08.24.06
Posted in Social at 3:55 pm by steve
A bicameral legislature exists in the United States for a set of specific historical and political reasons: to represent the will of the people in the broadest and most durable sense, and to separate legislative power from judicial and executive power. The Congress as it is now conststituted fails to do this. We examine some reasons why, including shifts in the way interests of society are aligned. We argue that the structure of the legislature ought to be rationalized against the these new patterns. And we offer some straw-men proposals to start the discussion about structural fixes.
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08.22.06
Posted in Social at 2:55 pm by steve
The myth of the threatening outsider has been used to manipulate the American public and to misshape public policy since the end of WWII. It took the form of the Red Scare during the Cold War, and the Domino theory during the Vietnam war. It has been reincarnated as the fear of terrorism and of Islam. This article argues implicitly that it is time to stop the fear machine and to start dealing in facts. It looks at some of the seductive products of the fear machine and shows how many of the assumptions about the nature of the outsider have been mistruths manufactured by the fear machine. And it suggests that the fear machine is stoked and operated by a common group of people with a unique agenda.
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08.21.06
Posted in Social at 11:28 am by steve
Virginia Senator George Allen was recently videotaped at a campaign function berating a college student who had for some time been filming the campaign. Not that it ought to matter one bit, but the student was born in the US of Indian parents. It was therefore interpreted as a racial slur when, as part of his tirade against this student’s person the Allen referred to him at least three times as macaca - presumably a reference to a small, chattering monkey.
Allen’s Macaca Jibe
The video clip has become quite a hit on the web. And pundits are now actively questioning whether the clip will harm the senator’s preparations for the 08 presidential campaign. The event was covered recently in the NYT.
YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways for the good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists of both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television where any moment of a candidate’s life may be captured on film and posted on the web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics or destroy it? NYT 20AUG06 Sec4 p1
This is a great question to ask, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the event in question.
Firstly, Senator Allen was openly campaigning. He announces it during the tirade. So the suggestion that this snippet is any sort of an intrusion into the privacy of the candidate is absurd. This is not reality TV. This is a real campaign being held in the open, and open to the public. Are we to believe that when candidates are with small, chummy groups it is acceptable to behave in ways that are contrary to the public interest, pandering to bigotry, fear of outsiders, and other biases that they would never dare do in public arenas?
Secondly who a person is in public is important. If a person panders to racial bigotry to win a race then this raises serious questions about whether that person ought to be a politician. It is not a question of acting wooden. Nor does Allen’s explanation that he did not know what ‘macaca’ meant have any bearing on the interpretation of the video. Allen was trying to garner votes among rural white Virginians by being disrespectful to a person whom his audience might think of as being ‘different.’ He was pandering to fears and suspicions of outsiders that are part of the rural psyche throughout America, and far too often exploited by ‘Red State’ politicians as such. This kind of practice is offensive regardless of the language used.
Thirdly, the assumption that cameras make politicians wooden, while it is a concern, ought not run our politics. Sometimes little snippets will teach us profound things about a candidate. Sometimes they will mislead us a bit. It is possible that we misinterpret Allen’s comment when we imagine it makes him racist. An alternative hypothesis is that he believes his audience is racist and he is playing to their racial biases. This, of course, is no more excusable than the first argument. A third hypothesis might be that Allen actually did not know that the term was derogatory in any sense. This hypothesis is highly unlikely since the term phoenetically resembles a term for poop; but if it were true, it still does not get the Senator off the hook for even without using the term, he is being highly disrespectful to the person in question. Had his supporters turned on the cameraman and attacked him - an eventuality also highly improbable but by no means completely imposible - the good Senator would have certainly been responsible for inciting a riot. This is not who we need in the Senate. It is not who we need in the White House.
It is certainly true that snippets of material taken out of context can convey messages that are far different from what is actually going on. And so it is hypothetically possible for short snippets, especially if they are purposefully framed in misleading text, to convey messages that are simply the wrong messages.
But the several YouTube videos I have watched have a particular quality to them. They are low fidelity in sound and picture, but rather high fidelity in their portrayal of the event in question. The YouTube snippet is, by television reportage standards, rather long. It is not that the Senator is going along talking about something and, when his guard is down, out pops a politically incorrect word. No. Allen starts his whole campaign speil with an attack on foreigners! The cameraman in question is still pulling the focus when the attack begins. Had this been network television, the whole bit probably would be lying on the cutting room floor because the video camera was not rolling at the start of the tirade. YouTube, by contrast, has served us well.
So while I share the concern that video snippets will distort the process, there is no question in my own mind that this is not what is going on here. Allen is purposefully and knowingly exploiting fear of outsiders among rural white Americans for political gain. And he is caught on tape doing it. This is caca up with which America ought not put. America has suffered enough under the yoke of the politics of fear. It’s time we start calling candidates on it before they get elected to high offices. Thank goodness that YouTube, so far, has been able to help define issues that are, actually important.
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08.19.06
Posted in Social at 12:23 am by steve
The warrantless snooping program has been judged illegal. The facts were not disputed before the court. We argue here for the necessity of the fourth ammendment protections and for their applicability to the case. Further, we voice concern that both this warrantless program and the administration’s response to prosecution and to the judgement constitute a pattern of dangerous talk that puts Bush Administration members solidly on the wrong side of both law and Constitution and points America down a path toward tyranny.
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Republicans said the decision was the work of a liberal judge advancing a partisan agenda. Judge Taylor, 73, worked on the civil rights movement, supported Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign.. and was the first black woman to serve in Detroit federal trial court. — NYT 18AUG06 p1
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08.08.06
Posted in Social at 10:29 pm by steve
The Democratic party, by allowing itself to be defined by Republican issues and by filling a niche just a little less far to the right has driven politics to the right fringe. This article argues that Democrats can be more influencial, more effective, and more progressive simultaneously, if they succeed in defining issues in terms of values that Democarats have always held, especially issues involving the values of fairness and democracy.
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Not until the Democrats succeed in defining themselves on their own terms can they go head to head with the other guys and regain control of their tails.
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08.07.06
Posted in Social at 10:05 am by steve
SInce the inception of air power, it has been axiomatic that bombing works to make conditions better only to the extent that it makes a ground war more productive, more winnable, less costly. When this idea is forgotten, bombing becomes an act without a strategic purpose: It is an act of theater. When violence becomes theater, what do we call it.
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08.05.06
Posted in Philosophy &c, Website Management at 8:22 am by steve
I was happy to see that the Answer Bus had sent my site two web surfers this month. And it is only the third of the month. The site in question has almost no incoming traffic, so I was interested to find out what could have caused this great bounty. I went to the web site and read about how the clever trick was done. Then I tried a few questions of my own. My first question was “What does one put in coffee?” To its credit, the Answer Bus identified coffee as the key word and the five or six sites it recommended all contained references to coffee. But the phrases they quoted had nothing to say about what might be put into it. One was about brewing coffee. And that’s pretty close. Conceptually, if one drinks coffee black, one might imagine that one puts water and coffee beans in coffee. I, however, drink coffee with half and half, and have the stubbornly odd notion that one puts that in coffee.
Thinking that I really had not gotten the hang of riding on the Answer Bus, I decided to mimic one of the passengers. I clicked on one of the recently asked questions which was about what Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album had in common with Wizard of Oz, the movie. Evidently, certain events in Dark Side of the Moon correspond nicely with events in the movie. And, evidently, certain phrases and sounds in the album echo events in the movie. Start them playing at precisely the same time and the album works as a kind of alternate soundtrack. In other words, what they have in common is time. Well, also money. But that came some time later.
Listening to noises that are not part of a movie soundtrack is not a common practice for me, but I once rented Metropolis, an early twentieth century silent film with great, looming, dark, stylized visuals. I played Mile’s Davis’ Bitches Brew while watching it. There were times when the music seemed jarringly inappropriate. There were times when the music seemed to play independent of the visuals. But there were times when a chord, a note, spaces between notes, or whole phrases fit perfectly with the film. There were times when it seemed like they were somehow inextricably linked.
I believe the word used at certain web sites is ’synchronicity.’ In both of these cases, I imagine the synchronicity to be a little more literal than the Jungian term. My sense, in the case of Oz, which is informed by reading through all 38 points of sychronicity at one of the Answer Bus recommended sites is that that the subconscious space that Dorothy and company occupy is somehow disjoint from the subconscious space of Pink Floyd. And if the temporal synchronicity is purposeful, the band is clearly calling into question the reality of Dorothy’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ world.
I read the obituary of Sid Barrett in a recent Economist. Barrett founded the band, but his mind was compromised by powerful hallucinogenics, not far into his career. Members of the band, we are told, were greatly saddened by their fellow’s fall. Like Icarus, Sid flew too close to the sun and ended in darkness. Somehow ‘over the rainbow’ seems like a fitting way do describe his state of mind. Of course, the album cover’s rainbow art suggests this link.
I was glad to have been reminded of this particular album, for as a monument to a sort of existential ennui that pervades a world defined only in terms of money, time, and power, it towers above almost any modern work in its broad appeal. Sid was a kind of counterpoint to that world. He was lovable in a very strange way. And fragile. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Back from my brief trip to Oz via the Dark Side of the Moon, I got back on the Answer Bus. Being interested in this sort of thing, I clicked on one of the ‘how do they do that’ buttons at the right edge of the site. Up popped a page-long list of web sites about Artificial Intelligence, parsing documents for meaning, and automated answer generation. Four of the first five documents I clicked on produced a 404 - File not Found error. Clearly the Answer Bus was swerving close to the edge.
I decided to ask it one more question. “Why does this site have so many ‘error 404 - file not found links?’ ” This is a question, evidently that is impossible even for a very intellegent machine to answer. The Answer Bus crashed. One lives dangerously when one steps outside the realm of simple fact. But that’s where the beauty is. Beauty and danger. Sid would have understood.
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08.04.06
Posted in Social at 1:53 pm by steve
If one is going to pay a person $119.8 million not to work for one’s organization, is it reasonable to pay them $80.6 million to continue working for it? According to NYT 04Aug06 p.C2 That is pretty much what the board of the New York stock exchange did a few years ago in awarding compensation for one-time chairman Richard Grasso. The first amount was a retirement account, the second, was salary, bonus, and stock options. The arguments to date are about reasonability. Those defending Grasso’s pay argue that they have the discretion to set it as they wish and whatever they wish is reasonable. They argue that among powerful chief executives such levels of pay are not uncommon in America.
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08.01.06
Posted in Philosophy &c at 2:03 pm by steve
The debate over so-called intelligent design (ID) vs. evolution keeps resurfacing in Kansas. We argue that this is a controversy rooted in the same philosophical debate as the one that raged in Kansas in the 1850’s. The ideas are the same. The players are the same, and the stakes are just as high. At stake is not the just the future of the notion of evolution, nor just the future of all of science, but the whole legacy of the Enlightenement including its assumption of transcendent personal freedoms. This article argues for what science is, how evolution fits into that framework, and why ID - rather than being a plausible scientific theory - is the negation of science.
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