Throughout college I spent so much time concentrating on political theory buzzwords and identities (liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, neoliberalist, communist, free-marketeer, internationalist, protectionist, anarchist, transnationalist) and now I’ve realized I couldn’t care less about these words. They are meaningless to me unless applied to very specific situations which they almost never are.

Was this a recent revelation? In August you implied that your readers should take my travelogue in Cuba with a grain of salt since they were “reading the accounts of a super-libertarian in a super-socialist country…”

Emphasis added.

I’m so bad. I didn’t blog about the Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) workshop I went to last week. I’m getting so lazy with my blogging.
The workshop was lasted only two days, but it was very useful. Mark Tapscott, bl…

Very well said. I am starting to fall in that direction of thought. I think it’s your fault, and HP.

As far as the protestors are concerned …what ever happened to creativity? I need some more WTO Seattle like protests!

Oso,
The stats nerd in me would have loved to have gone to a workshop on all the different statistics you can get through government websites. At work we merge data from the IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems in with the survey data we collect. The National Center for Education Statistics has tons of stuff too and I visit it frequently. We use SPSS at work and we have files with hundreds of thousands of cases. I’ve also used STATA.

HP, I feel terrible, I made fun of you without providing the link I had meant to put in there.

You must have meant a different link than, since in that link I only contrasts liberals with liberals.

In fact, if you look at the link more closely, you will see that I didn’t use the word conservative once.

I read the Hitchens article. There’s a great example of someone who has turned into a knee-jerk political hack. He interprets any given act by who is friends with who, trying to discount actual arguments by throwing in politicized keywords

I don’t see how you could say this, Hitchens did separate those who were and those who were not associated with these lefties groups. He writes, “If the “United for Peace and Justice” lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account. And those who just tag along … well, they just tag along”.

That sounds at least as retarded as a video clip from the protest concert that I’ll post later on.

Again, I am confused here. Hitchens didn’t just make unsupported accusations against George Galloway and Michael Moore, he didn’t just base it on their friends, he based it on what they actually said. He writes, “…are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance”. He even linked to the articles that supported such claims, here and here.

How is that retarded?

For the record, I am no Christopher Hitchens fan, he is far too leftie for my taste. All I am doing here is defending, what seems to me, a straw man attack on his article, but than again, that is the difference between liberals and conservatives. LOL I kid…

HP continues to impress me to this day how he can take any given topic and always reply, “this reminds me of how liberals look at this sort of thing compared to conservatives.”

I read the Hitchens article. There’s a great example of someone who has turned into a knee-jerk political hack. He interprets any given act by who is friends with who, trying to discount actual arguments by throwing in politicized keywords:

Some of the leading figures in this “movement,” such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance.

That sounds at least as retarded as a video clip from the protest concert that I’ll post later on.