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Category Archives: Politics & Government
Is this good government?
Probably not but let’s remember the whole point of being the government.
Free Speech
Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us
From an op-ed piece by Tim Kreider in the NYT:
(Young people) “remember everything, and forgive nothing.”
“…they will have a thousand times more energy for that fight than you and a bottomless reservoir of moral rage that you burned out long ago.”
“I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us.”
I hope he’s right but have my doubts. I remember how quickly my sixties era passion faded as I aged. I’m still waiting to see a million young people in the streets again.
A world without jobs
This article is way too long for anyone with a job to read. So here are a few nuggets:
“Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”
Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”
“I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”
As all such articles do, this one mentioned UBI (Universal Basic Income). I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. But I can almost imagine a world in which — for whatever reasons — there are just a whole bunch of people without jobs. And I can only see two options for dealing with them: Let them starve or provide them with food and shelter. Some way, somehow. I’m counting on smarter people to come up with more options.
Scott Adams: Quotable
I started this blog in 2002. Since then I have quoted Scott Adams — from his blog, his books or other publications — 114 times. More than any other writer, blogger, or public figure. I found his insights fresh, provocative and brilliant. Topics included: robots; reality; education; the universe; immortality; free will; the economy; war; religion; politics; voting; government… and a bunch more. I stopped following and quoting Mr. Adams near the end of 2015. That was around the time he became — it seemed to me — obsessed with Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. It was “All Trump all the time” on Mr. Adams’ blog and I stopped following. As did many others. This week I’ve been doing a bit of housekeeping on this blog and had occasion to reread Mr. Adams’ posts. Many of his predictions about technology were eerily prescient. Most of his pre-Trump ideas still resonate with me.
Trust
“There’s plenty of trust out there. It just isn’t where it used to be. Trust, the glue that holds society together, has shifted from institutional trust to a new form of distributed trust. Instead of flowing upwards to institutions, experts, authorities and regulators, it now flows horizontally to peers, friends, colleagues and fellow users. […] And because trust is moving into the hands of the many, there will be more of it around.”
“Distributed trust, combined with technology, also means that within the next decade, we’ll be comfortable trusting well-trained bots, whether they’re driving us around, giving us financial advice, or telling us if we have cancer.”
Vietnam War Draft Lottery
“If your birthday was just 1 day earlier, your draft number would have been called.” Somebody at USA TODAY deserves a raise for coming up with this. Enter your birthdate and the site tells you your draft number (like you’d forget) and whether or not you would have been called.
Distraction
I’m re-reading Distraction by Bruce Sterling. Published in 1998, it is/was frighteningly prescient. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts (does that first one remind you of anyone?).
“He’s like a not very bright child who can be deceived and managed, but not reasoned with.”
“The American national character realty wasn’t suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World’s Movie Star. The world’s tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world’s acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.”
“It always offended him to hear his fellow Americans discussing the vagaries of “white people.” There was simply no such thing as “white people. That stereotype was an artificial construct, like the ridiculous term “Hispanic.” In all the rest of the world, a Peruvian was a Peruvian and a Brazilian was a Brazilian— it was only in America that people somehow became this multilingual, multinational entity called a “Hispanic.”
“Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimize.”
“Knowledge is inherently precious even if you can’t sell it. Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s central to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”
“Terrorism is a racist term in the U.S.”
“Terrorism is a racist term in the US. It means white people were harmed by people who aren’t white. If the shooter is white, he’s just crazy.”
— Dave Winer