That Was Sweet

Ten years ago this month Mércia and I took a three week vacation in Spain and it remains probably the best trip we’ve taken together, but one of the highlights for me will always be seeing a game between FC Barcelona and Villarreal at the Nou Camp Stadium. Full disclosure: I’ve been a dedicated fan for years.

Yesterday’s 5-0 absolute pasting of Real Madrid by Barcelona was exceptionally sweet. This may be the single biggest rivalry in club football in the world; arguably bigger than Celtics/Rangers and pretty much any regional or city derby match up.

What you saw was one team that communicated well and whose players had an almost telepathic read of the game. Leo Messi’s pass to David Villa for the fourth goal showed how thoroughly gifted he is as a player. While he didn’t score a goal, Messi’s skill as a playmaker merely underscores his versatility, his ability to read the game and adapt. In other words, to play as a member of a team and not a star.

I also believe it showed Pep Guardiola’s skill as a coach. He has crafted the play carefully, his style meshes well with the talent on the team. It’s truly impressive how quickly David Villa has fit in.

As for Real Madrid, there is too much talent on the team to ignore, although frankly, I’ve never really understood why Sérgio Ramos is taken so seriously. For their own good, it’s time for them to focus on fundamentals and team play. They looked completely disorganized, especially in the second half.

Blog vs Forum

So the main complaint given in DougJ’s circle-jerk post (wherein the advent of more dispute on the front page of this blog has somehow been labeled as an ‘Atlantic style circle-jerk’) is that too much of the argument is occurring in posts rather than comments. I guess I’m confused.  Why is one more circle-jerkish than the other? And is this a blog or a forum? Some people come here to comment. Others come to read posts and don’t comment. Why should the commenters get to decide how the arguments take place? This smacks of readership capture. I say, if a blogger wants to argue in post-format vs comment-format, well that’s good for the thousands of non-commenting readers who come here. If not, hooray for the commenters. And why should it really matter? This seems like a complaint very unique to Balloon Juice.

But wait til 2012

Dave Weigel has a piece up about how there won’t be much Republican infighting in 2011. I’m sure he’s right. Generally, Republicans don’t argue with each other much during the legislative season because they aren’t interested in governing, they just don’t care enough to argue about the boring, concrete things that go into making laws. If things become sufficiently symbolic—flag burning, keeping brown people out, the Dubai ports deal (not that the reaction there was totally irrational), TWOC —they’ll fight to the death, but they’re not going to battle with each other over whether the CBO estimate for that is $100 billion more than the CBO estimate for this.

But when the presidential campaign season starts, they’ll go for each other’s throats. I remember reading in 2008, on Ben Smith’s blog, I can’t find the link, that he was astounded by Republican presidential candidates routinely crotch-kicking each other in ways Democrats never did (for better or worse). The details are a bit Inside Baseball— I remember the oppo report on Giuliani judicial appointments and lots of nasty stuff directed at Romney—but ask yourself if you’ve ever seen Democrats do anything like the push polling Bush did about John McCain’s “black baby”.

The Republican party of today is built on winning elections by fighting hard over imaginary issues. I don’t think there’s quite as simple an answer for what the Democratic party is built on but there is more interest in bloodsport over policy details and less on bloodsport during elections.

Yes, But WHAT Is Our Children Learning?

As part of a semi-off-topic discussion of the current unemployment problem on an earlier thread, one commentor brought up an issue I have been wondering about:

1) All of those eager beaver foreign engineering students? Dollar to a doughnut, most of those students have their education being paid for by their governments. This is more than likely not the case for many of the supposedly “lazy” American potential engineering students. Remember these are people who CAN do the math. Incurring a disabling level of indebtedness to have only SOME chance of working in their field while likely, as a consequence, being forced to delay starting up households and families because of that privately-held indebtedness serves as a powerful disincentive to embark upon that career.

2) Coupling this with the easy availability of foreign H-1B engineers in THIS country, it looks as if going into engineering could easily be seen as a sucker’s game. Not only do you go deeply in the hole to get qualified, but when you emerge saddled with debt, the CORPORATE LOBBYISTS have guaranteed that you will have to compete with what are essentially modestly-paid indentured servants for a job.

3) One might hope that universities would make more of an effort to recruit more American students for the engineering department, but if the cost of doing this is to pony up ever-scarce scholarship monies THEMSELVES, as opposed to merely holding out their hands to receive scholarship monies supplied to their foreign students by THEIR GOVERNMENTS, well, the answer is right in front of your face.

And the trajectory for a declining standard of education in productive occupations for American citizens is ever more firmly entrenched.

Y’see, the “Most Popular” article on Slate for most of the long weekend was an article by Chad Harbach, “MFA vs. NYC“, about the immediate future prospects for professional fiction-writers in America. I do not think the article spoke well for whichever advanced degree program credentialed Mr. Harbach, because it was rambling, repeatative, and not very well written. But presumably the fact that it served as high-value link-bait for the Slate audience (upper-middle-class meritocrats with a bias for faith-based bipartisanship?) indicates something about the current Coventional Education Wisdom, which is why I keep coming back to Harbach’s casual announcement of certain key numbers…

... MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students’ work—especially shocking if you’re the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the ‘70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market…

There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments—though these abound—but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared to other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers—what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts—but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation—of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength—is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.

I suppose it makes James Frey’s scam a little more explicable, but still. Whatever you think about the war of market-based versus degree-certified fictioneers (which is, of course, just a new subset of the ‘genre hacks vs. lit’ry aesthetes’ that’s been going on since at least Dickens, if not Jane Austen), the raw data raises a whole rat’s nest of questions…

Open Thread- WoW Talk That Will Confuse Many of You

Just got done transferring my mage to join the Daily Kos players. Should be fun.

Now if we could get TNC over there…

Jack D. Ripper Would Have Seen This Coming

Hrmm:

Interpol has issued an international warrant at the request of a Swedish court for the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in connection with alleged sex crimes.

The Stockholm Criminal Court last week issued an international arrest warrant for Assange on probable cause, saying he is suspected of rape, sexual molestation and illegal use of force. Sweden asked Interpol to post a “Red Notice” after a judge approved a motion to bring him into custody.

You know what? Maybe he is a pervert and a rapist. But you don’t exactly have to be Alex Jones or Paul Watson or drinking grain and rain water to think this is a little sketchy. Especially the way it just sort of appeared after the military document dump, and now after the latest dump, the arrest warrant is issued. It is just getting too convenient (Ritter) that every time someone throws a fly in the ointment, this kind of thing happens. Maybe there is something in the personality type and it is all just a big coincidence. Or maybe not.

The Return Of Not Cynical Enough

For my tastes, Tbogg doesn’t quite get across here what it feels like to be a liberal Democrat in the age of Obama. This version hits a bit closer to the mark.

“Hey, John. I noticed that you got a new lawnmower but you didn’t toss the old one. I could use it if it’s just taking up space in your garage. If you want I can pay something for it.”

“I don’t really want to sell it, Barack, but I might let it go for $50 if you give me some money to think about it. Say, five bucks.”

“Sure! Here’s eight. Can I give you fifty bucks now?”

“Mmmm, no. I might sell it for eighty, but you have to give me another eight first.”

“Okay! How about now?”

“No.”

“Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Here’s ten bucks.”

“Hmm. No.”

“Really?”

“Hey! Smith! You see this guy threaten me? Get off my lawn, you sumbitch! I’m getting my gun.”

Harass, snatch or neutralize

I found the WikiLeaks dump interesting but not very surprising. The biggest news was how much Arab countries want us to attack Iran, but I already suspected that might be the case. But I am surprised (though I probably shouldn’t be) by the ferocity of the neocon attacks on Assange:

“Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible?” Kristol writes.

I don’t know what neutralize means here, but I’m guessing it means assassinate. And snatch presumably means kidnap.

Forgetting for a moment about whether one thinks WikiLeaks is good or bad for the world how could anyone fail to see what awful PR it would be for the US to kidnap or assassinate Assange right now? The worst I’ve heard about the recent document dump is that it makes the US “look bad”. How much worse would it look if the CIA grabbed or shot Assange?

This is so dumb I can’t wrap my head around it.

Getting What You Voted For

Y’all made your bed:

Tempers flared at an unemployment office in Louisville, Ky. as the end nears for federally-funded extended jobless benefits.

Local CBS affiliate WLKY captured a bit of the scene on Monday—amid some commotion, a man can be heard saying in a raised voice, “What did you just say to me?”

WLKY reported that “at least two people were escorted out” of the office. With the threat of benefits expiring for 100,000 Kentuckians, WLKY reported, “tempers are flaring.”

It’s the type of scene that contributed to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development’s decision to add armed guards to each of its 36 field offices where workers can file unemployment claims (previously only some of the offices had armed security).

Kentucky just voted Rand Paul into office for six years with 56% of the vote. Here are Rand Paul’s thoughts on unemployment benefits:

Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul has a blunt message for the millions of Americans who remain unemployed in the long-term: “Accept a wage that’s less than [you] had at [your] previous job” and “get back to work.”

According to Paul, the issue is “bigger than unemployment benefits” and the Tea Party-backed Senate hopeful made his position on the matter clear in an interview with talk radio host Sue Wylie on WVLK-AM last week.

“As bad as it sounds, ultimately we do have to sometimes accept a wage that’s less than we had at our previous job in order to get back to work and allow the economy to get started again,” Paul explained. “Nobody likes that, but it may be one of the tough love things that has to happen.”

Paul’s advice for the increasing proportion of the long-term unemployed came in response to a question from Wylie on Republicans successfully blocking a measure that would have extended $120 billion in unemployment benefits to jobless Americans in the Senate last week.

Obviously I feel sorry for the people of Kentucky, but it is kind of hard when they continue to vote against their own interests. If unemployment benefits do get extended, it will only be after the GOP secures tax cuts for millionaires. Maybe the people of Kentucky ought to get a damned clue.

Wait until they find out what Rand thinks about their social security checks and tells them they can’t have free scooters from Medicare anymore (although he’ll still keep accepting their medicaid payments for visiting his office). Knowing these folks, they’ll probably pitch a fit and then give him 64% of the vote, because, you know, Charlie Rangel.

Sometimes the Snark Writes Itself, Megan McArdle edition

Update, Correction, and (gulp) Apology:

As Megan McArdle notes below—very mildly, I’d add, given the provocation—there is a material error in this post, right there in the first line below this correction.

I said “She actually writes…” when, as she says, she did not.  The quoted lines below are from the Post itself.  McArdle was quoting the Post’s ombudman, Andrew Alexander.

Whatever one may think of the context of McArdle’s celebration of the Post’s errors, what I wrote was wrong, and I apologize to Ms. McArdle for the error.

Did that hurt to write?  Yes it did. But it is necessary.  Live by the snark, die by it, on occasion.

_

So Megan McArdle actually goes there.  In a post titled “Department of Awful Statistics,” she busts on the Washington Post for its presumed tropism toward arithmetical mistakes.  She actually writes

Open Thread

I think DougJ is an asshole. Thus endeth the circle jerk.

Also, pizza or tacos?

Hands touching hands

Ever since FourLokoGate, TrashGate, and TSAGate overwhelmed this blog, I’ve felt very trapped. I have fairly limited interest in these topics (I have some interest in the TSA stuff and none in the others), and my inclination is mostly to make fun of it all, but I know where that leads—to me getting blamed for being the childish nihilist who ruined all the honest discourse with simplistic snark—so I’ve been soft-pedaling it. But then I got an email from a commenter I respect the other day saying that the place was turning into an Atlantic-style circle jerk, where we all respectfully disagree with each other’s principled, intellectually honest positions about stuff. I’m not one to be stung by criticism, but that one really hurt.

Is that commenter right about what this place is becoming? What can be done to stop this from happening?

Update. Everyone has the same complaint: too much back-and-forth on the front page that belongs in comments.

This Should Be The End of DADT

In a rational world, at any rate:

Okay, I’ve got some more detail for you on the findings in that forthcoming Pentagon report on the impact repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t tell will have on the military. The upshot: It will leave GOP moderates with no reasons left to oppose repeal.

One of the key findings in the report is that a whopping 74 percent of spouses of military service-members say repeal of DADT would have no impact on their view of whether their husbands or wives should continue to serve. This number comes by way of a Congressional staffer who attended a private briefing that the report’s authors, Defense Department officials Jeh Johnson and Carter Ham, gave to Senate Armed Services Committee staffers this morning.

This finding is important, because it undercuts a key argument made by repeal opponents: That having service-members mingle with gay colleagues could worry their families.

Also: The report will also undercut another key argument being made by repeal opponents: That opposition remains strong in the Marines. According to the source, while the report does find that concern runs high among Marines, it also finds that 84 percent of Marine combat corps combat arms units who said they thought they’d worked with homosexual service-members in the past found the experience either very good, good, or neutral.

The entire report is here (.pdf), and here is the endorsement from Mullens.

As I said, in a rational world, this would be the end of this ugly and discriminatory policy that makes no sense and demeans us as a nation while also limiting our military effectiveness. However, this is not a rational world, and we have a bunch of elected neanderthals who would rather be seen as bigots than do anything that could be perceived as a victory for the opposition party. So, basically, your guess is as good as mine if this will finally be repealed.

Prepare To Be Teabagged

All of these folks can expect primary challenges from grade a wingnuts:

Eight Republican senators on Tuesday voted to preserve earmark spending despite pressure from the Tea Party movement.

Sens. Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Inhofe (Okla.), Dick Lugar (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Richard Shelby (Ala.) voted against an amendment to food-safety legislation that would have enacted a two-year ban on the spending items. Retiring Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio) and defeated Sen. Bob Bennett (Utah) also voted against it.

Not quite sure how you out-wingnut Shelby, Cochran, and Inhofe, but I’m sure the party of Palin, Miller, Angle, and O’Donnell will find a way. And then David Broder can write a column about the lack of ideological diversity and the dangers of ideological purity… in the Democratic party.

BTW- It is sure going to be fun watching Murkowski give the GOP a middle finger at every opportunity.

The Tired Old Smear

Sullivan on Goldberg:

Notice something about these two passages. Jeffrey interchangeably uses “Israel” and “Jews” in the paragraph above, when it suits him, which makes anyone’s commentary on Israel at any particular time indistinguishable from some grand ethnic or racial statement about “Jews”. For me and most people, there is, of course, a distinction. There is also a distinction between Israel and any particular Israeli government. And that is why strongly resisting the arguments and actions of any one Israeli government is not about Israel as such or “Jews” or “the Jews.” It is about my good faith belief about US interests. By conflating these things so casually, Jeffrey keeps the anti-Semite card fully on the table, chilling criticism of Israel as if it were indistinguishable from bigotry. This rhetorical game really does have to stop.

They don’t want an honest debate on the policies of the Israeli government, so they just try to shut you down by calling you a bigot. This is nothing new. Ask Glenn Greenwald or the “Juicebox Mafia.”