21 Jan 2004
I finished reading Dude, Where’s My Country a couple of days ago. It’s a very quick read, and pretty much follows the mold of Michael Moore’s other books
, but there’s some interesting new content in there, including:
- The concept of Dead Peasants Insurance. This was a new one to me, and if you haven’t heard of this before, prepare to be disgusted: Large corporations including Disney, Dow Chemical, and Walmart routinely purchase life insurance insurance policies for their employees – wherein the company is the beneficiary! So if you work for one of these companies and have no life insurance of your own, and you have the misfortune of dying, your widow and children will be left penniless while your erstwhile employer rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars! I understand that this kind of thing is legal (so far), but man, that is sleazy.
- Moore claims that numerous polls show that Americans are, on average, more progressive on most issues than commonly believed. My standpoint is to initially assume that he’s accurately citing poll data (based on the principal of "innocent until proven guilty"), so I’m not going to bother looking up this poll data. However, I’m really curious about whether people I know (family, friends, etc) might not also actually be more “leftist” than they consider themselves to be! More on this later.
Read on →
21 Jan 2004
I’ve been wondering about Michael Moore’s assertion that Americans tend to be more progressive than is commonly acknowledged. I figured it could be instructive to find some online tests, the kind of thing where you are asked a bunch of questions and then are shown where on the political spectrum you actually lie.
Here are some of the tests I found:
- Where do you stand on the liberal-conservative spectrum: A quick test that answers the stated question
- The Political Quiz Show: This test is nearly a decade old, but the questions on it are still pretty useful in today’s political context.
- World’s Smallest Political Quiz: This very short test test seems to be hosted by a libertarian organization. Perhaps its questions and results are skewed to move everyone that direction, who knows?
- Political Compass: This seems to be the most well-thought-out of the bunch. Rather than smashing everyone onto a one-dimensional left/right line, your answers place you on a square grid, where left and right correspond to the economic ideals of the left and right (controlled economy vs free enterprise), and up and down correspond to authoritarian vs libertartian social policies. Using this notation, George W. Bush appears in the upper right, Saddam Hussein in the upper left, with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama keeping me company in the lower left.
Take some tests, you may be surprised at the results! And feel free to post your results in the comments here if you like. All these tests easily labeled me as the wacko commie liberal I am, so no surprises there.
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21 Jan 2004
After nearly a year of visiting my doctor to try to find out what mysterious condition was causing bizarre patches of flaky skin on choice locations throughout my body, I was able to finally visit a dermatologist who looked at me for a few seconds and said, "No question, you’ve got psoriasis." Bleah. Well, at least I now have a diagnosis and a treatment plan; Prior to this, my regular doctor was just making it up as she went along, prescribing a random array of creams and ointments to see if any of them did anything.
Anyway, if you notice my hair is all flaky and it looks like there’s been an isolated snowstorm on my shoulders, now you know it’s not just run-of-the-mill dandruff or bad grooming (although that can’t ever be ruled out either), I’ve actually got a diagnosed medical condition, bub. I just hope I can get it under control before I drown in a sea of skin flakes.
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16 Jan 2004
Thanks to the plethora of plugins available on the
blosxom website, I’ve added more new features to this site. The most interesting is the ability for you to add comments! Now anyone and everyone can comment on the stories posted here. Feel free to let me know what you think!
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16 Jan 2004
New pictures of
Beanie and
Squiggly are
online!
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