The President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness's interim report: Taking Action, Building Confidence.
All the Single Ladies by Kate Bolick and a follow-up e-mail interview with the author.
Eric
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Occupy Wall Street
I went down and checked it out. It's your basic, as Eric Cartman would call it, hippie jam fest. The people involved and disparate, even contradictory, lefty demands represented look like the composite radical protests I witnessed during college. The only prescriptive position I found belonged to a couple who called themselves socialists but whose views were mostly libertarian, though granted, I didn't stay to listen to every soapbox speech.
Common views at the protest: Wealth redistribution is good (whether through big estate tax or uncovering the corporations' secret trillions), President Obama is reviled as an exposed Manchurian candidate corporate stooge, and the belief that big money (400 richest families and corporations!) and big government are closely allied in advancing plutocracy against the populist interest. Anti-corporate is a common label at the protest but different protestors define the label differently. On one end, some are calling for campaign finance reform and barring corporations from political campaign funding, very much in line with the opposing view in the Citizens United case. On the other end, there are ideological calls for an end to capitalism, destruction of the current political economic system, and radically redistributive class warfare (99% overthrow of the 1%). I don't agree with many of the various views at the protest, but I have some common ground with a few of the more reasonable protests. I agree with the critique of nominally American but actually global corporations that their primary loyalty, indeed their legally mandated fiduciary duty, is not to America and Americans, but to their own corporate profits. which may be maximized by investing and employing outside of the US. I also am concerned that legal personhood has been extended too far for corporations, which was a commercial legal concept that imbued a specific business model with a specific legal character and rights in order to serve a specific risk-mitigating business purpose, not to actually become a fully endowed legal person. Generally, I agree that a critical reassessment needs to take place of our relative global economic standing, and our system and assumptions. Perhaps most troubling is the dire job market for the college educated, many of whom committed their youthful prime and took the risk of non-dischargeable student loan debt based on the promise that higher education was the path to financial security. That promise has been broken and people who followed the rules are stuck. We need a sophisticated sober conversation among the American people and leaders about the economy; it remains to be seen whether actions like Occupy Wall Street will spark or hinder this needed conversation.
There's no substantial difference from similar yet marginalized protests that have taken place in the last 10-20 years, except the current protest fits neatly with the widespread angst over the current financial and jobs situations. The lack of coherent agenda helps the protest by allowing others to impute their concerns and anxiety on the story. The media helps the protest because the media is in the business of telling simplified memetic stories. When enough dramatic ingredients are present, the media's professional story-tellers will fill in the blanks with their own narrative.
The Occupy Wall Street protest on its own merits is less than advertised, but the public angst amplified by the media coverage of the protest is real. However, the lack of reasonable options by the protestors may indicate the most powerful threat of the movement: emotion-driven oppositional force with a 1000 faces that can only attack and cannot compromise because it has no reasonable negotiable positions with which to compromise; in that light, Occupy Wall Street is an anarchist movement.
10/21/11 add: Lexington Green has a detailed account of his visit to OccupyChicago. He doesn't believe the Occupy Wall Street protest will lead to the sober national conversation we need. He believes the movement will more likely follow the destructive 60s template of tantrumic lashing out by mobs. (He points to an emphasis on nonviolence, but I didn't see that in my visit to OWS. I saw plenty of violent rhetoric in the composite viewpoints. As well, the 60s protest history that Green believes is being repeated featured peaceful protests displaced by violent protests.) He saw some worthwhile points in the protest but no prescriptive movement. Can I find a prescription? Can the Ivy civil-military movement evolve into the sober, prescriptive, problem-solving movement our nation needs?
11/26/11 add: Matt Continetti, who as a student wrote about ROTC return for the Columbia Political Review, analyzes the Occupy Wall Street movement. He sums it up thus: "The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism."
5/1/12 add: Another analysis, Shoplifters of the World Unite, which says the lack of message is the defining feature.
Eric
Common views at the protest: Wealth redistribution is good (whether through big estate tax or uncovering the corporations' secret trillions), President Obama is reviled as an exposed Manchurian candidate corporate stooge, and the belief that big money (400 richest families and corporations!) and big government are closely allied in advancing plutocracy against the populist interest. Anti-corporate is a common label at the protest but different protestors define the label differently. On one end, some are calling for campaign finance reform and barring corporations from political campaign funding, very much in line with the opposing view in the Citizens United case. On the other end, there are ideological calls for an end to capitalism, destruction of the current political economic system, and radically redistributive class warfare (99% overthrow of the 1%). I don't agree with many of the various views at the protest, but I have some common ground with a few of the more reasonable protests. I agree with the critique of nominally American but actually global corporations that their primary loyalty, indeed their legally mandated fiduciary duty, is not to America and Americans, but to their own corporate profits. which may be maximized by investing and employing outside of the US. I also am concerned that legal personhood has been extended too far for corporations, which was a commercial legal concept that imbued a specific business model with a specific legal character and rights in order to serve a specific risk-mitigating business purpose, not to actually become a fully endowed legal person. Generally, I agree that a critical reassessment needs to take place of our relative global economic standing, and our system and assumptions. Perhaps most troubling is the dire job market for the college educated, many of whom committed their youthful prime and took the risk of non-dischargeable student loan debt based on the promise that higher education was the path to financial security. That promise has been broken and people who followed the rules are stuck. We need a sophisticated sober conversation among the American people and leaders about the economy; it remains to be seen whether actions like Occupy Wall Street will spark or hinder this needed conversation.
There's no substantial difference from similar yet marginalized protests that have taken place in the last 10-20 years, except the current protest fits neatly with the widespread angst over the current financial and jobs situations. The lack of coherent agenda helps the protest by allowing others to impute their concerns and anxiety on the story. The media helps the protest because the media is in the business of telling simplified memetic stories. When enough dramatic ingredients are present, the media's professional story-tellers will fill in the blanks with their own narrative.
The Occupy Wall Street protest on its own merits is less than advertised, but the public angst amplified by the media coverage of the protest is real. However, the lack of reasonable options by the protestors may indicate the most powerful threat of the movement: emotion-driven oppositional force with a 1000 faces that can only attack and cannot compromise because it has no reasonable negotiable positions with which to compromise; in that light, Occupy Wall Street is an anarchist movement.
10/21/11 add: Lexington Green has a detailed account of his visit to OccupyChicago. He doesn't believe the Occupy Wall Street protest will lead to the sober national conversation we need. He believes the movement will more likely follow the destructive 60s template of tantrumic lashing out by mobs. (He points to an emphasis on nonviolence, but I didn't see that in my visit to OWS. I saw plenty of violent rhetoric in the composite viewpoints. As well, the 60s protest history that Green believes is being repeated featured peaceful protests displaced by violent protests.) He saw some worthwhile points in the protest but no prescriptive movement. Can I find a prescription? Can the Ivy civil-military movement evolve into the sober, prescriptive, problem-solving movement our nation needs?
11/26/11 add: Matt Continetti, who as a student wrote about ROTC return for the Columbia Political Review, analyzes the Occupy Wall Street movement. He sums it up thus: "The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism."
5/1/12 add: Another analysis, Shoplifters of the World Unite, which says the lack of message is the defining feature.
Eric
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
Columbia University Science Fiction Society
CUSFS is cool. I would like to have been involved with the club more as a student, but I'm still on their mailing list.
Eric
Eric
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Snapshot of my 2003-04 views on the War on Terror
In the years following 9/11, I vigorously debated in varied settings about the War on Terror and American global leadership. My most extensive unvarnished contemporary arguments are preserved on-line in pseudonymous posts on BasketballBoards.net (now BasketballForum.com). In fact, the Perspective on and Contextualizing the argument over Operation Iraqi Freedom posts on this blog grew out of my BBB.net posts. A few days ago, due to a laptop breakdown, I powered up my old desktop computer for the first time in years and rediscovered a .txt file where I had saved a selection of my BBB.net posts from 7/30/03 to 6/5/04. I'm posting the compilation as I found it with no adds, cuts, or editing - a historical snapshot.
Given that I joined BBB.net to talk NBA basketball, why did I become involved in intensive 9/11-related debates there? My 8/31/03 post explained:
The compilation is mostly in chronological order, and where the dates skip shouldn't cause any confusion. However, due to the loss of formatting from pasting into a .txt file, it's not always clear where my responses divide from where I quote other posters. It's a ranging, rather exhaustively long read, so I split the file into 4 manageable chunks.
Enjoy: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Eric
Given that I joined BBB.net to talk NBA basketball, why did I become involved in intensive 9/11-related debates there? My 8/31/03 post explained:
The main reason I've written so much in this thread and it's predecessor thread (War in Iraq poll) is a comment one poster made that irked me. He said something to the effect that people who support the US mission in Iraq or the Bush admin's foreign policy in general were ignorant Americans who were easily duped, and even claimed that anybody with even a rudimentary college education would oppose the Bush admin's actions. You know, too many of our guys and gals - better people than any of us - are working overtime, hurting and dying in Iraq right now, doing the right thing, for me to let comments like that go, even on BBB.net. In terms of morale, it is very important to our soldiers as they endure many hardships in Iraq and Afghanistan that they know the American people back them and support their mission. My goal with my posts, along with fellow posters, is to show that there is an informed, intelligent basis for Americans to be patriotic and/or to support post-9/11 US-led missions, without abandoning critical faculties.My engagement in BBB.net was also a self-conscious experiment in nuanced contextual discourse. In 2003-04, people were still paying attention to the hotly debated global controversy with room to listen because the partisan poles, though quickly taking form, weren't yet immutably hardened. BBB.net's Everything But Basketball forum was an ideal setting for democratic dialogue because the BBB.net community was diverse and not politically self-selected as it would have been on a political website. Internet discussion boards in general allow participants to focus on the words without the distractions inherent in other media, digest the content at their own pace, and deliberately respond on a level playing field. But in the end, despite all the conducive features of the setting, my attempt at nuanced contextual discourse was frustrating and ultimately disillusioning. (You can see the frustration in my changing tone in the posts.) I failed to beat the pull of the partisan echo chamber.
The compilation is mostly in chronological order, and where the dates skip shouldn't cause any confusion. However, due to the loss of formatting from pasting into a .txt file, it's not always clear where my responses divide from where I quote other posters. It's a ranging, rather exhaustively long read, so I split the file into 4 manageable chunks.
Enjoy: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Eric
Anwar al-Awlaki killed
Good news if confirmed . . . and a deserved congratulations to President Obama and the Team America he commands. Part of winning hearts and minds is living up to the dichotomous principle "No better friend - no worse enemy".
Read John Yoo's rebuttal of the claim that the killing of al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was illegal. Make sure to read the comments. Professor Yoo states a 2-prong test for whether a killing is a legal war act: "What is important is not whether someone is an alien or a citizen, but whether they are a member of an enemy conducting hostilities against the United States". In other words, did al-Awlaki qualify as a "member of an enemy" (against the US)? And did his conduct qualify as "hostilities" (against the US)? Keep in mind that historical precedents are necessarily imperfect when applied to a "new type of war".
To President Obama's critics who are reluctant to give credit where credit is due, Walt Harrington reminds that "[President Bush's] only remark about Barack Obama was, as I recall it, “No matter who wins, when he hears what I hear every morning, it will change him.”"
Eric
Read John Yoo's rebuttal of the claim that the killing of al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was illegal. Make sure to read the comments. Professor Yoo states a 2-prong test for whether a killing is a legal war act: "What is important is not whether someone is an alien or a citizen, but whether they are a member of an enemy conducting hostilities against the United States". In other words, did al-Awlaki qualify as a "member of an enemy" (against the US)? And did his conduct qualify as "hostilities" (against the US)? Keep in mind that historical precedents are necessarily imperfect when applied to a "new type of war".
To President Obama's critics who are reluctant to give credit where credit is due, Walt Harrington reminds that "[President Bush's] only remark about Barack Obama was, as I recall it, “No matter who wins, when he hears what I hear every morning, it will change him.”"
Eric
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