Sat - November 27, 2004

How to Understand America


The USA is a country of vast importance in today's world but it is also misunderstood by so many. There are a great deal of parties who are either interested in telling a distorted picture of the US or who are utterly incapable of providing enough or the proper kind of information to provide people with the tools to properly predict what the US will do. If the world is surprised by Lesotho or Burundi, it will easily recover, misunderstanding the most powerful military power, a huge political, economic, and social influence on the world is a great deal more serious.

The US is a democratic republic based upon two parties and five political traditions. The traditions endure far better than the parties and move between the parties, influencing their political platforms. If you do not understand what are the five political traditions and only take in information from one or a few of them, the US will always surprise. For those who are unfamiliar with them, the five traditions are Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Madisonian, Wilsonian, and Jacksonian.

The US is a revolutionary country whose revolutionaries were essentially conservative. This fact of history is especially important today. When challenged, the conservative strain in any country goes back to the founding principles of the nation. For the US, such challenges turn conservatives into a very unusual sort of radical. This unusual political circumstance is generally a footnote in American history. Existential challenges are rare and has happened only twice in the US' history, in the formation of the Republican party and its ascent to power under Lincoln and today in George W Bush's administration with it's War on Terrorism.

Mass media in the US is configured in a very unusual way. Following a decades long period (starting in the 1930s) of center-left dominance, traditional media was predominantly center-left. This led to the center-right having their story told largely by hostile voices, a situation which led the center-right to create it's own counter-institutions in new media outlets of newsmagazines and journals of opinion as well as in dying media backwaters such as AM radio. The international visibility of center-left dominated media is much higher than that of the center-right media for two reasons. First, the center-right has tended to be more concerned with reversing center-left dominance at home than winning converts abroad. Second, the powerful force of AM talk radio programs are technologically unsuited to reach far and only the very few most popular programs are rebroadcast abroad, mostly on armed forces radio and mostly without the benefit of caller feedback which is a large part of what makes such programs so powerful.

The new media construct called the blogosphere is also being used in different ways by the left and the right, ways which directly influence popular opinion in the US. This influence is twofold. First popular blogs are being read directly, influencing political opinion. Second, larger media figures are picking up predigested news stories from the blogs and using them as news, fact checking, and commentary arms. This sort of use is not always attributed and some of the oddest moments in US mainstream media these days come from journalists answering blog charges without ever acknowledging their opposition's existence, a phenomenon that dates back to before the blogosphere when Matt Drudge's Drudge Report website and Rush Limbaugh's EIB radio program suffered this cordon sanitaire for years.

If you (outside the US) depend on getting information about the US from news sources who maintain their own cordon sanitaire and do not read, listen, or react to the alternative media structures of the US center-right, you will be laughably misinformed, even dangerously uninformed, though you do your part and consume your national news media voraciously. Far too many foreigners seem dangerously uninformed about american realities.

If you woke up and neither you, nor anybody you knew, could explain why George W Bush was reelected, it's a strong warning sign. If everybody was depressed over how such a bad man could have possibly been elected, this is a dangerous warning sign that you and your set have not gotten enough information to even come close to predicting the US. It's not a problem of you disagreeing with the US electorate. Diversity is the spice of life. It is that those whose opinions were different were invisible to you and when they made their force felt at the ballot box, you were shocked by their very existence. Your news media had an absolute duty to explain these people to you and they failed to do so. That failure is just one data point in a very busy graph.

Pay attention to photographs. They are gold mines into the editorial slant of a news outlet. If you consistently see unflattering photos of one side of a debate, be aware that this is an attempt at subliminal manipulation to influence you into dismissing their arguments without thought. Most of the time there are complimentary and embarrassing photographs available for both sides of any debate.

Posted at 10:50 AM    

Sat - November 1, 2003

Taming Faction



Faction is the great downfall of ancient Republics. Factional strife was rampant in all accounts of the old republics and brought down a great deal of them through internal weakening. Republics were all small experiments and they all seemed to fail, and fail again. A large territory such as the US seemed destined to need a strong hand to guide it either through hereditary monarchy or some other method of choosing a strongman.

But the US has no strongman and really never has. The solution adopted to tame the problem of faction was ingenious. Instead of trying to ban them, circumscribe them, or suppress them, they are encouraged beyond belief in the United States. In fact, everybody belongs to multiple factions simultaneously. There are factions by race, social class, geographic area (some really small), ideology, political unit (of which there are many that are overlaid on top of each other), religion, economic standing, as well as by several other criteria, both mundane and bizarre.

The effect of this multiplicity of faction is that there is since everybody belongs to many of them, they are all minorities, all losers in the political game simultaneous to the fact that they are usually winners as well to some extent. Your party might have won a majority but your religion may be unhappy about some policy that your party favors. So are you happy or angry with the current government? Very often, the answer is both.

Thus, when it comes to minority rights, the people of the US have a remarkable perspective. Since virtually everybody has the experience of being both a winner and a loser, in the majority and the minority, often at the same time, safeguarding minority rights is the same as safeguarding your own personal rights. There is no permanent majority so the arrogance that tends to accumulate in the majority is much less present.

Posted at 04:38 PM    

Fri - October 17, 2003

Network Demarcation Points


In the US, there is a particular point where the phone line becomes yours. You own the wiring from the phone to that point, the phone company owns the rest. This was the inevitable consequences of the AT&T network challenges. When AT&T couldn't win the right to declare everything, end to end was its property and unmodifiable, it was inevitable that every phone owner would end up with a portion of the network under his control and AT&T ruling the roost past that point.

This concept has been a great boon for competition but where the demarcation point (demarc point from here on out) exists is, essentially variable. The point is generally right where the line enters the house, just inside or just outside depending on various circumstances. At the beginning, it was declared to be the switchover point where the line stopped using outside wiring and started using the cheaper inside variety. Nowadays there are special demarc boxes that are placed on the outside of the building on most new residences.

Cable TV has the same sort of demarc system. You may need to pay for additional TVs but if you cut the inside wiring and add a splitter, you're not altering the cable company's wiring. You're altering your own.

In the case of the Internet, where is the demarc point? Here, there is no fixed definition in law. If you get DSL is the modem you buy from the carrier yours or the carrier's? It varies, and your rights on the internet vary right along with it. The Internet is unique in that all computers have the capacity to be both consumers of information passed on by producer computers and also be producer computers for other consumer computers. With costs quickly dropping under the pressure of Moore's law, what ends up happening is possibly the greatest haphazard capitalization of ordinary people that the world has ever seen.

But being a producer means that you are a competitor, even if only a potential competitor, to a variety of fat bloated, entrenched interests. Add a permanently connected networked computer with a digital video camera, you can be a competitor to TV stations, movies studios, and movie theaters. With a SIP phone, you're a competitor to the phone company. With a MIDI interface added you're a competitor to music production studios, radio stations, concert halls, and juke box operators. The list goes on and on.

Some of these markets don't know or don't care you exist (concert halls and juke box operators are examples). Some are accommodating and happy to integrate new entrants into the mix (music production studios, for example). But then there are those who know, understand, and find the potential of that many new entrants in the field deeply frightening and unacceptably threatening. These are the ones that are pushing back. And if they win, they will snatch defeat from the jaws of possibly the most world enriching innovation to come down the pike since the industrial revolution.



Posted at 04:45 PM    

Tue - October 7, 2003

On Civilian Casualties


As a country grows stronger militarily, you can choose where and when to deploy forces to minimize or eliminate civilian casualties. But no military budget is unlimited and every military planner has to say at some point, that's too far fetched. If the enemy does that then civilians are just going to have to die.

Military planning has some very macabre traits. It always has. Like any safety system, there is a point past which threats are considered too unlikely or too far off to budget for and create a defense. Opinions legitimately vary on this which is why the UK is much more interested in searching for catastrophic meteor impacts than the US is. There is no right or wrong answer on this because nobody really knows when such a thing might happen.

Unfortunately, some of these 'far fetched' attacks happen and then people die. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on 9/11/2001 were one spectacular example of such an unlikely attack.

Posted at 12:52 AM    

Mon - October 6, 2003

Is it getting too cheap to cause mass havoc?


Weapons of Mass Destruction keep getting cheaper to make and technology transfer to the civilian side means that over time, anybody with a burning desire to get a nuke or other WMD will get one. So how can we survive in such a world?

When the first atomic bomb was made, it took a tremendous amount of technical know-how and infrastructure to build and keep a bomb. The US, on a war footing, could not have quickly produced a 3rd atomic bomb if the Nagasaki bomb had not ended Japanese resistance.

Today, the real nightmare is when we all can make our own WMD. We're not there yet but it will soon be within the capability of a highly motivated and large sub-national group to do it. Al Queda's efforts to do just this have been uncovered in several countries.

Posted at 03:52 PM    

Fri - October 3, 2003

The War on Terrorism


While terror is only a tactic, it is a tactic that is almost exclusively used by the weak against the strong.

There is no terrorist group on the planet that, given superior conventional firepower, wouldn't abandon terrorism in a flash. So why do it? Because they are weak and can't hope to win their goals without recourse to terror.

Posted at 06:13 PM    

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