epiphanatic » politics

Posted on 02.06.08 by jstoner @ 11:26 pm

I sat at work last night, thinking about what to do with my evening. I could go home, like most nights, and work on a little project I will share here at some point soon, or… Obama is in town.

I had voted for Obama that morning, and I’m excited about him, but the undertow of habit is strong in my mind. So I struggled with debate for a while. But I managed to get myself up, treated myself to a rare cab ride, and made my way to the Hyatt Regency.

And after an interminable wait, being shuffled from ballroom to ballroom, I stood with aching feet in that crowded room in the presence of the man. These are my thoughts:

First, I projected my hopes and fears onto the loose framework of his message, just like everyone else does. It’s sad, I know, but I can’t escape the feeling that a good cult of personality is exactly what this country needs right now.

The challenges that face this country, this world, are very large. The excesses of the last century have left us with a financial crisis and an environmental crisis at the same time. Both multi-trillion-dollar problems that will take decades to resolve, and more than a technocratic laundry list of ’solutions for America.’ They will require the utter transformation of American society.

I don’t say that lightly. I expect to lose and gain jobs in that process, change careers. I expect to watch my friends struggle, and my parents struggle in retirement. This is going be a dark time, a test.

And it’s going to require all hands on deck. This is it, folks. The party’s gone on very long, and the bills are coming due. There will not necessarily be a nuclear war, though that may happen, and not necessarily famine or plague, though those may be entailed. This could make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park.

When I think about the times ahead for us, I imagine lifting a school bus over my head. That’s how hard it looks to me, what it’s going to demand from me personally, to get through the next few years. And I realize it will take that from more than me: it will take that from every American, and a lot of others besides.

This is the context in which I hear his words: yes, we can.

It’s going to require the depth of vision he demonstrated in his early opposition to the war.

It’s going to take his understanding that Islamic extremism is not the greatest challenge our country faces in the twenty-first century. It’s not even second.

It’s going to require a politics of hope, because the politics of fear could lead to the loss of liberty for this country, and the loss of the dynamicism we desperately need to get through to the other side of what we face.

So this is the substance of Obama: not the laundry list of policy proposals. Though the moral courage, integrity, and commitment to change are important. The depth of vision thing is central, his essential intelligence, and so are his leadership qualities.

FDR had a cult of personality. Abraham Lincoln might not have had one in the moment, but the nation came to understand his contribution after he died. They led us through our greatest trials, and it made a difference. They had something special. I think Obama does too. And I think it’s exactly what we need right now.

Filed under: politics--us
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blowing Ann’s cover

Posted on 07.02.07 by jstoner @ 5:04 pm

I admit it: I love the Yes Men. Comic brilliance.

And they have an ongoing project–and I think it’s their biggest–a deep-cover prank so brilliant, it blows my mind. I don’t say “it blows my mind” lightly: my mind is not easy to blow at this point. But when I finally figured this out, I had no other way to describe it.

I’m speaking, of course, of the career of Ann Coulter.

Doubts? Just to be clear, let’s review one of the Yes Men’s prank methodologies.

The Yes Men represent themselves as members of an establishment organization, perhaps not explicitly right-wing, but serving a right wing agenda: perhaps some Bush-aligned government office, perhaps a world trade group.

Make an appearance at an appropriate public event, usually a conference. They’ve made several news show appearances, on BBC and CNBC. Perhaps a trade conference, perhaps a Heritage Foundation meeting. Get the confidence of the audience.

Give a speech. Work up to some proposal or statement that is completely outlandish, but based on the premises of that organization. Package it in a presentable, acceptable way.

Conservative audiences have been fooled into accepting slavery, using “Justice Vouchers” to allow repressive regimes to trade for the right to abuse their citizens, or a scheme for rationalizing death for profit. Their hidden biases are exposed, and they are discredited.

Ann? Ann targets a different crowd. She’s less focused on issues around globalization and injustice, and more focused on exposing the hypocrisy and gullibility of many on the religious right. She targets cultural conservatives more than social conservatives.

But the approach is similar: rehabilitating Joe McCarthy? Calling John Edwards a faggot? Or this page of quotes? Or this gaffe? How can you take her seriously? The point is, some actually do. They don’t get the joke.

She’s been at it longer than the Yes Men have. But it’s clear she has been an inspiration. And what does it mean to be a Yes Man, really? After all, you too can be a Yes Man. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them collaborating more directly in some way soon.

Now, being as I’m fairly liberal, why would I blow poor Ann’s cover like this? Well, I don’t really think I am: she has a committed audience. They might not like what I’m saying, but they won’t believe it anyway.

On the other hand, there are others who think they oppose her, who also don’t get the joke. Fellow liberals who find her infuriating. I was one of them for a while. I figure there’s no harm in letting them in on the prank. It is pretty funny.

Further, though I’m generally liberal, I’m also honest, and there are conservatives I respect. Honest disagreement is an important part of my politics.

Most of the conservatives I respect find her more infuriating than liberals do. And while I may oppose them in certain contexts, there’s no reason to be cruel. Besides, I think she illuminates an important distinction within conservatism: people who have a commitment to authentic American values, and people who will fall for fascism the first time they get scared. Terrorism’s low-hanging fruit: people terrorized-waiting-to-happen. And I think it’s import to know where we all stand with regard to that.

So, Ann, I have to say: great work. Hilarious. Way to show those America-haters. Nudge, nudge,wink, wink.

Filed under: ha and politics--us
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a way out of Iraq

Posted on 01.15.07 by jstoner @ 1:28 am

I think I’ve got an idea of how to extricate ourselves from Iraq. It might not be a good idea, but I think it’s better than Bush’s current plan:

First, draft orders for immediate and complete withdrawal, as fast as possible. If you gotta leave some equipment behind, so be it. Get them complete and initialed, to the point where a single presidential signature will start the process. Make it as few pages as possible, for the President to carry around. I’m calling this the sword of Solomon document;

Get all the regional powers together, everyone with an interest other than chaos. Exclude those who would profit by chaos. Their interests may conflict, but none of them will be happy with the hell-in-a-handbasket scenario. There are those who would be happy with that: don’t invite them. Include Syria, Iran, the Saudis, Turkey, Jordan, the Kuwaitis, and all the appropriate internal players: al-Maliki, al-Sistani, and so forth;

Threaten them with the document. “We are leaving. We can leave now, or we can leave later. The choice is yours. You have x number of weeks to make a deal. If at any point, I lose faith that you are going to come up with something that will be stable, lasting, and as just as we can manage for all concerned, including the Sunnis, I will sign this, and we will let you people deal with the mess.”

“We’ll work with you. We’ll provide support for peaceful directions. But we have to move in accordance with the patience of the American people, and we also have to do our best by all of the Iraqi people.

“And we have to deal with the realities of spheres of influence that will interact over time here. Better to be up-front and diplomatic now than shedding blood in the shadows for years to come.

“If partition is the direction of history, then so be it. Those who want a unified Iraq have to stand up for it, now. This is probably your last stand.”

It would require balls, and statesmanship–if the next president does have to sign the Sword document he/she will have to answer to the American people for $100/barrel oil. But you know, the president serving from 2008-2012 will probably be a one-termer anyway, so they might as well step up.

Filed under: politics--global and politics--us
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Liberty begins in the heart, not the law

Posted on 10.27.06 by jstoner @ 11:59 pm

Liberty begins in the heart, not the law. A mind clouded with fear cannot know it rights; it will not use them. A heart filled with hate will not respect them in others. So in these moments, when we are weak and thrown to hate and fear, we must return to that highest mind, the mind that gave us these rights inalienably, and our deepest heart, the heart that demands we respect them in others. By whatever name, we must reconnect with the universal source of dignity.

Only there do we find the strength to be free in difficult moments. Only there do we find a way to truly defy terrorism. And only from there can we truly defeat it.

The true guardians of liberty need more than guns and bombs. All human beings know hate and fear: true guardians of liberty know them, have them, but guard against their yoke.

In that mindfulness there is a gift. A liberation not only of will, but of spirit. And a liberation not only of spirit, but of mind. A wisdom and a sensibility emerges: is the building on fire? No? Then take a deep breath. Calm down and think. What’s the real threat here? How do we deal with it sensibly, rationally? How do we manage our minds to bring our best to the problem?

So look carefully at those who would lead you. Know that those who lead by fear are themselves led by it. They are not fit leaders of free people. They do not have what it takes to be free in times like these. They deserve your compassion, not your allegiance.

In every dictator, there is a scared little boy, too afraid to face respected equals; in every backslider in the cause of liberty, a panicked, overwhelmed individual, compromising when they know they shouldn’t. Fear puts these simple principles out of their grasp: it is as important to know when to trust as not to. A nation’s greatest power is the goodwill of its people. And while security is important, respect for human dignity and basic freedom is both the deepest foundation and highest expression of that spirit.

So when you choose your representatives in the coming election, ask yourselves this: what kind of civilization do they stand for? How deeply civilized are they? How well do they think when their civilized nature is tested? Do they fixate on barricades, or do they seek ways to leverage the best of our nature to make our world both safer and freer? Free people must demand no less.

Filed under: politics--global and politics--us
Comments: 2 Comments

the flag-burning amendment

Posted on 06.29.06 by jstoner @ 2:29 pm

Why is this a bad idea?

Here’s the thing: the flag stands for the country. The country stands for liberty. Which is more important, the symbol of the country, or the principle the country stands for? Is representing liberty more important than praciticing it?

It’s not such an important issue of itself. It’s important as a test of how people think. Do you care about symbols or principles, surfaces or depth?

This is why this news is upsetting. Not particularly surprising, but the rising vote count for this measure is a curious thing. I wonder why a senator would change their vote on this issue.

Filed under: politics--us
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“Consciousness raising”

Posted on 06.11.06 by jstoner @ 4:37 pm

David Brooks had an interesting but flawed column today, about recent findings in neurological gender differences, and how they explain problems boys are having in school. (Sorry for the pay link–you can sign up for the two week freebie, but don’t forget to cancel if you don’t want to pay.) His bottom line was that literary lessons were designed to appeal to girls, and that boys need different kinds of assignments to learn to appreciate reading. Less Austen, more Hemingway.

It make sense to me: literary education at that age is more about seduction than stretching your palate. You have to have a palate to begin with. Work with what boys will like, get them hooked, then stretch their little minds.

I have mixed feelings about Brooksâ€“sometimes heâ€™s close, often he writes in cariacature without depth. I wrote a response to his column. The whole column was OKâ€“muddied a couple points, missed some interesting possibilities, but it was fine till the last line. Here was my critique:

“Consciousness-raising doesn’t turn boys into sensitively poetic pacifists. It just turns many of them into high school and college dropouts who hate reading.”

David, this is a deeply confused sentence. OK, I accept that boys and girls should be educated in different ways, based on recent findings.

But this sentence (if not necessarily the article) confuses “consciousness-raising” with literary education. One could teach boys to love literature with Twain and Vonnegut, and by other means teach them to appreciate the viewpoints of others, including women.

You could teach both sexes the very lessons you enumerate in your article–men and and women are different, and here’s how. These are your tendencies for strength and weakness.

“If your brain worked this way, here’s how you would see the world.” That sounds like some very interesting consciousness raising.

Filed under: politics--us and stoney language love
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talking to Iran

Posted on 05.27.06 by jstoner @ 12:00 pm

News piece in NYT today about the debate within the administration over direct talks with Iran.

I’d love to see them try to justify military action without trying direct talks. That would be funny:

“We’ve tried everything possible before taking this action…”

“Did you talk to them?”

“Well… our friends did.”

“But did you?”

“Um, no…”

The scary thought is that they might do it as a formality, just so they can avoid this conversation.

Filed under: Uncategorized and politics--global and politics--us
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a sad opposition

Posted on 04.29.06 by jstoner @ 9:32 pm

In the debate over “network neutrality,” there is a sad and unneccesary opposition between two streams of innovation.

One is bandwidth innovation. The telephone companies claim to champion increased bandwith available to the consumer. They claim that without tiered bandwidth access for big websites, they won’t have incentives to build the next generation of networks.

Notice their rhetoric acknowledges only bandwidth innovation: they say the most important thing the American net needs is more bandwidth, so they can give us more channels of TV. Note also they only acknowledge one source of innovation: themselves. All Google does is freeload on their wires. Who cares where companies like that come from? After all, the telcos have such a sterling history of innovation.

The other stream is applications innovation. Companies from Yahoo to Google to Flickr stand on the other side of the debate as proven innovators. These post-AT&T-breakup companies have delivered wave after wave of new technology to customers around the world.

Notice how the telcos have framed it: you can have one stream, from us, or another, from them. You can’t have both.

It’s interesting to compare their attitudes to those of the applications innovators. In a recent interview, James Gosling had this to say about American telecom firms:

Q: Has North America’s extensive fixed-line networks held back the jump to massive mobile development?

A: No. The place it’s been most advanced and most interesting is Japan, and Japan has at least as much old-line infrastructure as North America. â€¦ They [NTT DoCoMo] came up with this scheme of encouraging third parties to develop lots and lots of services in the hopes that that would drive network usage. They came up with a methodology where you could be a software developer for their network. What it took the join was essentially nothing. So, you get two guys and a dog going off to do a game. The game would get popular and the way that popular culture works it explodes really quickly. People were going from napkin to millionaire in two months. This started this huge feeding frenzy of developers, writing all kinds of software, making it really easy for people to get at. It really hinged on having this mechanism from the phone company that allowed third-parties to do all kinds of stuff, to get great diversity.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been in conversations with people [in North America] where they go, “Well, we think DoCoMo was stupid for giving up all that revenue. We want all of it. We’re going to have our developers develop all the games.” I actually had somebody from Telus say to me, “You know, we did this analysis and we decided that there are eight apps that people need on their cellphones. So we’re having our developers develop those eight apps.” And it’s like â€” (Mr. Gosling scrunches his face with incredulity) â€” the person just so deeply doesn’t get it.

First, the kind of apps that phone companies generate tend to be mind-numbingly bad. And you can’t actually predict what’s going to be successful. In a lot of these things that are truly social experiments, you got to try stuff. You’ve got to have the creative weirdoes out there. And by and large, creative weirdoes don’t work for big phone companies. You’ve got to figure out a way to tap into the creative weirdoes.

So it seems clear that this is what causes this unneccessary opposition: American telcos are unwilling to leave cash on the table. In a very shortsighted, pre-1994 way. I mean, if anyone should have learned the value of establishing an innovation ecosystem in the past ten years, it’s the telcos. But every time their executives open their mouth, they make it clear they haven’t learned a thing.

Worse, the limit of their vision is profoundly narrow. They want to sell more channels of television. Exactly what the world needs: we have conventional broadcast, cable, sattelite, and now AT&T delivering more video. Aain, I’m reminded of 1993: a communications revolution was coming, and right-thinking folks knew it would be based on the Internet, but there were all these visions of 500-channel TV, too. And you know what, we do have 500-channel TV now, and it’s not changing the world. Is it even making much money?

Maybe it’s an organizational culture thing. Maybe the telcos need to go through the same kind of near-death experience IBM did in the mid-nineties. Maybe they just need to die. I find a scenario for their death (er, marginalization) easy to imagine. That’s a future post.

Filed under: politics--us and science|technology
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satisfying thoughts on abortion

Posted on 03.10.06 by jstoner @ 3:57 pm

It’s taken me a while to find a satisfying way to think about abortion. I’ve always been pro-choice, but I’ve never been happy with either position in the debate. It’s something I’ve struggled with, and I think I finally have an opinion I like:

I don’t think of abortion as murder, but I don’t think of it as the moral equivalent of an appendectomy, either.

I don’t think of a fetus as a person, but I do think of it as the possibility of a person.

I don’t think of abortion as wrong, but I do think of it as bad.

To me, it has more the character of defeat than criminality.

I don’t have a problem with things like requiring counseling beforehand. I have a problem with doing it in a way that restricts access. “OK, now go think about it, come back in two days and we’ll peform the procedure. Oh, you can’t get another day off? Too bad for you.”

I disagree with the pro-life position, but I respect it. Pro-choice is not a slam-dunk position for me. I grew up in a feminist family, and most of the people I know are pro-choice, but the idea has never sat easily in my mind. I had to defend it to myself.
I have a bigger problem with those who agree with me on the point of law, and seem to think that’s all that matters. “But you’re still pro-choice, right?” Yes, and you’re missing the point.

I think the desperation on both sides of the issue flattens and hardens the debate into an ugly black-and-white conflict. Even ordinarily liberal folks fall into this: some pro-choice people I have known seem just as absolutistic about it as many fundamentalist Christians. And these are people who can see shades of gray in many other areas.

Filed under: politics--us
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sleepless in Chicago

Posted on 08.19.03 by jstoner @ 11:27 pm

My first experiment with TrackBack! Sent this as a ping to Howard Dean’s Blog for America:

I’ve just ended 19 months of marginal employment. I’m a software developer who works primarily with Web technology. I’ve begun a contract through the end of the year with a company in downtown Chicago.

I have moved back with my parents in the suburbs, at age 36. I am thankful for my supportive family, but my parents are getting on in years, and I’d rather be helping them than the other way around.

I am sleepless over what happens after my current contract ends. I lucked into this. Will I find something quickly? Or will I be out of work for another year and a half?

I am sleepless over my lack of health insurance.

Honestly, I don’t entirely blame George W. for my situation. The seeds of my current misfortune were sown during the dot-com boom. I knew those good times had to end, and that there would be a rebound. I didn’t know it would be this painful. And I know for a fact that September 11 has exacerbated things.

But the tax cut Bush has handed his favorite patrons is blatantly biased towards the rich. It might help me a little in the short term, but it will be a disaster for this country in the long term. We desperately need to repeal it. I will endure short term pain for long term gain.

I remember watching the national debt balloon during the 1980’s. I was in high school then, too young to vote. I knew I’d be paying it someday, and I was right. I considered it taxation without representation. For a time, the 90’s looked like they would provide a respite, but now we’re back to digging the same hole.

Trickle-down economic theory is discredited and delusional. Leaving enormous debt to our children is irresponsible. Taking the lone-ranger approach to the world’s problems is impractical. Why did it take this long for them to figure out they need the UN in Iraq?

We need leadership to make the necessary sacrifices. We need the courage to ask for help with problems we can’t and shouldn’t try to fix by ourselves. We need responsible liberalism to have an effective government.

I like Dean a lot. I haven’t committed to him yet. I’m not even a registered Democrat. I like being independent. But I’m sorely, sorely tempted to register and vote for Dean in the Democratic primary.

Filed under: politics--us
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