Where are all these fucking swing voters?

I'm trying to figure out who the fuck these mythical swing voters who can decide a presidential election are, because I have a message for them.  

When I say "swing voter," I'm not talking about someone who makes a principled shift from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other over the course of their life.  I'm also not talking about people like "Obama Republicans," intelligent people who had traditionally voted Republican but who felt that their party had gone off the deep end and felt no choice but to vote for Obama in 2008.  

And if anyone out there really has as eclectic a set of beliefs as this guy, then fine, I sympathize. 

But you know who I'm talking about.  People who think the president sets the price of gasoline.  Whose vote is for sale for a $600 tax cut.  (I can sympathize with that being a significant amount of money for a lot of people, but if they can't learn to understand their own fortunes in the larger context of policies and trends which have effects overs long periods of time, then they'll continue to get the butt-ass leaders they deserve.)  

I wouldn't be shocked if there are get-rich-quick entrepreneurial types who build and then squander fortunes so quickly - while lacking any broader understanding of economics - that one election they're all for the capital gains tax-demolishing Republicans who want to let them keep their money, and by the next they're voting for Democrats while crying about being part of "the 99 percent."  

Why do I hate them?  Because, due to their disproportionate influence, the media panders to them, the candidates pander to them, and before you know it, we're all hostage to yet another election cycle in which their simplistic fantasies about how the world works drag the level of public discourse even lower than it normally is.  

I'm going to do some reading on the phenomenon of swing voters and come back with more thoughts if it seems worthwhile.  But in the meantime, if you encounter any of the specific brand of swing voter I'm talking about, please convey my message to them:

Eat a dick up.  

Delete your Google search history before March 1

I strongly suggest that everyone take this simple step to reduce the impact that Google's new privacy policy has on you. 

If you'd like to start looking more deeply at the relationship between web search and protecting your privacy, this is a great resource. 

Obama gets in the nation's ass

Some much needed satire from The Onion.



In The Know Panel Analyzes Obama's Furious, Profanity-Filled Rant At Nation

More on Google's new privacy policy

Although I remain unconvinced that Google's upcoming privacy policy change is the singular death knell for privacy in the age of the internet, I have been persuaded that it is worthwhile to speak out against Google's disingenuous spin in it's presentation of the new policy to the public.  Companies with such intrusive personal data gathering capabilities need to be forced to be more forthright with the public about what they do. 

Click here to join the effort. 

Is online privacy dead?

I don't know.  But if it is, it had already died well before Google announced its new privacy policy, set to take effect March 1.  And if it's not, I don't think we're all going to look back on March 1, 2012 as the day when we lost our footing and rolled all the way to the bottom of the slippery slope.  

I'm not saying that Google isn't fucked up.  Their hollow "Don't be evil" motto has long made me roll my eyes (Were we really to believe that they'd be any more or less evil than any other big, rich company?), and their cutesy PR campaign coinciding with the announcement of the new privacy policy made me nauseous on the subway to work the other day. 

I'm not crazy about the personal data gathering that Google (and lots of other companies) does, but I've found a couple articles making good arguments that my life is not going to get that much worse when Google flips the switch on March 1 and, importantly, that all the hubbub surrounding the issue is bullshit. 

I have a pet theory that when a scientifically or technically complex issue (and perhaps others) starts to get major public attention and politicians start to grandstand about it, there will soon be (if there isn't already) such a shitstorm of soundbites, sensationalism and open warfare between competing agendas that reaching a facts-in-their-proper-context-based consensus on the most efficient and effective way to address the issue - or even a reasonably efficient and effective way - will be damn near an impossibility.   And this is irrespective of whether or not the issue is actually that big a deal in reality.  


So there you have my standard "I don't know the answer, but I do know that I wish eternal damnation upon those who are self-servingly turning this into a total clusterfuck" mantra.


Online privacy is an issue that does concern me and that I've done a lot to learn about over the last year or so, so I will return to it again later.  In the meantime, if you want to start to learn about how to exert some control over the information collected about you online, I suggest you begin with this article on search engine privacy, and for more information - both policy and practical - on a broad array of related issues, check out the Privacy, Internet Freedom and Cyber Security section of my online resources page. 

Inflammatory arguments are not automatically bad

About a year ago, after Gabriel Giffords was shot, people started talking about the need to restore civility to the national debate.  I'm not going to comment on whether or not inflammatory rhetoric influenced the shooter - that's a question better left to mental health professionals than to the news commentators and political attack dogs who all chimed in with their self-serving analyses - but I am going to make a point.  Before civility becomes a sacred cow in our canon of political correctness, let's remember one thing:

Inflammatory rhetoric is not all necessarily bad. 

Look at a sincere polemicist like the late Christopher Hitchens.  He had a penchant for saying inflammatory things that could make even people who agreed with him shift in their seats.  But no less dazzling than his verbal pyrotechnics was his command of logic and facts whenever he debated.  He used polemics to raise passions and to draw attention to issues, but not to divert people from debating the core of the real issue at hand.  He took nasty comments directed at him in stride, sometimes even with sportsman like admiration, knowing that he invited much of the ire he received, and he never feigned indignation about it.  


In other words, he inflamed passions in order to make people think.  


Demagogues, on the other hand, use inflammatory rhetoric in order to make people stop thinking.  They stoke people's emotions in order to heighten our appetite for simple, catch-all solutions, and then they exploit our fears and anxieties to force us to uncritically accept their dogma, conspiracy theory, or whatever bullshit they happen to be peddling.   And then they'll use faux calls for decorum and civility to avoid answering important questions.  


I'm not going to say more about demagogues here, because I'll be saying enough about them other places in this blog.  I'll just say that if you don't want to invite a polemicist to your dinner party, fine, but don't write someone's opinion off simply because of their inflammatory rhetoric, and don't automatically give someone credibility just because they're polite.  Cut through it and look for the substance and the facts.  


I'll close with a video of Penn Jillette telling us about the wonderful ways a thinker like Christopher Hitchens can stimulate our minds.  

What's so bad about public discourse today (Part 3)

If you haven't already, make sure to check out my first and second posts on this topic.  

I'll pick up where I left off....

Giving Undeserved Credence to Information Sources

The average person doesn't judge, say, a newspaper article or a statement by a politician based on the credibility of the sources cited; they judge it according to their own worldview.  

Fits my worldview = firmly grounded in reality.  
Conflicts with my worldview = baseless. 

It's no wonder that the Republican presidential contenders have made all kinds of factual errors in the latest television debates.  They learned in their November 9 debate last year that voters don't care (do they even notice?) when the candidates simply leave facts out of the equation.  Does making factual errors demonstrate greater disregard for truth than not citing any facts at all?  Who cares.  People don't mind either as long as you don't challenge their beliefs. 


Obsessive Mistrust of Authority


Mistrust of authority has a long tradition in the US, and properly incorporated, it's an important part of critical thinking.  The problem is that Americans give too much immediate credibility to anyone who claims to stand in opposition to the establishment, and then they accept their claims uncritically.  We see this in all the populist ranting against "Washington elites" leading up to each election, and it's not hard to recognize it in the misleadingly named "9/11 Truth Movement" and all of the other garbage peddled by conspiracy theorists. 


The Obliteration of Meaning in the Use of Language


We live in a world where there are no longer any problems, only "challenges."  Ordnance is delivered to targets in preemptive actions against enemy combatants in response to a clear and present danger.  Industry offers us game-changing value-added services in their innovative customer relationship management regimes, leading to a paradigm shift which causes me to shit my pants.  


I expect to return to this topic repeatedly throughout the life of this blog.  It makes for good laughs, but it's a serious and insidious problem. 


The Marketing of Everything


I don't have a good statistic on hand right now, but I'm sure that most of the words the average person is exposed to during a normal day - printed, broadcast, perhaps even spoken - are aimed not at conveying information and letting the individual make their own judgments, but rather at influencing the individual's thoughts and behavior towards specific outcomes.  This has poisoned our society on many levels, not least our ability - maybe even inclination - to obtain and judge factual information. 


Triumphalism and False Attributions to the "Natural Order of Things"


Attributing one's advantaged position, and the disadvantaged position of someone else, to the "natural order of things" is a great way to turn off one's brain and avoid grappling with difficult questions about how fucked up and unpredictable the world is.  We can tell ourselves that we've found "the answer," or at least a part of it, and delude ourselves that we can settle into a static worldview and never have our beliefs challenged again.  And then, when our position changes, we have the choice - barring an immediate mental collapse - of either remolding our beliefs to reflect the new reality we encounter, or insulating ourselves in a world of delusions which blames outside forces and allows us to maintain our false beliefs.  The former involves a lot more up-front pain, but it can also improve our situation.  The latter, which I believe is more common, allows us to breathe some new life into our illusions until reality inevitably crashes down on us in a far more destructive way.  




In closing, I'd ask that you take a moment to skim through the topic headings in this three part post.  Consider some of the ways these different phenomena can interact to amplify and exacerbate each other, resulting in a cataclysmic deluge of bullshit which sometimes reaches proportions that can overwhelm even the sharpest of minds.