Category Archives: Politics & Government

Southern Discomfort

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From article by George Packer in The New Yorker:

The region was an American underbelly in the semi-tropical heat; the manners were softer, the violence swifter, the commerce slower, the thinking narrower, the past closer.

Following the upheavals of the civil-rights years, the New South was born: the South of air-conditioned subdivisions, suburban office parks, and Walmart. Modernization was paved with federal dollars, in the form of highways, military bases, space centers, and tax breaks for oil drilling.

the Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and nascar, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C.

As its political power declines, the South might occupy a place like Scotland’s in the United Kingdom, as a cultural draw for the rest of the country, with a hint of the theme park.

Technology Talent Gap

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Among employees who work for Google, Mr. Obama received about $720,000 in itemized contributions this year, compared with only $25,000 for Mr. Romney. That means that Mr. Obama collected almost 97 percent of the money between the two major candidates. Apple employees gave 91 percent of their dollars to Mr. Obama. At eBay, Mr. Obama received 89 percent of the money from employees. Democrats had the support of 80 percent or 90 percent of the best and brightest minds in the information technology field.
FiveThirtyEight Blog

“Welcome to the team. Don’t fuck it up.”

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This article in The Atlantic was one of the more interesting pieces I read about the 2012 campaign and election. A few excerpts:

“If you look like an asshole, you have to be really good.”

They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. 

With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. “We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff.”

Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team’s Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchases to political donations. “It’s the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online,”

They learned what it was like to have — and work with people who had —  a higher purpose than building cool stuff.

They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.

Scott Adams: Gullibility

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“Interestingly, a person can be brilliant and well-informed but gullible at the same time because the brain uses different zones for different functions. I’d like to know who my brilliant-but-gullible fellow citizens are because those folks are a menace to society. The brilliant part makes them highly capable while the gullible part makes them dangerous. The ones who don’t become serial killers are voting. In terms of body count, which is worse?”

The Great Divide

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“Romney is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.”

“That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.”

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Information terrorist

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“Information terrorist” – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized – they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, “Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake.”

Why Anonymous ‘might be the most powferful organization on earth’

Matt Taibbi: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

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“This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It’s as if all of the American public’s bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.”

Like me, Mr. Taibbi remembers the early conservative movement very different from what we’re seeing now:

“It was just a heartfelt request that we go back to the good old days of America as these people remembered or imagined it. Of course, the problem was, we couldn’t go back, not just because more than half the population (particularly the nonwhite, non-straight, non-male segment of the population) desperately didn’t want to go back, but also because that America never existed and was therefore impossible to recreate.”

The Wisdom of Scott Adams

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Common sense isn’t a real thing. And its ugly cousin, fairness, is a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments. Fairness isn’t a natural part of the universe. It’s purely subjective.
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My idea is that the United States, China, and Russia – the three biggest nuclear powers – sign a joint agreement that goes like this: The three powers agree that if any country in the world, excluding the big three nuclear powers, uses nuclear weapons, the offending country will be denied military and economic aid for the next hundred years. In return for this agreement of non-support from the big three nuclear powers, both Israel and Iran would be asked to agree to nuclear inspections. Israel’s inspections would be handled by the United States military. Iran’s inspections would be handled by an international team of inspectors excluding the United States and Israel. That’s the fake deal.
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I see life as a process, not a goal. If my goal had been to create world-changing ideas that worked right away, I would be a complete failure. But I don’t have that goal. Instead, I have a process that involves seeding the universe with ideas and waiting for the strongest to evolve and make a difference. The worst case scenario is that my ideas cause the eventual best ideas to compete harder and evolve to even better forms. When you use a process that makes sense, even the unanticipated outcomes are good.
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If you want a president who promotes freedom of religion, choose a non-believer such as me. Think of it like a eunuch guarding a harem. I won’t try to convert you to my belief system because I don’t have one. Some of the people I respect the most are believers of one sort or another. I’m in favor of whatever works in your personal life. But I prefer science over belief when it comes to government.
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My plan for shrinking government is to freeze total federal spending immediately and forever, and let inflation eliminate the bureaucracy by chewing into its budget over a few generations. That way, the government can unwind at a leisurely pace, allowing technology, competition, and better ideas to deliver natural cost reductions over time. With my plan of gradual government shrinkage, there’s no shock to the system, and no outsized risk.
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Someday, technology will make it possible for governments to shrink down to nearly nothing. Well-informed citizens, connected by the Internet, could accomplish almost all that government does for us today, including much of foreign policy. But that day is not today. I think the best path to smaller government involves the government transitioning into an information clearinghouse.”

“In the long, long term, I see governments as being nothing but intelligent managers of information. That’s a few hundred years from now.”

“The Odd Couple: Romney Vs. Gingrich”

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This isn’t part of some clever but inscrutable master plan, put on by the hidden hands who run this country, to fool or distract the masses. This is an unscripted fuck-up of heroic dimensions, radiating downward from the highest levels of our society, playing out in real time for all of us to watch. Our oligarchy has thrown a rod.

(Romney) is incapable of sympathizing with people who can’t pay their bills, because their condition is tied too closely in his mind with the question of how he made his enormous fortune: If you ask Romney to imagine what life is like for someone who’s broke, what he hears is you accusing him of making that happen.

This, of course, was the final irony: that South Carolina – a nest of upright country church folk proud of their exacting morals and broad distrust of buggery, stem cells and Hollywood relativism – had chosen as its values champion Newt Gingrich, a man who has been unfaithful not just to two wives but also two religions (raised Lutheran, he is currently Catholic by way of Southern Baptist)

There is a distinct odor of corrupt indulgence around Gingrich that may not bother sinners like you and me – but sure as hell ought to bother Southern evangelicals, who a decade and a half ago wore us all out wailing about the nearly identical personal failings of one William Jefferson Clinton, another flabby, smooth-talking hedonist who, in the pulpits of America’s megachurches, was whispered to be the earthly vessel of Satan himself.

If Gingrich ends up winning the nomination, Obama will essentially be running against the political version of Gilbert Gottfried or raw garlic – strong tastes that some like quite a lot, but many more can’t stand to even be near. If that happens, every Democratic flack from Leon Panetta to Obama himself will have to wear restraints to keep from publicly crying out in joy.

— Matt Taibbi on Romney and Gingrich (Rolling Stone, January 30, 2012)