10.18.04
Posted in General at 1:57 am by site admin
I read an article recently in US News and World Report about some undecided voter in Wisconsin.
After I read that portion of the article, I decided that reading the rest of the article was a waste of time.
For some reason, when we start talking to and about individual undecided voters, we start using huge generalisms and making grand conclusions based on iffy to nonexistent data. Feel free to disagree with me; I could probably write a decent paper on it, if you truly don’t believe me.
Anyway, the biggest reason for this post was when I read this:
“A single mother struggling to make ends meet in suburban Philadelphia, Baldwin wonders whether the Republican incumbent or the Democratic challenger ever pore over their checkbooks or worry about paying bills.”Full Article
Now, Bush and Kerry each got, what, $75 million from the federal government to run their campaign?
They. Are. Not. Normal. People.
They do not have the same everyday concerns. They had a much richer upbringing than you did. They are from a different class than you. This is pretty much guaranteed among politicians(with the exception of Feingold(D-WI), I guess.).
So my point is: If that sort of thing is influencing your vote, you must be on crack, entirely uninformed about politics, inclined to have a rose-colored view of politics(or at least your preferred political candidate), or are just plain stupid.
Which leads to my question for the night: Why do we care what the undecideds think? Most of the time even THEY don’t understand what they’re thinking, evidently. What we obviously DO care about is how they’ll vote, and we do have some solid historical evidence on what they’ll do, but that has pretty much nothing to do with what they’re thinking.
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10.14.04
Posted in General at 1:17 am by site admin
I watched the third debate tonight, and wanted to throw out a few comments:
First off, I hate all moderators. They tend to ask overly long, leading questions that, as hard as they try, always end up with the candidates giving roughly the same answers as they’ve been giving for months; you’d think by now that moderators would know better than to ask a question about Iraq and expect something other than, “We have to win in Iraq, and saying, ‘wrong war, wrong place, wrong time’ …” and, “I made a mistake in how I talked about the war, the president made a mistake in …”.
Mind you, this moderator was better than the rest, as he managed to ask several questions that Bush and Kerry ignored because they didn’t want to talk about it. One instance was the flu shot question, which at first I intensely disliked, as the answer should be mostly factual. And, in fact, Bush’s answer was basically that. Kerry twisted it into a question about health care. But, they had to think on their feet, and there was a danger that they’d actually say something new.
Other than that, there were only a few things that truly bugged me(although I should point out that I’m not bugged by most things I see as being the best way to politically answer a question. In other words, if you ever answer a yes or no question with a yes or no, you’re an extremely bad politician, and should lose. Bush and Kerry are good politicians, and thus will never give you a straight black-and-white answer when you demand it.). One of the most annoying things in the debate was when Bush talked about how he supported an increase in the minimum wage(And then went on to talk about edimicating the people who are evidently too stupid to get an above minimum wage job on their own.). Does anyone actually believe that he supported an increase? This is also much like his support of the assault weapon ban. His saying that he is willing to sign a bill means pretty much nothing, as he’s never vetoed a bill, and thus his influence must have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not he’s willing to sign something.
Mind you, at this moment I should also point out that while Kerry may have a good case in saying that he’s never literally flip-flopped, it’s pretty obvious that he was much more anti-war in his terminology back during the primaries than he is now.
Anyway, to tie this all together, the one type of question I’d like a moderator(or, god forbid, some stupid, “member of the public”) to ask is how the candidates view copyright law. I’m pretty certain neither candidate has actually prepared a statement(or memorized biased facts) on the topic, so it’d lead to one of three things: Talking about the American Public getting shafted, talking about the musicians getting shafted, or talking about something completely unrelated that, in normal conversation, would lead you to believe that the person you’re talking to is senile or just plain stupid.
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10.04.04
Posted in General at 11:22 pm by site admin
I asked a coworker today if she thought that, aside from position and consequence, the brouhaha with CBS doing a shoddy investigation of Bush’s past was roughly equivalent to the recent revelations about certain steel pipes being obviously not WMDs.
Here’s my reasoning:
Dan Rather believed so fully that Bush didn’t actually fulfill his obligations to the Texas Air National Guard that he was convinced of the veracity of the documents long before he should have been.
Bush, Cheney, and company believed so fully that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that they were convinced that they had evidence of it long before they did.
In both cases, certain people’s beliefs got in the way of their making a reasonable judgment, and in both cases they told the opposing side that they were stupid for questioning the evidence. (As an aside, I fully believed that Saddam had some amount of WMDs or at least production capability, and I’m still pretty fully convinced that Bush’s military career is pretty stellar for a drunken frat boy getting by on his dad’s name.)
My coworker thought the two instances are worlds apart. I’m still not sure exactly why, aside from the position and consequence things(In other words, regardless of how bad Dan Rather gets, there probably aren’t going to be many people whose heads literally roll because of his actions.)
All of this being said, I’m inclined to say that neither will terribly matter in the longer run; nearly everyone who now thinks we should have gone into Iraq will dismiss this with logic along the lines of, “Well, WMDs don’t matter, as Saddam was the one who had to prove he was clean in the first place.” and the people who think Bush went AWOL will say, “Well, CBS may have false documents, but the gist of the argument is certainly true.”
And both sides will conveniently ignore that the people they trust either lied to them or were wildly incompetent.
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10.02.04
Posted in General at 11:31 pm by site admin
Hi, I’m a moderate.
Now, Rush Limbaugh believes that moderates are people who are just wishy-washy about their viewpoints.
I’m not. Thus the “wacko” in “moderate wacko”.
My intent with this blog is to present the sides to an issue, and then attempt to view them from a logical point of view. My intent is also to present my viewpoints. Hopefully I’ll make it clear enough that you’ll see the difference. If you don’t see it, or you don’t agree with me, please comment — I’d also like discussion, as dissent is a key to a free society — it keeps the fringes from going ever more extreme, and since this is a site devoted to moderation, I’d like an extreme amount of dissent. Do be ready for the possibility of being called a moron, though. I don’t take kindly to stupid(i.e., illogical, not thought through) ideas.
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