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03 Aug 2003 — Saving the party from its saviors

The Democratic Leadership Council, which fancies itself a bastion of moderation against the special-interest hordes, Just Doesn’t Get It, and Digby has their number:

“The Internet may be giving angry, protest-oriented activists the rope they need to hang the party,” wrote Randolph Court in the DLC’s bimonthly newsletter, The New Democrat Blueprint.

I sure wish that the Republicans had believed that about talk radio because then we’d hold both houses of congress, the presidency and the courts today….

This is a terrible misconception and one that will indeed “hang the party” because these guys are not only out of touch with their own party, they are obviously delusional about the opposition. They don’t recognize that the political landscape has completely changed since 1985 when the DLC was created and 1992 when it reached its zenith of power. In 2004 it is losing its relevance to many Democrats, not because of a difference in policy but because it has failed to recognize that while they have not changed, the Republican Party has undergone a complete metamorphosis. They do not seem to understand that when the competition completely changes strategy, you must be prepared to change strategy as well.

The Republican Party of George W. Bush is fundamentally different than the Party of George H.W. Bush. They are playing a form of political hardball that is completely unresponsive to the cooperative, consensus style politics that characterizes the DLC. They will not budge on policy and when it comes to tactics they are knife wielding thugs.

Dean’s early success isn’t about liberal spending programs and “far left” hatred for Junior. It’s about opening your eyes and seeing what is right in front of your face — a dangerously radical Republican party that simply will not compromise or deal fairly.

03 Aug 2003 — Boffed in Boston

While the Boston press is gaga over the new archbishop…

13 Jul 2003 — I could have told him that

The blurb on the New York Times Online front page for this article:

L. Paul Bremer III now realizes he needs an Iraqi governing body to share responsibility — or blame — for the long-term task of establishing postwar order and stability.

“Now realizes,” eh?

11 Jul 2003 — Preach it, brother!

Excerpt from this interview with Kent Beck, the Extreme Programming guru:

I wish developers would consider the enormous consequences of their actions. When I got my driver’s license at 16, I was both elated and terrified; I had newfound freedom and responsibilities to go with it. Now, compare that feeling to when Microsoft sends me a new operating system. Do I have the same feeling? No, I think it’s going to screw up my life for months. For how many decades and for how many millions of people has that negative emotion been created around software. I think it’s such a shame we set our sights so low. Either you’re stuck with software that works the way it works because you don’t want to break it, or you get an upgrade that causes pain and anguish. I just want my stupid computer to work and it doesn’t. That’s not computing.

09 Jul 2003 — The whole world is fact-checking

David Horowitz doesn’t have many good things to say about his old comrades in Students for a Democratic Society, but he should acknowledge that Todd Gitlin, who used to be the SDS president, is on to something.

Gitlin’s 1980 book, The Whole World is Watching, described how mass-media coverage both influenced and isolated the New Left in the 1960s. Reporters and photographers were drawn to the scruffiest and most revolutionary members of the antiwar movement; SDS members, perhaps confusing media coverage with social influence, became progressively more and more inflammatory. By the time a liberal movement against the Vietnam War arose, it was completely separate from the New Left organizations and thinkers who had been opposing the war for years—because the liberals didn’t want to be associated with people who threw shit at cops.

The New Right of the 2000s, it appears, is now trapped in the same positive-feedback cycle. Case in point: Horowitz’s review of Ann Coulter’s latest book, Treason.

When Coulter, in the wake of 9/11, opined that the US should invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity, she was booted from the National Review, but Horowitz invited her to continue publishing on his own FrontPage Magazine. (In the review, Horowitz says he “regarded Coulter’s phillipic as a Swiftian commentary on liberal illusions of multi-cultural outreach to people who want to rip out our hearts”. Uh-huh.) This, and similar sentiments, have won Coulter plenty of TV appearances and book sales.

But then Horowitz read Treason. He heard Coulter (on Hardball) argue that “the Democratic Party, as an entity, has become functionally treasonable … [JFK’s] heart was in the right place but he was surrounded by bad policymakers and he harm[ed] the country and its national security.” And he realized the Coulter, aside from being full of it, was Bad For The Cause:

[T]his charge—that no Democrat, apparently including Jack Kennedy, can root for America—is obviously absurd, and if conservatives do not recognize that it is absurd, nobody is going to listen to us.

Kevin Drum laments:

Actually, though, it’s too bad to see that even conservatives are attacking Coulter since it means she’ll probably have to tone down her next book. I was looking forward to the third volume in her series in which we learn that Democrats from FDR forward have all been secret child molesters. Now I’ll never get to read it.

Don’t worry, Kevin—if the pattern that Gitlin observed holds true, either Coulter will continue to publish more and more outlandish “Swiftian commentaries”, or others will compete to outdo her, until the neoconservative movement generates its own versions of the SLA and the Weather Underground.

It’s gonna be one of those decades.

09 Jul 2003 — Pulpits for sale

To resolve the glut of PhDs who toil in adjunct-faculty jobs while they hope for tenure-track professorships, Daniel Davies prescribes the bracing tonic of the free market: let the universities sell their professorships for whatever price the market will bear. In defense of this proposal, he appeals to tradition:

This isn’t a piece of hypothetical neoliberal Panglossian market-boosterism, despite appearances, it’s a very well thought-out proposal to return to a system that has already been thoroughly tested and worked very well. Commissions to be an officer in the British Army used to be bought and sold in the nineteenth century, and so did “livings” for parish priests. There was even considerable price discrimination; smarter regiments and more agreeable parishes sold for higher prices. Commissions had to be bought from the regiment, but livings for priests were advertised in the classified columns of the Times.

The sale of livings has its counterpart in Jewish history. To quote from Marc Shapiro’s Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1966:

[T]he outright purchase of positions of religious leadership…is even referred to in the Talmud and its prohibition is recorded in the standard legal codes. Yet despite all the criticism, and a number of herems promulgated forbidding the sale of rabbinic offices…it nevertheless remained a common practice and is often referred to in rabbinic literature. In the nineteenth century Rabbi Solomon Judah Rapoport (1790–1867) referred with pride to the fact that he had broken with the universal practice and refused to shower the community leaders with presents in order to ensure his appointment. By this time the purchase of rabbinic positions had become so prevalent that two leading halakhists, Rabbi Isaac Schmelkes (1828–1906) and Rabbi Shalom Schwadron (1835–1911), were led to defend it…. In the early twentieth century there is at least one example of a rabbi actually advertising in the newspaper for another rabbi, any rabbi, to buy his position from the community.

For more comments on Davies’s proposal, see the Invisible Adjunct; for more details on the nineteenth-century market for English pulpits, see Jam Today.

02 Jul 2003 — Save those quarters

Ampersand reports that Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, has a new comic on his Web site, The Right Number, which you can read over the Web for a quarter.

That is, if you pay him a quarter, you can view the comic up to 32 times over the next six months.

That is, if you deposit at least three dollars into an account at BitPass, you can then deduct 25 cents from that account in order to view the comic up to 32 times over the next six months. The other $2.75 can be used to pay for other McCloud comics, or the works of Dr. Joshua Ellis, whoever he is, or products from whoever else signs up with BitPass in the future. If you never do anything else with that BitPass account for a year, you get charged an inactivity fee of three dollars a month.

(I can’t tell how much of that quarter actually goes into McCloud’s pocket, and how much BitPass takes; the FAQ for BitPass “Earners” is password-protected.)

Ampersand remarks: “If it works, this will begin the next age, and maybe — just maybe — a new flourishing of comics worth reading.” Unfortunately, micropayments have been touted as the future of the Web for the past five and a half years, and I see nothing about BitPass to make me believe that it will succeed where its predecessors have failed.

Craig Shirky’s Case Against Micropayments is as compelling as ever. The effort of deciding “is this thing worth buying or not?” is a transaction cost that a consumer pays with every purchase, no matter how low the purchase price. To save themselves the burden of making this decision over and over and over again, consumers usually prefer subscription-based, unlimited-usage services over pay-as-you-go services, even if they would save more money with the pay-as-you-go option.

30 Jun 2003 — A visionary community

[Based on a d’var Torah given by Jennifer Gordon at Kadimah-Toras Moshe Synagogue, at seudah slishit, on June 28, 2003.]

In Parshat Shelach, which we read on Saturday, there’s the story of the arrest and execution of the man who gathered sticks on Shabbat (Numbers 15:32–36). Immediately after that story, there’s the commandment of tzitzit (15:37–41).

According to the text, the reason we (Jewish men with four-cornered garments) should wear tzitzit is so that “you may see them, and remember all the Eternal’s commandments, and perform them, and not stray after your minds and after your eyes….” The underlying theory seems really cool: people don’t sin because they’re wicked, but because they forget. I don’t gossip about someone because I want to drag his name through the mud (usually), but because I start gabbing, and one thing leads to another, and all of a sudden I’ve violated the commandments against lashon hara, negative gossip.

Two traditional sources discuss why this story and this commandment appear next to each other. The Tanna d’Bei Eliyahu Rabba (cited by Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz) has a midrash in which God asks Moses why this man was gathering sticks on Shabbat. Moses replied that Jews wear tefillin six days a week, which serves as a reminder to observe the commandments, but have no such reminder on Shabbat, and so God gave tzitzit as another reminder. According to Nachmanides, if that man had been wearing tzitzit, he wouldn’t have gathered the sticks, because he would have seen the blue thread, which would have reminded him of the sky, which would have reminded him of the Throne of Glory, and he would have refrained from sinning.

The problem with both of these explanations is, they’re absurd:

1. In order for our stick-gatherer to be liable for the death penalty, two witnesses would have had to see him and explicitly warn him that he was committing a capital crime, and according to the oral tradition (Rashi, quoting Sanhedrin 41a), that’s exactly what happened. If that warning couldn’t deter the man, what difference would a little blue thread make?
2. The reason we don’t wear tefillin on Shabbat is because Shabbat itself is supposed to serve as a sign, so on Shabbat the tefillin are superfluous. If Shabbat isn’t doing a good enough job at reminding us to observe the commandments, that’s an argument for wearing tefillin on Shabbat, not an argument for adding another sign.
3. Nachmanides is suggesting a ridiculously long chain of associations for a person to make in the face of temptation.
4. If you’re wearing one of the standard tzitzit-enhanced garments—a prayer shawl, a talit katan under your shirt, or one of those square tunics that everybody wore a thousand years ago—then you usually won’t even see your tzitzit, unless you stare at the ground all the time as you walk around.

All these explanations suggest that tzitzit have some kind of magical power to keep people from sinning. Is there a more rational explanation for how tzitzit can help you lead a more Torah-oriented life?

Let me suggest one: you see tzitzit on other people who are wearing them. Tzitzit are only useful in a community of people who wear tzitzit and follow the other commandments. With continual reminders that all of your peers are observant, you feel pressure to do the same, you won’t follow up on an impulse to look for opportunities to do wrong, and you’ll be less likely to take advantage of such opportunities when they appear.

20 Jun 2003 — Manna for something and the fish for free

In this week’s Torah reading, the Israelites complain about not having meat. Then they go on to reminisce about fish, cucumbers, leeks, onions, and garlic (Numbers 11:4–5). What do they really want here? The passage continues with a description of how the manna was gathered, prepared, and eaten (11:7–8). Why is that description here, instead of in the chapter where the manna first appeared (Exodus 16)?

The Gemara, asking where the “free” fish came from, says that when the Israelites drew water, God put small fish in their buckets (Yoma 75a). Let’s assume, based on this Gemara, that when the Israelites are longing for fish, they’re longing for small fish, like anchovies. What do small fish, cucumbers, leeks, onions, and garlic have in common?

First, they can be prepared easily: you can throw them in a pot of boiling water, and come back in an hour and have stew. Or, if you’re in a real hurry, you can eat them raw. Second, they can be preserved easily: fish and cucumbers can be pickled, and the other vegetables can just be stashed in a root cellar for months. Manna, on the other hand, took effort to prepare: it had to be ground and then baked (Numbers 11:8). It could not be preserved for even a day: on every day but Friday, leftover manna putrified the following morning (Exodus 16:20), and fresh manna appeared with the morning dew (Numbers 11:9).

When you’re a slave with no time for yourself, and food comes into your hand, the rational thing to do is fill your stomach with as little effort as possible, because the taskmaster might come back at any moment, and store whatever crumbs you don’t need, because you have no guarantee that more will come tomorrow. The Israelites in the desert had all the time they needed to prepare and enjoy the manna, but some of them had not escaped from the appetite of a slave. To such people, God sent quail, which could be cooked almost as easily as fish. The people who sought the quick gratification of roast poultry found an equally quick death: “the meat was still between their teeth when they were cut off” (Numbers 11:33).

20 Jun 2003 — A tough cell

One of the dirty secrets of the computer-science world is that spreadsheet programs, from Visicalc to Excel, are actually programming languages, even though the program code, input, and output are intermingled and smeared out over two dimensions. And where you have programs, you have bugs:

There is a substantial body of research showing that spreadsheets often contain bugs. For example, field audits of real-world spreadsheets have found that 20–40% of these contain bugs, and that between 1% and 4% of all cells contain bugs. Also, in an early empirical study of experienced spreadsheet users, 44% of the spreadsheets created by those users were found to contain user-generated bugs. Results of several later studies have been similar: between 10% and 90% of the spreadsheets examined have been found to contain bugs. Compounding this problem, creators of spreadsheets seem to express unwarranted confidence in the reliability of their programs. [Citations omitted —sethg]

And where you have bugs, you have expensive bugs:

A simple spreadsheet error cost a firm a whopping US$24m.

The mistake led to TransAlta, a big Canadian power generator, buying more US power transmission hedging contracts in May at higher prices than it should have.

In a conference call, chief executive Steve Snyder said the snafu was “literally a cut-and-paste error in an Excel spreadsheet that we did not detect when we did our final sorting and ranking bids prior to submission,” Reuters reports.

If Microsoft, Lotus, and their predecessors had sold spreadsheets as revolutionary new programming languages, they wouldn’t have had so many customers. Unfortunately, if spreadsheet users don’t see themselves as programmers, then they have no reason to learn from how programmers in traditional languages protect against bugs, and the companies that make spreadsheets have little incentive to add features that would make spreadsheet-debugging easier.

(via the lightweight-languages list)

19 Jun 2003 — A note regarding the nazirite

Last week’s Torah reading had the laws regarding the “nazirite”, one who swears off wine and haircuts (Numbers 6:1–21), and the Haftorah was about Samson, the most famous nazirite in the Bible (Judges 13). However, the Torah reading and the Haftorah reading are not really talking about the same kind of person. In the Torah reading, it refers to someone who swears “a nazirite oath to become a nazirite for the Eternal” (6:2), and in the Haftorah, an angel tells Samson’s mother that “the boy will be a nazirite for God from the womb” (13:5). The Talmud (Nazir 4b) picks up on the difference in which Divine name is used, and concludes that Samson was not a true nazirite; someone who says “I swear to be a nazirite like Samson” is accepting a different set of regulations than someone who says “I swear to be a nazirite”.

Traditionally, the Tetragrammaton (translated as “the Eternal”, or “the Lord”) is used to connote God’s attribute of mercy, while elokim (translated as “God”) is used to connote His attribute of justice. As the leader of an Israelite revolt against the Philistines, Samson was a nazirite acting for God in His capacity as Judge. But what does the other kind of nazirite have to do with mercy?

Suppose that somebody takes it upon herself, as a spiritual exercise, to fast on Mondays and Thursdays (a traditional form of self-abnegation). A few months later, she realizes that she has a dilemma. On the one hand, she has become so used to going without food for two days a week that fasting is not really a challenge for her any more; the sense of spiritual elevation that she got from fasting has evaporated. On the other hand, the people who know that she fasts still see her as standing apart from the community. If she continues to fast, she will be maintaining this separation to nobody’s benefit. If she stops fasting, she will touch off a wave of speculation and gossip about her motivations, especially from the people who interpreted her fasting as a form of vanity.

A nazirite vow, on the other hand, has an endpoint and a ceremony for marking the endpoint (bringing sacrifices). Just as a nazirite is marked in public by long hair and abstaining from grape products, a person who just completed a nazirite vow is marked by a shaved head. As the ex-nazirite’s hair grows back to a normal length, he or she can be gradually reintegrated into the community. Since the term of nazirism was specified at the time of the vow (or, if none was specified, thirty days—Nazir 1:3), the end of the term does not have to be an occasion for any surprise or speculation. This is the mercy shown to the nazirite.

Of course, someone can avoid the benefit of this mercy by saying “I swear to be a nazirite permanently”; based on II Samuel 14:26 and 15:7, the Talmud deduces that Absalom made such a vow. And since today there is no Temple for bringing sacrifices, if someone makes a nazirite vow, regardless of its term, they won’t be able to drink wine again until after the Temple is rebuilt. But God can only do so much to protect people from their own foolishness.

17 Jun 2003 — Free markets for me, but not for thee

Teachers are not overpaid. Meghan Keane, Michael Podgursky, and Richard Vedder say so. How do they know this? Because if you divide teachers’ annual salary by the number of hours they are contractually obliged to work in a year, assuming they spend none of their own time grading papers and none of their own money buying classroom supplies…

(Pause for incredulous laughter from the teachers reading this weblog.)

…then if you compare the average hourly earnings of various professionals working for state and local governments, elementary-school teachers get $30.52, lawyers get $34.64, and engineers, architects, and surveyors get $27.71. “Solidly Middle Class”, says the caption on Podgursky’s bar chart.

Matthew Yglesias remarks, “Seems to me that Ms. Keane needs to go back to free market school and remember that there isn’t some number out there in the sky representing What Teachers Deserve to Get Paid.” In this vein, I would like to point out “Teacher Turnover, Teacher Shortages, and the Organization of Schools”, a study by Richard M. Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania.

Ingersoll points out that while the national employee-turnover rate is 11 percent, the rate for teachers ranges from 13.2–15 percent, depending on the year of the survey. (Lest you think turnover is high because teaching is a predominantly female profession, the rate for nurses is 12 percent. Lest you think that retirement of elderly teachers is causing the turnover, retirees account for less than 15 percent of it.) In private schools—those alleged beacons of hope for the union-stifled public education system—turnover is 18.9 percent. Younger teachers (i.e., those who are just realizing what their job entails) are almost twice as likely to quit their jobs as middle-aged teachers.

When teachers were asked why they quit, almost half gave “poor salary” as one of the reasons. After accounting for a variety of other teacher and school characteristics, Ingersoll found that the more money a school offered to its experienced teachers, the lower the chance that teachers at that school would leave. This should suprise nobody—except perhaps Keane, Podgursky, and Vedder. Podgursky opens his article by quoting a former president of the National Education Association — “It’s hard to convince someone to stay in the classroom when the salary is so low” — and then tries to convince us that the salary is not so low at all. Don’t convince us. Convince the teachers who are quitting.

16 Jun 2003 — Brothers under the septum

Erin Aubry Kaplan, a black essayist in Salon, reports with trepidation on a new study: “Rhinoplasty in the African-American Patient”.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Rod Rohrich, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Texas in Dallas … sees plastic surgery not as a tool of black assimilation—that’s old school—but as a means of individualization, of sculpting each nose in proportion to each face to achieve what he calls “nasal-facial harmony”.

Kaplan is unconvinced. As a member of another ethnic group with a reputation for nasal-facial disharmony, I can relate. She recalls

tragic-mulatto potboiler novels from the late 19th century in which the secretly black heroine’s aquiline nose was like a talisman that always protected her from harm and preceded her in good fortune…

and I recall the Dellwoods’ song from my wife’s Dr. Demento tape:

She got a nose job, she got a nose job
It’s all turned up where it was hanging down
She got a nose job, she got a nose job
And now she’s the prettiest gal in town…

(via john & belle have a blog)

13 Jun 2003 — Write once, debug everywhere

If you’re installing Java on a system running some variety of Linux other than Red Hat, make sure you have installed whatever package includes the libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 shared object file; this is a library that allows C++ code that was compiled with an earlier version of the GNU C++ compiler run on a contemporary system. Sun’s installation instructions tell you to install the compat-libstdc++-6.21-2.9.0.0.i386.rpm package if you’re using Red Hat Advanced Server, but say nothing about the other distributions.

I used to have a much longer posting here describing all the trauma I suffered along the way to learning this fun fact, but typing in the whole story practically bored me to sleep, so there’s no need to subject you to the same misery.

13 Jun 2003 — Testing, ping, ping, ping

Yet another test to see if I have autotrack set up correctly on this blog.

Later posts / Earlier posts