I'm surprised more people don't get it. Wikipedia says something about how a lame duck can't keep up with the flock, becoming a target for predators. Word Detective says something about the British stock exchange, and traders who default on debts. This is probably the historical origin - I've heard it from other sources.
But what is a lame duck, really? Well, a duck with an injured leg would swim in circles, accomplishing nothing. QED.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Rhetoric, pt. 1
This was meant for someone else, but since I spent so much time on it I don't want to let it go to waste. --TM
-----,
I hate politics. I hate this political cycle. The worst comes out in people during the political season, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I know that individually people are good and caring, I would lose faith in humanity altogether. Honestly, you would think that we’re talking about the Big Game instead of our own government. The Republican Party in particular plays a very nasty game, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt rather than trying to provide a positive stance on any issue. They use rhetorical tricks, misleading statements and misrepresentation of the facts to try to scare you into thinking that they are the only alternative.
Let’s take as an example the email you received from NRSC.org. They quote a reputable newspaper (the Wall Street Journal) and even give a date. Citing your source is very important; however after a minute digging on the Internet I found the WSJ article, which turns out to be an uncredited opinion piece that doesn’t cite any other sources.
Despite their reputation as a liberal paper, the WSJ Opinion page is notoriously right-leaning. The NRSC is depending on the WSJ to lend credibility to their argument. This is known as an Appeal to False Authority, and is a fallacious argument because, although the WSJ is a prestigious paper, an opinion article with no references does not count. Despite this fact, NRSC wants you to be impressed that they can quote a source, depending on you to not look any further.
The main tool in the Republican rhetorical tool-bag is the Appeal to Adverse Consequences. The article in question uses the fear of what could happen to scare you into accepting their opinion. For example, one of the premises that this article makes is that if elected, the FCC and a Democratic Congress would reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in order to gag Right-Wing talk radio.
It is true that for sixty years a rule called the “fairness doctrine” existed, which required station owners to air equal points of view in exchange for their license to broadcast. This came about in an era where radio was the only broadcast medium. As technology improved and more licensed and unlicensed spectrum became available, the fairness doctrine became obsolete, and was finally killed at the end of Regan’s administration.
Supposing that the FCC should ask Congress to reinstate the fairness doctrine, and supposing that it passes, this would only require broadcasters to provide equal access to opposite opinions if requested. I doubt seriously that anyone would ever give any thought to it, because with cable television and the Internet most Americans have access to media that covers a broad range of opinion.
Another example of Republican rhetoric is Argument by Emotive Language. In the article, Democrats would not be the majority; they would be the “supermajority”. Sarbanes-Oxley, the 2002 legislation that came about as a response to the corporate greed and accounting scandals of Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and MCI-WorldCom is referred to as “regulatory overkill”.
Instead of attacking the issues, Republicans tend to use Ad Hominem attacks, attacks on a personal level rather than attacking a person’s arguments. For example, a lot was made of Barack Obama’s middle name being Hussein, despite the fact that Hussein is a common name in Kenya, where Obama’s father is from. Another example of an Ad Hominem attack is the rumor that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, despite having been born in Hawaii. Early on in the campaign, some felt that because Obama did not make his birth certificate public, that it proved that he was not a citizen. This fallacious argument is known as Burden of Proof.
Even during the Debates, a time when the candidate is supposed to present and defend his political position, McCain spent most of his allotted time attacking Obama instead of clearly stating his position. Through his use of repetitive words and phrases like, “Obama wants to spread the wealth”, an Argument by Repetition, he tries to convince you that a statement must be true if it’s repeated often enough.
I am too intelligent for mere verbal trickery to fool me into voting against what is right.
As I look at the Democratic Presidents of the last half-century, I see great works: Kennedy and Johnson ended racial discrimination, fought poverty, and gave us hope for the future at the height of the Cold War and during escalation of the Vietnam Conflict. Carter encouraged energy conservation and development of renewable energy, something that we have only just now begun to understand as important to our environmental future. Clinton, for all of his personal faults, left office with a budget surplus. Unemployment was at a historic low and our economy was in great shape.
On the other hand, Nixon led us into a debacle which Gerald Ford, a member of his own political party, described as, “our long national nightmare”. Reagan was so afraid of Russian bombs that he spent Billions on a weapons system that, when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, proved to be utterly unnecessary, since the only way that the Russians could have gotten their missiles onto U.S. soil was to fling them across the Bering Strait into Alaska.
George W. Bush is so bad he deserves his own paragraph. This illiterate redneck (Ad Hominem Attack) can hardly count to ten on both hands and his left foot. He routinely mispronounces words in his own language, and resorts to making them up with he cannot remember the correct ones. His idea of “Education Policy” is to reduce the intelligence of public school children to the lowest common denominator through his “No Child Left Behind”, which forces teachers to spend all of their time preparing for standardized tests rather than actually teaching, just so they can keep their jobs.
His dogged refusal to accept reality led us into a shameful war that has left 4188 American servicemen and women dead and untold thousands physically maimed and psychologically scarred. In 2006, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, said that he, “participated in a hoax on the American people, the International community and the United Nations Security Council” when he helped prepare the presentation of the evidence of WMDs in Iraq to the UN Security Council by the Secretary of State.
When I explain to my son about how our country fought this unjust, unethical and immoral war, and how the man who was supposed to be the leader of the Free World lied to the American people to justify his own evil agenda, and how hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children lost their lives as a result, and he asks me, “Dad, what did you do?” I’m going to say, “I did my part to ensure that the people responsible were removed from power.”
You say that you pray to God that we “have the strength to survive” a liberal “regime”, but I welcome it. I supported John McCain in the 2000 election, thinking that he was different enough from other conservatives to make a difference. When he was not nominated by the Republican party, I decided to vote for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, I hoped that he would be a follower of the third way; a moderate conservative like his father. I see now my mistake: I bought into the political attacks against Al Gore.
-----,
I hate politics. I hate this political cycle. The worst comes out in people during the political season, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I know that individually people are good and caring, I would lose faith in humanity altogether. Honestly, you would think that we’re talking about the Big Game instead of our own government. The Republican Party in particular plays a very nasty game, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt rather than trying to provide a positive stance on any issue. They use rhetorical tricks, misleading statements and misrepresentation of the facts to try to scare you into thinking that they are the only alternative.
Let’s take as an example the email you received from NRSC.org. They quote a reputable newspaper (the Wall Street Journal) and even give a date. Citing your source is very important; however after a minute digging on the Internet I found the WSJ article, which turns out to be an uncredited opinion piece that doesn’t cite any other sources.
Despite their reputation as a liberal paper, the WSJ Opinion page is notoriously right-leaning. The NRSC is depending on the WSJ to lend credibility to their argument. This is known as an Appeal to False Authority, and is a fallacious argument because, although the WSJ is a prestigious paper, an opinion article with no references does not count. Despite this fact, NRSC wants you to be impressed that they can quote a source, depending on you to not look any further.
The main tool in the Republican rhetorical tool-bag is the Appeal to Adverse Consequences. The article in question uses the fear of what could happen to scare you into accepting their opinion. For example, one of the premises that this article makes is that if elected, the FCC and a Democratic Congress would reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in order to gag Right-Wing talk radio.
It is true that for sixty years a rule called the “fairness doctrine” existed, which required station owners to air equal points of view in exchange for their license to broadcast. This came about in an era where radio was the only broadcast medium. As technology improved and more licensed and unlicensed spectrum became available, the fairness doctrine became obsolete, and was finally killed at the end of Regan’s administration.
Supposing that the FCC should ask Congress to reinstate the fairness doctrine, and supposing that it passes, this would only require broadcasters to provide equal access to opposite opinions if requested. I doubt seriously that anyone would ever give any thought to it, because with cable television and the Internet most Americans have access to media that covers a broad range of opinion.
Another example of Republican rhetoric is Argument by Emotive Language. In the article, Democrats would not be the majority; they would be the “supermajority”. Sarbanes-Oxley, the 2002 legislation that came about as a response to the corporate greed and accounting scandals of Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems and MCI-WorldCom is referred to as “regulatory overkill”.
Instead of attacking the issues, Republicans tend to use Ad Hominem attacks, attacks on a personal level rather than attacking a person’s arguments. For example, a lot was made of Barack Obama’s middle name being Hussein, despite the fact that Hussein is a common name in Kenya, where Obama’s father is from. Another example of an Ad Hominem attack is the rumor that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, despite having been born in Hawaii. Early on in the campaign, some felt that because Obama did not make his birth certificate public, that it proved that he was not a citizen. This fallacious argument is known as Burden of Proof.
Even during the Debates, a time when the candidate is supposed to present and defend his political position, McCain spent most of his allotted time attacking Obama instead of clearly stating his position. Through his use of repetitive words and phrases like, “Obama wants to spread the wealth”, an Argument by Repetition, he tries to convince you that a statement must be true if it’s repeated often enough.
I am too intelligent for mere verbal trickery to fool me into voting against what is right.
As I look at the Democratic Presidents of the last half-century, I see great works: Kennedy and Johnson ended racial discrimination, fought poverty, and gave us hope for the future at the height of the Cold War and during escalation of the Vietnam Conflict. Carter encouraged energy conservation and development of renewable energy, something that we have only just now begun to understand as important to our environmental future. Clinton, for all of his personal faults, left office with a budget surplus. Unemployment was at a historic low and our economy was in great shape.
On the other hand, Nixon led us into a debacle which Gerald Ford, a member of his own political party, described as, “our long national nightmare”. Reagan was so afraid of Russian bombs that he spent Billions on a weapons system that, when the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, proved to be utterly unnecessary, since the only way that the Russians could have gotten their missiles onto U.S. soil was to fling them across the Bering Strait into Alaska.
George W. Bush is so bad he deserves his own paragraph. This illiterate redneck (Ad Hominem Attack) can hardly count to ten on both hands and his left foot. He routinely mispronounces words in his own language, and resorts to making them up with he cannot remember the correct ones. His idea of “Education Policy” is to reduce the intelligence of public school children to the lowest common denominator through his “No Child Left Behind”, which forces teachers to spend all of their time preparing for standardized tests rather than actually teaching, just so they can keep their jobs.
His dogged refusal to accept reality led us into a shameful war that has left 4188 American servicemen and women dead and untold thousands physically maimed and psychologically scarred. In 2006, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, said that he, “participated in a hoax on the American people, the International community and the United Nations Security Council” when he helped prepare the presentation of the evidence of WMDs in Iraq to the UN Security Council by the Secretary of State.
When I explain to my son about how our country fought this unjust, unethical and immoral war, and how the man who was supposed to be the leader of the Free World lied to the American people to justify his own evil agenda, and how hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children lost their lives as a result, and he asks me, “Dad, what did you do?” I’m going to say, “I did my part to ensure that the people responsible were removed from power.”
You say that you pray to God that we “have the strength to survive” a liberal “regime”, but I welcome it. I supported John McCain in the 2000 election, thinking that he was different enough from other conservatives to make a difference. When he was not nominated by the Republican party, I decided to vote for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, I hoped that he would be a follower of the third way; a moderate conservative like his father. I see now my mistake: I bought into the political attacks against Al Gore.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Yes We Can
I grew up in the South. I was born in Baton Rouge, one of the last Public School districts in the South to be desegregated. I lived in Montgomery, the heart of the Civil Rights movement, for eight years. I travel down Selma Highway every time I go to the Airport. I have seen racism, both personal and institutional. I was raised to see people as human beings, not colors, but I know that I am not perfect, and I know that I have said and done things in the past that I'm not proud of.
If I could press a button, and turn the clock back on history for the purpose of preventing slavery and the hatred and oppression that African Americans have inured since before this country's founding, I would.
I did not vote for Barack Obama because he is Black. I voted for him because he is a great man. Kennedy has some pretty big shoes to fill. Calling Obama my generations's Kennedy would, in my opinion, limit his potential.
I'm betting that in thirty years, a candidate will come along that my son will consider his generation's Barack Obama.
If I could press a button, and turn the clock back on history for the purpose of preventing slavery and the hatred and oppression that African Americans have inured since before this country's founding, I would.
I did not vote for Barack Obama because he is Black. I voted for him because he is a great man. Kennedy has some pretty big shoes to fill. Calling Obama my generations's Kennedy would, in my opinion, limit his potential.
I'm betting that in thirty years, a candidate will come along that my son will consider his generation's Barack Obama.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
A Little Late...
(Eight months go by...)The Happy Day was April 2nd, not April 11th as we had planned. A. and L.J. weren't doing well, and the doctor made the decision to do an emergency C-section after a very anxious night in the hospital.
A. had the hardest time I can imagine. Her anesthesia failed as they wheeled her out of the OR. She went into recovery at shift change, so there was some confusion as to who was to care for her, resulting in a patient - an employee of the hospital - who was all but abandoned in the recovery room. When I came back from the nursery, I found her screaming, with only a nursing student in the room.
We spent the next six days in a postpartum room. On Friday night, A's temperature shot above 105. Our OB doctor was volunteering in Atlanta, and the only other doctor available was doing back-to-back C-sections.
She made it, He made it, and now, on the Seven-month anniversary of his birth, I give you LJ. It was all worth it.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Inaugural Post
T-Minus 25 Days...
A recent conversation with my very pregnant wife went something like this:
Her: I think I went into labor
Me: What?!?
Her: you're such a retard.
A recent conversation with my very pregnant wife went something like this:
Her: I think I went into labor
Me: What?!?
Her:
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