The Audacity of Bipartisanship
May 9, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
The Audacity of Bipartisanship
It would appear that the bloggers for The Nation are beginning to shift their attention from handicapping the Democratic Primary to handicapping the November election. For example John Nichols put up a reflection yesterday evening on the “news buzz” over supporters of Hillary Clinton claiming they would choose John McCain over Barack Obama. Read more
Behavior: From Bad to Malicious to Pathological
May 9, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Behavior: From Bad to Malicious to Pathological
The most annoying precept of Internet evangelism is the idea that cyberspace houses one big, happy family in which the spirit of cooperation is always thriving and where any instance of “bad behavior” can be managed by the general spirit of good will that pervades the community. I find this annoying because I believe that we are obliged to analyze any instance of bad behavior when we encounter it, because we can only deal with it by understanding it. If we fail to understand it, it can only get worse. Thus, when behavior makes the transition from “bad” (in a connotation we tend to associated with “childish”) to “malicious,” we need to take vigilant notice, since the next step along the progress of that behavior is “pathological,” examples of which I recently reviewed. Read more
Two Perspectives on the Food Crisis
May 6, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
Two Perspectives on the Food Crisis
This morning my RSS feed for the Financial Times greeted me with two back-to-back articles about the global food crisis. One of these was actually just a report taken from their own Reuters feed. The lead paragraphs indicate the extent to which those in the power elite are still struggling to grasp the nature of the problem by understanding its source:
Food price inflation may be one of the most serious problems facing the world, but it is one that monetary policy has little power to tackle, central bankers said on Monday.
With the price of food rising by more than 40 percent a year, the issue is high on the agenda at meetings at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel which began on Sunday.
”Food pressure is a global problem, we have to observe, monitor, but we cannot use monetary policy tools to manage this problem,” said Polish National Bank President Slawomir Skrzypek. ”Food pressures could be one of the most serious problems that we have to face now.”
The Machine Stops
May 5, 2008
Sunday, May 4, 2008
“The Machine Stops”
I feel as if I am living in the world of E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops,” at least as far as mail servers are concerned. I have been corresponding with a neighbor over some work she has been doing to promote the music of nineteenth-century composer Amy Beach (who happens to have lived some of her years here in San Francisco). My neighbor reads her mail through AOL, and I read mine through Yahoo! Recently I have been getting failure-to-deliver notices from the Yahoo! mail server, claiming the mail was “rejected by the recipient domain,” that being the AOL mail server. After running some experiments, which included sending one of my blog posts through Blogger (which uses Gmail) and sending mail from the account I have at a research laboratory in Palo Alto, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is on the AOL side, because all of these attempts were getting bounced, regardless of which mail server was delivering them. Read more
Condi Advances Her Chutzpah Count
May 4, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Condi Advances her Chutzpah Count
Condoleeza Rice may continue to lag behind her boss, George W. Bush, when it comes to the number of Chutzpah of the Week awards; but she is still steadily advancing her count. Actually, this week turned into a tough call between the two of them. Bush was there with his $770 million food aid package, which might finally have thrown the guy into a humanitarian light had he not tacked the allocation on to his $70 billion Iraq war budget (the operative phrase being “tacked on,” as opposed to reallocating some of that Iraq budget to wage peace rather than war). However, having just read the Al Jazeera English account of Condi’s moves in preparing for today’s Middle East peace talks, I decided that, this week at least, hers is the greater arrogance of power. Read more
Elitism, Exclusion, And the Fallacy of Community
April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Elitism, Exclusion, and the Fallacy of Community
Some interesting conundrums continue to boil up in the stew the media have cooked over the charge of elitism leveled against Barack Obama. Given that one of his messages has been that of uniting groups with many different interests and values under a single “umbrella,” under which they can discuss their differences as well as their agreements, an accusation of elitism is tantamount to an accusation of hypocrisy. Thus, as I had previously speculated, this attack may have been concerned more with finding and piercing Obama’s most critical point of vulnerability than with weighing the many issues relevant to deliberating over who would make the best successor to the Oval Office. My reasoning is simple enough: The American electorate may not fully grasp all the intricacies associated with the rights and duties of the Executive branch of their government, but they know hypocrisy when it bites them. If they are convinced that, for all of his “audacity of hope,” he is as hypocritical as any other politician, then there is a strong chance that they will turn away from him.
