Will we ever return to 'normality'?

Perhaps the greatest contribution of our 29th president, Warren G. Harding, to American life had nothing to do with politics. When I say "perhaps," I mean almost certainly, because as president, Harding was essentially a zero.

However, Harding's campaign slogan was a "return to normalcy." "Normalcy" was, at the time, not actually a word. The "-cy" suffix can sometimes be used with adjectives to create new nouns, for example "literate" and "literacy"; "pregnant" and "pregnancy". However, the suffix with the word normal was (and should still be) "-ity," hence "normality," the quality of being normal.

It is funny that I get annoyed about this, because I am generally not a proscriptive linguist; I believe in descriptive linguistics and that it's not really anybody's job to get involved in the development of language beyond providing explanations (at least in the case of majority, non-endangered languages). I just think that the word "normalcy" is really annoying.

Here's the example that set me off this time:

While difficult for inveterate hawks to admit, the victory for normalcy in Vietnam, celebrated by Bush last week, came about not despite the U.S. withdrawal but because of it.

(This is from Robert Scheer's column that I generally agree with, via Mahablog.)

It seems to me, though, that I see the word "normalcy," and get mad about it, at least one every couple of days.



Irrelevant, immature side note

(Also notably, according to the current version of the Wikipedia entry I just referenced to figure out what number president he was,

Warren Hardon (November 2, 1865 - August 2, 1923) was an American politician and the 29th President of the United States, from 1921 to 1923. ... In the 1920 election, he defeated his Democratic opponent James M. Cox in a naked pillow fight in the oval office, 69 % to 31 % (404 to 127 in the electoral college), becoming the first gay president to win office after a naked pillow fight.

Yes, it's immature, but I still laugh at this stuff sometimes, as much as at the people who have nothing better to do as at the content.)

Shorter title

I'm trying to think of a shorter title for this blog. If you can help with any ideas, email me! (Or, you know, just comment).

Getting scarier in Gaza

The situation in Palestine is getting scarier (if this is possible). The prime minister, or head of the PNA "government," Ismail Haniyeh, is declaring that the shots fired at his limousine were an assassination attempt.

The context for this is that Haniyeh had gone on a visit abroad and was attempting to return to the open-air prison in Gaza with some money for food and salaries to alleviate the misery that continues to increase in the territories. Haniyeh had to leave about $30m in Egypt and eventually, after diplomatic negotiations, was allowed to return. But hey, humiliating the head of "government" is always an acceptable step.

The PNA should have been dissolved long ago, when Abbas could still make the decision himself to end the charade and return responsibility to Israel. If your "government" is arrested by its supposed negotiating "partner," then what sort of "government" is it and what does it "govern"? The Israelis still have all the cards and, like true Likudniks, treat the Palestinians elected as the elected representatives of the prisoners (sorry, "Arabs of Eretz Israel"). But now, Hamas and Fatah cannot agree on anything, and neither will concede for fear of giving the other some sort of edge; and even if they did, other groups make the situation impossible.

As for the horrible situation in the Territories, this can be credited almost entirely to Israel as the power broker. The Palestinian track, if such a thing exists, no longer has anything to do with diplomacy; it is entirely about Israeli domestic politics. Peretz and Olmert jockey for who gets to talk to Abbas or other Palestinians (who hasn't met them in person since the election, but is forced to receive lower ranking Israeli diplomats). Israel's refusal to negotiate or concede any points, and its policies in the Territories, were largely responsible for Hamas's election victory (along with its attempts to subvert Fatah and make it a dependent puppet); and now the boycott and the checkpoints, and the closure of Gaza to almost any traffic, are sealing the deal.

So Israel, as Danny Rubinstein opines in Ha'aretz, will probably have a full-scale Palestinian civil war on its hands soon. If they are hoping the Palestinians will horribly weaken themselves again, they may well be correct, but the fallout won't be pleasant, and the Palestinians won't go away.

What could be done about this? A circumvention of the boycott to pay civil servants through roundabout means, including U.S. funds; release of Palestinian tax funds stolen by the Israeli government to serve this purpose; an alleviation of the unnecessary WB checkpoints; extension of the Gaza "ceasefire" to the WB; an immediate halt to outposts and dismantling of some; resumption of negotiations and diplomatic overtures to Abbas; encouragement of a Palestinian unity government; reopening of the Gaza-Karni and Gaza-Rafah checkpoints to allow agricultural export, movement between Gaza and Egypt and products to move between GS and WB.

What will be done about this? None of the above. At some point, the Israeli government may decide to kill or arrest someone else, to show that they can.

The Belgiumization of Belgium

If you were Belgian, it would probably scare you (or make you happy, one of the two) to turn on the TV and hear that your country no longer existed.

Belgian public broadcaster RTBF ran an on-air spoof for almost two hours, claiming that Flanders had declared independence. Their reason, they said: to provoke debate about the current state of the nation's affairs.

Belgium is, kind of, an example of successful federalism--it's a federal state with six federal entities, three of them regions and three of them cultural communities, which overlap. "Kind of" successful because the system keeps changing to accommodate additional demands, and Flemish nationalists in particular (Vlaams Belang) continue to perform well at elections. When I studied in Granada, Spain, my European politics professor spent two classes going over just the Belgian federal system. In part this emphasis was because most of my classmates were (1) not polisci majors and (2) didn't speak Spanish as well as I did, but I did learn a decent amount about how Belgium is ridiculously complex.

While we in the U.S. might immediately know that a news report that the South had seceded again was fiction, in Belgium, you can't be sure--hence, the alarm and controversy surrounding the broadcast decision.

Brace yourself

I'm almost done for the holidays. Be prepared for the onslaught of posts to follow...

Another part of the gay agenda, revealed

Wondering why your kid is gay? Here's the explanation.

Next time, let his mother eat the tofu herself.

(Via PoliBlog)

The #17 university in the world?

Not that I like to criticize my own university, in general, but...

As I was updating my blogger profile I decided to include a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Jiao Tong university rankings of global institutions. The top 20 include such recognized centers of learning as Harvard (1), Cambridge [UK] (2), Stanford (3), UC-Berkeley (4!), and... the University of Wisconsin at Madison (16) and the University of Washington (17)??? Umm, are we talking about the same UW here? Apparently it is ahead of Michigan, NYU and Northwestern.

This becomes somewhat more logical when you see that the rankings are basically based on the volume of publishing by faculty and prizes won. By sheer size, UW has an advantage there, being a larger-sized institution than most, and some of the faculty are pretty good. However, the rankings have almost nothing to do with the student experience. Admittedly, universities aren't made just for students; but students play a vital role in them. And from my young perspective, there is no way the University of Washington is #17 in the world...

An interesting note about the survey is that pretty much all the top schools are American. This, and the way the rankings are made, is just another citation for the fact that American schools are much better at facilitating research than European ones.

Pinochet dies

General Augusto Pinochet has died at the age of 91. I believe the initial reaction from the UK foreign office was appropriate:

We note the passing of Gen Pinochet and want to pay tribute to the remarkable progress that Chile has made over the last 15 years as an open, stable and prosperous democracy.

Margaret Thatcher has apparently said she is "greatly saddened." That saddens me.

Según La Tercera, un 55 por ciento de chilenos opinan que Pinochet no debiera recibir honores de ex presidente en el funeral. (According to the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, 55% of Chileans believe Pinochet should not be buried with the honors of an ex-president).

News flash!

Via Milkmoney or Not

Ecuadorian elections

As usual with Latin American elections, the talk has all been about the presidential election in Ecuador, where leftist Rafael Correa defeated banana magnate Alvaro Noboa. Correa was originally aligned with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela but has moderated a little bit since, at least according to the Economist, who I trust more than I do in a matter to which I haven't paid a horribly large amount of attention.

There has been less discussion of the legislative elections. (The Wikipedia article doesn't really mention them yet). However, Ecuador uses a rather unusual voting system. For a discussion of how the system works, check out my comment at Fruits and Votes (the original post regarding both Correa's win and the legislative polls). Essentially, it is a strange open-list system. As far as I can tell, it's also possible to cheat. Individual votes on the open lists are weighted by the average number of votes everyone casts for candidates. In big constituencies (there are a couple, with 14 and 18 seats), pretty much nobody casts all those votes. In Guayas (18 seats) the average was about 8 votes. This means that if you voted for every individual that your party nominated, your 18 votes * 1/8 = 2.25 votes for your party, effectively. As far as I can tell, that's perfectly legal and possible.

Full results can be found at the Ecuadorian TSE.