Motzei shabbat time-delayed debate blogging
Let me just post my quick reactions before I find out what everyone else in the world has been saying about this debate for the past 27 hours.
I think for both Obama and McCain, the debates are their best opportunity to refute the negative images that their opponents have attached to them over the past nine months. So Obama had to demonstrate that he’s not just an empty suit, and McCain had to untie Bush and the Republican Party from around his neck. In this respect, I think Obama did fairly well by talking of specific policy proposals and by referring to work he had done in the Senate. McCain was clearly taking every opportunity to distance himself from his party, but the issues where he made the distinction were matters of foreign policy, e.g., supporting Clinton’s war in the Balkans.
Unfortunately for McCain, (a) most voters in this election cycle are going to care more about the economy than on foreign affairs, and (b) on the one foreign-policy issue that people care most about, the Iraq war, more people are likely to agree with Obama than with McCain. (As far as I can recall, McCain dared not claim, during the debate, that invading Iraq was a good idea in the first place. It was all surge, surge, surge.)
If I had to score the debate on points, I would therefore give Obama an edge, but not a decisive victory. If Obama were five points behind in the tracking polls, rather than five points ahead, I would be very very nervous.
As they say, a week is a long time in politics. But we’re running out of weeks.
Standing on principle
Even as Congress mulls over a titanic debt-fueled corporate bailout, it’s good to know that some legislators know where to draw the line and demand fidelity to old-fashioned principles of capitalism:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reiterated Tuesday afternoon the importance of giving bankruptcy judges greater flexibility [to adjust mortgage rates of bankrupt homeowners]. He noted that judges can readjust mortgage terms if a borrower facing bankruptcy owns multiple homes.
Republicans say they are willing to curb executive compensation but remain inflexible on greater power for bankruptcy judges. One Republican familiar with the talks said the proposal would undermine the sanctity of financial contracts…
The secret history of the Betamax
Sony v. Universal, also known as the “Betamax case”, is a bit of legal history so beloved of geeks, passed on from grizzled hacker to Slashdot newbie, that it deserves the title of “myth”.
The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an innovative consumer-electronics company called Sony invented a wonderful machine called the Betamax, which could record TV shows on tape. Then a big mean entertainment conglomerate called Universal sued them, saying that people could use the Betamax to break copyright laws and it was Sony’s fault. Universal sued Sony over and over and over again, until finally the United States Supreme Court gave Sony a pat on the head and a big hug and said they hadn’t done anything wrong. And in the years that followed, Universal earned millions and millions of dollars by selling its movies and TV shows on tapes that could be played in Sony’s machines. The moral of this story is that innovative content-liberating technology is good for everyone, even big mean entertainment conglomerates.
There is, however, a small detail of history that didn’t make it into the myth.
At the same time that Sony was developing the Betamax, Universal’s parent company, MCA, was developing a playback-only video medium, the laserdisc. MCA wanted to partner with Sony on developing laserdisc playback machines and convince Sony to discontinue the Betamax. So, in September 1976, top executives of MCA and Sony met to discuss videodisk development. At the very end of their discussion, the president of MCA and Universal threatened to sue Sony if the Betamax were not discontinued or modified. Akio Morita, steeped in the Japanese way of doing business, was certain that MCA would not follow through on its threat; as he told a colleague, “friends don’t sue”. Except, of course, they did.
If Universal’s negotiators had been savvy enough to shut down the videocassette industry without suing, or if they had swayed one more Supreme Court justice, then they still would be collecting millions and millions of dollars from home video sales. They just would have been comforted knowing that their customers’ home video equipment used a non-recordable medium.
The moral of this story is that big mean entertainment conglomerates are not always as dumb as they look.
source: Bargaining for Advantage
Being and nobodyness
The Talmud records the following deep philosophical debate:
For two and a half years, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel had an argument. These said: It would have been better if man had not been created. These said: It is better that man has been created. They put it to a vote and decided: It would have been better if man had not been created, but now that he has been created, let him examine his deeds.
Eruvin 13b
This passage, I assume, is the inspiration for a classic Jewish joke:
It would be better never to have been born. But who among us has such luck? One in a thousand, perhaps.
If you want to study this matter in more depth, I have just the book for you.
A drash in honor of our 10th anniversary
כִּֽי־יִקַּ֥ח אִ֛ישׁ אִשָּׁ֖ה וּבְעָלָ֑הּ וְהָיָ֞ה אִם־לֹ֧א תִמְצָא־חֵ֣ן בְּעֵינָ֗יו כִּי־מָ֤צָא בָהּ֙ עֶרְוַ֣ת דָּבָ֔ר וְכָ֨תַב לָ֜הּ סֵ֤פֶר כְּרִיתֻת֙ וְנָתַ֣ן בְּיָדָ֔הּ וְשִׁלְּחָ֖הּ מִבֵּיתֹֽו׃ וְיָצְאָ֖ה מִבֵּיתֹ֑ו וְהָלְכָ֖ה וְהָיְתָ֥ה לְאִישׁ־אַחֵֽר׃ וּשְׂנֵאָהּ֮ הָאִ֣ישׁ הָאַחֲרֹון֒ וְכָ֨תַב לָ֜הּ סֵ֤פֶר כְּרִיתֻת֙ וְנָתַ֣ן בְּיָדָ֔הּ וְשִׁלְּחָ֖הּ מִבֵּיתֹ֑ו אֹ֣ו כִ֤י יָמוּת֙ הָאִ֣ישׁ הָאַחֲרֹ֔ון אֲשֶׁר־לְקָחָ֥הּ לֹ֖ו לְאִשָּֽׁה׃ לֹא־יוּכַ֣ל בַּעְלָ֣הּ הָרִאשֹׁ֣ון אֲשֶֽׁר־שִׁ֠לְּחָהּ לָשׁ֨וּב לְקַחְתָּ֜הּ לִהְיֹ֧ות לֹ֣ו לְאִשָּׁ֗ה אַחֲרֵי֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר הֻטַּמָּ֔אָה כִּֽי־תֹועֵבָ֥ה הִ֖וא לִפְנֵ֣י יְהוָ֑ה וְלֹ֤א תַחֲטִיא֙ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ נֹתֵ֥ן לְךָ֖ נַחֲלָֽה׃
When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it turns out that she does not please him because he finds some indecent thing in her; and he writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her from his house; and she leaves his house, and marries another man; and the latter man hates her and writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her from his house, or if the latter man, who took her as a wife, dies; the first man who sent her away may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been disqualified, for it is a disgusting thing before the Eternal, and you shall not pollute with sin the land that the Eternal your God gives you as an inheritance.
Deuteronomy 24:1–4
Ki Tetze, the parsha that was read in shul this morning, is our aufruf parsha, and I think it’s the best aufruf parsha EVAR, because it talks about just about everything that could go wrong with a marriage. There’s the beautiful woman captured in wartime, there’s the man who hates one of his two wives, there’s the stubborn and rebellious son, etc., etc., etc… and there’s divorce. Which is what I want to talk about. It’s OK. I’m not about to deliver bad news.
In the Tikkun Olam anthology, Rabbi Michael J. Broyde has an essay in which he asks: should Jews, through persuasion and/or the political process, encourage non-Jews to be more observant of the seven Noachide commandments? One problem with such a project, he points out, is that we’re often not sure what those commandments entail. As a specific example, he cited a three-way controversy over the law of Noachide divorce. The rest of this post is basically the result of my chasing down Rabbi Broyde’s footnotes, with some help from my local Orthodox halakhic authority and besamim.
Before we can have divorce, we must have marriage
The Mishnah (Kiddushin 1:1) summarizes the ways that a woman can be married (through money, document, or sexual relations) and unmarried (through death and divorce). Surprisingly, while the plain text of this week’s parsha says a lot about divorce, it doesn’t say very much about marriage itself; when the Gemara looks for sources in the Torah to justify the Mishnah’s rules about how to get married, it relies heavily on indirect arguments from other verses. I would suggest that we can understand this asymmetry by looking at the Torah’s original audience. It’s safe to assume that when they arrived at Mt. Sinai, Jews were familiar with the laws of Noachide marriage, or at least, they had a traditional family law that was consistent with the laws of Noachide marriage. Therefore, the plain text of the Torah focused on what aspects of the law were new to them, rather than what was continuous with the old law.
The Jerusalem Talmud (Kiddushin 1:1) derives laws of Noachide marriage from Genesis 2:24—“therefore a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife”. Rabbi Mana expounds on this verse that a man should cleave to his wife, and not to his neighbor’s wife. The Yerushalmi also declares that non-Jews do not have kiddushin, the first stage of Jewish marriage. Regarding gerushin, divorce, it says that either non-Jews do not have any divorce or they divorce one another (“או שאין להן גירושין או ששניהן מגרשין זה את זה”). Furthermore, the Yerushalmi cites Deuteronomy 24:1–4 (see above) and says because this passage concludes by mentioning “the land that the Eternal your God gives you as an inheritance”, it does not apply to Noachides. But there are so many laws packed into those four verses that it’s not clear what it means to negate them.
The matriarchal interpretation
Bereshit Rabba 18:5 covers much of the same ground as the Yerushalmi, and adds an opinion by Rabbi Yochanan: the wife divorces the husband, and gives him a דופורון (which, according to Jastrow’s dictionary, is a mistransliteration of the Latin repudium, the bill of divorce that the Romans used). Rashi unpacks Rabbi Yochanan’s logic as follows: since under Genesis 2:24 the husband is obliged to cleave to his wife, he can’t “uncleave” her by divorcing her. But since the wife has no corresponding obligation to her husband, she is free to send him away.
The no-fault interpretation
Maimonides, in the Mishnah Torah, states that before the Torah was given a man could simply marry a woman by taking her home and having relations with her (Ishut 1:1); for a man’s wife to become “like one of our divorcées”, she just had to stop living in his household, or alternatively, he could send her away. It’s interesting to note that when he talks about these laws, Maimonides, is careful not to use the Hebrew words kiddushin or gerushin to describe transactions between non-Jews, even in the “they divorce each other” sense that the Yerushalmi and Bereshit Rabba use. I haven’t studied this stuff in any depth, but note that for Jews, once a man and a woman enter kiddushin (e.g., he gives her a ring and says the magic words), even if they have not yet had chuppah, their relationship can only be dissolved with death or a get. So I would speculate that for Maimonides, kiddushin and gerushin come as a matched set; if you lose one, you have to lose the other, and without the change of legal status that these two actions generate, you’re left with mere cohabitation.
The more-than-Catholic interpretation
The Pnei Yehoshua, an early-18th-century German rabbi, offers a third interpretation. In the Bablyonian Talmud (Kiddushin 13b), there is an argument over how we know that a woman becomes free to remarry after her husband dies. Various proof-texts are brought and rejected; the one that sticks is Deuteronomy 24:3. The Gemara concludes that since that verse connects a husband’s divorce and his death, we can say that just as divorce frees a woman from her husband, so does the husband’s death. But wait! says the Pnei Yehoshua. We know from the Yerushalmi that this whole passage only applies to Jews. Therefore, the rule that a woman is freed by her husband’s death also only applies to Jews; Noachide women must remain in their marital state even after their husbands die.
Practical consequences for the reader
So, if you have a non-Jewish friend who approaches you for advice, because he or she is in an unhappy marriage and has moral reservations about how best to proceed… and this person thinks that since you are a righteous and caring individual, you might be able to counsel them about the most appropriate course of action to take… don’t nominate any of these worthy authorities to serve as your friend’s moral compass. Instead, you should take the position of the Ragamam (haRabbanit haGaonit Miss Manners) and just not say anything.
Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
I spent last night in my local hospital for a sleep study. The guy who called to pre-register me sounded like he had been up for 48 consecutive hours.
They’ll have the results back to my doctor in two or three weeks. Take your time, guys! Don’t stay up late on my account!
Not that I’m an expert in the genre, but...
So the Bursteins were kind enough to loan us the DVDs of the first Torchwood season, and we’re about halfway through them, and I have to ask:
What is the point of writing Jack/Ianto fanfic? It seems somehow…unsporting.
The POW-In-Chief
I guess I have to say something about McCain’s speech now, too.
- In the biopic preceding the speech, the narrator told the story of a massive and deadly fire aboard the USS Forrestal caused by an accidental missile launch. Somehow, the narrator declared, McCain survived. Perhaps, the narrator declared, it was because he had more work to be done. And the Republicans accuse Democrats of setting Obama up as a Messiah-figure? I am rubber and you are glue…
- Did you know that McCain used to be a POW? And that he was in hell? And in a box for five years? And that he was dumped in a cell? And that he was a prisoner in another country? I’m impressed by how the biopic author and the speechwriter were able to rephrase the same concept in so many different ways to fill up so many minutes. We saw and heard in vivid detail about McCain’s capture, his imprisonment, his endurance, and how it made him grow as a person.
- Not so much detail, though, on what he’s going to do if he’s elected. There was the standard Republican wish list: lower taxes, lower spending, school “choice”, and “culture of life”. There was a list of things that probably appeal to many voters but seem incompatible with lower spending: job training for people whose jobs have gone overseas, more pay for good teachers, and every alternative-energy source that Obama supports. (Plus, of course, “drill now”. I think “drill now” got as much applause as “culture of life”. Remember, ladies, if you abort that fetus, you deprive your country of a future offshore-drilling-rig technician.)
- Before delivering that standard Republican wish list, McCain insisted that he’s different from all those Republicans who have been corrupted by “Washington”. He’s a “maverick”. But he provided even less detail about what, exactly, he has done to distinguish himself from those bad Republicans. For example, he took credit for fighting “big spenders in both parties” without identifying any big expense that he fought against. Given McCain’s recent return to Republican orthodoxy, his boast deserves to be compared against his recent record.
- Oh, and McCain demonstrated his bipartisanality by saying “Instead of rejecting good ideas because we didn’t think of them first, let’s use the best ideas from both sides.” Did he name a good idea that came from the Democratic side? (Say, “nominate a woman for the vice-presidential position”?) Of course not.
- “I fight for Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan, who lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market.” See, Democrats fight for people who lost their homes. Republicans fight for people who lost their real estate investments.
- The paragraphs about Iraq, the surge, and Georgia seem to be repeats of earlier press releases and I can’t think of anything to say about them other than “yadda yadda yadda”.
- George W. Bush was not mentioned by name, only by title.
- McCain’s tone was folksy and mellow. I fear that in the swing states, that tone will get more attention than the content.
This week’s sleep deficit has been brought to you by the Republican National Convention. Maybe next time I should liveblog, just like the pros.
Disorganized thoughts on last night's speeches
There’s a long and linky post about Governor Palin that I’ve been wanting to compose, but last night, instead of writing that, I watched the Giuliani and Palin speeches. I know I’m not the intended audience for these things, but here are my reactions:
- Do we now have a bipartisan consensus that it’s shameful to criticize a mother of young children who works outside the home? (Pause for raucous laughter.)
- Both Giuliani and Palin pronounced “community organizer” with the tone of contempt that Republicans usually reserve for “trial attorney”, “American Civil Liberties Union”, or “French”. As osewalrus puts it: “because getting a large group of fractious people motivated and organized around a common goal on a non-existent budget is work for pussies, right?”
- Quoth Palin: “Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” But she never told the crowd what her responsibilities as mayor were… perhaps because in her case, they included raising the city sales tax, hiring a DC lobbyist to get pork from the Federal government, and putting the city over $18 million in debt.
- I bet a lot of people watching the speech on TV wondered why “Styrofoam Greek columns” was an applause line. It’s the sort of insider reference that alienates the outsiders.
- A prime-time convention speech is an opportunity to appeal to swing voters. If I had been Palin’s speechwriter, I would have scoured her biography for specific examples of her reformist actions and padded that into a half-hour “Mrs. Smith Goes To Juneau” story that she could tell the cameras. They could always save the red-meat attacks for the time slots where independent voters are less likely to be watching, and of course the folks in the stadium would have cheered enthusiastically for Palin reading the phone book. So why didn’t they take that route? Is her record really that thin? Is the campaign staff too unfamiliar with her record to compose such a speech? Does McCain need to energize his base that desperately?
- Instead, we had some fire-breathing speeches that, as Sean of FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out, will motivate Democrats to work their asses off.
- Both speeches rehashed the attacks on Obama that the Clinton and McCain campaigns have been running all year. If those arguments haven’t pulled McCain to a decisive victory in the polls yet, why should they do it now? Contrast that with Obama’s acceptance speech, where he counteracted the image of himself as an empty suit by talking fluently about specific policies.
- I think the crowd’s reaction to Palin should kill off any speculation that she’ll be bumped off the ticket.
- Moments after the speech ended, NBC’s announcer reported that when Palin boasted of turning down the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, she had been, shall we say, not entirely accurate. I don’t know how many people heard the fact-check over the crowd noise, but congratulations, NBC, for that moment of actual journalism.
PS: The Obama campaign’s fact-check of Palin’s speech has been reposted here.
I am my blog's and my blog is mine
It’s Elul — a time to reflect on the past and prepare for the future, a time to concentrate (even more than usual) on turning away from sin, a time to renew and rebuild those things that have been neglected.
Such as, say, posting to a blog that’s been on a long hiatus.
So I hear we have a Presidential election coming up in a few months….
