For the press corps, there was no power; at first, there weren’t even any chairs. But none of those things were what made the wait unbearable. That honor belonged to the warm-up act, the ever-execrable Dave Matthews, who at one point uttered a sentence that, coming from him, was so horrific it chills my soul to restate it now: “I’m gonna play a few more.”
Category: blog
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Please don’t.
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Voting is Apparently All the Rage in Small-Town Maine
Jessica and I voted first thing in the morning today, and I decided to bring Toby along. He’s not even three, of course, and he was bored and a little cranky most of the time (I had forbidden him Munchkins from Dunkin Donuts, and that about severed our familial bonds), but I thought it was important for him to see his parents taking this democracy thing seriously.
Plus, he loves saying, “You know what? JOE BIDEN!” So this was a chance for him to see us vote for him.
Here are the pictures I quickly took of our polling place at the community center in Saco, Maine.
Because I was driving, I did not get what would have been the far more remarkable pictures of the cars backed up for blocks, filled with folks coming to vote before going to work. It was much more than I expected, especially when you consider that Maine is not a swing state this year, our U.S. Senate race to replace Olympia Snowe is a foregone conclusion (you could pretty much call him Senator-Elect Angus King as soon as he announced), and of course, our U.S. House race for our district was also without drama, with our popular Democratic incumbent.
Even given all that, all those people showed up. Maybe we’ll see more today across the country than is commonly assumed.
And in Toby’s own words, “That was good voting!”
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A man in full
One of the few things that Christie and Obama share is a palpable sense that their political opponents are lesser men, though in Obama this exhibits itself as an airy idealism and in Christie as an all-encompassing disgust. What the president’s embrace gave Christie was a grand identity—a national leader, bigger than politics—that for once matched his own self-image. And so here he was, Chris Christie, guardian of the boardwalk, canceler of Halloween, bard of the sausage-and-pepper stand, raging against the storm, ministering to sorrow, a man in full.
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Never saw us coming
To my fellow seculars, skeptics, humanists, and nonbelievers, the political class did not see us coming. For decades, maybe centuries, they’ve been avoiding us, ignoring us, or outright reviling us. And then one day in October, they realized that they couldn’t do that anymore.
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What if it All Goes Horribly Pear-Shaped?
In 2004, though I had high hopes, it was not really a surprise that George W. Bush was “re”-elected. Oh, there was despair. I remember the sharp feeling of disappointment at the majority of the electorate — how could they be fooled by this numbnut? — but I knew we’d all kind of muddle on.
2008 was its own thing. On Election Night it was pretty obvious how it was going to go, even if I was afraid to admit it to myself.
It’s different now. It does still seem that the president is likely to win narrowly, but it remains fully plausible that Romney could eke it out. It’s not the most likely scenario, but it would not be a huge surprise.
So what then? How do I handle that? What should be my response? There was a lot of idle chatter about a mass liberal exodus to America’s Hat in 2004, but this time it feels even more dire. I think that’s because even with a Democratic president (and Congress, if briefly), we still couldn’t seem to stop the entire political and governmental system from collapsing under the weight of the astounding cynicism, greed, and heartlessness of the GOP. Real or not, it feels as though a Romney presidency will only push things over the edge once and for all, and we will have ourselves a country we no longer recognize.
Paranoid? Probably. But I also think there’s at least a few grains of truth here. Clearly, things are going wildly off-track, despite the best intentions and efforts of the few well-meaning folks in Washington that are still left. Once the villains run the entire show, at this point in history, I’m just not confident there’s going to be very much left to salvage.
Considering how utterly discouraging the past couple of years have been (yes, despite the important successes, which have felt, however, more like freak exceptions than a sign of potential), I’m not at all sure that I can continue to be as engaged in national politics if a hollow, cynical phony like Romney is elected. I might take some solace in a Democratic Senate, but let’s be honest, the Senate’s Democrats are not exactly a coterie of socialist hippies.
The one glimmer of interest I might maintain in the wreckage of an Obama defeat might be in the cells of resistance to the newly-slavering GOP behemoth. What does a Senator Elizabeth Warren do to fight the tide of plutocracy? What kind of actitivity do we see from folks on the ground like Cory Booker? They will have so much to push against, though, and it may feel futile.
Again, I suspect I will not have to confront this. But if we are looking down the barrel of a Romney administration, I may have to avert my gaze.
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Kindle Paperwhite
I’ve had the Kindle Paperwhite for only a few hours, but I want to get down a few quick first impressions.
As far as the object itself, it’s a big win. None-more-black, grippy, heavier than the vanilla Kindle 4 I just sold, but not enough to matter. The screen has a kind of matte finish that feels almost like paper, which I think has a nice psychological effect of removing the device from comparison to tablets. I also got the official Amazon cover, which has a magnetic clasp that turns the device on and off, a la iPad Smart Covers, and that’s more useful than I predicted: it really is like opening and closing an actual book.
The illumination is excellent. It really doesn’t shine at you, but simply lends a soft glow, giving the screen marvelous contrast that just makes previous models’ displays look like old LCD watches from the 80s. Yes, there is inconsistency in light coverage at the very, very bottom of the screen, and yes, it’s definitely noticeable. So far, not a deal breaker by any stretch, but it will take time to see if I get used to it enough to stop thinking about it every time I see it.
The software is leaps and bounds improved from the Kindle Touch. Far more responsive, it starts to approach a half-decent tablet in its speed and sensitivity. It’s still not stellar, but it’s still hampered by the fact that we’re taking about an e-ink screen. Amazon changed the touch screen from infrared (detecting your finger as it passes an invisible light grid) to capacitive (actually detecting contact with the screen) and you can very much tell the difference. The Kindle Touch is junk in comparison.
The resolution is vastly improved as well from previous models, but it so much that it quite achieves what it sets out to do with fonts. The original default font looks far better than it did, but while the near-Retina-iPad resolution allows for a wider variety of fonts, they’re mostly not executed very well, and fancy typefaces like Baskerville and Palatino look pixelated. I guess it’s nice they’re there, but since you can easily see the difference is resolution between those and the default Caecilia font, I’m likely to stick with that. But UI elements overall look far better than they did, and even the crappy web browser is better looking.
So far, this seems to easily be the best Kindle, and probably best e-ink based reader available.
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They just hate computers
This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need «entry-level» performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: «Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.» And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is incredibly slow, the keyboard sucks, and they either never actually use it, or eventually come to the conclusion that they just hate computers. In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.
Lukas Mathis – Crappy Computers
Wow, this just lit a big lightbulb for me.
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The Attack, Ctd?
Last year, the anniversary of my assault carried great weight with me. I dreaded the coming of the date October 27, and worried that I would relapse into a spiral of terror and despair all over again. (I didn’t.)
This year, I completely forgot about it. The day came and went, and I didn’t notice.
It’s taken an enormous amount of work and suffering and rebuilding to get to a point where that’s even possible. I’m still wrestling with that night’s repercussions to this day, and likely will for a long time, but even I’m a little astounded that the second anniversary came and went, and I was just too busy to realize it. Hmph.
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The belligerent South
Anthropologists have long noted that societies that herd livestock in rugged terrain tend to develop a “culture of honor.” Since their wealth has feet and can be stolen in an eye blink, they are forced to deter rustlers by cultivating a hair-trigger for violent retaliation against any trespass or insult that probes their resolve. Farmers can afford to be less belligerent because it is harder to steal their land out from under them, particularly in territories within the reach of law enforcement. As the settlers moved westward, they took their respective cultures with them. The psychologist Richard Nisbett has shown that Southerners today continue to manifest a culture of honor which legitimizes violent retaliation. It can be seen in their laws (like capital punishment and a stand-your-ground right to self-defense), in their customs (like paddling children in schools and volunteering for military service), even in their physiological reactions to trivial insults.
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Fired from the polity
Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.
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Reading Shakespeare is like going to church
While I’m very much interested in Shakespeare’s life, I’m more interested in my own. What I extrapolate from The Winter’s Tale is that if Leontes deserves a break, so do I. There came a time in my life when I needed to be forgiven. I wasn’t. If I must take my consolation from a play rather than from any flesh and blood Hermione, that’s not quite so bleak as it sounds. Yes, I would have preferred real forgiveness to the literary kind, but I find it no small consolation that at the end of his life the world’s supreme imaginative writer returns again and again to a basic home truth: we must forgive each other. For me, reading Shakespeare is like going to church, except that in place of a God I could never and wouldn’t want to believe in, I “commune,” so to speak, with a mind that seems to comprehend all others and enforces no doctrinal obedience. This community of believers embraces anyone who has ever seen, heard, or read a word of Shakespeare’s and been moved to wonder and reflection. That’s what I call a catholic church.
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But America Didn’t Listen
Connor Friedersdorf on how we should have listened to George McGovern, now nearing death:
Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who’d be alive today if the country had listened to McGovern rather than his opponents about the Vietnam War. Think of all the veterans who’d have been better off. Think of how many Vietnamese civilians would’ve been spared death by napalm. But America didn’t listen.
The country would eventually come to see Vietnam as a mistake.
But ours is a people who are dismissive of men who lose presidential elections. We behave as though the electoral outcome discredited their ideas, even on matters where they’re ultimately proved right.
Indeed. Now take all the ideas above about Vietnam and war, and replace them with global warming. The analogy to Al Gore is equally, if not more powerful, and even more consequential.
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269
This horror scenario of an Electoral College tie is completely plausible. I have an unprovable hunch that this scenario is far more likely than almost anyone is thinking.
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Break the seal of shame
… should Obama fail, the people who will suffer under a triumphant Republican administration will not be abstract to him; they will be down the street. The poor black women who will doubtlessly find their access to contraception troubled will be degrees closer to Obama than to any other presidential aspirant. That 47 percent whom Mitt Romney will surely treat as the loafers he considers them to be will not be a subject of academic study, they will be his fellow parishioners. Barack Obama has spent a life breaking barriers, and should he lose, in any part, because he neglected to prepare — to work hard — he will break the seal on a shame which few can fathom.
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Invisible hand
Maybe a couple of magazines will survive in print as status symbols at the high end, or as supermarket check-out tabloids at the lower stratosphere. But I doubt even that. Tablet subscriptions seem to me the only viable way forward. The good news is that the savings from this can be plowed back into journalism if revenues from subs and ads revive. In the end, the individual who will decide if magazines survive at all, even on tablets, will be readers, and their willingness to pay for writing in that form, when they go online and get it for free. Yep, it’s up to you. And all your invisible hands.
Out Of The Ashes Of Dead Trees – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast
Leave it to Sullivan, in the midst of of embracing radical, forward-thinking change, to sneak in a free-market shiv that makes even a pinko socialist like me smile while I’m being stabbed.
pav dot quest 