In this episode, Kaiti, Andrew, and Jimmy discuss the ins and outs of names and naming while sharing the history and meaning behind their own names, online names, and nicknames.  Enjoy!

http://gettingthinky.blogspot.com/2010/11/episode-6-what-makes-good-name.html

* edit, I modified the file to fix some sound issues. Please delete and re-download it if you already downloaded it once. *

My joint podcast is up to episode 5 now!  In today’s podcast we discuss What Makes a Classic.  In which I torment my fellow hosts with many a random absurd hypotheticals as we try to get to the bottom of just why we consider certain works of Literature Classics, who gets to decide what’s a classic and what can classics get away with that other written works can’t and why.

Listen and Subscribe here.

The future of the internet is going to be in making hyperlinking far more easy, powerful, fluid, and flexible. We’re already seeing that happen with url shortening and twitter and wikis.  But what has always bothered me a lot is that there’s never been any super easy way to link to things INSIDE content. There’s simply no reason that I shouldn’t be able to trivially link directly to a comment that I wrote on someone’s blog or a single paragraph within my blog.

We are seeing a little bit of the latter. There’s a wordpress plugin that allows a blogger to create paragraph level links easily. It’s not popular yet but it’s an awesome idea and should be implemented much more widely.

For videos you should also be able to link to any arbitrary segment. Some video sharing sites do provide mechanisms to allow people to specify segments but the process is clunky and it’s different for every single site.  It should be as simple as html. Simpler even ideally.  Videos should have metadata tagging specific sections of the video that you can easily see and point to or embed with a hyperlink with a simple hashtag syntax. Or as you’re watching a video the sections should be mouseover highlightable so you can right click and get the url to the specific section you want. For more complex lnking you should be able to specify start and end time in some consistent format.

Music should DEFINITELY have this feature. There should be tags in every audio file that specify various segments of the music as the chorus or the opening or the various verses. That way I could very easily write a program that when given a link to an audio file clips out the first 10 seconds of the chorus and appends it to the beginning of a different audio file fading out as the other audio file begins. Right now identifying where the “chorus” begins in an audio file is difficult without human intervention and that’s just silly.

The desire to do that last thing is of course the thing that inspired this blog post.

Of course tagging these files could be a community process or a wiki-like process so that not every artist needs to be tech-savvy enough to know how to specify the metadata themselves.

Once these things exist the internet will become perfect and we can all go home and get back to our regularly scheduled lives.

I was just thinking randomly if you were an institution trying to decide whether to install easily accessible electrical sockets in a public area of a building you are building would it be a good idea?

I don’t mean just putting like a couple but like wiring the whole place so there are sockets everywhere at easy reaching distance.

Certainly in the far past there were virtually no benefits to doing so. Maybe someone uses your electricity for a light or something.  If someone used it for a personal space heater that might be nice but your probably paying for central heating anyway and those things in the past drew so much energy that they could be quite dangerous.  Portable televisions and portable radios and stereos and stuff existed but were not in heavy use and battery powered walkmans replaced the latter two.

Still if you were farsighted you might have decided to install the sockets just banking on the fact that future technology would almost certainly be heavily electricity based.

Your gamble would have paid off over the last 7 or 8 years as laptops took off with a vengeance. Now these people love to plug in and for the most part they need to if they’re going to stay in any area for any extended period of time. You would be providing a considerable service that makes your place stand out as a place that laptop users will want to go. Not only that but you might even have thought you were providing a long term service for the world as if we ever get truly smart grid technology it will mean that the more battery nodes we have plugged in all the time the more efficient the network.

BUT now things have changed somewhat. Now laptop technology is becoming increasingly small and efficient. Netbooks and super slim laptops like the Macbook Air are all the rage in new laptops. Tablets and e-readers have finally started to take off with a vengeance too and people are more and more using their cellphones as more of a primary computing interface.  What all of these share in common is that they have very long battery lives and over time it appears they will get increasingly long battery lives.

That means it will be considerably less essential for people to charge these devices while on the go. In fact getting out the cable and plugging them in will be more of a hassle than anything else. People will just want to pull them out and start working.  Charign them will be something people do while at home overnight, especially if they can just toss the devices on a wireless charge station without even having to pull out a plug.

Now if this is the case, does it make sense to invest in making sure there are a lot easily available electrical sockets in your building? If you already invested it will it be a wasted investment?

You might argue that people will still want to charge their laptops and other devices in your place and not everyone will have the super efficient laptops. That may be true. But your institution won’t stand out considerably from other institutions as a place people will go because it makes it easy to plug in. MOST people will be able to use their computer technology anywhere. They won’t be drawn to your institution particularly. Most likely the people who are plugging in are basically just using your electricity in order to avoid having to pay for it at home. And that’s not a problem if you are getting something from it in return but are you? 

And really we just don’t know whether there will be more demanding technology that requires more direct electricity beyond what rapidly improving battery technology will enable that you’ll want to plug in at a coffee shop or a restaurant or a lobby. Right now I don’t see anything on the horizon. I guess people could plug in their segways but that’s all I can think of and how many people are going to have those?

I imagine there are similar devil’s bargains all the time with how rapidly technology is changing. You probably had a similar problem if you updated your institution to have ethernet jacks all over the place to provide internet or phone line jacks for modems.  And in the future we can see a similar problem that will emerge if local wireless broadband internet gets eclipsed by cellular broadband coverage through networks like 3G and 4G.

Luckily the initial cost for setting up a local wireless network is pretty low: all you need is a good wireless router (or several) and a cable/dsl modem. You can cancel your broadband service if 3G/4G becomes the dominant internet mechanism. So this is definitely more of an issue the bigger your initial costs are.

Similarly what about looking ahead for the far future? Would it make sense for example to setup your whole building for easy wireless device charging throughout the building? That really WOULD be a service people would like right now, assuming it’s safe, that would distinguish you from your competitors. But would technology eventually just make such endeavors useless and obsolete?

I suspect this is sort of a piece of a bigger puzzle about how hard it is to get businesses to quickly adopt new technologies because of how risk averse they are and how quickly technology evolves.  It’s something worth thinking about.

Anyways, these thoughts brought to you by the fact that I am sitting in a student lounge and there isn’t a single damn plug to plug my not very energy efficient laptop in anywhere near me. But hey maybe they’re not just too lazy to put them in. Maybe they’re the ones smart enough to have planned for the future.

The part that people found most disturbing about the Rachel Maddow interview of Jon Stewart was when Stewart seemed to be defending former President Bush. In particular it arose when Stewart argued that the Left shouldn’t be calling George W. Bush a war criminal. 

First, let me say that I don’t think the “war criminal” part was the most important element of the interview. I certainly don’t think it was the most interesting. In a certain sense even to point it out and focus on it is to kind of detract from all of the other really important significant things Stewart and Maddow discussed. Nevertheless, the “war criminal” comments ARE being discussed everything and I think they are worth at least looking at.

But before that, let me just say quickly that I was impressed by Stewart’s discussion of the way the Media amplifies things, his discussion of his role in the media, and his discussion of how we need a new kind of filter through which to see things rather than the Left/Right distinction, especially his suggestion of ‘corruption’ being a possibly more illuminating meter to judge by. There are others who share a similar philosophy and I think if you want to seriously engage in these views you need to read someone like media critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen or constitutional scholar and activist Larry Lessig and the works they regularly link to. I honestly think Stewart sees his role as similar to that of Jay Rosen’s as a critic and analyst of the media and the process of journalism. Even his comments at the end of the interview sounded very much to me like a plug for Rosen’s view of the problem with the “View From Nowhere”. Stewart professes the opposite, that what matters is where people are coming from.  The section on “corruption” and the need to avoid the left/right divide sounded like it could have been taken directly from one of Lessig’s speeches.

Anyways, on o the “war criminal” stuff.  First let’s look at exactly what he said (transcribed by hand so any errors are mine):

The next part of the interview goes a bit off on a tangent of Maddow defending her work. But it bears some commentary before we get to the War Criminal stuff. I think Maddow kinda missed Stewart’s point.  Stewart is talking about tribalism. On Fox News they cover the woman shouting out that Bush is a War Criminal. On MSNBC they cover the Tea Partiers shouting out at townhalls. If Maddow’s point is that it matters when it’s people running for Senate and not when it’s regular activists, then why is there MSNBC coverage of the Tea Partiers shouting at townhalls at all? Or if there IS good reason to cover this kind of disruptive protest, why doesn’t MSNBC also cover the woman shouting out that Bush is a War Criminal with the same tone?

And the exact same questions can be asked about Fox News.

Maddow argues that her coverage was about the funding of the groups and that may be… but there is a sort of tribalism air to it that is hard to ignore. It certainly seems like Maddow and the rest of the people on MSNBC saw these people saying things they disagreed with strongly wanted to cover it on their programs so they could show their viewers these “Crazy tea partiers” because that’s what would sell to their liberal tribal audience. But then they felt bad about it because they know that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with direct activism and disruption and that if there IS something wrong with it,  their own side is equally guilty of it, so they went out there and found a justification for covering it. Namely that these groups were being funded by big corporations.  Now the justification for the coverage IS real and it is a real story since it is something very new in the political history of the United States that really does need to be covered somewhere, so maybe it turns out fine. But it certainly makes one wonder how far MSNBC is away from just running the clip of the townhall protesters as if it alone were the story. Fox News certainly does. And as far as how much it feeds the tribal divisions between the two groups it’s nearly equivalent, except that the Left wing way gives the Left a way out.

Some people on the Left did argue that the initial attacks from other people on the Left on the Right wing protesters weren’t fair. I recall defending them too early on and felt uncomfortable doing it because there were people I liked doing the criticism and mockery. But then the astroturfing stuff came to light and now people like me on the Left were full comfortable because we had a real and neutral justification that we could use as a vehicle to level our critique. But is that really right?

It’s hard you see? I exist within this tribe of ideological similar people like me whether I want to be or not and even when you’re being as fair as you can to some extent you’re still fighting for your beliefs so you really are in the business of criticizing those you don’t agree with because you don’t agree with them. It’s not always the case that there’s some clear right or wrong. Sometimes we just fundamentally disagree. And that isn’t always fair and those arguments do shut down debate when you hit that fundamental wall of basic differences of perspective and values, and people get p their backs up.

The simple fact is I really do think the people showing up at the Townhall meetings protesting Health Care Reform were wrong. That’s why I wanted to talk about them. It wasn’t their tone that was wrong. It wasn’t their shouting. It wasn’t even that they were being funded by massive corporations (though I think that that was also wrong). IT was what they were arguing for that I thought was wrong:  less government intervention in health care. That I thought and still think is fundamentally wrong. I probably will always think that that is fundamentally wrong. You’d have to show me a LOT of real empirical evidence of the triumph of minimal government intervention health care to get me to change my mind. That’s partly because of my fundamental values and partly because I’ve seen in my lifetime so little evidence that even hints at the idea that health care when left wholly to its own devices works out good for the masses. All the health care systems that work seem to have significant government presence and I don’t see the point in experimenting when we already know what does work..

I also think the protesters were strategically wrong too. I think they were acting against their own best practical interests. By protesting Health Care Reform in the way that they did at the time that they did they certainly helped put political pressure that resulted in a worse health care bill getting passed rather than a better one. And that set the stage for what is likely a repeal of the health care bill eventually which will hurt them even more and make life a lot harder for them, the very thing they feared the government health care would do. And in the long run, adopting uncritically the “less government” argument ultimately will result in their losing their social security, medicare, and medicaid as well. And that I find to be horrible.

I didn’t understand why they were doing it and once the stuff about the major companies effectively funding the campaign made it all make sense. But even if those companies hadn’t existed they still might have been doing it just because maybe they just fundamentally don’t agree with me. And they still would have been, in my opinion, wrong and I’d still think it’s right to critique their argument.

The question is how do you critique it in such a way that they will actually HEAR it, especially when the media that they watch paints any criticism as victimization and treats every critic as an elitist snob looking down on them?

So the question of what arguments shut down debate is really really important. Which brings us to the “war criminal” remarks.  I think Stewart is right that calling George W. Bush a War Criminal does shut down debate. But I think what he’s missing is that it’s not that saying things like George W. Bush is a War Criminal creates the tribal atmosphere that is so disruptive (though it may contribute). It’s rather that the tribal atmosphere has become so intense that even mentioning the words George W. Bush and “war criminal” in the same sentence immediately causes all the people in one of the tribes to just stop listening to you. It’s not necessarily the case that that sequence of words is used to shut down debate, but it is nevertheless the case that debate is shut down as a result of that particular choice of words.

I recall this sequence with Noam Chomsky. 

Here he says that he can’t level unconventional charges on national television because people would rightly demand that he given a long and detailed explanation which he can’t do within the heavily time constrained nature of television. So that’s why back then they wouldn’t air Chomsky.

But now things have changed, now you CAN level the unconventional critique on air and nobody will complain, it’s just that the audience no longer wants an explanation. Nobody is demanding it of them. We’ve skipped right over that step. It’s like we’ve become so tribal that we’ve been conditioned to either cheer the proclamation or denounce it without ever saying: “Well WHY are you saying George W. Bush is a War Criminal? What’s your evidence? Can you explain?”  And if ever anyone ever tries to explain well it’s basically too late. The very people you most would want to convince of that have already decided you’re a member of the other tribe and tuned you out.

If you want to read some super interesting commentary on the “war criminal” stuff I highly recommend reading Digby’s blog entry on it here.  She makes some really impressive points that are very important to keep in mind about this stuff. 

Here’s part of what she said:

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been arguing that Jon Stewart makes very interesting and very important points. And I think it’s really important to talk about it and try to self-examine ourselves to try and prevent ourselves from falling into these traps. But when it boils down to it I’m still very much on Digby’s side in this.

I very much DO believe that when we refrain from telling the truth, say hold back from calling George W. Bush a War Criminal simply because we are afraid that the other side will stop listening to us… unless we have a really good alternative strategy… we’re basically just giving in and letting the people who WANT there to be this tribal war and are fully comfortable with it go completely unopposed.

Stewart offers great critique but he doesn’t offer a particular compelling alternative strategy. If the problem is that the truth can’t be heard over top of the incredibly loud noise of all the cable networks and the tribal war that’s going on, what the hell do you do?? It CAN’T be stop telling the truth. Obviously then nobody gets the truth. It can’t even be say “let’s all tone it down and be more civil”. That doesn’t work. It especially doesn’t work when one side doesn’t want to tone it down. And it especially doesn’t work when all of the money and popularity benefits flow toward those that explicitly choose NOT to turn it down. And it certainly doesn’t work if nobody here’s you even make the request in the first place because it gets so drowned out by everything.

That’s what it seems like here from the view on the left anyway. But maybe I’m wrong and there are a lot of influential media people on the Right who really do want to have a more productive dialogue. But it doesn’t seem so. I don’t see it. It seems that they are benefiting greatly from the divisiveness in ways maybe they didn’t even intend but that gives them a very very strong incentive to preserve the arms race. Each time it happens, they win more power. It’s really working out incredibly well for the people on the tribe of the Right.

And if we flipped it around it would probably be the same. If it were the Left that benefiting far more from the battle to keep the noise level over the tops I think there’d be many fewer leftists arguing to tone it down too.

So in that environment the only conclusion I think that can be drawn is you have to make your case loudly and forcefully too. You have to try to be heard very loudly and hope that what you are saying is more compelling than the other loudly argued arguments BECAUSE it is true.

But if you’re in a crowded loud noisy room already, you have to be pretty loud and noisy to be heard. You can’t quite people down unless you find a way to be heard above the rest of the noise.

In a way I think Stewart actually did that with his rally. He was heard just for a quick moment telling everyone to “pipe down!” But the next day everybody started shouting again and his message was lost, as everyone who was shouting said it would be: sort of a self fulfilling prophecy.

But maybe something can be learned from this. Maybe we can all change our tactics a bit to try and be loud in a way that makes people think a little bit more. I’m not sure how, but it’s worth thinking about. It might be as simple as the difference between shouting “Bush is a War Criminal” and shouting “Bush approved torture which is a war crime!”  But probably not. That just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Or maybe the real answer is to bypass the whole machine altogether. Stop fighting in this arena where noise is the only thing people hear and start having more one on one personal conversations in other arenas such as civics organizations and churches and schools and on the internet about detailed concepts. For example, maybe we have a bunch of conversations all around the country between people on the Left and people on the Right about whether or not Bush is a war criminal. Should the term be applied? If not, what term is appropriate? Maybe our standards for what constitutes a war crime are too low? Maybe we should examine that. Should he be held accountable for any of the things he did? Should we be concerned if he’s not held accountable of other Presidents abusing the authority that George W. Bush has established? These are not obvious questions that you can quickly answer in sound bites.

Ideally there’s be some impetus from some high level to facilitate these conversations, if only like some kind of public inquiry or truth and reconciliation commission. But even if not then we can try to setup grass roots groups  around the country to try and hash these things out.

But still, I don’t see it happening and not quickly enough to stop corporations and politicians from causing enormous harm for their own selfish interests. So right now I’m still of the opinion that we on the Left shouldn’t lay down our arms and stop making our critiques as loudly as the other side. I think to do otherwise would just be the same as letting the Left as a movement vanish from this country. I’m sure would make some people happy but I think would have disastrous consequences for our nation’s long term future.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop trying our hardest to be as honest and fair as possible even if that means confronting our own hypocrisies and inner biases in the process whenever we can. Maybe when people see us doing that, even as we are being as loud mouthed and obnoxious as the other side, they’ll wonder why we go through so much trouble to be fair when the other guys aren’t and maybe that in turn will be the hook that enables us to begin a deeper more civil dialogue.

Twitter sometimes, is a horrible medium. You can really slanted information especially in 140 character bursts. Last night I saw many a tweet flowing through my stream saying things like “Stewart defends Bush!” and “Stewart defends torture and waterboarding!” and “Stewart defends Fox, says they are nonpartisan!”.   This made me feel ill and I was extremely reluctant to watch the video of the Stewart/Maddow interview for fear that I would lose all respect for Jon Stewart and end up having to go back and retract everything I said in the last two posts.

I shouldn’t have worried. Stewart’s response is far more interesting and nuanced than those absurd characterizations. And in fact I found myself still agreeing with him a lot.

But really, it’s a very thoughtful, interesting exchange at much higher level than most of the interviews you hear on television. I agreed with much of what both of them were saying. I actually ended up watched it twice, once the clipped version that appeared on the Rachel Maddow show and once the full version which I linked to below. The interview really made me think a lot. There are few interviews I can say that of. There’s still a lot of what they talked about that I’m still mulling over. These are complex issues that I don’t think are entirely black and white. I know I’ll be thinking about a lot of this for a long time.

Overall my estimation of Stewart and Maddow both grew from watching this.

But here judge for yourself.

 
One of the things that stood out to me though in this interview is that I think Stewart is really really fundamentally wrong if he thinks he can or is “out of the game” or that he can’t do as much as someone like Maddow to effect real change.  Either he is saying that simply to be ironic or to mock Maddow or he’s living under a little bit of a delusion.

Jon Stewart actually has significantly more of an ability to effect change than Maddow. Even with his considerable restraint in wading into the political arena or perhaps BECAUSE of that restraint he still has the kind of sway over masses of people that can move mountains. He might not realize it and maybe not realizing that is part of what keeps him sane and helps him be effective but it’s still the truth. If you have the respect of a huge portion of the youth of a generation across the political spectrum (if significantly tilted to the left) then you have enormous power. Recall that Stewart was able to give voice to a deeper level of Left leaning criticism of President Obama than anyone in the media during his interview of him. And that has enormous ramifications. And he’s done other profoundly influential interviews on his own show and on other networks.

Don’t mistake 300K people signing a petition to save Olbermann’s job and 215K people showing up in person to see Stewart and Colbert hold a big party on the national mall. There is NO comparison. For good or ill Stewart’s power is far far greater.

It will be interesting to see if Stewart tries to or is even able to “enter the game” more directly. I really wish he would talk to Al Franken and have a really long deep private conversation with him. And I would pay a great deal of money to be a fly on the wall during that conversation. It would be fascinating.

I don’t think Stewart would ever go fully the Al Franken route, but I would love to see him go at least a little bit further in that direction.  And if things ever got bad enough that we really needed him to, no matter his personal wants, I’d wish that he went much much further.

But that doesn’t sound like where he wants to be. He doesn’t want to be anywhere close. He wants to be in this guy’s place:

But I think he’s already gone way beyond that. And there’s not really any going back for him.

I was too lazy to post this last night but here’s the video of Stewart’s speech.

I thought this was a really good speech but most of the people I usually agree with had opinions ranging from mild annoyance to outright disgust at this.

So… discuss. Good? Bad? Terrible? Agree? Disagree?

And if you don’t like it or feel like listening just enjoy the autotuned version:

There’s been this huge debate amongst progressives and liberals about Jon Stewart’s Rally that took place on October 30, called the Rally to Restore Sanity. Basically virtually every major progressive media figure offline and online to whom I listen to frequently and most often agree with took the time to viciously criticize The Rally for creating a False Equivalence between Fox News and the Left and ridiculing and attacking activism.

I surprised myself while observing all this in that I discovered myself to be pretty firmly on Jon Stewart’s side. And that’s coming from someone who hates false equivalences and is a huge fan of activism. I definitely got the points of all those critics and I think they made some good ones. However, I think overall, THEY were missing the point. They weren’t seeing the bigger picture.

There’s this thing the Left does that makes me a little ashamed of being a part of it at times. We have a tendency to viciously attack one another on moral grounds. It’s not solely a tendency of the Left but it is frustratingly common amongst our leaders. Though our arguments aren’t made up or grounded in fiction they are still not always the most fair or the most reasoned.

For some reason the Left has become pretty bad at strategy too. That’s why at every level the Right has been kicking its ass badly for 30 years. We’re great on specific issues but terrible at seeing the big picture. At every level we fail at that. At the level of Media, at the level of activism, and at the level of politics. Our overarching strategies have been near complete and utter failures. We win battles but we’re losing the war for hearts and minds and we’re losing it pretty badly. (To be fair we have regained extraordinary ground in the last six years or so, but that’s why this past year, and especially the last six months have been so terrifying. It seems like we are losing that ground at an insanely rapid rate)

But what’s interesting to me is that we weren’t bad strategists during the Civil Rights era. In fact they were pretty great strategists then. They managed to mobilize people in ways the world hasn’t seen since. And they had a huge impact. And that’s not so much in the legislation that was passed or the rules that got changed. That’s in how they changed the entire mindset of the country. We became more inclusive, more fair, more willing to at least TRY to treat one another as equals no matter our race or gender and even in some cases sexual orientation. But the landscape shifted beneath our feet and for some reason the Left never really caught up with the changing times. We kept trying the same old things and we didn’t get any better at doing them either. Our great leaders were shot or locked up or were discredited and those that took their place though well meaning lacked the vision. We never really recovered.

Meanwhile the Right has developed extroardinarily skilled strategists. Media geniuses like Limbaugh and Beck. Political masters like Gingrich and Rove. They’ve had no shortage of people who are planning for the BIG picture. And they are totally willing and able to use all of the lessons learned from the successes of the Left as well as any other tools of the modern era and build upon them and use them to their ends. And they do. Beautifully. Effectively.

Here’s the thing. 3 Million people a week watch Glenn Beck. If you think that’s a small number compared to how many people live in the country you are deluding yourself. That’s a massive number to be watching one demagogue. And they talk to people. They interact with people. The message that appears on Glenn Beck doesn’t stop at his 3 Million fans. And that doesn’t even take into account the millions of people who listen to his radio program or the many millions who listen to Rush Limbaugh who are sometimes different people.

One top of that at least tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people attended Beck’s rally and many more attended the several other conservative rallies and marches that have been held over the past two years. But much more important than the attendance numbers,  everybody knew about that Beck rally.  It was a media events. You couldn’t escape it no matter where you went. That’s why it was a success. Because no matter how many people attended, everybody heard their conservative message. It was everywhere.

And part of that message is: if you don’t believe as we do, you’re evil. You’re dangerous. You’re stupid. You’re destroying the nation and a direct threat to the well being of the good and true “normal” Americans. They have lots of other messages some good some horrible, but by far that’s the WORST of their messages. The one that tells people that their kids and neighbors and fellow Americans who live on the coasts have something fundamentally wrong with them because they believe it’s possible to create a government that can help people without creating a society run by tyranny. It’s a message that pits people against each other and trains people to accept the practice of othering various groups and peoples from muslims to illegal immigrants to blacks to gays. This tells them it’s okay to be angry at them. It’s fine to hate them. They’re really to blame. Those evil liberals.

If you don’t believe that’s a fundamental part of their message, I recommend you read some of the comments on my blog. Or ANY blog that gets considerable conservative commentary. Listen to how they react to anything remotely resembling “liberalism”.

The scary thing is when people are worried and afraid and don’t know what to do that message is extraordinarily convincing. People who worked their whole lives living within what they thought were the rules are looking for someone to blame. They are looking for someone to let out their anger and frustration at. And so they love to hear that there’s this conspiracy of monstrous people called liberals that they can vent at and hate. Not everybody does. But enough do. 

And many of those who don’t are just confused enough that they’ll latch onto anything that seems remotely plausible as an explanation for their collapsing shifting world. Anybody who offers them a sense of stability and normalcy. Being a part of the Fox News community gives them that. Glenn Beck tells them what’s wrong in simple terms they can understand. It’s the libs. It’s that evil philosophy of progressivism. Stick with me and I’ll bring you back to your happy conservative values. That’s his message.

Indeed when I watched the interviews with attendees of Glenn Beck’s rally that’s what stood out the most to me. It was how very happy people were to be there. They were having a good time. There was a sense of community and togetherness amongst them. They felt good about what they were doing.

And I don’t begrudge them that happiness or that sense of community and purpose. I think it’s a good thing. I’m just terrified of Glenn Beck’s message of hatred and ignorance that underlies it. THAT’s the problem. Teaching people to associate these good feelings of togetherness with and unity with hatred of the other and vilification of alternative ideologies can’t be a good thing.

The only question then that the Left needs to ask is HOW CAN WE COUNTER THAT MESSAGE?

And there’s no easy answer to that. It’s going to take a lot of different things and a lot of new creative thinkign. It’s going to require a lot of experimentation too.

But here’s what we know won’t work. Doing what we’ve been doing. And by that I mean having smart hosts on MSNBC that simply shout out the alternative viewpoint. Yes they serve a good purpose and yes it’s great that not everything that Fox News says goes without challenge somewhere in the media. But that doesn’t sway the country either. Nor does it, apparently, motivate sufficient numbers of the disenfranchised or depressed to go out and vote either.

Similarly the many many many many normal Left wing marches and protests don’t work. That’s not to say that they are entirely a waste of time. They do serve a good purpose of linking activists together and building networks. But they don’t force major legislative changes either. They don’t scare anyone. They don’t get the country behind them. Indeed they don’t even command enough of an audience to cause them to get much press in the News media at all. And as much as we may like to whine about how the Media is being fundamentally “unfair” because many of those marches were bigger and deserved a lot more attention, the fact is media companies probably WOULD cover a rally if they thought it would sell. But no. They think these rally’s and marches don’t rate. They believe that even if they did cover them, they’d be so boring and inconsequential that the television audience wouldn’t even pay them any heed. Just more of the same they’d think. And legislators have learned to studiously ignore these marches too so that can’t be the angle for the story either.

So you’d need a truly phenomenal number of people to march to break into the modern media scene with a traditional cause. It just doesn’t work anymore like it used to. People need to start to take that into account.

But Glenn Beck’s rally DID work because he based it off of celebrity and it was something new and different and because it was radically opposed to the position of most marches. That made it interesting to people. Glenn Beck himself is a lightning rod for controversy. Even the timing, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech was a brilliant move to gin up extra controversey and garner more attention. All this brought the reporters out.

At that point it didn’t even matter how many people Beck got out to the mall. He would have claimed victory even if it was only 20,000. And in a lot of ways he’d be right.  All he needed was for the rally to be big enough not to be seen as joke.

So what do you do? Traditional strategies don’t work. Beck and Limbaugh are eating your lunch. Who’s innovating?

Jon Stewart that’s who.

Jon Stewart took a different approach. What if you answer the core problem of Beck’s message and his undeserved media fame by directly showing how silly it was. Glenn Beck says that everybody else out there who doesn’t think like he does is a monster. So Jon Stewart said, “okay, here we are, 200,000 of us. Do we look like monsters to you?”

He demonstrated that you could bring together a massive crowd of mostly Left leaning people who were NOT demonic and indeed were ANTI-demonic. They were people who argued for “sanity” and civility and mocked “fear-based” politics.  And they were fun loving joking friendly and above all normal people. Here were your friends and neighbors and children just getting together and having a good time. These were the people Glenn Beck tells you it would be a disaster if you let them take control? Did they seem like people who would bring about the end of the world? Is a world where people watch the Daily Show really so bad?

The overall theme of Stewart’s rally was that we’re more alike than we seem. Not Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann or Barack Obama and Sarah Palin but maybe a listener to Rush Limbaugh and a watcher of Keith Olbermann.  Maybe a voter for Obama and a voter for  McCain/Palin. We all live our lives the best we can. And that’s EXACTLY the right messgae to counter that of Glenn Beck which is that we’re not all that alike. Those progressive are NOT like you. They’re the enemy. They’re dangerous. They’re trying to destroy you and enslave you and they probably don’t even realize they’re doing it those poor deluded fools. That’s Beck’s message.

But more important even than the theme of Stewart’s rally was the spirit of it. I don’t even think of Stewart’s rally as your traditional March or Rally. Most of those are protests or advocacy trying to agitate for something specific. Stewart’s wasn’t that. It was nothing like that at all. But it still had meaning. Stewart’s rally was a gigantic sort of national Pep Rally. It was a giant party. It was in effect a way to cheer people up in the exact same way Glenn Beck’s rally did but NOT have that underlying message of hatred. Instead beneathe Stewart’s rally was a message of unity and hope.

And we needed it. Now more than ever. People were and are really really incredibly depressed. So many of Obama’s voters didn’t turn up because they were in pain and in trouble and depressed and thinking that system is fundamentally broken and they are surrounded by people who hate them. They’re tired of defending Obama, tired of defending the Democrats and tired of fighting to stay afloat in this miserable economy. And most of all they’re tired of the bickering and fighting that results in nothing getting done in Washington. You think you can get these depressed, out of touch, borderline angry people to vote? How? You’re lucky if you can keep them from falling completely into despair and giving up on politics altogether.

A lot of people complaining about Stewart’s rally are upset because he didn’t ask for people to vote and make it a rally all about electing democrats.There’s two problems with that argument. One do you really think that would have made an overwhelming difference? I don’t. That late in the game it maybe would have shifted one or two seats if you were really lucky. 200K is a good number of people but spread all around the country, I’m skeptical. A huge number of the people there were probably people who would have voted anyway and a good chunk were probably people who weren’t going to vote no matter what Stewart said.  You can’t pretend that a single rally is going to have a sway big enough to undercut a massive unemployment rate and serious dissatisfact over a whole plethora of Obama’s policies. Pretending otherwise is to embue in Stewart a kind of God-like influence I’m sure he wishes he has.

But worse than that, making this a Rally abotu Democrats might have been decent tactics but it would have been terrible Strategy. No matter how much we on the Left might wish it’s not so a vast majority of the independents and people in the center and even a good large chunk of the leftists are directly turned off by the political infighting that happens on a daily basis. They don’t WANT to be told to vote and who to vote for or to be “mobilized” to serve the interests of a political class they don’t trust. They hate the shouting that goes on on Cable Television and they wish there were resources out there that would give them a real education in political matters without all the bullshit. And they don’t think Republicans are fundamentally evil and they don’t really care about which is better Fox News or MSNBC.

When Obama ran he mobilized a lot of these people and a part of his allure is becausse he portrayed himself as being above the stupid partisan fray and was not possessed of ideological riggidness that would cloud his judgment. And yet at the same time he gave people a message of hope and the idea that people really could get along and make things better.

And people really really do respond to that message. They respond to it when it’s Jon Stewart saying it and when Barack Obama was saying it.  No matter how much you don’t like that bi-partisanship message or think it gets perverted into something grotesque in the political sphere (and believe me I do) it still brings people together. The fact is, A LOT of people will simply NOT listen to you if you sound like you are expressing a view that clearly favors one side over another or if you are painted by Glenn Beck as a shill for MSNBC. They will assume you’re “just like all the rest” and tune you off before they even hear a word you say.

You have to deal with people as they are not as you wish they would be. We do live in a country where 3 million people watch Glenn Beck and we live in a country where the vast silent masses of non-voters don’t watch anything and avoid politics like the plague because they think it’s because sick and twisted and wrong and has no real bearing on their lives.

You have to win one or two of those groups over.  I don’t know how. Nobody knows really. But the same old tactics just won’t work. We need to think of really long term strategies and start experimenting on how to really make a difference.

That’s what I think of Stewart’s Rally. It was an experiment in a different kind of mobilizing of people around a different kind of model than traditional activism. And I think it worked reasonably well all things considered. People had a good time and felt energized by the process. Maybe some people were inspired to get involved. Maybe some people just were able to keep the despair and discouragement at bay for a little while longer. Maybe it just made people feel a little less alone.

And I think that keeps a step further away from the dark place it sometimes seems like we’ve been falling closer and closer to lately. It sometimes feels like were are on the verge of falling into something really really bad and ugly and Stewart is one of those on the edges trying to pull us back up.

And on top of all that, given all the Good that Stewart and Colbert have done on their shows for the last however many years, don’t they deserve at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt? 

Do we really think the energy of our Left wing leaders is best spent railing against these two for daring tho mention MSNBC in the same sentence as Fox as if there might be some similarities between the two networks, something that most people in the country already believe? Aren’t there a lot bigger fish to fry?

I’ve always said you shouldn’t withhold criticize from anyone just because you like them, and I do believe that so I’m not saying Olbermann or Maddow or Maher or any of the rest shouldn’t have criticized Stewart. But I am saying the vehemence with which they went after him was excessive and I’d think so even if I didn’t think their criticism was fundamentally misguided and short sighted. At the very least I think they should take more seriously what Stewart was doing and what he was trying to accomplish.

Anyway, Stewart will be appearing on the Rachel Maddow program soon and I’ll be very curious to see if or how they hash out their differences.

Stewart already did a great segment in which he mocked his critics. One line in particular stood out to me.It was along the lines of Stewart’s critics were acting as if the only thing that was important was which side was worse the Left or the Right.

I think that statement is profound. Which side is worse is NOT the most important thing. That’s the narrowminded of a viewpoint that prevents our movement from growing. Changing this society for the better is going to require more than simply proving the other side stands for something bad. It’s going to require proving that WE can stand for something GOOD and that we can explain that Good to people in such a way that they can be compelled to believe in it.

Approximately once a week I get a spam message on my Xanga comments.  Usually it’s a registered user. Usually it’s a comment on a really old blog post that nobody reads anymore. Occasionally it’s on a recent post, such as the one I just got today on by blog post about who will follow Obama as President.

The spam is fundamentally the same. It’s usually some nonsense pretend serious comment followed by a link to somewhere that I don’t dare click on. The key of course is the link. It’s trying to get stupid people to click. The text is irrelevant.

Why is my Xanga so attractive to spam? I regularly block known spam accounts and delete spam messages but they still appear. What can I do to reduce this spam amount? Do I have to just suffer through it or disable comments?

What can XANGA do to reduce the frequency of spam?  Well as always I have some ideas.

How about a way to lock older posts from getting comments while keeping your newer posts comment worthy? How about the ability to limit users ability to post links in comments? Or a way to limit the length of comments? Those things would radically reduce the value of spam comments? How about a dedicated learning spam filter you can apply to your account akin to what we have in emails? How about a system where we can approve of comments before they appear on our blogs?

Do you have spam problems? What do you think is the best way to handle it personally and for Xanga as a whole?

Roger Ebert posted this video on his blog and I find that I have an irrationally excessive love for it.

It’d be awesome if more people thought and talked like this.