Those Crazy Jerseyites

Pollsters have gathered some interesting data on attitudes toward Barack Obama in New Jersey. Apparently, 8% of residents in the Garden State are convinced that Obama is the Anti-Christ, and another 13% aren't sure. Those numbers are even higher among registered Republicans (14% and 15%, respectively). 21% of those polled, including 33% of Republicans, are "birthers", believing that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. On the other end of the whacko spectrum, 19% of respondents, including 32% of Democrats, believe that George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. "Birthers" and "truthers" combined make up 37% of the electorate polled.

In my view, this is probably a reflection of the limits of polling as an apparatus for gauging public opinion - as has been well documented by people who study human communication, the same option can elicit vastly different responses depending on how it is presented. Furthermore, one cannot discount the "wiseass factor" - people are notoriously prone to lying to pollsters, and quite a few of my friends I suspect would tell a pollster they believed the President was the Anti-Christ just so they could laugh about it afterwards.

Assuming, however, that the results are somewhat reflective of real opinion, it's scary, because it means that we are attempting to operate a democracy in which 37% of the electorate (perhaps more - New Jersey had the lowest percentage of "birthers" of any state polled, though probably a higher percentage of "truthers") believe things that are, not to put to fine a point on it, absolutely batshit fucking insane. JFK-was-assasinated-by-the-Illuminati-the-Mob-and-Cuban-Agents-plotting-in-Area-51, tinfoil hat wearing insane. This is not because the beliefs that Obama is actually foreign-born or that Bush wished to let 9/11 happen so he could invade Iraq at the behest of the neocons are inherently as implausible, but because we have scads of contrary evidence that renders both notions implausible upon rational scrutiny. Believing something for which there is no evidence is one thing. Continuing to believe it when investigation has revealed nothing but masses of evidence to the contrary is another thing entirely. It's not a commitment to finding the truth. It's delusional psychosis. No democracy in which a third of the body politics consists of delusional psychotics can possibly stay healthy for long.

Ergo, I really, really hope that the data in this poll are correctly explained by my initial theory.

Quote of the day

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." - attributed to Mark Twain

This line came to mind as I was reading a news report about the ongoing investigation of the murder of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student whose body was found stuffed into the wall of a campus lab building, and the comments section that accompanied it. The police are being very tight-lipped about the details of the case, and rightfully so it seems to me - there's no reason to make evidence or other aspects of the investigation public until a suspect is formally charged - but that hasn't stopped an array of amateur detectives, psychoanalysts, and forensic investigators from the across the internets from engaging in all sorts of overheated speculation. Among the wilder theories that have been posited are that Ray Clark, the lab technician who is being interrogated as a person of interest in the case, had an unrequited obsessive crush on Le and couldn't bare the thought of her marrying another man, that Le was secretly cheating on her fiance with Clark and Clark became enraged when she tried to break it off, and that Le threatened to expose some professional foul up of Clark's and he killed her to keep her quiet. These theories have two things in common - they are 1.)sensationalistic and slanderous of the people involved, and 2.)outlandish and more than likely untrue. If there is one thing I've learned from reading accounts of real crimes, it's that they're rarely as lurid or spectacular as a typical episode of "CSI" or "Law and Order". And if there's one thing I've learned from reading things on the internet, it's that people will jump to all sorts of conclusions about the character, mindset, and motivations of people they have never met, or even spoken to. As someone who's suffered through a missing persons case - one that didn't have a happy ending, either - I recall that one of the most painful parts of the experience was having to listen to people who didn't know the missing person offer unflattering psychological theories about him. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for Le's family, fiance, and friends to hear her impugned as they mourn her death.

Turn off the TV set and put away the thriller DVDs, people. This is real life. Le doesn't deserve to have her name dragged through the mud by anonymous assholes on the internet, her loved ones don't deserve to have their suffering amplified, and Ray Clark, if he's not the one who killed her, doesn't deserve to be tarred as a psychopath. Wait until the facts are known to form an opinion.

Random link of the day

Question - what would Walden have been titled had it been written and published today? How about The Wealth of Nations? Here are your answers.

Is the publishing industry responsible for the recent trend of wordy, too-clever-by-half book titling, or are individual authors?

Ouch

A petty burglar breaks into someone's garage, and gets hacked to death with a samurai sword by the occupant of the attached house. Quite a way to go out.

God's Cosmic Joke

Gotta love yet another "family values" blowhard Republican getting busted (or, in this case, busting himself) for cheating on his wife in a decidedly unwholesome fashion. While some foreigners may question Americans' preoccupation with our politicians' sex lives, I've got to say I love it, and hope it continues, because it's fantastic entertainment. There's no better farce than the spectacle of a cheating pol getting caught with, so to speak, his hand in the cookie jar, and the Kabuki ritual that inevitably follows. Vehement denials, uttered in mock outrage, followed by weasel-worded spin doctoring, followed finally by ritual confession and serial apology, in an attempt to gain absolution and a return to the voters' good graces, all of it unfolding in a narrative arc with the predictability of a Hollywood genre film. In this case, you can throw in a nice dash of graft and cronyism for seasoning. The shit practically writes itself. Tom Wolfe once referred to sex as "God's cosmic joke". I'd say that's a pretty good assessment. Nothing punctures the myth of the rational animal quite like a man with wealth, power, and connections (or, in the case of Bill Clinton, the fate of the world literally in his hands) setting it all on fire for the sake of smearing himself in another primate's smelly body fluids for fifteen minutes.

If there are any socially conservative politicians out there who don't multitask preaching self-righteous horseshit with having deviant extramarital sex with women of low virtue, would they please come forward?

RIP Patrick Swayze

I won't go so far as to say he was a great actor, because he wasn't, but he was always entertaining and never seemed to take himself too seriously. He was also by all accounts a really nice guy, something that should never go unappreciated or unremarked upon. I remember him when he was fairly young, and it definitely feels like he was too young to die.

Hopefully he's dirty dancing at the great road house in the sky. Goodbye, Mr. Swayze.

Question of the day

Is Silvio Berlusconi the worst elected leader in post WWII western history? If not, who tops him, and why? Be prepared to defend your reasoning.