20-something investments

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My Pro-Skub T-Shirt: A Play in Three Acts

Act I

Dude: [Looking at my shirt] What's a "skub"?

Me: Skub is a viscous non-descript paste.

Dude: ...

Me: ...

Dude: What's a skub?

Act II

Dude: [Looking at my shirt] What's a "skub"?

Me: A mass noun.

Dude: ...

Act III

Dude: [Looking at my shirt] What's a skub?

Me: Well, you see, there's this comic-strip series I like called Perry Bible Fellowship and there's this one strip where...

Dude: OH I'M SORRY! I STOPPED LISTENING SEVERAL SECONDS AGO!

Moral of the Story? One day I will fulfill my destiny. On that day, I will be wearing my Pro-Skub T-Shirt. I will see a man on the street wearing his Anti-Skub T-Shirt. He will see me. We will spontaneously engage in a street-fight. Until that day, I must resign myself to not having a particularly good answer to the common question, "What's a skub." So it goes.

Excellent California Commentary

Via Bilerico Indiana, I thought this was hilarious:



I'm not going to lie, I was particularly amused by the Scott Nevins joke. Attaboy, Scott and fine work Jeffery Self!

I Continue to Receive Credit for Looking like Grover

Sitemeter always yields fascinating information. For example, I am continually surprised by the number of people who come to my blog because they did a google image search for "Grover." Indeed, a rather old post -- the second oldest on this blog -- chronicled the similarities between my own appearance and Grover's. The picture from that entry is the third most popular result for a Grover image search on google! I swear that like three or four people look at it every day. Weird.

In completely unrelated news, now that summer is near, I am ashamed to admit, against all my better judgment, that I still find LFO's "Summer Girls" perversely endearing and charming. I don't really understand why I find it so, but I just do. Go figure.

Indy to Host Super Bowl

Add this to the growing list of good things the Peterson administration accomplished that the Ballard administration is going to get the credit for:

Indianapolis won the hosting rights to the 2012 Super Bowl today.

The National Football League’s 32 owners, meeting in Atlanta, voted to award the city the Feb. 5, 2012, game on their first vote. Arizona came in second.

Two things that would be awesome:

(1) Peyton Manning wins his fifth Super Bowl on home territory.

(2) Republicans who raked Peterson over the coals for "wasting" all that money on a Super Bowl bid that was "never going to happen" apologize and give Bart some damn credit.

Odds on each?

Crossposted at BlueIndiana.

California, Homophobia, and the Living Rebuttal

As I've written before, I generally place anti-gay marriage arguments into one of two camps. The first camp starts with the assumption that gay sex is sinful. Therefore, this line of reasoning continues, the state is justified in doing whatever it can to discourage and punish gay sex, any and all practices that might lead to gay sex, and especially any practice that might normalize the “gay lifestyle” -- which is imagined to be composed exclusively of non-stop, sweaty gay sex. From this perspective, gay marriages are problematic largely because they are intrinsically evil -- unions built around a fundamentally immoral act. Their practical or empirical effect is irrelevant. In other words, this argument is not premised on the idea that gay marriage is bad because bad things will happen if gays marry. Rather, it believes that gay marriage is, in and of itself, a bad thing. This argument is often buried in a naturalistic fallacy of some sort -- usually “marriage is definitionally between a man and a woman, therefore same-sex couples can't be married” -- but at its core it takes issue with fundamental moral qualities of gay sex. Given that core, one cannot rebut this argument by discussing the empirical consequences of gay marriage, since it is utterly indifferent to those consequences.

The other camp is a bit more thoughtful and nuanced, though it still relies upon the idea that same-sex relationships are inherently inferior to different-sex relationships. In general, it posits that there is unique social value in monogamous different-sex marriages and that the broadening of “marriage” diminishes that value -- if anyone can get married for any reason, marriage will soon be meaningless. The deterioration of marriage, furthermore, will herald a series of other catastrophic social consequences: increasing delinquency, crime, and poverty. This argument is usually indifferent to gay sex itself. People are entitled to privacy and freedom in the bedroom, it reasons. Gay relationships are only problematic when they move from the bedroom to the town hall -- when gay people seek wider social acceptance and protection for their relationships in ways that may harm or weaken society in a broader sense. This argument, thus, has a predictive quality which allows it -- at least hypothetically -- to be falsified. It predicts that heterosexuals will perceive marriage to be a less attractive and meaningful arrangement because of the of gay marriages. Fewer straight people will want to get married and, once married, they will be more likely to get divorced because gay people can also marry.

In practice, these camps are not entirely distinct, but its important to understand that they function differently and are, thus, rebutted differently. Most opponents of gay marriage argue variations of both, or mix and match components of each. Nor do either of these arguments suggest much about the intellectual honesty or animating experiences of the particular advocate: some people have deep personal animosity towards all gay people and the argument they deploy is little more than a pretext to justify that hostility. They cannot be convinced or persuaded. In general, if pushed, they collapse back on the first argument, which, by resorting to a fundamental moral truth, cannot be contested except by sticky theological jousting. My sense is, however, that most people who oppose gay marriage argue in good-faith and can be persuaded. Most Americans, as public opinion shows, aren't as obsessed with gay sex as the folks over at the American Family Association. They are simply anxious about possible consequences for what they feel is a substantial change to an important social institution and they are, by and large, ignorant of the serious harm that denying marriage rights does to queer families.

This a long and somewhat circuitous route to getting to the main topic of this post: namely, predictions of a so-called “backlash” against GLBT rights as a result of judicial actions like the recent California Supreme Court holding in In re Marriage Cases. The ink on the decision was barely dry before Jeff Rosen, The New Republic's legal correspondent and Professor of Law at George Washington University, was already declaring that the California Supreme Court was too far ahead of public opinion and had handed down a needlessly inflammatory decision. Rosen has memorably encouraged fellow leftists to abandon Roe v. Wade, under the analysis that courts were ineffective vehicles for social change and that defending Roe had been too costly for the left.

In the very short-term, Rosen is undoubtedly correct. Opponents of gay marriage will mobilize around the California decision. Already anti-marriage activists in Arizona are doing just that and our own home grown Hoosier homophobes are reportedly “re-energized” by the development. It's entirely possible that this agitation will result in the passage of ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments that otherwise would not have passed and will prove difficult to undo in the coming years. That was certainly the case after the Massachusetts and Vermont decisions. In addition, critics like Rosen contend that such ballot initiatives are particularly harmful to Democratic electoral ambitions because they tend to mobilize solidly Republican constituencies. Such critics argue that the presence of ballot initiatives in response to Goodridge helped Bush cruise to victory in 2004 (though that argument appears quite dubious given public opinion polling).

One can help but notice that with each additional pro-gay marriage decision the kerfuffle smaller, the opponents more shrill, and the electorate more indifferent. New Jersey' s October 2006 marriage bomb may have played a role in the passage of Virginia's 2006 constitutional amendment, but its effect on the larger electoral map was entirely negligible. It did nothing to save the GOP from a ballot-box blowout, even in districts like IN-02, IN-08, and IN-09 where Republican candidates attempted to make gay marriage an issue in districts usually receptive to socially conservative wedge issues. Rosen may be correct that there is a short-term rallying effect for anti-marriage forces, but it's not clear that gay marriage will be a particularly salient issue in any larger sense for conservative forces.

Part of the problem is that the experience of living in a “post-gay marriage” world simply does not match well with the predictive elements of anti-marriage advocacy. Straight folks are beginning to notice that their own marriages look pretty much the same now that gay folks can marry too. The country isn't falling apart because gays can marry; it's falling apart because the folks who rail against gay marriage appear to be incapable of managing the economy, guiding our foreign policy, and governing effectively.

In other words, the most powerful rebuttal to the second anti-marriage argument I outline above is simply the experience of living in a world in which large, populous states have legalized gay marriage and have not collapsed under the weight of ensuing anarchy and bacchanalian orgies. Good-faith critics of gay marriage will revise their opinions when faced with that empirical data. Bad faith critics masquerading as good-faith critics will try to pretend like that data doesn't exist or they will abandon the argument. In either case, the presence of actual gay marriages serves an incredibly important purpose for pro-marriage advocates precisely because it rebuts arguments based on erroneous predictions. And I don't mean rebuts in some sort of cheap rhetorical sense, where its just another tool in the gay activist's handbag to-be-deployed-in-case-of-blog-war. I mean rebuts as in every morning Micah Clark wakes up and notices that California hasn't fallen into the Pacific, it makes his job harder and his arguments more divorced from reality. The presence of actual gay marriages strips anti-marriage forces of their most useful argument, an argument that presents itself as more than mere animosity to homosexuals.

In that sense, Jeffrey Rosen's argument is more than a little bit silly. Every dime the right spends on fighting the gay marriage tide is wasted. Let conservatives build their houses on the sand of opposition to gay marriage and it will only mean that in ten years they will be homeless. Gay marriage is infectious in one very real sense: its presence in any state allows gay people to performatively rebut the worst slurs against them, turns living openly and happily into the best response to homophobia, and it thus makes it just that much easier to win marriage rights in other states. The California Supreme Court is helping thousands of queer families show that gay marriage is not a threat to straight marriage, but an ally. Good for them.

Crossposted at Bilerico Indiana.

VP Buffett Redux

The pieces are beginning to fall in to place for the Warren Buffett vice presidency, as the populist billionaire makes his support for Obama official. Here's hoping Huginn remembered to buy plenty of "Warren Buffett VP" contracts at intrade.

Spaceman in Your Garden

Roomie and enviro-fascist Huginn and I sometimes talk about Matthew Yglesias's urban design kick and, while well-intentioned, we seem to concur that it's missing something. Namely, it's all good and fine to talk about Americans walking more, taking mass transit more, and just driving less -- and those are all great things -- but it's only half the story. The products we purchase from the "walkable" shop still need to get to that store. Your carbon footprint isn't just a matter of physically transporting your body, it's also a matter of physically transporting all the products that sustain that body, as well as the infrastructure that enables those products to be transported. The carbon costs of feeding 1.5 million Manhattenites is not trivial, even if it is better than the costs related to feeding the residents of, say, poorly designed Houston.

That's precisely why something like the high-rise farming project Matt links to today, isn't just cool, or vaguely interesting, or a nice segue into some other component of your urban design kick. It is crucial to think about how we can make the process of transporting humans and goods more carbon efficient. But it's also crucial to think creatively about how we can collapse the distances between spaces of production and spaces of consumption so that we can minimize the need for any transportation. This strikes me as important at a philosophical level -- people should have a more intimate relationship with the food they consume -- but also at a practical level. Meanwhile, this sort of advocacy also has the benefit of uniting the often antagonistic camps of green urbanophiles and the crunchy slow foodies and Wes Jackson/Wendell Berry set. Hot.

Konichiwa Bitches!

Hump returns.

And it's Swedish themed!

Noonan!

This seems like a bit much:

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They're frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

Alright everyone, let's just take a deep breath. The results in Mississippi aside, I seem to recall a lot of articles like this between 2003 and 2005, only it was the complete collapse and demise of the Democrats that was being predicted. But somehow the Dems survived and are back in control. Who'd a thunk it?

If there's one thing you can trust about the American electorate, it's that it has an exceptionally short attention span, such that damage to the Republican "brand" -- as the political marketers like to call it these days -- is almost certainly neither permanent nor complete.

The basic problems that Republicans are dealing with right now are pretty complicated, but many of them are largely contextual and can easily be solved with time:

(1) The popularity Republicans enjoyed in the earlier part of the decade was partially a relic of immediate post-9/11 politics and overstated substantially the "base-line" popularity of Republican governance. The sustained, substantial majorities in both the Senate and House are just not things, in broader historical perspective, that the Republican party has enjoyed or should regard as its standard since before the New Deal.

(2) To some extent, Republicans are simply sowing the electoral dividends of success. I don't mean "success" in the sense of good policy or good governance, I mean success in terms of elections. Being the "winners" has rightly placed the onus of performance on the Republican party. In a hyper-partisan environment in which the other side is bound to criticize you vociferously regardless of the outcome of the policy in question, in which the media has a vested interest in pursuing sensational and embarrassing story-lines, governing is, itself, bound to be politically taxing. Democrats will bear the brunt of governing in the coming years and, especially, when the Bush administration is out of the picture and no longer sucking the political air out of every room.

(3) The Republicans are victims of not just governing, but exceptionally bad governing. Maybe the Democrats will govern flawlessly. I doubt it. I think they'll do a whole hell of a lot of a better job than the miserable, abject failure of a government presided over by the Republicans for the last 7 years, but I'm not naive about the inevitable and eventual shortcomings. Time will heal the memory of bad Republican governance. The question is how long -- and that will be somewhat contingent on how long it takes the Democrats to screw up royally.

(4) This is intimately related to the last point, but part of the problem right now has to do with the particular political style Republicans have developed in the post-9/11 world. Indeed, there will always be some room for swaggering machismo in the American political world, but as the voice and face of your party that strategy carries serious risks. If you are the party of macho-men, you must always win. Bullying is a workable strategy only when you can actually force your will on other people. The minute you can't, the whole strategy collapses. When the other side stops being intimidated and finds the political means to resist you, what was once perceived as strength and righteous confidence, begins to look a whole lot like overcompensation and insecurity. I get the feeling that Republicans have overplayed the "Only We Manly-men will Protect you from the Terrorist Threat" card. Their obsession with firm and unbending resolve, now sounds less like a good strategy to confront global terrorism and more like just another way to distract the electorate from how clueless they are about practical solutions. The obvious out is for Republicans to step back from the edge, quit making Americans think they're a bunch of insecure weirdos, and quit using policy debates as a way to compare dick length. As any good liberal would tell them, it isn't the size... of government, it's how you use it.

Yum.

Via, Bilerico, this is just unbelievably hot.

Little Bit

I know I promised a IN-07 recap last week, and I've got a little bit. But I'm not sure I have much of anything interesting or insightful to add. The results of the election speak for themselves, and I'm not in much of "I-told-you-so" mood.

That said, I told you so. Betting against an incumbent named Carson in Marion County who has ballot position and a pulse is a bad idea. Just like his grandmother, André outperformed expectations and made fools of people who would underestimate his political skill and appeal. Some folks are a bit poorer for that underestimation today. It isn't the first time somebody went broke (or slightly less insanely wealthy) betting against a Carson, and it won't be the last time either.

Meanwhile, I think Abdul is a real smart cat, but this bit of analysis is a little bit silly:

Andre Carson is living proof the Carson name is a brand and still works. However, there is a chink in the armor. 54 percent of people who voted in that primary chose someone other than Carson. If the GOP can figure out a way to capture that discontent, they just might be able to win the 7th one day.

The only way the GOP could capitalize on that “chink in the armor” would be to run a Democrat. And I don't mean your milquetoast Jon-Elrod-Republican-lite. I mean an honest-to-goodness Democrat. You know, the registered and vowing to caucus with the Democrats variety.

Abdul is confusing voter intent in the primary by suggesting it expresses an absolute rather than a relative preference. Clinton supporters tend to make the same mistake when describing how white downscale voters react to Barack Obama. I'm still looking for evidence that suggests that, by voting for Hillary Clinton, those voters are expressing dislike or distaste for Obama (errr... West Virginia excepted?). Similarly, what is the evidence that the 54% of the voters in IN-07 dislike or are discontented with André Carson? A more sensible reading would be that 54% of the voters prefer some other Democrat to André Carson and that, moreover, nearly all those voters tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans.

Look: Democratic voters, despite what some bloggers have suggested, actually like André Carson. Quite a bit, in fact. Every poll I've read on IN-07 has shown Andre enjoys favorability ratings in the high 60s or low 70s. Because some of them chose to vote for one of the two extremely qualified and well-funded challengers, isn't particularly convincing evidence that they would be likely to ever vote for a Republican. Put another way, André's 62,000 votes in the primary is almost certainly an absolute basement of support rather than a ceiling. You can expect that most of the people who voted for other candidates in the primary will be happy to pull a lever for André in November. In fact, most of the Orentlicher and Myers voters I talked to on Tuesday said they liked André just fine, they merely preferred another candidate.

On that note, there is rumbling that the Carson organization is planning some sort of retaliation against people who supported their primary opponents. I haven't heard anything of this sort from real, live Carson folk, but I suppose scattered loose talk is possible. In both theory and practice, it would seem like a pretty bad plan. Obviously, it would depend a great deal on individual circumstances, the whats and hows of what a person did or did not do during the primary -- we shouldn't expect the Carson team to smile upon Democrats who openly campaigned for Jon Elrod in the special -- but as an abstract proposition, it's always wise to be magnanimous in victory.

On the other hand, Woody Myers is a particularly tricky case. Woody's primary problem was that while he had the money and sterling biography, he didn't have any sort of grassroots apparatus, an actual base, or a very strong connection to the democratic voters in the district. Thus, it would seem like a dangerous proposition to let him get a foothold in the county, since it would go a long way to minimizing his biggest weakness. What you don't want, if you are the Carson team, is Woody Myers ingratiating himself to the African American community, spreading money all over the city, and setting himself up for a primary challenge if redistricting happens to gut a portion of the Carson base. That seems like a ticket for trouble in the future.

But what are you going to do? It's not like you can stop Woody from doing those sorts of things in any practical sense. Maybe what I outlined is a play for Woody in the future, but it also seems like a MD/MBA with tens of millions of dollars at his disposal has better things to do with his time than waiting for André Carson to experience a moment of weakness so he can jump into yet another expensive, uncertain and bloodying primary battle. And, really, the 2008 primary was the absolute weakest André is ever likely to be. If you couldn't beat him then, the chances of beating him down the road are pretty slim. You'd do better to try to make nice and look for a different office.

Alright. That's all. I promised a little bit, and you got a little bit. Now listen to "Little Bit," by Lykke Li:

Alien Music

And I always thought ETs were probably already listening to The Knife. From pitchfork:

Lidbo is currently working in cahoots with the Swedish Space Corporation on a project to send a variety of new electronic music into space via Sweden's Esrange station-- known for offering some of the world's first commercial space flights in conjunction with Spaceport Sweden and Virgin Galactic.

And just who is contributing to the "Music for Alien Civilisations" project? Naturally, the Knife is involved. Olof Dreijer has recorded a track called "Al Jazeera", which, as Lidbo describes, presents "the very mechanics from the inside of his computer-- the sounds from the circuits and hard drives."

I'm really torn here. On the one hand, as a big fan of The Knife, I think it's good that Earth is finally putting it's best foot forward. On the other hand, I can't help but think this sort of thing will make a Kzinti invasion much more probable. And who could really blame them? I'd probably want to eviscerate an alien civilization if all I knew about them was this:



In the meantime, you should be pleased to know the ETs are already here. They threw a rave. This is what it sounded like:

I don't usually go for this sort of thing...

I usually loathe Chris Matthews, but I have to admit this is pretty hilarious:



Well done.

What is FT pointing out?

What is this Financial Times article really saying?!

Like most people in Mingo County, West Virginia, Leonard Simpson is a lifelong Democrat. But given a choice between Barack Obama and John McCain in November, the 67-year-old retired coalminer would vote Republican.

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist," said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.

Mr Simpson's remarks help explain why Mr Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, by 40 percentage points ahead of Tuesday's primary election in the heavily white and rural state, according to recent opinion polls.

Are they indicating Democrats in this small W. Virginian coal-mining town know disturbingly little about Barack Obama, and therefore state 2 completely untrue 'facts' regarding Barack and Michelle's religious views that (apparently) prevent this voter from voting for Barack come November? Does FT want to educate these W. Virginia voters that Barack is not a Muslim, and Michelle is not an Atheist, that they are in fact church-attending and self-identifying Christians, and this voter's sole rationales for opposing his candidacy are untrue?


Or is the point that Obama is vulnerable among these white blue-collar Democrats, because he hasn't increased his support among voters who consider him a Muslim and consider his wife an Atheist?

I greatly fear the latter.