What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
The Northeast
The Inland North
Philadelphia
North Central
The South
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

But....but...I'm not from the Midlands!

Dialogues with Machiavelli

Last year I began reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy anew. After a short while I conceived the notion that I should follow his example and comment on the Discourses in the same way that the Discourses comment on Livy. Soon I had several very rough pages summarizing and commenting on Machiavelli's ideas. After a while, however, this grew tedious. Around the same time I discovered that there already was a published commentary on the Discourses. Faced with my growing boredom with the format I was utilizing but still charged by the idea of a discourse about Machiavelli's ideas, I suddenly realized that a dialogue might be a better format.

So, several months ago I began a dialogue between a "young lawyer" and Machiavelli on aspects of the Discourses. This project did not get very far before I realized that it might be a good idea to familiarize myself with pre and post-Machiavellian thought on the issues in the Discourses. Since then I have been reading Tacitus,Sallust and other ancient authors and preparing to read "modern" work such as Cato's Letters and Montesquieu. Eventually I plan to use my reading experience as source material for referencing in the dialogue with Machiavelli.

I mention all this, Dear Reader, because I may post this dialogue serially on this blog for your perusal and criticism. Stay tuned.

Squeeb Nation

Matt Taibbi, the acerbic reporter for Rolling Stone has recently made the following observations about the effect of the media,the candidates,

A laid-off worker in Ohio will go to a Hillary Clinton speech, hear Hillary talk about the dangers of electing a president without "experience," and then five minutes after the speech he'll be shaking his fist at the ceiling at the very idea of someone without "experience" even trying to run for president. A teacher in New York will go to an Obama event looking curious and happy, then come out furious at the politics of "the past," rambling like it's been on his mind for years about how we need to "look to the future" instead of staying stuck "where we are." A Republican turns on the TV, hears some asshole like Michelle Malkin say the surge is working, then turns around and with his arm draped around his wife gives you a long spiel about how the surge is working and how those damned liberals don't want to admit it.

Crucially, however, those same people never tell you the same story for more than a few weeks. A few weeks later, their brains are a clean slate again, and the next story they tell you is the one they heard even more recently on TV. Now the outrage might be Barack Obama getting a free ride in the media (your squeeb-citizen here might cite the SNL skit about Barack getting offered a pillow by debate moderators), or John McCain not knowing al-Qaeda is Sunni and therefore not an ally of Iran, or Hillary misspending campaign money on luxury suites in Vegas. "That just shows she's not fit to manage money," he'll say, solemnly.

The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything that smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination to look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and policy.

What disturbs me the most about this is that I have noticed the same phenomenon in those around me and myself. The suggestion that has been made by several pundits that Obama's name and racial minority status would be a foreign policy boon struck me as at least partially true. Hence I have almost mindlessly repeated it in discussions about the Senator.

Is there a way to combat our squeebishness? Any suggestions?