Dork Tower: Health and Unhealth

I'm happy to have discovered the joys of LJ syndication to tide me over until I get around to setting up my own RSS reader, because it makes it easier for me to keep up with some things.

John Kovalic's comic strip "Dork Tower"--LJ syndicated as dorktowerfeed--is an irregularly updated, often hilarious, comic strip about gamers, pop culture, and stuff. I have a page of links to comic strips that I read regularly--two different custom pages of daily comic strips through the Houston Chronicle, PVP, and some others, but the strips which are irregularly updated are annoying to access that way, since I hate clicking on the link and seeing a strip which hasn't been updated in two weeks.

Anyway. Dork Tower. The latest installment is part of a series about how low-carb diets are being missold as "eat all the fat you can cram down your gullet and still lose weight" diets, centering around a KFC ad trying to present fried chicken as a low-carb healthy food.

The punchline shows Carson (a sentient muskrat) watching a TV commerical:

( Discussion of the punchline with its special irony in my life )

Choosing a candidate: The Superiority Dance

Yesterday on All Things Considered, James Poniewozik delivered a short speech on the concept of "electability". His basic point was that when someone says "I like Foo, but candidate Bar is more electable", that person is saying "I understand how the average voter reacts better than the average voter does because I'm smarter than those other chumps."

This isn't completely accurate. For instance, if he were running, I would support Henry Waxman for president, but I think he's unelectable because he's significantly further to the left than most Americans seem to want. My positions are, in general, significantly left of the American center, and I think that the American center is where the votes are. (Well, that's not completely true--I think that the Republican national leadership is significantly to the right of the American center, but they campaign as if they were close to the center.)

None the less, I think that Poniewozik is definitely on to something, and that something can be numerically measured.

This week, Newsweek has a poll which indicates that if the election were held today, voters would prefer John Kerry over Rutherford Bush by 49 to 46 percent. Bush beats Clark by one point and Edwards by three. Statistically, this a dead heat--the voters polled pretty much could go either way with those three candidates.

(Disappointingly, Bush beats Dean 50 to 45, which might just indicate that two months of Pile On the Frontrunner has torn Dean down. Thanks a lot, all those responsible. Joe Lieberman, why don't you just go hang yourself?)

There's lots of other crunchy anti-Bush numbers in there, including a drop in Bush's approval rating following the State of the Union address, which is both surprising and unsurprising--usually, politicians get more approval when they make major speeches, but we are talking about a man who spent more time discussing the defense of marriage (184 words) than unemployment (0 words) or Osama bin Laden (0 words).

However, those polled think that it is very likely (40%) or somewhat likely (38%) that Bush will be elected to a second term of office. Now, "somewhat likely" covers a large terrain, but I'd put it at roughly equivalent to "more likely than not", and that very poll just put him at "more not than likely".

This indicates that, although the voters think that the Democrats (or, anyway,Kerry, Edwards, or Clarke) should win, they don't think they can win. Why do you think that is? Is it, perhaps, because everyone keeps saying that Bush can't lose, even as his approval rating steadily falls, the jobs steadily do not return, and the war in Iraq steadily keeps on warring?

Don't take despair. Don't be defeated. Bush will lose if people act like he will lose.

Following up to my last post

Needless to say, there's a lot of discussion of electoral politics on rec.arts.sf.fandom these days--has been pretty much non-stop since before the Stolen Election. After I made my last entry here, I came across a post that I thought explicitly embodied the defeatism I decried in that entry. It contained the sentence "If the US is still _visibly_ in Iraq in 2008, then there will be a change of administration"--which I read as saying "The Republicans are guaranteed victory this year, but have to clean up Iraq completely to avoid losing in 2008." That's not, actually, what the poster was saying.

However, my response contained a thought that I was trying to articulate in my last entry here, and I quote myself now:

Getting people to act like the 2004 election is a foregone conclusion is the best way for the Republicans to win it.

Remember that, please.