Okay, so it’s actually a bit more than two weeks, but close enough– November 2 is quickly approaching, and goddamn if it hasn’t been a long four years. On the other hand, a lot can change in two weeks.

I remain optimistic about Kerry’s chances of winning. The momentum is on his side, and I still think that come election day, in the privacy of the voting booth, the majority of the undecideds are going to end up voting for him.

In the midst of the debates, I got sucked into www.electoral-vote.com, but I’ve given up on trying to figure out the polls. They’re all over the map and frankly, I’m highly suspicious of the polling organizations’ claims that their sampling methods produce statistically representative samples.

However, something else to keep in mind is that the period immediately preceding the election (and immediately following the election, for that matter) is when Karl Rove tends to do his best work. Joshua Green has an excellent article on Rove in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly that’s worth reading for a preview of what may be to come.

This is brilliant. Jon Stewart was on Crossfire yesterday, and took Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson to task for conducting meaningless political theater. Carlson in particular takes it very personally, and begins attacking Stewart and the Daily Show for not asking hard political questions of the candidates, and it escalates from there.

The complete video is here, courtesy of iFIlm.

I heard Jon Stewart on Fresh Air a week or two ago, and found myself thinking about how sad it is that some of the most insightful criticism of the mainstream news media is coming from a show on Comedy Central whose lead-in, as Stewart likes to point out, “is a show where puppets make crank calls.”

Blame it on debate-fatigue, I guess, but damn that debate was dull. I turned off the tv an hour into and listened to the rest on the radio while working on other stuff.

There’s only so many times I can listen to Kerry battle the President’s blatant fabrications and oversimplifications before I lose interest.

I watched the Frontline documentary “The Choice” on PBS last night. Very well done. Two hours on the life histories of George W. Bush and John Kerry since they were both at Yale.

One person with whom I was watching it felt that while it was very good, it was also clearly pro-Kerry. She may have a point– Kerry did clearly come out in the end looking a lot better than Bush.

However, objectivity does not require that both subjects come out looking equally good (or bad). For example, in an objective review of the lives of Hitler and Gandhi, one of them would, it is safe to say, come out looking better than the other. This example is extreme, of course– George W. Bush is not Hitler (despite many claims on the Left to the contrary), and John Kerry is certainly not Gandhi. However, it doesn’t seem to me that objectivity requires the documentarian to find a way to make Bush’s years as a C student at Yale and a wealthy Texas drifter appear equivalent to Kerry’s service in Vietnam and work as a prosecuting attorney.

I’ve seen a lot of obituaries and tributes for Christopher Reeve the last couple of days, but frankly, I’m more troubled by the passing of Jacques Derrida, who died this past Friday.

Derrida was one of the founders of Deconstructionist philosophy. According to the Deconstructionists, language is always a text that is subject to interpretation. We use language because the thoughts and ideas that are in my head are not directly present to you; if you knew exactly what I was thinking, then we wouldn’t need language to communicate. Therefore, they would say, the very fact that we must use language, be it written or spoken, belies the existence of any inherent meaning in that language.

Thus, questions such as “But what did the author of that book really mean?” are irrelevant, because we can never know what the author really meant. We can’t tell from reading the words in the book, and asking the author to explain what s/he meant would just be even more words with no inherent meaning. Expanding on this idea, the deconstructionists would tell us that the only meaning of any kind to be found in language is that which occurs between a given text and the individual consuming that text: between the book and the reader, between the movie and the filmgoer, between the words I am hearing and me.

Unfortunately, Derrida was not the clearest of writers, and his various followers have taken his ideas to some rather egregious extremes. As a result, he has gotten a pretty bad rap in the philosophical world.

More to come…

I’ve changed the software I’m using for the blog, and I have switched my server at home to Linux. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to dump the database from the old blog into the db for the new one. We’ll see.