Today!

At the gym this morning watching CNN I couldn't help but smile.  Seeing the excitement on the mall in DC just gives you a really good feeling.

The coverage is interesting.  Fortunately Maureen just came in and made me change the channel off of Good Morning America to NBC, and we got to see a really insightful interview of Colin Powell by Matt Lauer.  He asked about Afghanistan, specifically "What are we doing there? What is the mission?"  and quoted Joe Klein's latest thoughts on the Karzai government (not sure which article exactly, but some recent ones are here and here), basically asking what the game plan is now, years after the mission to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden began.

Powell's initial answer was that the mission was to make sure Afghanistan did not become a place in which Bin Laden could operate again, which is troubling in its open-endedness.  We should all be wary of even the broad idea of the US attempting to prop up a government just because we think it is better than the alternative.  Afghanistan is a pretty good example of how that can go wrong, and there will be a lot of work to do to figure out how to transition out of occupation.  It's a real mess, and props to Matt Lauer for keeping it in mind in his interview.

No Fair

I don't presume to have ALL the answers, but this is pretty messed up.

Thomas Friedman presumes to have SOME of the answers - but I have trouble buying this theory of his that the over the top military response is somehow going to dissuade people from resisting.

After all, as I saw when sitting with my Dad yesterday watching some DVDs, it didn't work for the Cylons.  

I don't think you can enforce a civil society with the threat of violence alone.  It's all stick and no carrot.  Peace is a deal, and when people aren't getting what they want out of the deal, it falls apart.

To make a deal that sticks, it has to be fair.  To some people, especially in the realm of the op-ed, the idea of fairness is thought of as an objective thing - something that you prove to the audience.  So the op-ed columnist's goal is to convince their readers that their idea is the fair solution, so that the audience sides with the columnist against anyone who might disagree.

But that is, essentially, a sideshow.  It doesn't solve the problem of creating a fair deal, it's just about cheerleading for one side or the other and can never lead to resolving the situation that they are discussing.

I had a game theory professor in college, Steven Brams, who has made a career of studying fairness.  If there is one simple take-away from the class I took with him, it is that one of the best indicators of fairness is the idea of being envy-free.  In other words all parties look at what all other parties have and universally feel that they wouln't want to trade their position for anyone else's.

What I find most interesting about that concept is that it's entirely subjective, but that its subjectivity is its strength.  When both sides feel that they got the better deal relative to the other, neither has an incentive to rock the boat - they both go home happy.

Childish, but come on now.

I saw this a few days ago and just had to comment.  In Tuesday's NYTimes about halfway down the article "Obama Seeks Wide Support in Congress for Stimulus" is this paragraph:

The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said he was concerned about the overall size of the stimulus package. He said the American public was rightly agitated by the lack of accountability in the bailout bills that were abruptly approved last fall.

I know you don't pronounce his name like that, but WHY OH WHY couldn't the headline have been:

"Boehner Concerned about Size of Package"

Seriously.

Can't Catch Me

I was about to pay this parking ticket that I got last month, and then realized that it had a typo in my license plate #.  That means I don't have to pay it, right?

I consider this payback for all the bogus parking tickets the City of Somerville meter maids have dumped on my car in the past two years.  Suck on that, Somerville.

Coding The Strategy

Sunday morning I was watching CNN and Wolf Blitzer was doing the usual crossfire-esque talking heads bit with James Carville and Ed Rollins.  The topic was Blagojevich's ridiculous but ballsy move to appoint a new Senator for Illinois despite being on the verge of impeachment, and the man who was appointed, Roland Burris.

Now normally since Carville is the Democratic strategist and Rollins is the Republican strategist, you'd expect that Carville would be defending whatever the Democrat in question has done and Rollins would be condemning it.  But the twist of course is that Blagojevich is too sleazy for anyone to agree with, so the positions were more: Carville saying Blagojevich's decisions are suspect and Rollins trying to find a way to make Democrats look bad by tying them closer to Blagojevich.

So this all goes as expected until at one point when asked whether the Senate has the authority to block a Blagojevich appointee, Rollins says:

"Well, they certainly can attempt, procedurally, to do it. I think it's idiotic to try and do this. I think Burris will be a good Democrat senator. He's been elected, statewide, four times, including the job of attorney general. The governor does have the power, whether we like it or not. He's not been impeached. He's not been indicted yet. And he's not been convicted. We do believe in due process. 

So, for Harry Reid to make phone calls and recommend that African-American congressmen don't be appointed, and that someone else should, I think, is very foolish on his part, and to draw this thing out when they have all these other problems."

The part that sticks out is that last bit - Rollins chooses his words to imply that the Senate Democrats don't want Burris seated, not because he was appointed by Blagojevich, but because he's black.

Now that quote above is from the CNN transcript, and to his credit I don't remember it that way - I remember Rollins saying "and recommend that an African-American congressman not be appointed" so it was more vague, but at the time it struck me anyway as odd that he brought Burris' race into the conversation.

Carville jumped on this right away and says:

I wasn't aware Senator Reid's made phone calls urging him not to appoint an African-American. 

But maybe -- I wasn't aware of that. What he said was, was they were not going to seat, and 50 other Democrats said it also, that they were not going to seat anybody that Governor Blagojevich appointed because there are very, very serious allegations that he had said that he wanted something in return for the seat.

It's kind of hard to pin down, but this exchange immediately got me thinking, because something about this is definitely my pet peeve in political newscasting and in politics in general.  It's very similar to when anyone says "Well I just don't think the American people want..."  Because inevitably what they say next is designed to misinform the audience with some untrue or twisted characterization of the subject in question.

Here Rollins was throwing a shockingly bold hail mary hoping that he could paint Harry Reid as racist, and I think it's indicative of where conservatives are these days in terms of strategy.

Paul Krugman's January 1st column, "Bigger than Bush" really gets to the heart of this concept, and I think the Rollins exchange above is just the latest incarnation of Republican "coding" strategy.  Krugman lays out the Republican strategy of the past 28 years as one of exchanging overt racism for policies that are just code for that same racism, because you can't be overtly racist anymore.  Krugman isn't making this stuff up - as he quotes Lee Atwater, the famous Republican strategist, who said (I edit out the n-word here):

You start out in 1954 by saying "n---er, n---er, n---er." By 1968 you can't say "n---er" - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.  You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying "we want to cut this" is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "n---er, n---er.

That's Lee Atwater talking there - the guy who passed his mantle to Karl Rove.  The father of current Republican strategy.  Seen through that lens, Republican strategy of the past 28 years does indeed make a lot of sense, as does the utter implosion of the Republican brand during this past election cycle.  How can you use coded racism when you're running against a black man who steps up to the podium and directly addresses it?  The failure of the Republicans during this last cycle is a failure of coding both because it became so abstract that Republicans themselves didn't get it and because Obama so deftly blew apart the code with, of all things, straight-talk.

I think the Ed Rollins exchange shows that he's pretty well locked into the Atwater-style coded politics.  After all, he's an old guy and he's been at this a while - I'd be surprised to see him using any new tricks.  Likewise I think Sarah Palin rose to power in Alaska on the old-school coded strategy, but hers was more focused on abortion than on race.  Rick Warren dodges the question of whether banning gay marriage is fair by falling back on states' rights.

"States' rights", once code for anti-voting rights politics, now also covers abortion politics and gay marriage. But how long will coding work for abortion and gay marriage?  These were once discrete and private topics that people didn't really discuss - but in the next few years gay marriage is going to be right at the forefront, and I don't think coded bigotry is going to work for the Republicans on it.

On top of which, liberals are becoming more bold with their arguments.  Jon Stewart made a killer case for gay marriage when he had Mike Huckabee on the Daily Show, and Huckabee's claims that opposing gay marriage doesn't make him a homophobe are weak at best, and he totally fails to come up with any substantial argument against it.  Oh also, Huckabee uses my pet peeve:

If we change the definition then we really do have to change it to accomodate all lifestyles. I mean we'd have to say to the guy in West Texas who had 27 wives  'that's okay'. And I'm not sure that I hear a lot of people arguing that that's a great idea.

Man, that really annoys me.

Anyway, I think we're well into a new era in political strategy where Democrats have largely figured out how to beat the Republican strategy of coding by boldly confronting the issues.  It doesn't hurt that the economic disaster has blown apart Republican claims of being the more fiscally responsible party, but the real long term political change is the failure of coding as a winning strategy.

Like I said, Ed Rollins is an old guy.  Sooner or later some young conservative hotshot is going to come up with a new strategy, and we'll see how that plays out.  But for now I think you're going to see people like Mike Huckabee increasingly fall by the wayside as their old-school coding fails to connect with voters.  Which I guess is another way of saying "I don't think the American people want it."

Bleeping Blagojevich

The use of the expression "bleeping" to stand in for profanity has reached a fever pitch with the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.  In fact it's gone beyond that, it's a bleeping epidemic. 

Okay I got mine in, now let me complain about it.  Of course it all started with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference.  You really have to watch that clip to appreciate the awkwardness of how he handles the expletives: "quote - those are his words not our characterization, other than with regard to the bleep".  He has to explain to the audience (which is the entire nation) that Blagojevich didn't actually say the word "bleep".

First of all, if you read the actual criminal complaint issued against Blagojevich, you'll see that they really do use the word 'fuck' where he said 'fuck', 'shit' where he said 'shit and 'fucking' where he said 'fucking'.  There is none of this "[expletive]" crap when you're making a case to indict a Governor.  So when Attorney Fitzgerald used the word "bleeping" to stand in for "fucking" in the press conference, it was his call to do so.

Okay so you're going on national television to announce the arrest of a Governor - it's probably smart to watch your mouth, so let's give Fitzgerald credit.  He obviously didn't have time to think about the linguistic implications of what he was doing, since he was busy trying to put a corrupt Governor in jail.

Still, we all know what word he is covering up with the "bleep".  That's the point of saying "bleep-ing" for "fucking" instead of just "bleep" - it's so we know that he was saying "fucking" instead of "fuck".  And if we feel strongly enough about clarity that we want everyone to be able to tell whether our censored profanity is finite or non-finite, isn't it pretty silly that we dance around a word that no longer even has a profane context?

But more specifically, why'd Fitzgerald choose to say "bleeping"?  When words are censored in print we often use symbols: $#@% or ****ing, etc.   Sometimes they print [censored] or [expletive deleted] as an explanation of what has happened to the word that was really there.  But in spoken conversation, we can't pronounce symbols in any meaninfgul way and to say "censored" or "expletive deleted" doesn't make any sense because in print they are letting us know what happened in the past - the editor came along and removed the word from the text - but in real-time spoken conversation, the deletion is happening right here and now, so the past tense doesn't work and there are no brackets to denote that it is an editor speaking (unless you are Victor Borge).  So on television we get the bleep, and the onomotopaeia of the bleep takes its place in conversation without technical assistance.

What annoys me about "bleeping" isn't just the bowdlerization of media (which is stupid), it's that it's washed over into innapropriate formats.  In the December 22nd issue of Time Magazine. the article "Governor Gone Wild" the big text quote next to the big photo of Blagojevich reads:

'I've got this thing, and it's [bleeping] golden. I'm just not giving it up for [bleeping] nothing.' -Governor Rod Blagojevich, on a wiretap

However, in the actual body of the article, Time chooses to print it like so:

"I've got this thing, and it's f______ golden," he told an aide a day after the November elections on a home phone that was tapped by the FBI. "I'm just not giving it up for f______ nothing."

The discrepancy in how the profanity is covered up in a single article in a single publication is weird.  First off, how can "[bleeping]" possibly be appropriate in a text format?  There was no bleep, the man said 'fucking' and a print editor decided not to print it.  The word was never bleeped out (except for by Fitzgerald).  It bugs me that Time went with a colloquial method of indicating profanity, because if we're going to be informal why not just print the real word? Second, Time chooses to preserve the '-ing' (albeit in brackets) in the first instance, but opts to drop it in the second in favor of the single 'f' followed by a blank.  So f and ing are okay, but not uck?  I find the lack of editorial consistency and appropriateness more offensive than the word 'fucking'. 

Are children in danger of reading the Time magazine article about Governor Blagojevich and being exposed to the word "fucking"?  If a kid is taking an interest in the corruption scandals of Illinois politics, I think they can handle the expletive.

And so it seems we are doomed to have to listen to so-called news anchors saying things like "The Governor told his aide that, quote "Candidate 5 can go bleep himself in the bleep-hole with his bleeping offer, and then bleep it out onto a platter and eat it."  Except they he didn't say bleep, bleep-hole, bleeping or bleep."  Perhaps after a few months of that we'll all be ready for some actual fucking quotation.

Democratizing Democratization

In the past couple days I've read two Huffington Post commentaries that make a point of talking about "the democratization of _____".  In Michael Garrity's bit about Twitter vs. Digg, he touts the way Twitter has the potential to or already has democratized the news industry, media and it's own code base.  Shortly after reading that post, I came across Peter Daou's internet commentary about internet commentary and his use of the word stuck out once more, this time referring to "the democratization of opinion-making".

Years ago, when Wikipedia first came on the scene and before it really reached its tipping point as a go-to source of relatively reliable (though still not infallible) information, my Mom lamented the fact that "on the internet, anyone can say anything and there's no respectable authority to police if they are right or wrong."  In essence, she found it to be anarchy - and I think that remains a more accurate description of what Garrity and Daou are trying to describe than "democratizing".

Garrity draws a great contrast between Twitter and Digg, highlighting some really interesting ideas about how information is disseminated online, and how it will be in the future.  But I think claiming that Twitter is the superior democratizing agent is misuse of the term.

Now technically it's true, we can interpret the word democratize to mean a movement away from authoritarianism.  And so for instance, newspapers being supplanted as a source of information (and opinion) by unregulated and myriad blogs could be described as democratization - since it's a move away from a singular and authoritarian power.  But there are two problems with sticking with the word as we get further into the reality of what is happening to news and information - and more immediately, opinion - online.

First, there's the problem of relative accuracy.  Once we get past the idea that the old authorities are the arbiters of information and opinion, does democratization continue to accurately reflect what is going on?  I'd argue that the disintegrating influence of established news and opinion organizations and the rise of the online community is more accurately described as a move towards anarchy (anarchization?) in light of the fact that there is no collective elected power resulting from the swaths of commenters.  Online opinion is closer to 4chan than to Parliment.  If we are to continue to think of public information generation and consumption as analogous to politics, I don't think what we see online can be considered democratic.  And to be honest, democracy should not be the ideal when it comes to information and opinion anyway, since it is the quality and truth of the information that really matters - not how many people believe it.

Which leads to the second problem and the real issue: The sea-change we are seeing is not really about democracy or politics at all.  It is instead about the question of how our information sourced and vetted.  Use of the term "democratization" suggests that information gathering and vetting is akin to a political struggle in which dictatorial news organizations who have long ruled over the suffering masses are finally being overthrown and power to disseminate information is being transferred justly into the hands of a source elected the people.    Digg is democratic - the people vote for what should be "the story".  Twitter is a different sort of competition - instead of "electing" a winner, stories worthy of dissemination reproduce and spread, those that are boring, uninteresting or untrue die off - something that we also see in the blogosphere.

What we're really seeing is a marketplace of ideas - or one might say, capitalism.  So again I'd even favor calling it the "capitalization" of opinion-making to "democratization", if we're looking for a word to use.

So anarchy or capitalism work better for me than democracy as a descriptor for the changes brought on by the online opinion universe.  But here's the key to finding an even better adjective: It's not really about "the people" or news organizations - it's about the information itself, the word that we love to throw around online: the memes.

The world of online opinion has changed the environment in which ideas live and die.  No longer do they rely on a benefactor like a newspaper to give them life, but instead in the culture (in the scientific sense, not the social one) of the internet there are ample minds for ideas to grow and reproduce in.  This is the real difference between Digg and Twitter.  On Digg, ideas compete for votes to win the honor of being displayed for consumption by the masses.  On Twitter (and the blogosphere, and online in general) the ideas bypass the sanctioned competition altogether. Instead they duke it out in the mind of every person they encounter, and those that survive the encounter spread to other minds, sometimes changing in the process - adapting, evolving.  Yes, the process has moved from editorial boardrooms to the internet-using public at large, but it's not about people coming together to make a decision (democracy) - it's about people acting as incubators and hosts for communicable ideas, judging each one individually and transmitting it to those around them based on its survivability.  It's memetics.

What Garrity and Daou see as a revolution in information politics is really just a symptom of the revolution in information transmission.  We the people have no power over how popular an idea becomes, or how many people read a news story or opinion article.  That power rests in the idea itself.  We can provide the brainpower to adapt or transmit it, but the real revelation is that we are approaching an environment in which the success of an idea, story or opinion is based solely on it's ability to survive and reproduce.

And so, a warning.  The quality of ideas in an environment depends upon the nature of the environment itself.  Do our brains value truth?  True ideas will prosper and spread.  Do our brains value sensationalism and excitement?  The titallating and scandalous will dominate online.  Every blog post and link emailed to friends contributes to the conditions that new ideas evolve in.  Educated minds are fertile ground for great ideas, and as individuals and political entities we have the power to enrich the soil the ideas of the future grow in.  We have a long history of mistaking structure for substance, and let's not make the mistake of thinking that democratization (or whatever you want to call it) is a good unto itself.  Increasingly, it will be the quality of ideas themselves that matters - not the format they come in.