Blog Spectrum

Week two's Spectrum Perspective will be on the US electoral process, exact wording available soon....

I see no need to force people to be informed. If they don't want to be then it is Darwinism in action...societal Darwinism being the only place that his theory has been proven.

If I might quibble, Quilly--what part of Darwin's theory has not been proven? What part has?

Well, first, what is Darwin's theory? That the offspring of a species are slightly different from their parents, and that the offspring better suited to their environment will prosper and reproduce; further, Darwin speculated that over time, this change—let us call it evolution, though Darwin called it transformism—would change a species of animal so much that it becomes an entirely different species.

This is called "natural selection," and it has been proven, again and again, to be scientific fact. It can be seen in the ligers of Africa, who prove that Tiger and Lion descend from a common ancestor; in the birds of the Galapagos Islands, whose beaks can change shape in mere generations; in the breeding records of the Westminster Kennel Club, freely available at their annual dog show.

Of course when people say, "evolution has never been proven," they mean, "it has never been proven that man descends from monkeys." That is true, and will remain true until the time machine gets back from the shop. The debate is between those who think that the well-demonstrated law of natural selection probably applies to humans just as it applies to the animal kingdom, and those who see something wholly unnatural—divine, some would say, a word which here means precisely the same thing as unnatural, "something that cannot be explained by nature"—in mankind and reason that there must therefore have been some supernatural process at work in the beginning of mankind. In general, the question is, are we of the Earth, or beyond the Earth?

It's a question beyond the scope of this blog, of course. And whichever way you fall on it, Darwin's ideas are too important and complex to be reduced to a simple one liner. A rather stupid Englishman named Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" when he invented Social Darwinism, a philosophy as opposed to a theory, and something of which Charles Darwin vehemently disapproved, as Social Darwinism was invented mostly as a way to make the Robber Barons feel better about not giving a shit for poor people.

It hasn't changed much since, although apparently it's now an excuse for not caring about stupid people, too.

Actually QM, most of America does differentiate between you and the current 'leadership' by calling the current yahoo at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Ave and his ilk "Neo-Cons". In truth, just about everyone who's not pulling the pork of one Neo-Con or another readily admits that the Neo-Cons appear to combine the worst aspects of the 'tax and spend liberals' and the 'Bible or Brimstone conservatives' (see i was a good boy and didn't refer to them as the Religious Reich this time!) . Bush is after all the first President never to veto a spending bill. Even Tubby Teddy the Grand Duke of Kennedyia has voted against a spending bill or two.


He of the splendid Quillage spoke so eruditely:

Actually, while Vlad had a bit of an idea...Radical Islamic
Fundamentalism
is dangerous...I'm not really a Conservative.

Conservatives, as currently portrayed, and which many of them believe,
is
keeping God in the Public Square and kicking the ass of the foreign
bastards
that screw with us. Now that is not without merit; but my personal
belief
is that the most powerful government should be the one down the street
from
your house. From that center of government should emanate the care of
the
_truly_ unfortunate and the dismissal of those that are either
parasites or
predators.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this.

——Garrison Keillior

Columbia Journalism Review has a fascinating list of which companies in America own what. The second half of the twentieth century was a time when we witnessed something very sinister, in which a chart reflecting the various news sources in this country ceased to be a crowded jumble of various, contradictory voices, and started to look like an octopus—el calimari, as Gore Vidal put it— with every tentacle leading, ultimately, to the same few dark and hungry beaks. On the New York Post website, there is a banner that can direct you to papers from dozens of countries—all of them owned by Murdoch. Just before I left Utah, the paper I read as a child, The Salt Lake Tribune, was taken over by Media News Group, Inc., the same company that owns the Charleston Daily Mail, the "local" paper where I now live, half a continent away.

Of course, the big media tycoons and the independent voices have co-existed for a very long time. The Rupert Murdoch's of this country have been driving us into unnecessary, pointless wars since William Randolph Hearst blamed the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine on shadowy Enemies of Freedom and started the Spanish-American War. And those of use with the ability to think for ourselves have always been able to find independent voices, from the Abolitionist newspapers of the 1840's to the indie weekly paper where I was a summer intern the year before I started high school.

And we don't lack voices from either side of the aisle, as Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh prove. We also have smart people in media, despite Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh. The problem is that both Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are tentacles of the same calimari. The same company that put up the money to make Fahrenheit 9-11 owns Limbaugh's home station. (That company, ironically, is Disney.)

That's a strength of capitalism, right? Certainly Ayn Rand would say so: no matter what your beliefs, if you can get people to watch you, you can get on TV.

Well, here's the sinister part: these eleven companies that own ninety percent of the news sources in America all report the same news. Here's a pop quiz, kids: which enormously influential, wealthy and long-lived leader of an Arab country died in the run-up to 2004 presidential election?

If you said Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, congratulations—you're from Europe! The number of people I known in this country who knew about Sheikh Zayed's death when it happened number precisely four. The number who knew about his death and have never been American ambassador to Abu Dhabi is just three!

Sheik Zayed was president of the UAE from 1971 until 2004. That's over thirty years. In that time he was one of the most influential and powerful men in the Middle East. He spent decades building hospitals, schools and universities across his country, he was tolerant of Christians, his majlis (a traditional Arab council) was open to the public, he even gave up hunting with firearms to encourage conservation—in short, he was one of the most liberal, democratic leaders in the entire region. He advocated the presence of women in the workplace and allowed a private media; not with as much freedom as we have here, unfortunately, but a thousand times better than Iran or even Russia. In other words, precisely the sort of person we want to be encouraging, supporting and helping.

Yet not one person in the American media have I heard lament his passing. Does Tucker Carlson know who Sheik Zayed was? No. Bob Novak? Hell, no. Does Michael Moore? Michael Moore knows that the Saudi embassy is right next door to the Watergate apartments, an irony I have known and appreciated since I was fifteen.

So we can sit back and listen to the folks on Crossfire or Hardball or Can 'o Whoop-Ass argue about today's scandal, that Yasser Arafat may have owned part of the bowling alley Rudy Giuliani went to—you think I could make that up?—and congratulate ourselves that we have people both red-faced-with-fury and blue-in-the-face-from-yelling on TV. We can sit back and listen to conflicts as scripted and substance-free as the WWF while el calimari gobbles us all up. It would be easy.

The fact that we might do that is the greatest threat to America today.

---

The above entry may come off as hostile to Michael Moore. I would like to remind readers that Moore wrote and directed one of the better pieces of political satire ever put on film, 1995's Canadian Bacon, with Alan Alda, John Candy, Rhea Perlman, Kevin Pollak, Rip Torn and Wallace Shawn, some of the best in the business. Looking for a documentary? Check out Control Room. Political commentary through the magic of satire? Michael Moore's way funnier than IMAO.

The biggest problem facing America right now is work. Put it as two questions. How do we occupy ourselves, and why? What is the proper relation between your effort and your reward, between your work and your income?

It used to be that our occupations defined us. Once upon a time, work was the cauldron in which your character was forged. In some ways, it still is. Who hasn’t been asked “What do you do?” And then watched as expectations took shape on the face, in the eyes, of the stranger who asked the question?

A century ago, there was a similar sense of crisis, or at least frustration, in trying to define the meaning and significance of work. The Populists and the socialists claimed that the paper-pushing mental labor of bankers, lawyers, merchants, and intellectuals—all those prissy “middlemen”—was not productive. In fact they insisted that such labor was parasitic.

By this they meant that the incomes of the bankers, et al., were deducted from the sum of value created by others, by the productive labor of the “toiling millions.” Their assumption was that your consumption of goods was authorized by your production of goods. You weren’t supposed to get more than you contributed to the sum of value, to the stock of real, tangible goods.

Not a bad idea, mind you. It’s what animates some of the more strenuous versions of the labor theory of value—including that purveyed by Marx.

But with the rise of a corporate kind of capitalism, mental labor became central to every enterprise and every sphere of social life. Witness the emergence of higher education as we know it, ca. 1890-1920. Witness the little magazines, the young intellectuals, the government agencies employing sincere young men and the settlement houses employing sincere young women, all in the same moment.

This kind of mental labor looked suspicious from the standpoint of most Americans, not just Populists and socialists (although, if you do the math, these folks were probably the majority of voters in 1894 or 1896). Then as now, people wanted a transparent, tangible, reasonable relation between effort and reward—you were supposed to earn what you received as income.

But how to measure this relation? What exactly do intellectuals and other paper pushers do? Like bankers and lawyers, they clearly don’t produce anything tangible or measurable, or even enjoyable.

The crisis of a century ago was solved by admitting mental labor into the category of work as such, but it took a while. The question, then as now, was How should we think about the relation between effort and reward, between work and income? The question never went away, of course, and it has been answered in interesting ways by recent “reforms” of both welfare and Medicare, under both liberal and conservative presidents, as well as by Social Security and other redistributive programs.

But we are now at a real crossroads. There is no way that private investment can produce enough jobs to employ even the slowing growth of the labor force. Since 1919, we have seen economic growth (larger output of goods and increasing productivity), as a result of declining net private investment and of declining labor inputs to expanded goods production.

Since the 1930s, public policy has acknowledged this very basic fact by attempting to detach the receipt of income from the production of value through work—via the programs I already mentioned, but also by developing the notion of “human capital,” by treating education as the basic industry of the U.S., by trying to come to terms with what is clearly a “post-industrial society.”

But what now is to be done? None of us, left or right, wants to abolish a transparent, tangible, reasonable relation between effort and reward, between work and income. That’s why we tell our children to work hard in school, and why we laugh, or cringe, when someone says Jack Welch earned what he now gets from G.E.

What is to be done is, quite simply, to stop acting as if we can restore the moral universe of the 19th century. We have to understand that our rewards are not, and cannot be, the function of our measurable efforts. I’m not invoking luck here, people, I’m telling you that there’s not enough work to do. And the private sector, the “supply side,” can’t change that. Either we redefine work or we redefine income.

This is the biggest problem because it is at once an economic, a social, a political, and, most importantly, a moral problem.

P.S. Matthew: MM got this from me, not vice versa: see Pragmatism and Political Economy (1994), Part I


Reposted from: Politics and Letters since James is having techical difficulties

So, first, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

The Biggest Threat to America Today – the American People

I don't mean everyone in America. I'm talking about the eligible citizens who don't vote. The apathetic citizens who simply don't care enough to have a say in what happens with our country. The past few presidential elections have hovered around 50% voter turnout, this year's election was at about 56% turnout. What's wrong with this picture?

The excuses for not voting are many and varied, including (but certainly not limited to):
• "I don't have time." Vote absentee, it's easy and you can do it whenever you want, as long as your ballot gets in before Election Day.
• "My vote doesn't count." Every vote counts towards the electorate, and if everyone who said that had voted, the results may have been different.
• "I can't get off work." The law allows up to 3 hours off to go vote. If you are out of town, vote absentee.
• "I don't want to vote for this office/ on this proposition/ etc." You don't have to, vote for what you want to vote for, leave the others blank if you don't want to vote on it.
• "If I vote, they will get my name and call me for Jury Duty." Guess what, most states use lists of driver's licenses, not voter rolls. I have a family friend who is a legal resident, but a Canadian citizen. She's been called for Jury Duty several times.

Then after not voting, they bitch about what is wrong with this country. If you don't vote, you can't bitch, simple as that.

Voting is not just the right and privilege that most people think of it as; it is also a DUTY.

So Bloggers and Bloggetts it begins here,

We can either A) get off to a hell of a start by showing how diverse and intelligent a group we are, or B) we can crash and burn or later attempt to rise from the flames. I picked an issue that gives us a lot to work with in our first week, and will hopefully fill my poor little brain with ideas for future issues. For now, this weeks Spectrum Perspective is:

What is the biggest threat to America today?

And present to you the Cat-a-rat.











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The rules

A) One topic per week. Unless something (I decide) is really interesting happens.
B) One post on topic per week. Keep the rebuttals and general debate on target, and short while its on BlogSpectrum. On your own blogs I have no say.
C) Be Civil. To each other, idjit respondents are of course different.
D) Have hard facts to back yourself up. Blithering idjits will be removed.
E) Be specific, if you’re painting the world and using air craft carrier wide rollers I will personally mock your silly ass, repeatedly.
F) Be Civil. To each other, idjit respondents are of course different.
G) When posting put the week number in the title, or first paragraph of your post. For ex “WK 1 Why TheCO is the best blogger alive”
H) I’m the sole (official) judge of who comes to play, but people may be voted off once here.

Strong suggestions:
A) Please link to all the other team members, preferably under a separate header.
B) Please mention BlogSpectrum once or twice a month on your blog.
C) Remind people that I am God.
D) The Web Dominatrixes are Sidial and Politikat, worship them.
E) Notice the fact that I’ve gone with an alphabetic rules system and that if they have to grow too far the fun ends.