Comments on: Not so different

By: jet

jet — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 17:45:23 +0000

jlw,
I’m completely with you on that (including the part about Sullivan being over the top). I knew that the data I was putting together would be useless for describing the motives, lives, or politics of those who were harmed or killed in the military. But it might somehow be relevant to the communities from which those soldiers belonged.

I’m sure this thread will be long gone by the time I get the data together since I’m being nice to the census bureau and pacing my requests for each county. I didn’t look but there are probably a couple thousand unique city/state combos for all the casulties which means a couple thousand hits to the .gov site (at the medium pace of 5 seconds per hit). I’ll check the archive of this when I’m done to see if anyone cared about the results.

By: jlw

jlw — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 15:33:50 +0000

Let me just add that I think this whole exercise—starting of course with the idiotic Red/Blue articles written by David Brooks shortly after the 2000 election—is reduction taking to its most excretible extreme.

We are where we live? It’s not even that precise, this b.s. It’s more along the lines of We are what at least a slim majority of where we live vote for. Did the godless heathens of Iowa and the steely eyed patriots of New Hampshire really exchange identities between 2000 and 2004? Do the Hassidim of Williamsburgh count twoard the decadent left?

And when does the mark get made? Am I the Bircher/Klansman rural area I grew up in? Or the small-town pricy private college I attended (on scholarship)? Or the blue state indigo borough where I live now? If I perform some great act of valor, who gets the credit? If a turn traitor, which party gets the blame?

No offense, but there were likely 1,700 reasons why those killed in action joined to serve in the military. And reducing them to a dot on the map or the political affiliation of 55 percent of the people in the place where they spend some of their childhoods is ghastly.

As is the attempts by people like Sullivan to slice the nation into Republicans and traitors.

By: Ray

Ray — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 14:26:44 +0000

Fair enough.

By: jet

jet — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 14:11:14 +0000

Ray,
I said my database was a list of those killed, but it is actually a full list of all casualties (updated to about 1 week ago). It seems a little dishonorable to try to see if Republicans tend more towards combat and Democrats away from combat, or vice versa. And once I get the data, I’m not sure what it would mean. To make sense of it, I’d need some way to tell what percentage of the military was Republican and Democrat, which I’m not sure it is possible to get accurate enough numbers to make up for the casualty numbers being such a small sample. So while it seems pointless I’ll have created an interesting data set that might have some future value. And it is one more list where people look at the names of the dead making sure they are not forgotten.

By: Ray

Ray — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 12:42:21 +0000

What kind of conclusion do you expect to be able to draw from your results? If you want to work out how Democrats and Republicans responded to 11/9, how likely members of each group were to sign up to defend their country, then you need a different set of figures. You need to check the change in enlistment rates in the various counties after 11/9.
The low ratio of soldiers killed to soldiers serving means you’ll get a lot of random noise in your figures anyway. (Injury figures would be better)
And there’s probably a positive feedback loop between ‘voting Republican’ and ‘serving in the army’, which would give you a high correlation between red states and casualty figures in any year or conflict, which you’d probably want to disentangle from the Iraq figures.

By: jet

jet — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 22:06:20 +0000

Never mind, the US Cenusus Bureau to the rescue.

By: jet

jet — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 22:03:47 +0000

Anyone know of a website that will allow you to put in a city and state and get back a county? I have a complete database of all the US killed in Iraq and their hometowns and states, but I need to get their counties in order to find out if they came from predominently Republican or Democrat counties.

By: Redwolf

Redwolf — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 04:20:42 +0000

Why exactly do we argue with Sullivan? His voice exists only in our sound chamber. Let him hear back from his readers in the religious right.

By: W. Kiernan

W. Kiernan — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 13:13:34 +0000

The “decadent left” a “fifth column,” Sullivan? It was my first thought when I watched the teevee on the morning of 9/11/2001, that the right-wingers’s Afghanistan scheme had backfired on them harder than anything before in American history. That when people recalled Ronald Reagan declaring that the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan were “the moral equivalents of the Founding Fathers,” and contemplated their Saudi financiers and their intimate relations with the leading families of the American far-right, the right-wing would be properly held responsible and discredited for decades.

To my disgust, not only had the air-headed American public completely forgotten how the CIA had set up those God-lovers in Afghanistan as a weapon against leftism in the first place, and the American news media strenuously refrained from reminding anyone about this fact, but also right-wing politicians and propagandists, eager to point the blame elsewhere, started linking us atheistic leftists with Saudi-led and ISI-funded Wahhabi fanatics within 48 hours. The American public totally bought into that absurd lie, too. It’s very depressing; with such bold, conscience-free propagandists, and such stupid, stupid voters, how can American democracy possibly survive?

The filthy lie that I have ever been ideological kin to or sympathetic toward that swine bin Laden infuriates me to this day. I know it was only words, but just thinking about it even now has me grinding my teeth and clenching my fist. Someday I would indeed like to meet this Andrew Sullivan at arm’s length.

By: Randy Paul

Randy Paul — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:50:26 +0000

Matt wrote “I hold Sullivan’s inability to use the ‘shift’ key against him.”

Of course Sullivan is shiftless.

Actually, I believe he’s quite shifty.

By: Barry

Barry — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 12:41:33 +0000

Ted: “hand-coding an HTML table takes forever”

idiot/savant: “Perl?”

Take the Excel table, copy in to Word, pasting special as rtf, save Word document as html. The various style aspects of the blog page might still mess this up, and I’m not somewhere where I can test this.

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 09:59:15 +0000

Seriously. Tom Wolfe’s brilliant essay “The Last American hero” on the Appalachians and stock car racing (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/twolfe.html) includes a passage that encapsulates the paradigm of the macho South:
“In the Korean War, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-two of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-two were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia.”
If I’m getting this right, the Iraq casualties simply don’t reflect this pattern. Is it really a myth, and red blood flows in blue veins?

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 09:49:08 +0000

Matt wrote “I hold Sullivan’s inability to use the ‘shift’ key against him.”
Of course Sullivan is shiftless.

By: Kevin Phillips Bong

Kevin Phillips Bong — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 08:37:34 +0000

When Sullivan’s column was originally posted in the Sunday Times he wrote: “The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead – and may well mount a fifth column.” That version is stil up here. “[W]hat amounts to” is a later addition.

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 06:07:10 +0000

John –
Thanks for pointing out the bad link (this no preview thing kills me). As for “why kids join up?” … well, I grew up in West Duluth—if yer from that area, you know what a shit-hole it is (I thought the American Indian kids were rich…). I joined the Marines at 17. So, I know a few things about the wildly variant reasons kids join, too (mine was one part “fuck you,” one part “what the hell else?”). Who knew, in 1985, that they’d actually send my ass to war in 1990? Who among the 1700+ dead thought the same thing about 2003-2005 when they joined? I just wanted to complicate the “blue state/red state” picture by showing how within one “blue” state, the stats showed a much more complicated affair.