Archive for August, 2006
After The Needle Stick: The Real Trial Behind HIV Testing
This column was printed in the Daily Illini today and is reprinted here for your reading pleasure.
When I went into McKinley to schedule an anonymous HIV testing last week, I was asked to provide an anonymous name. I got flustered and couldn’t think of anything but “Brian,” which possibly defeated the purpose, but then, so does writing about it for public consumption.
The actual blood testing is a quick and easy procedure. The struggle is what comes before. I sat on a blue bench for about ten minutes, grad student assistants milling about in the offices along the hallway. They knew what I was doing there; they must have. It was on my face.
Then a woman came and took me back to a room and sat me down next to her desk. She asked me several questions like “What would a positive result mean to you?” and “How do you think you can prevent exposure to HIV in the future?”
It all seemed a little silly to me. The only reason I was there was because my new boyfriend wanted me to go just to make sure; there was little reason to think I might actually have contracted HIV. I told the woman as much, and yet the questions kept coming. “When’s the last time you had anal sex?” (Answer: three and a half months ago-happy birthday to me!) “When’s the last time you had vaginal sex?” (Answer: ew, never.) “When’s the last time you had oral sex?” (Answer: that morning, which was more than a little embarrassing to be telling this woman.)
After the questions were all asked and answered, she sent me with a smile to the basement to get my blood drawn like the AIDS-ridden sodomite I potentially could have been. Because it was all anonymous and they didn’t know my name, they gave me a number.
A short while later, they called number 26, and in a matter of seconds my blood was slurped from my body into a syringe that would be handled with plastic gloves and extreme caution. It would be held at McKinley for a preliminary test, for which a negative result would mean I was fine. If it came back positive, it would be taken off to a more advanced facility for more advanced testing – and if that came back negative, I would still be in the clear. If it was positive, I’d be brought in and tested all over again.
All in all, the whole thing was an unpleasant ordeal. I felt terrified and awkward and isolated and dirty throughout, despite the best efforts of all the McKinley employees involved who did everything they could to smile and make me feel comfortable and like I was doing the right, responsible thing.
I won’t find out the results for another couple of days. As I say, I’m not worried, and yet the fact that it’s out there – my blood, floating out there, being put under a microscope and scrutinized for antibodies – makes me wonder just what would happen on the off chance that I do have the disease that has taken more than 25 million lives around the world since it was discovered in 1981, and about 3 million lives in the past year alone.
Soon enough I’ll have peace of mind. And in spite of the dread I felt walking up the stairs in McKinley and turning right at the sign that reads “Anonymous HIV Testing,” in spite of the awkwardness I felt sitting in the hallway waiting to be called inside, in spite of the embarrassment I felt answering the intensely private questions they asked, in spite of the shame I felt handing the woman in the basement the papers I had indicating I needed HIV testing – in spite of the entire awful mess, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second doing it all over again. Some might think it is too heavy a price to pay, but in exchange for the ability to look a loved one in the eyes, it is a steal, I assure you.
Age of the Marketaucracy?
Buck B. over at
To summarize Buck:
The problem isn’t with government programs themselves, however, but with how they’ve traditionally been run…Even when given a good idea, they tend to screw things up. But why do things have to be this way? We have thousands of multi-billion-dollar organizations in this country that run efficiently and smoothly — they’re called corporations.
I’d love to see some government programs closely monitored and evaluated on an ongoing basis and judged solely by results. You know, the way things work in the real world. If something doesn’t work, you knock it off and try something different…
I agree Mr. B. that would be nice. The problem is that your optimism for an efficient government agency is unrealistic, perhaps naïve, given the history of government programs. He proposes creating another level of bureaucracy so that other bureaucracies can be “closely monitored and evaluated.” Still, I share the same disillusionment, so I asked myself why in the Hell can’t things be done better at the government level?
Two things, the looming harshness of the free market’s firing power does not exist, therefore, the interests of the bureaucrat do not coincide with the interests of the public. A person who works for the government is commissioned as a public servant; however, just like any other human being they are not altruistic. They work for themselves and their families; we should expect nothing else from them. So how should an organization correct for this? They should convert or reshape the interests of their employees to coincide with the public interest. They can do this by forcing efficiency on their employees through the looming threat of being fired. However, that threat does not exist to nearly the same extent in a bureaucracy as in the corporate world. Why? Those bureaucracies aren’t competing with anything else. Managers and others on top of the hierarchy have few incentives for efficiency other than the public good. Unfortunately, humans have redundantly proven that the public good is not sufficiently motivating to create efficiency. Furthermore, because managers don’t have a direct economic stake in the agency, their salaries are not correlated with performance; it allows special interests and nepotism to devour the people’s money (sometimes ironically referred to as “tax dollars,” which implies that it is the government’s money). So how should we remedy this?
I am not a libertarian; government has the capacity to do good. Markets do have unavoidable failures and holes. Buck is on to something when he says that government agencies should be run more like corporations. This is a great idea. The problem with it is that I think it’s probably impossible given the description of the process I provided in the previous paragraph. But his idea does dovetail with the one I began to propose in my previous post.
There are a couple of reasons the Gates Foundation is more efficient. The people who donate have a direct and identifiable interest in the money, it is their money and they can directly trace it. They personally ensure that it isn’t wasted by paying for toilet paper that has Billy Gates’ initials on it (I was once told by a Microsoft intern who ate dinner at his house that he embroiders his initials onto every ply, no joke). Further, the Foundation has the looming threat that funds will not be donated if they don’t act for the public good, if they don’t act for the public good then those hired by the Foundation will lose their jobs. Thus there is a parity between the interests of those employees and the public good. However in a bureaucracy funds come in by the complex system of legal theft that the government has crafted; there exist no choice of paying taxes and no threat of losing funding. We’d like to believe Congress holds the mighty threat to strip funding, but they simply never do because of the confluence of special interests and insider bureaucrats.
The solution to this conundrum is an isotope of Buck’s proposal. We should integrate government programs with the free market whenever possible. As a clear example, if we privatized Social Security it would create higher returns on investments and it would significantly reduce the budget of whatever damned bureaucracy currently runs it. Thousands of bureaucrats could be fired if the responsibilities of administering it were shifted to the private sphere. We should give as little money as possible to bureaucracies, because once they have it there is no hope of it being effectively used. Welfare reform, as discussed in my last post, is another great example. Not only will free market integration systems cost the government less, but they will also serve the people better by giving them more freedoms. When people are given more freedoms on the micro level it means that allocation of resources will be more efficient, since no one has more information or knows better about what to do with his money than the person himself. What would be a more efficient allocation of resources, forcing people to pay into a fund that retrieves mediocre returns or at least allowing people to choose between those safe, mediocre returns and riskier, higher returns in a private investment? We should allow the person who is in a better position to accept risk to accept it and for the person who prefers a safer investment to choose it (This is precisely what the Bush plan proposed).
Buck said something else very important, “Imagine a government agency tasked with helping the poor…” After all of these cuts and privatizations there will be plenty of excess cash. Nothing will help people more than cutting taxes dramatically. Again, the higher degree to which money is in the hands of someone on a micro level, the more likely they are to make an efficient allocation of it because they have the most information. However I would propose a new free market integrated bureaucracy, a marketaucracy (that is the second word I have invented and added to my Word dictionary), that would be solely devoted to helping the bottom 20% or so of this country. This could come in the form of, as I discussed privately with Brian, a program that would give money to the bottom 20% once they have reached old age, thus creating no disincentives to work, since they will already be too old to work. Or the money could be devoted entirely to training people in the bottom 20% for better, more high-skilled jobs as
The second thing I would do is find a way to get
The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.
~Thomas Jefferson (letter to Spencer Roane, 9 March 1821)
The Respect Rankings
Billy and I are going to be doing these respect rankings intermittently as new respect-earners emerge in the political scene, or as those already there lose or gain respect in our eyes. I still need Billy to educate me on the art of the Flash slide shows and pictures and all that, so unfortunately you’re stuck with only my words, but hopefully they will suffice for now.
Not surprisingly, mine are not that much different from Billy’s. I strongly object to a couple of his selections (McCain, Schwarzenegger, and I’m not a huge Lieberman fan). But two of his top three also appear on my top three, which shows that while political affiliation plays a role in earning one’s respect, there are qualities that can be recognized as signs of integrity even through the haze of ideological differences.
1. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI)
My respect for Sen. Feingold goes well beyond his work with John McCain on campaign finance reform, work which, while well-intentioned, was ill-conceived, poorly executed, and possibly not even necessary. I criticized Billy’s placement of John McCain as number one on his list because “political courage requires sacrifice and risk. I have rarely seen McCain engage in either in his political career.” It never ceases to amaze me that McCain has been able to garner so much acclaim for being politically courageous without committing a single politically unpopular act.
Feingold, on the other hand, a man with clear presidential ambitions, has almost no hope of ever winning a national election because he takes stances on issues that genuinely require a willingness to risk power for integrity. Perhaps the most impressive among these is that he was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and when it was up for renewal in 2005, he led a bipartisan coalition to remove some of the more controversial elements of the bill. He was the first, and is now one of only five, US Senators to openly favor gay marriage. He has long supported universal health care. And lest you think he merely safely resides in the Senate chambers as an ultraliberal, he opposed reauthorization of the assault weapons ban, opposes handgun bands and mandatory firearm registration, and interprets the 2nd amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms. All of this is politically risky. Everything everybody says about John McCain actually applies to Russ Feingold. Plus, he’s right about nearly everything.
2. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA)
My token Republican on the list, often called by critics a Republican In Name Only. He is pro-choice, anti-NSA wiretapping, and has been more critical of the Bush adminstration than probably any other Republican senator (in January he mentioned impeachment and criminal prosecution of Bush as a possibility). He supports a raise in the minimum wage, voted against CAFTA, and his opposition to the ultraconservative Robert Bork helped ensure he was not sent to the Supreme Court. A favorite: during the Clinton impeachment process, Specter cited Scottish law to render a verdict of “not proven,” feeling that Clinton did not get a fair trial.
3. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (D-NY)
Some politicians who are terrible candidates end up being excellent public servants, and some terrible public servants have been superb candidates. I worry that Eliot Spitzer is a little too perfect of a candidate to end up being as capable a governor as many are hoping he will become, but his performance as New York’s attorney general has garnered well-deserved recognition for his commitment to white collar accountability. He is that rare Democrat who can be tough and liberal at the same time, a reminder of the age of giants like FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ. He and Feingold make me, perhaps foolishly, believe that the Democratic Party will soon be at the helm of strong, unafraid, consistently liberal leadership (not the consultant-driven moderation of a John Kerry or a Hillary Clinton).
Elsewhere in the Top 10:
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)
Perhaps still a little unproven, but a thorough look at his words reveals a brilliant mind who, if given the chance, could be an integral part of the new Democratic leadership I just mentioned.
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
Read the last paragraph of this post to see why he makes the list.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
She has gotten herself too entrenched in one of the worst presidential administrations in recent (if not all of American) history, but one gets the feeling that if she had been president instead of Bush, things would not be so bad not only around the world, but domestically. She is one of the only names being thrown about as a potential Republican presidential candidate whom I would strongly consider voting for.
Representative Barney Frank (D-MA)
“I’m used to being in the minority. I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.” What’s not to respect?
African American Economics & Siren Songs of the "Progressives"
Progressives define themselves as a group that does something through the government to help a disadvantaged group of people. They nobly and gallantly defend the poor and the dreary. Beyond doubt they have great intentions and their motivations are pure. Unfortunately, none of them seems to have ever taken a single economics class, or if they have tend to blindly follow discredited “economists” like Galbraith.
The question domestically is not whether we should help African Americans, but how we should do so. Years of “progressive” legislation have reinforced the regressive American class structure which has remained synonymous with racial structure. Liberals have designed programs, namely welfare, which gives benefits to people who do not work. Ironically, it is the people who drag their feet in finding a job that are smarter than those who aggressively search for jobs. Who can blame someone for doing what is in their best interest, namely getting paid to do no work? It would be stupid for a person to get paid for a job when they get paid nearly the same amount, or more, for not working.
A recent article in the Economist praised the results of the Republican-led, Clinton-signed 1996 Welfare Reform legislation. To the glee of economists and the ire of “progressives” “there has been no upsurge in the poverty rate; in fact, it has fallen over the period.”
Despite those recent improvements, economic inequality is still perverse. The first chart shows U.S. unemployment rates divided by race and compared France and Germany. The Hispanic rate, a group that has recently arrived en masse, is close to half that of the African American rate. Also of interest, the African American rates are comparable to the general populations of France and Germany, two states that also subject their people to the warm suckling of the welfare state.
The other charts show that Hispanics have the lowest weekly earnings, but combined with the other chart we see that last year Hispanic earnings increased by 3.29% while African American earnings actually decreased by -.95%. That statistic is incredibly disturbing in an expanding economy with rising interest rates. For the econodorks you can download my spreadsheet with BLS source info.
We have an interesting problem. African Americans in this country are poorer and less educated than other ethnicities that have lived in America for the same or a shorter period of time. This reality is mostly attributable to about 400 years of slavery, racism, segregation, and legal and covert discrimination. It is convenient for us to think that the issue of raising blacks out of poverty and recidivism is an issue for blacks, that it is their problem. Wrong.
When a group in a society is the weaker group and the weight of the rest of society crushes it then it becomes nearly impossible for the weaker group to lift themselves up. It is a failure of the free market and of libertarianism. But does that mean we should abandon the free market altogether? Does that mean we should move to the opposite end of the spectrum? Socialism? Why not, as the 1996 Welfare Reform bill does, integrate the free market with the idealistic goal of curing black poverty? The name of my previous blog, “Conservative Means, Liberals Ends,” seems apt here. And why not expand integration of the free market with social programs into other realms such as Social Security, health care, and education?
“Progressives” have always had good intentions; unfortunately they have also always had no clue what they were doing. What often seems progressive, like raising the minimum wage, supporting labor unions, big box ordinances, fair trade coffee (see Brian below), etc, ends up harming the very people who are the objects of the aid. When government gets involved massive, inefficient bureaucracies are created which even when they work, as with welfare, do more harm than good. Non-free market based aid creates larger bureaucracies and fewer benefits, a dual disaster.
What we need is a radical rejection of “progressive” policies that tend to sound so sweet and wonderful to the open ear when proposed, but always look disgusting and dreary to the skepitcal eye once enacted. The Siren Song of the progressives is responsible for the continuation of the drastic inequities created by slavery, segregation, and racism.
Does Fair Trade Coffee Really Help Anybody?
Because I’m skeptical by nature (and also pretty cheap), I am wary of coffee shops that scream at me in colored chalk about how they offer fair trade coffee. But because I’m also a bleeding-heart by nature, I am drawn to the claim that paying a few extra pennies for my Spanish latte will help solve global poverty. I am suspicious when I am told not to buy coffee from the non-fair trade Starbucks (actually, Starbucks’ whole beans are fair trade, but its brewed coffee is not), and I don’t know whether to feel righteous or duped when I buy from the local Espresso Royale down the street from me, which only uses fair trade coffee.
As a result, I decided to do as much research on the subject that I can tolerate (read: a cursory look at the Google search results for “fair trade coffee”), and, of course, have ended up feeling even more conflicted and confused.
It seems there’s a decent chance that buying fair trade coffee will actually end up hurting coffee producers on average, through what economists call “price discrimination,” in which the same product is sold at two different prices by the provider. Some have called fair trade coffee “exploitation coffee,” because by dividing the market in two, a class of coffee producers who are not producing fair trade coffee ends up being treated especially poorly. The increase in price dispersion results in a widening gap between richer and poorer coffee producers, with the poorer ones being treated worse than they would be if nobody sold through fair trade.
In cases where price discrimination exists, an increase in price dispersion is inevitable, but whether the average treatment of a producer improves or not depends on the specifics of the coffee market, and it is difficult to determine what the truth is. Basically, if enough people buy fair trade, the average worker treatment will get better. But, in a kind of catch-22, if some – but not enough – people buy fair trade, it will actually end up hurting the average producer. At the same time, as more people buy fair trade, the “average” worker will become less and less common as the numbers of producers who are either being treated very well or very poorly increase in a kind of inverse Bell curve.
So, from what I can tell, it may help or hurt to buy fair trade coffee, or even both (you’re welcome for the conclusive opinion, by the way). But, it does seem that if Starbucks and other big corporate chains of coffee sellers converted entirely to fair trade coffee sales, it would increase the chances that the average treatment of coffee producers would improve (though, again, that may mean that the ones who aren’t producing fair trade coffee get treated really, really poorly).
Anybody with a little more expertise in economics (I’m looking at you, Billy) can fill in any gaps in this analysis, or let me know if I’m completely off base on this. I’m by no means the final word on any of this, and I’d be interested to learn more on the subject.
Answering the Call
This column will be printed in the Daily Illini on Monday, August 21st, most likely in a more edited format (pretty sure you’re not allowed to drop the F-bomb in the DI).
Dear incoming class of 2010,
You will hear the call of Kam’s. You will hear the call of Brother’s. You will hear the call of CO’s, and Legends, and Murphy’s, and White Horse. You will hear the call outside your dorm room. The kids you meet on your floor will be talking out in the hallway, and you will hear their call: “We’re going out to the bars tonight,” or “We’re going on an alcohol run and seeing who wants something,” or “Dance party in Justin’s room tonight!” (Justin is so obviously gay and why won’t he just admit it already, who does he think he’s fooling?)
Oh yes, you fearless young thing, you will hear the call. You will hear it so often you will wonder how exactly life held any meaning back in those dreary, dull days before you heard the call. And to you proud, hopeful, born-to-be-free, lustful, invincible wonders, I say this: answer it. Answer the call.
There will be those who tell you to resist. There will be those who say you should just go to Quad Day, and join a nice student group where you can meet students dedicated to changing the world one person at a time: Habitat for Humanity, perhaps, or might student government be interesting?
There will be others who say you should focus on your classes and study diligently and do all your reading and turn in your homework on time. Sure, you got decent grades in high school, but you’re at the grown-ups table now and things aren’t going to be so easy any more.
There is an adjective for these people: square. They are losers and stubbornly refuse to recognize it. I mean, have they ever even been to Kam’s? Do they know what it’s like to walk into a building—no, not a building: a sanctuary, a temple, a fucking cathedral, for crying out loud—and smell the stale beer mixed with vomit and feel the baseline of the music vibrating the rubber soles of your Pumas all the way up to your chest, your heart, your heart is actually beating in concert with the music, have they never felt this way before?
Answer the call, I beg you. You are young. You are sowing your oats. You are entitled. Entitled to the warm, sickening flow of Skol vodka down your protesting throat; entitled to the apartment parties so crowded that it takes a half hour to walk across the room on a floor that is sticky with jungle juice (you can barely even taste the alcohol in this jungle juice, but you can tell it’s really strong, isn’t it amazing?); entitled to live your life and seize the day and damn the torpedoes.
So go. Answer the call. I beg you. And when you wake up in a bush outside your dorm on a Sunday morning with sun-dried beer stains on your shirt and you don’t know if you’ve been drugged or raped the night before, you will know what it is to be alive and young and free and stupid and incredibly, incredibly wasteful.
Catching Up: Billy Is A Sexist and Doesn’t Even Know It
I returned from my week in California yesterday rejuvenated and eager to get back to this nascent blog of ours, and saw with delight that Billy has maintained it pretty well, what with his fanciful multimedia presentations and data downloads and whatnot. I also saw with a mild sense of horror that what Billy has had to say has been, by and large, what I will now dub centrist propoganda. I have a feeling a lot of Billy’s posts as we go forward will be filled with much of the same, and I don’t intend to reply to every comment he makes that I have a problem with, but just to get us started on the right foot, I’d like to make clear that his claim that this blog will be the home of the so-called McCain-Lieberman Party has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I would much sooner celebrate it as home of a Feingold-Obama Party, so what do you say we draw a sharp territorial line between his posts and mine and label this blog a house divided, so to speak. Before I left, I even expounded on why I dislike Lieberman (the comment on that post by Buck B. is, by the way, better reading than my original post).
So, as a means of catching up to the present day, I will now briefly dip into the past and respond to two of Billy’s more outrageous claims over the past week (again, I promise I won’t make a habit of just rallying against Billy–my boyfriend has already told me this blog looks like an online version of Hannity and Colmes, and he will make sure I do become something more than a weak liberal counterpoint to my blogging companion):
Hillaryous
Let’s count the number of times Billy makes a latently sexist remark about Hillary Clinton in this post:
- “My Midwestern instincts tell me she’s a stone cold b!tc#…”
- “Both her face and her morals are made to look pretty by plastic surgery.” (Her morals are made to look pretty by plastic surgery? Really?)
- “The best part is right after her little diatribe, [Rumsfeld's] initial response is simply, ‘My goodness.’”
Only three by my count, but those three sentences, if you take out the charts and quotes and video clips and comments unrelated to Hillary, constitute about half Billy’s post. Mind you, there is no evidence (unless Billy’s “Midwestern instincts,” a term that makes me cringe from its middle America smugness, count as evidence) for exactly why Hillary is any of the things he says she is, merely a vague kind of intuitive distaste for her. Her so called “little diatribe” involves nothing more than the kind of angry railing against an incompetent and unaccountable cabinet secretary that this particular cabinet secretary has coming to him for his disastrous conduct.
Billy’s post attempts to do two things to Hillary Clinton: belittle her and call her a bitch. These are, coincidentally, exactly the same two tactics that any man employs when trying to put a woman in her place. Has Hillary done anything, I ask myself, to distinguish herself from any number of her political colleagues also grooming themselves for a national campaign in 2008? Does she possess any qualities which, if possessed by a man, would inspire the same kind of visceral hatred she inspires? I can think of nothing. I can think of no explanation for people who do not otherwise hate politicians, and even who do not otherwise hate female politicians, to hate Hillary Clinton except that she possesses personality traits that while they may not be desirable for anybody (she is not, I will admit, particularly charismatic, for example), are especially hard to stomach for many when they are possessed by a woman. I don’t believe Billy holds any quaint notions about the role women ought and ought not play in our society, but I do believe he and many of those who have an inexplicable, innate, and powerful resistance to her are guilty of possessing an insidious, latent, subconscious chauvinism which they should probably try to deal with.
2. The Respect Rankings
I’m going to be posting my own respect rankings probably later today, and I don’t have any problem with Billy’s rankings that I can’t let slide aside from his comments about John McCain. So immediate is this post’s juxtaposition with his post about Ms. Clinton that it is surprising that Billy didn’t realize his own hypocrisy. About McCain, he says this: “He is derided by some as an opportunist. This is a fair criticism; however, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the necessities of politics. It reflects McCain’s understanding of pragmatism, a core conservative value.” About Clinton, he says this: “My Midwestern instincts tell me she’s a stone cold b!tc# who is disingenuous and fake.” McCain’s political maneuvering is acceptable because it is pragmatic, while Clinton’s is cold and disingenuous. Huh?
McCain, by the way, is no moderate. His disagreements with the Republican Party are rarely, if ever, a result of ideological differences. Republicans are not in favor of torture; this administration merely has a tough time refraining from conducting it. Does it make McCain moderate or just human to stand against torture? There is no party consensus on either side regarding campaign finance reform; McCain and Feingold were criticized from both sides for their attempts at it and in the end weren’t particularly successful. A lot of Republicans voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment and are opposed to elimination of the inheritance tax because true conservatives (not moderates) oppose government intrusion and support responsible fiscal policy.
Any claim at moderation is indefensible, and his maverick reputation is exaggerated by a slobbering media which cannot recognize that none of McCain’s “courageous” stances against his party cost him anything politically. For all I dislike about Lieberman, I can at least recognize that he has paid a heavy political price for advocating the things he believes in. You can’t say that about McCain. Political courage requires sacrifice and risk. I have rarely seen McCain engage in either in his political career. I respect and admire the man, but I almost certainly will not vote for him, and if I do, it won’t be because I get swept up in an overblown lovefest for the perfect media darling that he is. If voters are not careful, they will end up casting a vote for a man who does not believe what they do and will not do what they want all because they mistake a series of politically popular moves with political courage.
Catching Up: Billy Is A Sexist and Doesn’t Even Know It
I returned from my week in California yesterday rejuvenated and eager to get back to this nascent blog of ours, and saw with delight that Billy has maintained it pretty well, what with his fanciful multimedia presentations and data downloads and whatnot. I also saw with a mild sense of horror that what Billy has had to say has been, by and large, what I will now dub centrist propoganda. I have a feeling a lot of Billy’s posts as we go forward will be filled with much of the same, and I don’t intend to reply to every comment he makes that I have a problem with, but just to get us started on the right foot, I’d like to make clear that his claim that this blog will be the home of the so-called McCain-Lieberman Party has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I would much sooner celebrate it as home of a Feingold-Obama Party, so what do you say we draw a sharp territorial line between his posts and mine and label this blog a house divided, so to speak. Before I left, I even expounded on why I dislike Lieberman (the comment on that post by Buck B. is, by the way, better reading than my original post).
So, as a means of catching up to the present day, I will now briefly dip into the past and respond to two of Billy’s more outrageous claims over the past week (again, I promise I won’t make a habit of just rallying against Billy–my boyfriend has already told me this blog looks like an online version of Hannity and Colmes, and he will make sure I do become something more than a weak liberal counterpoint to my blogging companion):
Hillaryous
Let’s count the number of times Billy makes a latently sexist remark about Hillary Clinton in this post:
- “My Midwestern instincts tell me she’s a stone cold b!tc#…”
- “Both her face and her morals are made to look pretty by plastic surgery.” (Her morals are made to look pretty by plastic surgery? Really?)
- “The best part is right after her little diatribe, [Rumsfeld's] initial response is simply, ‘My goodness.’”
Only three by my count, but those three sentences, if you take out the charts and quotes and video clips and comments unrelated to Hillary, constitute about half Billy’s post. Mind you, there is no evidence (unless Billy’s “Midwestern instincts,” a term that makes me cringe from its middle America smugness, count as evidence) for exactly why Hillary is any of the things he says she is, merely a vague kind of intuitive distaste for her. Her so called “little diatribe” involves nothing more than the kind of angry railing against an incompetent and unaccountable cabinet secretary that this particular cabinet secretary has coming to him for his disastrous conduct.
Billy’s post attempts to do two things to Hillary Clinton: belittle her and call her a bitch. These are, coincidentally, exactly the same two tactics that any man employs when trying to put a woman in her place. Has Hillary done anything, I ask myself, to distinguish herself from any number of her political colleagues also grooming themselves for a national campaign in 2008? Does she possess any qualities which, if possessed by a man, would inspire the same kind of visceral hatred she inspires? I can think of nothing. I can think of no explanation for people who do not otherwise hate politicians, and even who do not otherwise hate female politicians, to hate Hillary Clinton except that she possesses personality traits that while they may not be desirable for anybody (she is not, I will admit, particularly charismatic, for example), are especially hard to stomach for many when they are possessed by a woman. I don’t believe Billy holds any quaint notions about the role women ought and ought not play in our society, but I do believe he and many of those who have an inexplicable, innate, and powerful resistance to her are guilty of possessing an insidious, latent, subconscious chauvinism which they should probably try to deal with.
2. The Respect Rankings
I’m going to be posting my own respect rankings probably later today, and I don’t have any problem with Billy’s rankings that I can’t let slide aside from his comments about John McCain. So immediate is this post’s juxtaposition with his post about Ms. Clinton that it is surprising that Billy didn’t realize his own hypocrisy. About McCain, he says this: “He is derided by some as an opportunist. This is a fair criticism; however, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the necessities of politics. It reflects McCain’s understanding of pragmatism, a core conservative value.” About Clinton, he says this: “My Midwestern instincts tell me she’s a stone cold b!tc# who is disingenuous and fake.” McCain’s political maneuvering is acceptable because it is pragmatic, while Clinton’s is cold and disingenuous. Huh?
McCain, by the way, is no moderate. His disagreements with the Republican Party are rarely, if ever, a result of ideological differences. Republicans are not in favor of torture; this administration merely has a tough time refraining from conducting it. Does it make McCain moderate or just human to stand against torture? There is no party consensus on either side regarding campaign finance reform; McCain and Feingold were criticized from both sides for their attempts at it and in the end weren’t particularly successful. A lot of Republicans voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment and are opposed to elimination of the inheritance tax because true conservatives (not moderates) oppose government intrusion and support responsible fiscal policy.
Any claim at moderation is indefensible, and his maverick reputation is exaggerated by a slobbering media which cannot recognize that none of McCain’s “courageous” stances against his party cost him anything politically. For all I dislike about Lieberman, I can at least recognize that he has paid a heavy political price for advocating the things he believes in. You can’t say that about McCain. Political courage requires sacrifice and risk. I have rarely seen McCain engage in either in his political career. I respect and admire the man, but I almost certainly will not vote for him, and if I do, it won’t be because I get swept up in an overblown lovefest for the perfect media darling that he is. If voters are not careful, they will end up casting a vote for a man who does not believe what they do and will not do what they want all because they mistake a series of politically popular moves with political courage.
Catching Up: Billy Is A Sexist and Doesn’t Even Know It
I returned from my week in California yesterday rejuvenated and eager to get back to this nascent blog of ours, and saw with delight that Billy has maintained it pretty well, what with his fanciful multimedia presentations and data downloads and whatnot. I also saw with a mild sense of horror that what Billy has had to say has been, by and large, what I will now dub centrist propoganda. I have a feeling a lot of Billy’s posts as we go forward will be filled with much of the same, and I don’t intend to reply to every comment he makes that I have a problem with, but just to get us started on the right foot, I’d like to make clear that his claim that this blog will be the home of the so-called McCain-Lieberman Party has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I would much sooner celebrate it as home of a Feingold-Obama Party, so what do you say we draw a sharp territorial line between his posts and mine and label this blog a house divided, so to speak. Before I left, I even expounded on why I dislike Lieberman (the comment on that post by Buck B. is, by the way, better reading than my original post).
So, as a means of catching up to the present day, I will now briefly dip into the past and respond to two of Billy’s more outrageous claims over the past week (again, I promise I won’t make a habit of just rallying against Billy–my boyfriend has already told me this blog looks like an online version of Hannity and Colmes, and he will make sure I do become something more than a weak liberal counterpoint to my blogging companion):
Hillaryous
Let’s count the number of times Billy makes a latently sexist remark about Hillary Clinton in this post:
- “My Midwestern instincts tell me she’s a stone cold b!tc#…”
- “Both her face and her morals are made to look pretty by plastic surgery.” (Her morals are made to look pretty by plastic surgery? Really?)
- “The best part is right after her little diatribe, [Rumsfeld's] initial response is simply, ‘My goodness.’”
Only three by my count, but those three sentences, if you take out the charts and quotes and video clips and comments unrelated to Hillary, constitute about half Billy’s post. Mind you, there is no evidence (unless Billy’s “Midwestern instincts,” a term that makes me cringe from its middle America smugness, count as evidence) for exactly why Hillary is any of the things he says she is, merely a vague kind of intuitive distaste for her. Her so called “little diatribe” involves nothing more than the kind of angry railing against an incompetent and unaccountable cabinet secretary that this particular cabinet secretary has coming to him for his disastrous conduct.
Billy’s post attempts to do two things to Hillary Clinton: belittle her and call her a bitch. These are, coincidentally, exactly the same two tactics that any man employs when trying to put a woman in her place. Has Hillary done anything, I ask myself, to distinguish herself from any number of her political colleagues also grooming themselves for a national campaign in 2008? Does she possess any qualities which, if possessed by a man, would inspire the same kind of visceral hatred she inspires? I can think of nothing. I can think of no explanation for people who do not otherwise hate politicians, and even who do not otherwise hate female politicians, to hate Hillary Clinton except that she possesses personality traits that while they may not be desirable for anybody (she is not, I will admit, particularly charismatic, for example), are especially hard to stomach for many when they are possessed by a woman. I don’t believe Billy holds any quaint notions about the role women ought and ought not play in our society, but I do believe he and many of those who have an inexplicable, innate, and powerful resistance to her are guilty of possessing an insidious, latent, subconscious chauvinism which they should probably try to deal with.
2. The Respect Rankings
I’m going to be posting my own respect rankings probably later today, and I don’t have any problem with Billy’s rankings that I can’t let slide aside from his comments about John McCain. So immediate is this post’s juxtaposition with his post about Ms. Clinton that it is surprising that Billy didn’t realize his own hypocrisy. About McCain, he says this: “He is derided by some as an opportunist. This is a fair criticism; however, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the necessities of politics. It reflects McCain’s understanding of pragmatism, a core conservative value.” About Clinton, he says this: “My Midwestern instincts tell me she’s a stone cold b!tc# who is disingenuous and fake.” McCain’s political maneuvering is acceptable because it is pragmatic, while Clinton’s is cold and disingenuous. Huh?
McCain, by the way, is no moderate. His disagreements with the Republican Party are rarely, if ever, a result of ideological differences. Republicans are not in favor of torture; this administration merely has a tough time refraining from conducting it. Does it make McCain moderate or just human to stand against torture? There is no party consensus on either side regarding campaign finance reform; McCain and Feingold were criticized from both sides for their attempts at it and in the end weren’t particularly successful. A lot of Republicans voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment and are opposed to elimination of the inheritance tax because true conservatives (not moderates) oppose government intrusion and support responsible fiscal policy.
Any claim at moderation is indefensible, and his maverick reputation is exaggerated by a slobbering media which cannot recognize that none of McCain’s “courageous” stances against his party cost him anything politically. For all I dislike about Lieberman, I can at least recognize that he has paid a heavy political price for advocating the things he believes in. You can’t say that about McCain. Political courage requires sacrifice and risk. I have rarely seen McCain engage in either in his political career. I respect and admire the man, but I almost certainly will not vote for him, and if I do, it won’t be because I get swept up in an overblown lovefest for the perfect media darling that he is. If voters are not careful, they will end up casting a vote for a man who does not believe what they do and will not do what they want all because they mistake a series of politically popular moves with political courage.
Speech of the Unknown Statesman
~Article to be published in the Daily Illini on August 18th, 2006 (this is the non-edited version)
The political season will soon bring waves of political speeches. They will nearly all be fraudulent, disingenuous and overflowing with lies. Of all the national politicians, I can only say with confidence that I have full faith in two of them: Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold. That is disgusting.
How refreshing would it be if a candidate didn’t treat voters as idiots to be duped into electing a Potemkin politician? Here is what I believe would be at the core of a speech from an honest and sincere politician. I beg for his future existence:
“The American Revolution is not complete. The War, the Declaration, and the Constitution formally took back power from the elite and returned it to its rightful owner: you. But informally and covertly, that power has been maintained and centralized.
Every year politicians get up here and make the same drab, sterile partisan speeches. They tell you that they’re from the middle class when their parents attended Harvard. They speak to you with rehearsed integrity and calculated honesty. They have the cold ability to stare into your eyes and lie to you. They tell you to trust them.
I tell you the opposite.
Do not trust me. Force me to earn your trust. Investigate, debate and dig into my life and my beliefs. I am going to stand on this stage for a long time and allow you to ask whatever questions you’d like, free from censorship. I know, I know, my political advisors are about to kill themselves right now. They warned me not to make this speech, they told me to abide by the conventional wisdom. But I don’t want to just win this election; I want to change the entire political game.
During my campaign, even if my radical tactics result in a loss, I would like to reinvigorate the idea that politicians are supposed to serve. They are supposed to rise above the overwhelming and innate desires of greed. Can we not find in this country of 300 million just 100 honest and good people to fill the Senate? I meet good people everyday, so why are they not in the Senate? Precisely because they are good people and tend to be too honest to win elections. They lack pragmatism.
I’m going to edit that rule of the game. I’m going to make the pragmatic political step the one of integrity. I can only do this with your help, with your spirit. Along with me, I would like for you to all demand, not hope for, honesty and integrity from your officials. Then we will have accomplished the pragmatic task of aligning the interest of the candidate in getting elected with the interest of the voters in electing a genuine person.
Ironically, the Internet and blogs have made the completion of our distant Revolution possible. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Paine, Henry and many others had visions of American freedom. Let’s jointly reincarnate the spirit of the Revolution and enact their vision of genuine liberty.”