Spareink

November 24, 2005

New Definitions I'm thinking about

I may start to use these definitions (in the never-ending quest to boil everything down):

* Leftist: someone generous with other people's capital but stingy with his own.

* Rightist: someone stingy with other people's capital but generous with his own.

Note that I'm using the word "capital" because this isn't only about money, but about putting yourself on the line in different ways, financially, emotionally, intellectually, physically, and so forth.

Related possibilities: A Hedonist or Altruist is someone who is generous with his own and other people's money; and I'm taking suggestions for a label for someone whose cheap with his own and other's money alike!

Posted by Morgan at 01:49 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack (1)

November 23, 2005

Cell Phone Etiquette

I'm now watching a rerun of Seinfeld (I love WB11 & TBS) and this episode - which is probably a bit under 10 years old now - begins with Jerry reprimanding Elaine for calling a friend, to see how her sick father is doing, from her cell phone. It is rude, Jerry says-implies, because calling someone from your cell phone and not your land line implies that they are not important enough for you to sit down and call them for real, instead you only call them while you're walking around or driving, while doing something else.

Funny how etiquette changes over time. It's still rude to speak to someone while doing something else, but the cell phone issue is now moot and the cell phone has triumphed (do I have any friends who even have land lines? I'm not sure) but now it might be considered rude, for similar reasons to Jerry's, to instant message someone instead of calling them.

What other examples of etiquette changes can you think of, that have changed over the last 10 years?

Posted by Morgan at 01:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

November 20, 2005

Secretary

"Secretary" implies two seemingly opposite sorts of jobs: the low-end one, who sits at a desk and organizes her boss's work; and the high-end one, who is the big boss himself (the Secretary of Defense). How did this one word come to mean he who gives the orders and he who takes it?

Dictionary.com helps with the answer by summarizing the etymology of the word:

[Middle English secretarie, from Medieval Latin secretarius, confidential officer, clerk, from Latin secertus, secret. See secret.]

Secretary--in other words--comes from secret (put that into the class of things so obvious that I never realized it). The secretary, high or low, is the person in whom the other members of the team have complete confidence. And you need to have complete confidence in both the people high up and those down low.

This implies another interesting etymology as well: confidence. Note how I played a bit of a word game in the above paragraph, using two definitions of confidence: the confidential officers is one who keeps a secret (keeping a secret is one type of confidence) but then there's having confidence in members of your team (trusting them to get something done, which is a different type of confidence). What's the similarity? Well, let's look up its etymology: Confidence is from confide, which - thinking about the word in adjective form - is pretty obvious, "with faith" (fide=faith, think of "fidelity"). What all of these different definitions have in common then, is that a secretary or confidant is someone you believe in.

Therefore, those who don't believe in belief or faith, probably have difficulty trusting or believing in people, too. The agnostics, in other words, will probably be socialist.

Posted by Morgan at 01:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 19, 2005

Defining Relationship Movies

Some defining movies/TV shows about relationships:

• When Harry Met Sally: the defining movie about whether men and women can only be friends
• Everybody Loves Raymond: the defining TV show about maintaining a long-term relationship.
• Shopgirl: the defining movie about how dating turns into a long-term relationship.

Any others? I'm sure I'm missing some. For example, is there a defining movie about long-distance relationships? Or having an affair? Or dealing with the S.O.'s friends/family? Etc.

Posted by Morgan at 01:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 18, 2005

Polygamy: coming soon to a family near you

According to the Guardian, there is an increasingly large and popular movement for Polygamy in the USA, especially New York.

They use an interesting vocabulary:

Being polyamorous not only means adapting to a new way of life; it also involves adapting to a new vocabulary:

Poly A person with multiple serious relationship partners at the same time.They can be straight, gay or bisexual.

Vee A polyamorous relationship where one person,'the hinge', maintains a relationship with two others who are not involved with each other. The language of multiple love

Triangle A relationship between three people where each is involved with the others.

Compersion The feeling of getting pleasure from a partner's other relationships. Polys argue that this is the opposite of jealousy.

Primary Where a poly has one central relationship, perhaps with a spouse, while maintaining links to other people who are 'secondary' relationships.

This is more evidence for the proposition that the legalization of gay marriage will led to the legalization of polygamy, too.

Posted by Morgan at 01:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 17, 2005

Yale Anthropologist Fired for not spending time on Anthropology

In reading the new issue of the Yale alumni magazine (don't ask!), I found an interesting article about an untenured associate professor of anthropology, David Graeber, who was not given tenure and he claims it is because of his political views: he is an anarchist.

Three notable quote from the article:

..during a sabbatical, he became more involved with anti-globalization street actions like those that disrupted world trade meetings in Seattle and Genoa.

and

Although no reason was given for the decision, Graeber has concluded that his politics were the problem.

Okay, it's funny how he thinks that the cause of his not getting tenure was his political views. Wouldn't the much more likely explanation be that, since he began dedicating so much time to political activism, his scholarship began to suffer? If you're throwing stones in world trade street protests in Genoa, that's probably taking time away from your time spent in the library or field doing your work.

The best line, however, is this:

Noted MIT professor Noam Chomsky has expressed his support.

Ha! So Noam Chomsky, who is not an anthropologist and presumably not qualified to talk seriously on Graeber's merits as an anthropologist, comes out in his defense. Gee, I wonder why! Getting tenure, I think, should be based on your scholarship; but Noam Chomsky's support makes it clear that they think that it should be political--which makes perfect sense, because everything is political to them.

One conclusion is that foolish ideologies result in the self-destruction of those who try to practice what they preach.

Posted by Morgan at 01:30 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (2)

November 16, 2005

Argentina in 1933

I purchased a copy of a National Geographic from October, 1933, to read an article titled, "Life on the Argentine Pampa, with 41 Illustrations, by Fredercik Simpich." Some interesting quotes:

• There is a photo of a device used to prevent "Acting the Pig." When food is served on a farm to the pigs, all the pigs fight for it simultaneously--even crowding out the little piglets, who then starve. So the Argentines put the food for pigs around a sandbox, with a fence around it where the horizontal planks are spaced apart enough so the small pigs can get inside (and thus eat the food spread around it in comfort) while the adult pigs fight for it outside.

• Quote:

  Once the prairie-dog-like viscacha was numerous. It lived in colonies, digging tunnels and chambers for its home, which it shared with owls. Looked on as a pest by the farmers, this prairie dog has now been largely destroyed. Many an Irish and other immigrant got his first job here poisoning viscachas.

  I saw viscachas myself, while camping there, and for years have been wondering if what the translation is into English but I guess there is none. We sould see their eyes shining at us at night, so it makes sense that they live with the owls. 70 years after this article was written, the viscacha was anything but less numerous--so things that are about to die off, just don't. (Or this is evidence of Argentina's worsening quality of life?). Also interesting how Irish immigrants used to poison them.

• Quote:

  More than ever the Midwest American feels at home here when he looks at the familiar farm implements. So many are "made in Chicago." You see whole rows of tractors, disk plows, cultivators, seeders, and many harvesting outfits, as well as wagons, trucks, scrapers and an endless list of small tools and implements, all made in the U.S.A. Moreover, thousands of these machines are now made by local manufacturers.

  We know about the "Made in the USA" tag but it is interesting how, 70 years ago, there were significant regional differentiators in this regard: "Made in Chicago" meant something! And what was made in Chicago is consistent with the stereotype of the city today--the industrial center of the "rust belt." Today, the farms of the Pampas are a world away from those of Argentina, it's important to remember that, at one point, the comparison could be made in all earnestness (although the author was probably being hyperbolic even then, trying to hype up Argentina).

• In a section discussing the splendor of the "palatial homes" and summer estates in the Pampas (including a mention of the stereotype of the Argentines as big tippers in Paris!!), the author mentions:

  With every facility from harness shop to hospital, these huge estates are self-contained units, baronial in scope. Many are owned by English and Irish families whose bilingual sons are famous in the annals of Argentine sport, especially polo. One big estate vies with another in exhibiting prize animals at the annual Live Stock Show in Buenos Aires, and love of horse racing is above every other emotion. Even in the small, drab pampa towns, on any Sunday, ranch hands from far and near race their horses down the dusty main street. Betting is exciting, noisy, and universal.

  Funny how the children of the successful hard-workers spend their lives obsessing over sports and other non-business matters--some things never change--more evidence of John Adam's foresight. The prevalence of betting is also noteworthy: either the Church wasn't that opposed to gambling, or most people ignored the Church then as much as they do today.

• "In 1895 Argentina had fewer than 4,000,000 people. In ten years this number more than doubled." Doubling in ten years? I knew the population grew quickly, but I never realized that quickly! With 4 million people, before 1895, the whole country was mostly empty.

• Quote:

  Along immigrant trails into the pampa a scattered fringe of European grass, weeds, vegetables and berries first grew up, where fodder, camp refuse, and seeds were dropped, just as along the Santa Fe and Oregon trails out covered-wagon trains introduced many berries, plants, and fruit trees from farther east.

  When I read this, the first thing I thought of was the children's video game--if it can be called that, it was in green-and-black on perhaps the Apple IIE?--of Oregon Trail. Perhaps because of my yeshiva years, some elementary knowledge I know only through games. Video games, therefore, can successfully teach us about history!

Posted by Morgan at 01:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

November 15, 2005

Benford's Law & Book Reading

Hypothesis: When someone is reading a book (in public), the page they are reading follow the pattern implied by Benford's Law.

In other words: You see lots of people in public, reading a book, at the very beginning of the book (open to one of the first few pages); you see a bit fewer reading the middle portion of the book; and even fewer reading near the end of the book; and so forth.

Explanation: People start reading lots of books, but give up easily, and few even make it to the end.

Posted by Morgan at 01:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 14, 2005

Removal of Context = Appearance of Intelligence

Hypothesis: Viewing something without its context makes that thing appear to be of a higher quality than when seen within its context.

Anecdotal Evidence:

• I used to think the couple of brilliant bands from the '60s I love spontaneously emerged to create some unique musical types; but through a former music-loving former roommate, I discovered thousands of bands with very similar styles of music, upon which the famous ones slowly built and improved piecemeal.

• Similarly, I come from a particular intellectual tradition (Hayek, Popper) and people with whom I discuss politics who don't know anything about about these thinkers (and the traditions they themselves come from!) think that I'm much more insightful than I am, even when I credit Hayek for everything.

• A fun example of this pattern is how we think that people we meet from other countries are more intelligent than our local peers when really, they are so knowledgeable about other cultures and languages because, well, for the Frenchman, they know as much as we do about our own culture and language.
  

In other words: nothing appears out of nowhere, but we--romatically--think that genius is just spontaneously created, thus magnifying the role of genius in our minds.

Thoughts?

Posted by Morgan at 01:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 13, 2005

"We are Galt's Gulch"

Hypothesis: As a consequence of so severely limiting the number of immigrants to the US, the US is keeping the world's economy afloat.

In other words: who are the people that want to emigrate to the US? The really high-productivity people, who want to create their own businesses and make a lot of money--something very easy to do in the US, but very hard to do elsewhere (due to government regulation inhibiting commerce and starting businesses and hiring and firing people, bribery and corruption, cultures where you have to "know people" to get anything done, etc). Many of these people come to the US but many can't reasonably do so--the US severely limits the number of Argentines who can move here permanently, for example. As a consequence, these people stay in their respective countries and become high productivity citizens--as much as they can--in their local economies, keeping their local economies much more afloat than they would be without them. For any economy to flourish, it is deeply dependent on these people; and the US attracts them away; so the difficulty getting work visas here is really a huge gift America is giving to these countries. We should be thanked for it!

(The subject line is Luke's boil-down of a conversation that he, Alex and I were having the other day, where we discussed this hypothesis and it was first formulated so directly.)

Posted by Morgan at 01:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

November 12, 2005

Le Pen

Wanting to do some primary research on the political situation in France and seeing how the different parties are responding to the crisis, I went to Le Pen's National Front web site and there are a few interesting points about the site:

• The opening page of the site has a clip from an commercial for the EU elections from 1999. From a propaganda point of view, it is unbelievably funny, I actually burst out laughing. Leni Riefenstahl would be proud. My reaction is probably how much of the world sees clips of jingoistic American patriot acts, so this helped me better empathize with them. But Le Pen's is so over the top, it's laughable. It is a video-game style simulation of burned out streets of French cities, with a ray of light (blue, white and red rays of light, actually) shining through with the image of a man coming to save the sities, and then spreading the blue/white/red light across all of Europe.

• This burned out cities clip was in 1999. And he was already going wild about the burned out cities. Over the last few years, it has gotten much worse, not to mention, the last two weeks. (I mean, 80 cars have been burned per night in 2005, before the riots began!). The fact that he got 20% of the vote in the last election, and that this was clearly a prominent part of his campaign, is more evidence that the situation was already pretty bad then, and that people were angry then.

• Le Pen's site is a blog! (Written, supposedly, by the various guys running the party.) Funny how blogs are being used for every political purpose!

• They actually have normal blog-like entries on their blogs. Not just formal press releases. For example, they have an interesting entry about how Sarkozy's party (UMP) has taken out advertisements on Google (for words like "incivilite" and "banlieue")! It's not obvious to me if the UMP doing this is a good, bad, or neutral thing: I'm trying to imagine the Republican party taking out ads on Google so that if you search for "Iraq" it goes to one of their pages.

• Le Pen's daughter has a blog entry from Tuesday, which I found funny and will quote:

  Ce slogan est depuis 20 ans celui du Front National qui avec plus de politesse réclamait :

  « La France aimez-la ou quittez-la ! »
  

  That is, the National Front's slogan for 20 years has been, "France: Love It or Leave It!". Um, I've heard an almost identical phrase before! It was just really funny for me to hear the identical phrase and verbiage used, in France, in regards to France.

• I remember from going to France in high school how everyone would write their last name in capital letters. It's funny to see how formal and official of a convention this is: everyone's last name (except for public personalities mentioned in news articles) is capitalized. This ranks up their with the German capitalization of the first letters of nouns as a small but interesting universe of capitalization differences between the different languages.

• They list their Propositions of what they will do when elected (the platform) and, unlike those of mainstream American parties -- and I consider the National Front a mainstream party, since they got 20% of the vote and were the finalist and runner up in the last election -- their platform is clear, concise, and unambiguous. One advantage of being an extremist is that you don't have to deal in the language of ambiguity. It's also noteworthy how so many of the issues there are the same as the issues debated here and use the identical language as well (the very first item on their list is, "Inscrire le droit à la vie dans la Constitution" - to put the right to life in the Constitution.)

Posted by Morgan at 01:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 11, 2005

Predictions: France as Israel

I just want to put it on the public record, so I can accurately test the prediction:

In 5 years, France will look an awfully lot like Israel today or, worse, a couple of years ago, with a state of constant internal warfare.

Specifically, there will be a significant number of Muslims engaged in low-key rioting regularly, like throwing stones. Over the next few years, they are going to slowly evolve into more sophisticated types of attacks, like suicide missions, that are going to regularly rock France. The French military is going to become a constant presence everywhere in the French cities with military security everywhere. There will be regular, violent "demonstrations." France will have a civil war, but one without a clear start or end: it will be a permanent conflict, Palestinian-style.

France will win all of these battles, but - further down the road (20, 30, 40 years) - it will lose the war.

How could this end? In one of four ways.

1.) Muslim Victory: First, there is the possibility of a Muslim victory, which I think will happen a half-century from now: this is the prediction I would bet on. What France will look like then still isn't clear: at best, a multicultural, democratic country that is deeply puritanical and anti-Israel with strong Sharia-influenced laws, such as the inability to criticize the Prophet, and so forth. This will also happen very slowly, maybe imperceptibly if we don't pay close attention, since there won't be a WWII-style war, but rather a long-term series of street fights resulting in changing government policies to accomodate the hoodlums and the extremist Muslim elements. This could also take a very negative form, with a more deeply oppressive government. But I'd predict the lite form, though.

2.) Lebanon: The conflict never ends and this state of ethnic warfare escalates and continues forever. This would be characterized by constant street and military battles between different ethnic groups.

3.) Genocide: Another solution is for France to expel or murder its Muslim 10% -- and this lead to an immediate, bloody civil war. It is entirely likely that, in the elections in 2 years, Le Pen could win. He did get 20% 5 years ago, and this crisis could easily double his support, and that brings him awfully close. This, too, is a distinct possibility and not mutually-exclusive to options 1 and 2: if this happens, it will lead to option #2 (Lebanon). Indeed, if France becomes Lebanon, then this is the option under which France "wins", and option #1 is the one under which France "loses."

4.) Another solution, the one I would love to see France implement and I think is absolutely imperative, is, effectively, to become the US: to [a] have the police and military strongly enforce the law everywhere in France, Giuliani-style, including crushing the local Islamist extremists; [b] dismantle the welfare state (because people develop crazy ideologies and hate the hand that feeds them only when they're living off of someone else and not worrying about working themselves -- this explains why youth are so indulgent and radical, with their parents watching over them, and this is also the reason why the Muslim population has integrated perfectly into the US system, because here they have to concentrate on working--I'm proud of the Muslism in the USA and think they're wonderful here, and this demonstrates that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with Islam itself); and [c] implement capitalism: make it easy to buy and sell and create and create businesses and make money and hire and fire people. If you implement [b] without [c], the result is poverty -- this is basically what's happened in Argentina -- which is why you need both. This solution, if implemented, would save France and it would also turn France into the USA. And France will not have the strength to implement it, until it's too late, unfortunately.

A different approach is that, to win a war, you need both physical strength and emotional willpower, and it's not clear to me that France has enough of either: heck, there is almost a 1-1 ratio of Muslim-to-Catholics among the youths of France and quickly getting even more Muslims, and wars are fought by the youth (thus it's not obvious who wins with the physical strength); and the French political and media infrastructure is responding by further appeasements, such as Villepin's offering 20,000 jobs to the rioters and Chirac and the media and politicans downplaying the severity of what's happening (thus it's obvious who has more willpower).

I want to go vacation in Paris now, before it's too late.

Posted by Morgan at 09:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 09, 2005

SpareInk Boildowns

Alex boiling down one of Morgan's main arguments: non-Anglo-Saxon cultures are at a distinct disadvantage in everything because they lack a libertarian tradition.

Dan boiling down one of Alex's main arguments: if you don't like reality, then change your preferences!

Posted by Morgan at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 08, 2005

A real-life Monarchist

Last night I met, and spent two hours debating politics with (in the bar Coyote Ugly!), a professor of philosophy at the New School. He's very interested in the same issues I am and he is a MONARCHIST, hating democracy and loving kings. He hates bush for the same reasons the leftists do, and also he hates the leftists for the same reasons the rightists do. Very smart guy. I asked him what government has his ideal government and he said florence in the 16th century, and I said, "no, I mean, what current government has the closest to your ideal government" and he said, "the Scandanavian social democracies - and it's not a coincidence that they have strong ties to the monarchies of their countries."

This conversation was noteworthy for a few reasons, including the fact that there actually do exist monarchists today. The most interesting meta take-away points I learnt, while thinking about the conversation post facto, are this:

• He used in every sentence the rhetoric of reason and logic. Any deviation from his views was illogical. He sounded a bit like a stereotypical Randian (she was unyielding in her emphasis on logic, too) in this way, and it is precisely this comparison that was so interesting: there are a variety of people with very differing views who are obsessed with logic (and obssession with is good!) but who believe that their logic is so infallible that their view is the right one and anyone who doesn't believe it is illogical--which is a weird view for me, because, at any point in your thought process, maybe you're committing some sort of logical fallacy so you might be wrong! I love the Popperian falsification model, where you must always try to demonstrate your own ideas to be false. (Yes, Alex, I know what you're thinking: how do you falsify falsification?). Last night, this professor wasn't able to convince me that we should replace our democracy with a king, for example, and is it because his logic is weaker than mine or because my beliefs too strong?

• He's Argentine and this is an important and interesting point. The evolution of his thought is the evolution of what happens to rightist intellectuals in Latin America--or any society, I would posit, without a libertarian tradition (which is the whole non-Anglo-Saxon world, I believe). We all know Churchill's line about young men being socialist and then conservative as they get older (heart/head). In the US, when you become more mature and conservative (a la Churchill's quote), that's when you become libertarian, Randian, neo-con, or some other similar variation. This is in fact the history of the neo-con movement, beginning as disillusioned Jewish socialists. But in Argentina, there is no libertarian, Randian, neo-con, or any movement of these sorts at all. So the intellectuals there rebel against the leftist tradition and instead become monarchists. I will point out that the great Argentine intellectuals and writers -- Borges and Cortazar, at the top of the list, for example -- are often criticized deeply for being, effectively, monarchists (the leftists would always claim that they were so "conservative" that they wanted the traditional European kings to continue ruling Latin America; I don't know what they actually believed publicly, but I just know the criticism always used against them). There is a pattern here and I don't think these are arbitrary data points: in societies without a libertarian tradition, intellectuals rebelling against the dominant leftist tradition turn to the tradition of the kings.

Posted by Morgan at 09:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

November 07, 2005

Hitler on the Butter vs Margarine Debate

Here

Lessons learnt include the fact that Hitler allowed a Jewish scientist named Imhausen to live and flourish - and made him a hero, honoring him with medals, and officially treating him like an "honorary aryan" - who developed alternative methods for making margarine.

(Found via Small Dead Animals, in a funny article about how it is illegal to sell yellow margarine in Quebec, and that government officials are raiding Walmart there to catch them trying to do so.)

Posted by Morgan at 10:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 06, 2005

Why Vote?

As Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, note in an column today, it is sometimes hard for economists to understand why rational people vote. The classic joke:

Two world-class economists run into each other at the voting booth.

"What are you doing here?" one asks.

"My wife made me come," the other says.

The first economist gives a confirming nod. "The same."

After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: "If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I'll never tell anyone I saw you." They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.

The article then proceeds to do a fairly comprehensive summary of some of the possible reasons that have been posited for why people vote and an analysis of some of the empirical studies that have been done on the subject, including one that indicates that people are more likely to vote if they actually have to go to a voting booth than if they have a vote-at-home option.

Posted by Lonne at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 03, 2005

The Blog to read on the French Riots

Every crisis has a blog that is positioned at the center, sometimes due to its enterprising bloggers (LGF and Rathergate) and sometimes due to the physical proximity of the blogger to the criss, and the fact that he speaks English (such as Iraq the Model during the war). The blog to read during the French Muslim Revolt:

No Pasaran

Posted by Morgan at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Denmark

It's not only Paris that's burning: Denmark, too.

Posted by Morgan at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 01, 2005

I'm surprised...

...that the political blogs I enjoy reading - Instapundit and his children - have not become obsessed with the riots in France. Is it not incredible that these Frenchmen (and/or French Arabs?) have been rioting night after night, destroying their own property? Does this not further demonstrate so many points about French society, world politics, socialism?

And I thought that - at least - the French newspapers would be flipping out. I would be if this happened in New York. (Question: when was the last time there was a full-fledged riot in NY? I think I have vague memories reading of rioting in Bed-Stuy when I was a kid...).

So I looked at Le Monde to see the French perspective. Totally predictable. First of all, it's the third article on the fron page of their web site, behind the new German government forming a coalition. And here are the various headlines:

Clichy-sous-Bois : Dominique de Villepin reçoit les familles et se pose en médiateur Réaction Azouz Begag en première ligne face à Nicolas Sarkozy Les faits Clichy-sous-Bois cristallise les tensions politiques et sociales

Yes, these riots do crystallize the political and social tensions--but your citizens are destroying your cities, shouldn't this be an acute crisis, consuming your attention that you should be working hard to try to solve?

So I just clicked on the lead article in the group, Clichy-sous-Bois : Villepin reprend la main en rencontrant les familles. From the headline and my poor French, I assumed that the families that the Prime Minister would be meeting with were those of people caught in the riots, whose lives are being destroyed by their neighbors--to go into the war zone and try to calm things down just by being there. But it actually turns out that he visited the families of the hoodlums whose death sparked the crisis. (Quick background: the ostensible reason for these riots is because two hoodlums, while trying to escape from the police, ran into an electric machinery and were, well, electrocuted.) In other words, if two gang members in New York were running away from the police, and died while fleeing, and a riot ensued, would you go visit the family members of the dead hoodlums, or the town of the riot and talk to the good people of the town and try to stop the rioting? I know what Giuliani would do.

PS: There is an article in The Australian with some excellent facts on the riots.

Posted by Morgan at 03:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)