kottke.org posts about Politics
Analysis of some studies that link political tendancies and factors like education level, how afraid we feel, and personality traits. “[A study] found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.” And an interesting conclusion about the effects of rational thought on all this.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams wants Bill Gates for President, and I can’t say I disagree. “For my president I want a mixture of Mother Teresa, Carl Sagan, Warren Buffet, and Darth Vader. Bill has all of their good stuff. His foundation will save more lives than Mother Teresa ever did. He’s got the Carl Sagan intelligence and rational mind. He’s a hugely successful businessman. And I have every reason to believe he can choke people just by concentrating in their general direction.”
Tariffs on imported sugar and ethanol imposed by the US government keep our sugar expensive and is keeping the US from using more efficient methods of saving energy and, oh, by the way, helping the environment. This excerpt from the last two paragraphs of the piece is a succinct description of what’s wrong with contemporary American politics:
Tariffs and quotas are extremely hard to get rid of, once established, because they create a vicious circle of back-scratching-government largesse means that sugar producers get wealthy, giving them lots of cash to toss at members of Congress, who then have an incentive to insure that the largesse continues to flow. More important, protectionist rules flourish because the benefits are concentrated among a small number of easy-to-identify winners, while the costs are spread out across the entire population. It may be annoying to pay a few more cents for sugar or ethanol, but most of us are unlikely to lobby Congress about it.
Maybe we should, though. Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol, while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we’ll use less. And while most of the time tariffs just mean higher prices and reduced competition, in the case of ethanol the negative effects are considerably greater, leaving us saddled with an inferior and less energy-efficient technology and as dependent as ever on oil-producing countries.
Maddening. Partisan politics is a not-very-elaborate smokescreen to distract us from this bullshit.
Interesting speculation that the 2006 election was the last 20th-century election. “The era of baby-boomer politics — with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all — is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological — and not a moment too soon.”
From Strange Maps, a great new blog I stumbled across the other day, comes a map originally done by the Boston Globe of the 10 regions of American politics.
It’s like happy happy joy joy day in liberal land today….first the election stuff and now Rumsfeld is “resigning”.
Update: The entry for schadenfreude in the Flicktionary.
“It is with mounting nausea that we watch poets race to cast their liberal votes for candidates more conservative than the Republicans they found beyond revulsion twenty years ago — and indeed not just to feed at this trough but serve the slop.”
Watch democracy in action: the “ivoted” tag on Flickr.
If you’re registered, get out and vote today. Have questions about voting? Are you registered to vote? Try the Smart Voter site (FAQs).
“The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.”
Notes from day 3 at PopTech:
Chris Anderson talked about, ba ba baba!, not the long tail. Well, not explicitly. Chris charted how the availability of a surplus in transistors (processors are cheap), storage (hard drives are cheap), and surplus in bandwidth (DSL is cheap) has resulted in so much opportunity for innovation and new technology. His thoughts reminded me of how surplus space in Silicon Valley (in the form of garages) allowed startup entrepreneurs to pursue new ideas without having to procure expensive commercial office space.
Quick thought re: the long tail…if the power law arises from scarcity as Matt Webb says, then it would make sense that the surplus that Anderson refers to would be flattening that curve out a bit.
Roger Brent crammed a 60 minute talk into 20 minutes. It was about genetic engineering and completely baffling…almost a series of non sequiturs. “Centripital glue engine” was my favorite phrase of the talk, but I’ve got no idea what Brent meant by it.
Homaro Cantu gave a puzzling presentation of a typical meal at his Chicago restaurant, Moto. I’ve seen this presentation twice before and eaten at Moto; all three experiences were clear and focused on the food. This time around, Cantu didn’t explain the food as well or why some of the inventions were so cool. His polymer box that cooks on the table is a genuinely fantastic idea, but I got the feeling that the rest of the audience didn’t understand what it was. Cantu also reiterated his position on copyrighting and patenting his food and inventions. Meg caught him saying that he was trying to solve the famine problem with his edible paper, which statement revealed two problems: a) famines are generally caused by political issues and therefore not solvable by new kinds of food, printed or otherwise, and b) he could do more good if he open sourced his inventions and let anyone produce food or improve the techniques in those famine cases where food would be useful.
Richard Dawkins gave part of his PopTech talk (the “queerer than we can suppose” part of it) at TED in 2005 (video).
Bob Metcalfe’s wrap-up of the conference was a lot less contentious than in past years; hardly any shouting and only one person stormed angrily out of the room. In reference to Hasan Elahi’s situation, Bob said that there’s a tension present in our privacy desires: “I want my privacy, but I need you to be transparent.” Not a bad way of putting it.
Serena Koenig spoke about her work in Haiti with Partners in Health. Koening spoke of a guideline that PIH follows in providing healthcare: act as though each patient is a member of your own family. That sentiment was echoed by Zinhle Thabethe, who talked about her experience as an HIV+ woman living in South Africa, an area with substandard HIV/AIDS-related healthcare. Thabethe’s powerful message: we need to treat everyone with HIV/AIDS the same, with great care. Sounds like the beginning of a new Golden Rule of Healthcare.
2.7 billion results for “blog” on Google. Blogs: bigger than Jesus.
Juan Enriquez had a nice idea for rebalancing the priorities in the voting booth: proxy votes for parents of children under 18. That is, if my wife and I have two kids, the family gets four votes, not two. Juan’s rationale for this plan is that the voting public is currently made up of a lot of baby boomers, who are going to begin to vote for things that benefit their age group, which can be thought of as an investment in the past. By voting on behalf of the 0-18 year-olds, the parents might support issues that benefit that age group (education, etc.) and invest in the future instead. Here’s a quote from Juan in CIO Magazine:
Why not give parents of kids under 18 one proxy vote per child? Only then will there be a strong voting block to counter growing gray power. It is also time to quit spending more than we earn. And above all, it is time to realize just how fragile countries can be.
If you missed his talk on PopTech Live, the CIO article covers some of what he talked about.
William Gibson speaking on secrecy:
It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.
Taken from Alex Steffen’s talk at PopTech.
Jimmy Carter on the North Korean situation: “What must be avoided is to leave a beleaguered nuclear nation convinced that it is permanently excluded from the international community, its existence threatened, its people suffering horrible deprivation and its hard-liners in total control of military and political policy.”
Abridged version of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, which “details the infighting, disarray, and mistakes made by the Bush war council during the Iraq war”.
R.W. Apple, longtime and beloved political and food writer for the NY Times, died early this morning aged 71. “In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with…a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr.” Here’s Apple’s last piece for the Times, on the cuisine of Singapore.
Update: The NY Times put up a piece that Apple filed right before he entered the hosptial that they were going to run later in the fall: The Global Gourmand.
Update: Ed Levine wrote a nice personal remembrance of Apple. See also Trillin’s article on Apple from the New Yorker.
John Moe, liberal, changed his music playlist, stopped hanging out at Starbucks, ate steak whenever possible — basically spending thirty days as a conservative — and lived to write a book about it: Conservatize Me. “What would happen if a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool, recycling liberal immersed himself entirely in conservative thought, culture, and rhetoric for one month?”
Sources cited by The Independent say that George W. Bush is planning “astonishing U-turn” on his global warming policies, which, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes in this week’s New Yorker, have been anything but helpful. Those who oppose Bush will give him a lot of crap for doing this just so he can salvage something from his shoddy Presidency, but if something genuinely gets done on the issue, I’ll be happy…who gets credit for what and when needs to take a backseat here.
Oh, rejoice and be glad…there will be a season five of The Wire. “Balancing small audiences again critical acclaim, HBO has picked up a fifth season of drama The Wire.” The season may focus on the media’s role in politics. (thx, mark)
Fascinating charts of how the US Senate votes on issues from a liberal-conservative perspective and a social issues perspective. More charts here. You’ll notice that the lines on the graphs are mostly straight up and down which means “it’s all economic; all the noise about social issues never actually flows thru into the legislative agenda.” That is, the Senate decides issues, even social issues, based mostly on economics.
Haven’t read it yet, but New York magazine has a ginormous feature called What If 9/11 Never Happened? “Without 9/11, would the London plot have been foiled? Without 9/11, would there have been an Iraq war? Without the Iraq war, would there have been a London plot?”
David Remnick on the Bush Administration’s sustained assault on the press. “You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.”
Newer posts
Older posts
Stay Connected