Brains: Gotta remember to update the title!

[elfs]

The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Your Clutter

Monks keep it simple, and get a lot done. Why can't you?

Seth: How To Make Money on the Internet

Just plain goodness. Enjoy.

Republicans: Dying from the Head Down

The Economist explains the death of the Republican party:

Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantanamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

Conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives–particularly lower-income ones–are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin's apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today's pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

Andrew Sullivan says the "ruled by dynasties" bit is "a nice touch." Oh, if only that were true. National Review could have done will with Chris Buckley at the helm. I don't think he wants the job.

Crippled Dogs and One Trick Ponies: The Texas State Board of Education's Science Hearings

Apparently, the pro-science faction had to deal with state board member Terri Leo, who railed against "militant Darwinism" and tried, as creationists will, to use science when it benefitted her, and dismiss it when it didn't. A long, personal account of yesterday's meeting, in all its sick glory.

Obama's secret plan to muzzle talk radio. Very, very secret.

Marin Cogan at The New Republic does some actual journalism and fails to find a single person in congress who thinks the Fairness Doctrine will return. Obama is opposed to it. Those members of Congress most interested in media oppose it. Last year, when Democrats were in charge of Congress, the House voted 3-to-1 on a resolution discouraging the FCC from re-instating it.

I suspect that it's more than mere paranoia. In order to be effective, right-wing radio must be in opposition. They must appear to be the scrappy revolutionary upstart. It can't be the idea in ascendency. But they clearly are: in Seattle we have one "pretending to be neutral" station, one Air America outlet, three evangelical channels, one Catholic, and three rabidly right-wing. "Conservative" ideas own the airwaves. The only way to look as if they're under seige is to create this phony controversy. (via Steve Benen)

Comments

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

This is because Obama and most of the congressional democrats are not liberals, they are centrists.

[heofmanynames.livejournal.com]

SHHH!
(you won't wake him, but you may disturb his dreams)

[fallenpegasus]

"Central" is a statement of relative position. Thus, all it means in this case is "someone not as liberal as me".

The semantic content of that is almost but not quite zero.

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

We use the terms "Conservative", "Liberal", and "Centrist" as if they occupied locations or regions on a unidimensional spectrum, with "Conservative" and "Liberal" being on either end, and, as one might guess, "Centrist" being in the middle.

I think the truth is more that each of us has a large constellation of beliefs, and that you could, to some extent, plot the beliefs of individuals as points in a multidimensional space, then do the equivalent of clustering analysis to identify the centroids of the "Liberal", "Conservative", and "Centrist" regions of that multidimensional space. Of course, it's an open question as to whether or not clustering analysis would give you groups that correspond to the three aforementioned categories.

Failing some sort of mathematical analysis similar to the one I posit above, how would one go about determining whether or not a particular person was "Centrist", and, assuming you did make such a determination, what, exactly, would that tell you that you didn't already know?

If my subjective impression is that "Mr. X is a Centrist", and someone else's subjective impression is that "Mr. X is a Liberal", how do we determine which, if either of us, is correct?