Comments on: Intransitivity

By: Shelby

Shelby — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 16:48:30 +0000

So is this an effort toward a grammar of politics, or a geometry? (Or calculus?)

Just so it’s not a dialectic…

By: scribblingwoman

scribblingwoman — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 03:54:44 +0000

At the risk of being mysterious …

I may yank this later, but I need clickable links for my presentation tomorrow: “The 18thc Online: commonplace book or…

By: Thompsaj

Thompsaj — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:05:32 +0000

Is Bill Bennett’s connection to Bill Frist (through Kevin Bacon, obviously) transitive, since going into the entertainment industry (on PBS no less)?

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:22:59 +0000

DeLay could shoot people down in the street in broad daylight and I STILL wouldn’t have any confidence that the Dems could capitalize on it. Sigh.

By: Amardeep

Amardeep — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:12:04 +0000

I hope this isn’t a digression from the thread, but I wonder if the Dems. will really be able to make any hay out of all these investigations and indictments in the midterm elections next year.

Campaign finance irregularities like DeLay’s are hard to explain to voters—because the law itself is pretty arcane—and hard to run on.

You’re stuck running on things like “the whole congress is ineffectual” or “there is a culture of corruption,” which is quite a bit weaker as a selling point than the “Contract With America.”

I worry that the Democrats won’t find any way to capitalize on the wave of scandals.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:03:14 +0000

Of course the Republican House majority leader has nothing to do with the Republican Senate majority leader. And of course the Republican Senate majority leader has nothing to do with the number one Republican lobbyist. Only a conspiracy theorist would think otherwise.

By: Semanticleo

Semanticleo — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 03:41:46 +0000

Is there anyone with the intestinal fortitude to follow this thread throughout the lengths of it’s related members?

We need a Captain America, but I’ll take a suit that feels it’s important to be able to look at him/herself in the mirror every morning.

Where the Hell is Mr. Smith?

By: Kenny Easwaran

Kenny Easwaran — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:43:25 +0000

I just pointed out to my officemate this same use of intransitivity to implicate a lack of connection between DeLay and Abramoff. Or, to a mathematician or philosopher, to make this connection painfully obvious.

By: Chimpeach

Chimpeach — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:59:05 +0000

I think the point was that DeLay has everything to do with Abramoff, and Kristol made a weak attempt at separating them rhetorically.

George Bush has nothing to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary has nothing to do with Old Crow Bourbon, but let us never take that to mean that George Bush isn’t getting shitfaced drunk on that very booze right now.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:07:50 +0000

Irreflexive, I’d say. It’s symmetric, which I think is what your point needs.

I think it probably is true that whatever Frist is up to, he’s up to on his own—but Abramoff and Savafian and all that seem to be part of a big steaming pile.

By: foo

foo — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:51:46 +0000

Presumably “has nothing to do with” is reflexive though, right?

Whether you believe him or not (my bet: no!), looking at it like that (along with the fact that he had already brought up the Frist hca stock thing earlier), it’s clear that Kristol isn’t trying to say anything about transitivity, he’s just trying to make the weak claim that “these things are all independent, and it’s just bad luck that it’s all happening to the republicans at the same time.”

i.e, “Frist independent of DeLay” and “Frist independent of Abramoff” => “Republicans shouldn’t be blamed for the stock-shenanigans and the abramoff-shenanigans at the same time.”

An altogether different sort of error…