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OTB Caption JamTM
Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . .
Other Humor: To join in, start a Caption Contest at your blog, edit it to add a link to this post, and then send a TrackBack. If your blog doesn’t automatically generate one, use the Send TrackBack feature below. For more information, see this post. ‘New’ Europe Outworks ‘Old’
Workers in eastern Europe work more hours and take less vacation than their counterparts to the west.
This is mostly a function of affluence, of course, but also an indication of culture. It’s noteworthy, for example, that Estonians, who are at the bottom of the EU vacation scale, get twice the paid vacation time that Americans do. It should be noted that the EU numbers aren’t just averages: They’re government mandated minimums! And, no, the figures above do not include public holidays. The U.S., of course, guarantees 0 days of paid vacation. Show comment here »Palin More Popular Than Obama and McCain
A new Rasmussen poll has Sarah Palin viewed favorably by 58 percent of likely voter respondents, compared with the 57 percent favorables that both John McCain and Barack Obama enjoy. Yes, that’s a statistical tie but it’s pretty impressive considering that 67 percent of the country had never heard of her a week ago. Not surprisingly, there’s a strong partisan breakdown, with 89 percent of Republicans, 33 percent of Democrats, and 59 percent of unaffiliated respondents viewing her favorably. More interesting — although partly explained by party — is that she’s much more popular with men (65 percent favorable) than with women (52 percent). A separate Rasmussen survey released Wednesday found that men prefer Palin to Hillary Clinton 49 percent to 45 while women prefer Clinton to Palin 57 percent to 35. Go figure. Maybe Will Wilkinson is on to something with his “Paglian chtonoic sexual power” analysis. McCain has benefitted from a “Palin bounce,” getting a jump of 12 percent (from 42 to 53) amoung Republicans and 11 percent (54 to 65) among independents in the week since making the announcment. Show comments here »Country First: A Fascist Idea?
While hyper-nationalism is a key component of fascist ideology, it doesn’t follow that loyalty to country is fascist. McCain isn’t advocating blind obedience to government authorities. Rather, he’s expressing a profound sense of duty to stand up for our shared ideals. This excerpt from the speech captures that spirit:
One presumes McCain doesn’t quite literally mean that he values his citizenship above, say, his family, friends, and former comrades in arms on a day-to-day basis. I’m rather sure he doesn’t. But he’s willing to risk all those things, and his life itself, in support of a higher calling. America was quite literally founded on the idea of individual rights. But while we’ve declared those rights to be inalienable and God-given, they nonetheless have to be guarded and defended by men like John McCain[*]. ___________ *To clarify, I’m referring to those willing to put their lives on the line to defend the country as McCain did in his younger days. While I think McCain’s past service tells us something about what kind of president he’d be, I’m not arguing by extenstion that Obama wouldn’t protect the country were he elected. Show comments here »John McCain’s Acceptance Speech
John McCain has accepted the nomination of the Republican Party for president. His speech, like Barack Obama’s a week before, was long for my tastes and contained far too many bromides that could have been in any convention speech of his party in recent years. McCain continued a strategy that I’ve disagreed with but that has gotten him this far in building so much around his Vietnam experience. His repeated professions of love for his country, accompanied by chants of USA! USA! USA! put me in mind of the Olympics. As I keep reminding myself, though, I’m not the target audience. McCain’s speech wasn’t as funny as Sarah Palin’s and his delivery wasn’t as good as Obama’s. Despite having delivered big speeches, including convention speeches, for years, he seemed to have difficulty dealing with unexpected applause. He’s not selling himself as an orator, though. He did what he had to do: Delivered a competent speech, contrasting his service and experience with that of his opponent, while emphasizing that he understands the need to deal with the country’s problems. The speech won’t generate a groundswell of support but will likely both steady the base and appeal to moderates. Update (Alex Knapp): My main problem with this speech, as with Palin’s, was not so much the delivery as the writing. This one was particularly bad from that angle–there was no narrative or flow to the thing. It jumped from biography to patriotism to attacks to policy to patriotism to biography. It was disjointed and I think that made it more difficult for McCain to do what he needed to do. It was also surprisingly short on detail–I think the most time was spent talking about education reform and energy (with no mention of solar even though he mentioned other alternatives, which I thought strange). However, I thought McCain handled the protesters well. (Note to everyone who thinks about protesting an event like this: you always make yourself look like an idiot and end up hurting your own cause. Plus, it’s rude. Stop it!) And while I think that a lot of the promotion of McCain’s history as a POW this election has bordered on tasteless, I thought that it was well handled in this speech. Personally, I’m not sure he needed to bring it up at all, but he did it with a lot of grace and that portion was by far the most effective part of his speech. All in all, I’m not sure if the speech made much of an impact on voters, but I don’t think it hurt, either. At this point, most people are pretty familiar with John McCain, and he didn’t really give them anything different. Show comments here »Caption Contest Winners
The “Pi Lise Domine, Dona Eis Requiem” Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.
Rich Work More than the ‘Working Class’
NYT sociologist Dalton Conley, in a NYT Labor Day op-ed entitled “Poor Man’s Burden,” notes that rich people work longer hours than their less-well-off cohorts.
Well . . . no. It’s not the money that causes the problems, it’s the earning process. Most people who have hourly jobs leave their work-related worries behind the moment they leave the job site. Sure, they might be worried about losing their job but they aren’t thinking about jackhammering or delivering packages or flipping burgers or stocking shelves or whathaveyou once they get home. In most cases, there’s a clean division between work and homelife. That’s not true for most salaried workers, let alone executives. Sure, many of us have the luxury of taking a few minutes here and there during the “work day” to surf the Internet or, indeed, even write blog posts. But our day doesn’t end when we step out of the office. It’s not just that we’re chained to the job with our email and ubiquitous BlackBerries. Were it not for those conveniences, most of us would be forced to spend more time in the office rather than having the flexibility to work from home on occasion. Even when we’re not consciously working, we’re fretting over the next day’s presentations, looking ahead to various problems, and otherwise engaged in work. Beyond that, most of these people build their lives around their work, drawing both much of their self-worth and quite a bit of satisfaction from it. This is the difference between a job and a career. A quarter century or so ago, Al Franken had a bit on “Saturday Night Live” wherein he observed that, as a comedian, anything that he used in his act was techically a “business expense.” He proceeded to hold up various luxury purchases, mentioning them on the show, so that he could get a tax write-off. Presumably, he didn’t actually put in for the deductions. But his humor was on target: What, exactly, does constitute “work” for people who make a living making observations about living? To be sure, there are those who are rich even though they don’t do much. Some people win the lottery. Others inherit lots of money because someone related to them worked really hard and left it to them. But the vast majority of those who inhabit the upper reaches of the income distribution are there because they’ve worked really hard for a long time. Somehow, though, they’re not part of the “working class.” Via Jason Kottke via Andrew Sullivan Show comments here »Why Don’t Politicians Write Their Own Speeches?
I was scouring the op-ed pages of the papers today and came across a David McGrath piece in the Washington Post introduced with the blurb “When was the last time you saw or heard a writer credited at the end of a speech by John McCain or Barack Obama?” I clicked through, expecting a piece expressing bemusement over CNN’s commentators last night continuing to point out the Matthew Scully wrote Sarah Palin’s VP acceptance speech when nobody bothered to point out that Obama, Joe Biden, and others didn’t exactly write their own speeches, either. Instead, McGrath had a much more substantive point: Why is it that we accept ghost written speeches at all? He notes that we universally decry term paper mills and that public figures are routinely excoriated for passing off others’ words as their own in just about every other circumstance. And the arguments excusing ghost writers — they’re paid, they consent to let others use their words, everyone knows it happens — apply in cases we deplore.
Now, it’s not clear that being a gifted writer of prose necessarily translates into executive leadership. And, one could argue that, since we’d never be certain that candidates didn’t get surreptitious help with their speeches, we might as well do away with the pretense. And, I’d argue, professional speechwriters are more akin to the behind-the-scenes writers who work for Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, and others than term paper mills. The point of a political speech isn’t — as with a college paper — to demonstrate mastery of writing skills but rather to convey a candidate’s message effectively to a wide audience. Still, McGrath has a point. Even if people theoretically know that candidates don’t write their own lines, we all fall into the psychological trap of acting as if they do. We credit them, not their handlers, for getting off good zingers in the debates or a particularly funny line in a speech. That’s true, of course, for the standup comic as well. But politicians are not, at least in theory, mere showmen. Show comments here » |
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