This topic contains 101 posts. You are seeing posts 81 to 101. Previous posts.
Posted: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:30:39 GMT Forcing reform online
: A good round-up story on the role of online in Iran's real reform movement by Luke Thomas at Salon. For those who've been following this story here, there's not a lot very new and it all but ignores weblogs and the strong voices that are making a difference there. Nonetheless, it's an overview of why the net matters to this (and thus every) democracy emerging from repression: But the real story is that by blocking free and fair elections, clerical hard-liners have driven dissent online -- lighting up thousands of alternate channels of communication for the Iranian people.
In Iran, the Internet is becoming the most successful route around oppression. It gives ordinary Iranians access to real news and information. They can express their opinions freely and communicate with their countrymen residing in nations all around the world.
Indeed, the more the government cracks down, the more Web sites dedicated to changing the system spring up. There are now dozens of Web sites providing news and views in the local Farsi language.
It's official - Party Tues night at Etech Posted: Thu, 05 Feb 2004 15:40:57 GMT Laszlo Systems will be sponsoring a party at O'Reilly's Emerging technology Conference Tuesday night at the Emer3g1ng L0ft scene.
It'll start up at 10 PM - after the day's sessions are over. Music, beer, booze and great conversation.
Location to follow. Check out the Wiki.
The next night - will also be a party there - as well.
This year's Etech is looking to be quite a scene - what with the Emergent Democracy day long pre-sessions, etc.
Hip Hop You Don't Stop Posted: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 21:07:49 GMT You have to read Chip Gibbons' annotation of Bush's budget. Jakob Nielsen writes about online surveys and Keep It Short Stupid! One goal beats all others when designing a customer survey for a website: maximize the response rate. Low response rates can create actively misleading survey findings because they're likely to be based on a biased sample of your most committed users as opposed to most users (who have better things to do than take your survey). It doesn't matter what you "learn" from a survey; you can't trust the data if it doesn't represent your users.
Tibor Machan writes about how upsetting it is that one cannot mention the personality of the poor with respect to "solving" poverty. Yet, in nearly all the studies of this phenomenon of extreme poverty, scholars tend, in the main, only to search out impersonal factors that impede development, factors such as climate, terrain, disease, ignorance, and so forth. What doesnâ•˙t seem to find a place in the thinking about world poverty is that people themselves sometimes â•„ even often â•„ are responsible for how they fare. This is clearly evident to us when we consider our own friends, neighbors, acquaintances, so why should it not be so with people in far off lands? (We even know people who are poor deliberately â•„ ascetics and ones who have taken a religious wow of poverty!) Probably we shy away from considering the poorâ•˙s own complicity in their poverty because we donâ•˙t know those far away well enough and we tend to avoid explanations that have a normative component. Instead, scholars tend to rely on general models which invoke causal variables of an impersonal kind, so as to explain poverty. Studies of the phenomena, influenced very much by the tradition of value-free analysis in the social sciences, do not make reference to the merits of the beliefs and conduct of the individuals who experience the poverty.
Related to this is the story that Doug Miller linked about the African villages refusing healthcare because they thought it would help demons possess them or something. If you don't want to be helped, don't complain when we don't. Update on 2004/02/04: Doug Miller linked me to the story in question.
Ethan Zuckerman writes about emergent democracy and how the Internet can be involved, but with great skepticism. When Joi and Jim talk about action emerging from online community organizing, I get the most skeptical. In many developed nations, especially the United States, the greatest enemy of activism is apathy. Grassroots activism may turn out to be a powerful weapon to fight apathy and encourage engagement. But apathy may not be the problem in other nations. In nations with a high deal of political repression, the enemy of activism may be threats to personal safety. In these situations, transparent public debate leading to action is likely an unwise path to political change. Can we expect democracy to emerge from Internet communities in countries where political activity is constrained and the Internet is censored? Or are we assuming that these democratizing technologies are only applicable in places where democracy and accompanying rights of free expression are already well protected?
Dave Winer writes about breasts. Oh my. For the record, I missed Janet Jackson's breast because I was writing something at halftime yesterday. Women's breasts are great. I think there should be a requirement that all women bare their breasts if they want to when they're on television. It should be a choice thing. I'm pro-choice. It might be more comfortable. It's unbelievable that Michael Powell is having a hissy fit over this. More breasts, not less. That's my opinion.
Lance Arthur writes about the "Stupor Bowl." Janet Jackson's tits are real. I would have said that this was all a publicity stunt and it was meant to happen, because how could Justin "accidentally" tear off her breast cover? He reached right over, and she let him, and he grabbed it and pulled and look, nipple! And, better even than that, nipple hardware! And then he's all "sorry about the wardrobe malfunction, yo," and MTV is all, "well, (shrug), we didn't know that was going to happen," and CBS is all "hey, they did it! not us. it was them" and shit and whatever and like, okay, so let's throw a hissy fit. And then America is all, "Hey, boob!" and the FCC Chairman is all "I am highly offended and deeply aroused," and Janet's all, "I have a new album coming out and my new single drops on Monday and how can I get some free publicity?" and I'm all, "Wait, what? Was that a... that was her... am I in fucking France or something?" Sure it's a tit, but it's a celebrity tit! On the most widely-watched spectacle on TV! In Prime Time! And it's a Jackson! So, that's all important to remember. And also: So, what was supposed to happen? Justin was going to reach over and grab her breast cover and pull and it reveals a diorama in support of our troops in Iraq as he sings "you're gonna be all nekkid and shit when I do this, yo," (I think he says "yo" all the time) and her chest heaves and cannons fire and skywrite 'marriage should be between a man and a woman's right breast' and she goes on to sing another fucking medley of her hits from two years ago?
James Joyce tells you to delete your fucking blog. You are all pretentious twats Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.
Halley Suitt writes about the Howard Dean campaign and movement. Removing Joe Trippi from the Dean camp was all about that realignment -- away from "the movement" and back to "a campaign". It was a fearless 360 degree turn and it remains to be seen if Dean can decouple from that runaway freight train of democracy and ride the rails to a simple nomination as the leading Democratic nominee. I hate to rain on any social software parade, but I think the operative word of the two is SOCIAL, not SOFTWARE. When you think software is the important part of any radical change in the way people live -- no matter how exquisite and elegant that software may be -- you're focusing on the wrong story.
Chip Gibbons links to Walter in Denver who writes about North Korea's concentration camps. Once the philosophical determination has been made that the needs of society outweigh the sovereignty of individuals, anything goes. North Korea is a miserable place, and if these prisoners are impeding the progress of the country then they should be eliminated from society. That's what it means to put society ahead of the individual. The only remaining point of contention is the severity of the punishment. There is another option, of course. Instead of using government and the criminal justice system to protect the needs of society you could reserve the use of those institutions strictly to protect the rights of individuals. That would mean prosecuting and punishing only those who directly violate the rights of others. Even the U.S. and other freer countries don't do that.
Death camps are the inevitable result of a powerful state.
Harry Brighouse writes about conservatives, values, and gay marriage. Rather to my surprise, reflecting on issues about the family has made me think that the state should make some, limited, assumptions about what constitutes a flourishing human life, and that conservatives are right to assert the value of one aspect of procreation, even if they do so in entirely the wrong way. Neither Macedo nor Mansfield distinguish between child bearing and child-rearing. I assume that procreation is supposed to include both. Think first about childbearing. This is just obviously not necessary for a perfect or complete human life: no (biological) men can do it, so if it is possible for a man to live a perfect life, childbearing is not necessary for it. If no man can live a perfect human life anyway, then the impossibility of childrearing is irrelevant to the case against (male) homosexuality and homosexual marriage. But, child-rearing is different: I think it is a necessary part of a fully flourishing life for many, if not most, human beings. But child-rearing can be done by homosexual couples, if society allows it. So, thereâ•˙s no problem with homosexuality on this front.
AKMA is curious about what will happen when Google's Googliness kicks into Orkut. But letâ•˙s remember, this project has backing from Google. And Google attained its present search-engine pre-eminence through. . . . tracking and measuring real connections among websites. My uninformed guess is that the present flaky rating program will turn out only to have provided a rough seeding base, and that Orkut turns out to have in reserve a Pagerank-like algorithm for measuring the online association between people, so that instead of crude characterizations such as smileys and ice cubes, and even hearts, weâ•˙ll see some characterizations based on measurable linking/citing behavior. That will, in turn, have weaknesses of its own, but itâ•˙ll be a great deal more interesting and less trivial.
Matthias The Correction writes about religious ecstasy. It is beautiful to hear stories of God's grace, and they are lovely things to consider. But in the end, they don't mean much to anyone other than the individual who experienced them. And even for those people, such experiences do not remain fresh. The mind has a way of paving over the extranormal, whitewashing all experiences to fit in with our understanding, smoothing out the wrinkles in our already-complex worldviews. The shower pushed me along a path, but it no longer sustains me. It cannot; its work has been done. But we need not look to the heavens for miracles. We need not look beyond our own backyards for outpourings of God's love. Some people, more devout by half than I will ever be, have never had any kind of religious ecstasy at all. And yet they believe. For some, the witness of the saints is enough. For others, the graceful cant of a butterfly in the air is enough.
David Madore writes about some problems with Orkut. Everything is way too US-centric. I'm not even talking about having to enter one's height in feet and inches when every single other country in the world uses SI units. It's the location field that annoys me most: it's only by zip code, and if you don't live in the US or in Canada it won't make sense of one. This is plain stupid. They should be storing a longitude and latitude instead: convert US zip codes to geo coordinates, and have a database of major world cities for other people, or let the user explicitly enter his coordinates if he prefers to. That way they could even display a world map with little dots showing the density of registered users; or one could easily find the list of users living within this-or-that distance from oneself. Please: how hard is it to obtain a list of the world's 10000 largest cities, by country, with precise coordinates? There's simply no excuse for not having done this. Also, I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure all times are expressed in US Pacific time: ever heard of Universal time or about letting the user pick his favorite time zone, guys?
Ryan Overbey links to anti-Islam propaganda. I really hope all those American evangelicals itching to save souls in Iraq don't rely on this trash. They'll get their asses kicked. Missionaries do better when they stick to their strengths: bribing people with food, medicine, and education.
Main external link for this post http://www.makeoutcity.com/Archives/2004/02/03/131700Post Topics:Listings, Politics, Education, Hardware, CSS, Emergent Democracy, family, Social Software, Iraq, Writing, Thinking, Justice, The State, Influence, Orkut
Hip Hop You Don't Stop Posted: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 22:17:12 GMT You have to read Chip Gibbons' annotation of Bush's budget. Jakob Nielsen writes about online surveys and Keep It Short Stupid! One goal beats all others when designing a customer survey for a website: maximize the response rate. Low response rates can create actively misleading survey findings because they're likely to be based on a biased sample of your most committed users as opposed to most users (who have better things to do than take your survey). It doesn't matter what you "learn" from a survey; you can't trust the data if it doesn't represent your users.
Tibor Machan writes about how upsetting it is that one cannot mention the personality of the poor with respect to "solving" poverty. Yet, in nearly all the studies of this phenomenon of extreme poverty, scholars tend, in the main, only to search out impersonal factors that impede development, factors such as climate, terrain, disease, ignorance, and so forth. What doesnâ•˙t seem to find a place in the thinking about world poverty is that people themselves sometimes â•„ even often â•„ are responsible for how they fare. This is clearly evident to us when we consider our own friends, neighbors, acquaintances, so why should it not be so with people in far off lands? (We even know people who are poor deliberately â•„ ascetics and ones who have taken a religious wow of poverty!) Probably we shy away from considering the poorâ•˙s own complicity in their poverty because we donâ•˙t know those far away well enough and we tend to avoid explanations that have a normative component. Instead, scholars tend to rely on general models which invoke causal variables of an impersonal kind, so as to explain poverty. Studies of the phenomena, influenced very much by the tradition of value-free analysis in the social sciences, do not make reference to the merits of the beliefs and conduct of the individuals who experience the poverty.
Related to this is the story that Doug Miller linked about the African villages refusing healthcare because they thought it would help demons possess them or something. If you don't want to be helped, don't complain when we don't.
Ethan Zuckerman writes about emergent democracy and how the Internet can be involved, but with great skepticism. When Joi and Jim talk about action emerging from online community organizing, I get the most skeptical. In many developed nations, especially the United States, the greatest enemy of activism is apathy. Grassroots activism may turn out to be a powerful weapon to fight apathy and encourage engagement. But apathy may not be the problem in other nations. In nations with a high deal of political repression, the enemy of activism may be threats to personal safety. In these situations, transparent public debate leading to action is likely an unwise path to political change. Can we expect democracy to emerge from Internet communities in countries where political activity is constrained and the Internet is censored? Or are we assuming that these democratizing technologies are only applicable in places where democracy and accompanying rights of free expression are already well protected?
Dave Winer writes about breasts. Oh my. For the record, I missed Janet Jackson's breast because I was writing something at halftime yesterday. Women's breasts are great. I think there should be a requirement that all women bare their breasts if they want to when they're on television. It should be a choice thing. I'm pro-choice. It might be more comfortable. It's unbelievable that Michael Powell is having a hissy fit over this. More breasts, not less. That's my opinion.
Lance Arthur writes about the "Stupor Bowl." Janet Jackson's tits are real. I would have said that this was all a publicity stunt and it was meant to happen, because how could Justin "accidentally" tear off her breast cover? He reached right over, and she let him, and he grabbed it and pulled and look, nipple! And, better even than that, nipple hardware! And then he's all "sorry about the wardrobe malfunction, yo," and MTV is all, "well, (shrug), we didn't know that was going to happen," and CBS is all "hey, they did it! not us. it was them" and shit and whatever and like, okay, so let's throw a hissy fit. And then America is all, "Hey, boob!" and the FCC Chairman is all "I am highly offended and deeply aroused," and Janet's all, "I have a new album coming out and my new single drops on Monday and how can I get some free publicity?" and I'm all, "Wait, what? Was that a... that was her... am I in fucking France or something?" Sure it's a tit, but it's a celebrity tit! On the most widely-watched spectacle on TV! In Prime Time! And it's a Jackson! So, that's all important to remember. And also: So, what was supposed to happen? Justin was going to reach over and grab her breast cover and pull and it reveals a diorama in support of our troops in Iraq as he sings "you're gonna be all nekkid and shit when I do this, yo," (I think he says "yo" all the time) and her chest heaves and cannons fire and skywrite 'marriage should be between a man and a woman's right breast' and she goes on to sing another fucking medley of her hits from two years ago?
James Joyce tells you to delete your fucking blog. You are all pretentious twats Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.
Halley Suitt writes about the Howard Dean campaign and movement. Removing Joe Trippi from the Dean camp was all about that realignment -- away from "the movement" and back to "a campaign". It was a fearless 360 degree turn and it remains to be seen if Dean can decouple from that runaway freight train of democracy and ride the rails to a simple nomination as the leading Democratic nominee. I hate to rain on any social software parade, but I think the operative word of the two is SOCIAL, not SOFTWARE. When you think software is the important part of any radical change in the way people live -- no matter how exquisite and elegant that software may be -- you're focusing on the wrong story.
Chip Gibbons links to Walter in Denver who writes about North Korea's concentration camps. Once the philosophical determination has been made that the needs of society outweigh the sovereignty of individuals, anything goes. North Korea is a miserable place, and if these prisoners are impeding the progress of the country then they should be eliminated from society. That's what it means to put society ahead of the individual. The only remaining point of contention is the severity of the punishment. There is another option, of course. Instead of using government and the criminal justice system to protect the needs of society you could reserve the use of those institutions strictly to protect the rights of individuals. That would mean prosecuting and punishing only those who directly violate the rights of others. Even the U.S. and other freer countries don't do that.
Death camps are the inevitable result of a powerful state.
Harry Brighouse writes about conservatives, values, and gay marriage. Rather to my surprise, reflecting on issues about the family has made me think that the state should make some, limited, assumptions about what constitutes a flourishing human life, and that conservatives are right to assert the value of one aspect of procreation, even if they do so in entirely the wrong way. Neither Macedo nor Mansfield distinguish between child bearing and child-rearing. I assume that procreation is supposed to include both. Think first about childbearing. This is just obviously not necessary for a perfect or complete human life: no (biological) men can do it, so if it is possible for a man to live a perfect life, childbearing is not necessary for it. If no man can live a perfect human life anyway, then the impossibility of childrearing is irrelevant to the case against (male) homosexuality and homosexual marriage. But, child-rearing is different: I think it is a necessary part of a fully flourishing life for many, if not most, human beings. But child-rearing can be done by homosexual couples, if society allows it. So, thereâ•˙s no problem with homosexuality on this front.
AKMA is curious about what will happen when Google's Googliness kicks into Orkut. But letâ•˙s remember, this project has backing from Google. And Google attained its present search-engine pre-eminence through. . . . tracking and measuring real connections among websites. My uninformed guess is that the present flaky rating program will turn out only to have provided a rough seeding base, and that Orkut turns out to have in reserve a Pagerank-like algorithm for measuring the online association between people, so that instead of crude characterizations such as smileys and ice cubes, and even hearts, weâ•˙ll see some characterizations based on measurable linking/citing behavior. That will, in turn, have weaknesses of its own, but itâ•˙ll be a great deal more interesting and less trivial.
Matthias The Correction writes about religious ecstasy. It is beautiful to hear stories of God's grace, and they are lovely things to consider. But in the end, they don't mean much to anyone other than the individual who experienced them. And even for those people, such experiences do not remain fresh. The mind has a way of paving over the extranormal, whitewashing all experiences to fit in with our understanding, smoothing out the wrinkles in our already-complex worldviews. The shower pushed me along a path, but it no longer sustains me. It cannot; its work has been done. But we need not look to the heavens for miracles. We need not look beyond our own backyards for outpourings of God's love. Some people, more devout by half than I will ever be, have never had any kind of religious ecstasy at all. And yet they believe. For some, the witness of the saints is enough. For others, the graceful cant of a butterfly in the air is enough.
David Madore writes about some problems with Orkut. Everything is way too US-centric. I'm not even talking about having to enter one's height in feet and inches when every single other country in the world uses SI units. It's the location field that annoys me most: it's only by zip code, and if you don't live in the US or in Canada it won't make sense of one. This is plain stupid. They should be storing a longitude and latitude instead: convert US zip codes to geo coordinates, and have a database of major world cities for other people, or let the user explicitly enter his coordinates if he prefers to. That way they could even display a world map with little dots showing the density of registered users; or one could easily find the list of users living within this-or-that distance from oneself. Please: how hard is it to obtain a list of the world's 10000 largest cities, by country, with precise coordinates? There's simply no excuse for not having done this. Also, I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure all times are expressed in US Pacific time: ever heard of Universal time or about letting the user pick his favorite time zone, guys?
Ryan Overbey links to anti-Islam propaganda. I really hope all those American evangelicals itching to save souls in Iraq don't rely on this trash. They'll get their asses kicked. Missionaries do better when they stick to their strengths: bribing people with food, medicine, and education.
Main external link for this post http://www.makeoutcity.com/Archives/2004/02/03/131700Post Topics:Listings, Politics, Education, Hardware, CSS, Emergent Democracy, family, Social Software, Iraq, Writing, Thinking, Justice, The State, Influence, Orkut
Whence does democracy emerge? Posted: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 08:59:05 GMT When I think about Emergent Democracy, and I confess that I'm not well schooled in the theory, I ask myself, from whence does democracy emerge? And that is really the nature of the question that leads me to this thinking...
Weinberger is bummed out Posted: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 00:01:20 GMT  I was working on organizing a party for Etech - when Dave Weinberger pointed me to this article by Andrew Orlowski (yes - HIM again!) David was directly attacked several times and more or less blamed for Dean's losses.
Pretty harsh.
In some ways I actually agree with many of Jerome Armstrong's views (the guy Orlowski quoted in the article) on how the technology 'pundits' associated with the Dean campaign "could be made to look" like blowhards, eggheads and far from representing anybody's beliefs - especially the everyman.
I agree that Technology shouldn't be seen as a panacea, solve all our problems, it's more important than people. That's how Orlowski made Weinberger seem like.
But we all - that's NOT what David Weinberger is all about. In fact I've heard him plea for human passionate, logical, everyman-based 'sechel' (Yiddish for 'common sense) many timesin public and private - so I know Orlowski is just twisting words and pushing the limits of honesty to make a name for himself.
But something tells me that this Guy Armstrong is all about POINTING fingers and laying blame on bloggers, MeetUp and the Dean on-line efforts - for what went wrong with the vote results. orlowski simply repeated what this Armstrong guy said - and it sure seems to me, that he "had it out' for david. That's also pretty obvious.
But what's funniest to me - is how typical political, word twisting, slimey, back-room shenanigans has come to our world. Because of the logical extension and out reach of the Web, politics were SURE to get involved.
And now we're experisincing teh ULTIMATE spin doctoring, stretch the truth to suit our own ends, kind of back stabboing that politis is all about. And scapegoating is a crucial technique in a battle back - for some lagard candidate.
Now that they've brought in an old school, smoke filled room, inside the beltway kind of guy -you wonder why the nerds are getting scapegoated?
SAME OLD STORY.
Call it chads, a scene from Citizen Kane, Watergate or dead Chicagoans voting for 15 years after their death - politics has ALWAYS been about dirty pool and now the Internet got involved. The ONLY thing that matters in the world of politics - are the vote results.
the ONLY THING.
It's the same bottom line, make a profit, do your IPO focused vision that drives business. But politics is not business - so making money ain't the goal. It's this other sort of 'chit' system - a system called democracy.
And in Amerika - it's winner take all - no seconds or runners up. The Republicans figured that out in the 60's. That's why they had Nixon. Now they have Bush.
Here's the letter I wrote David - to try and cheer him up. I'm actually really proud of what David, Zack and the whole Emergent Democracy/MeetUp/Drupal/DeanLink thing have done up til now. If nothing else happens... they can be proud of their accomplishments.
=======
Dear David,
So what is the answer that traditional politicians would give - to counter where you're coming from?
Focus groups in malls with lots of 3 x 5 cards asking 5 versions of the same question? As usual this Orlowski piece spent all it's time criticizing and did not list ONE alternative approach to what the Dean campaign has been doing up until now.
Orlowski's writing reminds me of Ken Aueletta or Roy Cohen. Vicious mean spirited pandering to reptilian hatred, designed to reach into the bigot inside us all. It's almost propaganda.
What is this 'bellhead', inside the beltway guy gonna do differently that Joe Trippi didn't do? How does that effect Dean's policies? What actions will be taken that counter-act what's been up until now? What's more important ot Dean - getting elected, or........
The Dean campaign seemed to be playing by different rules - and I'm surprised that no one realized that silly things like media coverage and voter turnout would NOT go along with ANY sort of progressive approach to ANYTHING.
Even Democrats get reactionary and vicious when confronted with something that says: "the way you‚re doing it now (politics) is wrong - here's the right way..." Who's gonna admit they're wrong?
So it shouldn't surprise us if the media are in cahoots with the fascists and Dean was targeted with being made to look a fool and lose elections. It's all about media image.
Wag the Dog.
If they can make planes fly into buildings on cue - or seem to get all the wrong intelligence info - right when they need it the most (to start a war), they can steal an election campaign. Ever hear of Tricky Dick Nixon? How 'bout those Kennedy boys back in the 60's?
Watch them do a similar thing to Kerry. He's Catholic.
From the Road: Greenville, South Carolina Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 22:07:31 GMT We just landed in Greenville, South Carolina. This morning we started the day in Lansing, Michigan. Over 800 people came to hear the Gov speak at Michigan State University. We had to have two overflow rooms!! Here's part of what the Gov said: "If you want to stand up to George Bush and the special interests who own his White House, stand with us." "If you want to address the real concerns of American families, from the challenges of making ends meet, to the Iraqi war that continues to take young lives, stand with us." "If you want to bring Americans together to reclaim our government and our democracy, then I say: stand with us."
Right now we're in Greenville for a debate that will be on MSNBC at 7:00pm tonight. I hope everyone will tune in and cheer the Gov on!
Turn it around Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 20:17:41 GMT Reading in the Chronicle about Howard Dean's new campaign strategy, I find myself thinking less about how candidates learn to use the Net than about how the Net learns to use candidates. Maybe after I get some sleep I'll remember exactly what I meant by that. Meanwhile, read Britt's Reboot post. As usual, lots of good energy, good links, good ideas. [Later, in the morning...] Whoa: Chris Lydon's essay, After New Hampshire is simply brilliant. The gist: No, the results so far are not about politics. They're about an assault by commercial media on the very idea of a self-willed, self-defining citizenry. Howard Dean scares the institutional media out of their wits--not because of who he is or what he might do as president, but because of what he and "Internet democracy" say about them. In September, 2002, right about the moment Howard Dean was deciding to run, the nonpareil media critic Jon Katz was writing prophetically on the New York University web page: "The flight of the young has become central for our understanding of what journalism is or needs to be. The young drive our new information culture. They invented and understand new forms of media--especially the Net the the Web... They understand, too, the extraordinary power and meaning of interactivity, and how it is redefining narrative and story-telling... But journalism doesn't get it, and has resisted the idea fiercely. Newspapers, newsmagazines and TV networks haven't radically changed form or content in half a century, despite their aging audiences, and growing competition from new media sources. They are allergic to interactivity. Increasingly, it appears they are incapable of it." Katz forecast it all. The Dean campaign is everything that contemporary journalism is not. If you believe he is their worst nightmare, it's small wonder they tried to crush him like a bug. Almost every touch from Big Media has been to cheapen the Dean cause, to miss the point, to find some personal excuse not to notice the Dean movement.
Also outstanding: John Perry Barlow's The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised. If anything, this election may reconfirm the preeminent role of the idiot box in American politics, just as the Bush administration is demonstrating the power of plutocracy to an extent not witnessed since Karl Rove's political hero William McKinley was elected. I have seen the past, and it still works.
More brilliance follows. Read it. Here's the closer: Some of us believe that another four years of the Bush Administration might turn America into something so oligarchical that it will make Mexico look like Sweden, so broke that the dollar will buy less than the Hungarian pengo, surveillant enough to make East Germany look like a good start, and puritanical enough to make Cotton Mather feel at home. Some of us want a president who is straight about his real reasons for sending our kids off to die and kill other kids, a government that is of, for, and by more people than will fit on the Forbes list, and a military that isn't simply a private security force for the Fortune 500. We want to give our grandchildren something more than a crushing debt and a country too stripped of resources and opportunities to pay it off. The stakes seem high to us. But if we feel that way, and many of us do, we will have to knock on doors and persuade the folks inside to turn off their televisions and talk about what's really going on, just as we will have to turn off our computers occasionally to have such exchanges. If we are to restore democracy in America, we will have to get out amongst 'em and engage in it. I believe our arguments are persuasive, but we have to present them in person to the people who don't already believe us.
Reading this, I can't get Jackson Browne's Before the Deluge out of my mind. Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge
Recently I spent some time with some old friends. When I told them I had just come back from visiting the Dean Campaign in Vermont, one of them said "He's too angry." They preferred Kerry, they said, but for no reason I recall. They weren't big TV watchers, but I guessed they watched enough. Or maybe not. Maybe they understood Reality better than I did. Big Media's big story from the start hasn't been the horse race of the primaries, but the boxing match of the presidential election, in which George W. Bush defends his heavyweight title. Who to cast in the role of the challenger? Gore was the guy. He had won the last fight on points, but lost on a TKO after the final round, when the referees declared Bush the winner. But the fight was gone from Al, and Al was gone from the fight. Without Big Al, Big Media needed somebody who looked right to play the part of The Contender. Only Big John Kerry made sense. He was tall and leathery, a military veteran, a Washington insider, and a speaker gifted with the ability to paint a smooth rhetorical gloss over every contradiction ˜ the political equivalent of an actor who never blows his lines. So Kerry was Big Media's man in the first place. And he still is. A short guy named Dean climbed in the ring, but Big Media mocked him until the crowd went boo. Two primaries later, Dean's out and Kerry's name is going up on the marquée. Meanwhile, there's the matter of that TKO: the constitutional crisis that should have happened after the last election, but didn't. Big Media would rather forget about it, but the voters won't let them. I was delivered that realization last night when I talked on the phone with another friend. She's a republican, a historian and an astute political observer. She reads a lot of blogs, but she also watches a lot of TV. After telling me that ABC pretty much "apologized" for tendentious reporting of the "Dean Scream" (I just saw Diane Sawyer do a huge mea culpa on Good Morning America, offering excerpts of the same from CNN and Fox... no useful links on the ABC News site, of course) she offered something of a Unified Field Theory that explained everything from ABC's apology to Joe Trippi's resignation to the unexpectedly large support for Kerry by voters primary states who favored Dean in the polls only a few weeks ago.... This is a recall election, she said. Dean isn't the angry one. If you want anger, look to the voters. There is an enormous resolve out there to recall George W. Bush. As we've seen in California, the country likes the straight burboun of direct democracy. The representative system failed in the last presidential election. Regardless of who won, the process was an ugly and unfair mess. Now voters see a barely-elected president with delusions of empire, preparing to keep the country in perpetual war, spending trillions in money the government doesn't have... Meanwhile the country appears headed toward a one-party state, thanks in large part to gerrymandering that deeply perverts the very principles of representative democracy. A second term for Bush will also guarantee a republican Supreme Court as well. With all that writing on the wall, neither the voters nor the democratic machine cares as much about who started the recall as they do about the recall itself ˜ just like we saw here in California, where the recall started by Ron Unz was finished by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This indeed makes the primaries a referendum on electability. These voters are realists. Some of them use the Net, but all of them watch TV. If the TV wants to put Kerry in the ring, then Kerry's the man, for better or worse. If the counter-revolution will be televised, these voters say, then the revolution will be televised too. The job now is to get Kerry in condition.
Anyway, I kinda nodded along with all of this. It made sense to me. But the Net is still there, connecting voters in more ways than ever. And connecting governance as well. The Net is the people's medium. It's where understanding is produced as well as consumed. In the long run the Net, and the people who use it best, will win. I just hope I live to see it. Bonus link: David Weinberger's Loose Democracy at his new Corante blog. Main external link for this post http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/01/29#turnItAroundPost Topics:Listings, Politics, Will Wright, Learning Theory, Ideas, Security, Media, John Robb, reBoot, Howard Rheingold, Emergent Democracy, David Weinberger, Personal Publishing, Topic Exchange, Chris Pirillo, two-way links, Don Box, John Perry Barlow, Yale University, Social networks, Grid Computing, Our Society, George Bush, Writing, Buy Music, Howard Dean, Thinking, Big Media, Journalism, The State, Systems Thinking, Home Networking, Pay for usage, Shelly Powers MR. RUSSERT: Is it appropr... Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 18:58:48 GMT MR. RUSSERT: Is it appropriate to call the president of the United States a deserter?
GEN. CLARK: Well, you know, Tim, I wouldn't have used that term and I don't see the issues that way. This is an election about the future, and what's at stake in this election is the future of how we're going to move ahead with the economy, how we're going to keep the United States safe and what kind of democracy we want to have, whether we want an open, transparent government or whether we want a very closed and secretive government. To me, those are the issues.
Stand with Us Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 17:18:27 GMT Governor Dean is speaking right now in East Lansing, Michigan. Here is some of the text of his prepared remarks: Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire have cast their ballots. The 2004 election is underway. The election won‚t be decided by pundits or polls. That‚s not the way our Constitution works. Democracy leaves the last word to the people, and the people are going to decide ˆ in primaries and caucuses across this country in coming months. I began this campaign over two years ago, hoping to talk about issues: health care, investing in children, balancing budgets. I was outraged at the direction of the country ˆ but what struck me quickly was how deeply my outrage was shared by the people. Outrage not just at the President but at the Democrats in Washington for failing to stand up to George Bush and for what we believe. Our economy is at risk. Our international reputation is in tatters. The fabric of our society is being ripped apart. These aren‚t petty political differences to be papered over. This is a fundamental disagreement over the very nature of what it means to be an American. Eleven months ago, when few people knew our campaign existed, I spoke before the Democratic Party leadership in Washington. I asked some fundamental questions. I wanted to know what the Democrats, including many of my opponents, were doing when they gave George Bush a blank check for his war in Iraq. I wanted to know about the deficit, health care, and No Child Left Behind. I am still waiting for the answers. The American people deserve the answers. The Democratic Party deserves the answers. This campaign is about who has the courage to ask these questions, the judgment to find solutions, and the toughness to fight for real change. In my book, leadership means having the courage to stand up for what you believe, no matter what the polls say. And to deliver results, not just rhetoric. Today, all my opponents are talking the talk. Even those who voted for the war speak like they opposed it. Those who voted for No Child Left Behind, now criticize it. Those who shrank from confrontation in the face of polls and pundits, now compete to outdo each other in their condemnation of George W. Bush. But in 2004, Democrats must decide: Who will stand up for you against George W. Bush? I say, only someone who has consistently and firmly stood for change ˆ even when it wasn‚t politically popular ˆ can truly lead this great struggle. I ask Democrats to imagine 2005. Radical Republicans of the BushˆDeLay school will press their divisive agenda: omore tax give-aways, driving national debt higher;
ophony health care plans that transfer your money to HMOs and drug companies; oefforts to slice away further at the Bill of Rights, threatening a woman‚s right to choose, and giving government greater power to search our homes, read our mail, monitor our Internet use;
omaybe even another dangerous, preemptive unilateral war that puts our brave men and women in uniform at risk and further damages moral leadership.
When that happens, who will stand up for you?
A Washington insider who shifts with every poll? Who cuts deals that sell out the interests of ordinary Americans? Who has spent decades collaborating with the special interests that fuel his campaigns?
Or someone from outside Washington, truly independent, and ready to do what‚s right? As President, I will stand up for you ˆ I won‚t just say it. You know I will do it ˆ because I have done it. For eleven years in Vermont, we balanced budgets. We created 20 percent more jobs and raised the minimum wage.
We invested in Vermont‚s children. We lowered child abuse rates and raised graduation rates. Teen pregnancy went way down; childhood immunization way up.
We provided health care for nearly every child in Vermont. We expanded prescription coverage for seniors. And we can do it for all Americans if we stand together. If you want to stand up to George Bush and the special interests who own his White House, stand with us. If you want to address the real concerns of American families, from the challenges of making ends meet, to the Iraqi war that continues to take young lives, stand with us. If you want to bring Americans together to reclaim our government and our democracy, then I say: Stand with us. Main external link for this post http://blog.deanforamerica.com/archives/003450.htmlPost Topics:Politics, Will Wright, Emergent Democracy, family, Spell checking, Stephen Downes, Iraq, Our Society, Health, Leadership, George Bush, United Nations, faces, Howard Dean, Knowledge Economy, Home Networking, Pay for usage, Shelly Powers
The Atlantic Monthly, January/Feburary 2004 Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:41:33 GMT In the 2004 January/February issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows writes about the planning that was done by US government prior to the Iraq occupation. There was a great deal of research done--but it was "willfully ignored by the people in charge. This inside story [is of] historic failure." Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz's Wolfowitz, comments on the criticism that is generally lodged at the administration: "This is an important point," he said, " because of this issue of What did we believe? ... The common line is, nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us that everything was going to be swell." Chalabi, the exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often been blamed for making rosy predictions about the ease of governing post-war Iraq. "So we predicted that everything was going to be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell," Here Feith paused for a few seconds, raised his hands with both palms up, and put on a "Can you believe it?" expression. "I mean--one would really have to be a simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not that dumb, that how can people write things like that?" He sounded amazed rather than angry. [pg. 53]
The primary problem it seemed, was that the people in charge put such a great focus on the inability to predict the future that they did not trust any or investigate any prediction what so ever. Caution turned into carelessness. And this problem was not resolved any easier with the Pentagon being in complete control of the operation. Here is a comment about its style, versus the traditional approach: According to the standard military model, warfare unfolds through four phases: "deterrence and engagement," "seize the initiative," "decisive operations." and "post-conflict." Reality is never divided quite that neatly, of course, but the War College report stressed that Phase IV "post-conflict" planning absolutely had to start as early as possible, well before Phase III--"decisive operations"--the war itself. But neither the Army nor the other services moved very far past Phases III thinking. "All the A-Team guys wanted be in on Phase III, and the B-team guys were put on Phase IV," one man involved in Phase IV told me. Frederick Barton, of the Center for Strategic and INternational Studies, who was involved in postwar efforts in Haiti, Rwanda, and elsewhere, put it differently. "If you went to the Pentagon before the war, all the concentration was on the war," he said. "If you went there during the war, all the concentration was on the war. And if you went there after the war, they'd say, 'That's Jerry Bremer's job.'" Still, the War College report confirmed what the Army leadership already suspected: that its real challenges would begin when it took control of Baghdad. [pg. 68-69]
Kenneth Pollack on the details of the Iraqi WMD Bubble. Some defenders of the Administration have reportedly countered that all it did was make the best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a defense attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case for a client (even if the client is guilty). That is a false analogy. A defense attorney is responsible for presenting only one side of a dispute. The President is responsible for serving the entire nation. Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the U.S. government╉and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.
P. J. O'Rourke deconstructs the speeches of the various Democratic presidential candidates. Voters are not really expected to pay attention to the grandiloquence. And candidates are not really expected to produce it. That is, candidates--major candidates, anyways--don't write their own speeches. Custom dictates that others take no credit for doing so. And the candidates cannot be said to "give speeches," as that phrase was understood from the dawn of language until Roosevelt and Churchill. The public speaking skills of the presidential candidates (Al Sharpton always excepted) are such that orations are more discarded than given, delivered in the paper-boy-and-porch-roof manner, a kind of campaign litter. Still, it's important to check what the candidates are saying, as opposed to what commentators say the candidates are saying--and, indeed, as opposed to what the candidates say they are saying when they are called to account for what they say. Thus the printed transcripts of thirty-six speeches by ten candidates have been read. Analysis of the contents may provide a lesson in contemporary democracy, or ("What we need most immediately is a sense of immediacy"--Joe Lieberman) it may not. [pg. 95]
And later: Reading the candidates' speeches, one's mind wanders. And one's mind is not alone in its meandering. The whole nation seems to have drifted away from the candidates. "I want my country back," says Howard Dean. "I'm running for President to turn America around," says John Kerry. [pg. 96]
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Do People Really Believe This Stuff? Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:41:33 GMT The Binary Circumstance writes about measuring morals without a ruler and those who don't understand self-interest. The article also discusses rational-choice theory: Rational-choice theory -- the hypothesis, popular in economics and political science, that we behave in ways that efficiently serve our self-interest -- can't explain such behavior ["cheating" or in general, not following morals -Je]. Nor can it explain why we make anonymous gifts to charity, return lost wallets to strangers, or choose to work for modest pay at socially useful jobs.
The problem is that they don't have a clear, objective definitions of what rational and self-interest are. To assume that it is rational to use material wealth and/or social status as the gold standard of rational behavior is an irrational premise to begin with. In and of themselves, wealth and status have no value, for the same reason that food has no value unless you are hungry and a car has no value unless you have a need to use it. Presumably, if a person gives to charity, returns a wallet or works for modest pay, he sees some payoff in it for himself, otherwise he would not do it.
Kuro5hin.org reports on Americans making it illegal to laugh. Samantha Marson, a 21 year old woman from Britain, was jailed in Miami after making a joke to an American customs official. The joke: "Hey be careful, I have three bombs in here," she quipped, as her carry-on luggage was screened. Unfortunately, officials asked her to repeat herself twice and promptly had her arrested. Â She was released from Miami-Dade County Jail, but only with a $5,000 bond.
See also: Faré on "Our Ultimate Weapon: Laughter."
Rob Lawson doesn't think that America is an Empire, or trying to become one. When a nation builds empires and wish to conqueror other lands, they usually start with nations which share a border and/or close to their region. See: Hitler, WW2. In the end, strategy overwhelms greed. So, why hasn't America conquered Canada or Mexico yet? We have the ability, the army, the technology, and enough money to make Microsoft top-dog Bill Gates jealous. Here's a better question: Why do we keep sending foreign aid to small, puny, third world nations? In the long run, taking over the country itself would save us billions of dollars. As I said: In the end, strategy overwhelms greed. The sheer will of the American people will never allow our government to dominate countries which do not pose a threat to us or our allies. The left uses this ╲America is an empire╡ canard so much because they hate America, Americans, and our way of life.
Apparently ALL empires are evil and must do exactly the same things in the course of their development.
Lisa Williams wonders about what Fascism really is. I hear the term "fascist" being thrown around a lot lately, but I have to confess although I get the idea I still don't have a clear conception of what "fascism" is, really. Most other "isms" in politics have a clear connection to the process of identifying leaders (democracy = leader chosen by people; monarchy = leader identified by heredity, etc.) but "fascism" doesn't really fit this mold. It turns out that fascism isn't really built on ideas or a "platform" or program that's expressed in written documents (such as the Communist Manifesto for communism or the Federalist/Antifederalist papers and of course the Constitution for US democracy) but is instead a sort of individual gut response to insecurity that can be whipped up into a mania.
MNOT writes about the funny subtleties of United States law. As alluded to before, youâ•˙re taking on legal risk when you allow people to say things to you. Yes, this is crazy, but hey, itâ•˙s the US legal system. Go figure. For Weblogs, this means copyright on comments. Specifically, if you reproduce something that someone else has created without a license from them, you open yourself to copyright violation lawsuits. Now, sane people know that comments are meant to be reproduced, and Iâ•˙d be willing to bet reasonably large amounts of money that a court would say that if you submit a comment to a blog, you know the consequences. In many ways, itâ•˙s like sending mail to a mailing list; if thereâ•˙s a reasonable expectation that people know how mailing lists work, youâ•˙d likely be said to have given up your copyright when you post.
Tibor R. Machan writes about the fallacy of market failures. The first case of alleged market failure is no such thing because it assumes that some alternative method for providing the goods or services could be more efficient. Yet, as public choice theory has shown, what occurs instead is that political failures replace the so-called market failures, ones that are far more severe and lasting than the supposed wasteful duplications of free markets. Mill was wrong, also, because he failed to notice that nearly all competitive production can be faulted for producing supposedly wasteful duplication â•„ ten competing shoe manufacturers all need to have the equipment, overhead, and delivery systems to get their shoes to market, so why not fuss about that duplication? (Indeed, it is Karl Marx who regarded the market anarchic and irrational for, among other things, just such duplications.) But Mill also failed to appreciate that once one places the provision of anything whatever into the purview of coercive government, all the ills of politics will beset the process. Graft, special interest favoritism, pork and similar "inefficiencies," not to mention violations of justice, will make for a far greater mess than a little duplication ever would.
This is explored in greater depth by François-René Rideau in Public Goods Fallacies.
Pete Guither at Drug War Rant writes about effective means of quelling addictions. If you're going to read one article this week to gain a new perspective on the drug war, you must read this one by Dan Gardner in today's Edmonton Journal. It's about one of those notions in the drug war that has been so ingrained into our consciousness by the drug warriors that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around the most effective reform. My friends will tell me, "OK, I can see what you're saying regarding legalizing marijuana, but what about the hard drugs? What are you going to do about heroin?" My response: "Give it away for free" is meant to shock them. However, it's also the truth. It is, in fact, the only approach for some heroin addicts that has historically been shown to be effective. In some cases, it is the best approach to reduce crime, increase the life-span of addicts, reduce new addictions, and eliminate the profit incentive for dealers.
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Long Live Liberty Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 16:41:30 GMT Kieran Healy points to Tina Fetner on the Iowa Caucus. The opportunity for corruption in this process is enormous. Nobody could hear what was going on, the campaign leaders are striking deals with each other, but no one knows what the deals are. The campaign leaders are in charge of counting their own constituents. The rest of the people are sitting or standing around like sheep while all of this goes on around them. If they move, perhaps to talk with someone over from another campaign, they might not get counted. It was nowhere near the robust, townhall meeting exchange of views that I was hoping for. And it took forever - over 4 hours (not counting the platform stuff that makes up the 2nd half of the caucus). I was exhausted by the end of it.
Alex Halavais is against us! Burn him at the steak! For a long time, Iâ•˙ve wondered what a West Coast Revolution would look like: you know, secession by California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii, and╉for continuityâ•˙s sake if nothing else, British Columbia and Baja. If the latter two seem especially strange, remember that BC was a relative latecomer to Canada (joining in the 1870s) and often shares a cultural identity with the Pacific Northwest of the US, and that Baja is increasingly becoming a suburb of San Diego, and has a history of potential annexation. Itâ•˙s been a while since I read Ecotopia, and ecological concerns might very well be a part of this, but I think the difference is cultural. The West Coast thinks differently, it is a different culture, and a different nation.
François-René Rideau writes about the Mars mission and gives a great quote: I am irresistibly reminded of this quote from one of my favorite books, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman (RIP) and Charles Weingartner: Consider this: The first hole ever dug on the moon by a man-made machine is now done. It is the most expensive hole in the history of the human race. Now what does that mean? How do we know whether this is one of man's noblest achievements or if it is a game being played by a small group of lunatics for their own amusement -- at our expense?
Postman hits the nerve, he knows what questions to ask, what assumptions to question. But being a depraved leftist, he can provide no justifiable criterion to answer.
An article at Game Girl Advance doesn't really have an interesting content to me, but the headline is great: "Local man dances, awaits revolution." (Click if you're unhip for an explanation.) François-René Rideau on the Lord of the Rings and the meaning of the One Ring. Most importantly, the corrupting nature of the Ring's power wasn't explained, whereas in the book it is most important: the episode of Sam wearing it is most funny, whereas Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel and Faramir refusing it are most serious, and Boromir or Denethor desiring it is most sad. What is the nature of the Ring, according to me, will you ask? Well, don't read this summary, it's bogus. You could also find similarities between Frodo's quest and most any quests, including getting a PhD. But really, the meaning of the Ring, is really a libertarian message: in the words of Lord Acton, Power corrupts, and absolute Power corrupts absolutely. There is no way to achieve Good by using Power, because your very using it slowly turns you into the same Evil you wanted to fight. You can withhold Power, and prevent other people from using it; but ultimately, the only solution to the problems it raises is to destroy it.
The Binary Circumstance on what it means to be "homeless" in today's political climate. Both political parties exist to provide a home for well-financed special interests who wish to gain control of government so they can use government as a tool to control our lives and regulate the market to their advantage. What kind of person would want to feel comfortable in that home? Being homeless in the current political climate is a testament to self-esteem, respect for individual rights, and the quality of one's character.
Paul Hein writes about "Democracy at Its Best." Moreover, the rules of the caucuses state that any candidate who does not have a sufficient number of supporters in a "preference group" cannot be considered; he must lend his support to another, more viable, candidate. It wouldnâ•˙t do, I guess, to have too many choices available to the voters. You can carry this democracy thing too far! And it was delegates to the convention that the voters were choosing, not Presidential candidates. Whatâ•˙s more, the Iowa voters were not choosing delegates to the national convention, but to Iowa county conventions. These latter delegates, in turn, choose delegates to the national convention, but these delegates are not bound by anything but their own consciences; they are not committed to any particular candidate. Our triumph of democracy is an edifice of Jell-o, rooted in quicksand. [...] An innocent person â•„ say a child â•„ might assume that the way to elect a president would be to give each person a piece of paper, and ask him to write down the name of the person he favored for the job. The person with the largest number of votes moves into the White House. Obviously, this is NOT the way itâ•˙s done. The actual process is convoluted and confusing, and what the people think theyâ•˙re doing at the polls may not be what theyâ•˙re doing at all.
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More over at Loose Democracy Posted: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 15:51:35 GMT I've posted an appreciation of Joe Trippi over at my new Corante blog, "Loose Democracy." (I haven't figured out my policy about cross-posting myself, so for now I'm taking the raw self-promotional approach.)
Posted: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 18:06:17 GMT A new political blog
: David Weinberger has started a new Corante blog: Loose Democracy. I'm way looking forward to reading this because Weinberger is one of the smartest and most candid yet humble people in this new world. In his first post, he rebuts Clay Shirky: We do have a couple of indisputable facts: Dean came in a poor third in Iowa and a disappointing second in New Hampshire. But this by itself leads to no conclusions about whether social software hurt the campaign. For all we know, Dean would still be in single digits as an ex-governor of the Maple Sugar state if the online connection hadn't happened. And we certainly don't know that, if social software failed, it was because it lulled participants into a sense of "inevitability." That's just Clay's speculation. My earlier comment on this here. See especially Jack Balkin's analysis there.
New blog Posted: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 17:55:43 GMT I've started off my new Corante blog — on how the Net is changing our democracy and politics — with a critique of Clay's provocative Dean meme. The new blog is called Loose Democracy, and I'm open to comments, suggestions, criticisms, unfunded mandates and recall initiatives. And please remind me of the 4,000 people I've left off my blogroll...I have problems creating lists ex nihilo. All I can promise you is that I will never make a mistake and I will never ever be wrong.
Now that I've got a democracy, what should I do with it? Posted: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 02:52:51 GMT Opening John Stuart Mill's On Liberty today, I'm surprised by how fresh and modern this 1859 essay sounds. I suppose that's because Mill's ideas are the winning memes -- his writings embody how we still think about liberty and democracy today. In a way,
Little d democracy Posted: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 23:53:31 GMT Note: Contains completely partisan Deanism... I spent the day in Exeter, yet another picture perfect New Hampshire town, alternating between standing outside holding Dean signs and sitting in the unheated Town Hall, checking off voters on the Dean supporter list. Then, at 5pm, it was back to the Portsmouth HQ, phoning people to urge them to vote. In short, I spent the day being a little-d democrat. This is the real thing: American democracy. People reduced to their singular equality. Each one of them nuts in her or his own way. With the kids in their winter caps with animal ears or jester's horns. Shuffling in, trailing the midwinter cold behind them. Seeing friends they haven't talked with in months or years. College kids voting for the first time. A grandmother and her grown daughter, both wearing festive mittens. A blind woman being assisted in the voting booth. A husband taking a pink ballot to vote for a Republican and a wife taking the blue. A beautiful baby asleep in a back carrier as the father repeats his name softly to the local voting official. The real thing. Outside, the cold was the fact you tried to forget. Lots of Dean supporters, lots of Kerry supporters, some Clark, a few Edwards, and one lonely and very affable man with a Bush-Cheney sign. (Oddly, it turns out he likes Bush because he wants a balanced budget. He didn't accept my offer to take up a Dean sign.) We all shared our coffee and muffins. We laughed at the same jokes. All us Democrats know in a few months we're all going to be working on behalf of the the same person. My back aches. My feet are sore. My butt is warming up. And I'm ready to do it again.
Hodgepodge Posted: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 20:30:37 GMT Want a laugh?
It's a bit late, but this response to the State of the Union cracked me up. You'll probably have to have seen Buffy Season 3 to get the joke...
Spent much of the weekend listening to the Dean remixes. Amusing, and some are actually rather good. I'm just surprised nobody's yet redone Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell." As a child, we had an old Atari game called "Yar's Revenge" that I'm surprised nobody's tried to ape.
Avedon Carol quotes Hal O'Brien on military support for the Republicans come the 2004 election: Put it to you this way. A joke I heard from an NCO buddy of mine in the Army:
Q: What's the difference between Dubya and Jane Fonda?
A: Hey, at least Jane went to Vietnam! [Perhaps there's more reason to get paranoid over the inherent insecurity of the military's new Internet-based absentee voting system and the administration's completely dismissive response...]
Beware of the dog!
This week's local newspaper notes: You can tell the police log is real, because there is no way we could actually make this stuff up. Someone actually did call in Saturday morning to say their dog's foot was stuck in another dog's bum -- that's the technical term used by the dispatcher.
If we had made it up, we'd know how and why. Alas, it's a mystery to us.
Also in the local paper... Longtime readers may remember that last year, I thought I saw a bald eagle overhead. Well, this week a bald eagle was spotted at Ell Pond (apparently munching on dead goose) and somebody managed to get a photograph of the bird on the front page. The paper quotes a local birder who "said he has seen the eaagle in the area a few times this week." But that makes it quite likely that what I saw last December was in fact a bald eagle. As I said at the time, Wow.
Looking for something to read, I picked up The School of night -- a contemporary novel addressing the authorship question -- at the library on Saturday. I was amused to find a Post-It note inside the front cover listing three other books -- other recent novels about Shakespeare and all of which I have already read (A Mystery of errors, The Slaying of the shrew, and Chasing Shakespeares). When I got it home, it turned out there was a second Post-It under the first, listing more titles, neither of which I've read. [Alias Shakespeare Sobran, Joseph, and Isler Alan The Prince of W. End Ave] This tells me that (a) another library user has similar interests to mine, but (b) thanks to USAPAT privacy, I have no way of contacting him or her to share further suggestions or return the favor...
Speaking of librarianship, Seth Finkelstein raises an excellent point. Google-bombing, as I think of it, demonstrates the conflict between *popularity* and *authority* for search engines.
<snip>
It's an illustration of many people repeating something (popularity) for purposes of having it accepted as meaningful (authority). This leads to obvious concerns as to just how much neutral authority can be corrupted by partisan popularity (note this assumes for the sake of discussion that course there's a neutral authority in the first place - a very arguable assumption).
I'm toying with expanding upon this notion with quotes from Tocqueville (how Americans tend to confer more authority upon the majority than is perhaps healthy or true) and Heinlein ("Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again?") and comments that if majority opinion were always correct, then Titanic is a better film than Citizen Kane and lasers work by focusing sound waves [*]. But I've been through this before.
Many people believe that with a fast web connection and Google, they no longer need libraries. Remember this Colin Powell quote? "I no longer have any encyclopedias, any dictionaries, or any reference materials anywhere in my office, whatsoever, I don't need them. I've stopped using all reference materials because you don't need it. All you need is a search engine."
Aside from the lack of authority control on the Internet, the difficulty of determining whether a source is reputable or not, the new trend of Google-bombing, particularly for political purposes, makes the Internet more difficult for novice searchers. This further demonstrates the need for skilled, professional librarians. And maybe we ought to point this out before society writes us off as obsolete!
The Leaky Cauldron shares yet another article on why adults read kidlit. I've blogged this kind of thing before, as have they, but I rather like this turn of phrase that accurately sums up one of the appeals the genre holds for me: "[M]aybe grown-ups like children's entertainment simply because it's better than their own. Since writers can't fall back on sex, romance or profanity, the storytelling has to be dramatic and clear." This is so true. As I've written elsewhere, YA books can and often do have sex, violence and strong language -- but it's not gratuitous. If it's there, it's there for a reason. Which makes those elements all the stronger and more powerful. [This Usenet post contains further reasons I enjoy YA fiction.]
That's about all for now, although I'm sure I'll think of something else the moment after I post. Main external link for this post http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/journal/2004_01_25_j_archive.htm#107514903744550683Post Topics:Listings, Politics, Search engines, Listening, New kinds of conferences, Emergent Democracy, novels, Alan Cooper, Writing, Howard Dean, Thinking, The State, Systems Thinking, Home Networking, Pay for usage, Shelly Powers Wesley Clark Posted: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 23:21:19 GMT Finishing up the Laá’ΣkÄ™vatÄ™ra paper, I listened in to CSPAN to hear Clark giving a stump speech in Henniker, New Hampshire. He had a hell of a stage presence, and gave a really wonderful speech. He kicked serious ass in the question-and-answer session. "The greatest enemies of democracy are financial... This topic contains 101 posts. You are seeing posts 81 to 101. Previous posts.
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