We think in terms of stories. “Tell me a story,” says the child to her parents. She doesn’t say, “Give me some analysis.” In his book “Black Swan,” Nassim Taleb talks about the way human beings tend to create narratives around facts, whether the facts justify the narratives or not. Psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen’s superb book “The Political Brain” — a must read — argues that if you want to succeed at spin, you must basically spin a tale.
People on the right believe their alternative narrative about the crisis simply because it fits their broader narrative, the story of the Big Bad Government and the Perfect Market.
People on the left are just as bad. They are just as apt to believe all stories about the wonderful, beneficent effects of government spending, about the evils of any private-sector enterprise, and about universal racism, sexism and so forth.
I hope they [Yahoo] let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo! Who needs a high rank at a small company in New York? I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can’t make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking. Marco.org ☀
What is to prevent a corporation from targeting a particular individual, using face recognition technology to assemble all uploaded videos in which he appears, and effectively constructing a surveillance record that can be used to analyze his life? Michael Chertoff ☀
As I approached the line to the restroom, I took a deep sigh, thinking that I might find some respite from the hundreds of cameras strapped to people’s heads at the conference. Yet when it was finally my turn to approach the rows of white urinals, my world came screeching to a halt. There they were, a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals, peering their head from side to side, blinking or winking, as they relieved themselves. Nick Bilton ☀
Let’s face it, the Dow is so high not because the economy is great, or even because it is projected to be great soon. It’s mostly inflated out of a combination of easy Fed money for banks, which translates to easy money for people who are already rich, and the fact that world-wide investors are afraid of Europe and are parking their money in the U.S. until the Euro problem gets solved. In other words, that money is going to go away if people decide Europe looks stable, or if the Fed decides to raise interest rates. The latter might happen when the economy (or rather, if the economy) looks better, so putting that together we’re talking about a possible negative stock market response to a positive economic outlook. The stock market has officially become decoupled from our nation’s future. mathbabe ☀
Marshall Ganz on Making Social Movements Matter ☀
- BILL MOYERS: We need a new story?
- MARSHALL GANZ: We need a new story. But it's also a new way of describing our economic challenges and our political challenges that emphasizes not this idea of what each individual competes with, each other individual as the answer, but the ways in which we cooperate and collaborate with one another as the answer.
- You know, Albert Hirschman, the development economist wrote this book a number of years ago, I'm sure you know about it, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.” And sort of the idea was, okay, so you got an institution. And it's screwing up. And so one way to fix it is to exercise voice. The other way is you can exit. The market solutions are all exit solutions.
- BILL MOYERS: Explain that to me.
- MARSHALL GANZ: Well, so you don't like the way the schools work, exit, make your own over here. And that way you exercise choice. You don't like the way public health works, exit, over here, make your own. Now the only problem is you can only exit and make your own if you got the money to do it. And so the result is that you create these parallel systems of elite systems that are, you know, that fragment the whole.
- The public gets poorer and poorer and poorer, and you create all these little isolated golden ghettos all around of privilege. And the focus is on how do we find market solutions, market solutions, market… when we should but saying, how do we find more effective ways to exercise voice? How can we have more, more effective public deliberation? How can we bring more people into the process? How can we create the venues where people can actually learn and deliberate with one another?
Any time a group of people get together, they’re going to create a structure. The difference is whether it’s visible or invisible, whether it’s accountable or not, and whether it’s open and above board and, or whether it’s all factionalized and personalistic. Marshall Ganz ☀
Jesus announced, lived, and inaugurated for history a new social order based on grace and not on merit. He called it the Reign or Kingdom of God. It is without doubt his most common message and metaphor, so it must be very important. Maybe we should just call his Kingdom “the final and big picture.” Many of us would put it this way: “In the end it all comes down to …” There we believe that all will be found and revealed inside of the love and mercy of God—for everyone without exception—and for all of creation. All of our little divisions and dramas will be revealed to be just that. All smaller kingdoms and criteria will pass away and mean very little. To live with that final consciousness today is to live in the Reign of God. This now and not-yet Reign of God is the foundation for both our personal hope and our cosmic optimism, but it is also the source of our deepest alienation from the world as it is, which is all based on largely meaningless merit badges, and various forms of win or lose (at which almost all lose!). I must warn you that living in this Big Picture of God will leave you in many ways as a “stranger and pilgrim” on this earth (Hebrews 11:13). It is not a popular position, because you can no longer easily fit into ordinary superficial conversations and anti-any group jokes. Nevertheless, our task is to learn how to live lovingly in both worlds until they become one world—at least in us. True Kingdom people bridge worlds and do not again create separate or superior little kingdoms. This is a common mistake. Richard Rohr ☀
The real scandal is that: The IRS has interpreted our tax laws to allow big corporations and wealthy individuals to make unlimited secret campaign donations through sham political fronts called “social welfare organizations,” like Karl Rove’s “Crossroads,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and “Priorites USA.” This campaign money has been used to bribe Congress to keep in place tax loopholes like the “carried interest” rule that allows the managers of hedge funds and private equity funds to treat their income as capital gains, subject only to low capital gains taxes rather than ordinary income taxes, and other loopholes that allow CEOs to get special tax treatment on giant compensation packages that now average $10 million a year. Robert Reich ☀
Conversations with each other are the way children learn to have conversations with themselves, and learn how to be alone. Learning about solitude and being alone is the bedrock of early development, and you don’t want your kids to miss out on that because you’re pacifying them with a device. Sherry Turkle ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
