Category Archives: Politics

I think the Luddite is right

Ron PaulSpending as much time as I do online, I often forget that most people do not, and that the distribution of political opinions of other members of the general “online community” does not necessarily correspond to those of the much broader “real world.”

In particular, I’ve observed the disproportionate number of libertarians (and Libertarians) online. There are many ways in which I agree with libertarian views, especially to the extent of individual freedoms, inasmuch as if what you’re doing doesn’t hurt anyone else, the government shouldn’t be telling you not to do it. (However, I think the libertarian view often struggles with looking beyond the end of one’s nose regarding the impact of individual actions.)

And so, in this election year, we come to Ron Paul.

Judging by the range of discourse you’ll find on a lot of websites, you’d think Ron Paul has secured 98% of the Republican vote and probably about 60% of the Democratic vote as well. And, based solely on opinions on the issues (as indicated here), even I agree with Ron Paul a lot more than I do with any of the other Republicans. (I have to wonder how many online libertarians really agree with Ron Paul on evolution, though… but I am guessing most of his tech-minded supporters don’t know he doesn’t believe in it.) But the issues don’t tell the whole story, as Wired’s blogger Tony Long (a.k.a. “The Luddite”) explained well in his recent post:

He almost sounds rational. But he’s not.

Like all absolutists — and make no mistake, libertarianism is absolutism as surely as atheism is faith — Paul is ill suited for this particular job. He’s running for president of the United States, remember, not for a seat in some gerrymandered Texas congressional district. If elected, he would be leading the most powerful nation on earth, one whose every action has repercussions in every corner of the world.

The biggest problem I have with libertarianism is its exaltation of absolute, Ayn Rand-esque individualism. Again, the Luddite:

There are 300 million of us now, not 30 million, and we can’t all go running around unsupervised. This is where libertarian ideals get a little unwieldy. Besides, we’re not all John Waynes, saddled up and gazing with flinty eyes across the prairie. Some of us can barely cope. Sometimes, Ron, them dad-gum polecats in Washington jest have to step in and take charge. Dang it all.

And so, we reach the great chasm between my personal beliefs and those of libertarians: individual freedoms are incredibly important, but we don’t all live in our own little, disconnected bubbles. We’re sharing this planet with every other human being (not to mention lots of other species of life — dismiss that if you like, but let’s see how long we can last on our own without them; Soylent Green won’t feed us forever). The things we do affect others, whether we realize it or not, and will continue to do so for generations to come. That’s a heavy responsibility. Perhaps the average online propeller head can dismiss it, but the President of the United States cannot.

It’s 2008: are you ready to vote yet?

Purple Is UnamericanYes, we’re still less than 100 hours into 2008, but the first caucuses are today and the general election is but ten short months away. Have you picked your candidates?

Like the Political Compass site I wrote about last year, there is now a nifty Electoral Compass website (which, tellingly, is Dutch, not American) with Flash-y goodness, that asks your opinion on a variety of political issues, then plots your position on a similar coordinate grid (though I’m pleased they’ve reversed the Y axis), along with the relative positions of the major presidential candidates. What’s really cool is that it has checkboxes that you can tick off to filter the results based on a variety of broad issues, allowing you to decide which factors are most important to you in finding a candidate who best represents your views. The final results page also lets you see how your answers to the specific questions compare to each of the candidates’ views on the same topics, based on their statements from past debates and positions outlined on their campaign websites. You can even see a breakdown of your relative proximity to each of the candidates, sorted from most- to least-similar.

Me, I’m not terribly surprised to see that I have more in common with Barack Obama than Mike Huckabee. But it’s still reassuring to get objective verification. It’s also not surprising that among the Republicans, I’m most closely aligned with Ron Paul, although I still (thankfully) only agree with him 50%. One thing that does surprise me is that on the economic scale (the X axis), I’m actually to the right (slightly) of someone (Hillary Clinton). But I’m more progressive (ranging from 11% for Obama to 91% for Thompson) than all of the candidates. Here’s to progress.

A former network reporter speaks out

Kudos to former NBC reporter John Hockenberry for sharing his observations about the woeful state of network news reporting in a Technology Review article entitled “You Don’t Understand Our Audience.” Modern “reporting” is worse than a bad joke: it’s an affront to critical thinking and a disgraceful shirking of an important responsibility to the public.

As much as I’m willing to rant against the “mainstream media” (and even worse, the bogus claims of “liberal bias” in said media by the partisan hackery of the likes of Fox News), my perspective carries far less impact than that of someone who’s been on the inside and managed to escape with his integrity and commitment to truth intact.

He even gets a bit theoretical at one point, and comes pretty close to my oft-rehearsed tirade against commercially-driven news programming:

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

But the real value of Hockenberry’s perspective comes from his insider experience — a look at the real Jack Donaghys of the world that I only wish was unbelievable:

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC’s news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. “It’s such a great gadget. It changed my life,” one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.

Yes, this person is an idiot. And he’s one of the people who are deciding what “news” the public receives.

Of course, the network heads cannot accept all of the blame for the current state of affairs, nor is the Internet the panacea of truth and intellectual freedom that it may, at first, seem to be. Consider this: the community-built Wikipedia article on Jack Donaghy is longer and more detailed than that of his real-life counterpart.

On a tangent (not that I wasn’t already on a tangent), I did a Google image search for “dunce executive” in vain hope of finding a copyright-free photo to use with this post, and I was led to a British blogger’s post about Minneapolis’s own James Lileks’s (yes, two in one sentence!) reassignment to beat reporting at the StarTribune. I was momentarily outraged, until I realized that this reassignment took place seven months ago; if I’m just now learning of it, it must not really be that big of a deal to me. Besides, this news pales in comparison to the same blog’s more recent announcement that China has banned reincarnation. So um, yeah… Internet… news… wow, I really feel informed now.

Meanwhile, the story has gotten even more grim at the Strib, where the “reader rep” (known in more perspicacious, if gender-biased, times as an ombudsman) whom Lileks somewhat desperately implored his fans to contact regarding his reassignment, was herself let go (without replacement) five months later. So much for journalistic accountability. And now I’ve somehow managed to come full circle.

Keith Olbermann’s gloves are off!

Holy freakin’ schnitt. (No, not Schnitt.) Check out Keith Olbermann’s tirade on Bush last night:

I’m speechless. Yet despite the intensity and severity of his accusations, he still made me laugh out loud a few times, such as when he was reading a Bush quote and not-so-subtly emphasized a grammatical error — you could almost hear the “[sic].” Then of course there were the moments where he referred to Cheney as an “evil ventriloquist” and Bush as “marionette or moron.”

Too bad no one watches MSNBC.

The “free market” solution

I’ve always found the notion that the free market will naturally solve any pressing environmental problems ludicrous, but this light bulb joke puts it in succinct perspective.

I was not in attendance at this year’s Nobel Conference but I just read about a comment made by presenter Steven Chu:

How many free-market advocates does it take to change a light bulb?

None, because if there was a problem, the free market would have taken care of it.

In other words, it’s possible that just maybe the profit motive does not always coincide perfectly with what’s best for the world (shareholders notwithstanding).