Category Archives: politics

Insured Insanity

Progressive insurance on defense after court case (AP) When Matt Fisher’s initial Tumblr post about this whole story came out and several of my friends were tweeting about it, it really upset me. My reaction was complicated by the fact that not only am I a customer of Progressive Insurance, and one of my friends work for the company, but I’ve written repeatedly about my girlcrush on Flo. (She’s basically a geeky Bettie Page, so it’s hard not to crush on her.) Even now that this…

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Yes We Can (Criticize Romney)

Romney blasts Priorities’ attack ad; spot still hasn’t had paid runs (cnn.com) Romney wants his business record off-limits (maddowblog.msnbc.com) I blogged recently about the use of narrative and personal stories in politics, and how it can be a very effective technique despite being fraught with controversy because stories tend to appeal more to emotions than to logic. It’s certainly not a technique that’s going to go away from American politics any time soon, and in the short time since I wrote that blog entry it’s…

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Doubling Down on Destruction

Austerity’s Cost: Abandoned Children in Europe (CNBC via yahoo.com) I should have known better than to blog here about how I hadn’t been subjected to much right-wing advertising about the coming election given my position in a “swing state” and the obscene amounts of money likely to be spent on advertising this year. Earlier this week I got hit with the same video seven times in one day from one of those right-wing PACs advocating for debt reduction, recycling the same canards about how the…

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The Only Difference Between Genius and Insanity is Success

Although I’ve heard that statement throughout my life, I associate it most with Donnie D’Amato, whom I first became aware of through his amazing dance game performances when I got into dance games about nine years ago. (His new site, schema.tc, is really worth checking out.) In a way the statement embodies American pragmatism, but it’s also kind of a sad statement to me, because I think when you consider that it implies that anything that doesn’t succeed must therefore be insane, it shows the…

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The Power of Labels

One of the least palatable parts of working to increase the potential audience for your writing — what’s called “building an author platform” in industry lingo — is making comments on other sites, blogs and news sites and such. Although intelligent debate is possible online, it can be hard to come by, especially in political circles. Given that there are significant political undercurrents in The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, I really can’t avoid political sites because the politically-minded are one of my target demographics. Recently one…

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