Politics as war

Conor Friedersdorf has a new post on The Atlantic's website about the role that extreme rhetoric all too often plays in politics.  His position is pretty well summed up by this passage: "... I hope you'll agree that the subset of people who treat politics as guerrilla warfare have a terrible win-loss record, and a warped, wrongheaded view of how winning in politics is done."  I always enjoy reading his work, and this post is well-written and thoughtful.  But he's dead wrong.

He writes that "Political winners persuade more people to join their coalition."  That is true, you can  win politically by persuading people to join your cause, your campaign, or your ideology.  But there are other ways of winning.  You can, say, make people afraid of ever leaving that same coalition.  Or you can make people afraid of the other coalition.  He is right that politicians like Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama don't win elections by with nasty, brutal campaigns, but I think he glosses over the role that nastiness and brutality can play in racking up fear-driven victories.

Seth Godin wrote an excellent post on the power that zealots have.  People live their lives between sets of extremes, like cannibalism at one end of the spectrum and a dust-based diet at the other.  As he says: "Most of us draw a line somewhere between the extremes. That means we're already compromising, we just argue about how much."  The zealots make it just a little more comfortable to move just a little closer to one extreme or the other.

"Political and ideological gains don't come from being best at smashing faces through plate glass windows or winning news cycles or employing the most extreme rhetoric," according to Friedersdorf's post.  I want to believe that, but I don't.

Image that you could arrange everyone in the country in a single, straight line.  It would be like a schoolyard role-call, but instead of lining up according to last name it would be based on how passionate someone was about a given issue.  At both ends there are the outliers.  These are the people for whom this issue, whether they're for it or against it, is the single most important issue in the entire world.  How many of these people are willing to smash windows and faces (metaphorically or even literally) over this issue?  How many ready are willing to spew as much "extreme rhetoric" as they can squeeze out at anyone who will listen?  It's probably not 100%, but it's not zero.

I admit that this is an very flawed analogy, but it can be a useful thought experiment.  Consider the immigration debate.  It has been too toxic for any politician to even touch for decades.  But what if you removed the most extreme 5% from that debate?  Or just the most extreme 1%?  How small is the number of people who perennially mannage keep immigration reform off the table?

I share Friedersdorf's disgust with the process, but I believe that it's dangerous to underestimate the power of the Andrew Breitbarts and the Betsy McCaugheys of the world.

Update to my Facebook adventures

A little while ago, I wrote about my attempts to take control of my social networking.  I'd been very happy with the results, until someone pointed out that I'd turned off way more than I'd intended.

On the one hand, it's embarrassing that I can't navigate my way through Facebook's privacy settings without accidentally turning at least one thing on or off without my knowledge.  (In this case off.)  On the other hand, it's a happy accident to find out that I can be quite content with even fewer social networking features than I had first thought.

I figured out a useful trick for Twitter

It took me all of five pages to fall in love with David's Allen's Getting Things Done, but it's taken me a year (and still counting) to master all of the techniques in the book.  The single hardest part of his entire system for me is the "capture" phase.  It's the tiny things that tend to fall through my cracks.  Right now, I have a pair of dress pants that need to be hemmed.  It's entirely possible that I won't have a single occasion to wear them over the next three months.  But twice a week I do vaguely recall a non-pressing need to call a tailor.

I don't have a hard time capturing (and–truthfully–I never had a hard simply remembering) big pictures items.  It's the little things, like altering pants I probably won't wear, that always seem to slip through.  My reading list is another example of this.  I have many, many books that I want to read.  Of course, when your reading list already has several hundred items, it's really easy to miss that one book.  You know, the one they were talking about on NPR.  Or that other one your friend was reading.

The Getting Things Done system is all about developing a system you can rely on to capture everything, including very small things that you might never even notice if you forgot.  The sense of relief that comes from knowing that you have everything–big and small–recorded somewhere is immense.  You can finally stop worrying that you forgot something.

This is what's working for me.  I created a Twitter account to be my capture device.  I can text myself all the little things that pop into my head throughout the day (and vanish as quickly as the came).  Any PDA would probably do the same thing, but I distinctly remember saving my money and buying one of the early PDAs (a Visor!) when I was a teenager.  I remember the cashier smirking as I uncrumpled bill after bill to pay for it.  I barely used it.

I don't have a smart phone.  (I don't particularly want one.)  I'd much rather get as much use as humanly possibly from what I have now before I get another gadget.  I didn't use my Visor then and now I use my iPod shuffle way more than I use my iPod that, well, actually has a screen.

Did you know that you can text updates to your Twitter account?  You probably did.  Did you know that you can also set it so it's really difficult for anyone but truly devoted stalkers to find you on Twitter?  If you combine those two features, you have a powerful capture tool.  I can text myself all of the little things that pop into my head.  If a well-dressed man walking down the street jogs my memory, I can tweet that I need to alter my dress pants. This afternoon, I was in a bookstore.  I realized that I don't have enough money to buy all the books I want, so I tweeted "library card" to remind myself that I need to find mine or get a new one.  The only time I ever remember that fact is when I want to spend money for books.

That might not work for you, but carrying a pen and paper doesn't work for me.  I found my system, and it's awesome to feel the last pieces of a puzzle slide into place.

Tiliting at windmills and cringing at commercials

I just saw a commercial on TV that made me cringe.  The ad wasn't gross.  I'm not squeamish.  I cringed because the commercial was incredibly stupid. The first several seconds show grainy footage of a line of women doing a dance on a street-corner while one of them holds a hair-removal product.  Or is it a rooftop?  I'm pretty sure that it's supposed to be the seventies, but I can't be positive, because I wasn't alive at that time.  Anyway, whole point is that the product is new and improved!  To show this, the ad switches to not-grainy footage of women doing a sexier dance in more revealing outfits.  I'm pretty sure that it's supposed to be the present.  But I haven't yet seen any scantily-clad women spontaneously burst into a choreographed dance routine while holding hair-dissolving chemicals, so maybe it''s supposed to be the future. 

I feel bad for dwelling on one ad that I don't like.  I've seen a few dozen that are at least as stupid so far today.  The ad's "retro" opening reminded me of some of the truly, deeply cringe-worthy advertisements of decades past that have now achieved immortality on the internet.  It boggles the mind to think that people like my grandparents may very well have been moved to purchase those products (some of which, like 7-Up, I still buy).  It's also astonishing to imagine that at some point in time, an actual living, breathing, sentient human being thought that ads like this just might work.

But then I had a thought.  What if Grandma and Grandpa were just as embarrassed by most of the advertising that they saw?  Are we all just sitting there, wincing, embarrassed for the poor idiot trying to sell us something?

Out of the millions of print, radio, TV, and now internet ads that have been created, the only ones with any staying power at all are the really, truly bad and the unbelievably awesome.  How many people give up on the ever making the latter and are fighting to be noticed for making the former?  If that thought gives you a headache, apply directly to the forehead.

Call me antisocial

I've never loved Facebook.  It has its uses, but it causes headaches–more than usual over the last couple weeks.  In fact, I've been thinking, "How little can I use Facebook?"  That sounds like a silly question to ask, but the key is that I still want to use Facebook.  I don't want to delete my account, and I don't want to simply not log in anymore.  I'm just tired of dealing with unwanted–sometimes creepy–comments from friends of friends.  I'm tired of getting tagged in every picture from every party I've ever attended.  I'm tired of Facebook causing drama.

I've taken a few steps to change how I use Facebook.  I may take some more eventually, but I'll see how it goes for a few weeks.

First, I've started using it less.  Much less.  I stopped commenting on other peoples' pictures and statuses, and I stopped posting articles to my friends' walls.  If I have an article to share, I'll email it.  And I only did the other things to waste time when I was bored.  It's so simple that I've taken it for granted, but simply being less visible invites fewer people to take notice.

Second, I tweaked my privacy settings.  One of the reasons that I don't want to delete my Facebook account is that it's a great tool for sharing pictures with friends.  I want people to look at pictures that I put up, like pictures from my vacations.  I just got tired of getting emails saying that so-and-so tagged me in a photo only to log in and see that it's another picture from that party.  You can change your privacy settings to take care of just that.  My friends can see my pictures, I can see theirs, and I don't have to worry about, well, anything.

There's one more step that I haven't taken yet.  I've been playing around with the idea of getting rid of my wall and posting a message saying that "I don't use Facebook very much, so if you want to get in touch with me, call me, email me, or chat with me on AIM.  Just don't expect me to respond to anything on Facebook."

I'll see how it goes for the next week or two before I decide whether or not to do that last option.  Either way, it's incredibly refreshing to remember that I can still have control over my place in social networking.

What comes next

Paul Krugman has an interesting post imagining what happens if the Republicans retake the House in November:  "... expect many, many fake scandals; we’ll be having hearings over accusations of corruption on the part of Michelle Obama’s hairdresser, janitors at the Treasury, and Larry Summers’s doctor’s dog."  (from Krugman's NYT blog)

I think he's correct.  Of course, that's not a difficult prediction to make.  The "not-Obama" crowd (which seems more appropriate than nebulous labels like Republican, Conservative, or Tea Party) has been trying their best to whip up scandal after scandal after scandal since they first accused Obama of secretly being a Muslim.  Or was it being a Marxist?  Or Kenyan?  Sometimes the media picks up on these, as they have with the Black Panther story.  Spend five minutes browsing World Net Daily, and it's easy to see that for every story that Roger Ailes pushes into the mainstream, there are ten more waiting.

It's sad, but I'll be curious to see what happens.  It's much, much easier to be the snarky person sitting in a corner of a party badmouthing the music and the beer selection.  When you get used to playing that role, the worst thing that can happen is suddenly finding yourself in the middle of the room, drink in hand, with a crowd of people standing around waiting for you to say something.  People might realize that you have nothing to say.

My mind was just blown

It finally happened:

"...and with that bite, the lolcats meme became obsolete."  Or maybe not.

(From that cute site)