United States’ agents have localized and killed a foreign national on foreign soil, then recovered his body. This man is accused of committing serious crimes against humanity, but no attempt was made to capture him alive and put him on trial. The president of the United States has acted as both prosecutor, judge and jury with the US Navy Seals as executioners. Despite this, President Obama freely owns up to his achievement, without even an attempt at explanation as to why the killing was necessary. Official word from the US Government is also that the mission was to kill It also seems that the aim has been to kill him, not a serious attempt to capture. And the rest of the western nations applaude. Including Norway’s prime and foreign ministers. And the people of the United States (and to a lesser degree in Europe as well) celebrate. Celebrate the killing of another human being.

I am, as most Norwegians, an opponent of the death penalty. I believe it is wrong to kill a human being, even if they have committed serious crimes, unless keeping them alive constitutes a direct and immediate threat to more lives. But even if you do believe in premeditated killing under certain circumstances, should it not be a last resort? Should it not happen only when there has been a trial, or when no other options were possible?

Osama bin Laden was an evil man. Killing him may also have been necessary, but I have problems accepting the fact that not even an attempt is made to justify the killing as necessary, and that a live capture was not even part of the mission agenda. Is this how a supposedly liberal democratic state is supposed to behave?

At the very least, I had expected a little bit of criticism from the press or even a modicum of moderation from governments that are against the death penalty.

These figures are rather amazing. There seems to be only one country where the people don’t think Obama is more likely to do the right thing in international affairs – Israel. And the relationship between Israel and the US can hardly be said to be much like the relationship with any other country…

Yesterday, he released a Youtube video aimed at the Iranian people, obviously in an effort to convince Iranians that the United States hopes for peace and does not want to be enemyof Iran. You can see the three-minute video here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MDklneATBI]

In another display of rhetorical proficiency, his language is extremely subdued and forthcoming compared to what we’re used to from his predecessor, and doesnt’ seem aimed at trying to tear down the Iranian regime. It seems he’s taking a more subtle approach, trying to remove the fear of the Iranian people and thus make it possible for the leadership to seek other ways out of the current diplomatic stalemate than continuing a hard-line approach. It could all be a clever application of Putnam’s two-level-game-theory that dictates by giving your opponent more options you’re actually strengthening yourself in a bargaining position.

Let’s hope it works…

She discusses Barack Obama’s use of classical rhetorical tricks of the trade, linking it among others to the great Marcus Tullius Cicero. One of the points she discusses is the negative association the very word rhetoric has aquired. Rhetoric may indeed be used to cloud a subject and befuddle an audience, but I wonder how much important knowledge has been lost on account of bad rhetoric by scientists. I’m sure I have missed a lot of important insights because articles and lectures were just so damn boring I stopped paying attention.

So scientists of the world – read Higgins’ article, read Cicero, read Aristotle. Reinvigorate your style of writing and make sure your knowledge lives on.

Economist.com voter map screenshot

The world at large probably prefers Obama, but this “survey” does in no way confirm that. Why not? It’s really quite simple. The survey is conducted at the Economist.com website. And who are going to claim that worldwide readers of the Economist represent a fair approximation to a random distribution of the population? None, I hope. For example, I would expect the Economists’ readers to have vastly higher than average levels of education. This is further accentuated by the fact that not every visitor to the website can vote, just registered Economist.com members. This ensures that even those casual visitors not normally reading the Economist are even less likely to vote.

There is no easier way to prove the bias of the survey than just looking at the scores for the US in this survey. In this survey the US supports Obama by 81-19.

This isn’t even very original. I have seen several such maps made on the basis of different surveys already, and must have read a dozen different online articles on it.

So has the Economist suddenly gone naive and stupid? Of course not. This was never intended as a survey by the Economist, so just don’t make the mistake of treating it like one. What the Economist wanted was more hits to their website, and more registered members on their website. I’d guess this got them hundreds, if not thousands. It worked on me. More seriously on the idea of global representative voting, The International Student Festival in Trondheim (ISFiT) did something like this properly when they had gathered students from around the world last year. They put together a world parliament with a system of representative voting based on world regions to decide on a wide range of global issues. Read more about this experiment at tgde.org.

Yes, say Norwegian newspapers. The reason they all agree is of course because they all quote their favourite expert, professor Ole O. Moen from the University of Oslo. To Dagsavisen, for example, he says he thinks it will now take a real or imagined terror threat for Obama to lose. He doesn’t think Obama is going to make any big enough mistakes.  But with a single expert being quoted across the board I thought I’d look around a bit.

I assumed I could rely on Fox News to bring me predictions that didn’t favour that black yuppie, but their website did little more than confuse me. They were more interested in telling me that the great-great-great-granddaughter of a slave on McCain’s ancestor’s farm is now a psychology professor.

The Washington Post seems to think Obama will win. Among other things, they can tell us how McCain’s got trouble with media as Obama gets all the endorsements and the great maverick himself is starting a fight with the NYT. Just in case the unthinkable should happen and McCain wins, the Post has posted (ha-ha) some emergency help to journalists to help explain it. At least they list possible reasons why things might take an unexpected turn.

Time Magazine highlights an alternative strategy that might help McCain: redefining the states. If you exclude the parts of a state that doesn’t like you, then you’re actually winning. Unfortunately it’s tougher than you’d think to take away the voting rights of half a state (unless they’re Florida of course). Time’s Karen Tumulty takes a look at what McCain’s followers are doing, which seems to be mostly trying to discredit people that don’t agree with them. A sign that they think they’re losing she claims. This still doesn’t seem to get very exciting.

CNN highlights “the Bradley effect” aka. “the Wilder effect” that’s been discussed a lot. They think we might have to take about 6 points off Obama’s total because of the color of his skin. That’ll surely make the race closer. Independent expert Michelle Obama did however tell Larry King that she thinks things have changed since Bradley lost his election.

What about the professor bloggers out there? Larry M. Bartels shows us that we have to account for some fairly large errors in the poll predictions. Perhaps things might get exciting still? But alas, it seems that most of these effects seem to point to the fact that Obama has actually got a bigger lead than it seems…

Another political scientist looking to history for help is John Cohen. Reagan was hopelessly behind Carter on the polls in late October when he became president, but he won by 10 points. Might McCain be a new Reagan..? Well, Reagan won by crushing Carter in a presidential debate. With the last debate over I think we can safely say that McCain did no such thing…

Tom Holbrook doesn’t promise much excitement either. His predictions for the electoral college is currently at 354-184 in Obama’s favor.

Some times the simplest argument is the best. Didobamawin.com offers compelling simplicity. That nagging feeling at the back of my head seems to agree with their “not yet” in huge letters… I’ll still be paying attention.

And in case you need divine advice, here’s some: www.godhatesobama.com – not your usual zealot hate-campaign.

(Special thanks to The Monkey Cage for some good sources for this post.)

Current numbers (September 30th 2008):
Obama: 106 articles, +29 balance
McCain: 73 articles, -3 balance

It does however seem clear as well that this enthusiasm doesn’t translate into a campaign against McCain. The coverage of McCain’s campaign seems well-balanced, with the number of negatively and positively angled articles roughly balancing each other out.

The Republican convention seemed to be a changing point. Before this the coverage of Obama’s campaign outweighed McCain’s by much more. A significant “Palin effect” seems to account for much of this. Palin has grabbed a major part of the media attention after her appointment. First impression, without having done actual counting is that she has contributed much to volume of articles, but that the positive and negative coverage balances out. After her appointment as VP candidate, it was largely positive, but as the novelty of her candidature has faded, she seems to attract more and more negative focus.

A complete exported table of the data can be found here in Microsoft Word format:080930_uselectiontable This is available in other formats on request.

The saved information is the date, title of the article in Norwegian, my translation into English, the URL, the name of the newspaper and an encoding of bias towards each candidate, where 0 means it’s roughly balanced, 1 means it’s mainly positive while -1 means it’s mainly negative. The “balance” statistic I use is merely the sum of these numbers for each candidate, while the count statistic is the number of non-empty fields for each candidate.

On article titles I might add that I started out not translating, but rather describing in one sentence in English, and changed to more or less literal translaitons later on. Also some articles have different headlines on the newspaper front page and main page. In such cases I’ve picked one more or less at random. In other words, too much shouldn’t be read into article titles.