I Know Myself Well

26 Dec 2007 05:17 pm

I just realized that Google Reader has a "recommendations" function whereby Google makes suggests of new feeds "generated by comparing your interests with the feeds of users similar to you." Their number one recommendation is . . . my blog. Basically, I have the reading habits typical of someone who would read my blog. Which makes sense, of course, but still seems a bit odd.

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AVP: R

26 Dec 2007 04:45 pm

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Alien Versus Predator: Requiem is by no means a good movie. But if Juno left an unduly upbeat & happy taste in your mouth, the old-fashioned bloodiness of this romp does help cleanse the palate. What's more, unlike the catastrophic Alien Versus Predator, the sequel really does deliver on the basic promise of lots and lots of fighting and killing. Exposition is kept to a bare minimum -- you're supposed to just know all the backstory, sit back, and watch a whole bunch of acid blood fly around while tons of people are killed.

On the flipside, it's hardly worth pointing out the many, many, many levels on which this movie didn't really make sense. I will note, however, that it's a bit unfortunate to see them appear to screw around with the alien life cycle such that the time elapsed from when a facehugger grabs you to when a new alien pops out of your head appears to be greatly compressed. In a larger sense, it's really too bad that all these silly sequels now can't help but detract from the fact that Alien and Aliens are both legitimate good movies that don't really deserve to have been conscripted into this low-grade franchise.

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The Ambiguously Good News

26 Dec 2007 03:42 pm

Sudarsan Raghavan's lengthy Washington Post article about the conflict between Muqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and, in particular, the way the latter's fortunes seem to be on the rise, will warm the heart of hawks. Here, after all, is a long newspaper account of American military success:

This year's U.S. military offensive and dramatic shifts in tactics by both Sunni and Shiite groups are redrawing the balance of power across Iraq. With less violence between Sunnis and Shiites, festering struggles within each community may come to define the nature of the conflict. In the Shiite-dominated south, Sadr's main Shiite rivals are taking advantage of the surge in U.S. troops, as well as Sadr's imposition of a freeze on operations by his Mahdi Army militia, to make political gains.

What one wonders, however, is if this is good news, what's good about it? Hakim's group is the one that's willing to work with Americans whereas Sadr's is the group that's trying to kick us out. But it's not as if the Supreme Council are a bunch of nice liberal democrats. What's more, the extent of their "pro-American" sentiments seems to extend precisely as far as we're willing to help them acquire power -- it's not a case of deep resonances of values and interests.

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Because There's Nothing Fascist About Racism

26 Dec 2007 03:27 pm

Charles Murray loves Liberal Fascism: "'It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion,’ Jonah Goldberg writes near the beginning of Liberal Fascism. My first reaction was that he is engaging in partisan hyperbole. That turned out to be wrong. Liberal Fascism is nothing less than a portrait of 20th-century political history as seen through a new prism. It will affect the way I think about that history--and about the trajectory of today’s politics--forever after."

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LCD Soundsystem

26 Dec 2007 02:52 pm

Clicking around the internet, it seemed to me that a curiously large number of people were putting LCD Soundsystem on various top ten lists. Metacritic confirms this -- the critics love LCD Soundsystem. On some level, this is just something I refuse to believe. I mean, I went to see LCD Soundsystem play at the 930 Club one time and I'll happily grant you that it was a totally awesome evening -- vodka + dancing = fun even in famously danceaphobic Washington, DC. But one of the best albums of the year? Really? The Guardian deemed Sound of Silver "dance rock for grownups," which I guess is right, but doesn't strike me as a particularly laudable achievement. Why do we need dance rock for grownups?

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In With The New

26 Dec 2007 02:29 pm

It seems that there's a tradition of the Queen of England making Christmas broadcasts. And, now, those broadcasts are available on YouTube via The Royal Channel. It's interesting stuff, but apparently embedded video is too revolutionary for the monarchy so you'll have to click the link to see it.


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Happiness is an Improvement Over the Status Quo

26 Dec 2007 02:04 pm

Ezra Klein pronounces himself basically happy with the three major Democratic candidates. Matt Stoller responds with a proclamation of unhappiness, citing a variety of objectionable elements of the status quo than none of them dare tinker with. Matt's right, I think, to outline an agenda that goes well beyond the list of things Democratic Party politicians are prepared to tackle -- the related problems of America's crazy drug regulation regime and America's horrific prison system are, rightly, going to look like huge scandals to future generations and the odds of any of the major Democratic contenders doing much of anything about any of it are tiny.

That said, happiness is relative. All three of the potential nominees seem like they would make the country a better place. Hence the "fairly common sentiment among both Democratic base voters and Democratic elites" that Stoller bemoans. "Better than what we've got" seems like a kind of low bar to cross. And yet, in politics it's really the only bar that matters.

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Innumeracy

26 Dec 2007 01:33 pm

Kevin Drum reads a New York Times article about holiday retail sales and bangs his head against the wall as he observes the story citing nominal sales figures: "Question: why does this happen so routinely?"

It almost certainly happens so routinely because many reporters and editors don't really understand what they're doing. Reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have almost no understanding of quantitative methods. I recall that Larry Summers observed in his inaugural speech that "We live in a society, and dare I say a University, where few would admit—and none would admit proudly—to not having read any plays by Shakespeare or to not knowing the meaning of the categorical imperative, but where it is all too common and all to acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth." Journalists, being basically a species of writer, tend to come from humanities backgrounds even though we deal with quantitative issues all the time. Journalism schools might help close the gap by making people take "math for journalists" classes (the concepts of statistical significance and margins of error in polls come up constantly, for example, and are often dealt with very poorly) but as best I can tell they normally don't.

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Sovereign Wealth

26 Dec 2007 01:00 pm

Mark Kleiman notes that back when we were looking at budget surpluses, it was deemed necessary to pass large regressive tax cuts to stave off the socialist dystopia that would surely result from government ownership of stocks (don't ask about the dubious logic that failing to pass large regressive tax cuts would inevitably have this result). What we have now instead are "sovereign wealth funds" (a.k.a. foreign governmnets) buying up equity in American companies. Somehow, though, this is all fine.

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Pushing Fighters

26 Dec 2007 12:32 pm

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Here's a telling bit from The Washington Post's account of yesterday's bombings in Iraq: "U.S. military commanders have said that major military efforts in and around Baghdad have pushed fighters to the areas north of the capital, often to rural or mountainous hideouts, where there are fewer troops pursuing them."

Two morals from this story. One is that aside from the "surge" -- the temporary increase in the overall number of American forces in Iraq -- we've seen a surge-within-the-surge, an increase in the Baghdad-centricity of our deployments. The other is that outside of this surged areas, there haven't been any security gains. There's no change, in short, in the nationwide dynamic.

So what happens when we start de-surging?

Well, things will just get worse again. After all, when the goal of the surge was outlines as creating space and time for national political reconciliation, that wasn't something Bush and Petraeus just pulled out of their asses. A temporary increase in force levels aimed at creating a temporary increase in security doesn't, after all, sound like much of a strategy. So they said that the temporary increase in troops would lead to a temporary increase in security which would lead to political reconciliation which, in turn, would lead to sustainable security gains. But it hasn't happened. So when we start desurging, we're just going to find that nothing's changed and nothing's been accomplished.

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Angelica Golindano

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Today's Top Ten

26 Dec 2007 12:04 pm

The top ten tracks on Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks of 2007 list:

  • Rihanna, “Umbrella,” Good Girl Gone Bad
  • The New Pornographers, “Myriad Harbour,” Challengers
  • The National, “Mistaken for Strangers,” Boxer
  • Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, “La Costa Brava,” Living With the Living
  • Arcade Fire, “Keep the Car Running,” Neon Bible
  • M.I.A., “Boys, Kala
  • Feist, “1 2 3 4,” The Reminder
  • Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina,” Night Falls Over Kortedala
  • Spoon, “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
  • Justice, “D.A.N.C.E.,”

That's in no particular order. I don't really believe in ordinal rankings and have no idea what it would mean to claim that "D.A.N.C.E." is 'better' than "A Postcard to Nina."

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A Very Serious Argument

26 Dec 2007 11:31 am

You've laughed at the hilarious excerpts on Sadly, No! but now Spencer Ackerman gives you the in-depth analysis of Liberal Fascism you've been waiting for. Using non-standard definitions of both "liberal" and "fascism" seems important to this project.

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Fearful Symmetry

26 Dec 2007 10:33 am

Everyone likes a good scary/tragic animal attack story, but I find it hard to believe the zoo was open on Christmas in the first place. Here in DC the zoo is open the other 364 days of the year but no luck on Christmas.

Photo by Flickr user Ber'Zophus used under a Creative Commons license

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The Texas Factor

26 Dec 2007 09:34 am

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I'd known that in the modern period just five states -- Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Missouri -- were responsible for some huge proportion of total executions (see map) and that, in general, the death penalty is obviously being applied very differently from place to place. But Adam Liptak points out that in 2007, Texas alone accounted for 60 percent of total executions in the United States.

I used to be a death penalty proponent. And I still think, in principle, that it's not always wrong to execute people. But at the systems level, actually existing capital punishment in the United States is clearly a mess. Your odds of dying for your crime have much, much, much more to do with where you committed your crime and your socioeconomic status than anything about the nature of your crime. In theory, I think you could have a fair system that involved some number of executions. In practice, though, it barely seems doable and Harry Blackmun's conclusion that he had to simply refuse to "tinker with the machinery of death" seems more and more sensible to me as time goes on.

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Romney's Lafferism

26 Dec 2007 08:44 am

I'd been under the impression that Mitt Romney had thus far resisted the urge to claim falsely that reducing tax rates is likely to increase federal revenue. Brendan Nyhan shows me that it's not true. Romney's explained that " you lower taxes enough, you create more growth" and "if you create growth, you get more jobs" and thus "You get more jobs, more people are paying taxes. You get more taxes paid, the government has more money by charging lower tax rates."

This is not only bad economics, but seems to indicate a failure to grasp some of the basic principles of logical inference.

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Christmas In Falluja

25 Dec 2007 11:47 pm

Annoyed by the incredibly horrible "Citizen Soldier" recruiting ad / song / music video that plays in many movie theaters these days? Well, never fear, Brian Beutler's identified the antidote: "The music's equally terrible (possibly worse?) but the message is deeply anti-war."

Yep, that really sucks.

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A New Christmas Tradition

25 Dec 2007 01:31 pm

You may recall that last year, Ethiopia launched a major invasion of Somalia timed for right around the Christmas holiday so that nobody would notice. Or else, you may not recall since Ethiopia timed it for right around the Christmas holiday and thus nobody noticed. With this story out of Kurdistan, I wonder if we're starting to see a new under the radar military action Christmas tradition:

Two Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq hit more than 200 targets and killed more than 150 rebels, the Turkish Army said Tuesday. [...] Turkish officials have not commented reports by the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq that two more airstrikes took place on Monday and early Tuesday. But Turkish surveillance planes were spotted early Tuesday flying over Cukurca in the Hakkari Province of Turkey’s far southeast, along the border with Iraq, and also above the Kanimasi region in northern Iraq, and shelling was heard, the semi-official Anatolian news agency reported.

Meanwhile, suicide bombing seems to be back in style in Iraq.

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Jewish Christmas

25 Dec 2007 01:25 pm

As everyone knows, American Jews celebrate Christmas with a meal composed of the North American Ashkenazi Diaspora's traditional cuisine, Chinese-American food. Thus, Jeff Weintraub directs our attention to two key documents. One, Brandon Walker, "Chinese Food on Christmas":

Two, Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine, "New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern", Contemporary Ethnography, 1992: Vol 22 No 3. pp. 382-407.

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A Christmas Classic

25 Dec 2007 01:24 pm

For the scrooge in your family, Joel Waldfogel, "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas", American Economic Review, 1993, vol. 83, issue 5.

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Merry Christmas

25 Dec 2007 02:02 am

I'll be celebrating by watching the NBA doubleheader, going to Chinatown Express, and watching Alien Versus Predator: Requiem. And, probably, writing more blog posts. The rest of you do whatever it is y'all do....

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