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Reflections The Web and Technology

Subtle Connections and Far-reaching Implications

What blog type am I. Typalyzer answers the question. (H/t Andrew Sullivan.)

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

I think this type may be a bit too common though – as Daily Kos, Think Progress, and about a half dozen other sites I tossed in all came up as “The Thinker” too.

I liked the graph though.

Categories
The Media The Web and Technology

The Best Designed Site on the Web

I have to agree with Stanley over at 37Signals.

Categories
Barack Obama Catholicism Morality Reflections

Political Catholicism and the Obama Apocalpyse

[digg-reddit-me]Cardinal Stafford, a prominent American Catholic close to Pope Benedict XVI, launched into a vicious tirade against the newly elected President of the United States, Barack Obama, last week. He incorporated  some boilerplate conservative attack on the state power reminiscent of Ronald Reagan (implying socialist tendencies in the President-elect); he stated that America would be experiencing the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane before it’s Crucifixion and destruction in the coming years, comparing America to Jesus and Barack Obama to Pontius Pilate; he stated that America as a nation was suicidal and has been “thrown upon the ruins;” and then, he used three curious words to describe Barack Obama: “aggressive, disruptive, and apocalyptic.”

As a Catholic I am offended by  Cardinal Stafford’s extreme politics delivered without distancing himself from his official capacity as a “prince of the church” or official rebuke from the church. It is not just what he said – but when and who he is. One thing that surprised me in the aftermath of this election was the number of Republicans, conservatives and other McCain supporters who came to me – as a person who had argued with them in favor of Obama – and expressed their cautious optimism about Obama and their pride in America for having elected him. Cardinal Stafford though seems to lack such common grace.

He joins the small cadre of movement conservatives who – rather than giving President-elect Barack Obama a chance to govern even for a few days before declaring the end of civilization – has decided to preemptively attack Barack Obama, the American people and our democratic choice. Rush Limbaugh has begun to call the financial crisis “the Obama recession” – because he clearly can see that Obama caused it by running for president. Steve Marlsburg, while talking to a prominent Israeli, encouraged her to press her leadership to launch a preemptive strike on Iran – so America would already be embroiled in yet another war in the Middle East before Obama comes into office. Michael Savage proclaimed that all competent white men would be fired from their jobs at fire and police departments and that America had been destroyed by this election. While most Americans, and many in the world, hope and pray that Barack Obama will have the strength and resolve to face the challenges that face us collectively, these men choose instead to fan the flames of fear and violence in uncertain times. They are demagogues whose latent anger at America has been unleashed by the election of a progressive in a time of crisis.

Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Steve Marlsburg are all radio shock jocks though – whose job it is to be outrageous. The fact that an Eminence has outstripped all of these men for sheer outrageousness and for blatant fear-mongering is telling. Pope John Paul II’s long reign had many legacies – but the most lasting may prove to be his politicization of the clergy, and especially the hierarchy of the Church. In America, he encouraged a culture that rewarded conservative ideology and encouraged a hierarchy-centered approach whose focus on minimizing scandals to protect the church’s power led to child abuse scandals. But the more direct result of this politicization has been the gradual movement of the church hierarchy away from the Body of the Church and its transformation into an arm of the Republican Party. Bishops, using their sacramental authority as a political public relations tool to aid the Republican Party, have publicly stated their desire to deny Communion to John Kerry (while he was running for president), to Kathleen Sebelius (after she endorsed Obama) to Republican lawyer Douglas Kmiec (after he endorsed Obama on pro-life grounds) to Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden (in the lead-up to the 2008 election). Now, post-election, some priests have begun to equate Catholicism with voting Republican so completely that they see any support for a Democrat as a mortal sin, and are denying Communion to anyone who voted for Barack Obama. And now we have a cardinal warning of the Obama apocalypse.

The Church – 54% of whom voted for Obama in America and a greater percentage who wished him to win abroad – sees it differently than the old cardinal and the politicized clergy.

For many years, the Catholic clergy have had their radical leftists and their reactionaries – but the great mass of priests have been moderates of various sorts. Today, we are seeing the fruits of thirty years of promotions of the most conservative ideologues, the fruits of a church hierarchy that no longer has any appeal except to the sexually repressed, morally corrupt, or fanatically certain, and the result of the gradual dying of the older generation of priests from a less ideological era and the emergence of the Baby Boom generation into leadership positions among the bishops – prolonging the 1960s culture war within the American Church. We are seeing the politicization of the church hierarchy. Sometimes it seems as if the more radical elements are deliberately attempting to provoke a schism, to sow disunity in the Church, so that they, with their monopoly on the institutional power of the church can declare themselves the uncorrupted Remnant.

I have never felt more distant from the Catholic church than I do now; yet I have rarely felt more one with the community of Catholics around the world and in America, more hopeful about the future, or more certain of my path and America’s path.

The Catholic Church has survived far worse men than Cardinal Stafford and the current hierarchy – it has survived popes and cardinals driven by an insatiable lust for power; it has survived warmongers and thieves who claimed their evil was done in the name of God; it has survived the greedy and corrupt, who used the institutions of the church to protect themselves; it has survived it’s war on reason and science in an age of reason and science – until it came to terms with these forces; it has survived it’s condemnation of democracy and freedom – until it came to terms with them; it has survived as popes and cardinals and bishops transparently used their moral authority to profit for themselves – until these rules promulgated for private purpose became enmeshed in tradition; it has survived it’s attempts to declare itself the sole source of Truth in the world; it has survived a plague of child molestation – enabled and covered up to the highest levels of the church. The Catholic church has survived – and it will survive this too.

The corrupt institution – through all of this – has survived because of the faith and good sense of the Church, the people and their sensus fidelium.

As Cardinal Stafford misuses his office to promote fear of apocalypse and as reactionary priests use the sacraments to provoke a schism, it should be remembered that this too will pass, and that as Christ challenged the Pharisees, so we too must challenge the corrupt institutions of our church. What we need to get past with Baby Boomer church politics is a new generation of leadership for the Catholic church, an Obama-like figure able to move past the debilitating culture wars and partisan politics to focus on the true business of the church.

It’s hard to see new leadership arising from the politicized clergy – but God does work in mysterious ways. Remember – just four years ago, it was almost inconceivable that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could be President of the United States. Yet here we are. Know hope.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Bringing Back the Fairness Doctrine

Marin Cogan in an investigative piece in The New Republic has trouble finding any media-reform liberals or Democrats who are actually want to bring the Fairness Doctrine back or are trying to do so.

As Kevin Drum points out at The Washington Monthly:

Given the collapse of the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes, folks like Limbaugh and Michael Gerson have to create a rallying cry, and there’s no better way to whip up the Republican base than to make far-right activists feel like victims. “Liberals are coming to take away your talk radio!” is, obviously, pretty effective.

At the same time, a conservative effort is underway to label legislation protecting net neutrality (which prevents the internet from being structured to favor certain sites over others and was one of the founding principles of the internet) a “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet,” which may be the only chance the big corporations who oppose net neutrality have to stop it – as Adam Reilly of The Boston Phoenix pointed out, citing me.

It seems the Fairness Doctrine is one of the key components conservatives will be using to keep their partisan backs up in the coming lean years – as well as being a potential fundraising tool.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

The Anatomy of an Obama Revolution

Sara Robinson wrote a prescient essay earlier this year (h/t Jeff BlakelyBlakley of Turning Points) exploring the promise of Barack Obama – and how the country was ready for change.

She applied the lessons of Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a Revolution (by way of the sociologist James C. Davies) to our current moment and to understanding Obama’s campaign. I’m not entirely convinced by the essay – as I don’t think America was or is as near to revolution as Sara Robinson suggests. I think that one of the touches of genius marking our political structure is that it allows change to come well before revolution is needed. And in our current age, the greater threat than revolution is apathy.

Which is why one of the first points Robinson brings up to suggest that we could be on the verge of revolution strikes me as off. One of Brinton-Davies pre-conditions of revolution is a economically advancing society that suddenly crashes. We are certainly might be headed there – more clearly now than back last winter when Robinson wrote this piece. But the most Americans today – especially younger Americans – have been lacking in that precise quality that comes from economic progress Robinson deems essential to a revolutionary people – what she calls “the kind of hopeful belief in their own agency that primes them to become likely revolutionaries in an era of decline.” (A phrase I have used before to describe this hopeful belief in one’s own agency is “engagement with power.”) Neither today’s youth nor today’s middle aged seem to have that belief – at least not in a political sense. There is a kind of hopeful belief in entrepreneurship – but that focuses on private actions and success in the market – very different from revolution.

However, since Robinson has written this article, it seems that people have become engaged with power again – in the Obama movement, in his campaign, and in the election. Although apathy is still quite real, and if Obama is able to continue to inspire people to participate in politics, he may end up creating an engaged citizenry – which is the key ingredient in both a successful democracy and a pre-condition for revolution.

Robinson also makes an excellent point regarding the essence of pragmatism in ensuring stability in a society such as ours:

Now, we’re also about to re-learn the historical lesson that liberals like flat hierarchies, racial and religious tolerance, and easy class mobility not because we’re soft-headed and soft-hearted — but because, unlike short-sighted conservatives, we understand that tight social cohesion is our most reliable and powerful bulwark against the kinds of revolutions that bring down great economies, nations and cultures…[The] headless ghosts [of past plutocratic nobilities] bear testimony to the idea that’s it’s better to give in and lose a little skin early than dig in and lose your whole hide later on.

Again – I’m not sure that we, as a society, are at the point when the elites (the ones Sarah Palin palled around with rather than railed against – the corporate and conservative ones) need to worry about their heads. But the overall point – that everyone in society must give up something, that pragmatism must rule over pure self-interest or ideology – that point is essential.

I suppose I tend to read this essay as an argument for smart policies to prevent revolution rather than as a prescription, which is consistent with my conservative politics based mainly on trying to prevent a revolution from being necessary. That perhaps is the best way to understand and define Rooseveltian liberalism.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues The Opinionsphere

Bipartisan Corruption

Glenn Greenwald:

Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much about?  Just examine the question dispassionately.  Look at every major Bush initiative, every controversial signature Bush policy over the last eight years, and one finds virtually nothing but massive bipartisan support for them — the Patriot Act (original enactment and its renewal); the invasion of Afghanistan; the attack on, and ongoing occupation of, Iraq; the Military Commissions Act (authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, abolishing habeas corpus, and immunizing war criminals); expansions of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity; declaring part of Iran’s government to be “terrorists”; our one-sided policy toward Israel; the $700 billion bailout; The No Child Left Behind Act, “bankruptcy reform,” and on and on.

Most of those were all enacted with virtually unanimous GOP support and substantial, sometimes overwhelming, Democratic support:  the very definition of “bipartisanship.”  That’s just a fact.

Moreover, Bush’s appointments of judges were barely ever impeded, resulting in a radical transformation of the federal courts.  Other than John Bolton and Steven Bradbury, not a single significant Bush nominee was blocked.  Those who implemented Bush’s NSA program (Michael Hayden) and authorized his torture program (Alberto Gonzales) were confirmed for promotions.  The Bush administration committed war crimes, broke long-standing surveillance laws, politicized prosecutions, and explicitly claimed the right to break our laws, yet Congress did nothing about any of that except to authorize most of it, and investigated virtually none of it.  With regard to many of those transgressions, key Democratic leaders were briefed at the time they were implemented and quietly acquiesced, did nothing to stop any of it.  Both parties are in virtually unanimous agreement that our highest political leaders should be exempt from accountability under the rule of law even for the grave crimes that have been committed.

As The Washington Post‘s Dan Froomkin observed at the end of last year:  “Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed.”  How much more harmonious – “bipartisan” – can the two parties get?

Categories
Barack Obama Reflections The Opinionsphere

The Magic of Dish-Washing

John Dickerson of Slate magazine wrote a moving piece yesterday exploring Barack Obama’s brief return to normalcy before he enters the White House. He takes a number of Obama’s comments from his 60 Minutes interview with Michelle – comments that struck me at the time – and develops this sense of melancholy they conveyed.

What made the piece moving was how Dickerson was able to relate his constantly hectic life as a political reporter covering the campaigns for the past two years with Obama’s life making the news – and how both are now suddenly returned to their everyday lives – their families who they neglected and sorely missed, their homes, their mundane routines that now seem to wonderful – washing dishes!

A symptom of the campaign bends is the temporary view that even the life’s most mundane tasks are magical. Why? Because they are discrete, yield results, and require manual labor: characteristics not associated with most campaign duties…

Any professional who has been on the road for a long period of time can identify with the drift away from a normal life. Your cooking skills are replaced by room-service-ordering skills. Gradually, you forget which floor your office is on or whether you take a left or a right turn from home to get to church. A presidential candidate experiences this bubble-wrapped life completely. He lives in a world where his meals, movements, and laundry are all taken care of for him. This is necessary so that he can focus on NAFTA and Afghanistan. If he makes a wrong turn, there is a hand to direct him gently down the correct hallway.

This highly artificial life makes a body starve for the reality it used to know. It was clear that Obama was sensitive to the simple pleasures of returning to his home environment when he described hearing his wife move around the house when she wakes up before him. He’d been away from it so long, it probably rang like thunder.

Categories
Humor

The Worst Excuse

Ever.

Categories
Barack Obama Economics History Politics

Lincoln’s Advice on the Detroit Bailout

[digg-reddit-me]Think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.

From Abraham Lincoln’s first Inagural Address. Brought to mind by George Packer’s invocation of it in his excellent piece in the New Yorker on “The New Liberalism.”

In a time of crisis, sometimes, much can be lost in the time required for due reflection. But not often. And much more often, hasty decisions lead to unanticipated side effects, often worsening the original condition. Our current media environment punishes daily the patience Lincoln counsels – and rewards the patience, if ever, only on occasion. This has been the case at least since Bill Clinton, as every prominent political figure is forced to respond to scandal after scandal – and in the midst of this, the bigger picture was lost. John McCain’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaign got lost amidst their daily attempt to win the media war and quash brewing scandals. Barack Obama managed to stand apart from the daily grind. He kept his campaign’s course amidst the tumult. This wasn’t always to his benefit – as it led him to take too long to address the Reverend Wright scandal for example- but in the end, his response worked more effectively than a day-to-day attempt to distract and quash the story would have.

This patience and deliberation is Obama’s strength. Now, he must maintain it while he manages his transition and in his administration.

I’ve been hearing that the Detroit bailout won’t be able to pass in this lame duck session of Congress. I hope this is true – because I think a smart rescue plan for Detroit will work better than the current proposal for a hasty bailout. We need to ensure that this bill doesn’t succeed just because – as George Will pointed out – it follows “the supreme law of the land…the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.”

Yet at the same time, I am not quite as cavalier as many others who have suggested we let these companies simply fail. It may be just – but it is not prudent in this financial climate. In a just world, certainly, Lehman Brothers would have failed – but if it were prudently preserved, this financial crisis may not have been precipitated. Can we risk letting these companies fail now? I don’t believe we can, so we need some kind of rescue plan.

But this rescue plan should be crafted to avoid the exact moral hazard that accompanies any help to an ailing industry. The plan should be punitive towards the management of these companies. It should not prop up the companies directly. My thought is that Obama could propose some Tennessee Valley Authority type project for Detroit – in which the government could offer contracts for green industry jobs in the area – specifically attempting to utilize many of the structures and factories and workers in the area. They should allow any company to apply for these contracts – and structure it in such a way that they could attempt to buy up the necessary facilities after applying.

The goal of this legislation should not be to prop up General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford – but to rejuvenate the car industry in the area and to utilize as much of the infrastructure and employees already built in the area.

This legislation will not be able to be crafted and debated in the next week. This will need a new Congress and a new president.

There are many troublesome paths that can be taken here. To choose the least bad will require patience and deliberation. Which is why this matter must wait until after January 20th.

Categories
Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

Adam Reilly Argues Against the Fairness Doctine

[digg-reddit-me]This blog has a new favorite newspaper – the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix which I actually used to read while I went to college in Massachusetts.

Adam Reilly, media critic for the paper, recently fashioned an argument against the Fairness Doctrine – including the specter of it being used against Net Neutrality:

Regarding Net Neutrality, McDowell asked, “Will Web sites — will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views, rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

This is a stupid question. The Fairness Doctrine involved government mandating, in certain cases, that specific content be added to a particular media entity. In contrast, Net Neutrality doesn’t involve intrusion into content; it only dictates absolute freedom of (virtual) movement. It’s the opposite of what McDowell seems to think.

But as Joe Campbell, author of the blog 2parse.com, recently noted in a post linking Thierer’s paper and McDowell’s remarks, this is about tactics, not logic. If conservative Net Neutrality supporters come to see it as the Fairness Doctrine 2.0 — something that’s more easily done if the Fairness Doctrine is already on everyone’s brain, as it is today — they might rethink their support. Given Democratic gains in Congress and Obama’s support for Net Neutrality, Campbell argues, “This is the big corporations’ only chance to squash Net Neutrality.”

Now that’s a scary prospect. The Web is the future of news media. (It’s also a battleground where, at the moment, Democrats are totally dominating Republicans.) Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine is a dubious proposition, period. But if doing so could jeopardize the success of Net Neutrality, it’s downright reckless.