skepolitical

I agree with Keith.  Don’t watch the debates (unless you’re doing it ironically of course).  And let me just real quick sum up the election by providing the most parsimonious prediction as to the outcome that I can:  If youth and minority voters vote en masse, Obama will win by a land slide.  If not, Romney may win.  Boring, but not even Nate Silver can argue w/ that logic.

Also, everyone (I’m looking at you Bloomberg and the Economist) shut up about A123 Batteries.  There is no controversy here.  ”Obama” (scare quotes b/c we seem obsesses w/ blaming the president for everything) didn’t do anything stupid or out of character here.  Sustainable technology is risky.  Too risky for the market to support on its own.  So the government must step in if we are to develop this part of our economy.  So it should be no surprise that some companies will fail.  The only reason this should be a story is if A123 was found to be corrupt or feckless.  AFAIK there is no evidnce of this.  The truth is much more depressing – they couldn’t get their manufacturing right.  Oh well, we’re a service economy!

TLDR; Developing an economy around sustainable technology is a worthy/necessary national goal.   But it’s not going to be easy getting there.  It will be risky.  Companies will fail.  Learn from those mistakes and move on. (272)

[Update below, Oct 16]

This week’s cover story represents the culmination of Newsweek’s decade-long descent from a respected establishment-news source to a tabloid rag.

Continue reading → (2808)

[Update: I copied and pasted this from my backup blog, skepkeith.wordpress.com I see that the formatting didn't translate correctly. Simply click here to view the post at skepkeith, and I'll try to figure out a better way to handle this in the future.]

Continue reading → (649)

A Links Post! (With commentary.)

Continue reading → (3470)

Allow me to indulge in some public self-exploration. I promise to conclude with a worthy resolution. As readers of this blog know, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to react to the injustices I see in the world around me. Of particular interest are those injustices that I am ostensibly responsible for: those committed by my own government. The current reality seems to be that Americans are so far removed from the levers of power that they have, perhaps rationally, given up not only the hope of affecting their government’s actions, but also any sense of responsibility for them. Any lingering sense of civic duty in a typical American’s heart is assuaged by voting once every four years and voicing their indignant anger at those in opposition to their favored party. Over one-third of Americans didn’t even bother going that far in 2008 (37% didn’t vote).

Continue reading → (2709)

[Updated below, Sept 8.]

Chris Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation is quickly becoming one of my favorite political commentators. (I defended him in an earlier post after he was criticized for discussing his misgivings with the use of the word “hero” as a blanket descriptor for any American soldier who dies in combat.) Recently, I learned that Hayes made almost the exact same commentary on his show Up With Chris as the one I made in my last post (and on the same day, August 18), where I decried the use of the word “hypocrisy” to describe certain stances and behaviors of advocates of small government.

Continue reading → (1801)

Criticizing the deceitfulness of one’s ideological opponents is the national pastime of the blogosphere, but it’s all rank hypocrisy unless one simultaneously holds the discourse of one’s ideological allies to an equally high standard. I wish neither to be a hypocrite nor to relinquish the moral high ground required to criticize my ideological opponents, so I feel obligated to point out a an example of unfair “spin” that’s recently been propagated by Glenn Greenwald and Jay Tomlinson’s The Best of the Left podcast. Since this is ostensibly a skeptical blog, and since a primary goal of the Skeptic Movement is to improve the level of discourse in society, this topic seems especially appropriate. Besides, this shit’s been getting on my nerves for weeks. Before I get into it, I want to emphasize that these rhetorical offenses are not representative of BotL and (especially) Greenwald; to the contrary, I find them noteworthy because they are exceptional.  Continue reading → (2391)