Obviously, for any plutocrats looking to buy elections, this would have to be a bit troubling. If Cantor couldn’t win despite having such a massive financial advantage, then is any election safely bought and paid for? And it wasn’t like they had caught Cantor in some giant scandal right before the primary either, which is about the only way one could normally imagine this happening. Everyone was just assuming Cantor would win.
Apparently, the Cantor people didn’t pay for accurate polls, which might have told them how much dire trouble they were in, and gotten people scrambling to do something. They just wandered into their defeat without understanding what was going on.
How did this happen? How did people even find out Brat was a guy they wanted to vote for? Was it just a matter of a bunch of Republican voters wandering in to the polls, seeing “Eric Cantor v. Random Other Guy” on the ballot and thinking to themselves “well, Cantor’s bound to win, but I don’t like him being such a stuffed-shirt Washington insider, so I’ll vote for the other fellow as protest,” never thinking he might actually win?
I keep hearing that it’s about “grassroots opposition to immigration reform”. I’m skeptical of the impact of “grassroots opposition”. Ordinarily, grassroots opposition and $2.95 will get you a cup of coffee in Republican primaries. The Republican establishment crushes grassroots opposition to things all the time. What made this different?
It’s a good story of the protege who has turned against his mentor–it’s practically the stuff of High Drama. I don’t know how much stock to put in the Wikipedia articles on this (Noory’s Wiki page in particular does not follow the Wikipedia guidelines for how an article should read) but the Coast article claims:
The Commonsense show [Don’t know what that is–has Thomas Paine got a show now?–MM] has described Noory led Coast to Coast by the following: When Art Bell relinquished control of his program to corporate interests, Premier and ultimately Clear Channel, Coast to Coast was never the same as the show took a turn and became reflective of “the corporate message”
I have no idea if this accusation is true, but the program is definitely owned by Clear Channel Communications, which syndicates, through its subsidiary Premiere Networks, shows like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. (Interestingly, Clear Channel itself is owned by Bain Capital–Mitt Romney’s old company. Like any good Coast-to-Coast conspiracy theory, this one has a trail you can follow pretty far up!)
My point, though, has less to do with the political machinations, real or imaginary, that may or may not lie behind the change in the program’s focus. Rather, I want to revisit eurobrat’s original point that Coast now “sounds like everything else out there”.
As I alluded to in my other post on this topic, “Diversifying” is generally considered a sound strategy, and yet the logic here seems to have been “homogenizing”. But more and more, I realize how common this is, and to some extent this transformation does suggest Clear Channel is responsible, because it’s exactly the sort of thing a big company does when it takes ownership of something. It’s sort of like what I wrote about regarding the saga of Electronic Arts and BioWare’s Mass Effect: they acquire something unique and successful just to turn it into a knock-off of something else.
Generally speaking, I don’t like to comment on peoples’ appearances much on this blog. You wouldn’t go up to random people and start criticizing their looks, so it seems similarly rude to do so in a public forum. It’s true that I occasionally do talk about it, as in this post, but I justify that by saying (1) it was about appearances as they related to politics, and (2) it was about politicians, who are sociopaths whose feelings can’t be hurt.
But for the most part, I try not to go around playing “hot or not” just for fun–people pay enough attention to surface appearances as it is, and this blog is supposed to be about examining the less-obvious things in the world, and the subtle points that people too easily miss.
This post is going to be about looks, though–and it’s even going to involve one particular lady’s looks. (I am especially hesitant to blog about women’s appearances, since I think they tend to be judged on those too much as it is.) I’m only doing it because I think it’s a good jumping-off point for sociological and cultural discussions, and because the lady in question already discussed the topic on her own blog, which I think (at least, I hope) means she does not mind a polite public discussion of it. But before I get to the point, I’ll need to give some background.
Felicia Day is an internet celebrity, popular especially among gamers because she is not only pretty, but also a gamer. This, of course, makes her very popular with many male gamers. She’s been in several online video series, including starring in the show The Guild, which she also wrote.
I mainly like watching her show Co-optitude, where she and her brother play multi-player games. It’s a very funny show. (be warned: lots of profanity, only some of which is censored.) Here is a recent interview with her for those unfamiliar with her:
Anyway, though, the point is she had a lot of male gamer fans, until one day, she cut her hair short. Well, ok–she still has a lot of male gamer fans, including yours truly, but according to this post on her blog, she started losing some, who complained that her new short haircut made them lose interest in her.
She linked to this article by Laurie Penny about why short hair on women is a political statement. That article is itself a response to another article called “Girls With Short Hair are Damaged” by someone called “Tuthmosis”.
At this point, I should like to pause briefly for an editorial comment: there may be many articles on the internet about celebrity haircuts. But what site besides Ruined Chapel gives you assigned reading in the course of such an article?
Now, there are lot of interesting points in all these posts. For starters, I don’t buy Penny’s idea that a woman cutting her hair short is a political statement. I know conservative Republican housewives who cut their hair short because they find it more practical and convenient.
But what I really want to focus on is this: in the “Girls With Short Hair” article, “Tuthmosis” asserts that long hair is “almost universally attractive to men.” And Penny, in her feminist response to that article, implicitly agrees with this assertion. She views short hair, therefore, as women rejecting the notion they need to please men, whereas “Tuthmosis” views it as a negative thing.
What I want to examine is whether the assertion is even true. It is qualified with the word “almost”, which may be enough to save it, but I want to see the data backing it up. I say this because I am one of those men who find short hair more attractive. I don’t mean this in some high-minded “it’s attractive when a woman asserts her independence” sort of way (although I do think that as well.) I mean that at a very fundamental level, I find women with short hair to be, for lack of a better word, “prettier” than those with long hair.
My personal opinion does not prove the assertion false. I am the “almost”. (I might even say, “I am the 1%”) Even so, the fact that such an exception as myself exists admits the possibility of this taste for long hair changing, and short hair being preferred.
But while I may be in the minority, I’m by no means convinced I’m in as small a minority as that. And anyway, if the 1% elites are allowed to control every other aspect of society, why not hairstyles as well?
I’m kidding. But really, is long hair that overwhelmingly preferred?
Last year, there was an online service that was in very high-demand. It was hyped, but its rollout was very rocky. When it was released to the public, it tended to crash a lot. It couldn’t handle the number of users it was getting.
People criticized the organization that created it for being unprepared for the number of users, and for designing the system poorly. It was quite embarrassing, especially since the organization behind it has always been a lightning rod for controversy.
The game companies got flak for it, too–gamers hate Electronic Arts about as much as Republicans hate President Obama, but with the additional problem that they aren’t allowed to filibuster EA’s products and demand they come back with new ones. It’s the equivalent of if Republicans had to pass and endorse all Obama’s pet projects or else leave politics entirely.
But at what point does this sort of thing start to constitute a pattern? When the U.S. Government and two separate large electronics companies cannot roll out a satisfactory online service, you have to wonder if anyone knows what they are doing as far as building online services.
One argument might be that in all cases, the people making the service thought so many would have to use it–because of the law in the one case, and because of the gaming industry hype machine in the others–that they felt no reason to do a good job on the service in question.
But I don’t buy that for the Health Care case, because it’s one of the major political issues of the time, and even if you are so cynical as to believe the architects don’t care about the people, many of them will find their careers riding on the success or failure of the program. So they had good reason to make sure the product worked from the get-go.
I don’t have any real explanations for this myself. I just think it is interesting that wealthy organizations, who ought to have enough resources to understand what they can and can’t make, keep failing at debuting web products like this.
Peter Hitchens is one of my favorite conservative writers. I do not agree with him on very much, but he is an intelligent man, who usually analyzes political and social matters very well, even if he comes to very different conclusions than I do.
That said, sometimes he makes some pretty wacky assertions. For example, in his column today, Hitchens writes:
I am worried by the TV popularity of George R.R. Martin’s clever fantasy Game Of Thrones.
Mr Martin’s imaginary world is frighteningly cruel. The society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages, because its characters are entirely unrestrained by Christian belief. [Emphasis mine] There’s a lifeless, despised religion but nobody takes it seriously.
I fear it will make those who watch it worse people than they were before.
I never watched this show, or read the books it is based on. Yet, I still find this statement very, very difficult to believe. There were a lot of bad things done in the Middle Ages, and its hard to see how George R.R. Martin could have invented something crueler than any one thought to do back then.
My core disagreement with Hitchens is that “Christian belief” made the Middle Ages more restrained. He would have been correct if he had said that people who practiced Christian teachings were more restrained–“All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword“, after all–but the fact is there have been many people throughout history who professed Christian belief without ever letting the tenets of such belief color their actions in any way.
I think it’s pretty clear there were people in the Middle Ages who were unrestrained by Christian teaching. And I am only talking about in the places that were generally “Christian” lands–that becomes even more obvious when you consider all the non-Christians in the Middle Ages.
Is April Fools’ Day on the 6th this year? Or am I missing something? I wish Hitchens would have gone into more detail about what cruel acts the Christian restraint of the Middle Ages prevented, because I frankly can’t come up with much evidence for the claim.
In a strange coincidence with Thingy’s post, there was some kind of Jimmy Stewart marathon on TV yesterday. I saw the end of Anatomy of a Murder and then Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.I won’t comment much on Anatomy, since I didn’t see the whole thing, but what I did see was superbly acted.
The same was true of Mr. Smith. I knew the basic plot going in: A naive everyman goes to Washington and ends up fighting corruption in the Senate. The details are that the naive everyman is a Boy Scout Ranger leader who wants to establish a “Ranger” camp on a piece of land in his state. but the land is reserved for a graft scheme being run by Senator Joe Paine, Smith’s mentor, and the powerful political interests in his state.
As the political interest groups try to destroy Sen. Smith, Sen. Paine and the rest of the political machine fabricate evidence to have him expelled from the Senate. It culminates in the famous filibuster scene, where Smith talks for nearly 24 hours to hold up the bill. (Aside: How different would the current political scene be if Senators had to abide by the strict filibuster rules that Mr. Smith did?)
Finally, Senator Paine is so overwhelmed by Mr. Smith’s last impassioned plea before collapsing on the Senate floor, that he admits to the whole corrupt scheme and Smith is vindicated.
As I said, the acting is excellent. Jimmy Stewart is naively earnest without ever being annoying, and his exhausted speech at the end and witty comments throughout his filibuster are quite good. Jean Arthur is excellent as the cynical but good-natured Senate secretary who helps Smith learn the inner-workings of Washington.
But the best performance I think is that of Claude Rains. I’ve written before about what a great actor he was, and he is excellent as Senator Paine. He does a great job being both a corrupt career man who tries to rationalize compromising his principle, while still showing some genuine fatherly affection for Mr. Smith, that sets up his admission a the end.
The Senate was apparently not terribly thrilled with the movie when it came out. They felt it would cause people to lose faith in the institution. I’m guessing the most stinging part for wasn’t the over-the-top villainy of Boss Taylor, but rather Paine’s melancholy speech to Smith about how, in order to serve and do good for their state, he had to “compromise” certain things. It’s a good speech, because he clearly means it as honest advice, but at the same time, it’s almost like he’s trying to persuade himself.
Ever since the movie came out, various politicians tried to paint themselves as “the real-life Mr. Smith.” The “earnest outsider” card has been played too many times to count. But the thing is, the whole fantasy of the movie is that someone like Smith could ever get to Washington. (It requires a coin flip landing on “edge”.)
But the truth is, there are no Mr. Smiths in Washington–just endless, competing Senator Paines.
Did you hear about this weird rant by the House stenographer right before the vote to re-open the government? Very strange stuff:
I don’t know if there’s audio, but according to this article, part of what she said was:
“This is not one nation under God. It never was,” she said. “Had it been … the Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons, they go against God.”
Longtime readers know my mantra: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I love thinking about them. This would make a great opening scene for a Dan Brown-esque conspiracy novel.
I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this sooner! I just learned about it this week while discussing our latest Federal government crisis with someone. Turns out that, during the first debt ceiling crisis of 2011, people were considering the idea of the U.S. minting a platinum trillion dollar coin in order to bypass the Congress’s refusal to raise the debt limit. Says Wikipedia:
The concept of striking a trillion dollar coin that would generate one trillion dollars in seigniorage, which would be off-budget, or numismatic profit, which would be on-budget, and be transferred to the Treasury… Thus, if the Treasury were to mint one trillion dollar coins, it could deposit such coins at the Federal Reserve’s Treasury account instead of issuing new debt.
Read the article for the full details. The coin would have to be platinum, apparently, which of course immediately made me think of the “platinum chip”, the central MacGuffin in Fallout: New Vegas. Moreover, the whole concept of sounds like the denouement of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. So, how could I not be interested?
More seriously, I think the fact that this was even considered–and only rejected out of deference to the balance of power rules–shows the extent to which our government is not functioning like it should. But then, you knew that.
This latest crisis has shown some serious vulnerabilities in the rules governing the operation of the Federal government. Has our country really never been so polarized that the parties weren’t driven to this kind of thing before?
Because of this post and P.M. Prescott’s comments on it, I was reading again about the populists and William Jennings Bryan when I came across this page, which not only has the text of Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, but also an audio recording of Bryan himself giving excerpts from it. The recording is from 1921, 25 years after he first gave the speech at the Democratic convention. Apparently, it was such a big hit, he gave it many times. His performances of it are even mentioned in the book East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which I recently read.
It’s funny; I’ve studied the Populists and WJB a fair amount, and considered myself pretty familiar with the Populist party and the issues of the time. But there is something about actually hearing him speak–even if it was a recording made much later–that really brings the reality of it home to me. Makes it seem more real, in a visceral way. That sounds corny, but it’s true.
As for the speech itself–can you imagine a politician today giving such a speech? It’s brilliant rhetoric, but it uses so many big words and complex concepts. I bet a lot of people would tune out.