A Vote For My Opponent is a Vote for Child Abuse

Facebook has this new Causes app that essentially lets you say "I support Cause X and then donate Y amount of dollars to that cause." Two of the more, shall we say, interesting, causes I came across include this one on ending child abuse and another on supporting the troops. While I'm all for ending child abuse and supporting the troops, apparently, the best way for me to do so is to donate to Messrs. Hunter and Giuliani's political campaigns. Screenshots below.

I don't know what's more shocking, that these causes were created or that 60,000 Facebook users fell for this. Maybe Facebook is becoming more like MySpace.

Re: Joey Hanzich (and a note to incoming freshmen)

Having graduated last June, I was recently in the midst of severing my final ties to the Harvard Dems, or at least their mailing lists -- those of you not yet familiar with the exuberance of e-mail that is the Harvard College Democrats will soon understand -- when I came across Brigit and Harlan's e-mail regarding Joey Hanzich's memorial service. Joey was a good guy, and although I regret not knowing him nearly as well as I would have liked to, I do have fond memories of getting woken up by him to go knock on doors in New Hampshire,  sitting through long meetings on how to improve the Dems MAL experience, and getting lost with him in Boston while looking for Kerry campaign HQ (some of these memories being more fond in retrospect). That doesn't really do justice to Joey however, and I'll leave it someone who knew him better to do the eulogizing at the memorial service.

What I do want to say is to the incoming freshmen whom I will likely never meet, and possibly to some post-freshmen whom I have met. Upon entering Harvard, there's a lot of "what can I get out of this?" and the subsequent mad dash to chart a route to becoming president of the IOP, UC, Harvard Dems, Harvard Republicans (see hostile takeover), Salient, Crimson, Lampoon, IRC, and the Harvard Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, all while taking Junior Seminars freshmen spring, law school classes sophomore year, finishing your senior thesis by junior year, getting a Master's senior year, and graduating summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, Rhode Scholar, and future presidential candidate. I kid of course. No one in their right mind would want to be head of the Salient.

Anyhow, upon graduating, you go through the same process -- only in reverse -- where (most of) you lament not being president of the IOP, UC, etc.

But you know what? It really doesn't matter. The most important thing you take from Harvard are not honors and titles, because it is quite possible that such things may not do you much good. The Crimson article discusses at length Joey's academic accomplishments and future presidential ambitions, yet ultimately, his biggest impact on the world will be in the little things he did -- the products of a warm and kind personality. But believe me, even coming from someone who didn't know Joey as well as he should have, that can be a huge impact. And it's not something to be disregarded in whatever ambitious pursuits one may have.

So at risk of sounding like an aging Dean, the most important thing you take out of Harvard will not be your degree (or even that fat offer from McKinsey) but your friendships and memories (and in somewhat coarser jargon, your connections). I fully expect all of you to resume your plotting of campus domination after reading this, but try to keep a sense of perspective at least. Joey, for all of his accomplishments, still managed to be a really nice guy, and that's not a bad legacy.

Obama on American Foreign Policy

This Robert Kagan article and the Barack Obama speech that he refers to are mighty interesting. His comments on the Iraq echo a point I've been trying to make (as you can see here, here, and in the upcoming Blue Line). That is, withdrawal is not an end in itself. Peace and stability in Iraq is. Some withdrawal may help but the American military still has a role to play. Looking beyond that, American power, both military and otherwise can and should be used for good around the world.  

I suspect many of you will disagree, but if that's what Obama's saying, it's points in my book. Read the Obama speech if you have time. He says it better than I could and makes a lot of other interesting points as well.

Grand Strategery

For those of you interested in the future of the military and the long-term picture of what we should do beyond Iraq, some influential military strategists testified before Congress last week. There's a quick summary of what they said here.

For the record, I'm a fan of Krepinevich. I suppose the fact that he wrote some of required Vietnam reading for my War and Politics class played some role in that. I've also had a chance to meet with Larry Korb. Great guy.

Why We Can't Leave Iraq Now

Courtesy of Cindy Sheehan, we have this, a view you can also see illustrated by Matthew Opitz's comment from a previous post. The question is, why do most Dems advocated a widthdrawal date of one year (or in my case, at least two years) later? Why can't we just pack up and leave now?

The simple answer is that it's impossible, both logistically and politically. Remember that build-up of forces for both the first and second wars in Iraq took several months. Likewise, a withdrawal also takes time. The military has to figure out things like how much fuel is needed to transport everyone out of there, the details of a rear guard, how to protect a large number of vulnerable transports, and where the troops are going to go. If we want to keep a "quick reaction" force in the region and do a "redeployment," that's even more to handle. Logistics are hard. It takes time to figure out and it takes time to implement.

There's also politics. So long as Bush is Commander-in-Chief, he controls the troops. The most Democrats can do is cut funding for the military, but with Bush, it's entirely possible that he might play chicken and keep the troops in Iraq anyway. This would be disastrous for troops since they wouldn't leave and earlier andwcould spend their final months in Iraq without adequate supplies (e.g. body armor). If this results in more casualties than would have occurred had we simply took the time to convince Bush to give in (or if this is impossible, wait out the rest of his term), then trying to force a withdrawal state is counter-productive.

Hence, the one year deadline.

The longer answer is that we also have to take into account the diplomatic bits of it all. Presumably, our goals, in addition to minimizing the loss of American life, are to minimize the loss of Iraqi life and establish a stable political arrangement that maintains peace in the region. The priorities for each may differ for each person, but I think everyone would like for those things to happen. Withdrawing too quickly may complicate our ability to establish a diplomatic solution.

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Norwich, CT is full of morons

See here. Apparently, substitute teacher Julie Amero has been found guilty of "impairing the morals of a child" after a school computer she was using started showing porn thanks to malware installed on the machine. She faces up to 40 years in jail. This is stupid (but interesting) on a number of levels:

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I Hate Hippies

There is a David Brooks column worth reading. You need a New York Times Select membership to read it. I'm not going to post it, since it would be in violation of the New York Time's (silly) copyright policies or something. I managed to read the article through a post on the Dems-Talk (thanks Jarret). If you can't get a copy of the Times however, the basic gist of Brook's argument is that the extreme political polarization (i.e. name calling and mud slinging) of the past few years has made the current crop of young Americans "practical, anti-ideological, modest and centrist (maybe to a fault)."

I also suspect that we have a stronger sense of irony and a dryer sense of humor as well.

Regardless of what you think of David Brooks himself however, I think this article is dead on. It's a pretty good description of my political views and those I hang around with. If I ever run for office, my campaign slogan would be "shut up and do it." Maybe. Unfortunately, the political process seems to be favor selection of the ideologues (see immediate mockery of Brooks for things unrelated to article), so I don't expect a huge drop in the number of vapid airheads on the airwaves or in the blogosphere anytime soon.

Although I guess you could argue that David Brooks is a vapid airhead himself ... hrmmm ...

I will add, however, that I enjoy being around extreme conservatives. They're rather funny. If I didn't know better, I'd almost argue that they were politically incorrect hypocritical caricatures mocking the conservative movement -- in the same way that Borat's Jew bashing is really a mockery of anti-semites.

Extreme liberals on the other hand (read: hipipes) are just annoying. Hippy-bashing, however, is hilarious.

Mandatory Training Programs

Theoretically, globalization is supposed to make everyone better off in the long run, but in the short term, there can be some massive distribution problems -- i.e. corporations get increased profits from outsourcing, laid off workers get a free chickwich.

I'm a firm believer that globalization is ultimately the way to bring prosperity to developing countries and increase peace and stability, but we have to find some way to compel those who gain to compensate those who lose, since, in a democracy, we have to take into account the interests of everyone.

We could just make corporations pay a pension to laid off workers, but often the pension isn't much. If it were higher, then a lot of globalization would halt pretty quickly. It also doesn't solve a lot of the communal and social problems resulting from globalization (e.g. no work = more drinking = more domestic abuse). It's also a risky system (what if outsourcing company goes bankrupt and can't pay pensions?). Ditto for simply expanding the existing welfare state programs.

So in the hopes that American ingenuity might actually be more than a myth, why don't we mandate that companies shifting substantial number of jobs overseas have to retrain the workers they laid off or otherwise directly contribute to the social welfare of the community they might be destroying by leaving? There are existing (poorly-funded) government training programs, but why don't we have the corporations do the retraining themselves? It seems that job training should definitely be one of the things they do better. Even for corporations moving overseas, there's definitely a strong incentive to having a well-educated workforce at home (usually, they don't intend to move everything). Mandatory retraining would make corporations take into account the full cost of globalization.

I read somewhere that the Danes do something similar. Anyone have any ideas?

Why Democracies Suck at Wars

Actually, emperically, democracies tend to do quite well in wars, but Churchill had a point when he grumbled that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried".

Iraq is the unfortunate demonstration of that. The GOP supports a surge. The Dems call this escalation and probably want to withdraw, although a fair number are too chickenshit or indecisive to say so. Either option could potentially work. That's a relative unknown.

What isn't an unknown is that the current policy isn't acceptable, yet with two sides pulling in opposite directions, we're stuck in the middle. And that sucks for everyone. 

Then the Masses Smote the UC ...

... and it was good. Or my endorsement, insofar that I am qualified to give an endorsement, of the Hwang-Wong ticket for UC, wherein I abuse my infrequently used blogging privilege to push an idea that I am completely unqualified to talk about (but hey, most bloggers aren't).

Simply put, what does the UC do that couldn't be better done by someone else? After watching tonight's UC debate, I've decided that the answer is, at best, not much.

Based on the platforms of the various campaigns, I've divided what the UC does into a three simple categories. More on the flip.

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iCut and iRan

I have a confession to make. I don't like the iPod. My cousin gave me her old Nano when she got a newer one, and I promptly gave it my mom. It's not that it's poorly designed; it's mostly because it feels like one ginormous load of iHype. You can easily find an equivalent product that has a longer battery life, is less breakable, has more functionality, and is a fraction of the cost (until recently anyway). The drawback? They're fugly.

Occasionally, a friend of mine will have an iPod break or the battery life drop to five minutes or the case get scratched up beyond repair. And they'll curse out Apple for a minute, but then Apple comes out with something even thinner and sexier and they fall for it all over again. Not least because compared to the myriad of competitors, the iPod just seems like the safe simple (and sexy) choice.

And that's exactly like going to war with Iran.

More on the flip.

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Facebook, Transparency, and the Open Society

In case you’re not on facebook.com (but all the cool kids are doing it!), the social networking site whose popularity arises from being a no-frills site not MySpace — i.e. “I just need to find your cell phone number so I can call you, not wade through your emo color scheme, it’s just gone through a massive overhaul. I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:

On Tuesday September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced a new feature called “News Feed” that immediately stirred a controversy from the site’s user base. The new feature essentially shows up on any user’s Main Page automatically, displaying very detailed information about the recent Facebook activites of that person’s friends. Every documentable change (such as adding pictures, joining or leaving a group, writing on someone’s wall, changing relationship status, writing a new note, adding or removing friends, and editing specific profile information) is displayed on the Main Page directly after a user logs in.
The response to this change was massive. On the feature’s first day, hundreds of groups were created in direct response to this new feature. A simple search for “News Feed” produces over 500 results for groups. The most popular of the initially-created groups, “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook),” had over 200,000 members within 33 hours of the new format’s release. The vast majority of these groups have responded to the new feature negatively, claiming that it destroys privacy.

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Thar be Gays in the Military!

I wrote this on GOP-open in response to Chris Lacaria regarding his opposition to gays in the military. I enjoyed writing it and thought I'd share it for the non-GOP-open subscribers. For those interested in the entire conversation (it's funny if you look at it in a detached, cynical, "Oh those Republicans" sort of way), check our their archives. You have scroll down a little bit to Sahil Mahtani's post on "When you hate fags more than you love your country."

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Chris,

So, as I understand it, allowing gays into the military undermines the Judeo-Christian foundation of this nation, thereby placing us on the path towards moral decay and doom that befell the Roman empire (insert numerous comparisons between American and Roman empires, cite Stephen Rosen several times, reaffirm the principles of neo-conservatism while simultaneously disavowing the term, etc.)

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DemApples in China

FYI: DemApples access is funky in China. I am currently accessing this site via a proxy server. Trying to access this site directly results in the server timing out. DemApples does appear on google.cn, but apparently, a listing no longer implies access. I know there was some debate within Google about whether to list banned sites, but I'm not sure how they ended out on that.

Some other notes: Gop.org is accessible. Democrats.org is not. We could put forth a conspiracy theory, but I'm guessing there are problems with any site that makes repeated mentions of "democracy" or "democrats" -- hence, problems with democrats.org and harvarddems.com. Gop.org probably gets away with it because it mostly uses the phrase "Democrats" in a limited and negative fashion.

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In Defense of the Dubai / UAE Deal

I'll be the first to admit that the administration isn't handling this very well and there could very well be something fishier in all of this. However, from a strict national security perspective, there's no reason to delay or reject this deal. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that shooting this down will increase rather than decrease the likelihood of terrorism against American citizens.

Why? Imagine if you're a Muslim Arab in the Middle East right now. The past few weeks have filled with uproar over blasphemous cartoons poking fun at your faith. The West describes this as "free speech." Meanwhile, a holocaust denier is jailed. Add to that all of your normal complaints about the West (e.g. Iraq, U.S. troops, Gitmo, etc.). Now you have the United States, obstensibly the champion of free trade, blocking the sale of U.S. ports to Dupai Ports World (DPW). Meanwhile, no such objections were raised when similar deals were made with the British, the Singaporeans and the Chinese. Note that the latter two are also state-owned. All this despite the fact that the UAE is described as an ally in the war on terror and even donated $100 million for Katrina relief. Not exactly a good way to win allies, is it?

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