After Corbu » meta

The electoral vanguard will not be uninsured

Quixote — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:02:13 +0000

I know that chicken little can be a useful role to play, and I want to see the health care debate pushed left as much as the next blogger, but I also feel bound to abide by certain numbers. The collective blow-up over Baucus’s bill (see TPM, Pandagon, NMMNB, & LGM), while completely justified on the merits — the bill sucks — is completely off base regarding the electoral impact.

Assuming Democrats do pass a bill where “the poor, the unemployed, the working class are forced to pay large sums they don’t have to insurance companies for “junk insurance” with high deductibles” (aimai) or “the problem of the uninsured [is solved] by passing a law forcing them to buy health insurance which, by definition, most a) cannot afford or b) are gambling they won’t need because they’re young and healthy” (TPM), how potentially damaging is the offended constituency? This is a crude question and obviously the morality of a policy has nothing to do with political power. But I’m tired of the ambiguous boogie man of electoral backlash. Let’s quantify:

My chart of voting behavior for insured vs. uninsured people per US HHS Overview of the Uninsured in the United States, KaiserEDU Public Opinion: Health Care and the 2008 Election, and Gallup 2009 Detailed Political ideology.

Uninsured, politically moderate, likely voters (UPMLV). That’s my definition of the demographic who will be directly adversely affected if Democrats pair individual mandates with low levels of government subsidy. At most, that means 4% of voters. 4% isn’t nothing. Plenty of elections have been decided by less. Given current patterns, it’s 2/3 of the 6% swing Republicans potentially need to retake the House, and if Republicans did win 26 seats, that would be a big deal.

However, that number assumes a group so outraged as to produce a 100-0 split. It assumes no subsidies reach the UPMLV to dull the anger. It assumes that the uninsured are moderate at the same rate as the general population, when they likely skew liberal. I don’t feel comfortable trying to quantify these factors, since the combined margins of error become an order of magnitude greater than the size of the population we’re talking about, which of course is the larger point: we’re debating the electoral importance of Microtrends-sized group. Outside of politicians still being scammed by Mark Penn, I think we can agree that this is not going to be a winning argument for better health care reform.

What’s most noteworthy about this whole reform process is that universal/expanded access to insurance is the core of all the health care reform bills, even Baucus’s lame one. Democratic politicians have largely ignored the fact that there’s no real political margin among swing voters in reducing the uninsured. This actually says something pretty positive about the bulk of the Democratic political class.

A few notes about chart methodology:

“% who voted in 2002″ is from KaiserEDU and refers to the percent of uninsured and insured people, respectively, who self-reported having voted in the 2002 midterm congressional elections. I could not locate 2006 data, and in general it is a tragedy that every 2006 & 2008 exit poll didn’t record respondents health insurance status. For shame, pollsters, for shame.
“% of 2002 voters” numbers are determined using the following equation: [ "% of total insured population" x "% insured who voted in 2002" ] / [("% of total insured population" x "% insured who voted in 2002" ) + ("% of total uninsured population" x "% uninsured who voted in 2002" )]
Insured vs. uninsured as a percent of total population comes from the US HHS 2007 population survey, and given recent job losses the uninsured share is undoubtedly higher, likely meaning that uninsured voters will make up a higher percentage of the 2010 electorate.
Final set of bars overlays Gallup’s partisan identification data over the Insured/Uninsured bars for “% 2002 voters”. This is a bad assumption given the income, age, and race statistical disparity between insured and uninsured populations, but is methodologically conservative for estimating “uninsured likely swing voters.”

The New After Corbu

Quixote — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:03:42 +0000

If you are self-employed, and therefore actually visit the website of blogs you read — as opposed to the rest of us who use RSS readers to mask with javascript our non-work-related internet usage — than you have no doubt noticed that this blog has changed it’s look a bit.

The new header features a shot of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voison, which is a big more relevant than the Chefchaouen picture that was up before. Their is now an After Corbu flickr page, with photos from buildings I visit or images from models I create. I’m not as interested in pictures of complete buildings, as they hide so much, and will try to post my favorite pictures of the contruction process.

There’s also a few new areas to this site, which you can browse at your leisure:

About – a general statement of purpose.
Archives – I found a sweet little module that lays out old posts graphically very nicely.
Links – the ol’ blogroll can now be found here.

It’s still a WordPress blog, despite my rumblings about switching to Drupal. I had contemplated the switch because — and if you care nothing for web design, feel free to tune out at this point — I’m planning on having different content types on this site, namely Posts, Pictures, Links, & Graphs, and WordPress is not a natural CMS like Drupal. However, I ultimately decided to put the pictures on an After Corbu flickr page and will soon start adding little micro-posts of graphs & links, which will be differentiated from blog posts by simply overloading the post category feature of WordPress. It’s not as slick as using a real CMS, but it’s also easier than migrating posts and comments.

Anyway, enjoy!

Redesign Deployment In Progress

Quixote — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 07:31:48 +0000

Site’s going to be offline for a bit while I convert it to the new awesomeness. Yes this is what I do after midnight on a Friday. What can I say, I’m a sick human being.

In the interim, go watch this.

Update: And we’re back. Still some issues to work out so we’ll stick with classic corbu for now.

Coming Soon

Quixote — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:22:53 +0000

So I think I’ve gotten my blogging self together a bit after a…well, let’s call it an underutilized opportunity to participate in The Where Experience (which is going strong and I highly recomment the blog), and will now be using this space again. We’ll see if that’s true. But I have so many things I want to write about I can’t really stay away — anti-gentrification/displacement campaigns, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, contractors, CSAs and food coops, the post-real estate bubble construction industry, my cats (as is only traditional for the interwebs), and the Museum of Jurassic Technology:

I’m also going to be redesigning this site a bit and probably taking it from WordPress to Drupal, as my web skillz have developed over the past two years and I’ve become fond of those Dutch coders. Anyway, like countless promotors before me have implored:Watch This Space

Corbu Wants You

Quixote — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:00:47 +0000

…to enjoy the relaunch of After Corbu, now complete with:

consistent posting!
actual discussion of the politics of space + structure!
heretofore unknown brilliance!
more structural engineering nuts and bolts (sorry) than ever before!
more (!) punctuation!!!

So sit back, grab some horchata, and enjoy.

Technical Difficulties

Quixote — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:48:54 +0000

I couldn’t get video’s to embed properly, so I updated to the new version of WordPress, hoping that would help. This crashed the site, because the new version doesn’t like advanced cache plugins. Of course. A simple thing to fix…if you know what you’re doing.

Anyway, post-update the site seems to be running slowly for me (possibly due to primitive cache-ing). If this is the case for anyone else, let me know.

Update: Slow-down was apparently temporary and, hallelujah, Youtube video embed now works. However, it seems the problem was that switching to the “Visual” from the “Code” view of a post after adding the embed code messes it up. Coding is so weird.

Critiquing Feminists (or not)

Quixote — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:32:31 +0000

Wherein I explain why I am loathe to criticize posts or comments at the big Feminist blogs.

A history: In an earlier post I suggested that it was sexist to dedicate yourself to arguing against women, and came down hard on a male blogger for it. At the same time I ignored the female blogger, with whom I also had disagreements. This caused Mike to ask:

Don’t you think it’s more sexist to give women an automatic pass on their bad behavior than to call them out for it?

Short answer: Sometimes.

Long answer: I don’t generally call anyone out for “bad behavior” at all, because it doesn’t get you anywhere and I don’t like endless meta discussion. Run of the mill fallacious argumentation is certainly not enough to get me to speak up. My John Cain post is, I think, the only time I’ve done something of this type, and it was based on whole-blog problems, not bad arguments in a post. The two are not equivalent; I don’t need to speak on one to justify the other.

That said, I am more hesitant to criticize Feminist blogs, as they are different beast than pundit blogs. Feminist blogs are too raw; I’d critique GFR to my heart’s content, but tread lighter at Feministe. Why?

Feminist blogs are natural magnets for all the shit that patriarchy has to offer. They document the atrocities, and so reactionary people go to them to spew hate. They are safe places, so hurt and angry people go there seeking community. Peruse almost any comment thread and you’ll happen upon horrible stories that will make you want to hit something, or incensed anti-feminists who will…make you want to hit something. It’s intimate; It’s painful; it’s enraging.

This environment leads to basic stylistic differences with pundit blogs that tend to be one writer speaking in the abstract about an issue. Throw in a gender divide (not to mention race or class) and their’s a recipe for misunderstanding, offense, and hostility. These issues are just incredibly difficult to talk about, as even something as academic as an cross-cultural abortion study is very personal. It’s not called identity politics for nothing; it gets to the heart about who we are, and why we act a certain way.

Usually, you have to be good friends with someone to criticize their personal behavior, yet this is usually impossible in political discussions. A double-bind, so: group-membership is a stand-in for closeness. People assume you don’t mean well if you’re lobbing in a critique from beyond the barriers of the group (and do in fact experience you words as a grenade).

All this to say: I don’t critique feminist blogs because it’s hard; because I don’t think I’m a good enough writer yet to pose a critique in a way that wouldn’t get people’s shackles up and be counterproductive. At the same time, I know that there are plenty of female bloggers out there (at explicitly feminist sites and otherwise) who are perfectly capable of crafting criticism of feminist sites when needed; my commentary is rarely necessary. So, I write the critiques I feel I can, where/when I feel I can have an affect.

In practice, this means my writing does skew towards my own identity groups. Is that ideal? No. Is it sexist? I don’t think so.

Not Sober Enough

Quixote — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:18:38 +0000

The abortion-study blowup (with posts by Jill and Mike probably the last gasp), caused me to look into something.

Comprehensive list of woman criticized by John Cain:

Comprehensive list of men criticized by John Cain:

Note that these lists are based on a very small sample size (Soberish has two months of posts), and it it possible that this ridiculous skew will correct itself with time. Additionally, I merely point to a correlation, which in no way should be construed as definitive.

That said, I think John Cain dislikes women. Or maybe just smart women.

To those who may ask, “But wasn’t John right on the issues?” I reply: Maybe, sometimes — but that is irrelevant. One can choose to be ‘right’ against any number of online personalities; they’re hardly scarce. Who you choose to debate is a commentary on you. Exclusively correcting the follies of women is repulsive, irrespective of how wrong they may be.

A related observation: “liberal male pundit attacks feminist blog” is something of a cliche at this point, and needs to be abandoned as a goto posting strategy. Possibly it’s just that male pundits don’t understand feminism and need to be schooled. Maybe we attack feminists because they represent the most radical sector of the liberal blogosphere (the commies play in their own sandbox) and we all feel the need for a Sister Souljah moment from time to time to reinforce our seriousness/intellectual honesty. I don’t know, but it grates.

Update: I deleted Tegan and Sara from the list since they’re not actually a “person” and I didn’t intend to include groups or organizations.

Hitting the Big Time

Quixote — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:55:21 +0000

Now that After Corbu is the #74 Architecture Blog on the web, I wanted to take a moment to congratulate all the readers of this site. Clearly you are a brilliant bunch, or you wouldn’t visit such an awesome site.

I jest (re: my ego, not your intelligence), but I am legitimately excited when anyone takes notice of this little blog. Of course I stray far from “architecture,” so I feel a bit of poser on this list…but I’ll take it. Even if After Corbu is one of two 74s listed, raising the possibility that this 15-seconds of International Listings ‘fame’ is but a typo.

Death by Meta: Art Ed.

Quixote — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:16:20 +0000

There is a subset of contemporary art that is primarily concerned with self-examination and asks “what is art?” And then asks it again. And again. It’s a legitimate question — Tolstoy has a treatise on the subject — but I don’t see what the visual arts really add to the discussion.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing a whole show dedicated to this kind of meta-art. Shattered or subverted classical statues. Photographic illustration of the Fibonacci sequence. A sphere in the wall plane that spins so fast its motion is imperceptible. Adam and Eve, nude and garish, frolicking in the hedges. A pure black rectangle. A fragile glass crib. Manikins who play the drums from the roof or catch fire every 60 seconds. And, of course, a pile of candy for the taking (or not).

Half of the pieces seem self-effacing and come off amusing, the rest, self-important and masturbatory. But none come close to establishing a definition of art; all just rephrase the question in the manner of a toddler: “What about this?” “Or this?” “Ok, how about this?” Apparently, the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data,’ but it is ‘ground-breaking art.’

In actuality the definitional question, supposed inspiration of this genre, has become irrelevant. More than anything else, meta-artists resemble shock-comics. One artist passes out hardboiled eggs. The next reproduces soup cans. Another puts a urinal on a wall. Then a balloon animal is blown up to gargantuan proportions. Finally Chris Burden shows up and shoots himself. Isn’t this the high-brow equivalent of The Aristocrats? Competition over who can be the most edgy; the most over the top — a total arms race. And, consequently, not particularly new or interesting.

It’s not that there’s no value in this kind of pursuit — I mean, Sarah Silverman is occasionally funny and I do have a serving spoon hanging from my wall in Duchamp-tribute. But I wish most meta-artists would do art (whatever that is) that was merely self-aware, rather than self-obsessed.