Hypocrisy vs Symptom
I listened to the Know Your Enemy podcast episode "Freud and Politics (w/ Pat Blanchfield)" a year or so ago, and there's a game they play that's stuck with me ever since:
#politics
45 posts
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Code as Contestable Law
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →People tend to think of laws as set in stone, but they're very changeable. They're changeable in at least two ways: the laws themselves can be altered, through formal legal mechanisms like passing a bill through Congress, or laws can change through how they're enforced on the ground.
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In Defense of Conflict and Inefficiency
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →Few people are happy with the US government these days. Recent Gallup polls show that 71% of people are somewhat or very dissatisfied by "our system of government and how well it works". Common complaints are that government's too polarized and full of conflict, or that it's bureaucratic and inefficient and can't get things done.
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Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Tech Governance...
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →... so I put some tech governance controversy on the platform you were using for your tech governance newsletter.
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The Federal Trade Commission vs Facebook
Read more → More from Hello, Governor →Below, I summarize the FTC complaint against Facebook, citing the relevant paragraphs so you can get more detail as needed. This was a useful exercise in helping me understand the case; I hope it also helps you.
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Legacies of Disruption
Read more → More from Duly Noted →“Many scientists prefer not to think about politics, but the work that scientists do has always had political consequences, from the quiet tragedy of an understudied disease to the undeniable horror of a city destroyed in an instant.
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50 ways to win the midterms
Read more → More from Duly Noted →The problem is all inside your head she said to me The answer is easy if you take it logically I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free There must be fifty ways to win the midterms
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Quick decisions
Read more → More from Out of Many →Last week I went to a rally to protest a series of raids by ICE in my city. The rally turned into an unplanned march through the streets, and I had to make two quick decisions: first, whether to join the march, and second, whether to remain in the street when the police started to give warnings.
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Hannah Arendt on the role of reflection in political and moral behavior
Read more → More from Out of Many →Socrates, however, who is commonly said to have believed in the teachability of virtue, seems indeed to have held that talking and thinking about piety, justice, courage, and the rest were liable to make men more pious, more just, more courageous, even though they were not given either definitions or “values” to direct further conduct. What Socrates actually believed in in such matters can best be illustrated by the similes he applied to himself. He called himself a gadfly and a midwife, and, according to Plato, was called by somebody else an “electric ray”, a fish that paralyzes and numbs by contact, a likeness whose appropriateness he recognized under the condition that it be understood that “the electric ray paralyzes others only through being paralyzed itself. It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.”
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PyCon
Read more → More from Duly Noted →PyCon is one of my favorite events - the only big conference I’ve been to that feels like a small one. This year it was in Cleveland, Ohio, not too far from where I live, so three other pythonistas and I piled into a car together and turned it into a road trip. We had a blast and it made PyCon seem even more like a summer vacation.
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“Refusing the parlements their right of remonstrance was an act of despotism.
Read more → More from Duly Noted →“Refusing the parlements their right of remonstrance was an act of despotism. Liberty had taken shelter in them; it had chosen an irregular method of expressing itself; but since no one had given it another method, it was necessary to allow it that one.”
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Okoye’s Judgment Call
Read more → More from Out of Many →Warning: Black Panther spoilers.
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Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Social safety nets and ahistoricity
Read more → More from Duly Noted →From the studiously moderate Brookings Institution:
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every so often I remember that the clinton analytics team’s motto was “a…
More from Duly Noted →every so often I remember that the clinton analytics team’s motto was “a decision tree grows in brooklyn” and i smile
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Shades of gray
Read more → More from Out of Many →What shade of gray would you say this is?
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Compromise and its discontents
Read more → More from Out of Many →It's easy to complain about "purity politics". It's easy to complain about "neoliberals" and "sellouts". But we live in hard times, and the easy route's not going to get us anywhere.
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If it takes starting a war for us to meet, it will have been worth it
Read more → More from Duly Noted →So I read Kushner’s statement today, which includes the line “I am not a person who has sought the spotlight” and, well, I couldn’t help myself.
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When Thing Z is problematic
Read more → More from Duly Noted →I have seen this argument happen over and over again, especially in progressive spaces.
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Valentine's Day: on "Law, Like Love"
Read more → More from Duly Noted →For Valentine’s Day, I want to talk about the poem I posted the other day, “Law, Like Love” by WH Auden, and why it means so much to me.
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Law, Like Love
Read more → More from Duly Noted →Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
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What's left?
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Not giving up
Read more → More from Duly Noted →I visited House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz’s office today. If there’s nothing else good to say about him (and there may not be) at the very least his staff is warm and polite, even when you are implying things about their boss.
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Rules and Values and their Discontents
Read more → More from Duly Noted →I read a comment recently about the rules for bidding on government contracts. This isn’t the comment, but it gets at the same issue, which stuck with me:
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Partisanship on display
Read more → More from Duly Noted →Note: tumblr ate the initial, more comprehensive version of this post. :( Feel free to ping me for more details.
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A privilege I wish I didn't need
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My aunt died this week. She was a private woman who tried to keep her internet presence to a minimum, so I won't memorialize her here, except to say that she was an incredibly gracious, giving person and a loving aunt.
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Two Anniversaries
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Today, September 11th, is the anniversary of a number of events, but two in particular are being talked about today: the twelve year anniversary of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, of course, and the forty year anniversary of the overthrow and forced suicide of democratically elected president of Chile Salvador Allende.
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Word games
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've been hearing good things about the Capitol Words API for months now, so I decided to try doing something with it. I wrote a script which queries the API for instances of a given word and returns two text files: the first is a compendium of sentences from every time a Republican has said that word (in a given date range), and the second the same but for Democrats. I fed the results into a word cloud generator I found on github, which I modified slightly to suit my purposes.
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Does one-party control stifle transparency?
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Massachusetts is not a great place for transparency. We have some of the worst public access to information of any state in the country, and legislators have barely any oversight or accountability. I've heard people talk about trying to get access to information from closed meetings where no attendance is taken and no minutes are kept.
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Campaign Songs
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →On the six hour drive to New York City last week, my family somehow got on the topic of political campaign songs. Campaign songs today are pretty boring, because politicians just use popular music. Although it's kind of fun to watch Republicans try to find music made by artists who won't sue them to get them to stop using it.
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Worked to Death
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →This post lists common ways that people used to die from their jobs. They're mostly due to inhaling toxic chemicals. One of them, Soot Wart, is a type of cancer that was commonly found among chimney sweeps. The discovery of this link between job and disease, in the late 18th century, was pretty vital in our early understanding of cancer.
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Obligatory Political Post
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I tend to have complex feelings about elections.
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On Killing
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →(A discussion at last Tuesday's Iron-Blogger meetup reminded me of this review I wrote a few years ago.)
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Upward and Onward
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →It's Women's History Month, which I'm going to use as an excuse to ramble about a very cool historical lady I learned about only recently: Victoria Woodhull.
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Journal Disavows Study Touted By Abortion Foes
Read more → More from Meta-science →From the link:
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Show Me the Stats: Correlation Coefficients
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →So. Correlations. They're fairly simple creatures: they measure the relationship between variables, without making any assumptions or assertions about cause and effect, dependence, or direction. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1, with -1 meaning a perfect negative correlation, 1 being a perfect positive correlation, and 0 meaning no correlation at all.
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Show Me the Stats: Averages and Deviations
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My previous post about p-values has reminded me that I've been meaning to brush up on my statistics. I'm hoping to do this by writing a series of tutorials for this blog, and to keep things interesting for my less statistically-inclined readers, the datasets I'll be using will be campaign finance and lobbying information from Open Secrets and Sunlight Labs. So come, join me as I learn about quantitative analysis and also the pervasive corruption of our government\... The data in this post are from .OpenSecrets.org and represent the total contributions from commercial banks to individual house members in the current (2011-2012) election cycle.
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What We Owe
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →"But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" *Debate moderator to candidate Ron Paul. The audience with cheers and shouts of "Yeah!"*
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Who dreams of joy and radiance?
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →This interview with anarchist/anthropologist David Graeber, who has a book about the history of debt coming out, is pretty interesting. In it, he talks about the old practice of jubilee: the forgiveness of debt and the freeing of slaves and prisoners.
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Same Song, Different Meaning
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I was at a parade a few days ago when the brass band marching by played what I'm sure they thought was the Battle Hymn of the Republic. What fewer people know is that the song was popularized during the Civil War with completely different lyrics:
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Up Against the Wall, Boardgamers!
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →A few days ago I was browsing around Play This Thing, looking to find a present for a friend, when I stumbled across something else entirely: a review for Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!, a board game made in 1969 in honor of the Columbia riots. According to Play This Thing's review, the game is a fun, maybe even thought-provoking, but has roughly zero replay value.
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Lincoln's Inner War
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Several years ago I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly that has stayed with me: Lincoln's Great Depression.
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Beyond Belief
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →A few nights ago, Sprout had their monthly spaghetti dinner. Every month is a different theme, and I had been looking forward to this month's - mythology - with what might be considered excessive enthusiasm. The evening was heavy on puppetry, with an accordion-accompanied retelling of an old Yiddish folk tale, as well as a surrealist examination of a precious American myth: the failure of Reconstruction. (I am now tempted to go off on a rant about the election of 1876 - one of my favorites rants! - but I will save that for later.) There was also a performance by Molly Allis whose new album is a transformation myth. It's such a fertile topic, with so many people having so much to contribute, that they may even do a reprise (a retelling?) in the spring.
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Obama and the Fundamental Attribution Error
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The transition from Bush to Obama has been a strange one for me. There is a certain ease to opposing someone whose ideology is so different from yours. There is no need to be subtle, to try and tease apart where things are going wrong - you know why they are doing this thing that you hate: because they don't value what you value.
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Rotten Apples & Bad Barrels
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →When it comes to social psychology, everyone seems to know two names: Milgram and Zimbardo. It's funny, because they both studied essentially the same thing - under what circumstances otherwise normal, compassionate people will act to hurt others.