AOL Presidential Match Guide

Well, after Tuesday, I guess I will sort of know if I have to eat my words in my recent posting announcing not only my support for Dean but confidence in his coming victory.

While reading Cliopatria today I came across a great link to a Presidential Match website. It was better than other attempts I have seen at this and I went through the whole test. The results were amusing. According to my views on various issues, and my ranking of their importance, all the democrat candidates scored between 71-100%. Bush scored 6%, presumably because I share some of his views on economics and trade. In descending order, the quiz recommended I vote for: Kucinich (100%), Sharpton (95%), Kerry (91%), Clark (85%), Dean (83%), Edwards (78%), and Lieberman (71%). The site also allows you to compare candidates on the issues, side by side (for example Dean, Clark, Edwards, and Kucinich). It would of course be nice, though unreasonable to expect, columns for intelligence, knowledge, wit, tact, charisma, and “snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected”. These categories might help knock a few points off of Bush’s 6% and the last of these, chip away at Kucinich’s 100%.

Describe or Generalize

My friend Jae has posted an interesting entry, which includes a quote which I believe comes from a book he is reading called Bridges and Boundaries. I have yet to read this so I shouldn’t comment much on it, but the quote is quite intriguing:

“the primary goal of historians is to describe, understand and interpret individual events or a temporarily and spatially bounded series of events, whereas the primary goal of political scientists is to generalize about the relationships between variables and, to the extent possible, construct law-like propositions about social behaviour.”

This is a very nice and concise division. I imagine that this distinction would not meet with objection from many historians.

Unfortunately, the distinction horribly underestimates the ambitions of both historians and political scientists…
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Dean against the Incombent

As an American citizen, I am fortunate enough to have the right participate in a process which ultimately determines the ruler of the world for the next four years.

I have never been particularly political in my life, in so far as I have had a very realistic view of politics and because I am rarely pleased with any candidates in an election enough to need to share my favorite with others.

I am admittedly as “liberal” as it gets when it comes to most social and environmental issues, so radically so that few candidates for elections would stand a chance if they stood with me on those issues. On many economic issues, and particularly those concerning international trade, I am far less in tune with the policies and ideas of the political spectrum represented by the Democratic party in the United States, let alone those who inhabit its left flank.

I don’t want to go into the details of my positions on all the issues in fad right now, but instead simply post here, “officially” as it were, that in this election I will not only be voting, but doing what I can to persuade my friends and acquaintances lucky enough to have the right to vote in the “mother of all elections” that they should vote, and cast their vote the way of Howard Dean…
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Jai’s Response to the Engineer’s Look at Deconstruction

I asked my friend Jai Kasturi to take a look at the article that Derek posted a link to here in the Friends section of this site. Jai is a former engineer but now a PhD student at Columbia, studying, well, um, taking another look at the history of the world since Paul. His comments came in email form but he said I could post them here…
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The World of Postmodern Literary Criticism as Seen From an Outsider

Here is a posting submitted by my friend Derek:

I saw this article on slashdot, which probably means a lot of you have already seen it, but I thought others that might not have seen it already would find it humorous. A suggested read if you’ve ever attended a forum with a lot of literature professors and graduate students and after about half an hour you started wondering whether anyone was really saying anything useful, or if it was all just verbose and creative b.s.

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Strobe Talbott on Revolution in America

The topic of US-Eurepean relations has been hot in news and also academic journals ever since the war in Iraq. In the October issue of International Affairs Strobe Talbott from the Brookings Institute chimes in on the debate with an article entitled “War in Iraq, Revolution in America.”

Great title, but I have mixed thoughts on the content. Talbott starts by arguing that, “a nation-state is a territory controlled by a single government inhabited by a distinct population with a common culture that commands loyalty and shapes the identity of its citizens” and thus by definition America (unlike France, Sweden or England) is not a nation-state, “in the Westphalian sense”

The problem with this is that, is that there are few, if any, examples of countries which are nation-states, “in the Westphalian sense”…
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David Weinberger on Social Software

A lot of excellent bloggers are making their voices heard on the issues of social software or social networking software etc. the definition of which seems to vary with each blogger. I don’t know enough about it to organize my own thoughts, but I was amused by David Weinberger’s characterization of one of the problems of the explicit social networks registered in social software on a post at Corante:

“Real social networks are always implicit. The ones constructed explicitly are always — yes, always — infected with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because he’s your cousin and you couldn’t invite Marsha because then you’d have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.”

Another Shrine Visit

Koizumi has visited the controversial Yasukuni shrine again. I am compiling articles I find on it at my wiki at ChinaJapan.org. I wrote about an earlier visit here. Great collection of articles on the topic at Sina.com (in Chinese).

The response is still ongoing but I would say relatively muted compared to some other recent events. I think Koizumi and the Japanese government have calculated that the annual visits (this is to be the only one this year, says Koizumi), will always generate a response but never anything with any real consequences. That being the case, Koizumi’s own desire to visit the shrine and the political benefits domestically (from veterans groups and the right wing) are presumably judged to override any diplomatic fallout.

My feeling, however, is that this is a mistake in the long run. Despite a growing amount of contact between the countries, I don’t think the “sentiment” issue is getting better as a result. I believe that this will translate into trouble in the future as public opinion in China has a growing influence on policy making.