James Joyner ponders at a distance the following hypothetical exchange:

• A says to B, “I have X.”
• B says to A, “So I’ve heard.”
• A says to B, “And I have to offer it to someone.”
• B says to A, “Funny how that works.”
• A says to B, “If I offered you X, would you take it?”
• B says to A, “No, I wouldn’t take it.”

Here’s your ontological question: did A offer X to B? If not, what is the substantive difference between “If I offered you X, would you take it?” and “Would you like X?” if A intended to offer X to B had B answered in the affirmative?

My advice to Dan Drezner: move to Mississippi (or Utah or Massachusetts), where your vote won’t matter anyway. (Of course, the cynic might say that the likely prospect of massive voting fraud in Chicago makes Dan’s vote not much more likely to make a difference.)

Having said that, casting even a meaningless directional vote for Michael Badnarik is going to be tough, for reasons explained by Jacob Levy* (via Will Baude), even though—if push comes to shove—I’m slightly more inclined to write in “Stephen Harper” (q.v.) or “Condi Rice” than vote for either Bush or Kerry in the event I don’t vote for Badnarik.

Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong and the Volokh Conspiracy (at the moment, Tyler Cowen and Eugene Volokh) ponder the “alternative history” question of what the world would be like without a successful American Revolution. I don’t have much to add, but it’s an interesting concept to ponder. My gut feeling is that separation was inevitable by 1820 or so; the resources of the period (most notably, the lack of real-time communication and fast intercontinental transportation) probably just couldn’t sustain any form of unified government over an area separated by thousands of miles of sea.

Innocents Abroad has an interesting guest post from Steven Teles about what tangible benefits John Edwards can bring to the Kerry campaign. Chief among them: quite possibly the Florida panhandle.

Also, the Clarion-Ledger wastes ink interviewing a bunch of people* who agree that Mississippi isn’t in play, so Edwards being on the ticket isn’t going to change the disposition of the state’s six electoral votes. But at least it gets this quote:

Hinds County Democratic Party Chairman Claude McInnis said he hopes Edwards will attract Mississippi voters to the Democratic ticket.

“This is a strange voting state. Almost every need in the state is Democratic — Medicare, public education, social services — yet voters vote Republican,” he said.

“I hope Edwards can reach people here. We’re ready for something different.”

One suspects that if the average Mississippi voter didn’t think the national Democratic party stood on a platform of abortion-on-demand, gun-grabbing, and letting the Supreme Court decide every other issue that ought to be decided through the political process, they might be willing to pull the lever (or dimple the chad or beat the hell out of the touchscreen, as the case may be) for Kerry-Edwards.

Say what you will about Formula 1 racing, but Michael Schumacher has taken things to a whole new level; as BigJim points out, he’s won nine of the ten F1 races this season. This past weekend, he managed to take one more pit stop than the rest of the field and still left everyone in his dust. This guy is simply unreal.

Though you have to hand it to his teammate, Rubens Barichello, for the most audacious on-track move of the race, a nifty pass that gave him third place on the next-to-last turn before the chequered flag.

Well, the ice maker is fixed, with plastic tubing this time so we won’t be having another lightning strike (through it, at least) in the next week, and the DSL seems back to normal after a reboot or two.

In addition to damaging the copper pipe that feeds water to my icemaker, the lightning also took out one of the two inputs on the DirecTiVo in my bedroom, one output of the multiswitch on the dish, and (apparently) put my DSL modem in flakeout mode, where it loses sync once every 10–20 minutes.

The good news is I’m ditching the DSL and my current dish when I move to Jackson at the end of next week. The bad news is I was hoping to use the DirecTiVo in Jackson, but, since the primary input was the one that was fried, it’s not going to be a happy camper any more after the next time my power goes out. Now off to get a replacement pipe at Home Depot and some dinner…

Yes, I’ve become enough of a blogging whore to do the “daily roundup” post. At least for today.

• Michael Jennings uses soccer to explain how messed up British television regulation is.
• Kevin Aylward ponders the deeper meaning of the John Edwards “sigh of relief” from Democrats. Who’d have thought the “electable” guy would need the help of one of the less electable guys to become more electable?
• Also on the Edwards front: Stephen Bainbridge thinks John Edwards needs a new middle name. I suspect he overestimates the number of Americans who have been sued lately.
• Matt Stinson somehow got wind of all this in China, and reveals he doesn’t particularly miss the smiling countenance of Larry Sabato.
• Steven Taylor preferred Gephardt, but seeing as he wasn’t voting for Kerry anyway…
• Amber Taylor (presumably unrelated to Dr. Taylor) rounds up International Kissing Day in the blogosphere.
• Sebastian Holdsclaw ponders lies, George Bush, and Michael Moore.
• Dan Drezner warns wanna-be Larry Sabatos that they may be in danger of being schmoed.
• Finally, on a lighter note: it’s just like Dewey Defeats Truman, but without the Chicago machine resurrecting the dead to vote!

Dan Drezner ties together the twin themes of less-than-civil bloggers and bad comment hoodoo recently discussed in these parts.

One thing I will say, as a veteran of online fora in general (as an ex-MUD administrator and someone who’s been a part of Usenet since 1992), social problems rarely have good technical solutions. Technology can help—particularly when battling other forms of technology, like comment spam—but dealing with people and their idiosyncracies is a whole other beast.

As far as the negativity Dan has observed and been subjected to in academia, I have to say I’ve largely been spared it (although I will say I was deeply annoyed with the completely worthless one-line review I received for a manuscript once); I don’t know if that’s a function of one’s subdiscipline or perhaps just an example of my relative youth in things academic.

Update: More on this theme from Matt Stinson, who's strongly tempting me to join him in the media black hole that is mainland China.

Somehow, a lightning strike by my house a few minutes ago managed to burst the copper tubing between my wall and the ice maker in my fridge. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.

Update: Things have also been deeply flaky with the DSL since the lightning strike. Grr…

One thing I’ve been kicking around in my head lately while I’ve avoided working on my R&R is that there’s a qualitative difference between the chief executives chosen in presidential systems versus those from parliamentary regimes. In general, it seems (offhand) that parliamentary systems produce better leaders, but I’m not sure why.

Consider the United States. I can think of only one truly great president during the modern two-party era, and it’s Abraham Lincoln. And he’s only great because he won the Civil War. The rest seem to be a succession of mediocrities, a few of whom are “great” solely in relation to their presidential peers. FDR was better than Hoover, but he couldn’t hold a candle to Winston Churchill (though, I suppose, he was better than Neville Chamberlain). Reagan beat the crap out of everyone since Kennedy, but—let’s face it—he was a mediocrity compared to Margaret Thatcher. Bill Clinton or Tony Blair? No contest, Blair by a mile. Hell, John Major was better than 41 and 43 combined.

Lest we consider this a solely American phenomenon, let’s cross the pond and consider the succession of political hacks and nobodies that have led France as president since World War II. De Gaulle is only memorable because he was a jackass of the highest order. Mitterand? Chirac? Great leaders only in their own minds. Give me Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl, or even Gerhard Schröder any day.

I don’t have a good reason why this should be the case. Maybe it the experience of herding cats as a legislative leader makes prime ministers and chancellors better national leaders than the CEO-like experience of being a governor (the most common path to power our presidential system). Then again, Chirac was a party leader in parliament for years, and the experience seems to have improved him little. So, perhaps it’s just “grass is greener” syndrome—something to ponder the next few months while these two mediocrities duke it out.

James Joyner excerpts at length from the latest wisdom from on high produced by the great Oracle of our age, Dr. Larry Sabato, who James bylines (fairly appropriately) as “a TV talking head who sometimes teaches political science at UVA.”

I actually don’t really disagree with Sabato’s assessments (if North Carolina is in play, Bush is essentially fucked—by that point, any normal vote model tells you he’s already lost the swing states), but what’s with all this “we” crap, kemosabe?

Besides, I don’t think Edwards is on the Democratic ticket for regional considerations—he’s there because the base loves his stump abilities, which work just as well in Detroit as they do in Durham.

Lest I be seen as too hard on Matt Yglesias, Pejman Yousefzadeh provides the counterpoint. Surely he must recall the 2000 presidential campaign, during which our current president had less command of the names of foreign leaders than my then one-year-old cousin did.

Well, you’ve got to concede that at least Matthew Yglesias freely acknowledges his newfound status as a Democratic party hack:

Three, and most least importantly, I’d gone way out on a limb with the Gephardt-bashing and wasn’t looking forward to needing to defend him after all once he got the nomination.

Yes, heaven forbid that Yglesias actually not defend the indefensible. After all, there’s an election to be won, so who wants to be stuck with taking a stand on principle?

Update: Yglesias has updated his post to indicate he was joking on this point. I prefer to think of it as an inadvertently revealed preference, but since he went to Harvard and I didn’t, I shall give him the benefit of the doubt.

James Joyner echos my month-old hypothesis on weblog comments, writing in response to the decision to shut down comments at The Command Post:

Unfortunately, there seems to be a strange variation on the Gas Law with regard to blog comments: As blog readership expands, the quality of comments declines geometrically. When OTB had 500 readers a day, the vast majority of the comments—whether from people who agreed or disagreed with me—were quite good. With readership in the 5000–10,000 range, most comments are crap. Reading—let alone policing—the comments gets to be more trouble than it’s worth.

For my part, at least, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of acrimony and vitriol since enabling comments here at Signifying Nothing, but—then again—our little corner of the blogosphere only attracts about 1/40th of James’ daily readership.

It appears that the Kerry Veepstakes will come to an end today. Will Collier is betting on Gephardt, both Dan Drezner (who thinks Edwards is the man) and Matt Yglesias think Gephardt would be a bad choice, and Robert Garcia Tagorda is, as they used to say, afk.

I really don’t care much either way (except that it’ll be a relief to go from the endless McCain speculation to the endless explanations of why the selectee is inferior to McCain), but I think the better choice—grudges and ego aside—is John Edwards. I suspect this election is largely going to revolve around motivating the base to turn out,* and Edwards is far better on the stump with Democratic constituencies than Gephardt—or, for that matter, Kerry—is. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that Dick Cheney would wipe the floor with Gephardt in the veep debate, while I think Edwards could hold his own.

Chip Taylor notes the current congressional squabble over the distribution of highway trust fund money. He writes:

Of course, if every state got back exactly what its residents paid in, the main purpose of the federal tax and trust fund would be to allow the feds to dictate highway-related laws: drinking ages, BAC levels, open-container laws and the like. Come to think of it, that is likely the main purpose now.

Bingo.

Of course, now the sicko social scientist in me wants to construct an econometric model of state highway trust fund returns.

Ed Cone and OxBlogger David Adesnik are having a small tête-à-tête over Adesnik’s critique of a Onion piece entitled “American People Ruled Unfit to Govern.”†

Rather than wade into the animosity between Messrs. Cone and Adesnik, I think there’s an important corrective to be made to Adesnik’s unyielding “faith in the aggregate rationality of the American public.” Adesnik writes:

As I’ve explained before, the American public actually has a very strong record of rational decision-making:

Before the 1980s, it was taken for granted that the American public had volatile and incoherent opinions about politics, both foreign and domestic. By extension, this volatility and incoherence rendered Americans vulnerable to manipulation by both the media and the government.

In the 1980s, scholars began to discover that the premise of volatility and incoherence had led public opinion researchers to rely on methods that created an impression of volatility and incoherence even when there was none. In contrast, the United States had a rational public that derived its opinions on current events from a fixed set of values and updated its opinions when new information became available to it.

This conclusion reflects the research of America’s leading experts on public opinion, most importantly Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro.

I’m afraid Adesnik tells half the story; while a few of America’s leading experts on public opinion do agree on the existence of “aggregate rationality,” many others do not—including, ironically, the self-same Benjamin Page, whose more recent book Who Deliberates? argues that this aggregate rationality is skewed by the nature of public debate.

Perhaps the most promising effort to bolster the “responsible electorate” view is Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen’s work on affective intelligence, which largely rejects both aggregate rationality and the Michigan “normal vote” approach in favor of an explanation of politics based on emotional (or “affective”) reactions by voters.

That said, I generally agree with Adesnik’s view that the elitist perspective (captured by the Onion satire) of an American* public that is incompetent to manage its own affairs is inherently insulting; however, I’d argue that this is more the result of unrealistic expectations of a democratic public (fostered, ironically, in the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, often viewed as keen observers of the common man) than it has to do with embittered elitism per se.

More of interest here.

To echo Steven Taylor: Happy Independence Day #228.

If your power goes out for 30 minutes, but for the first 20 minutes you only think it’s out in the context of a bizarre dream, as your brain hurriedly tries to establish some in-dream reason why you suddenly feel like you are on a visit to the swamps of Southeast Asia (which is basically what summer feels like in Mississippi), does that mean that really your power was only out for 10 minutes?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Will Baude is doing his best to promote International Kissing Day, July 6, introduced to these fair shores by Amber Taylor (who, incidentally, only seems to get linked by Glenn Reynolds when posting in the realm of making out).

To the attention of my readers in the greater Ann Arbor area: help! Any and all assistance greatly appreciated (via email).

Dan Drezner and Alex Knapp have staked out positions roughly around Andrew Sullivan’s belief that there’s a coming civil war in the GOP.

Both Dan and Sullivan, however, make the classic “hammer-nail” mistake: Sullivan expects a rift over cultural issues—gay marriage and the like—while Dan expects it to be over foreign policy (and, to a lesser extent, budget issues). Both, I think, underestimate the elite consensus among the Republicans in Congress to tolerate socially conservative positions and spending increases (so long as they keep Bush in the White House) and overestimate the salience of foreign policy issues to the rank-and-file in Congress. If Bush loses, chances are many of the “moderate” Republicans will lose too—moderates tend to be in more competitive House seats—so, if anything, a Bush loss should lead to a more coherent and socially conservative party, who no doubt will be determined to make a Kerry administration the least productive administration in American history.

On the other hand, should Bush be re-elected, one suspects he will be more concerned with his legacy—and, by then, with an economic recovery underway he should be able to make the tax cuts quasi-permanent without restraining domestic spending. Since, rhetortic aside, there are surprisingly few Republicans on the Hill who care about spending restraint (that’d be Ron Paul and, er, uh, Ron Paul), this outcome seems unlikely to result in a GOP fissure either.

So, wishful thinking aside, I don’t think any of this will happen.

I think evidence of middle age is when you start to take interest in neighborhood revitalization efforts. Next thing you know, I’ll be showing up at resident association meetings and writing churlish letters to the editor.

Kate Malcolm has decided she has little use for core curricula:

I have a problem with [the liberal arts approach to] higher education. It seems to me that this approach assumes that college is necessary to be a productive member of society—“an educated citizen.” It also seems to assume that the quality of education at these universities would not decline if they imposed a larger core of required classes. I can’t say this for certain, but I believe that a larger core of required classes would likely result in bigger, less personable, less detailed classes. It might result in less motivated, less interested professors. It most certainly would sap resources from other courses. And it would also force specialized education more strongly into the graduate realm, depriving students who can’t afford those extra years (for one reason or another) of that educational opportunity.

I say phooey on the silly report. Keep the core out of our universities.

I must beg to differ with Ms. Malcolm, on at least a couple of her points. There is nothing inherent about a core curriculum that requires large, impersonal classes—such an approach is often advocated by penny-pinching college bureaucrats, but that has more to do with penny-pinching than any good pedagogical reason why Macroeconomics should be taught in groups of 100 instead of groups of 10.

To the larger point, I think a liberal undergraduate education is largely necessary to be a fully-versed, competent citizen. The purpose of a university or other four-year institution is not vocational training—if you want that, go to Ivy Tech, or go to engineering school. But no undergraduate degree outside engineering and the “applied sciences” (what respectable colleges call their vocational programs)—with the possible exception of a teaching degree—makes any claim that the degree will make you thoroughly competent in that field. Degrees in the liberal arts and sciences are intended as training in general competencies—how to think scientifically, how to come to your own conclusions based on information, how to think—rather than specific, rigorous training in the minutae of a particular field of knowledge, which is the goal of graduate and professional education (law school, medical school, et cetera).

And, in general, I think (in retrospect; as an undergraduate, I probably concurred with Ms. Malcolm’s assessment) that this is the correct approach—specialists are pretty useless outside their field of expertise without a general education to back it up. Witness the travails of modern journalists, who—armed with a B.A. in communications or some other “soft” specialized degree—routinely butcher the basics of the arts, humanities, sciences and mathematics, and confuse the common consensus of their colleagues with “objectivity,” all because their basic knowledge extends no further than a modicum of grammar and the ability to produce prose in “inverted pyramid” form. Those who deride the inability of the American press to “nail” the president might do well to remember that, “chimp” or not, he’s probably significantly more broadly educated than his would-be interrogators.

More core thoughts here.

Update: Stephen Karlson argues that Ms. Malcolm and I are talking past one another, although I personally don’t see it. My conception of the core is largely (though not completely) in line with that expressed in Millsaps’ core curriculum