Have you ever heard the phrase “I’m very emotional right now”?  I’ve alway thought that was a funny phrase. To me, emotions are discrete. It’s like you need a clarifier on that statement. Emotional how? Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you afraid? Or what? I can see you being angry now and then sad in an hour. Changing state isn’t weird to me. And indeed I can imagine some people change state quite frequently if there are a lot of contrasting stimuli triggering state changes. But what does it mean to be “emotional” in general? 

Maybe I think what is meant is that there is sort of an overall State pattern you are in. Maybe there’s a sort of binary character to these two states. Let’s call them Emotion-Low and Emotion-High. 

Emotion-Low we would describe as a kind of a stable equilibrium with regard to emotions. If you think of it as a wave pattern you’d see long low curves, most are close to zero with your occassional spike. The spike would reflect when something makes you really angry or really very happy or some other strong emotion. After the spike though you return back to the equilibrium pattern. That’s Emotion-Low. You have a tendency to return to a state where emotional changes are slow and take place over lengthy periods of time. The sum of the experiential stimuli drives the trend in your emotions.

Emotion-High is the opposite. When you’re in an Emotion-High pattern the equilibrium is unstable. That means small stimuli of any kind drop you off the stable state into a heavy change in emotions. If you imagine a wave pattern it would be like a lie detector test with the needle cycling up and down off the charts in rapid fire. The wave changes state rapidly. Like the spikes that you rarely see in the Emotion-Low state are the norm of the Emotion-High state. When something makes you angry, you become way angry. When something makes you happy, you become immediately really happy again. When something makes you anxious you suddenly become REALLY anxious. And it cycles rapidly. And your mind by its very nature has a tendency to present stimuli to itself, especially if you are introspective so you may well end up shifting emotional states rapidly by way of no external stimuli at all just as you think about many random thoughts.

If this theory is correct then the pertinent question is how does one shift from emotion-high to emotion-low and back again? Is this a matter of choice or is it a matter of chance? Are there certain dominant stimulli that don’t just change your immediate emotions but also your overall emotional state? Major life changing events might do that like having a child or losing a loved one or learning that you have a terminal illness. Can you will yourself out of one and into another? Maybe like through meditation or venting? Can someone deliberately or unintentionally drive you in or out of one state? Are there certain personality types that tend toward one State or the other more frequently? Is it genetic? Are there psychological disorders that can be explained by being more kind of stuck in one State or not shifting rapidly. Maybe Bipolar individuals are perpetually in Emotion-High and maybe people suffering from chronic depression are stuck there in part because they are always in Emotion-Low? Are certain chemicals effective in shifting one from one state to the other? All bears thinking about.

Self analysis-wise I can say that I’ve spent most of my life pretty much in near perpetual Emotion-Low. Of course I can get very happy and very sad or very angry but it comes in spikes interrupting the normal flow. General shifts happen over lengthy periods of time. So I might be depressed for months or generally in a good mood for weeks or months. That’s just the way I almost always have been.

This past few days though I’ve been in Emotion-High and I’ve gotta say it’s weird as hell. While I was riding with my friend to do errands yesterday she said in response to something I said (mocking some of the other drivers) “Man you’re really in a bad mood today.” That wasn’t really true. I wasn’t in a bad mood. I was just in an Emotion-High mood. Anything that made me angry quickly made me switch to a very angry state and anything that made me happy made me switch to a child-like cheerful state and mostly anything that made me anxious or afraid made me very very afraid. Driving back I was grotesquely nervous about possibly crashing. Going down I was experiencing a kind of road rage at people getting in my way. I NEVER experience road rage. At least not that I can remember.

Writing seems to help me drive myself back to a more Emotion-Low state though. And that’s happening right now. Though I think historically I’ve probably done my best writing when I was in Emotion-High. hmmm. I need to find a way to harness the power of these Emotion-state shifts! Then the world will be my oyster as the saying goes. I have no idea what that saying means. Eating the world doesn’t sound pleasant to me. Whatever. In any case I could be a better writer whenever I needed to be and that’d be kinda cool.

Yesterday after recording our podcast I had a lengthy conversation with two of the podcasters about the various social media platforms. It was a fairly interesting conversation and could have easily made its own podcast. During the course of the conversation though when we were talking about twitter there was this thought that I’d had a long time ago that came back to me that has been itching at the back of my head for a while.  Later that same day, I got a tweet from another friend that ironically reminded me of the very same thought and so I KNEW I had to write about it. You see, what I’m been thinking for a long time is this:

Twitter is corrupting us. Seriously. It may already be too late.

Twitter now dominates the world data sharing and information spreading online. Going ‘viral’ now is almost by DEFINITION being popular on twitter. If you want to get the word out about something, anything you best post it to twitter and hope it trends.  You will reach the most people the fastest that way as people “ReTweet” your stuff ad nauseum.

And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Twitter is a very nice service. I think it is a very powerful tool for skimming long streams of data and picking out the gems that matter. As a matter of getting the ‘news’ there is no better utility out there, whether it be news about your friends or news about your family or news about the world in general.  Twitter makes it easy. The more I use twitter the more I appreciate the power of its brilliant simplistic model and the amazing platform the twitter user community has turned it into. I say the user community because it has been Twitter users that have made Twitter into what it is far more than the developers who happened to create it.

There’s only one real problem and its one only the developers can solve. It’s That Dammed 140 character limit! 

Don’t get me wrong, some limit is necessary. In order to skim things they have to be short. You can’t sort of have an unlimited stream and then have people write novels in an attempt to plug links to other novels. That’d be ridiculous. But 140 character is SOO small, ESPECIALLY when URLs, hashtags, and @mention usernames, as well as any punctuation or emoticons all have to count against the limit  It’s super constraining. We’re sort of trapped. Trapped in a prison of 140 characters.

And the longer twitter remains a dominant force in our society the more of a pernicious impact that 140 character limit has on our culture.  It’s like if you were living in a police state. Culture still develops but it is constrained by the artificial boundaries placed by the cops and guards that limit where you can go and how you can act. The 140 character limit is our barbed wire fences. We can’t escape!

Here are just some of the obvious effects:

- It almost guarantees that shorthand shortcuts like Text Speech that seemed on the decline prior to twitter become permanent additions to our linguistic style. be become b. see becomes c. about becomes abt, etc. etc. etc. 

- Writers who want to write something that catches on will have a super strong incentive to write their cleverest lines in 140 characters.  Want your quote to become famous? Better make it 140 characters or less! That way someone can tweet it and other people can retweet it! AT the very least make the first 120 characters or so of your message the most catchy and eye popping as you can make it so that users will be willing to click the link to the rest. Similarly for jokes. No more long strings of words leading up to a big punch line at the end. The beginning has to STAND OUT. 

- Similarly relics of the past, linguistic phrases that are 140 characters or less gain popularity. This is particularly sad because some of the cleverest most brilliant lines of writers in the past get overshadowed by trite 140 character nonsense written by less skilled wordsmiths. It’s a crying shame.

- Titles of articles and stories and captions for images and the like similarly must be bound by the 140 character limit. Actually they must be significantly LESS than 140 characters because a title necessitates a link and the link takes up space. Anything that wants to lead people to click on a link must be smaller than 140 characters.

- Chains of ideas become hard to express. You can’t easily quote a conversation or carry on a coherent or substantive back and forth. The twitter stream breaks up even chains of distinct 140 character tweets. 

- Complex ideas are simply off limits and distorting what someone says is easy and fun.  Tweets are sort of wholly divorced from context so if you want to smear someone the easiest thing to do is to take their 140 character soundbite tweet and broadcast it to the world with snide commentary. 

- Users have a really strong incentive to try and come up with short usernames. In fact it seems that if you don’t want to be quoted frequently or retweeted or @replied you would want to make your username long and if you did you’d try to make it as short as humanly possible. That means awesomely creative but lengthy usernames become both less common and less “seen” by the community.

- The twitter Retweet Button becomes transcendant not because it offers any kind of better functionality (that’s arguable) than the natural Retweet users came up with themselves but because it doesn’t have the limitation of counting the username of the retweeted and the RT symbol against the 140 character limit.

- Talking to small groups becomes virtually impossible since the more people you @Mention the shorter and shorter your tweets become. It’s basically impossible to easily have a small group conversation.

- The small limit together with the inability to save or preserve tweets and the prevalence of the newest tweets encourages a kind of fire-and-forget culture where you throw out things in rapid fire in the hopes that something catches fire and gets retweeted. It makes no sense to spend 3 hours composing a perfect tweet when you are just as likely to get a catch by tweeting 50 less well thought out tweets that are mildly clever in those 3 hours.

I’m sure there’s more but my point should be clear. Don’t get me wrong though. Constrains often are the impetus for some of the most brilliant forms of creativity known to man. And indeed I think within twitter the community has risen to the challenges presented by the 140 character limit and done truly awesome things with it.  But at the same time these effects are still with us and clear and becoming stronger. I think over time the existence of twitter if it remains the dominant river of news will change us as a society and as a people in ways I’m not sure we’ve thought through so clearly. It might be that we don’t WANT to become a society that thinks 140 characters is the default perfect length of expression. Maybe we don’t wnat to feel like we have to justify going beyond that 140 character boundary and prove that we are worthy for a closer look?  Maybe it should be longer? A little longer or a lot lnger. Or maybe we DO want it. Maybe 140 characters is too much. Maybe it should be smaller? And maybe it should be different lengths for different languages? For example in English the average word is 5 character but in Korean it’s only 3 and in German it’s 6. Maybe German should have a longer limit than English and English longer than Korean?

I just don’t think we’ve thought it through at all. I think 140 characters was just fallen into for stupid reasons having to do will cell phones and since twitter had no real competition it stuck.

And does it have to be a number decreed from above? Isn’t there a way to make *users* set the limit somehow? So that it can grow organically rather than be the length that some bonehead programmers thought up one afternoon whilst sipping tea in the break room?

Now if I’m the bonehead tea-sipping programmer that is in charge of said decree I’d have some ideas that I think would be at least a little better. For English I’d make the limit 200 characters. The average sentence length in English is I think around 88.23 if you include punctuation and space and I think you need at least two times that to give enough flexibility for creativity. I like round easy numbers to work with so I round up to 200. Second I’d let people use damned hyper links that don’t count against the limit. You could use some kind of simple tag notation either <a href=> or some other easier to use notation.  Links hard coded in would still auto transform into links, it’s just that that would be another option to save character space. You could also do a “link behind” that is turn the entire tweet into something that if you click on it takes you some place else. And for audio and video a link behind would play the audio or the video or open up the picture in a preview panel of some kind. Next most important is that @Mention would stop counting against your limit period.  Why should you be heavily penalized for talking directly to more people? I’d put a hard limit on the number of @Mentions you could include to limit spam. The limit would probably be around 8 because I like powers of 2 or 10 cuz I like our base 10 social hegemony.  Next I’d also let you create group tags that act as @Mentions to groups of people. You’d only be able to tweet to one group tag at a time however but this would enable a group of people to hold a conversation. Finally I’d have an expandable tweet option that allows you to build a tweet that is larger than 200 characters and can easily be expanded by clicking the ‘more’ button in 200 character byte segments.  Oh yeah and I’d also fix the dammed @Reply tracking so I can A. see when a @Mention is a reply and not a mention and B. so if I click on a user who has been a chain of @Replies I can clearly and easily see the entire conversation *in order* instead of hunting around for the replies.

I’m sure you can think of other good ideas for how to dig our way out of this 140 character prison. My main point is that the prison exists and it sucks. I say it’s time for a REVOLUTION!  Free The Tweeters!!!  Tear down those 140 Character Walls!! We must escape before it’s too late and we become boring uninteresting slaves to the new 140 character language regime.

In this episode, Kaiti, Grace, and I start off talking about issues related to time and life management but we end up going into a long digression that takes over the entire show! We end up talking about our College and University system in the United States. We spend a lot of time venting about all of its strange idiosyncrasies, faults, and foils.

Listen here:

http://gettingthinky.blogspot.com/2010/12/episode-7-college-and-university.html

This is a quote from an interview I just listened to:

I know what you’re thinking.

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.