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anonymous

Reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-death-of-blogging-exaggerated

technology

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.
  • When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they'd always belonged (they'd been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.
  • For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don't really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms."That was coined in 1913 by Wolfgang Riepl. It's as true now as it was then.
  • Reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    "Blogging is not on the way out - it's just that other social media have taken over many of its functions." By Cory Doctorow at The Guardian on July 13, 2010.
anonymous

Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...shootings-in-the-united-states

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it. 
  • Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not.
  • “Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
  • Lots of guns don’t necessarily mean lots of shootings, as you can see in Israel and Switzerland.*
  • *Correction: The info is out-of-date, if not completely wrong. Israel and Switzerland have tightened their gun laws substantially, and now pursue an entirely different approach than the United States. More details here. I apologize for the error.
  • Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened from 2007 onward.
  • Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier.
  • “The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.”
  • In a subsequent post, Healy drilled further into the numbers and looked at deaths due to assault in different regions of the country. Just as the United States is a clear outlier in the international context, the South is a clear outlier in the national context:
  • “For all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,” writes political scientist Patrick Egan. The decline is most evident on the General Social Survey, though it also shows up on polling from Gallup, as you can see on this graph:
  • The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states. Citations here.
  • Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive:
  • Since 1990, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think gun control laws should be stricter. The answer, increasingly, is that they don’t. “The percentage in favor of making the laws governing the sale of firearms ‘more strict’ fell from 78% in 1990 to 62% in 1995, and 51% in 2007,” reports Gallup. “In the most recent reading, Gallup in 2010 found 44% in favor of stricter laws. In fact, in 2009 and again last year, the slight majority said gun laws should either remain the same or be made less strict.”
  • An August CNN/ORC poll asked respondents whether they favor or oppose a number of specific policies to restrict gun ownership. And when you drill down to that level, many policies, including banning the manufacture and possession of semi-automatic rifles, are popular.
  • Shootings don’t tend to substantially affect views on gun control. That, at least, is what the Pew Research Center found:
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "When we first collected much of this data, it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid "politicizing" the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for "don't talk about reforming our gun control laws." Let's be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It's just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws."
anonymous

An empirical perspective on religious and secular reasons « The Immanent Frame - 0 views

blogs.ssrc.org/...an-empirical-perspective

religion politics criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 22 Oct 10 - Cached
  • An example of a policy that would apply to all citizens is gay marriage, and we have all encountered religious reasons for banning gay marriage, such as, “Leviticus 18:22 tells us that homosexuality is an abomination before God.”
  • “Public reason” is a bit more obscure, but liberal theorists mean by the term general reasons that are widely or near universally shared by citizens. This would preclude reasons deriving from any “comprehensive perspective,” such as religion, obviously including Leviticus 18:22.
  • It is critical for our society that we get this normative debate right, for the stakes are high. We face increasing religious diversity. Liberal theorists, like Rawls, say that unless we keep religious reasons out of the public sphere, we could descend into a religiously motivated civil war similar to the Thirty Years’ War of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, critics of liberal theorists, like religious ethicist Charles Mathewes, say that unless we allow each other to talk about our deep differences, such as our religious beliefs, we could descend into the same nightmare that concerns the liberal theorists.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • This normative debate is about what people should do in public debates, but knowing what people actually do would allow theorists to develop greater nuance in their analyses.
  • One of the premises of this entire debate is that religious people want to use religious reasons in public debates.
  • If anyone would want to use religious reasons, it would be these activists. But what the scholars find is that, in fact, the religious Right offers secular reasons for their policy proposals.
  • This is not because they are normatively sanctioned for using religious reasons, as critics of liberal theory suggest. Rather, religious reasons do not convince people to accept one’s position.
  • Scholars such as Robert Audi say that religious reasons should not be used anywhere along the spectrum, while others, like Chris Eberle in an earlier post, argue that religious reasons can be given by elected officials while passing laws; and Charles Taylor writes that the use of religious reasons by elected officials is fine, but secular reasons are required in the “official language of the state,” such as the wording of laws.
  • the acceptability of using religious reasons depends on the proximity of the reason-giver to the creation of policy
  • near the “actual power” end of the spectrum, religious people do not want to give religious reasons, because they do not work.
  • If they do not work to mobilize a sub-group of citizens to  advocate for banning abortion, they are not going to be effective for forging a majority vote in Congress, which in theory is just as pluralistic as the citizenry.
  • In my interviews, a majority of the people thought one should use religious discourse with the Hindu neighbor, with conservative Protestants being the most likely to say so. Interestingly, a majority of the secular respondents also thought that one should use religious discourse
  • The most prevalent reason given for advocating the use of religious reasons is that using only secular reasons is not possible if you are religious.
  • respondents actually wanted to start the conversation with secular reasons in order to be understood.
  • As one evangelical said, he tries to avoid “Christian speak” because “nobody knows what the heck you are talking about.” However, if they were asked to give reasons for their reasons, then the respondents thought that eventually their religious reasons would have to be brought into the conversation, because those are “behind” everything.
  • two implications
  • First, it seems that both professional activists and ordinary religious people, including religious conservatives, want to use public reasons in the public sphere.
  • A second implication is that, contrary to what many theorists maintain, religious people appear to be quite capable of translating between religious and secular reasons
  • Calhoun, expanding on Habermas’s notion of translation, explores the idea that what is needed is not the translation of religious reasons into secular reasons, or the exclusive use of one or the other, but “mutual interrogation,” or a “complementary learning process” about people’s real reasons, religious or otherwise.
  • What would happen if people started invoking their comprehensive perspectives by using religious reasons? Famously, Richard Rorty claimed that religious reasons are a conversation-stopper, because they are unintelligible to those who do not share one’s religious beliefs. So, if Rorty is correct, Habermas’s translation proposal will never work.
  • Even though religious reasons are second-order, having religious reasons and not using them is considered insincere. To actually understand the other person’s argument, you have to hear their religious reasons if they have them.
  • Interestingly, the secular respondents did not want religious people to give secular reasons. Their reasoning is: if this is how a religious person thinks, why shouldn’t they be able to talk that way?
  • Of course, many of the secular people added that they were not going to be convinced by the religious reasons, but they would want others to offer such reasons if they wanted to.
  • This is but a sampling of the normative insights that can be developed from the limited existing empirical data on the use of religious reasons in the public sphere. It would be helpful for normative theorists to identify the critical empirical questions that they have, and for empiricists to discuss with them what is actually possible to determine. Working together, the two groups could really shake up the debate about this critical social issue.
  • My concern is that reason-giving isn’t necessarily where the action is, or at least where all of it is. Aside from the “that’s-just-who-I-am” approach you detail in the post, I can think of some other possible routes from religion to public discourse that bypass reason-giving.
  • A prime example here is Christine O’Donnell’s justification for her anti-masturbation stance, which is prima facie idiotic: “…if he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?” Leaving aside O’Donnell in specific, everybody of course already knows why a real, live sexual partner is in the picture!
  • The statement only makes any sense at all if uttered in a religious context, i.e., one in which there is an assumed religious commonality between the speaker and the audience. In this case, the commonality is the religious assumption that the purpose of sexuality is essentially religious. Thus this deserves to be understood as religious reason-giving even though there is no religious language in the reason!
  • anonymous on 22 Oct 10
     
    "This "religion in the public sphere" thread has featured debates about whether citizens of liberal democratic societies can offer religious reasons for public laws that will be coercive on all citizens, or whether they must use, in John Rawls's terms, "public reason."" By John H. Evans at the Immanent Frame on October 1, 2010.
anonymous

Defending Against Drones - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...print

military

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.
  • Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Mar 10
       
      That comment from Tuttle is classic and is a poignant reminder that many experts routinely miss bit shifts in institutional framework changes.
  • We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 10
anonymous

States' Rights Is Rallying Cry for Lawmakers - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...17states.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 31 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Some legal scholars say the new states’ rights drive has more smoke than fire, but for lawmakers, just taking a stand can be important enough.
  • anonymous on 31 Mar 10
     
    Referred to this article by the Lifecourse Blog (http://blog.lifecourse.com/2010/03/fourth-turning-watch-states-rights/). It's a look at the cry for states' rights in the New York Times, written by Kirk Johnson on March 16, 2010.
anonymous

United States of Insurance - 0 views

dilbert.com/...united_states_of_insurance

adams blog criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 12 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Today we will consider a model for replacing our current form of government with an insurance-based model.
  • For all practical purposes, the government is already a big insurance company. All I'm suggesting is that we become more efficient at it, and make some money in the process.
  • anonymous on 12 Apr 10
     
    A provocative idea: turning the U.S. into a global insurance provider. Scott Adams poses another "what if" on his blog on April 12, 2010.
anonymous

A fresh look at the left and right political blogospheres - 0 views

crookedtimber.org/...d-right-political-blogospheres

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 28 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Over 40% of blogs on the left adopt platforms with enhanced user participation features. Only about 13% of blogs on the right do so. While there is substantial overlap, and comments of some level of visibility are used in the vast majority of blogs on both sides of the political divide, the left adopts enabling technologies that make user-generated diaries and blogs more central to the site to a significantly greater degree than does the right. (p. 22.)
  • There are lots of other interesting results in the paper so I highly recommend reading it [pdf]. It’s very clearly written and summarizes related literature well so in case this is not an area you’ve been following, this is a good piece with which to start to familiarize yourself with related debates. If it is an area that you’ve been following then this is a must-read to see some truly original contributions to the literature.
  • anonymous on 28 Apr 10
     
    By Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber on April 28, 2010.
anonymous

Russian Military Reform - 0 views

russiamil.wordpress.com

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Apr 10
     
    Tracking developments in the Russian military. A great blog that helps to provide a more rounded perspective on matters pertaining to the FSU. The blog is somewhat critical of StratFor, which makes it a valuable counterpoint.
anonymous

Arsenic in Rice: of Baby and Bath Water - 0 views

health.usnews.com/...in-rice-of-baby-and-bath-water

health arsenic

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Arsenic is an element present in the earth's crust. There would likely be some of it in ground water even without the human activities that traumatize that crust in a variety of ways, but not enough to threaten health. Our various activities that have moved both rocks and water, from mining to drilling wells into aquifers, have resulted in significant mobilization of arsenic from rock into ground water.
  • Arsenic comes in two forms, organic and inorganic.
  • Organic arsenic, which is present in foods in very small amounts, is probably non-toxic, and may even be an essential trace element.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Inorganic arsenic is certainly a toxin, as was made famous in the movie, Arsenic and Old Lace. It is the primary variety released from rocks into water, and the main concern for human health.
  • Attention to arsenic in the environment by the Environmental Protection Agency, and in our food by the FDA, can only be a good thing, advancing food safety. Eating a variety of whole grains, for those without reasons to avoid them such as gluten sensitivity, is good for health in general—and may also reduce arsenic intake.
  • But inevitably, when a peril in our food or medicine cabinet or environment is pointed out to us, it invites the hyperbole of concentrated media attention, an inclination to invoke conspiracy theories, and at least some temptation to panic. When we do give in to panic, we tend to jettison the baby along with the bath water, resulting in net harm.
  • 1. Don't make perfect the enemy of good.
  • since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available choices are best for health?
  • The presence of a contaminant in food does not reliably indicate that eating the food is harmful.
  • Similarly, there is more arsenic in brown rice than white, but the health benefits of eating a whole grain may outweigh that.
  • 2. Don't exaggerate a risk just because you don't control it.
  • We have known for decades that the four leading causes of chronic disease and premature death in industrialized countries are smoking, poor dietary pattern, lack of physical activity, and obesity. Yet these four are routinely ignored or neglected by people who get very worked up over the latest chemical threat in our food or environment.
  • We should not ignore big risks just because they are under our control, nor exaggerate much smaller ones simply because they are not.
  • 3. New in the news is not new in the world.
  • The tendency when a chemical threat is highlighted in the news is to think the threat itself is new, and the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if arsenic in rice or other foods does actually contribute to cancer risk, it has been doing so for years.
  • the notion that there is a spike in cancer or other disease rates looming around the next bend is misguided; we are already around that bend, and any harms of arsenic are already part of the epidemiologic landscape we know.
  • Perfectly pure food is, alas, not available on this planet. So those of us living here should focus on net health effects rather than the media hype du jour, and do the best we can with the food supply we've got.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 12
     
    "Predictably, there was widespread media attention to a recent release by Consumer Reports highlighting contamination of rice by arsenic. In customary "consumer watchdog" fashion, Consumer Reports presented a long list of popular consumer products, from cooking rice, to rice cakes, to breakfast cereal, and most worrisome, baby food, with arsenic levels in each. The story was covered extensively by the major network news programs."
anonymous

Companies won't even look at résumés of the long-term unemployed - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...es-of-the-long-term-unemployed

generations companies résumés unemployed

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Matthew O’Brien reports on a striking new paper by Rand Ghayad and William Dickens of Northeastern University. The researchers sent out 4,800 fake résumés at random for 600 job openings. What they found is that employers would rather call back someone with no relevant experience who’s only been out of work for a few months than someone with lots of relevant experience who’s been out of work for longer than six months.
  • Here’s what this looks like in chart form:
  • the long-term unemployed are struggling to find work no matter how many job openings pop up.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • there’s some ambiguity about whether companies are discriminating irrationally against the unemployed or whether they have good reason for screening out people who have been out of work for six months or more.
  • Dozens of states have been considering legislation that would make it illegal to discriminate against the long-term unemployed. Some proposals would even allow unsuccessful applicants to sue under the same discrimination laws that apply to race or gender bias.
  • These proposals have plenty of critics. But it’s also unclear whether they would have much impact.
  • The Obama administration, for its part, has proposed a few other ideas, including training programs and tax credits for businesses that hire the long-term unemployed. (The latter were even included in the American Jobs Act that Republicans blocked in Congress.)
  • Yet economists have argued that while these programs might help at the margins, they won’t necessarily bring down the overall unemployment rate. For instance, a company might just hire a subsidized worker over someone else.
  • It’s worth noting, as Matt Yglesias points out here, that long-term unemployment was a major structural problem after the Great Depression too. But as this old essay by Richard Jensen suggests, it took World War II to finally solve the problem: “The war, by removing millions of prime men from the labor market, by restructuring the work process, by subsidizing wages, and by massive retraining, finally gave the private sector the methods and the incentives to rehire the hard-core.” That’s not really an option today, but it underscores a bleak fact about the recession. When the labor market stays weak for years on end, the damage becomes long-lasting — and extremely difficult to reverse.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "Here's one big reason why America's unemployment crisis may be here to stay. Thanks to the lasting effects of the recession, there are currently 4.7 million workers who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks. And new research suggests that employers will almost never consider hiring them."
anonymous

Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
anonymous

Wonkbook: Five reasons Republicans lost - and one reason they won - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-lost-and-one-reason-they-won

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • 1) Republicans got nothing.
  • Typically, the law that passes at the end of these standoffs could never have passed at the beginning.
  • Not this time. The bill, which cleanly funds the government, suspends the debt ceiling, and creates a bicameral budget committee, passed with mostly Democratic votes.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 2) The GOP's Obamacare boomerang.
  • The shutdown was meant to stop Obamacare. Instead, it provided crucial aid to the struggling law. If not for the drama in Washington, HealthCare.gov's disastrous launch would've been the top news story in the country. Instead, it was knocked off the front pages. Many assumed, reasonably but wrongly, that the flaws were attributable to the GOP's shutdown. And Obamacare actually gained in the polls. Rarely has a strategy failed so completely.
  • 3) The Republican Party is horribly unpopular.
  • Multiple polls found that the Republican Party is less popular than it's been since pollsters began asking the question. Gallup found their favorability at 28 percent. The NBC/Wall Street Journal disagreed: The GOP's favorability was actually 24 percent, they reported.
  • 4) The Republican Party devalued hostage taking.
  • Republicans took the wrong lesson from 2011. They thought they won major policy concessions because they were willing to take the debt ceiling hostage. In fact, they won major policy concessions because they'd won the 2010 election. The hostage taking was perhaps a necessary strategy to effectuate their mandate, but it wasn't sufficient without the electoral win.
  • By unwisely deploying the same strategy this year, after they lost an election, they proved its weakness -- and they let Democrats establish a principle that they won't negotiate policy under these terms. Going forward, Republicans will be more afraid of this kind of brinksmanship and Democrats will be far less afraid of it.
  • 5) They split their party.
  • The shutdown began with a schism. Republican leaders thought Sen. Ted Cruz's defund-and-shutdown strategy was lunacy. They tried everything they could think of to get out of it. They failed.
  • But there's one silver lining for Republicans:
  • They held their spending number. Even though Democrats won the 2012 election, Republicans have managed to keep sequestration's spending levels.
  • By making this about Obamacare and the legitimacy of hostage taking as a routine political strategy, the GOP lost terribly. But in terms of what fights over bills to fund the government are supposed to be about -- spending -- Republicans didn't give an inch. Sequestration is still there, and it still gives Republicans real leverage in the coming budget negotiations with Democrats.
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 13
     
    "Our not-that-long national nightmare is finally over. Last night, the House and Senate passed, and President Obama signed, a bill ending the shutdown. And for Republicans, this has been an utter disaster -- although there's one bright spot."
anonymous

Pendulum, Escapement Prototypes Installed in Museum - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...prototypes-installed-in-museum

longnow

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Austin Brown at The Long Now Blog on June 24, 2010
anonymous

The Very Angry Tea Party - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-very-angry-tea-party

criticalthinking media politics

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief.
  • When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy. 
  • Mark Lilla argued that the hodge-podge list of animosities Tea party supporters mention fail to cohere into a body of political grievances in the conventional sense: they lack the connecting thread of achieving political power. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What Lilla cannot account for, and what no other commentator I have read can explain, is the passionate anger of the Tea Party movement, or, the flip-side of that anger, the ease with which it succumbs to the most egregious of fear-mongering falsehoods. 
  • My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding. 
  • they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible
  • Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that  one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. 
  • Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.
  • If stated in enough detail, all these institutions and practices should be seen as together manufacturing, and even inventing, the idea of a sovereign individual who becomes, through them and by virtue of them, the ultimate source of authority. 
  • is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given  or a social creation?
  • It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects
  • Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. 
  • because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. 
  • This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.
  • All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved
  • About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality.  The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction. 
  • In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists. 
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 10
     
    By J.M. Bernstein (Opinionator Blog) at NYTimes.com on June 13, 2010.
anonymous

Quitting the hominid fight club: The evidence is flimsy for innate chimpanzee--let alon... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

longnow evolution

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • He asserts that both male humans and chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are "natural warriors" with an innate predisposition toward "coalitionary killing," which dates back to our common ancestor.
  • "Chimpicide," Pinker wrote in his 2002 bestseller The Blank Slate the Modern Denial of Human Nature, "raises the possibility that the forces of evolution, not just the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture, prepared us for violence."
  • I've been reading and talking to anthropologists about the demonic-males theory for years, and I've turned from a believer to a skeptic. Here are some reasons why:
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Mitani, for example, estimates the mortality rate from coalitionary attacks in Kibale to be as high as "2,790 per 100,000 individuals per year." But the researchers witnessed only 18 coalitionary killings. All told, since Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park in 1960, researchers have directly observed 31 intergroup killings, of which 17 were infants.
  • In other words, researchers at a typical site directly observe one killing every seven years.
  • But that raises another question: Could unusual environmental conditions be triggering intergroup chimpanzee killing?
  • When we first offered the chimps bananas the males seldom fought over their food; …now…there was a great deal more fighting than ever before." (This quote appears in Sussman and Marshack's paper.)
  • Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, told me that chimpanzee violence is "plausibly related to population stress occasioned by human encroachment."
  • Researchers have never observed coalitionary killing among bonobos. Noting that bonobos are just as genetically related to us as chimpanzees, Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, suggested last year in The Wall Street Journal that bonobos may be "more representative of our primate background" than are chimpanzees.
  • One author, anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, told me that Ardi has triggered a "tectonic shift" in views of human evolution.
  • There is also no fossil or archaeological evidence that our ancestors fought millions or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yes, archaeological digs and modern ethnography have established that warfare was common among pre-state societies, notably hunter–gatherers; our ancestors are thought to have lived as hunter–gatherers since the emergence of the Homo genus two million years ago.
  • Advocates of the demonic-males thesis suggest that if hunter–gatherers ever engaged in warfare, they must have always done so.
  • But as the anthropologist Douglas Fry of Åbo Akademi University in Finland pointed out in his book Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford University Press, 2009), the oldest clear-cut relic of group violence is a 13,000-year-old grave along the Nile River in the Jebel Sahaba region of Sudan.
  • Evidence of earlier lethal human violence is ambiguous, at best.
  • But most Paleolithic injuries probably resulted from "hunting large animals who object to being speared," Trinkaus told me. "You find a lot of evidence of bumps and bruises and broken bones" among Neandertals and other early humans. "There is absolutely no evidence," Trinkaus says, that "war is continuous back to the common ancestor with chimps."
  • Advocates of the demonic-males thesis insist that absence of evidence of warfare does not equal evidence of absence, especially given the paucity of ancient human and prehuman remains.
  • These relics indicate that warfare arose as humans began shifting from "a nomadic existence to a sedentary one, commonly although not necessarily tied to agriculture," Ferguson says.
  • War's recent emergence, and its sporadic pattern, contradict the assertion of Wrangham and others that war springs from innate male tendencies, he argues. "If war is deeply rooted in our biology, then it's going to be there all the time. And it's just not," he says. War is certainly not as innate as language, a trait possessed by all known human societies at all times.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By John Horgan at Scientific American Blog on June 29, 2010.
anonymous

Are Pro Sports Growing More Alturistic? - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...sports-growing-more-alturistic

generations sports

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Now, some twenty-odd years later, it seems that another attitude shift is under way, once again with some of the most interesting signals coming from professional sports.  The tide is beginning to turn on the fighting, the profanity, the performance drugs, the super-lux seats, and the renting of stadium names.  And, as this story shows, pro teams everywhere (though this story in mainly about the DC area) are starting to focus a lot more on how they can give back to the community.
  • Sure, you can say it’s hypocritical and just another way for the franchises to win the popularity of local crowds and national audiences.  But I’m sure many of the athletes and managers are sincere, and in any case why wasn’t this a formula for winning over crowds and audiences ten or twenty years ago?
  • You could also say it’s just the impact of the Great Recession.  People are tapped out, they don’t want to be reminded of things they can’t afford, and they are aware their communities have bigger needs but smaller public resources to handle them.  This is also true.  But it’s got to be more than that. 
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 10
     
    "Now, some twenty-odd years later, it seems that another attitude shift is under way, once again with some of the most interesting signals coming from professional sports. The tide is beginning to turn on the fighting, the profanity, the performance drugs, the super-lux seats, and the renting of stadium names. And, as this story shows, pro teams everywhere (though this story in mainly about the DC area) are starting to focus a lot more on how they can give back to the community." By Dave Sohigian at Lifecourse Blog on August 16, 2010.
anonymous

William Shatner vs. Carroll O'Connor - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...iam-shatner-vs-carroll-oconnor

generations media

shared by anonymous on 04 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 Oct 10
     
    "These two shows are about the politically incorrect sayings of "old guys." One appears nearly 40 years after the other. But the leading "old guy" actor of the more recent show is born only 6 years after the actor of the first. Wow. And Shatner actually looks younger now than O'Connor did back then." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on October 4, 2010.
anonymous

Stephanie Coontz on "Mad Men" - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...stephanie-coontz-on-mad-men

generations

shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Let me bring this discussion back around to generations, turnings, and cyclical versus linear time.  One thing  Bill and I discovered many years ago, even before  The Fourth Turning appeared, was that most people who really do not like our perspective on history have fairly strong ideological motivations.  These tend to be people whose ideology colors their perspective on history, who see history moving from absolute error toward absolute rectitude, and who (therefore) are really bothered by a view of history that is not linear.  In this view, the idea that there might be something archetypal in a bygone generation or era of history seems bizarre, even perverse.  There can be no archetype for social dysfunction and blatant injustice.  It’s like a disease.  When it’s over, you hope and expect it never returns.
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "I have argued before that " Mad Men" is a fundamentally unhistorical rendition of how most Americans felt and behaved in late First Turning (the High) America. To summarize, my point was basically that most of the roles are played by Generation X (born 1961-1981) who meticulously "look" like circa-1960 business-world people-but who fail to reflect the authentic mood of the era as it was lived and experienced. Instead, the actors come across as Gen-Xers dressed in 1960 clothing and trapped in 1960 social mannerisms. Let me put aside all instance in "Mad Men" where the script is simply impossible-like characters telling each other to "get in touch with their feelings." Even aside from such obvious anachronisms, most scenes (to my eye and ear) are suffused with a sense of oppressive tension and cynicism." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on October 11, 2010.
anonymous

The Least You Should Know - 0 views

dilbert.com/...the_least_you_should_know

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "If you live in the United States, you probably have an opinion on the best way to reduce the deficit. And you probably know almost nothing about the topic. I certainly fall into that category. If you listen to pundits and politicians, you're getting your information from professional liars. If you're reading books, you're getting your information from professional liars who also write well. If you read newspapers and magazines, you're getting only the information that someone has decided will be good for sales. If you say you "do your own research," you're probably a liar, possibly an idiot, and maybe some sort of analytical genius. And frankly, I can't tell you guys apart." By Scott Adams at his blog on November 8, 2010.
anonymous

Some Insights on Generation Size/Dates - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...sights-on-generation-sizedates

generations

shared by anonymous on 02 Nov 10 - Cached
  • The demographic challenge facing America is not as severe as the challenge facing near all of the other developed countries (and even some of the developing countries, like China).  The reason is pretty simple: We have a higher fertility rate and we have a higher immigration rate.  Indeed, we are the *only* developed country experiencing  “replacement rate” fertility.  And we are the only developed country whose total population is projected to continue growing (albeit very slowly), and not turn negative, through to the end of the next century.  The U.S. fiscal situation is also helped by the fact that our pay-as-you-go cash pension system is smaller and less generous, relative to GDP, than those of other countries.  But this plus is more than offset by our super-expensive health-care entitlement edifice, which is much more expensive as a share of GDP than any other country’s and is growing faster as a share of GDP. 
  • anonymous on 02 Nov 10
     
    "I have recently run into discussions where there is confusion about the date boundaries and sizes of generations. Even the word "generation" can sometimes be up for contention. On the definition of "generation," I don't get hot and bothered about it. The etymological history of the word "generation" is sufficiently broad (having been applied to families, computers, eras, what have you), that people are pretty much free to call any arbitrary cohort group a "generation" if they feel like it. Most of these definitions, however, are ad hoc. Even the famous Census Bureau definition of Boomers (which they define as 1946-64) is ad hoc, determined entirely by an arbitrary uptick and then downtick along a broad fertility-rate swell." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on November 1, 2010.
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