kottke.org posts about Politics
A group of designers (National Design Award finalists and winners) recently declined to be honored at a White House breakfast. “It is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.”
I know everyone’s upset about her new book. I’m not going to use her name, but you know who I’m talking about; she’s blonde, leggy, confident, radically conservative, radically full of shit, and you hate her with the fire of a million suns. But she’s also a huge troll. Wikipedia defines a troll as:
…someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion.
And the best strategy against trolls? Ignore them. If I see one more blog post, newspaper column, or debate on TV attempting to refute this woman’s claims, I’m going to scream. Claims? What claims? She wrote that book to piss you off and get you to respond, thereby legitimizing her ramblings. That smile of hers? That’s her celebrating a victory that you handed her without any effort. YOU’RE SMARTER THAN THAT…KNOCK IT OFF!
Maciej takes George Will to task on bilingual ballots. Will thinks bilingual ballots are “a mockery of the rule of law” because you need to speak English to become a citizen. Maciej says, “the insinuation that voters might want ballots in Spanish because they are cheating, lazy, bad people is malicious and wrong. You choose Spanish on your ballot for the same reason you might choose it in an ATM transaction - not because you have contempt for American civil society, but because you don’t want to make a mistake.”
Unsurprisingly, the WSJ doesn’t much care for An Inconvenient Truth. Is there any way of uncoupling political alignment and one’s position on this issue?
An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about Al Gore’s global warming crusade, opens today in NYC and LA. John Heilemann has a lengthy piece on Gore for New York magazine, the NY Times has a piece about Gore and the movie, the climate science blog RealClimate has a positive review of the film, and here again is my review. Larry Lessig, who knows a thing or two about bringing tha PowerPoint noize, loves the movie, calling the slideshow “the most extraordinary lecture I have ever seen anyone give about anything”.
An Inconvenient Truth will open in the rest of the US in mid-June; check this theater listing for details. For more news, check out the movie’s blog.
Riding a wave of publicity from his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, might Al Gore run for President in 2008? (My answer: unlikely.)
This is the most wonderfully nerdy thing I’ve ever read about politics and blogging. “So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself.” (via cyn-c)
George W. Bush, dissident president? “Now that President Bush is increasingly alone in pushing for freedom…” The WSJ editorial page is laughably bad sometimes.
Greg Saunders has a suggestion for a simple Democratic ad campaign for the midterm elections consisting of three graphs: gas prices, oil company stock prices, and oil company campaign contributions.
In the 1960s, a young Al Gore had the good fortune to study under Roger Revelle at Harvard University. Revelle was one of the first scientists to claim that the earth may not be able to effectively deal with all of the carbon dioxide generated by the earth’s rapidly increasing human population. The American Institute of Physics called Revelle’s 1957 paper with Hans Suess “the opening shot in the global warming debates”. Gore took Revelle’s lessons to heart, becoming a keen supporter of the environment during his government service.
Since losing the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, Al Gore has focused his efforts on things other than politics; among other things, he’s been crisscrossing the world delivering a presentation on global warming. Gore’s presentation now forms the foundation of a new film, An Inconvenient Truth (view the trailer).
In organizing my thoughts about the film, I found I couldn’t improve upon David Remnick’s review in the New Yorker. In particular:
It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scene. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth” is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.
Watching the film, I realized — far too late to move to Florida and vote for him in 2000 — that I’m a fan of Al Gore. He’s smart & intellectually curious (the latter doesn’t always follow from the former), understands science enough to explain it to the layperson without needlessly oversimplifying, and despite his reputation as somewhat of a robot, seems to be more of a real person than many politicians. As Remnick says:
One can imagine him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions and explaining them in the language of a confident adult.
The film has some small problems; many of the asides about Gore’s life (particularly the 2000 election stuff) don’t seem to fit cleanly into the main narrative, the connection it makes between global warming and Katrina is stronger than it should be, and the trailer is a little silly; this is a documentary about Al Gore and global warming after all, not The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon. But the film really shines when it focuses on the presentation and Gore methodically and lucidly making the case for us needing to take action on global warming. An Inconvenient Truth opens in the US on May 24…do yourself a favor and seek it out when it comes to your local theater.
20-year-long study shows that children who were whiny and insecure tend to grow up to be conservatives and “confident, resilient, self-reliant” children tend to grow up to be liberals. “He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.”
New Yorker piece on Bill O’Reilly. “It’s hard to be straight-ahead if you’re essentially oppositional and the people you like are in power, if the guests you most want will not appear on your show, and if it’s nearly impossible to demonstrate the existence of the trends you have made it your mission to oppose.”
Short Elizabeth Kolbert article on the conservative response to climate change. “The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter — let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences.”
Political party members’ brains get a rush from “ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view”. “None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged. Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”
If Mike Wallace could question GW Bush, he would ask him: “What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn’t want to travel …. Why do you think they nominated you?”
Jim Holt ponders the US population’s ignorance of (and hostility toward) science “at a moment when three of the nation’s most contentious political issues - global warming, stem-cell research and the teaching of intelligent design - are scientific in character”.
Good review of Philip Tetlock’s new book about expert predicitons, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.” Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen calls Tetlock’s book “one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005”.
Having not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the US is now refusing to work on its successor. Says Elizabeth Kolbert, “Without the participation of the United States, no meaningful agreement can be drafted for the post-2012 period, and the world will have missed what may well be its last opportunity to alter course.”
You can watch the entire program of Frontline’s The Last Abortion Clinic online. “With states across the US passing regulations limiting access to abortion, does Roe v. Wade still matter?”
Our short national nightmare is over, Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination for the Supreme Court (her letter). However, our long national nightmare still has 1181 days to go.
Time magazine asks Moby, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim O’Reilly, Clay Shirky, David Brooks, Mark Dery, and Esther Dyson about their views on the future: religion, culture, politics, etc. Gladwell: “If I had to name a single thing that has transformed our life, I would say the rise of JetBlue and Southwest Airlines. They have allowed us all to construct new geographical identities for ourselves.”
Regrading this: Summer Movies Other Than March of the Penguins That Conservatives Are Rallying Behind. “The Dukes of Hazzard: Not once is the word ‘evolution’ used in this movie. Many pundits proclaim this to be a tacit endorsement of intelligent design.”
A complete list of nicknames that George W. Bush has for people. A lot of people think the nicknames thing is stupid, but really it’s the only sign of Bush having any sort of personality aside from that of Bad Speech Bot.
Design for Democracy is utilizing the skillset of designers to improve the election process in America, including ballot redesigns and polling place signage.
Five things I’d ask every Supreme Court nominee if I sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee: “If you knew to an absolute moral certainty that you could capture and consume a live infant without being caught, how many do you suppose you could eat in a weekend?”
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