Archive for January, 2005

2005.01.14

Think of Moral Politics

 
- Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives

- Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

both books by George Lakoff

I spent the best part of my vacation back east over the Christmas holidays reading George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate – The Essential Guide for Progressives and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. The first is a small book that, though published afterwards, is an excellent introduction to the longer Moral Politics book. It is also geared specifically towards those with a liberal bent. In Moral Politics George Lakoff does an excellent job of not injecting his personal biases until the last chapters of the book.

The thrust of Don’t Think of an Elephant! is that conservatives have, for the past 30+ years, been funding think tanks and special interests to frame debates and issues. This allows them to control the terminology, the debate, and the coverage of these issues. Liberals are losing more and more because they do not have the political infrastructure in place to counter the conservatives effectively and are, in fact, using the conservatives own framing which then validates conservatives and their frames. The book then goes into more detail of the differences between the conservative and liberal world views based on their moral perspectives and frames.

And what is a frame? The definition of a frame comes from cognitive science (Mr. Lakoff is a professor of cognitive science at Berkeley) and describes how we perceive the world around us. Frames are, simply put, our point of view or our frame of reference. All people have them.

The title of the book is an example of how other people can force their frames to have an effect on you, regardless of your own. If I say, “Don’t think of an elephant,” the first thing you will probably do is think of an elephant. Your frame for an elephant can be many things like a large animal that likes peanuts, a frightening beast, a victim of ivory hunters, etc. Many of us share the same frames when we think of an elephant, which allows for a common frame of reference. What the conservatives are doing, says Mr. Lakoff, is telling us what frames to think of, and further, they are giving these frames a clear bias in their favor.

One of his favorite examples is the usage by conservatives of tax relief. What are taxes? They are moneys we pay to our governments for things such as getting roads built, certain benefits like Social Security and unemployment wages for hard times, protection through the military from threats abroad and the police/fire departments for threats within, and the judicial system. These are all good things and I don’t think anyone would do away with them entirely, and taxes are needed or else we won’t have these services. However taxes do take away from our private incomes. This is where the modifier relief comes in to play. A relief implies a burden, something we should not put up with or tolerate. Someone who can relieve us of our burdens is often considered a hero. If conservatives are for tax relief they must be heroes.

Both books go into detail of what is a liberal and a conservative and how they are different. The conclusion is a person is a liberal or a conservative based on the frame for their family life, what that family life should be, how we should raise our kids, how the family should deal with others, etc. This is then mapped on to the metaphor of “the nation as a family”. This metaphor isn’t strictly true (the government as the parent doesn’t raise us as the children) but is true in our minds none the less.

Liberals have the family frame of the Nurturant Parent model which emphasizes communication and encouragement. Conservatives have the Strict Father model which emphasizes discipline and authority. This oversimplification does neither model justice, however, because it is not true that nurturant parents lack authority or discipline or that the strict father model is against communication and nurturance. The difference is where the focus of family values lies, and that difference of focus leads to two very different systems.

One of the many conclusions I came to after reading this book is that the idea that our political system is a spectrum with an extreme left and an extreme right where most of us fall somewhere on the line between the two is patently false. We have two different frames for thinking of politics and never the twain shall meet. There are extremes in each system, yes, but they are unique to those individual systems. There are some pragmatists within each system who realize they have to work with the other system to get things done sometimes; we ignorantly call these folks centrists, but in the end they are really liberals or conservatives, not centrists.

Another conclusion, which won’t surprise any of you who know me, is that I find I am firmly a liberal. I would consider myself generally pragmatic and even have some conservative values but I am undeniably in the liberal camp, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

If you, too, are a liberal, I strongly recommend picking up Don’t Think of an Elephant! as an introduction. Then, whether you are a liberal or a conservative (conservatives may want to skip the last few chapters), pick up Moral Politics so you can better understand yourself and your unique political frame.

(Clicking on the images above takes you to Amazon where you can buy the books!).

2005.01.13

Textwrangler and Ciphire

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but there are two great applications that have been released for free for Mac OS X.

The first is an email cryptography program called Ciphire that integrates into many email applications. It works by “intercepting” your email before it goes out, encrypting it with a public two key system with various certificates, checks and balances. It’s available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. The application is currently in beta (though it seems pretty solid) and the will eventually come out with server solutions. Go get it.

The second comes from Bare Bones Software. TextWrangler has many of the qualities that the revered BBEdit has, but a bit stripped back. BBEdit is probably the ultimate text editor (which is not a word processor; that’s something completely different). TextWrangler is now the pentultimate text editor, and it is free, as in beer (what a freaking cliche). Read about it and download the application here. Since I only use BBEdit for HTML, CSS, editing server config files, and minor Perl (all natively supported), TextWrangler is the ideal “upgrade” for me, and probably for most of you out there, too.

2005.01.12

Patriotic Amazing Grace

Patriotic Amazing Grace

I’m not sure where or when I got this idea in my head. Not too long ago. Anyways, I was singing Amazing Grace in my head (yeah, I know, whatever) and thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to swap out ‘Amazing Grace’ with ‘America’?”

America, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

Sadly I never learned any more of the song. A quick search on Google found several versions. I decided I would try to make a patriotic version of the song using the same outline and format.

Read the rest of this entry…

2005.01.12

Dealing with Bloody Comment Spam

I finally got sick of going in almost daily and deleting the few bits of comment spam that were getting past my blacklist file (which is getting quite extensive; contact me if you want a copy). I’d seen captcha style solutions and knew there were two available for Blosxom. Captcha, by the way, stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.” You will often see this as an image with some letters in it which you then enter in a field to verify you are a person and not an automation device. This works because humans can see the letters despite the “noise” in the image, but automated systems cannot (yet). You can see an example on Bill Ward’s page announcing his captcha plugin.

I did try to use Bill’s plugin, but it requires the installation of many libraries (GD and all of its dependencies) and Perl modules that just weren’t working on my server and which, after two days of working on it, I decided to write off. Instead I installed and am using Pasi Savolainen’s wbcaptcha plugin. It creates ASCII art letters using Figlet which you then use the same way as an image. Getting Figlet compiled and installed was fairly simple, configuring the plugin required very minor tweaking, and the only hard part (not that hard since there’s an example in the plugin documentation) was modifying my writebacksform.general file.

The only drawback is that you, dear Reader, have to click a few extra times to leave a comment now. I am trying to figure out how I can reduce the number of times this happens. I’ve installed wbcaptcha here on spookee and on OOKEE.com. Other sites will follow. If the tests prove successful I might even allow posting of comments on old articles again since many visitors find them from Google.

Give the new comment system a go and let me know what you think!

2005.01.10

V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta Movie PosterI was cruising the web and discovered this bit of news that made me quite happy… The Wachowski Brothers are making Alan Moore’s great classic graphic novel of one person’s solo war against a fascist society that springs up in England after a huge catastrophe. It has an intelligence and depth that I often find lacking in many modern comics. I’ve loved the story since I was introduced to it by, I believe, Zapski.

One bit of good news (for a few of us at least) is that Natalie Portman has been cast in one of the lead roles. James McTeique has been tapped to direct. He hasn’t directed anything yet, but he’s worked on some notable movies including the Wachowski’s own Matrix series, the recent Star Wars series, and Dark City (a really phenomenal movie that not enough people have seen).

My usual Hollywood disclaimer that I hope they don’t screw it up applies. It also reminds me that I haven’t read the graphic novel in a very long time; maybe I’ll dig it out along with The Watchmen (also rumored to be in production) to refresh my memory of the details.

2005.01.08

Time For Some Smack

Addiction for RamenThere’s not a whole lot to say about the picture itself… someone obviously didn’t know how to translate the name well! So instead we get “Smack Ramen” which reminds me of my sister’s long standing love of the stuff. For years we thought she was never going to eat any other kind of food. She still chows it down like there’s no tomorrow.

The picture was taken just before XMas when Ann and I went to have dinner with Tys and Melissa. It happens that they are the happy owners of this Smack. I’m not sure where they picked it up, but I have the feeling it wasn’t the local Safeway or Andronico’s!

The funny thing is that every time I see this package I want to have some ramen… my mouth is salivating just thinking about it. Hopefully I’ll get some this weekend, or maybe I’ll head up to Japan Town and go to my favorite ramen place.

Mmmmm… ramen.

2005.01.07

Rehnquist Speaks Out

Here’s a bit of news that seems to have been skipped in general: Chief Justice William Rehnquist speaks out against politicizing the judiciary, specifically mentioning the Conservative’s use of the term activist judge.

I’ve mentioned before in a few places why I am against this terminology. Judges do not seek to legislate, but the are authorized to stop or modify legislation that is unconstitutional. The have to interpret the law, which is not always a simple matter, and a judge’s individual conservatism or liberalism does influence that interpretation. However, to say a judge is “activist” (the definition of which I have a hard time attributing to any judge, even one’s I don’t agree with) is like saying a human can breathe water unaided; I’m sure there are a few people who believe that they can breathe water without a scuba tank or a snorkel or genetic modification to give them gills, but they would be wrong.

I am rather proud of Rehnquist for having the courage to speak out against the political abuse of the judiciary. It is unfair to the judges and it is unfair to the Constitution which is the basis of our American Republic.

2005.01.06

January Blogging Challenge

Uncle Roger presents this month’s blogging challenge: come up with an evaluation of last year’s goals and a new set of goals for this year.

This is going to be a sucky one for me because generally I am not keen on making goals of this sort, but he has some astute advice:

This should not be a facile collection of cliches like “I will lose weight” or “I’m going to save some money” but carefully thought out, significant goals for your life. Don’t just list indefinite, non-specific platitudes, but specific, achievable goals. Include a plan for accomplishing each goal with concrete milestones and dates.

He goes on to give many examples.

There are two parts to the challenge. First is to list last year’s goals and rate their success. Jason Clark did this admirably on his site, and I’ll use his template. The second part of the challenge is to set realistic goals for this coming year, with specific dates for those goals. With that in mind, here we go…

Read the rest of this entry…

2005.01.05

Open Source Voting Machines

Now that the controversy and hoopla from the 2004 elections has simmered down (a little at least), I think it’s time I addressed something I thought was interesting regarding electronic voting. Nothing in the next two paragraphs will be new information; just a summation. The rest of the article I hope will be of more interest.

In America our electronic voting machines are primarily designed and built by three private, for-profit companies: Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia, and Diebold. A lot of controversy surround their systems. For example, their systems were and are not open to public scrutiny. This means that you have to take their word that their systems were safe, secure, and that votes were guaranteed and verifiable.

Further issues about, however, regarding the ties these companies have with political figures and groups. For example Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, is a well known Republican fund-raiser. A memo he sent out promised Ohio’s votes to Bush. Other companies are funded by very large government and defense contractors. There are known and exploitable flaws in some of the software packages. Verifiability is questionable at best. (For a scathing criticism along these lines see this article which outlines many of the publicly known aspects of corruption, criminality and incriminating links.)

Voting is a fundamental right in America and is everyone’s concern. The systems these private, for-profit companies have turned out have serious flaws.. It is clear to me, at least, and hopefully others that electronic voting in America needs a few improvements.

Trust. We have to be able to trust that their vote counts. Voting is a fundamental right in America and our democratic method of governing depends on the voting process functioning in a way that everyone believes trustworthy. Without this trust relationship with the voting process you will have more citizen complaints about unfair elections and fraud, more court decisions that make no one happy except the winner, and a deterioration of the American democratic method.

Simplicity. The machines and their interface have to be simple to use, in multiple languages, and handicap accessible (braille and audio interfaces of some sort). Anyone who is a citizen should be able to vote in a manner that is comfortable and uncomplicated.

Accountability. The system has to maintain a system of verifiable checks and balances. Not only will this aid in trust and confidence, but will allow election results to be certifiable by any legitimate source. Multiple counting methods should be integrated, from digital tallying (at multiple locations) to a paper trail (both for the election committees and a receipt for each voter). The strongest form of encryption should be used. A closed network inaccessible from the internet, telephone lines, radio, WiFi, or other communications should be used.

Open Source. The software and hardware schematics used in the voting process should be open source. This will allow any citizen with the knowledge and/or inclination to look at and confirm the wares involved. In case you’ve missed the past several years of technological innovation and think a closed source system would be better (keep those hackers/terrorists/hippies from ruining the election!), please read this article for general information or this one for how it has been applied to the biotech industry.

Keeping our voting systems open source using an open method allows vulnerabilities to be spotted and fixed, allows each of us to participate (if we so choose) in the process, and helps maintain trust in the voting process. I believe that until such a system is created that I will not be using electronic voting. If anyone doesn’t believe it can be done, Australia has already done it (and be sure to visit some of the links in that article; they are all relevant).

2005.01.03

Ecto In The House

So I finally -finally- have ecto up and running on a few sites. At issue were loads of missing Perl modules on the server. Now I’m installing ecto for Jon E. for his sites. I think he’ll have loads of material he’ll be getting online now. He’s a prolific writer and just needs the correct tools.

Many thanks to Allen Hutchison for pointing me in the right direction and for creating BXR which is the whole reason I could even get ecto working. I’m quite excited to be posting this first article with the new software. My only concern now is the nameing convention, which I’ll have to work on since ecto (and, apparently, BXR) use the title of the article for the name of the file. Bummer.

I think this will prove really useful when I start up my new topical blog I’m working on…