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Another two day affair - 20-21 April 2010
Apr. 22nd, 2010 01:10 amGreetings, seekers of the great things in life! We hope that you were not burdened unduly with the manner of your classroom education, a place that does not foster creativity, but instead makes it a negative, with the exception of those few classes, such as arts and music, where creativity is not kept on such a tight leash.
The Dead Pool claimed Dorothy Height, civil rights activist, at 98 years of age.
Out in the world today, a fine example of fifteenth-century thinking brought forward into the twenty-first - an Iranian cleric blamed recent earthquakes on provocatively-dressed women and adulterous women.
Not to be outdone, however, and earning themselves a shot at presumptive Worst People award so early in the posting, the representatives of the State of Oklahoma, now requiring those seeking abortion to fill out a length questionnaire that can probably be used to identify them, requiring an invasive vaginal probe ultrasound to be done and the image described to the person seeking abortion, and the posting of signs in clinics. The bills go to the governor for final approval or rejection. And thus continues the trend of “Well, we currently can’t outlaw it, so let’s make it as difficult, invasive, possibly identifying, and disapproving as possible so as to scare women away from abortion and into suffering.” And no, there are no exceptions to these requirements, which could produce the situation of having to penetrate a recent rape victim and describe likely triggering things to her.
Dashing their chances at winning today, though, is the knowledge that they’re only potentials at the moment. A 10 year-old rape victim in Mexico is finding she can't abort, because she's well past the 90-day window the law allows. This despite the obvious common sense that would say “Well, she was raped, AND SHE's TEN YEARS OLD. So clearly she should be able to get this procedure done.” But, zero tolerance is zero tolerance, and thus common sense is left by the wayside. Again.
Not that these are the only stupid people. Following on from much earlier - the school that made their students get laptops and then loaded them with spyware, remotely activating the cameras to spy on their students has supposedly taken several thousand of those images, including many where the students where asleep, in various states of dress, or otherwise in private areas of their houses performing private activities. So it’s not just one thing here and there, but a systemic pattern of violations of privacy. It’s like someone read Little Brother and decided it was a How-To book.
The United Kingdom has a couple of events to report on - one is the potential banning of a member of the Ugandan Parliament if the body passes his death for homosexuals bill, the other a birth certificate that is less gender-specific, to warrant the child's two mothers and leaving off the sperm donor that provided the method of fertilization resulting in the child.
Anyway, in more traditional news fare, some news outlets would like to remind you that if the United States doesn't turn Iran into a glass desert, then Israel is seriously considering it. This in conjunction with continued information on a steady diet telling Americans just how evil Iran is in the world to try and make that case better. (Not that they aren’t potentially all those things and more, just that this is a similar media diet to the one used to justify action against Iraq.) At least we’re not advocating for the destuction of Iran based on a complete fiction, that Iran wants to wipe out the holy places of Jews and Christians in Israel, which, as is eloquently pointed out, is flat-out stupid, considering Jerusalem is also holy to Muslims.
Domestically, if you ever wanted to know, the New York Times, the conventional Paper of Record for the United States, has an article or item Tweeted approximately once per four seconds on average. Of course, if one believes that social media is basically another way by which marketing messages are dispersed to the populace at large, while also fostering a culture that views critical commentary as unacceptable, the frequency of Tweeting may be disturbing instead of exhilarating.
Desperately seeking some sort of revenue and viewers, CNN is now continuing to roll cameras during commercial breaks for one program, showing the "behind the scenes" material in a small window while the commercials play in the larger one.
In more traditional politics, two senators from the Senate Homeland Security Committee have subpoenaed the Justice and Defense Departments for information regarding the Fort Hood shooting, information Justice and Defense maintain is essential to the criminal case, and thus is not ready to be released or provided to the Senators. The Senators maintain they’re only looking into how officials and others blundered and missed signs, not anything related to the criminal investigation.
Arizona is rapidly turning intself into anti-illegal immigration central, with the two Senators calling for federal troops to be stationed at the United States-Mexico border following the earlier act of the Arizona legislature approving a measure that would require immigrants to carry their immigration papers on them at all times or face deportation, and then would leave the discretion of asking for papers in the hands of law enforcememnt personnel to use wisely or abuse. Guess which is more likely. This was malodorous enough that one of the state’s federal representatives said not to do business with the state if the measure passes the governor. Well, if the measure passes, Arizona might receive the effect it was looking for, as everyone who looks immigrant and everyone who is decides to flee the state rather than face arrest for forgetting their documents one day.
In science and technology, not that scientific research suggesting that cognitive exercises games don't improve general cognitive ability, instead, they improve skill at those types of tests. Perhaps when they do it in a more controlled environment, they can go for making the claim more solidly.
Speaking of brains, enjoy the stylings of the Brain Orchestra.
And then, smart clothing and the devices people will likely start wearing soon.
Last out of technology, a special from New Scientist about what the upper limits of human abilities are.
In opinions, Ms. Rouziek points out several of the contradictions and sheer stupidity of the Tea Party people, noting also that most of the fringe is harmless, the fringe of the fringe might be dangerous in a domestic terror sort of way. As backwards as it sounds, it’s most likely that the people who do turn out to be dangerous will not be the ones attending rallies expressing their displeasure that the government can regulate or restrict what guns they can carry and where. We note, as an aside, it is a phenomenally dirty trick to attach to a bill talking about whether Washington, D.C. should have a vote in the House of Representatives provisions that would shred the District's current gun laws. The two are not related in any way, and it really feels like such tactics should be considered a breach of good parliamentary procedure and politeness, with disapproval and immediate deletion of the offending amendment to follow. On the other side of our argument, Mr. Pruden says that any attempt to make D.C. vote that doesn't involve amending the Constitution or requiring a vote for D.C. to become a state is also dirty tricks.
Perhaps as an example of this strange method of thinking is Mr. Cherry's insistence that Miley Cyrus is a sleeper agent to bring "San Francisco values" to the cherished right-wing institution of country music, posing as the totally harmless, all-American Disney Princess who’s thoroughly right-wing Christian to the core, but carrying a secret agenda to bring in sex and non-Christian, even Buddhist, values and spread them among the country audience, which will instantly turn them all liberal and not-Real True Christians.
In the defense of the Tea types, Ms. Charen says anything bad said about them is a lie from Democrats running a smear campaign against them, that there are no violent people in the party, and the media and others are focusing on isolated incidents instead of looking at the movement at large. Well, much of the commentary I’ve seen has been about the contradictory principles and ideas the Tea Party holds, and that some of their members are or are on their way to being the kinds of people that would take conservative talk radio and act on it, claiming they were striking back at that “overreaching government” that is apparently trying to ban or ridicule any dissent to its growth-and-takeover agenda. Ms. Charen also pulls out the “liberals are protesters too, and they’re always much more violent than conservative protests” card, utilizing the same attack that she claims is vicious smearing when applied to conservatives.
Elsewhere, Heritage says we need better defenses and response plans to a potential EMP attack - good suggestion, and one worth looking into to see whether or not we already have shielding of infrastructure in place and plans to address what happens in case of an attack.
Speaking of dangers, Mr. Senik says that a world without nuclear weapons is stupid and dangerous, because nukes keep war in check, and that saying we won't retaliate with nukes means it's less costly for attacker to hit us with powerful attacks. Ignoring totally that the United States and other countries would leverage significant conventional punishment against any actual nation that took such a step. There are still plenty of conventional ways to destroy somewhere and salt the earth. A world without nuclear weapons would still have lots of deterrence involved - it just would also not have the possibility that a non-state entity could steal something with the power to truly level nations and use it to settle their differences. To insist that we will always need nuclear weapons is to lack imagination. (Even if we always do need them, to stop believing in the possibility that we won’t is to resign oneself to dystopia, instead of trying to achieve something better and more utopic.)
Finally, Mr. Allred says a military commission is the correct place to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, because he is an unlawful combatant and the Geneva Conventions say that is where unlawful combatants are to be tried, and not only that, the Convention courts for unlawful combatants are right to give them less rights because it will deter others from following that path. I suppose it all depends, then, on whether you view the attacks of 11 September as an act of war or as an act of terrorism. Because of what happened afterward, 11 September is suffering from the Memory Hole and is now supposed to be viewed as the opening salvo to the Concept War instead of a terrorist attack. By that viewing of history, it makes sense to try the conspirators as unlawful combatants. To do so, though, one must view the actions of non-state terror entities as an organized conspiracy to wage war on the United States, which is a gross distortion of reality, regardless of what our and their propaganda departments want to tell us. KSM is an alleged terrorist and murderer, but I don’t think he meets the definition of unlawful enemy combatant at the time he is alleged to have committed and conspired in the 11 September attacks.
On economics, first the WSJ chides the government for amnesia regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying they first created the problem because the government-sponsored enterprises were told to do something for political purposes, and now the government proposes to fix the problem by granting itself more power to do more of the same, a line that Ms. Parker picks up and runs with. The WSJ accusses the President of hypocrisy in opposing regulations of the GSEs while pushing hard for reforms of private banks, and Ms. Parker takes the standard “clueless bureaucrats will be corrupt and control your lives” angle for any new financial reforms. Expanding the scope, Mr. Rahn says the United States is making many of the same decisions that Argentina's leaders did previously, with bad results for Argentina.
Mr. O'Driscoll provides a breath of sanity from the previous by noting that regulation is ineffective if the bureaucrats go to work for the firms and those in the firms become bureaucrats, focusing the point where it should be and making the wild suggestion that perhaps someone who is not steeped in the world of evading regulations and finding loopholes should be the person in charge of writing regs. And then that people who do write regs should be prohibited from working for firms and providing their expertise to help them avoid them.
In more general terms, and invoking the auspices or wrath of the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department, insistence that the President is a hardcore liberal, with nothing really conservative about him, at least in economics and foreign policy. Heritage is also insistent that they never supported anything the President does, no matter how many times he’s said that his ideas build from their ideas. In a previous life, where unthinking opposition wasn’t the official line of the party out of power, they might have actually sported such a repeated claim as a badge of pride, that they provided the core ideas for the bill and that it still got through despite liberal meddling. Moving on from there, Mr. Kohut references the increased skepticism of citizens about government effectiveness as an indication that the people are frustrated that the government can’t do anything right even as it tries to expand its reach to other places, and such a sentiment works against incumbents of all sorts. Mr. Sowell provides the capstone to all of this by declaring the President believes government power can do anything, even when history tells him it cannot be done. Mr. Sowell deliberately chooses the example of paying slaves for work that required brains or dexterity so he can reference the history of African-Americans and make his later point that while everyone else gave up on command-and-control, the President wants to move us in the direction of command-and-control.
Mr. Barone tries to frame the skepticism as a resistance against the "culture of dependency" the President is supposedly fostering, by pointing out that people still oppose government actions even after they’ve had all the benefits of that action that affect them explained. That, however, can be just as much that people dismiss, ignore, and refuse to acknowledge facts that run contrary to their opinions (Remember, We Are Not Unbiased) as it is any sort of overarching fealty to the concept of independence and freedom. Repeatedly, the opposition finds themselves in favor of bits that affect them when asked outside of their echo chambers or when the individual pieces are presented outside of the greater context. The only overarching concern that seems to be sticking is the worry that it can’t all be paid for. Not that it isn’t wanted or appreciated (especially entitlements like social Security), but that the country thinks we can’t afford it in the middle of a recession. Mr. Barone takes a swipe at the very poor and the very educated and suggests that people who make a middling income and don’t have a college degree are the truly independent, freedom-loving people. Actually, not so much - they’re the people who don’t see the maximum benefit from the programs (the poor) and have only gone through required schooling, which, sadly, is not as much about critical thinking, discussion, and analysis as it is rote memorization and standardized testing. This leaves several gaps for the Thinking (Wo)Man to be filled in by various propogandists, such as churches, cable television programs, and radio demagogues. I realize that this sounds like me saying those people are ignorant rubes, looking at shadows and declaring them to be reality. This is not the case - like all humans, they’re brilliant beings, but the system has failed to give them many of the tools they need to put that brilliance to work and espouse their ideas so that others can see that brilliance. (The opposite side would also declare that college-educated persons suffer from the same problems, and their lack of critical thinking skills are filled by professors, radicals, cable television programs, and the mainstream media.) They recognize that unchecked spending is a swift way to bad results, that increasing debt is deadly, and they haven’t heard anything concrete enough on how to fix the problem to satisfy their doubts. That’s not resisting dependency, that’s fiscal prudence. They’re untrusting of the government because, let’s face it, the government has a bad track record on a lot of major issues. They know that con men are dangerous, and they feel they’re electing a lot of con men to positions of power.
For a great example of what I mean about people being brilliant, Mr. Hawkins lays out seven things that make the government function highly sub-optimally and against the American people, he puts people off finding solutions by saying that they’re going to be difficult and complex and leaves it there to go onto his identification part. I’m sure that we could identify all of his seven bits (Earmarks-as-unspoken-bribes, hyper-polarization of the two major parties, a media that is biased against them, the requirement of politicians to always be in campaign mode, career politicians, the direct election of Senators by the people thanks to the 17th Amendment, and the lack of enforcement on the Tenth Amendment) as problems. We could even craft some amount of solutions, but we’re missing the spark that lets people then persuade others intelligently about the matter and build movements, recognize and resist the influence of corporations, parties, and propaganda machines that want to warp someone’s idea into a shell of its former self without power, and most importantly, avoid falling into the problems they recognize. Mr. Hawkins commits this particular error in his column, by saying the Democrats when hyper-political first and the media has gone progressively more left-wing with time, and any time any of those left-wing publications goes out of business, it’s better for the country. Those kinds of statements do not foster solution-building states of mind, regardless of how satisfying they are to say and hear (and how much they make the propagandists happy that you’re repeating their desires to annihilate competition). Blaming whomever did it first, or saying “they do it, too” does nothing toward making a solution to the problem.
And thus, people have brilliant ideas and no means of articulating, distributing, or building coalitions with them. For as democratizing as the WWW and social media and other things like blogs are, they still pale in comparison to broadcast outlets like radio and television stations in terms of reaching large amounts of people. after all, this single blog post will reach perhaps a hundred persons in a country of three hundred million persons, and unless I strike some chain forwarding core and have the miracle of not having the message distorted in a great game of telephone, at a hundred persons is where it will stay. I’d have to seize television or radio time, be syndicated nationally, and have massive amounts of funding to make things happen on a bigger scale. Which means, unless I am independently wealthy, sponsorships and advertisements and other entities exerting control over the message as a condition of their continued funding. Thus, some solutions that are needed will never see airwaves, because it would require broadcast entities to entertain views that would work against broadcast entities as a whole. It stinks. But we keep trying, because at some point, one of those ideas that was too small to survive catches on, and gets bigger, and eventually does manage to achieve mass dispersal and eventually is talked about politically and acted on to make us all better and fix some of the problems with the status quo.
Last for tonight, the Drift Deck, a series of adventure cards for use while ambling in a particular space. The cards provide instructions to be done when encountering a particular element of the space. I think these would be neat things to have in general, but especially at conventions or other gatherings.
The Dead Pool claimed Dorothy Height, civil rights activist, at 98 years of age.
Out in the world today, a fine example of fifteenth-century thinking brought forward into the twenty-first - an Iranian cleric blamed recent earthquakes on provocatively-dressed women and adulterous women.
Not to be outdone, however, and earning themselves a shot at presumptive Worst People award so early in the posting, the representatives of the State of Oklahoma, now requiring those seeking abortion to fill out a length questionnaire that can probably be used to identify them, requiring an invasive vaginal probe ultrasound to be done and the image described to the person seeking abortion, and the posting of signs in clinics. The bills go to the governor for final approval or rejection. And thus continues the trend of “Well, we currently can’t outlaw it, so let’s make it as difficult, invasive, possibly identifying, and disapproving as possible so as to scare women away from abortion and into suffering.” And no, there are no exceptions to these requirements, which could produce the situation of having to penetrate a recent rape victim and describe likely triggering things to her.
Dashing their chances at winning today, though, is the knowledge that they’re only potentials at the moment. A 10 year-old rape victim in Mexico is finding she can't abort, because she's well past the 90-day window the law allows. This despite the obvious common sense that would say “Well, she was raped, AND SHE's TEN YEARS OLD. So clearly she should be able to get this procedure done.” But, zero tolerance is zero tolerance, and thus common sense is left by the wayside. Again.
Not that these are the only stupid people. Following on from much earlier - the school that made their students get laptops and then loaded them with spyware, remotely activating the cameras to spy on their students has supposedly taken several thousand of those images, including many where the students where asleep, in various states of dress, or otherwise in private areas of their houses performing private activities. So it’s not just one thing here and there, but a systemic pattern of violations of privacy. It’s like someone read Little Brother and decided it was a How-To book.
The United Kingdom has a couple of events to report on - one is the potential banning of a member of the Ugandan Parliament if the body passes his death for homosexuals bill, the other a birth certificate that is less gender-specific, to warrant the child's two mothers and leaving off the sperm donor that provided the method of fertilization resulting in the child.
Anyway, in more traditional news fare, some news outlets would like to remind you that if the United States doesn't turn Iran into a glass desert, then Israel is seriously considering it. This in conjunction with continued information on a steady diet telling Americans just how evil Iran is in the world to try and make that case better. (Not that they aren’t potentially all those things and more, just that this is a similar media diet to the one used to justify action against Iraq.) At least we’re not advocating for the destuction of Iran based on a complete fiction, that Iran wants to wipe out the holy places of Jews and Christians in Israel, which, as is eloquently pointed out, is flat-out stupid, considering Jerusalem is also holy to Muslims.
Domestically, if you ever wanted to know, the New York Times, the conventional Paper of Record for the United States, has an article or item Tweeted approximately once per four seconds on average. Of course, if one believes that social media is basically another way by which marketing messages are dispersed to the populace at large, while also fostering a culture that views critical commentary as unacceptable, the frequency of Tweeting may be disturbing instead of exhilarating.
Desperately seeking some sort of revenue and viewers, CNN is now continuing to roll cameras during commercial breaks for one program, showing the "behind the scenes" material in a small window while the commercials play in the larger one.
In more traditional politics, two senators from the Senate Homeland Security Committee have subpoenaed the Justice and Defense Departments for information regarding the Fort Hood shooting, information Justice and Defense maintain is essential to the criminal case, and thus is not ready to be released or provided to the Senators. The Senators maintain they’re only looking into how officials and others blundered and missed signs, not anything related to the criminal investigation.
Arizona is rapidly turning intself into anti-illegal immigration central, with the two Senators calling for federal troops to be stationed at the United States-Mexico border following the earlier act of the Arizona legislature approving a measure that would require immigrants to carry their immigration papers on them at all times or face deportation, and then would leave the discretion of asking for papers in the hands of law enforcememnt personnel to use wisely or abuse. Guess which is more likely. This was malodorous enough that one of the state’s federal representatives said not to do business with the state if the measure passes the governor. Well, if the measure passes, Arizona might receive the effect it was looking for, as everyone who looks immigrant and everyone who is decides to flee the state rather than face arrest for forgetting their documents one day.
In science and technology, not that scientific research suggesting that cognitive exercises games don't improve general cognitive ability, instead, they improve skill at those types of tests. Perhaps when they do it in a more controlled environment, they can go for making the claim more solidly.
Speaking of brains, enjoy the stylings of the Brain Orchestra.
And then, smart clothing and the devices people will likely start wearing soon.
Last out of technology, a special from New Scientist about what the upper limits of human abilities are.
In opinions, Ms. Rouziek points out several of the contradictions and sheer stupidity of the Tea Party people, noting also that most of the fringe is harmless, the fringe of the fringe might be dangerous in a domestic terror sort of way. As backwards as it sounds, it’s most likely that the people who do turn out to be dangerous will not be the ones attending rallies expressing their displeasure that the government can regulate or restrict what guns they can carry and where. We note, as an aside, it is a phenomenally dirty trick to attach to a bill talking about whether Washington, D.C. should have a vote in the House of Representatives provisions that would shred the District's current gun laws. The two are not related in any way, and it really feels like such tactics should be considered a breach of good parliamentary procedure and politeness, with disapproval and immediate deletion of the offending amendment to follow. On the other side of our argument, Mr. Pruden says that any attempt to make D.C. vote that doesn't involve amending the Constitution or requiring a vote for D.C. to become a state is also dirty tricks.
Perhaps as an example of this strange method of thinking is Mr. Cherry's insistence that Miley Cyrus is a sleeper agent to bring "San Francisco values" to the cherished right-wing institution of country music, posing as the totally harmless, all-American Disney Princess who’s thoroughly right-wing Christian to the core, but carrying a secret agenda to bring in sex and non-Christian, even Buddhist, values and spread them among the country audience, which will instantly turn them all liberal and not-Real True Christians.
In the defense of the Tea types, Ms. Charen says anything bad said about them is a lie from Democrats running a smear campaign against them, that there are no violent people in the party, and the media and others are focusing on isolated incidents instead of looking at the movement at large. Well, much of the commentary I’ve seen has been about the contradictory principles and ideas the Tea Party holds, and that some of their members are or are on their way to being the kinds of people that would take conservative talk radio and act on it, claiming they were striking back at that “overreaching government” that is apparently trying to ban or ridicule any dissent to its growth-and-takeover agenda. Ms. Charen also pulls out the “liberals are protesters too, and they’re always much more violent than conservative protests” card, utilizing the same attack that she claims is vicious smearing when applied to conservatives.
Elsewhere, Heritage says we need better defenses and response plans to a potential EMP attack - good suggestion, and one worth looking into to see whether or not we already have shielding of infrastructure in place and plans to address what happens in case of an attack.
Speaking of dangers, Mr. Senik says that a world without nuclear weapons is stupid and dangerous, because nukes keep war in check, and that saying we won't retaliate with nukes means it's less costly for attacker to hit us with powerful attacks. Ignoring totally that the United States and other countries would leverage significant conventional punishment against any actual nation that took such a step. There are still plenty of conventional ways to destroy somewhere and salt the earth. A world without nuclear weapons would still have lots of deterrence involved - it just would also not have the possibility that a non-state entity could steal something with the power to truly level nations and use it to settle their differences. To insist that we will always need nuclear weapons is to lack imagination. (Even if we always do need them, to stop believing in the possibility that we won’t is to resign oneself to dystopia, instead of trying to achieve something better and more utopic.)
Finally, Mr. Allred says a military commission is the correct place to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, because he is an unlawful combatant and the Geneva Conventions say that is where unlawful combatants are to be tried, and not only that, the Convention courts for unlawful combatants are right to give them less rights because it will deter others from following that path. I suppose it all depends, then, on whether you view the attacks of 11 September as an act of war or as an act of terrorism. Because of what happened afterward, 11 September is suffering from the Memory Hole and is now supposed to be viewed as the opening salvo to the Concept War instead of a terrorist attack. By that viewing of history, it makes sense to try the conspirators as unlawful combatants. To do so, though, one must view the actions of non-state terror entities as an organized conspiracy to wage war on the United States, which is a gross distortion of reality, regardless of what our and their propaganda departments want to tell us. KSM is an alleged terrorist and murderer, but I don’t think he meets the definition of unlawful enemy combatant at the time he is alleged to have committed and conspired in the 11 September attacks.
On economics, first the WSJ chides the government for amnesia regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying they first created the problem because the government-sponsored enterprises were told to do something for political purposes, and now the government proposes to fix the problem by granting itself more power to do more of the same, a line that Ms. Parker picks up and runs with. The WSJ accusses the President of hypocrisy in opposing regulations of the GSEs while pushing hard for reforms of private banks, and Ms. Parker takes the standard “clueless bureaucrats will be corrupt and control your lives” angle for any new financial reforms. Expanding the scope, Mr. Rahn says the United States is making many of the same decisions that Argentina's leaders did previously, with bad results for Argentina.
Mr. O'Driscoll provides a breath of sanity from the previous by noting that regulation is ineffective if the bureaucrats go to work for the firms and those in the firms become bureaucrats, focusing the point where it should be and making the wild suggestion that perhaps someone who is not steeped in the world of evading regulations and finding loopholes should be the person in charge of writing regs. And then that people who do write regs should be prohibited from working for firms and providing their expertise to help them avoid them.
In more general terms, and invoking the auspices or wrath of the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department, insistence that the President is a hardcore liberal, with nothing really conservative about him, at least in economics and foreign policy. Heritage is also insistent that they never supported anything the President does, no matter how many times he’s said that his ideas build from their ideas. In a previous life, where unthinking opposition wasn’t the official line of the party out of power, they might have actually sported such a repeated claim as a badge of pride, that they provided the core ideas for the bill and that it still got through despite liberal meddling. Moving on from there, Mr. Kohut references the increased skepticism of citizens about government effectiveness as an indication that the people are frustrated that the government can’t do anything right even as it tries to expand its reach to other places, and such a sentiment works against incumbents of all sorts. Mr. Sowell provides the capstone to all of this by declaring the President believes government power can do anything, even when history tells him it cannot be done. Mr. Sowell deliberately chooses the example of paying slaves for work that required brains or dexterity so he can reference the history of African-Americans and make his later point that while everyone else gave up on command-and-control, the President wants to move us in the direction of command-and-control.
Mr. Barone tries to frame the skepticism as a resistance against the "culture of dependency" the President is supposedly fostering, by pointing out that people still oppose government actions even after they’ve had all the benefits of that action that affect them explained. That, however, can be just as much that people dismiss, ignore, and refuse to acknowledge facts that run contrary to their opinions (Remember, We Are Not Unbiased) as it is any sort of overarching fealty to the concept of independence and freedom. Repeatedly, the opposition finds themselves in favor of bits that affect them when asked outside of their echo chambers or when the individual pieces are presented outside of the greater context. The only overarching concern that seems to be sticking is the worry that it can’t all be paid for. Not that it isn’t wanted or appreciated (especially entitlements like social Security), but that the country thinks we can’t afford it in the middle of a recession. Mr. Barone takes a swipe at the very poor and the very educated and suggests that people who make a middling income and don’t have a college degree are the truly independent, freedom-loving people. Actually, not so much - they’re the people who don’t see the maximum benefit from the programs (the poor) and have only gone through required schooling, which, sadly, is not as much about critical thinking, discussion, and analysis as it is rote memorization and standardized testing. This leaves several gaps for the Thinking (Wo)Man to be filled in by various propogandists, such as churches, cable television programs, and radio demagogues. I realize that this sounds like me saying those people are ignorant rubes, looking at shadows and declaring them to be reality. This is not the case - like all humans, they’re brilliant beings, but the system has failed to give them many of the tools they need to put that brilliance to work and espouse their ideas so that others can see that brilliance. (The opposite side would also declare that college-educated persons suffer from the same problems, and their lack of critical thinking skills are filled by professors, radicals, cable television programs, and the mainstream media.) They recognize that unchecked spending is a swift way to bad results, that increasing debt is deadly, and they haven’t heard anything concrete enough on how to fix the problem to satisfy their doubts. That’s not resisting dependency, that’s fiscal prudence. They’re untrusting of the government because, let’s face it, the government has a bad track record on a lot of major issues. They know that con men are dangerous, and they feel they’re electing a lot of con men to positions of power.
For a great example of what I mean about people being brilliant, Mr. Hawkins lays out seven things that make the government function highly sub-optimally and against the American people, he puts people off finding solutions by saying that they’re going to be difficult and complex and leaves it there to go onto his identification part. I’m sure that we could identify all of his seven bits (Earmarks-as-unspoken-bribes, hyper-polarization of the two major parties, a media that is biased against them, the requirement of politicians to always be in campaign mode, career politicians, the direct election of Senators by the people thanks to the 17th Amendment, and the lack of enforcement on the Tenth Amendment) as problems. We could even craft some amount of solutions, but we’re missing the spark that lets people then persuade others intelligently about the matter and build movements, recognize and resist the influence of corporations, parties, and propaganda machines that want to warp someone’s idea into a shell of its former self without power, and most importantly, avoid falling into the problems they recognize. Mr. Hawkins commits this particular error in his column, by saying the Democrats when hyper-political first and the media has gone progressively more left-wing with time, and any time any of those left-wing publications goes out of business, it’s better for the country. Those kinds of statements do not foster solution-building states of mind, regardless of how satisfying they are to say and hear (and how much they make the propagandists happy that you’re repeating their desires to annihilate competition). Blaming whomever did it first, or saying “they do it, too” does nothing toward making a solution to the problem.
And thus, people have brilliant ideas and no means of articulating, distributing, or building coalitions with them. For as democratizing as the WWW and social media and other things like blogs are, they still pale in comparison to broadcast outlets like radio and television stations in terms of reaching large amounts of people. after all, this single blog post will reach perhaps a hundred persons in a country of three hundred million persons, and unless I strike some chain forwarding core and have the miracle of not having the message distorted in a great game of telephone, at a hundred persons is where it will stay. I’d have to seize television or radio time, be syndicated nationally, and have massive amounts of funding to make things happen on a bigger scale. Which means, unless I am independently wealthy, sponsorships and advertisements and other entities exerting control over the message as a condition of their continued funding. Thus, some solutions that are needed will never see airwaves, because it would require broadcast entities to entertain views that would work against broadcast entities as a whole. It stinks. But we keep trying, because at some point, one of those ideas that was too small to survive catches on, and gets bigger, and eventually does manage to achieve mass dispersal and eventually is talked about politically and acted on to make us all better and fix some of the problems with the status quo.
Last for tonight, the Drift Deck, a series of adventure cards for use while ambling in a particular space. The cards provide instructions to be done when encountering a particular element of the space. I think these would be neat things to have in general, but especially at conventions or other gatherings.
