Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 361 Editor's Choice: 12
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Various items
[Read the article: Favorite quotes of 2007]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]RMP: YearlyKos is now called Netroots Nation, and the convention is happening in Austin this year. A meetup of GG fans is a nice idea. You can, in the meantime, join the Facebook group that Jill and I created. Re NN, there's a reduced price registration in effect until the end of the year, so if you are planning to go, you should sign up early.
Dirigo: Is that sort of an authoritarian handle for this forum? Unless, of course, you're from Maine.
On quotations: It's a remarkable achievement that AGAG failed to produce a quote worth including.
renato: On Larry Craig being gay: I was chatting online, not long ago, with Jesus' General, and made the same remark. The General said that he believes him--that Craig doesn't think he's gay. He just likes this kind of dirty sex once in a while.
Commenters: Thank you all. I don't always have the time to comment, but I lurk constantly. I had my doubts about the transition to Salon preserving the commenting environment, but I'm happy to have had my doubts proved to be unfounded.
Finally, an anecdote on admitting error.
In grad school, I was in the the third trimester of macro theory, Welfare Economics. Welfare economics is a troublesome topic, because it ultimately entails making policy decisions regarding income transfers. Economists prefer to believe that there is a set of truths that policy makers ignore, rather than a rough and tumble fight over distribution of public resources.
However, they do face things. In welfare economics, more than any other part of the profession, one divides propositions between "normative" and "positive." Positive results are those that everyone believes, like Pareto-optimality ("if you can make some intervention that makes at least one agent better off, and makes no agent worse off, you should make that intervention"). Normative results are those that require a policy maker to interpret the will of those who made her a policy maker ("the death tax is immoral").
In this class, the professor was Japanese. His spoken English was not so hot, so in order to make it easier to follow his lectures, he distributed lecture notes in advance.
There was a group of about 4-6 students from Germany (I love America. The TA for this section was from the sub continent somewhere. Our TAs in the theory sections were from all over the world, as were the students.) The best of the German students was usually very quiet in class (stereotype alert: Germans, IME, worry about their fluency in English), but on this day, late in the lecture, he raised his hand. He stated, at some length, and with the frightened aggressiveness that shy people sometimes have when they're being uncharacteristically assertive, referred to the lecture notes and said "These claims are not positive. They're normative. They presume a benefit to redistributing income for its own sake. They have been incorrectly characterized."
The professor, whose nickname was Taka, looked down at the lecture notes, looked up at the student. The student was kinda pink in the face, and breathing kinda hard, ready to rebut any counter-argument. Taka said, "You're right. Thank you. Please modify your notes to reflect those comments, and I will have a revised version of the notes available shortly."
This was an epiphany for me. When we are engaged in fruitful discussions, we are not trying to win an argument. We are trying to advance our understanding. And our most valuable collaborators are those who help us see our errors.
One of the common threads running through Glenn's quotes of the year is that none of those quotations represent attempts to engage in fruitful discussion or even in getting things right. Those discussions do happen here. Would that they continue.
And, of course, thanks to Glenn for being the grain of dissent in the oyster of conventional wisdom that has allowed these pearls of accumulated wisdom to form.
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Dirigo
[Read the article: Favorite quotes of 2007]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For me, it is the insipid state song that sticks:
O, Pine Tree State
Your woods, fields and hills
Your lakes, streams and rockbound coast
Will ever fill my heart with thrills.
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Grew up in Cumberland County. Spent my last vacation down east. Crossed through 13 counties, although the time in Aroostook was very short.
Even went to Millinocket. For the uninitiated:
A man pulls up in front of a country store, three locals on the porch sitting in chairs. "Which way to Millinocket?"
One of the seated calls out and says "Well, you can head right along the way you're goin' for about 6 miles, and then you take the county road to the west, and then........No, no, that won't work."
The second guy says "There's the new state road. To get there you just hop along west on this junction in half a mile or so, thatn then you exit, well, there isn't any exit to get you to Millinocket."
The third guy then steps up and says, "Well, you could backtrack about eight miles, and then you can pick up the town road through Oldtown. And from there, you just get on route 117
and then go to the old bridge......No. that won't work either.
You know, you can't get there from here."
The thing is that it turns out that it is kinda tricky to get to Millinocket from the east. Roads run predominanly from the northeast to the southwest, and it's a pain to go due east or west.
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Dirigo
[Read the article: Favorite quotes of 2007]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cheverus. '76.
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Hmmmm
[Read the article: Peggy Noonan is a serious "grown-up"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No mention of Huckabee.
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Thanks GG, zack
[Read the article: Peggy Noonan is a serious "grown-up"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Read twice before posting a claim of absence.
That, of course, meant I had to reread the piece. What a contentless piece of nonsense.
As for coherence:
(Obama) has earned the attention of the country with a classy campaign, with a disciplined and dignified staff, and with passionate supporters such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen, who has told me he sees in Obama's mind and temperament the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed during the Cuban missile crisis....
He's not old enough either. Men in their 40s love drama too much.