Blackmoor Vituperative

Ten years ago, the idea of the US government spying on its citizens, intercepting their emails or killing them with drones was unthinkable. But now it’s business as usual, says John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent and torture whistleblower.

Kiriakou is now awaiting a summons to start a prison sentence. One of the first to confirm the existence of Washington’s waterboarding program, he was sentenced last week to two-and-a-half years in jail for revealing the name of an undercover agent. But even if he had another chance, he would have done the same thing again…

(from ‘US a police state, Obama consciously allows torture’ – CIA veteran John Kiriakou, RT.com)

Susan said this earlier and it struck me really funny, so I made a meme for it.

Okay, another political thing, but this is less about politics and more about accuracy. When people talk about the former Confederate states voting as a block for Romney, those people are full of hot air. (In fact, pretty much any time someone starts spewing invective about the South or the North, you can safely bet they are full of hot air.) The Electoral College votes are not representative of who people actually voted for.

I’ll say that again:

Electoral College votes are not representative of who people actually voted for.

“Cousin Cole” made the above graphic and posted it on Facebook.

I made this because 1) I wanted to see what it looked like and 2) I think it’s kinda important. Talking about red states versus blue states in a monolithic way is reductive and annoying.

Several people have asked how this was done. The numbers were taken from MSNBC. I matched the percentage of blue in an RGB color picker to the percentage of the vote Barack Obama got and did the same for Romney and red. Green stayed at zero.

So if a state had voted 100% for one or the other, you would see the bluest blue or reddest red your computer screen can produce. The reason all the colors are more or less in the middle is because no state went more than ~70% for one side or the other. Although if you zoom in you can see that DC is very bright with 91% for Obama.

A few people mentioned that they’d like to see this done by county. Personally I don’t think the county map would be that useful unless it reflected the population disparity between counties (which is harder, but maybe possible). I’m thinking about it.

The USA is not divided into huge subcontinent-sized areas that voted for Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum in monolithic blocks. There is a good chance that half of the people you meet on a given day voted more or less the way you did, and half didn’t. That’s true whether you live in New York or Georgia, Alaska or Florida. People who spout hate and demonize entire regions of the USA based on electoral college votes aren’t interested in accuracy or seeking common ground: quite the opposite.

Be accurate. Seek common ground. Assume good faith in others until they prove otherwise. Don’t distort the truth to spread hate and divisiveness.

P.S. Mapping politics (and the politics of maps)

I don’t interpret the election results the way anyone else does. When given the choice between two virtually identical candidates and three other very distinct candidates, 98% of the country voted for the two virtually identical candidates, and the votes for those two candidates got split almost exactly in half. To me, that says that a) 98% of the country approves of our current domestic and foreign policies, and b) that the two major parties are very good at choosing candidates that appeal to nearly everyone, to the extent that choosing between them may as well be a coin toss.

I find the chest-thumping of the winners and the hand-wringing of the losers surreal. Half of the country wanted a Pepsi, and a very tiny fraction less than that wanted Coke. This means that Coke is no longer relevant, can no longer be seriously considered as a soft drink, should be removed from grocery store shelves and relegated to local convenience stores, and so on? This means that people who want Pepsi are morally and dietetically inferior (or superior) to people who’d rather drink Coke? It’s the end of the world and/or the beginning of a new era because a very tiny fraction of the population prefers one brand of carbonated brown sugar-water over another brand of carbonated brown sugar-water?

It all just seems a wild overreaction to a very tiny difference in preference between two extremely similar things.

Here are two meme images I made in response to the outrage over the cost of PBS, and the outrage over that outrage.

POP QUIZ: One of these articles is satire, and one of them is factual. Can you tell which is which?

1) ‘Pregnancy Begins 2 Weeks Before Conception’ Now The Law In Arizona

2) Ann Romney: “Why should women be paid equal to men?”

I am of the growing opinion that our state and federal governments are all just an elaborate prank.

This is not a political blog entry. I don’t care what your politics are, and I’ve no interest in convincing you to adopt mine. The topic today is not politics, but political journalism.

Richi Jennings (who seems like a nice guy, and whose tech-related articles I typically enjoy) posted an article on Forbes, “Paul Ryan stimulus budget: What would Ayn Rand say?”

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI): Is he a libertarian or just another budget-busting politician? And does he or does he not support government fiscal stimulus?

Um… wait. What? What the..?

First, Paul Ryan is obviously not a libertarian. You may as well ask, “Is he a Klingon?” Uh, no. Clearly not.

Second, Ayn Rand despised libertarians even more than she hated communists. So why would anyone seek Ayn Rand’s opinion on whether someone else is or is not a libertarian? That makes no sense.

Granted, the article is basically a summary of what various pundits are saying about Paul Ryan (and what they say is equally nonsensical), but that doesn’t excuse this bizarrely nonsensical introduction.

I pointed this out to Richi Jennings. He replied,

Lest we forget, the point of OTOH is to sum up what a range of voices are saying on an issue. Whatever your own particular point of view, some of the voices are bound to be ‘wrong’ ;-)

Suggesting Ryan might be a libertarian or that Rand might approve of him if he were is not ‘wrong’, with quotation marks. That implies it’s a matter of opinion. It is flat out blatantly incorrect. “Mars orbits the Moon” kind of incorrect. “Chickens built Stonehenge” kind of incorrect.

People who don’t know the difference between objectivism and libertarianism, and which one Ayn Rand promoted and which one she despised, shouldn’t be using those words in a sentence. You may as well say, “Is Ryan a nihilist? What would Albert Camus say?” (The point being that Ryan is obviously not a nihilist, and that Camus was rather famously not a nihilist, either.)

Here are some other equally nonsensical headlines:

“Is Paul Ryan a dinosaur? What would David Wozney say?”

“Is Paul Ryan a moon of the planet Jupiter? What would Cyrus Reed Teed say?”

“Is Paul Ryan a 19th century geologist and naturalist named Charles Darwin? What would Pat Robertson say?”

Follow-up: Richi Jennings has modified his intro to say, “But is he a libertarian, an objectivist, or just another budget-busting politician?”

Here is an interesting article from Matt Bai: How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game? The gist of it is that Citizens United may not have exactly the impact that people tell you it has (or will have). Which, in retrospect, really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

And here is a … not so much a rebuttal, because he doesn’t respond to any of the original article’s points… it’s a reply, I guess, from Russ Feingold. I don’t find it persuasive. “A new form of corruption”? Hardly. Matt Bai makes it amply clear that this form of corruption has been around since at least the 1990s (and in my opinion, since long before that). But this Feingold fellow was the ONLY Senator to vote against the so-called PATRIOT act during the first vote on it, so I’ll give his arguments my attention based on that alone.