, and while Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam ultimately fell, the dominoes may have stopped right there because of our efforts. Yes, Vietnamization had shown tremendous progress but the U.S. cut off funding and aid for South Vietnam, and left them to their devices against the Russian-backed NVA. Yes, there were atrocities. Yes, the government lied but ultimately it was fighting in a good cause.

Taking a stand in the midst of that mess was not easy, and the answer is charity for all except for those few who unrepentantly took the other side: The Jane Fondas and the ones chanting "ho ho ho chi minh." The ones who wanted the communists to win and haven't apologized -- screw them. B

ut for those who made a good faith to understand a situation that still ... with the benefit of 33 years, still looks like a muddle ... no, I don't think we can be too tough on anyone. John Kerry included.

We are not electing the 1971 John Kerry. We are looking at the older man whom that thoughtful and brave young man became. He became one of the most liberal senators in the Senate. And now he's running a fairly moderate campaign, except for abortion.

My concerns about John Kerry are threefold:

* His lack of executive experience. What organization has Kerry run? How much managing has he done?

* His detachment from the mindset (and experience) of professional class, middle class, working class, rural and poor Americans. He's had an enormously privileged upbringing, but unlike George W. Bush, Kerry seems to have stayed mentally in that privileged cocoon. Bush, for some reason, identifies with ordinary Americans (and they with him) much better than Kerry.

* Kerry occasionally shows flashes of a sense of entitlement rooted in intellectual arrogance. That is, Kerry sometimes seems to be saying I hold the right ideas, so they must be right, even if the evidence points the other way. If this is true and not just my imagination, Kerry could potentially be a Carteresque president. (Carter was the last president with that kind of arrogance; Carter had contempt for Reagan and his ideas, a deep, abiding, and wrongheaded insistence that Reagan was unfit to be president and thus Reagan's ideas must be wrong.)

In the post below I objected to the term "choice" on the grounds that choice is too high up on the hierarchy of abstraction to properly describe the "pro-choice" position.

What I'm referring to is simply the categorization of concepts. At the lower levels, we have specific words that are often quite accurate. At the top, we have very general categories: choice, life, freedom, justice, that encompass broad fields of vision. In the middle we have various levels of middle management words, just like in a corporation.

I object to categorizing people who are in favor of legal abortion as "pro-abortion." That's a misrepresentation of their position. The actual position might be accurately described as, "You as a pregnant woman have a right to privacy concerning the disposition of the gestating human within you." More colloquially, "you as a pregnant woman have the right to tell people to butt out when it comes to your pregnancy."

I also have little use for people who call people who are against abortion as, "anti-choice." That's a misrepresentation of the position. The actual position might be accurately described as, "That gestating human within you has some rights, or at the very least one right, the right to life, and if you the pregnant woman do not protect that gestating human within you, then we as a community will take steps to protect the life from you."

As you can see, the accurate descriptions makes both sides seem a lot less nefarious. One thing I try to do here at Industrial Blog is unpack professional rhetoric, manipulative debate and spin — lies are often embedded cleverly in a debate, and if you don't spot the lies, you'll draw the wrong conclusions. One way spin is spun is by manipulating the level of abstraction.

Simply put, you start with a specific example, and then zoom out — that is, expand your field of vision outward and outward until you come to a general category no one could possibly be against. Freedom. Justice. Love. Then categorize people who are against your specific example against the broader concept.

So when it comes to abortion, ten levels of abstraction might go from specific to general something like this: 10. this abortion. 9. abortion. 8. choosing abortion. 7. legal issues of choosing abortion, a/k/a privacy. 6. legal issues of choosing medical procedures, a/k/a medical privacy. 5. legal issues concerning choosing anything. 4. legal issues concerning human freedom (i.e., rights). 3. human freedom. 2. life. 1. existence.

Pro-choicers' language indicates that they are at abstraction level 5, while implying abstraction levels 4 and 3. They are not.

How do we know? The test is applicability. Broad concepts are applicable to everything under them in the hierarchy. Choice as it is used by pro-choicers doesn't apply even to abstraction level 6. Minors cannot have surgery without permission but for abortion. Which puts the pro-choice argument at abstraction level 7: legal issues of choosing abortion.

Now that's all well and good, being at abstraction level seven. Fine. Let's keep the discussion there. Problems occur, and millions of people engage in the kind of hysterical rhetoric of last weekend in D.C., when they zoom out from level 7 to level 4 and act like their opponents are against level 4, or hell, 3, 2, and 1.

And if you notice, often the very people who use this kind of categorical manipulation are the very same people who attack hierarchical thinking. My response: If you don't like hierarchical thinking, don't use a PC. The file system is EVIL. Use only mainframes. That file system is nice and egalitarian. And if you can't afford it, well, too bad.

*****

Take-home: If you feel like you're being manipulated, but aren't sure how, you're probably right. Sometimes, you have to listen to your instincts. Inspect the tools of spin: analogy is one of the most effective, but manipulating categories (through the level of abstraction) is another.

Here is the classic example:

Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did. But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the actions of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you ... isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!

Who's with me?

No one told me that there were going to be a million moonbats activists marching in Washington, D.C., breathing threats and murder against the unborn discussing threats to abortion their rights. Too bad, I'd like to have gone, you know, as an observer.

Funny how the pro-choicers march in beautiful weather in the springtime, while the pro-lifers end up marching on Roe's anniversary in January. I'm not sure the pro-choicers don't have the better idea. What's so special about marching on an anniversary?

If it's anniversaries you want, how 'bout the Fourth of July — the day of the Declaration of Independence. [Going from memory here:] "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty ..."

Either you believe the unborn have inalienable rights, and these rights come from our creator rather than our mothers, or you don't believe these things. Where I stand is pretty obvious: To think your rights come from your mother is childish, in both the psychological and moral sense.

MORE: I know I'm way late on this discussion, but Misha has a good take here.

Lost in the pro-"choice"* discussion, as Misha points out, is the human stupidity underlying the debate on the practical level. We can argue all day about the abstractions, but what's really happening in the real world is largely preventable. There's nothing stopping both sides of the debate from working together to dramatically reduce the number of abortions.

In this day and age, there are very few excuses for unwanted pregnancies. My own sense is if there were about 50,000 abortions a year nationwide — about the same as traffic fatalities — most of the debate would go away. It still wouldn't be right, but at least we'd be demonstrating as a people that we value human life and abortion is regrettable but medically necessary sometimes. But there are more than a million abortions — about one in four in total — and we as a people are showing contempt for human life. And not much brains. Or restraint.

* ain't much choice involved for the gestating human, is there? So calling one side of the debate "pro-choice" is a lie. A "woman's right to choose" is a little better, at least identifying the source of the choice. But we're really not talking about choice in the broad sense, anyway — we're at the wrong level of abstraction. We're talking about termination. The accurate description would be a "woman's right to terminate" a pregnancy prior to birth.

Wrote the perfect headline for a story, except it's too tabloid:

Lehman Brothers
Caught, Pants Down,
With Hands In Cookie Jar

Too bad I can't use it.

And then it hit me while reading on Misha's site about various troubles with trolls ... a predecessor to blogs was the various discussions written on the bathroom stall walls in college libraries. You know, before they made them stainless steel. You used to have an opinion written by someone, and then comments that followed from there.

I recall one such wall. It contained picture of a submarine. Underneath, someone else wrote an amusing Freudian analysis on what the picture meant. Which led to a rebuttal. Then a rebuttal to the rebuttal. Then threats. Then counter-threats. Then other people chimed in here and there. Now, what's the remind you of? A blog entry and a comment thread that goes awry.

Blogging in cyber-space: Bringing bathroom walls to your living room since 2000.

Michele'spicked a bunch of songs as the worst ones ever. I won't list their names here for fear of attracting hits.

You know what's funny? When I found out that Blender Magazine had their survey on the worst songs ever, my first thought was their No. 1 song, too: We Built This City by Jefferson Starship. Glad I wasn't the only one. Jeez that song sucked. I thought Jack and Diane is up there, too, for its mindless stupidity. Note I wasn't include any songs by bands that never had a good song. That's just picking on the weak.

But music isn't my expertise. Writing is. And who is currently the worst writer in North America? No, it's not Mark Morford, but that's close. Morford is not the worst because Morford is always bad in exactly the same way. He only writes one column, over and over again. Besides, Morford's talent level isn't terribly high.

No, the worst writer in North American for the past eight years or so is Gary Kamiya of Salon.com. Kamiya has real talent. But he has one fatal flaws as a writer: He's a horse's ass.

Example One. He wrote this:

"I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings."--Gary Kamiya

That was a year ago. Maybe he and all his morally sensitive people are happy now that things aren't going so well in Iraq.

I'm currently writing the third straight story on fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance. Did all the judges go to a seminar and now it's all, presumption of reliance? Very exciting stuff.

Of course, there are worse jobs. See title, above.

*****

BTW, a friend of mine had a good line when talking about John Kerry's Purple Hearts: "There's nothing particularly difficult about getting shot in a combat zone. You just stand up. Not getting shot, now that's something."