Posts by Andre Alessi
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Speaking of Kentucky, by the by: Lexington, KY elects openly gay mayor.
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To take what Bolger was talking about if the likelihood of a person who is unemployed committing a property theft type crime is twice as much as an otherwise similar person who is fully employed, wouldn't that indicate to us another reason that we want to keep unemployment low? Given that there is a reasonable amount of property crime in NZ. And do some other things with unemployed people that make them less likely to commit crimes?
There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach in the abstract, but the devil is always in the details, and you can bet those details will be lost the moment a newspaper decides to write a story about any study like this. Not to mention the fact that causation is frequently extrapolated out of thin air when stats like these are published.
It's also interesting to me that these studies always emphasise the demographics of the perpetrators but totally overlook the demographics of the victims. There's a pretty obvious subtext at work there.
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Interns are being issues with aqua-lungs as we speak... All hail the avatar of the Aqua-Buddha!
I'm more amused by the fact that he and his friends kidnapped people and then read Nietzche at them. A more horrific fate I cannot imagine (unless it be Heidegger.)
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It appears that Stewart and Colbert weren't quite as effective as you'd hope.
I think Paul was always going to win. KY has had a Republican senator since 1999, and prior to that, the only Democratic senator in the last fifty years was Wendell H. Ford, who won one election in 1974 then rode the incumbency train through to his retirement.
It's hard to over-emphasise the tribalism at work here-people may think Paul is an absolute nut, that his supporters are genuine jackbooted thugs, that the entire Republican party is full of raving idiots, etc but they'll still put their tick beside the guy with the (R) beside his name because, in some indefinable way, the other guy is worse.
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Happens an awful lot with health screening programmes. People are told their chances will improve by a relative amount like 50% but not that they still have say a 249 out of 250 chance of dying of something else altogether or never having the problem at all.
The diference there is, though, that health screening is about changing individual behaviour (so needs to emphasise the importance of proactive action) while discussions of crime demographics is intended to justify changes in public policy.
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Great read, Jackie, and in line with my own experiences.
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According to an old Slovenian guy I used to work with, you could get away with referring to both one and many women as "voomenz". Usually prefixed with "bloody".
Pretty sure he wasn't a feminist, though.
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Personally, I always like to level things out with a bit of this.
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Next you'll be saying he should be congratulated for keeping up the war spending on track for a Bush timetabled withdrawl from Iraq. Or how he instituted a surge in Afghanistan, exactly like the surge Bush used in Iraq. Or how he hasn't closed Gitmo.
I don't seem to remember Tea Partiers protesting against any of that. Or conservatives generally. Liberal blogs have been hitting Obama on those exact issues, but they haven't exactly been protesting in droves near the Washington Monument.
Do something worthwhile, change something, don't behave like a continuation of George W Bush (y'know the guy who the Dems blame for getting into the mess).
As per the link I posted above, the US economy has been growing throughout Obama's term. TARP was a Bush initiative, but was quickly tapped as "Obama's bank bailout" and has had a positive effect on the economy. (McCain has retroactively declared he would have reversed TARP, but again, that's a case of a Republican trying to exploit Tea Party rhetoric for electoral gain.)
There have been plenty of significant changes in Obama's term so far, the health care bill only being the biggest.
And whatever you might think of the Tea Party movement craziness it is change from business as usual politics.
In delivery perhaps, but not in purpose. Have a read of this article on the "Tea Party Manifesto". Small government, reducing federal entitlements, lower taxes, no universal health care, etc It's the Republican Party platform of the last twenty years liberally sprinkled with phrases like "grass roots", "decentralization", "independent", "not politics as usual", etc
Which is not surprising given that one of the writers is the unfortunately named Dick Armey, who was leader of the Republican Majority in the House fom 1995-2003, and that it's published in the Wall Street Journal. You'll note that Armey's article, as a free market proponent, deliberately downplays the anti-immigration tenor of many Tea Party protests, but is otherwise spot on as to the later Tea Party's goals.
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More likely their motivation is: the economy is shit so please get off your lazy, good for nothing, over paid, worthless, golf playing, self serving collective arse and do something worthwhile.
"Do something"? You mean like the TARP bailout, which actually did do a hell of a lot for the economy? Or the tax cuts Obama instituted (see that same article.)
The "Politicians aren't doing enough to fix the economy!" trope is trotted out every single election when Democratic candidates are incumbents, and it is almost always a lie manufactured by conservative strategists because it plays well with the uninformed.