Mr Weatherby

Winter break from school finds me in a state of novelty: I actually have some free time. Time enough, in fact, to do a bit of blogging. It’s a Christmas miracle.

I’d like to talk about the U.S. senate, which is a source of nearly endless amusement for me. Becoming a senator is one “when I grow up” dream that has not yet entirely withered and died in the shadow of pragmatic resignation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is on my short list of personal heroes, what with his sociology Ph.D and his fairly auspicious career as a senator from New York.

Career dreams and personal heroism aside, part of the charm which the senate holds for me is on the basis of its more arcane elements, which frankly border on the comical. The filibuster, for example. That serious policy decisions are subject to crushing leverage by one person willing to get up in the highest house of the legislature and read from a phone book is too absurd not to be at least a little delightful. Sure, it’s annoying when this stands in the way of genuinely needed progress, and I’m not saying the delightfulness is necessarily worth the cost. A lot of senatorial rules are that way, actually, one of them being the procedure for replacing a senator who departs mid-term.

This has been the source of some rather distasteful goings-on in Illinois recently, but I’m more interested in the other one the talking heads have been chewing on: coincidentally the seat once held by Senator Moynihan himself, and subsequently by Hillary Clinton, which now seems to be Caroline Kennedy’s for the taking. This does not please me.

I like the Kennedy family as much as the next American liberal does, but that’s because a lot of talented people earned my respect. Caroline Kennedy, by all accounts, is a talented person, but does anyone really think it wasn’t John, Bobby, Ted and co. who “earned” her the privilege of consideration which she now enjoys? In some way, of course, the name creates not just entree but power itself, and it would in all likelihood make her a more effective legislator than the same person would be if she came from a different lineage.

I am not, on the other hand, decrying some kind of lack of democracy here. Democracy is important, certainly, but it is not the undying rule by which all governmental positions should be filled. This country was designed as an indirectly democratic republic, one meant to maximize the impact of people best in a position to make informed decisions. I am not asking for the seat to be filled by a popular vote — it would probably just go to Kennedy anyway, and still just because she’s a Kennedy. Name recognition is huge in the electoral business.

So what then? I’m glad you asked. I remember once, a few years ago, when the national Democratic party identified a young state senator in whom they saw a lot of potential. They decided to give him a boost — show him to the country, give him some name recognition so that he could parlay that into further career advancement. They let him give a speech at the convention in 2004, and then-state-senator Obama has done pretty well for himself since then.

Don’t tell me we’ve depleted our farm system already. Is there nobody else whose primary liability is that people have not yet heard of him or her on a national or even New York state level? There certainly doesn’t seem to be an experienced senator waiting around to fill the void, otherwise why would we be bothering with throwing a more-or-less untested Kennedy into the high house? If she wants the senate seat long-term, she can run for it when the election comes up, but it would be missing a tremendous opportunity to just give it to her now instead of using the opportunity to give a boost to another person who probably deserves it equally.

I know a young, enthusiastic grad student who has always wanted to be a senator. I bet he would take the job…

Tags: politics

So I was about to log into Myspace earlier today and when I saw this:

They’re promoting pop-country starlet Taylor Swift with a reference to the classic Sex Pistols album. Because if there’s anyone who’s going to be interested in the Britney Spears of canned top-40 country music, it’s old school punk rockers, right? Allow me to whip out a venn diagram in case my sarcasm isn’t coming through.

The sole entry under the “See Also” heading on the Wikipedia page for smelling salts is “aromatherapy.” I don’t know if it’s the smelling salts people or the candle/incense people, but at least one of those camps should object to that.

I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between the subset of people who read this blog and the subset of people who care about baseball, but whatever. I’m writing about baseball anyway. Really though, I’m sure you can make connections as to how it applies to other things if you want, things you find more relevant to your life. Football, maybe.

So here’s the deal: at the end of a given baseball season, they hand out awards to players for outstanding individual accomplishments of different types: some for pitchers, some for new players, some for hitters, for fielders, and so on. The most prestigious, for which all players are eligible, is the MVP, or Most Valuable Player. It’s like the Nobel prize of Major League Baseball, at least as far as specific players are concerned.

Baseball fans and “experts” like to engage in speculation about the eventual winner of this award, well in advance of the end of the season. The great charm of baseball, really, is the pursuit of hypotheticals, and this one is a classic. Debates are more engaging when there are camps and paradigms, and the MVP debate has them with gusto. I’d like to talk briefly about how the one I don’t belong to is silly and wrong.

What this comes down to, I think, is what is meant by the term value. At least I hope that’s what it comes down to, because sometimes I’m afraid it’s just a matter of widespread failure to think carefully about the situation, but let’s give the rubes as much credit as possible, at least for the purpose of discussion. Some would say that value is how much a player contributes to a team’s capacity to win ballgames. Other people seem to think value is some kind of interactive product between a team’s total accomplishments and the relative contribution of any one of its players, or something like that. The bottom line is that a lot of folks will insist that someone should not be recognized as the most valuable player if his team didn’t do well. These people make me angry.

I hope a brief metaphor will illustrate my position here. Let’s say that you and I collect baseball cards, and we go in to our local card shop and have our collections appraised. The shopkeeper says that all of the cards we have brought him are worth between a nickel and two dollars, with the exception of one card that’s worth ten. Now then, reader, I ask you: which is the MVC (most valuable card)? If your answer starts with “well, that depends on which collection is worth most in total,” I want you to go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done. It’s the ten dollar card.

I can understand, sort of, the argument that “value” should reflect a players value in practice, to the specific team that employs him. Of course, this would actually lead one to vote for guys on bad teams, not good ones. If you have a team full of guys who should be playing in a corn field in Toledo, plus Babe Ruth, that team won’t do particularly well. However, if you take Ruth out of the lineup, they would lose virtually their entire capacity to score runs. Ruth is probably more valuable to them than anyone else is to his respective team, and Ruth is more valuable to his team than he would be to any other team. This is a perfectly reasonable standard, by which it is perfectly reasonable to name Ruth the most valuable player, even if Barry Bonds had a better season, but it was while playing for a team full of stars.

There are not legions of people out there that say the MVP should go to the biggest star on the most incompetent team, as this line of reasoning would support. There are, however, people who try to use this line of reasoning to support the case of players on the best teams. They seem to assume that the only variation in talent and productivity exists between people about whom they are speculating; Batting Bob and Swinging Steve are both great players, and one of them will be the MVP, but everyone else in the league is part of an army of mass-produced, identical automatons. In this case, sure, the fact that Batting Bob made the playoffs while Swinging Steve didn’t is admissible evidence, because they had the same thing to work with. We’ve controlled for all the potentially intervening variables. Of course, every single player has some different productive value, and no one player has the single-handed capacity to ensure the pennant for his team, so it really doesn’t matter what the teams did — you just have to figure out which player performed best over the course of the season. I really don’t think it’s that complicated.

Tags: baseball

Michel Foucault is
a hypochondriac and
power is the germ

Tags: procrastination

Hello, reader. Let’s play a game. Which one of the following movie premises is not like the other? Ready?

• Adam Sandler is in love with a girl, but the it turns out the girl is a golden retriever or something.
• Adam Sandler inherits like a billion dollars, but first he has to become a boxer or something
• Adam Sandler is an Israeli army guy, but then he goes to America because he wants to be a hair stylist or something
• Adam Sandler is trapped on an island and falls in love with a coconut*

Ok, I’ll give you a hint: three of these were generated by Awesom-o 4000, an intelligent robot that is actually Eric Cartman dressed up in a cardboard suit. The other one hits theaters this Friday.

Conclusion? Awesome-o exists.

Dear George Lucas,

So then, about Indiana Jones 4…you’ve got to be kidding. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. I’d like to see the script that Ford refused to make. I don’t know, maybe this was his fault. Maybe that first script was better, and he sent it back to you riddled with post-it notes with messages like “more goofiness!” and “make this part sillier!!” scribbled on them. You know what though, I’m inclined to blame you, the man who could have left the world free of Jar-Jar Binks but instead chose not to. I want you to take a while and think about what you’ve done here.

Sincerely,
Geoffrey

P.S.
more Star Wars please.

Subject: FROM MR MIKES TO YOU (don’t use all caps.)
From: “Dear Sir/Madam” (mikeandree4@voila.fr) (put your name here, not a greeting)
Date: Mon, May 26, 2008 2:58 am
To: undisclosed-recipients:; (why? suspicious)

Dear Sir/Madam don’t you know who I am?
I am (a/the) manager of one of the leading company (which one? ) in South Benin. (runon) inIn my company, we discovered an abandoned large sum of money (US$14.7M) belonging to one of our Foreign Customer foreign customers, Mr. William Barnes, an American Nationality, a businessman,businessman who was involved in an air crash along with his family.:-( You can confirm from the website below. PLANE CRASH WEB SITE (don’t use all caps) http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa/12/26/benin.crash/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/egyptair/article/0,,196602,00.html. (website from 2003? use updated sources!) I am seeking for your Co-operation cooperation to front you as the beneficiary of the funds. (confusing…explain. why me? you come off crazy throwing this out for no reason) No beneficiary, No no other person knows about these funds neither operate nor has anyone operated this account since his death. (why not? doesn’t make sense) The Strategy strategy is to use our (”our”? who else are you representing? this comes out of nowhere) influence as managers of the company to approve you as the beneficiary and release the funds over to you. (do I need to pay you some of the money? What’s the catch?) So if you are interested please reply with your full name, Address, address telephone and fax (nobody uses fax anymore) number for further clarification. (clarify here!) You should contact me on my Private Email private email / mikeandree3@voila.fr (”.fr”? I thought you were in Benin?!?)immediately as soon as you receive this letter email. Trusting to hear from you immediately. (fragment, reword)

Yours faithfully
Regards. (choose one closing an use a comma after it.)
Mr. Mike Andree (If your last name isn’t “Mikes”, don’t call yourself “Mr. Mikes” in the subject line)

Your writing mechanics need some work. In particular, be attentive of your capitalization. Interesting usage of cnn.com, but as mentioned previously, please use a more recent article. Other than that, this email lacked originality…I felt like I had read this dozens of times before.
C-

I am of the opinion that making arguments of questionable validity does unquestionable damage to one’s position — it makes you look desperate, like you don’t have any stronger evidence to put forth. If you have really firmly established your strongest claims, then it might be time to move on to advancing the more debatable points in an attempt to win the fence-sitters with whom the secondary claims resonate, but I don’t know if just shutting up about them entirely is necessarily a bad idea in some circumstances.

Unfortunately, I see large chunks of the democratic party — specifically, the Obama chunks — engaging in what seems to me like shooting itself in the foot via this sort of weak argumentation. To be clear on where I stand in this arena, I can think of about six hypothetically viable Democrats whom I would prefer over Senator Clinton, with Obama near the top of that list. I have objections with several different elements of her campaign, and I think that by remaining in the race at this point she’s doing a disservice to the causes which I have no doubt she earnestly supports.

That being said, I would kindly implore everyone to please shut up about the comments she made regarding RFK recently. I don’t see what the big deal is, and there are many much more salient reasons to disagree with the woman.

Here’s a recap: Clinton, responding to inquiries about her continued presence in the race, noted that her husband didn’t wrap up the nomination until June, and that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June as well. Once word of these comments got out, knickers across the nation became horribly bunched. Here’s some AP coverage of the back-and-forth between campaign PR people, and here’s Gawker dealing in a narrative which I’ve seen several places, which is that Clinton’s motivation is the notion, already advanced by some, that Obama will be an unduly appealing target to potential assassins. This is not only unfounded (in my opinion), but a perfect example of the problems involved with trying to win support through tertiary arguments. On one hand, you’re probably getting your base all excited — and I’m talking about the Obama base here, attributing such tortured reasoning to Clinton — but everyone else is not going to uncritically accept the notion that she is so callous and fear-mongering as to rest her self-justification on the contention that Obama is as good as dead. This futility of message would probably be true irrespective of the actual evidence, but even more so in light of the fact that, taken in proper context, people can actually Clinton was making a rather benign (almost insipid, really) historical remark. Here’s a youtube video of the exchange in question.

See that? In specific answer to the “party unity argument” (the notion that her failure to concede the nomination results most notably in continued infighting amongst democrats, which creates a net negative effect for democrats in general), she cites the precedent of two previous candidates on successful trajectories who were still active in their primary campaigns at this point in the year, who are not generally regarded to have caused serious harm to the well-being of the party. Her husband took a while to secure the nomination, and proceeded to win the general election. Bobby Kennedy was only stopped by his tragic and untimely death — i.e., he was still actively seeking the nomination in June, and the man is held as highly in people’s memories as anyone in the party’s history, probably.

The key thing, really, is that in this particular metaphor, Clinton seems to suggest that she is RFK. It’s not “RFK got shot and so will Obama,” it’s “RFK was still going strong and so am I”. She wants people to think she’s a noble proponent of principled stances, and that it’s more important for her to continue fighting for them than to concede; she would sooner be a martyr than a quitter, or whatever. Now, this is silly (because by most objective measures Obama is much more similar to Bobby Kennedy than she is, which might be where some of this confusion is coming from), evasive (because she’s really not addressing the dynamics of the current race and specific ramifications of her actions, just citing two superficially similar moments in history without analysis), and probably a little insensitive, but I think people are really overreacting on this. I mean, senator Clinton isn’t stupid — if she actually is pinning her hopes on the possibility that Obama’s parallels to RFK continue with tragic conclusion, she would have conceded gracefully and then arisen as the default replacement post-assassination, promising to carry on in the spirit of his legacy in these saddest of times, so on and so forth. Maybe she doesn’t want you to vote for Obama because someone will kill him further down the line, at which point his VP/running mate would take over, which a) stretches the RFK comparison and b) doesn’t resonate very well without a specific person to put in that backup role. I don’t buy it.

Going on about this makes it look like we’re splitting hairs. Some of the discussion is clearly being maintained by (relatively/allegedly) disinterested media outlets, but it wouldn’t have much cache if the Obama camp made a statement saying they didn’t think it was a big deal. Irrespective of the advancement goals for the Obama campaign, it’s really just irresponsible not to do a little digging to figure out what was going on with these remarks before lambasting the woman.

I suppose the take-away point here might be that Senator Clinton’s comments have resulted in drawn out, petty infighting between democrats, rather than using that time and energy to prepare for the fight with Senator McCain. It would seem as though there might be something to all this party unity business after all.