Many, many people from my school went to Restoring Honor on Saturday. One guy even wore an Obama t-shirt and received a lot of harassment for it. (Someone even refused to distribute literature to him.) My intent in going was not to be the agitator or the alien of the crowd -- I sought to blend in as much as possible. Because I wanted to have fun! And I had lots of it. Turning off your brain and pretending to be a tea partier is fun.
Me and four other people caught one of the earlier shuttles to the Metro station. Bear in mind that Tenleytown is not a downtown neighborhood, and it was a Saturday (so no Maryland commuters), so I was expecting the trains to be only moderately filled. I WAS WRONG! Even early on in the red line, the trains were practically overflowing with the Tea Party types. As an aside -- you don't realize the demography of DC (middle-class professionals, young people, minorities) until they are nearly entirely displaced by the overweight, inbred, ugly, overtly jingoistic Tea Party Patriots with their Gadsden flags and their dumb clothing. And their scooters. Let's not forget the irony of myriad anti-government activists using a municipally operated transportation system.
The journey from Tenleytown to the Lincoln Memorial requires a transfer at Metro Center, and while the four other people were more intrepid about making that connection, I was not. So I lost them. As such I was in a mob of patriots, proceeding as a massive group to the other platform for -- I think it's the blue line. Metro Center to Smithsonian is two stops, and when the train made that stop at the Smithsonian, people started cheering. We all moved on out and proceeded as a group toward the site of the event. At the intersection we saw an SUV all decked out in posters and words and such -- one thing which caught my eye was "Boycott the People's Republic of Virginia" (those lousy communists and their arch-conservative governor). Naturally, people started applauding it.
It was a lot of walking. And while walking, I noticed that there were just so many people. A lot of my pictures and videos are just me recording how many PEOPLE there were. I wouldn't be surprised if a million people were there, to be honest. I ended up settling at some arbitrary spot very far from the Lincoln Memorial, but that was fine since I had a good shot of a jumbotron (of which there were many). I don't feel like recalling the schedule of the programming, but basically: Glenn Beck spoke, something about some scholarship for veterans (I thought the military already paid for college?), Sarah Palin, and awards given out for Faith, Hope, and Charity. The Faith award went to a black preacher who was present at MLK's speech 47 years ago, the Hope award went to Albert Pujolz (yes, the goddamn baseball player), and I had left before they gave out the Charity award. I figured that if I left before the event concluded, I would beat the crowd. I was wrong.
The event itself was largely apolitical in nature. The audience was politically charged, obviously. (And Christie is apparently revitalizing the New Jersey economy. News to me!) But the theme of the event was more about jingoism, supporting the military, and loving the Jesus. (They even had a rabbi on stage, who had to sit silently while a Christian preacher declared Jesus Christ to be the savior of mankind.) While Glenn in a prepared video talked about bringing America back, copious footage was shown of a stereotypical 50s middle class family. One person with whom I discussed this later asked what the meaning of it was supposed to be. I said Glenn Beck wants to bring us back to an era where women didn't have jobs. I'm grateful that once I left the Tea Party environment and was re-immersed in collegiate liberalism, my critical faculties turned back on. Just about everyone who went to the event tore it apart. I must not have talked to any of the Republicans who went. There were a dozen or so, I think.
I have pictures of crowds, videos of me walking, of Glenn Beck's introductory speech, of Sarah Palin's speech, of competing protests on a random street corner. I have some campaign literature, including a magazine which I briefly flipped through which is ostensibly about the United States but seems to be more interested in ragging on about "papists." For once, I'm not the one using the word. I also have a Restoring Honor water bottle; they were being given out for free as a sort of service. To me, it's a keepsake.
I will conclude with an aside about the Metro. Even at 5 pm, when I was getting back from Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street, the Tea Party Patriots were still clogging the Metro like the arterial plaque in their hearts. I am guessing that many of them flocked in from Maryland, and now that the day was over, they were going back home. The issue is not that they were rude tourists -- many of them were at least superficially polite -- but they're ignorant, as are all tourists. And all of them use paper fares, which they do not know how to put in the turnstile correctly, nor are they as fast and convenient as SmarTrip cards. I think much of the bottlenecking occurred at the turnstiles. Finally, I will note that escalefters ABOUNDED. The unwritten law of standing on the right side of the escalator so that people may walk up the left was utterly abandoned.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
What authorship is and isn't: Redux
The kids are lying!
At least this is the impression I get from the comments section in the aforementioned New York Times article, upon which the immediately preceding blog is based.
Fair enough. Regardless of whether or not students are lying, my words on the mechanics of plagiarism should hold.
At least this is the impression I get from the comments section in the aforementioned New York Times article, upon which the immediately preceding blog is based.
Fair enough. Regardless of whether or not students are lying, my words on the mechanics of plagiarism should hold.
Monday, August 2, 2010
What authorship is and isn't
It appears that the discourse of white people is largely fueled by the latest intriguing article offered up by The New York Times, so it should come as no surprise that I saw two people link to the same Times article: Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age by Trip Gabriel. First, Sage Ross linked to it on Twitter, where he promptly criticized it for suggesting that because the students of today have different opinions on issues of authorship than students of the past, that they are therefore more inclined to do what I and others "in the know" to be remarkably stupid: using other people's ideas without attribution. Plagiarism.
The second reference came on Facebook from Kelly Martin. I would link to her profile, but for whatever reason I consider linking to Facebook profiles more awkward than linking to Twitter feeds. At this point I was confronted with this text on two fronts: Facebook and Twitter. And the relevance to my own personal life is staggering, not just because I am an incoming university freshman who has written college-level papers for college-level classes in high school, but also because of my interest in establishing national educational standards. No one student in the United States should graduate high school without a firm grounding in critical analysis and analytical writing, and to do those you need to know how to properly incorporate the ideas of others. If this article is any indication, we are actually regressing on this matter. The situation is worse than ever before.
But here is my problem with most discussion on this: people bemoan the emerging ideology of people my age (I am 18 years old, born 1992) that authorship is ephemeral and not fixed to particular people -- with sampling in music and collectively written texts like Wikipedia, the power and ownership of an individual author is fleeting. The idea goes that because of this change in understanding, students who plagiarize aren't being lazy, but genuinely do not understand that in an academic context, the ideas and words of others must be attributed. Such is supposedly a disservice to the author's ideas.
I take issue with this explanation; let me quote what I have stated on Twitter: "The idea of authorship is a sham to begin with. No one is truly the progenitor of ideas." After all, there is no such thing really as a truly unique idea. Just about everything ever written draws its inspiration from something else, including things that cannot be directly given a citation. How do I cite the fact that my writing style and my ideologies are a reflection of my upbringing, and indirectly a reflection of my parents' and grandparents' and great-grandparents' upbringing? I suppose I just did that just now by mentioning it, but how do I drop it in at specific locations? No one is going to write "Free-market capitalism is the most functional economic system there is" and attribute that to "The corporate culture under which I was raised has instilled this idea into my head," even though it would be entirely truthful and a just citation.
What happens instead is that the ingrained cultural concepts influence the research and the subsequent analytical process. This obviously culminates in the glorious text which the NYT article repeatedly refers to as "property," as if the author owns it. Shouldn't credit be given to the various circumstances which were subconsciously responsible for making the text the way it was to begin with?
This may seem as though I am defending the taking of ideas from others without attribution as if ideas are just ephemeral, culture mainstays that are stolen by the author and then integrated into some text which, under the Western notions of intellectual property, become theirs. While non-obvious factors play a much larger role in academic analysis than people realize, this does not become a reason to take people's words or ideas.
Let's break it down into two possible things you can plagiarize: ideas, and as a superset of ideas, the very words themselves. With regard to the ideas, it can be assumed that if people are reading a text, they are doing so with the intent on becoming familiar with the concepts described within the texts. That is to say, they are learning things they had not learned before. Had they already knew the information, they would simply espouse from the top of their heads instead of doing research. As a result, this is not information which is subconsciously influenced, but consciously influenced through their own reading.
But recall that ideas do not exist in and of themselves. They have to be expressed with words, and with words there exist not only the aforementioned ideas, but also the sentence structure of that author, the largesse of their vocabulary combined with their anecdotes and experiences. Even when not considering copyright matters, all those influences combined are truly a reflection of that person as writer, intellectual, thinker. Think of a teacher in your childhood who has had the greatest influence on your thoughts. If you were to think about it, you could conceivably credit your career choices to the influence that teacher had on you as your mental framework was developing and your intellect nurtured. Similarly, an insightful journal article or even an informative Wikipedia article which ends up becoming crucial to a student's paper has an influence on that student, and it is morally imperative that the due credit be given.
Essentially, authorship boils down to words, and not ideas in and of themselves. Consider this blog post: I am not the first person to present ideas about authorship, and I am most likely not the first person to state that authors cannot claim ownership of ideas but only the means of presentation, as ideas are influenced by subconscious influences which then affect the analytical process. But what is more or less original is how I went about saying it: as a response to a New York Times article, as a reaction to all the buzz I have been seeing about it, in the context of a person interested in national education policy and as a person who is going to be starting college. Short of discovering my doppelganger, it would be impossible to produce a text exactly like this.
Thus is the flaw with the philosophy, allegedly held by modern day college students, that the text representing ideas are all part of a common good and should be treated as such instead of being treated as works of individuals. The issue is not so much that they stole the ideas, but they stole the means of presenting the ideas, and are thus appropriating other people's identities and experiences without due credit. Even if they are only lifting the ideas and not the text itself, the ideas got into their heads to begin with because of those words. The ideas are rarely new and totally innovative; however, the means of conveyance can be.
Which makes it such a shame that students would resort to plagiarism to begin with. Everyone in the world has their own unique understanding of the world, and writing is a valuable tool to say something to change the world, or at the least, impress people or blow their minds. Up until my college writing class in my senior year of high school, none of my instruction in writing trained me for this, and I will likely repeat this fact for as long as it takes for me to change the high school writing curriculum for the entire country.
And that includes teaching children to understand what plagiarism is.
The second reference came on Facebook from Kelly Martin. I would link to her profile, but for whatever reason I consider linking to Facebook profiles more awkward than linking to Twitter feeds. At this point I was confronted with this text on two fronts: Facebook and Twitter. And the relevance to my own personal life is staggering, not just because I am an incoming university freshman who has written college-level papers for college-level classes in high school, but also because of my interest in establishing national educational standards. No one student in the United States should graduate high school without a firm grounding in critical analysis and analytical writing, and to do those you need to know how to properly incorporate the ideas of others. If this article is any indication, we are actually regressing on this matter. The situation is worse than ever before.
But here is my problem with most discussion on this: people bemoan the emerging ideology of people my age (I am 18 years old, born 1992) that authorship is ephemeral and not fixed to particular people -- with sampling in music and collectively written texts like Wikipedia, the power and ownership of an individual author is fleeting. The idea goes that because of this change in understanding, students who plagiarize aren't being lazy, but genuinely do not understand that in an academic context, the ideas and words of others must be attributed. Such is supposedly a disservice to the author's ideas.
I take issue with this explanation; let me quote what I have stated on Twitter: "The idea of authorship is a sham to begin with. No one is truly the progenitor of ideas." After all, there is no such thing really as a truly unique idea. Just about everything ever written draws its inspiration from something else, including things that cannot be directly given a citation. How do I cite the fact that my writing style and my ideologies are a reflection of my upbringing, and indirectly a reflection of my parents' and grandparents' and great-grandparents' upbringing? I suppose I just did that just now by mentioning it, but how do I drop it in at specific locations? No one is going to write "Free-market capitalism is the most functional economic system there is" and attribute that to "The corporate culture under which I was raised has instilled this idea into my head," even though it would be entirely truthful and a just citation.
What happens instead is that the ingrained cultural concepts influence the research and the subsequent analytical process. This obviously culminates in the glorious text which the NYT article repeatedly refers to as "property," as if the author owns it. Shouldn't credit be given to the various circumstances which were subconsciously responsible for making the text the way it was to begin with?
This may seem as though I am defending the taking of ideas from others without attribution as if ideas are just ephemeral, culture mainstays that are stolen by the author and then integrated into some text which, under the Western notions of intellectual property, become theirs. While non-obvious factors play a much larger role in academic analysis than people realize, this does not become a reason to take people's words or ideas.
Let's break it down into two possible things you can plagiarize: ideas, and as a superset of ideas, the very words themselves. With regard to the ideas, it can be assumed that if people are reading a text, they are doing so with the intent on becoming familiar with the concepts described within the texts. That is to say, they are learning things they had not learned before. Had they already knew the information, they would simply espouse from the top of their heads instead of doing research. As a result, this is not information which is subconsciously influenced, but consciously influenced through their own reading.
But recall that ideas do not exist in and of themselves. They have to be expressed with words, and with words there exist not only the aforementioned ideas, but also the sentence structure of that author, the largesse of their vocabulary combined with their anecdotes and experiences. Even when not considering copyright matters, all those influences combined are truly a reflection of that person as writer, intellectual, thinker. Think of a teacher in your childhood who has had the greatest influence on your thoughts. If you were to think about it, you could conceivably credit your career choices to the influence that teacher had on you as your mental framework was developing and your intellect nurtured. Similarly, an insightful journal article or even an informative Wikipedia article which ends up becoming crucial to a student's paper has an influence on that student, and it is morally imperative that the due credit be given.
Essentially, authorship boils down to words, and not ideas in and of themselves. Consider this blog post: I am not the first person to present ideas about authorship, and I am most likely not the first person to state that authors cannot claim ownership of ideas but only the means of presentation, as ideas are influenced by subconscious influences which then affect the analytical process. But what is more or less original is how I went about saying it: as a response to a New York Times article, as a reaction to all the buzz I have been seeing about it, in the context of a person interested in national education policy and as a person who is going to be starting college. Short of discovering my doppelganger, it would be impossible to produce a text exactly like this.
Thus is the flaw with the philosophy, allegedly held by modern day college students, that the text representing ideas are all part of a common good and should be treated as such instead of being treated as works of individuals. The issue is not so much that they stole the ideas, but they stole the means of presenting the ideas, and are thus appropriating other people's identities and experiences without due credit. Even if they are only lifting the ideas and not the text itself, the ideas got into their heads to begin with because of those words. The ideas are rarely new and totally innovative; however, the means of conveyance can be.
Which makes it such a shame that students would resort to plagiarism to begin with. Everyone in the world has their own unique understanding of the world, and writing is a valuable tool to say something to change the world, or at the least, impress people or blow their minds. Up until my college writing class in my senior year of high school, none of my instruction in writing trained me for this, and I will likely repeat this fact for as long as it takes for me to change the high school writing curriculum for the entire country.
And that includes teaching children to understand what plagiarism is.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Fun with iTunes data
One thing I've always liked about iTunes is its meticulous tracking of any piece of data related to all the music in your collection. While I've recently started assigning star ratings to songs, I've found that you can use iTunes to rank music organically; all you have to do is listen. For instance, you probably like a song with 50 plays more than you like one with 15 plays. And by sorting songs from least-recently played to most-recently played, I can listen to something which I may not have listened to in months. All this data, and much more than you will ever need, is available in a poorly formatted XML file found in the iTunes folder.
Yet over the years, I find that this data alone is not enough to create a list of music, ordered from probably-my-favorite to probably-my-least-favorite. It needs to combined in a certain way, and since iTunes would not let me create my own custom column, I figured that I would take my efforts outside of iTunes.
Step 1: Bringing the data into Excel
While Microsoft Excel can open XML files, I advise against doing this directly without making some adjustments. The file maintained by iTunes, appropriately called "iTunes Music Library.xml", has no discernible sense of organization and no built-in organization schema. When I tried to make Excel import it, it basically said "you have got to be kidding me" and barfed up some horrendous, illogically-sorted nonsense. I can't be too surprised; after all, this is Apple we're dealing with (and allowing other programs to use data generated by software is for those open-source hippies).
This is when the Internet saved me. Some lovely bloke named Travis Illig created a tool to convert iTunes XML into a table, which can be copied and pasted into Excel with no problems. I followed the instructions on the linked page, and before I knew it, I had managed to paste a ton of beautifully organized data into Excel. Though for my purposes, much of this data was irrelevant. I did away with all but the name of the song, the artist, the album it appeared on, the date added, and the play count. Now that it sat there, before my eyes, I needed to do stuff with it.
Step 2: Manipulating the data
And by "manipulating," I mean converting the timestamps into Unix epoch timestamps. If you did not already know, a standard way of keeping time on a computer is counting up the number of seconds which have transpired since midnight on 1 January 1970, deemed to be the Unix Epoch. This allows for timestamps to be sorted numerically, a benefit not enjoyed by any other format. Yet I had over 1,700 timestamps to convert to this format. This is where the Epoch Batch Conversion Tool proved to be very useful, even if I could only convert 500 timestamps at a time.
So I copied roughly 500 timestamps at a time into the lower textbox, retrieved the converted data, and replaced it into the spreadsheet. Except it was not nearly that simple. For whatever reason, copying the table produced by the conversion tool and pasting it into Excel does not work; it takes all 500 rows (at three columns each) and places them in a single cell. My poor computer had a minor stroke before I decided a way around it would be necessary. This led me to viewing the source code of the generated web page, isolating the table, creating my own web page out of it, and opening that web page with only the table in it in Excel. This worked perfectly, but I really should not have had to do that.
Step 3: Devising the formula
Going into this, I knew that I was going to do something involving the play count and date the song was added to the collection. Why? Let's take these two factors into isolation: if two songs were both added on 1 January 2009, but one has 10 plays whereas the other has 20, you probably like the latter more. Furthermore, if two songs both have 30 plays, but one was added in 2008 whereas the other was added in 2010, you probably like the latter more as it accrued that many plays but over a much briefer time period. But what is a mathematical way of expressing this?
First, I created a column: "time elapsed since addition." I took the current time and subtracted it by the date-added timestamp to create this value. I then divided this by the play count to create another column: mean time between plays (MTBP). In other words, if I were to play a particular song now, the MTBP time would be the amount of seconds passed since I last listened to the song. Think about it: if I like a song a lot, I will seek it out and play it constantly. A song which I find to be okay will have a count that reflects that I listen to it just about every time it comes up on shuffle and little more. Finally, a song which I barely like will have a lot of time elapsed between plays, as I frequently skip over said song.
So was my hypothesis correct? After sorting the entire spreadsheet by MTBP, with the higher values (i.e. more time between plays) at top, I indeed found the listing to be accurate. The top of the list was filled with songs which frankly I don't care about. The dead bottom of the list was a song I added today and have since listened to twice, so naturally it had a very inflated rating (or is it deflated?).
Which brings up the flaw I've found with this list: a song's ranking is largely affected by how long it has been in the collection. I have not figured out a fix to this, and perhaps one isn't needed; maybe it's just the nature of my music listening habits. After being briefly fascinated by a song, I'll listen to it less and less, and in some cases, I'll just delete it after a few years. But if you can come up with a better formula, I am all ears.
Yet over the years, I find that this data alone is not enough to create a list of music, ordered from probably-my-favorite to probably-my-least-favorite. It needs to combined in a certain way, and since iTunes would not let me create my own custom column, I figured that I would take my efforts outside of iTunes.
Step 1: Bringing the data into Excel
While Microsoft Excel can open XML files, I advise against doing this directly without making some adjustments. The file maintained by iTunes, appropriately called "iTunes Music Library.xml", has no discernible sense of organization and no built-in organization schema. When I tried to make Excel import it, it basically said "you have got to be kidding me" and barfed up some horrendous, illogically-sorted nonsense. I can't be too surprised; after all, this is Apple we're dealing with (and allowing other programs to use data generated by software is for those open-source hippies).
This is when the Internet saved me. Some lovely bloke named Travis Illig created a tool to convert iTunes XML into a table, which can be copied and pasted into Excel with no problems. I followed the instructions on the linked page, and before I knew it, I had managed to paste a ton of beautifully organized data into Excel. Though for my purposes, much of this data was irrelevant. I did away with all but the name of the song, the artist, the album it appeared on, the date added, and the play count. Now that it sat there, before my eyes, I needed to do stuff with it.
Step 2: Manipulating the data
And by "manipulating," I mean converting the timestamps into Unix epoch timestamps. If you did not already know, a standard way of keeping time on a computer is counting up the number of seconds which have transpired since midnight on 1 January 1970, deemed to be the Unix Epoch. This allows for timestamps to be sorted numerically, a benefit not enjoyed by any other format. Yet I had over 1,700 timestamps to convert to this format. This is where the Epoch Batch Conversion Tool proved to be very useful, even if I could only convert 500 timestamps at a time.
So I copied roughly 500 timestamps at a time into the lower textbox, retrieved the converted data, and replaced it into the spreadsheet. Except it was not nearly that simple. For whatever reason, copying the table produced by the conversion tool and pasting it into Excel does not work; it takes all 500 rows (at three columns each) and places them in a single cell. My poor computer had a minor stroke before I decided a way around it would be necessary. This led me to viewing the source code of the generated web page, isolating the table, creating my own web page out of it, and opening that web page with only the table in it in Excel. This worked perfectly, but I really should not have had to do that.
Step 3: Devising the formula
Going into this, I knew that I was going to do something involving the play count and date the song was added to the collection. Why? Let's take these two factors into isolation: if two songs were both added on 1 January 2009, but one has 10 plays whereas the other has 20, you probably like the latter more. Furthermore, if two songs both have 30 plays, but one was added in 2008 whereas the other was added in 2010, you probably like the latter more as it accrued that many plays but over a much briefer time period. But what is a mathematical way of expressing this?
First, I created a column: "time elapsed since addition." I took the current time and subtracted it by the date-added timestamp to create this value. I then divided this by the play count to create another column: mean time between plays (MTBP). In other words, if I were to play a particular song now, the MTBP time would be the amount of seconds passed since I last listened to the song. Think about it: if I like a song a lot, I will seek it out and play it constantly. A song which I find to be okay will have a count that reflects that I listen to it just about every time it comes up on shuffle and little more. Finally, a song which I barely like will have a lot of time elapsed between plays, as I frequently skip over said song.
So was my hypothesis correct? After sorting the entire spreadsheet by MTBP, with the higher values (i.e. more time between plays) at top, I indeed found the listing to be accurate. The top of the list was filled with songs which frankly I don't care about. The dead bottom of the list was a song I added today and have since listened to twice, so naturally it had a very inflated rating (or is it deflated?).
Which brings up the flaw I've found with this list: a song's ranking is largely affected by how long it has been in the collection. I have not figured out a fix to this, and perhaps one isn't needed; maybe it's just the nature of my music listening habits. After being briefly fascinated by a song, I'll listen to it less and less, and in some cases, I'll just delete it after a few years. But if you can come up with a better formula, I am all ears.
Friday, June 4, 2010
So turn and face the strain already
A few days ago, I visited this blog with the intention of deleting it, deeming it as an unnecessary part of the part. I then read the commentary I made when I was sixteen years old, and figured that I was a decent enough writer that I would leave my writings of the time on the Internet. But oh, my God, how much has changed since I last updated my blog in August of 2008.
Therefore, this is my true voice. And while I may be a writer, I am not necessarily a blogger. So my return to blogging may not happen. If it does, I may post other things I have written since 2008.
As for the times: they are ... fuck it, I am not going to be the 50,000th guy to quote Bob Dylan. I will quote David Bowie instead: Ziggy played it left-hand.
- The President of the United States changed. What joy -- we dumped that stupid cowboy for a suave Harvard lawyer. My last blog post sang the praises of Senator Barack Obama while he was running for President.
- We realized as a country that Barack Obama is a human like everyone else and not Jesus Christ reincarnate.
- People lied, people died, people entered and exited my life.
- I pretty much completed high school.
- More things I cannot even remember.
Therefore, this is my true voice. And while I may be a writer, I am not necessarily a blogger. So my return to blogging may not happen. If it does, I may post other things I have written since 2008.
As for the times: they are ... fuck it, I am not going to be the 50,000th guy to quote Bob Dylan. I will quote David Bowie instead: Ziggy played it left-hand.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Barack Obama
I owe the Internet a blog post. It has been nearly two months, and I am in a rhetorical mood tonight.
The beginning of the year -- the first Tuesday in the first month of 2008, in fact, marked the beginning of the Primary Election season to determine which two people will be competing to unseat the incumbent. I have been following the race since that day, when the Iowa Caucus took place. At the time I was a supporter of John Edwards, for I respected his rejection of corporate sponsorship. He lost to the man I did not support at the time: Barack Obama.
John Edwards went on to drop out after he lost in his home state of South Carolina, and personally, I would, too. My support switched to Hillary Clinton, as I continued to be unsure about Barack Obama.
Yet it was sometime around Super Tuesday (if I am not mistaken, the day Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama) that I was really conflicted about my support for Clinton, yet I was not ready to consider myself an Obama supporter. I remember Clinton winning New Jersey on Super Tuesday, and though I should have been happy, I was dismayed. I wanted Obama to win, I really did.
Part of my decision to endorse Barack Obama was when a good friend of mine decided that he would support Obama as well -- and I very much trust his judgment, considering his vast knowledge of US politics. At that point it was clear, that until the end I would support the man I knew in my heart would end up coming out on top, and I was glad I did. I distinctly remember the last day of the primary season, June 3, 2008, when Obama secured enough delegation to make the nomination of anyone else mathematically impossible. I watched his victory speech on television. It was a great speech. It made me proud. I now knew -- the contest is between him and McCain, and luckily, Clinton confirmed it with the suspension of her campaign.
My interest in the election then simmered to a candle, as news kind of slowed about the race. It has since exploded into a fire of impatience, as I have watched the Democratic National Convention in its entirety. Which brings us to the reason I am writing this blog post.
As I watched the convention I've witnessed some of the greatest speeches I have ever heard, even considering that many appear to be generic and uninspiring (especially after being recited for the twentieth time). As the convention progressed, each night was getting better and better, as the more prominent people of the campaign were speaking. I anticipated the fourth night being the absolute climax of the event, and I was not mistaken. The video introduction set the mood -- of a candidate with humble beginnings being the recipient of an unprecedented nomination, and then it was followed by a walk on-stage unlike any other part of the ceremony. To recycle the phrasing of those who have been detracting Obama as having a cult of personality, it was truly the coronation of Barack Obama, the living deity. And I mean that in an absolutely positive way.
The speech, which Jim Lehrer reported lasted 43 minutes, was everything I could dream about. It was that climax I was anticipating, and it made the entire convention worthwhile. People previously criticized him for not being detailed in his pleas for change; tonight, he went right into the details. I've personally worried about how he would fund all these programs without worsening the defecit, and he told me how. He was truly speaking to me, and the country, and he has indicated that he is ready to approach John S. McCain and to tear him an asshole where his brain used to be.
I am strongly anticipating this election season. I want to see what there is in rebuttal; I've seen some of it, too, and in my opinion, it's weak. Weak to me, anyways, and how non-biased is my opinion? I hold a deep dislike to the Republican Party, and I extend that dislike to anyone who supports John McCain. It's very unfortunate; while it is possible that I will not hate someone for liking them, it will be like a permanent ink stain on a bleach-white shirt. In an attempt to entertain "dissenting" opinion, I will try to watch the Republican National Convention next week. I will be screaming at the television, I will want to turn it off, but in order to overcome a fear you have to confront it.
In the meantime, I am subscribed to the Gallup polls.
The beginning of the year -- the first Tuesday in the first month of 2008, in fact, marked the beginning of the Primary Election season to determine which two people will be competing to unseat the incumbent. I have been following the race since that day, when the Iowa Caucus took place. At the time I was a supporter of John Edwards, for I respected his rejection of corporate sponsorship. He lost to the man I did not support at the time: Barack Obama.
John Edwards went on to drop out after he lost in his home state of South Carolina, and personally, I would, too. My support switched to Hillary Clinton, as I continued to be unsure about Barack Obama.
Yet it was sometime around Super Tuesday (if I am not mistaken, the day Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama) that I was really conflicted about my support for Clinton, yet I was not ready to consider myself an Obama supporter. I remember Clinton winning New Jersey on Super Tuesday, and though I should have been happy, I was dismayed. I wanted Obama to win, I really did.
Part of my decision to endorse Barack Obama was when a good friend of mine decided that he would support Obama as well -- and I very much trust his judgment, considering his vast knowledge of US politics. At that point it was clear, that until the end I would support the man I knew in my heart would end up coming out on top, and I was glad I did. I distinctly remember the last day of the primary season, June 3, 2008, when Obama secured enough delegation to make the nomination of anyone else mathematically impossible. I watched his victory speech on television. It was a great speech. It made me proud. I now knew -- the contest is between him and McCain, and luckily, Clinton confirmed it with the suspension of her campaign.
My interest in the election then simmered to a candle, as news kind of slowed about the race. It has since exploded into a fire of impatience, as I have watched the Democratic National Convention in its entirety. Which brings us to the reason I am writing this blog post.
As I watched the convention I've witnessed some of the greatest speeches I have ever heard, even considering that many appear to be generic and uninspiring (especially after being recited for the twentieth time). As the convention progressed, each night was getting better and better, as the more prominent people of the campaign were speaking. I anticipated the fourth night being the absolute climax of the event, and I was not mistaken. The video introduction set the mood -- of a candidate with humble beginnings being the recipient of an unprecedented nomination, and then it was followed by a walk on-stage unlike any other part of the ceremony. To recycle the phrasing of those who have been detracting Obama as having a cult of personality, it was truly the coronation of Barack Obama, the living deity. And I mean that in an absolutely positive way.
The speech, which Jim Lehrer reported lasted 43 minutes, was everything I could dream about. It was that climax I was anticipating, and it made the entire convention worthwhile. People previously criticized him for not being detailed in his pleas for change; tonight, he went right into the details. I've personally worried about how he would fund all these programs without worsening the defecit, and he told me how. He was truly speaking to me, and the country, and he has indicated that he is ready to approach John S. McCain and to tear him an asshole where his brain used to be.
I am strongly anticipating this election season. I want to see what there is in rebuttal; I've seen some of it, too, and in my opinion, it's weak. Weak to me, anyways, and how non-biased is my opinion? I hold a deep dislike to the Republican Party, and I extend that dislike to anyone who supports John McCain. It's very unfortunate; while it is possible that I will not hate someone for liking them, it will be like a permanent ink stain on a bleach-white shirt. In an attempt to entertain "dissenting" opinion, I will try to watch the Republican National Convention next week. I will be screaming at the television, I will want to turn it off, but in order to overcome a fear you have to confront it.
In the meantime, I am subscribed to the Gallup polls.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
PERSIAM in full swing
With my AP summer assignments and my new website PERSIAM now in full swing (with a PERSIAM blog on top of that), updates on this blog may be less frequent. In the meantime, check out the new website and its blog, because that is where you will be seeing me more often.
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