The first-ever Twitter political debate, an exchange between McCain and Obama reps over tech policy, is, sadly … incomprehensible. There are various ways to view it, and all are confusing – you can’t tell who is saying what to whom when. Because they are talking about policy positions, there’s a fair amount of jargon to begin with; when you can’t follow the thread of an individual’s thinking, or the back-and-forth, the jargon loses all context.
The serendipitous randomness of Twitter works against the concept of an organized debate, where you want to hear what just a few people are saying, and have them interact with each other. That can’t happen when you have to sort through random noise, due to graphical inelegance or just people leaping into the conversation. The Summize version of the debate, for example, is effectively being auto-spammed by a Twitter account devoted to “twaiku” – Twitter haiku – because one of the participants called the tweets “policy haiku.”
I like the idea of political debate as a kind of dharma combat, where speed and smarts push the discussion in interesting directions, and people are following it wherever, on phones or computers. With a usable interface, prudent management, and participants who are good at the 140-character form, we might get that. Without those things, this becomes like those mind-numbing primary debates, where you had a scrum of candidates operating under “30-second” rules. At worst, you just get a parody, like a text message political debate (BHO is GR8!!)
But I question the usefulness of this for an actual, wonk-oriented debate about policy. Such discussions need context and room for explanation to be useful/informative. Participants ought to be marshaling arguments, not just hurling links at one another.
…is the latest pop-culture buzzword, taken from a scene in the latest Indiana Jones movie. It’s roughly equivalent, in movie sequel terms, to what “jump the shark” means for TV shows. But the process by which a catch-phrase propagates has become wearying and predictable:
The convergence of hipness or knowingness with social networking technology is evidently both fueling trends – the latest catch-phrase or high concept – while at the same time making them ever more trivial and short-lived. As Kottke notes, “viral” is now “virulent.” The Darwinian dynamic, via which pop culture memes endured a short, grueling ride through the lower echelons of Facebook and Wikipedia before either burning out or making it to the “show” of television and mass culture, may be burning itself up – in the process, eroding any shared notion of what’s “hot” or “not” at any particular moment. And, I might add, also eroding a source of annoyance for the vast majority of us. The more catch-phrases smothered in the cradle, the better.
I also liked the fridge-nuking scene in the movie. It was ridiculous, of course. But funny and unexpected.
The resolution approved by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East was proposed by authority Secretary John Barry, also the author of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.”
An 8/29 commission was originally proposed in 2006 by Levees.org, a local group critical of the Army Corps of Engineers and its construction of the levees. The group gained support from Sen. Mary Landrieu for the proposal, but Landrieu has said her attempts have been blocked by republicans.
Barry’s resolution calls for the commission to look beyond the specific reasons levees and floodwalls failed during the 2005 hurricane and include a review of how hurricane and flood protection are designed all along the Mississippi River.
“I’m really asking that they take a comprehensive look at the entire Mississippi River system, the entire Mississippi valley, from New York state to Idaho,” Barry said. “They should look, for instance, at the dams on the upper Missouri River in detail, because they have a real impact on the amount of sediment that’s carried in the river, which has a real impact on the erosion of wetlands in Louisiana.”
This is exactly right: at issue is not merely how some bad designs crept into floodwalls (a question that, criminally, remains unanswered), but why the whole system failed, and what lessons we might glean from that to prevent it from happening again, in New Orleans and elsewhere. As Barry so brilliantly documented in “Rising Tide,” in the 1920s the Corps of Engineers and other institutions (Congress, state and local agencies) were incapable of responding either to actual changes in the landscape or to advances in the scientific understanding of river flooding – resulting in the terrible 1927 Mississippi River flood. The same was true of hurricane flooding in the 40 years before Katrina. Incredibly, it’s true today as well – for both kinds of floods, as we can see by what’s happening in the Midwest now. Only by looking at the whole system from stem to stern can we get our arms around these problems. Will it happen? With the Democrats in control of Congress and perhaps the presidency, maybe.
There’s a good piece in the Washington Post today by the redoubtable Joel Achenbach addressing this issue. Agriculture has altered the physical landscape of Iowa in ways that scientists and engineers don’t fully understand or appreciate, and that is compounding the current flooding disaster.
There’s an important debate underway about whether governments ought to – or even can – try to control carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. There are two variations on this theme. One is the “uncertainty” argument advanced by some conservatives, including the National Review’s Jim Manzi:
As far as I can see, proponents of emissions reductions will respond with four arguments: (1) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by claiming the science actually now says things will be even worse than we previously thought, (2) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by embedding indefensible discount rate assumptions in the black box of econometric calculations used by economists to conduct the cost-benefit analysis, (3) deflate the analyzed costs of emissions mitigation by claiming a free lunch – that there is a cost-free or low-cost way to radically reduce emissions, and/or (4) turn this into a moral crusade asserting that we have a moral duty to the poor of the world because of our past sins of emission. I have laid out responses to each of these objections: 1, 2, 3 and 4. When considered carefully, emissions mitigation proponents have no persuasive arguments.
In other words, given the unknowns here – both the scale of the problem and the costs of fixing it – we should do nothing. There are several problems with this. The first is that this is not a new argument at all. It is the MO employed by business interests and anti-big government conservatives every time action is proposed on some environmental problem: “we don’t know enough, it will bankrupt us.” This is a recipe for political paralysis – and that’s exactly the point, as Manzi’s post acknowledges. And it has been disastrous – just look at the state of fisheries, to cite a prominent example. Fishing interests managed to tie regulatory agencies in knots for years, saying we didn’t know enough to restrict fishing. Many fish populations collapsed and the fishermen went out of business.
Our experience of the past generation – the past decade especially – argues for being more proactive, not less, especially on gigantic problems. What about the notion that cap-and-trade will sink the economy? It will clearly have at least a modest impact on growth – and it should, because growth is the problem. But businesses always argue that new costs will kill them, while history shows that they usually manage to innovate and adapt.
Finally, Manzi’s argument itself has the whiff of disingenuousness, as if he started not with the goal of actually addressing a problem, but to devise a political strategy and talking points that would allow conservatives to acknowledge the reality of global warming – and thus not seem crazy – while continuing to do as little as possible. It’s situationalism, not a genuine grappling with the issues.
The other argument, advanced by Schellenberger and Nordhaus, the proprietors of the Breakthrough Institute, is that the horse is already so far out of the barn that any global agreement to cap CO2 emissions will be both bureaucratically nightmarish and outrageously expensive – and will ultimately fail:
The entire global framework for reducing carbon emissions, and indeed the entire conceptual and policy framework for addressing global warming, is a failure, based on an older paradigm of pollution control that won’t slow global warming.
At bottom, global warming is not so much a pollution regulation challenge as it is an energy development one. To understand how different this challenge is from past pollution quandaries, consider that by 2050 global energy consumption will more than double, even as we face the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent. This transformation will not be accomplished by affixing scrubbers on smokestacks or catalytic converters on tailpipes–technical fixes that required little change to the underlying processes and technologies that they mitigated. Rather, it will require fundamental changes to the underlying technologies and fuel sources that power the global economy.
The problem with Kyoto, cap and trade, and most other policies aimed at enacting this transformation is that they focus primarily on the pollution problem, not the energy supply problem. As such, they attempt to enact the necessary transformation of the global energy economy through the indirect mechanism of pollution regulations and carbon markets, rather than through the direct deployment of new clean-energy technologies.
I’m sympathetic to these ideas – after all, they may be right. Carbon emissions are escalating, the world is changing, and there’s nothing resembling a global consensus on how to address this. Even starting now, we may never catch up; and even if we can, cap-and-trade may turn out to be unworkable. But I think the argument fails on two counts. First, global politics can change; cap-and-trade may work. It seems silly to just give up based on the experience of Kyoto, which for all intents and purposes was conceived and executed in a different era. Second, their solution is to direct massive government and private investment to technology. Surely, we need this. But if you’re skeptical about government regulation, you ought to be even more skeptical about government subsdies to private interests, which are, well, pork. In other words, our political system is not set up to dole out billions in a rational, strategic manner.
I don’t see why we can’t do both: try to control carbon emissions while also greatly boosting public and private investments in alternative fuel technologies. (And, of course, the proceeds from cap-and-trade auctions can be directed to do exactly that.) We should be using all the tools at our disposal. Now.
In this ad, which is pretty good, John McCain plays up his distance from Bush on the environment:
But over the past few days, McCain keeps circling back into the Bush orbit on the environment. He declared that the “cap” in his cap-and-trade carbon proposal was not mandatory, something that will please the oil, gas and coal industries, and large industry as a whole, because it makes the entire proposal meaningless. This was a little too reminiscent of Bush’s rescinded 2000 promise to regulate CO2 emissions.
Yesterday, he came out for lifting the ban on offshore drilling, and Bush has enthusiastically climbed on board. Obviously: pushing for more oil production is inimical to a policy focused on reducing carbon emissions. It doesn’t matter where you stand on global warming or energy policy – just from the standpoint of coherence this is a bloody mess. As it usually is with McCain, we don’t know if he is playing politics with carbon and trying to reassure Republican big business that things will go on as they always have, or if he is genuinely unaware of the contradiction. Or some muddled version of both. This again points to a basic problem with McCain’s candidacy, which is that we really don’t know which diametrically opposed promises he will choose to honor if elected; he probably doesn’t know himself at this point.
A settled view, among the electorate as well as the commentariat has formed, one that will take an earthquake to shake. I can see its distortions and exaggerations and yet, no matter how much I would like to, I cannot depart from the substance of it. I find myself in sympathy with those who admired Brown through his 10 long years as chancellor and who keenly awaited his premiership, and yet now conclude that they got Brown wrong – that, on the current evidence, he is simply not up to the job.
…
Even the prime minister’s closest allies say what has happened these past 12 months is “tragic”. It would take a Shakespeare to do justice to a story that combines the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth and the indecision of Hamlet.
By all accounts, Brown is a terrible politician. He can’t give a speech, he can’t fake a smile, even his principled moves seem opportunistic. And obviously, there is a perfect storm effect as Brown’s terribleness compounds the effects of the inevitable post-Blair hangover. The question is how the responsibility should be divvied up: Was failure inevitable, or if Brown were a political prodigy, could he have maneuvered out of the post-Blair morass and been a success? The question moots itself; some counterfactuals are just not useful because they diverge too far from reality, and in this case the Brown-Blair association cannot be hypothetically sundered without rewriting much of the past decade’s history. In other words, if Brown were a more talented politician, he wouldn’t have played the dutiful yet seething understudy for so long. His political failure is the legacy of place, time, and temperament.
This is a word cloud generated from the text of my Hurricane Katrina book, Path of Destruction. Click on it to get the full image, courtesy of Wordle. (H/T: Hodgman)
We were asking readers and non-readers about the jobs they expected our newspaper to do for them. “Tell me the truth” emerged as the top job, but then several added that they wanted it objectively and not from a reporter’s personal angle. Fair enough.
Now this led to people saying they thought The Record was politically liberal, according to our market research manager. Some even thought our Opinion section was “sneaking over” to the news section, both of which I personally oversee. Yikes. We are against that sort of opinion creep, and my fellow editors and I work at keeping the two separate, just as we do to keep news and advertising separate.
Still, some of those folks offered views such as these: “It’s prejudiced, politically [liberal].” … “Editorial could be less biased – slant is always going to be for Democrats.” … “Biased in certain ways – The Record is more liberal – does not present both sides of a story.”
I am familiar with The Record by its (good) reputation only, but this is, of course, faintly ridiculous, and reveals something about the crisis in American newspapers today. The editor of a daily newspaper shouldn’t have to investigate himself. For six months. This Freudian-analytical approach to journalism won’t work.
This isn’t complicated. An editor should be aware of bias in news coverage and be correcting it both daily and in overall strategy, the choices in who covers what and how they do it. If the charge of bias is wrong, unfair, or misguided, the editor should be out there knocking it down. I have no idea if The Record is New Jersey’s answer to Granma, but what’s going on here is that market research (always a poor guide for journalists if taken too literally) is revealing not creeping liberalism in the news pages, but a more global disconnect between the newspaper and its readers. This about the breakdown of a consensus in society over the past generation, not with whether running a photo of an anti-Bush protest is “bias” or straight news.
Consider what we’ve seen just in the past eight years: A massive terror attack in The Record’s backyard. Aggressive attempts by government officials to manipulate the media and public opinion to back a disastrous war. The near-destruction of an American city, abetted by massive government failure. The continued political/demographic sorting of society into self-selected “red” and “blue” socioeconomic groups. And, in the media world, the proliferation of opinion on the Internet and cable news.
When readers say “tell me the truth,” they want the paper to make sense of all of this. Rush Limbaugh at least has an explanation. But newspapers and other traditional media outlets haven’t done a great job explaining/interpreting these events – after all, they’re slow-moving institutions unaccustomed to stuff blowing up so often, or to high officials propagandizing them on matters of life and death, or to being whipsawed by bloggers on the left and right. And of course, right now nobody can claim to know where all this is going.
The success of a newspaper once depended not just on a steady stream of advertising revenue, but on a certain, general idea shared between readers and editors about what was fair, what was out of bounds, what was biased, what not. After all, the newspaper was a principal source of information about the world. That agreement has been dead for some time. In terms of national news, that train went off the rails quite a while back. Locally, you’d think it wouldn’t be such a problem – local issues and politics are of course more pragmatic, less ideological. But any newspaper is judged on the whole package, and far more of those judgments will be harsh today than they were a generation ago.
The problem is, The Record’s market research notwithstanding, I doubt very much that there is genuine agreement among readers about what’s wrong with the paper. “Liberal bias” is sort of a catch-all phrase, code for presenting unpleasant stuff readers don’t like (which is inevitable). And it can also mean readers sense the whole form of the newspaper, with its traditional stylistic tics, its faux-objectivity, its stilted writing, just isn’t doing a good job of reflecting the reality of the world around them.
The problems we face today, such as global warming or tightening energy supplies, don’t fit well into the “liberal vs. conservative” culture-war frame. And a newspaper should have better things to do than spend six months investigating the political shadings in each paragraph of school board coverage.
The summer blockbuster scorecard so far, in order of release:
Iron Man. Terrific. Action scenes take a backseat to Robert Downey Jr. tinkering with his suit, wittily growing a conscience.
Speed Racer. Not as terrible as reviewed, but not much better. Too long. Fun for the kids; and for fans of the original cartoon, it’s fun to see the car in CGI and observe some actors talking a little too fast, evoking English anime dubbing.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Lumbering battle-and-intrigue-heavy take on a story that, while slender, engagingly balanced serious themes, adventure with fun. The script’s diversions from the original add unnecessary computer-generated fighting, glowering villains and unconvincing character conflicts for the heroes. A disappointment.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Great beginning – Indy survives a nuclear blast in a refrigerator! Good middle – Indy advises archaeology student during a motorcycle chase; Marian returns! But: Dramatically slack, fake-looking CGI climax cribbed from Close Encounters and the X-Files movie. WTF, Spielberg?
Kung Fu Panda. We’ve seen the plot before (Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), but the execution is brilliant. Even the grains of ancient wisdom are … true.
Why is John McCain running such a fumbling, cautious, and message-free campaign when the message is right at his fingertips?
If I were McCain, upon sealing up the nomination I would have aggressively focused my campaign around domestic issues, building on my brand as a government reformer. Even if you don’t care much about the details of, say, tax or fiscal policy, reform in the broadest sense clearly has a potent political appeal this year. From national security to environmental protection, the government has been badly misused by the Bush administration. Thanks to Iraq and Katrina, to many it appears all but broken. Moreover, even if you could erase the disasters of the past eight years, the government simply isn’t set up to handle many of the problems engulfing us now. So reforms are not just politically appealing, but necessary.
McCain has credibility in this area – he fought for campaign finance reform against his party and won. He recognizes the pernicious effect Washington’s “permanent class” of lobbyists and trade organizations have on legislation and the executive branch. He really cares about these things too, for instance repeatedly making a point of stressing his personal horror at the big government breakdown in New Orleans. So all of this fits together very naturally for him. Even his strong advocacy for the surge in Iraq, seen in this context, was a reformer’s move in the face of massive blundering. It was an tactical innovation that got things working right – and showed they could work (work militarily, that is, as opposed to working politically or strategically – but that’s another argument).
McCain himself long ago offered the core of the answer. In announcing his first run for the presidency, in September 1999, McCain declared that if elected he would work to “reform our public institutions to meet the demands of a new day.” So far he has not made the vocabulary of reform a key to his second run for the White House. But a comprehensive reform agenda, which framed America’s challenge in terms of revitalizing and reimagining its core public institutions, would be a natural fit for McCain, and for the challenges of the day. It would provide him with the overarching theme for the assorted elements of his approach to public policy.
I’m not thrilled with Levin’s proposals, which dress up old conservative privatization schemes as a fresh antidote to problems they will never solve, and likely make worse, primarily because so much of what happens in Washington is determined by corporate lobbyists. But the point is, if you’re John McCain it shouldn’t be hard to come up with a simple, compelling message that is a credible alternative to Obama’s.
Yet it’s not happening. Instead, McCain seems to be betting the farm on his politically inadvisable “stay in Iraq” policy, while in the domestic arena he has become an ever-more conventional Republican in a year when Republicanism is clearly on the outs. And he’s constantly haranguing the media and Democrats for accurately reporting his own, inconvenient statements. Today, for example, he’s pushing back against the idea he supports “privatization” of Social Security. Set aside the mind-numbing semantic debate. Why does McCain put himself in this position of supporting an idea that George W. Bush pushed so aggressively, and which was an utter political flop, and which was never a serious policy solution to begin with? Because he’s bought the standard suite of Republican policy positions, most of which have already been tested in the political-electoral marketplace and failed. This may be the easiest way to get a position paper up on your website, but it actually makes the case against McCain: he doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do if he wins.
