Free for all

Andrew Sullivan has some thoughts on how to best elicit feedback on the Intertrons (via). Sully has long resisted having a full-fledged comments section, if y’all don’t know, and he links to Julian Sanchez:

If the type and volume of criticism we find online were experienced in person, we’d probably think we were witnessing some kind of EST/Maoist reeducation session designed to break down the psyche so it could be rebuilt from scratch. The only way not to find this overwhelming and demoralized over any protracted period of time is to adopt a reflexive attitude that these are not real people whose opinions matter in any way. Which, indeed, seems to be a pretty widespread attitude. Scan the comments at one of the more partisan political blogs and you get a clear sense that the “other side” consists not so much of people with different ideas, but an inscrutable alien species. I think it’s self-evident that this is an unhealthy development in a democracy, but it may be a coping strategy that our media ecosystem is forcing on us—at least until we find a better one.

Then adds:

I have a better one. Scrap comments sections, and add serious editors to filter the smartest emails both in favor of the blogger’s view and against. Yes, you need to develop the thickest of skins. But a thick skin isn’t the same as epistemic closure. Or it doesn’t need to be.

DeLong says something about humanizing yourself as a means of deflection. I’ve never had a high-traffic blog that attracts trolls, so I can’t really speak as to how psychologically damaging it is to often deal with idiots on the Internet. That said, I still think they’re wrong.

I get that there’s a ton of crap on the Web. But good comment sections, which (yes, I know) are few and far between, are still worth it, in my view. I’m aware that having a lightly moderated comment section is a recipe for attracting trolls. But how about Sully’s idea? That the writer gets to pick and choose to which arguments he or she will respond? Makes sense… as long as you entirely trust the writer. And how many people do you read that you trust entirely? I actually trust a fair amount of the people I read at this point but Andrew Sullivan sure as hell isn’t one of them (for good reason, I might add).

So, no, count me out. The Internet has tons of filth and idiocy and ignorance. But I’ll take that and sift through it rather than depend on the host of a site to pick and choose the arguments that they deem worthy of response. I’d like to be able to make that decision, thanks.

How to succeed in journalism

Came across this the other day, via Driftglass. The entire piece is worth reading just to remember how egregiously, arrogantly, dismissively, entirely wrong these people were, especially the NYT’s Most Reasonable Conservative™. But of all the howlers in the piece, this graf still takes it:

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic “Aha!” moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam’s remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, “We were wrong. Bush was right.” They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war’s opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

It just defies words.

So it begins…

My, my, that didn’t take very long. From the front and center article on Politico (no link for them):

American politics has become so angry and divisive that it favors candidates who appeal to extremists and eccentrics, and even are extremist and eccentric themselves.

The nonstop circus of modern campaigns, meanwhile, has left the county’s most accomplished and capable people on the sidelines, with scant interest in running for office.

Or so the argument goes.

But something strange—or rather something normal—is happening in 2012.

One of the most familiar refrains from this age of polarization—that rhetorical bombast and ideological zealotry are what carry politicians to the top—is running headlong into the reality of Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney.

The general election will pit one exceptionally self-contained, self-disciplined, self-motivated man against another with precisely the same traits.

Voters have a choice between two men whose minds gravitate to rationality and logic—both of whom have expressed disdain for the disorder and surliness that pervade modern governance.

Sigh. Yeah, because it’s not like Mitt Romney has embraced right-wing views on immigration or tax policy or social safety net policies or foreign policy or… you get the point.

Meanwhile, that radical in the White House is proposing to raise the top marginal tax rate by… 4%… and that top rate is the lowest it’s been since the 1930s (first few Reagan years excepted).

Gonna be a looooong six months, folks…

Only Chris Wallace can go to China

Had some time to flip around the TV channels when I got home yesterday and came across this, which I can’t figure out how to embed, so I’m linking.

Can’t imagine Ryan getting questioning of this type on Meet the Press or any other bobblehead show. Especially note how Wallace questions the amount of revenue Ryan’s plane will raise and how it continues to cut taxes for the wealthy. Wallace does even better to repeatedly question Ryan about which deductions he’s going to excise, pretty much aping the main question that progressives on the Intertoobz have been wondering.

Obviously, the interview suffers from all the usual things that make cable TV interviews stupid and unenlightening, but on a very graded curve, I’d give the interview a B+ and Wallace an A-.

Outsourced

…to Charlie Pierce:

Part of it is the preposterous way that the GOP set up its primary calendar, and the utter inability of the Republican National Committee to keep their state committees from banjaxing the whole thing in a scramble for the influence that comes from being early on the schedule. Part of it was the long time it took to clear out the deadwood from the field; Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann never should have been in the campaign long enough to be “frontrunners” even for one day. But the great responsibility lies with the fact that, for more than 30 years, the Republicans have been sucking around for a campaign just like this one. They knew full well that their “base” was heading into the wild places, and they did nothing to stop them. They did nothing to arrest the spread of abject wingnuttery in the various state houses, from which came the generation of young Republicans stalwarts who won in 2010. They played footsie in the South with the Council Of Conservative Citizens, and in the West with the more polite fringes of the militia movement. For mean and temporary political advantages, they allowed more and more of the fringes into power in the party until, finally, there was no “Republican establishment” any more. And now, too many respectable conservatives are wandering around, blinking, and wondering how it all happened that their party has lost its mind. You were there, kids. You just didn’t care.

The paradox of converted Republicans

Jay Rosen has an interesting post up that contains a bit of rare (for him) political analysis. To sum it up, parts of today’s Republican Party are still somewhat moored in reality and for other parts the horses have left the barn. Rosen cites David Frum as an example of a Republican who is fighting for a more factual approach to politics, describing him thus:

For a representative figure among reality-based Republicans I would go with David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a conservative who cannot stomach what has happened to his party. But rather than become a Democrat or claim some sort of ideological conversion, Frum has taken up his pen, as with: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

Rosen then quotes Frum diagnosing the problems in today’s GOP, noting that Frum writes:

Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

[…]

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat.

Frum’s diagnosis is eloquent and succinct. I could hardly write a better critique of the current conservative movement myself.And herein, for many progressives OK, for at least one progressive, lies a dilemma. Seeing this from David Frum, whom Charlie Pierce has appropriately referred to as former war propagandist David Frum, produces two very strong, very divergent emotions.

On one level, I’m happy. It’s good to have more people criticizing the conservative movement for all of the stuff that Frum outlines. Having that critique come from someone who is a Republican, or at least used to be, is useful as well because that argument may carry more currency than one from a person who has been opposed to the Republican Party for their entire life.

That said, an equally strong emotion (and maybe stronger depending on your view on politics, personal makeup, sociology, etc) is wanting to grab David Frum and shake him very hard and demand to know what took him so goddam long to figure this out. David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. He coined the term ‘Axis of Evil.’ He backed Bush’s policies to the hilt, with devastating effects on our image abroad (Iraq) and our national treasury (Bush tax cuts, Medicare Part D, Iraq again).

It’s all well and good that David Frum has discovered that the conservative movement and Republican Party is to a large extent ‘epistemically closed,’ but it would have been a helluva lot better if Frum had realized that before the 2000 election sent GWB to the White House and changed the world. And as Bush passed those shit policies, often with Democratic help, was David Frum a prominent, righteous voice demanding review and reservedness? Please. Let’s not kid ourselves: Frum might have been booted from FNC and AEI but he now gets to blog for the Daily Beast (along with another animal of similar stripes) and appear on other cable news channels as that coveted dissonant conservative.

One more note on Rosen’s piece. This line really jumped out to me:

So I’m not saying that the Democrats and progressives are the ones who are in touch with reality, while conservatives and Republicans are not. (But I guarantee you some will read it that way.) I’m saying that the tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don’t understand very well. That is, we don’t know the reasons for it, why it happened when it did, or what might reverse it. (We also need to know the degree to which it is a global phenomenon among conservative parties in mature democracies, or an American thing.) Political scientists: help!

Part of what is so potentially damaging about Frum and Sully and the rest of our recent conservative converts is that they implicitly present a false history. Frum was all cool with being employed by the movement that he now criticizes until a few years ago. But the concept that conservatism has just now gone ’round the bend is risible.

Like Jay, no, I don’t really know when this “happened” to conservatism. But here are a few guesses: you wanna know why conservatives won’t take incredibly good deals on policy proposal because said proposals might contain a teensy bit of revenue? Ask Grover (he got his start in the ’80s). You wanna know why Dick Lugar is gonna face a primary opponent in his next Senate race despite his status as a sane Republican statesman? Read about how Tom Delay turned the word “primary” into a verb (as in, “We’ll primary you”). You wanna know why the interests of the wealthy are as well represented by the Republican Party today as they have been during any time in history? Have a look at Jack Abramoff and the K Street Project.

I do know this: the change that Frum describes has been happening for quite some time. It has been steady, cumulative and forseeable. This is not a recent development. It did not just happen overnight. And David Frum, like his compatriot at the Daily Beast, voiced full-throat support for these policies and inadequacies for pretty much his entire adult life, including when it mattered most. And that remains important.

Last time, I swear

Really, though. Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to Obama’s SOTU and the response given by Mitch Daniels last night (via):

It was that rare event when the GOP response surpassed the actual State of the Union. It was what a sane Republican critique of this presidency would be. It began with a grace note on Obama’s courageous assault on bin Laden and the quiet dignity of his family life – avoiding the personal demonization of a well-liked president. There were several shrewd and helpful criticisms of his own side. And there were only a couple of off-notes. I don’t believe the administration has divided Americans or sought to. I don’t think it’s fair to describe a stimulus in a potential depression as wasteful or irresponsible.

But by reminding us of the debt, and the deep need to tackle it, he reminded us that conservatism at its best is about bringing us back to reality. And the president’s maddening refusal to tackle the long-term debt and entitlement insolvency in the Bowles-Simpson opening – and his decision to keep  these themes buried under a wave of new tax breaks in his speech tonight – gave Daniels an opening, where he outclassed the man who just left the stage.

Here’s the video of Daniels’ response (via):

I’m going to forgo my usual snark, although I’m tempted, and just go by the transcript (via):

In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet the president has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead.

No.

In our economic stagnation and indebtedness, we’re only a short distance behind Greece, Spain, and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe. But ours is a fortunate land. Because the world uses our dollar for trade, we have a short grace period to deal with our dangers. But time is running out if we’re to avoid the fate of Europe and those once-great nations of history that fell from the position of world leadership.

No.

The routes back to an America of promise and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we’ve driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today. Contrary to the president’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.

No.

There’s a second item on our national must-do list: We must unite to save the safety net. Medicare and Social Security have served us well, and that must continue. But after half and three- quarters of a century, respectively, it’s not surprising they need some repairs. We can preserve them unchanged and untouched for those now in or near retirement, but we must fashion a new, affordable safety net so future Americans are protected, too.

Social Security, with extremely small tweaks, is fine. Medicare is cheaper than private health care alternatives. So, no.

It’s not too hard to pick apart any political speech. Were I to go through Obama’s SOTU, I could find plenty to disagree with, especially in the realm of foreign policy. Some parts of Daniels’ response are not too bad and Andrew Sullivan does disagree with certain elements, which you can see if you read his entire post. The big difference lies in the policies the two parties recommend.

Republicans, with the Ryan plan and any of the candidates‘ economic plans, are right where they’ve been for the past 30 years: tax cuts for the wealthy and less spending on programs for people who need it.

Mitch Daniels, in his response, makes no mention of the Bush tax cuts, passed in ’01 and ’03, that have done so much to create the debt which Daniels criticizes. Those tax cuts will do ever more to ensure such debt if the tax cuts are extended, as Republicans want.

Daniels was GWB’s OMB director, by the way. The Indiana governor, did to his credit, get right the fact that the Super Bowl is in Indy this year (go Pats!).

At day’s end, it really is like Atrios said, in a post titled “It’s Just Tone:”

For Villagers, Republicans are “moderates” if they’re reasonable dinner party guests.

Much as Andrew Sullivan might like to detach Republicans on whom he casts his hopes and dreams from their party and its orthodoxy, he can’t. That he continues to ignore this fact, as in the case of Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels, is about as good evidence that you can ask for to indicate that Sullivan is not an honest arbiter.

 

Uh… no

I don’t know too much about Tyler Cowen. I know that Bobo and McMegan quote him approvingly, which is… yeah. I know that he is supposed to be a brilliant academic. Whate’er. He’s in an argument with Krugman, which started with a post by Alex Tabarrok and then Krugman responded and then Cowen weighed in and then Krugman took another shot.

So, here’s what caught my eye. In Cowen’s response, he suggests that Krugman pick the strongest austerity arguments and rebut them with a Thucydides sprinkled on top (no, seriously):

How about writing a NYRB essay that lays out the short-run negative output gradient to austerity, presents why austerity is considered a serious option nonetheless, discusses catch-up and bounce back effects and their relevant time horizons, analyzes what kinds of policies are actually possible in a 17 (27) nation collective, engages with the best public choice arguments (including Buchanan and Wagner) on a serious level, ponders the merits and demerits of worst case thinking, and ruminates on the nature of leadership in a way which shows some tussling with Thucydides and Churchill?  Surely that is within Krugman’s capabilities and if it still comes out Keynesian or left-wing, great, at least someone will have seen those arguments through.  Such an essay would stand a far greater chance of influencing me, or other serious readers, or for that matter President Obama.

Most of the time I wanna swear, I think about it for a second and don’t because prospective employers will read this blog when I apply for jobs swearing doesn’t add much to writing. But seriously. What the fuck is Cowen talking about? Barack Obama is going to take Krugman more seriously if Krugman zooms out to ten thousand feet and waxes poetic about Greek playwrights who have been dead for more than 2,000 years? Jesus tapdancing Christ.

Obama is worried about being reelected and the biggest influence w/r/t that is the economy. Not Thucydides. Many of Obama’s most dedicated voters (and a fair amount of those who have disposable income, I’d wager) listen to Krugman, making his current mode of communication pretty damn important to Obama already. Most importantly, Krugman is the best around at taking extremely complex subjects and making them easily digestible for the rest of us, which is precisely the opposite of what Cowen is asking Krugman to do. And that makes Krugman worth more than all of the solemn, staid, sober professors that Cowen can find in academia.

UPDATE: Also too Whiskey Fire.

Ain’t Talkin

Charlie Pierce directs me to a piece from Michael Kazin in TNR. Kazin wishes for an Obama-Newt! showdown in the general election because of the intellectual display such a matchup would promise:

Gingrich has already vowed to challenge the president to hold lengthy debates—absent the usual moderators, with their tired Q & A format. Obama would have to agree, lest he seem cowardly. And this could set up the kind of campaign Americans have never witnessed before: a serious debate between articulate exponents of liberalism and conservatism—the ideological conflict that has shaped American politics since the emergence of a mass movement on the right in the 1950s.

Well… OK. Kazin, continuing directly:

Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson could have engaged in such a struggle in 1964. But with a huge and consistent lead in the polls, LBJ had no reason to trade charges with the charismatic senator from Arizona. In 1980, Ronald Reagan bested Jimmy Carter in their single debate with relaxed one-liners, not by advocating conservative principles—and, anyway, Carter was no liberal. The 2000 election is remembered for its long, bitter denouement. But the debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush were banal affairs, nicely summarized by David Brooks: “Watching the two candidates speak about their rival plans was like watching an ad war between cellular phone rate plans: My plan gives you more choices! My plan gives you more minutes! My plan gives you free prescription drugs on weekends and holidays.”

Yeah no. First of all, don’t quote David Brooks unless you’re reminding people that he ridiculed and mocked and disparaged the people who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and also derided those hysterical, unSerious liberals who were concerned that the Bush tax cuts would blow a hole in the federal budget.

Which brings me to my second point: Some people don’t remember the 2000 election because it’s debates were “banal affairs.” Some people remember 2000 for a different reason. It is interesting that Kazin quotes Brooks, who, as I just mentioned, was a big fan of the Bush tax cuts. Funny enough, Al Gore tried to convey to the country just how disastrous said tax cuts would be during the election and during the debates. Guess what? The media just couldn’t be bothered. Oh, and lest ye forget, if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent (fingers cross they won’t be, but it’ll be a struggle), the deficit’s components look like this:

Yeah. Such banal, useless debates! If only Gore had only tried to clarify some important matters for the country…

And that brings me to my overall problem with the Kazin piece. Later on Kazin writes:

In other words, we would have a fair chance of having a true contest of ideas and ideals between two smart men. Newt would force Obama to talk about his principles and not just his programs—or rather how the latter flows from the former. The debates would sharpen the terms of political discourse in a healthy rather than demagogic fashion: Standing just feet away from the president, Newt would probably refrain from ranting about the Democrat’s “secular socialist agenda,” and Obama would not be able to get away with empty talk about “winning the future.”

Note the absurdity of the bolded line, although the opening sentence in the graph is pretty silly as well. You know why this won’t happen? You know why if even there is a Lincoln-Douglas-style series of debates there won’t be a “true contest of ideas and ideals” between the two men?

Because our media system can’t handle it. Let’s do an MSNBC edition: Gingrich will makes some dumb claim that his flat tax would help out poor people or not give a windfall to wealthy people or whatever. Obama will call him out for it. Ari Fleischer will appear, touting a Heritage report that backs up Newt’s claim. Ari Melber will try to call Fleischer out for his crap over the hysterical screams of whatever “conservative” guest appears with Melber and then the host would leave it there. Mark Halperin will get 15 minutes to expound on why the president always uses such divisive rhetoric. Joe Scarborough will lament the president’s partisanship, wondering why Congress can’t come together anymore. Mark McKinnon will stress that if we just elected a third-party candidate financed entirely by hedge fund managers there would be sunshine and puppies and we’d all get laid. Chuck Todd will wonder what this controversy means for the 2012 election and how the various factual claims will be parsed by bowling-league uncles. Chris Matthews will talk about his new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. And that’s on the liberal channel.

The reason this country won’t have the debate that Kazin yearns for isn’t because of the laughable formats of our political “debates.” It’s because of the people who cover those debates. Kazin closes with this:

After such debates, an Obama victory would signify more than just the re-election of a moderately popular president over an opponent who fails to inspire the base of his own party—as happened with both Bob Dole in 1996 and John Kerry in 2004. It would expose the moral and logical defects of the conservative ideology that has been mostly dominant in the U.S. since 1980, even under Democratic presidents. Then, perhaps, a true liberal revival could begin.

Good gravy. If the Bush years didn’t convince Americans of the “moral and logical defects of the conservative ideology,” how the hell does Kazin think that a Gingrich candidacy will do so? And, lest we all forget the 2010 midterms, the Bush years did not convince Americans of all that stuff. Pierce, in linking to Kazin’s article, terms it, “[a] curious, and ultimately frustrating, piece.” That’s much too kind.

Virtual Netwmentum!

FURTHER UPDATE: I am wrong about this. Mashable ran a study to confirm that Gingrich’s follower count is legit. Here’s a link to the smackdown of me in the comments section at David Meerman Scott’s blog.

I’m a bit late to this post from HubSpot’s blog about Republican general election contenders and the prominence of their online profiles, but I’m juuuust starting to get through my RSS feed now. I like HubSpot’s blog, because it puts out a consistent amount of content by industry blog standards and it often has cool infographics. On this one, however, they I didn’t do their my research.

I can’t speak to the accuracy of the stats on Perry or Romney, but the ones on Gingrich deserve a grain an asteroid of salt. Here’s why: per a former Gingrich staffer, Newt’s been dipping his toes into the black-hat game:

Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them. As you might guess, Newt is most decidedly one of the people to which these agencies cater.

About 80 percent of those accounts are inactive or are dummy accounts created by various “follow agencies,” another 10 percent are real people who are part of a network of folks who follow others back and are paying for followers themselves (Newt’s profile just happens to be a part of these networks because he uses them, although he doesn’t follow back), and the remaining 10 percent may, in fact, be real, sentient people who happen to like Newt Gingrich. If you simply scroll through his list of followers you’ll see that most of them have odd usernames and no profile photos, which has to do with the fact that they were mass generated. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Not convinced? I can understand why. First of all, that’s coming from a former staffer, who, given the nature of politics, might very well be disgruntled and itching to screw Newt over. Furthermore, that interview comes via Gawker, which some people might not think of as the most credible source.

So, PeekYou, the social networking research firm, crunched Newt’s numbers. Here’s what they found:

“We just started running the 2012 candidates’ numbers three weeks ago,” said Josh Mackey, PeekYou’s general manager of business and product development, “and when we saw your story, we went back to pull the Gingrich numbers. The huge majority of his followers are either completely anonymous people who have no other web presence, or they are spambots.”

Mackey said PeekYou actually scrubbed each and every one of Gingrich’s 1.3 million followers, using 23 criteria—including name, location, and inbound and outbound links in their feed—to determine whether they were real people. “We usually find out that real people have real web identities,” he says. For the vast majority of Gingrich’s followers, that wasn’t true. They were either business accounts, private accounts, anonymous accounts that had only a user ID and no other discernible connection to the internet, or spambots. The average Twitter user, Mackey says, has a follower count that consists of anywhere from 35% to 60% real people. At 8%, Gingrich’s is the lowest PeekYou has ever seen. “When was saw it, we actually had our quality assurance people go over the numbers for two days to doublecheck,” he says.

Here’s a link to ABC News, which has the same info, if Gawker ain’t yo thang (it ain’t mine, FWIW). So, yeah. Be careful, HubSpot (UPDATE: and David Meerman Scott). It ain’t just Republican primary voters of whom Newt is trying to take advantage.