Leftism

How Did They Know?

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Rockwell County Line asks a good question about the journalist who uncovered the Acorn scandal:

My question is, how did the film makers know what questions to ask?   Did they have inside information from former workers who had left in disgust when they found out about the perversity of the place?   Had they tried other tacks of questions and never found a limit before (possible drug dealers, counterfeit records for illegals, etc.) so they were escalating until they found something to outrageous that they couldn’t fathom its being supported?

Since this is definitely far from the first time Acorn has enabled criminal activity, I feel certain that the journalist heard stories and decided to follow them up. Apparently, there has been deep suspicion about Acorn in the non-profit world for many years. No doubt the journalist started there.

I do have to give them credit for following up. Frankly, if I had heard reports that a leftist activist organization was involved in base criminality I wouldn’t have believed them. I used to be a lefty myself, and I’ve know too many leftists with great personal integrity, so I don’t associate them with this kind of failure. I wouldn’t have carried out this investigation.

This is a good example of why we need strong partisanship in at least part of the media. At times, we need people who will readily believe something outrageously bad about their political opponents, and who will be motivated to investigate things that will be ignored by the less partisan. We can safely assume that 99% of partisan journalists will produce nothing but noise, but that 1% of the time they will score a hit will make tolerating all that noise worthwhile.

My Response

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I’m going to start pasting the following in threads whenever I encounter the casual and ritualized accusations of racism from leftists.

No matter what
 
You do or say
 
They’ll call you racist
 
Anyway

Abuse of a word or concept robs it of its power. Once the accusation of racism was devastating, now it’s just annoying and merely signifies that a leftist disagrees with you. It only has real impact when made by a non-leftist.

Instead of making the equally ritualized and pointless “No, I’m not a racist” retort, I will use my new phrase to point out the robotic nature of the accusation. Everyone else should consider doing it as well. Maybe we can train them to stop abusing the word or at least force them to come up with something new.

Three Times is Slavery and Treason

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Back when I did computer tech support, we had a rule of thumb for evaluating the significance of reports of unusual and previously unreported failures .

  • One report of a failure is a fluke.
  • Two reports of a failure is a coincidence. It might just be two users making the same error.
  • Three reports indicates a pattern of failure that arises from the hardware or software itself.

This rule of thumb evolved after observing the failures of millions of computers. We learned that three separate computers would only suffer the same failure if the failure arose from a common source in the computers themselves. Just three machines out of millions told us we most likely had a systemic problem.

This brings me to the Acorn child prostitution scandal.

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An Important Qualifier

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Via Instapundit comes a major  (albeit British) media report that the Tea Party protest in Washington turnout could be as high as two million.

As impressive as that no doubt upper-limit estimate is, I think that the raw number leaves out an important qualifier.  To be    truly accurate, the report should say:

Two million people with jobs…

Getting hundreds of thousands of kids, the professionally unemployed  and government workers to show up isn’t that hard (especially if someone buys the bus tickets). Getting two million middle-class, middle-aged people with jobs, careers, children and businesses is way, way more impressive.

We can safely assume that for every individual who made it to the protest that there are dozens of people whose grown-up obligations prevented them from attending.

That thought should keep Obama and Pelosi up at night.

[update (2009-9-13 10:17pm): I should point out that I don’t think anyone really believes that two million people showed up in Washington. One percent of the entire U.S. population is 3 million people so two millions gets you two thirds of the way to one percent of the entire population. I don’t think there is a city in world that could handle that big an influx of people. Washington D.C. itself only has a population for 590,000 so having nearly four times the population of the city show up is really not credible no matter what the senior Democratic leadership thought. On the other hand, having hundreds of thousands of people, most who have never protested before, show up is significant and puts the tea party in the big leagues no matter how you cut it.]

[update (2009-9-13 6:53pm): For unknown reasons, all comments by Hippeprof were deleted from the thread below. This issue is being investigated and we will try to recover the comments. If anyone else saw their comments disappear please email me at the link to the upper right.]

[update (2009-9-13 8:02pm): 20 comments were found to have been removed by the spam filter. We have restored them and I will be cleaning up duplicates and removing the “hey, what happened to my comments?” post in order to keep the thread clean.]

[update (2009-9-12-10:16): The technical problems have resurfaced. Your posts may not show properly. We may have to freeze the comments. If you have an important point to make  you can email at the link to the upper right and I will add your comment to thread manually as time permits.]

Health Care and the Crypto-Marxist Model

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From the Presidents latest health care policy speech:

Despite all this, the insurance companies and their allies don’t like this idea. They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I’ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.

There’s a lot that’s revealed in this paragraph about how Obama views the world. Most importantly, I think his statement about profits being inefficient reveals his crypto-Marxist model of economics.

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