FoDoM or FUBAR?

FoDoM is the acronym that I came up with for "Friends of Dennis (Daugaard) and Mike (Rounds)." I'm not a friend of either man, but I was getting ready to teach a unit about Aristotle's concept of friendship and Daugaard's disdain for philosophy came to mind. That led to musings summarized below.

Aristotle breaks friendship down into three categories:

In Book VIII of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle categorizes three different types of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of the good. Friendships of utility are those where people are on cordial terms primarily because each person benefits from the other in some way. Business partnerships, relationships among co-workers, and classmate connections are examples. Friendships of pleasure are those where individuals seek out each other’s company because of the joy it brings. Passionate love affairs, people associating with each other due to belonging to the same hobby organization, and fishing buddies fall into this category. Most important of all are friendships of the good. These are friendships based upon mutual respect, admiration for each other’s virtues, and a strong desire to aid and assist the other person because one recognizes their essential goodness.

When it comes to education, the past and current governors' collective efforts have produced little utility, pleasure, or good. Rounds created and Daugaard exploited a situation in education funding that, at best, brings to mind another acronym FUBAR. If one goes beyond funding, HB 1234, which was thankfully repealed, epitomizes the concept of FUBAR in the legislative and executive branch.

I have to do more reading to be certain, but it strikes me that Aristotle would consider those who vote for a candidate friends of utility. The candidate gets the votes he or she desires and voters get the policies they desire. I'm sure some contributing FoDoM gained utility from their friendship with Daugaard and Rounds. The FoDoM who are hunting or drinking or golfing or whatever friends of pleasure one might be doing also likely gained something from their friendship. As for the rest of us, I'm hard pressed to think of any utility or pleasure arising from the Rounds or Daugaard tenures.

More importantly, government should be about protecting the good. The idea that these two men as governors actually protected the good or created enough utility to justify their re-elections or elevation to the United States Senate is, to continue using an apt acronym, FUBAR.

Old People Shouldn't Try To Talk About Young People

Daniel Larison takes Michael Walsh to task for a rather ludicrous comment:

Michael Walsh describes Paul Ryan in a very strange way:

The first is that he speaks in the cadences of a younger America; he’s like a Quentin Tarantino character come to life, minus the profanity.

I confess that I don’t really know what this means. I am several years younger than Ryan, and there’s nothing in his “cadences” that I recognize as being all that similar to the way that I and other people in my generation speak. Which character would Ryan be? Mr. Orange? If he isn’t using profanity, I don’t think he can be a Tarantino character.

Walsh, who was born in 1949, apparently hasn't spoken to a young person in the wild for a long time.  Few are "without profanity."  Many are creatively profane.  Name dropping Quentin Tarantino doesn't provide hipness by association either.  There's a large swath of eighteen-year-olds who can't name a single Tarantino film.

Granted, the young do have a noticeable cadence.  Watch a segment of MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes and a round table segment of ABC's This Week.  Economics professor Karl Smith, a regular on the former, speaks about economics differently than Paul Krugman, a regular on the latter.  (As a side note, it's unclear whether Chris Hayes and George Will speak the the same language.)

That being said, Ryan does have a distinctive cadence; it's reminiscent of the class nerd who speaks too quickly because he's afraid of being cut off before he reveals all of the amazing statistics he's discovered.  He's unlikely to attract the ironic hipster demographic to the fold.

Walsh seems to be the sort who would suggest "organizing this new thing I've heard about-a flash mob-to get young conservatives to the polls" while being blithely unaware that flash mobs have become passe.

Finally, predicting what will attract young voters should be an exercise is Socratic humility: admit that one knows nothing.  Only fools attempt to predict with certainty whether a song, a spokesperson, or a cadence. will attract the youth vote.

On Santorum And Swearing

Oops, the family man said a naughty word

The Daily Beast's "Cheat Sheet" reports,

Following a Wisconsin speech in which the Rick Santorum called his opponent Mitt Romney the “worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama,” The New York Times's Jeff Zeleny tweeted, “I ask Santorum if Romney is ‘worst Republican’ to run. He says: ‘Quit distorting my words It’s bullshit.’ He says he was talking about health care.” Santorum defended his actions of Fox & Friends Monday, insisting, “If you haven’t cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of the campaign, you’re not really a real Republican.”

Politico reports,

Zeleny defended his question to the presidential hopeful earlier on Monday to CBS’s Charlie Rose – who himself characterized Santorum’s comments as “a little bit profane” — saying he had simply been “asking for clarification.”

Zeleny sounds a bit too much like the kid who tattled to the teacher because someone said a bad word on the playground.  I would be happy to give him examples of being completely profane if he wants.

I hope this little exchange doesn't provoke Santorum to start limiting access to only Fox News.  I'd rather hear him engage challenging questions even if he swears at a reporter than see him fawned over by syncophants.  That would be bullshit.

Follow Up on Swearing and Tax Dodgers

Big boy blogger Andrew Sullivan adds to the swearing textbook that I'll never get to use by comparing the most commonly used profanity in England and on the American East Coast.

The Daily Beast reports that GE is not the only company to dodge paying taxes.

Last year, Google reduced its tax burden by $3.1 billion by altering its tax practices. Boeing hasn’t paid any federal corporate income taxes in the last three years, despite earning $10 billion in domestic pre-tax profit. Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Forest Laboratories habitually avoid paying U.S. income taxes by recording profits in a country a world away from where the sales occur. (For reference, interactive explanations of the tax strategies of Google and GE can be found here and here.) A study released in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office concluded that 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the country paid “no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.”

The frightening part is that

“Companies don’t even have to be creative,” says Robert Willens, a taxation professor at Columbia Business School. “All they have to do is attribute or ascribe as much income as possible to foreign subsidiaries.” Companies register their intangible assets—intellectual property, for example—and income outside of the U.S. and register their liabilities and expenses in the U.S. to effectually reduce their taxable domestic income. Ireland and the Caribbean Islands are common tax havens.

I have to sardonically wonder if that lack of creativity is why China is becoming an economic juggernaut and the US is lagging behind