I'm looking for quotable stuff here. A clear expression of belief on an issue will do. Even better is an articulation of that belief which could plausibly persuade a fence sitter.

(Remember, the argument is that we don't have to settle for anything less than a True Blue Conservative, because we can, and should, simply articulate our case to the public so that they will join us in our beliefs; ergo, this being the plan and all, I'm curious as to what articulation of conservative conviction Cain has offered that people are drawn to.)

I don't remember Cain saying a single thing I noted as interesting or persuasive. Not a single statement I'd call quotable. I can't remember anything he's said, except he said it in a folksy and/or angry manner.

It's possible that I'm wrong on this, and just missed it.

On the other hand, it's possible that the point of my challenge is correct, and those supporting Cain will have difficulty coming up with any tangible reason to support him.

One of us is wrong, I think. So let's figure out who.

It is quite possible, as I said, I'm wrong. Maybe I missed all this great conservative stuff Cain was saying. It's completely possible.

Posted by: Ace at 09:03 AM | Comments (377)
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Nate Silver examines the Conventional Wisdom among pundits of all political persuasions -- Cain can't win, so we don't have to even pretend to take him seriously.

One small problem with the conventional wisdom -- Cain is polling at 30%, even 35%, is tied for the lead in two early-voting states, and well-positioned in a third.

I think the pundit class, by and large, is committing the crime of Aggravated Solipsism. They don't find Cain plausible or acceptable; ergo, he is not plausible or acceptable to a plurality of the Republican primary electorate and ergo he cannot, under any circumstances, win.

They seem to completely ignore the part about people getting to vote. And those people, when voting, expressing a different opinion on whether or not he is plausible or acceptable.

For what it's worth, I don't mean this to be a Cain Rules/Elites Drool thing. Well, I do mean it about the Elites drooling. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own biases. They listen only to themselves, to people expressing pretty much the same opinions they do.

What I meant was that I don't find Cain very plausible or acceptable myself -- but I don't confuse that with the majority of the base sharing this opinion. (Why don't I? Because he talks like a fucking dumbass much of the time, and when he's not talking like a fucking dumbass, he's doing an empty folksy pander which is all very nice for those who are receptive to it but says nothing about policy or ideas or competency for office.)

Most of the party doesn't want Romney as their standard bearer. We know this from the fact that Romney does all the technical aspects of politicking right -- good debater, good ads, raises lots of money, strong organization, unified and relentless messaging from surrogates -- and yet can't rise any higher than 25% in polls.

And yet Cain, who does almost all of the technical things wrong, is at the same 25% and rising.

Cain could very well win the nomination, if people just want an angry old dude spouting dumbass crap as their nominee. Which is what I think the people actually want, and I'm sick of instructing them that maybe they should rest their Emotion Muscles a little bit and work out their Thinking Muscles some more.

They won't do it.

Adding to Cain's strength is that he's already fallen once before, and risen again. That means that all the crap that caused him to fall -- the fact that he didn't know as much about Israel as the occasional talk-radio listener, despite having been a talk-radio host himself -- has been decided by one third of the party to not matter at all. So it really doesn't matter if he continues saying dumbass crap; as we've seen before, there's a segment of the party that actually almost seems to like that, as some kind of "rebellion" against the intellectuals or something.

Point is, he can be nominated. People should start taking him very seriously -- and I mean that for good and for ill. If you're inclined towards him, well, you can draw succor from the idea he should be taken seriously.

If you're inclined against him, you should take him seriously, and stop singing the song of the "experts" (who don't know what they're talking about) that he could never be nominated so why bother even thinking about it much at all?

And of course Cain raised $3 million in October alone, so he's got a fair amount of money and can start staffing up and so on (though it's questionable if there's enough time to get an on-the-ground operation going in the early states).

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Posted by: Ace at 08:15 AM | Comments (317)
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"Winter is coming," announced an organizer at SaturdayÂ’s Occupy Wall Street General Assembly. "And I am cold." But itÂ’s worse than that. Organizers admit that the protests may not be able to survive the winter in their current form. As temperatures drop, the bustling mini-community downtown will probably be reduced to a small group of shivering, hard-core occupiers. And when that happens, the 99 percent will start looking less like a movement, and more like a winter survival course.

Looks like some faith in Global Warming™ is about to be tested.

Update from JWF:

The city has stripped Occupy Wall Street protesters of their power.

Dozens of firefighters and police officers entered Zuccotti Park Friday morning to confiscate generators and gas canisters.

I'm betting it won't be long until #OccupyWallStreet becomes #reOccupyMomsBasement.

Posted by: andy at 06:02 AM | Comments (448)
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Friday! Woooooo! more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:55 AM | Comments (301)
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Stereotypes Around the World

This site has some updated versions of 'The World According to X'. They're pretty funny and have more than a kernel of truth. You can even order prints and t-shirts of these.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:23 PM | Comments (637)
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Game Six, mofakus.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:08 PM | Comments (661)
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I honestly don't understand how some people come by a reputation as a serious thinker. Exhibit Number 1, Fareed Zakaria, who I like to think of as a younger and dumber Tom Friedman.

He knows exactly what the problem with our Iran policy is...Obama won't talk to them.

Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama signaled that he was going to break with the Bush administration’s Manichean foreign policy. The topic was Iran. He explained repeatedly that the Bush policy of simply pressuring Iran was not working and that he would be willing to talk to the country’s leaders to find ways to reduce tensions and dangers. Two years into his presidency, Obama’s Iran policy looks a lot like George W. Bush’s — with some of the same problems that candidate Obama pointed out two years ago.

To be fair, the administration started out in 2009 by making overtures to Iran, which were rebuffed by its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then it watched as the Green movement rattled the regime. But the result is that the administration has lapsed into a policy of pressure, pressure and more pressure.

The punitive tactics have paid off in some measure. Iran faces economic problems. But the tactics are also having a perverse impact on the country, as I saw during a brief visit to Tehran last week. The sanctions are stifling growth, though not as much as one might imagine because Iran has oil money and a large internal market. Their basic effect has been to weaken civil society and strengthen the state — the opposite of what we should be trying to do in that country.

And then Zakaria gets silly.

Within the context of Iranian politics, Ahmadinejad is the pragmatist.

I really like how Zakaria just glosses over the fact that Obama's outreach, which included a very muted reaction to the slaughter of Iranians, was rebuffed. Clearly that rebuff called for more outreach!

Missing from the piece (aside from any sense of reality)? Any mention of Iran's role in supplying weapons used to kill Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Also left out is Iran's long standing commitment to terrorism including the recent plot to kill .

This is the problem, well one of them anyway, with people who advocate sanctions, never ending diplomacy and abhor even the threat of military force. Eventually they start to complain that the sanctions aren't effective but that making them any harsher won't work or will only hurt helpless people. Yet time and time again they push for this track.

It doesn't seem to occur to or bother Zakaria that by his own admission his preferred policy of "strategic engagement" has been tried and failed. Being a respected public intellectual liberal means never having to say you're sorry or even make any sense at all.

Posted by: DrewM at 01:52 PM | Comments (382)
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Lessons of social evolution, part 8: Sharing of resources only works within a small group with some natural connection (such as familial bond) or other emotional/personal fondness for each other. Sharing of resources generally only works for a brief period of time -- the natural resentment towards Takers can only be briefly suppressed -- and usually during special occasions (such as communal feasts).

Being expected to share with individuals outside of one's kin group quickly produces resentment, and soon after, a codification of the principle of private property, which is, of course, the right to exclude others from the use of one's property as one deems fit.

A shorter form of this rule: People like visitors and/or strangers with their hands full, not with their hands out.

Everyday is Learning Day for OWS.

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday -- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

Yeah, what right do the homeless and prisoners have to represent themselves as society's downtrodden. Impostors! They're not oppressed like the college graduates with too much debt from pricey private colleges!

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheepÂ’s-milk-cheese salad.

They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.

Amazing... they don't want to share their own stuff with people they don't have any particular common bonds with. And they're resentful of Other people coming in and acting like they have the right to take their stuff.

To show they mean business, the kitchen staff refused to serve any food for two hours yesterday in order to meet with organizers to air their grievances, sources said.

...

The Assembly announced the three-day menu crackdown announced earlier in the day -- insisting everybody would be fed something during that period.

Some protesters threatened that the high-end meals could be cut off completely if the vagrants and criminals donÂ’t disperse.

If these damn vagrants and criminals don't remove themselves from the public park we are illegally occupying, ooh, we will get so mad!

Unhappiness with their unwelcome guests was apparent throughout the day.

“We need to limit the amount of food we’re putting out” to curb the influx of derelicts, said Rafael Moreno, a kitchen volunteer.

This movement of the masses seems to toss around words like "derelicts" rather casually.

I (and you) think all of these layabouts are derelicts and losers.

But note within their little society, they themselves set up a hierarchy "those who belong" and "losers and derelicts we wish to exclude."

Do they not get that that's what they are to us?

Oh, remember how the left used to criticize the right for telling Tall Tales of professional homeless people who are really just scamming the system?

Many of those being fed “are professional homeless people. They know what they’re doing,” said the guard at the food-storage area.

I like this quote:

“We’re not going to let some members of this community destroy the whole movement,” a volunteer said.

My thoughts exactly.

Making this all the more interesting is the fact that the "In-Group" here -- the OWS protesters -- are largely white, while the Out-Group they seek to exclude are largely not.

At this pace, in a week they'll have full-on Jim Crow Laws, and then begin making arguments that "these rules help both Those People and us too, because different socio-ethnic groups really shouldn't mingle. That would produce a mongrelized, debased movement, after all."

Posted by: Ace at 01:25 PM | Comments (270)
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People are filled with vanity. Vanity defines people. People tell themselves pretty lies, to convince themselves they're superior to other people.

Case in point: The first guy's contention that "There is a thing called greed." He offers this as an insult to Peter Schiff. Later another guy gets into the "greed" thing too.

Both of these men seem to claim themselves to be virtuous, claiming they only want "simple things." Simple, materialistic things.

Here's a question for these guys:

When I work -- when I work, sporadic though that is lately -- I do so primarily for money.

Why do you guys work? (I mean, "you guys" as in "the guys in this video."

Altruism? You just show up for your jobs, and would do so, whether paid or not, because you're dedicated to doing work on behalf of others?

Hmmm... I sort of doubt that. I think you guys (again, the guys in this video) are working for the same reason as Peter Schiff: Money. Which is, in turn, simply a convenient unit of exchange for the most precious commodity in the world: Time.

When you buy a loaf of bread, you are giving up some of your time, in the convenient unit of exchange called money, by which you were paid for your time, for someone else's time.

This is why virtually everybody works. (Except for that blessed, tiny cadre of people who literally love their jobs and do their jobs almost entirely because they so enjoy it.)

So, these guys work for themselves. When they are compensated for the time they spend at work, they put that money into their pockets, and spend it on themselves (or their families).

And yet the self-deluded, entitled OWS crowd are absolutely insistent on the idea that other peopleshould spend large amounts of time working for the benefit of the OWS parasites.

Imagine walking up to any of these people on the street and ordering them: Come back to my house and clean my gutters, for free, because I want you to dedicate your time towards making my life easier.

Can you imagine the shock? The outrage?

And yet here at OWS these miscreants proudly proclaim that's what they want others to do. They want the productive people in society to mark off blocks of hours, days, and weeks to use their time working for their own selfish ends.

How many hours of our time -- we, who work -- do you who do not work think you are owed per week? How many hours per month do you believe we should dedicate towards supporting you?

FYNQ.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (249)
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The facts and numbers here make a strong case for themselves, without the need for shouting and emotional arguments (such as "Scott Walker is Hitler"). more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Comments (137)
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