digamma.net - notes

So apparently, Ralph Nader is running for President again. Which means, among other things, that once again Eric Alterman is going to become completely unreadable.

Look Democrats, before your heads explode, here’s your final exam in Digamma University’s Introduction to Political Strategy. Which of the following is the appropriate response by a Democratic Presidential candidate to the threat of a “spoiler” campaign?

• A. “Here are the issues on which I differ from Nader. Here’s WHY I differ from him. I understand your concerns, but I ask you for your vote, because I need it, and if I win, here’s what I can promise you that you won’t get from Bush.”
  
• B. “Yeah, Nader’s better, but at least I have a shot at winning.”
  
• C. “You must want to illegalize abortion and end all environmental regulation!”
  
• D. “I don’t care if he has a ticket to watch the debate. He is not welcome here. Take him away.“
  

Give up? The correct answer is A, the only answer NOT chosen by the Gore campaign in 2000!

When Nader was escorted out of that debate audience, and Gore’s campaign didn’t denounce it, Nader had my vote locked up. How many others were swayed in the same way? Whoever the Democrats nominate will be able to make Nader look stupid in a debate, if only they face him. If they clap their hands over their ears and yell “SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER!", well, a spoiler’s what they’ll get.

In the film In the Bedroom, there are two scenes in which characters listen to Boston Red Sox radio broadcasts. Only a truly obsessive baseball fan would bother to figure out exactly which games they were. So let me get started!

In the opening scene, I believe the radio is playing the Boston-Toronto game from May 16, 2000. The announcer can be heard saying, “In the last of the ninth inning, it’s the Boston Red Sox 6 and the Toronto Bluejays 4″, which matches the line score in the link.

Later in the movie, we hear an excerpt from the Atlanta-Boston interleague game of July 9, 2000. I’d call this a flaw, since this scene clearly takes place on Labor Day.

Why am I up past midnight looking up Retrosheet links?

Tyler Cowen lists his favorite songs about obsession at the Volokh Conspiracy, and includes Nirvana’s “Aneurysm” on the list.

Can you think of anything cooler than an expert on international trade citing “Aneurysm"? Me either. I would only add that if you haven’t heard the version on the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” single, you should check it out, as it’s better than the one on “Incesticide".

For my part, I don’t know how we’re defining “obsession", since it seems like any song about heartbreak could be made to fit, and there are a whole lot of songs about heartbreak, but here’s my attempt at an anecdotal list based on a quick scan of my CD and MP3 collection:

• “Brand New Key” by Melanie: “I rode my bicycle past your window last night / I rollerskated to your door at daylight….”
  
• “I Begin to Wonder” by Danii Minogue: “When I’m walkin’ down the street I call your name / Inside my head I go insane / Don’t you know that it’s really making me crazy / There were days when I went completely blind / No time to think and I lost time / Won’t believe what’s happened to me lately….”
  
• “Faint” by Linkin Park: “I can’t feel the way I did before / Don’t turn your back on me, I won’t be ignored / Time won’t heal this damage anymore / Don’t turn your back on me, I won’t be ignored….”
  
• “Found Out About You” by Gin Blossoms: “Street lights blink on through the car window / I get the time too often on am radio / You know it’s all I think about / I write your name drive past your house / Your boyfriend’s over I watch your light go out….”
  
• “Crazy in Love” by Beyonce: “When I talk to my friends so quietly / ‘Who he think he is, look at what he did to me’….. / Lookin’ so crazy in love’s got me lookin’, got me lookin’ so crazy in love….”

Jim Henley has nice things to say about John Kerry, who apparently has criticized the President for promoting a “culture of fear":

I may not be able to maintain my traditional aloofness between the two major hopefuls. Because this is the overriding issue facing the country right now: will we live bravely again or will we forever shiver in post-traumatic stress from our Very Bad Day two and a half years ago? And as I’ve said over and over, what’s despicable about the Bush Administration is that it wants us to wallow in perpetual, low-grade panic. That is what I can’t forgive.

Read the whole thing, because at the bottom Henley goes on to show how Kerry could screw up this line of attack.

From this weekend’s New York Times Magazine’s article on viruses:

The Slammer worm would find an unprotected SQL server, then would fire bursts of information at it, flooding the server’s data ‘’buffer,'’ like a cup filled to the brim with water. Once its buffer was full, the server could be tricked into sending out thousands of new copies of the worm to other servers. Normally, a server should not allow an outside agent to control it that way, but Microsoft had neglected to defend against such an attack. Using that flaw, Slammer flooded the Internet with 55 million blasts of data per second and in only 10 minutes colonized almost all vulnerable machines.

Wrong.

A patch was available for that vulnerability in July of 2002. Slammer hit in January of 2003. All the machines that were infected were administered by people who went six whole months without patching their servers.

Of course, if the Times was trying to make Microsoft look bad, they got some help from Microsoft further down:

Critics like Reitinger, the Microsoft security chief, are even harsher. ‘’To me, it’s online arson,'’ he says. ‘’Launching a virus is no different from burning down a building. There are people who would never toss a Molotov cocktail into a warehouse, but they wouldn’t think for a second about launching a virus.'’

No different whatsoever.

Says Eric Alterman:

We think Kerry is the best qualified of all major candidates to be president and also the one with the most consistently progressive record. But we share the stated view of most primary voters that at this moment of maximum national peril, we think it an unaffordable luxury right now to worry too much about who would be the best president if it’s someone who is never going to be president. We prefer someone who will be elected president, and we’ll worry about their imperfections and ideological deviations at some future date.

This line of thinking is best explained by David Brooks here:

These weird things didn’t really bother Democratic primary voters, but primary voters imagined they might bother general election swing voters. And since electability is all about Iowa and New Hampshire liberals trying to imagine what Palm Beach County, Fla., independents will want in a presidential candidate nine months from now, this created ripples of concern that Dean might not be so electable after all….

And, what do you know, Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, and from that moment on the election turned into a postmodernist literary critic’s idea of heaven. It became an election about itself, with voters voting on the basis of who could win votes later on.

Sigh.