AZspot

When, oh when, will liberals come to realize that the Left has been at-best only a part-time and problematic friend? That socialism may work in helping redress injustices (free education and all that) but it is absolutely lousy at generating the sort of economy that is wealthy enough to take on big projects? Good capitalism, the truly competitive and open and accountable kind — bulwarked by lots of startups and small businesses that unleash creativity — has always done better under democrats! So why not crow about it? Show the statistics. Embrace the “first liberal,” Adam Smith, who above all denounced and despised crony conspiratorial aristocratic monopolists? Why allow the shills of monopoly to pretend that corporate gigantism has anything, whatsoever, to do with free markets? David Brin ☀

According to surveys taken across much of the last decade, the average Republican is now behind the average Democrat by more than a year of schooling — and this despite the Democrats still representing society’s poor and underprivileged.   What could this mean? Other than reflecting a party-migration by nearly everybody in America with real expertise or a post-graduate degree? Including, lately, a great many members of the US military’s Senior Officer Corps.  (Except for MBAs, of course.  Funny — they still tilt toward the Grand Old Party.)   Seriously, might the “Republican War on Science” and George Bush’s war against the US Civil Service, plus Culture War animosity in red counties toward Urban America, all be rooted in something deeper and more fundamental than anything that’s spoken aloud?  Deeper than the run of the mill talking points? At this juncture, I am willing to wager that Culture War has almost nothing to do with race, or even region.  Certainly not classic “conservative” policies, since Barry Goldwater would be a democrat, today.   No, it is — to some large extent — about something puerile and basic.   Hating smartypantses. David Brin ☀

In fact, I find illusory “cycles” far less rewarding than the notion of “attractor states”… or pitfalls that seem relentlessly to pull in cultures, because of repetitive traits in human nature. Oligarchic feudalism is one such attractor. (Find the exceptions: agrarian societies that avoided this trap. I can name only eight.) Another attractor is fear-driven xenophobia. Machismo is one more. Put a dozen or so of these together and you start getting a really good picture of our tragic history.  (And yes, because these themes keep recurring, matters can thus look a bit cyclical.  But that’s like saying the fundamental reason that a car moves is because the wheels turn.) But leadership also matters, e.g. Athenian democracy did not fail till Pericles died, and then just barely. And that is where miracles keep happening to America.  here America finds NEW attractor states…. bad presidents are followed by good ones, citizenship triumphs (barely) over anomie and cynicism, and seminal decisions transform the world. David Brin ☀

Do these Hollywood studio folks — most of them devout Democrats — ever wonder why our civilization is turning anti-science and giving itself over to superstition? They wring their hands over a rising age of culture war and lost-confidence, while they are churning out relentless propaganda preaching the same tedious message — that progress is hopeless and technology only menacing. And that the default moral and wise choice should always be Just Say No To Change. Even worse, nearly every product they put out proclaims that the People are always stupid. Some democrats. David Brin ☀

Now we’re entering a new era when the village seems about to return. With our senses and memories enhanced prodigiously by new prostheses, suddenly we can “know” the reputations of millions, soon to be billions, of fellow Earth citizens. A tap of your VR eyeglasses will identify any person, along with profiles and alerts, almost as if you had been gossiping about him and her for years. It’s seriously scary prospect and one that is utterly unavoidable. The cities we grew up in were semi-anonymous only because they were primitive. The village is returning. And with it serious, lifelong worry about that state of our reputations. Kids who do not know this are playing with fire. They had better hope that the village will be a nice one. A village that shrugs a lot, and forgives. David Brin ☀

Central to “Trek” is the image of a large, quasi-naval vessel called Enterprise, based on 19th-century sailing ships like HMS Beagle, dispatched to practice peacemaking and war, diplomacy and science, tutoring and apprenticeship, all in equal measure. How different from the tiny fighter planes featured in “Star Wars,” each piloted by a solitary knight, perhaps accompanied by a loyal squire, or droid, symbols as old as Achilles. In contrast, the Federation starship in “Trek” is a veritable city, cruising toward the unknown. Its captain-hero is a plenipotentiary representative of his civilization and parent figure to the crew … but any one of those normal men and women may suddenly matter, during the next adventure, and perhaps become heroes themselves. Moreover, this ship carries something else, the Federation’s culture and laws, industry and science, its consensus values - like the Prime Directive - all embodied in the dramatic diversity of its crew. Each time Enterprise passes a test, so does civilization - perhaps, even one worthy of our grandchildren. Compare this to the Old Republic, in the Lucasian universe - a hapless, clueless mélange of bickering futility whose political tiffs are as petty as they are incomprehensible. Sound familiar? The Republic never perceives, never creates or solves anything. Not once do we see any part of it function well. How can it? The people, the Republic, decent institutions … these cannot be heroes, or even helpers. David Brin ☀

…the intellectual curse of vapid, simpleminded postmodernism has been slow to dissipate from hundreds of university English, Literature and social studies departments. One symptom of this obdurate troglodytism has been the refusal of all but a dozen U.S. universities to pay more than nodding attention to science fiction, the most exploratory and truly American of all genres. Another diagnosable illness is the slavish devotion that so many have pledged to the rigid storytelling tropes that Joseph Campbell called “fundamental” to myth. These rigid prescriptions may have been nearly ubiquitous for 4,000 years, but nobody seems willing to also point out the downside — that those bardic straightjackets were also fundamentally debasing of the human imagination, helping to limit and crush our shared cultural experience… until we finally broke free of our chains. David Brin ☀

Alas, I find myself hoping for a bit of a delay in the Big Obama Recover, if only because America needs a taste of radicalization, at this moment of history. Not enough to send tumbrels through the streets, or mobs waving red banners, or a tsunami of wretched, hypocritical Timothy McVeigh clones blowing up buildings. But enough to not let the reforms stay superficial — simply a matter of the government buying out the godawful horrid mistakes of a clade of business morons who styled themselves as geniuses. We cannot continue to ignore the cheat that brought us to this mess and provoked public wrath. This cheat goes deeper than any problem of excessive-leverage, or negligent mismanagement, or failures of regulation. Much deeper, since it caused all of those. David Brin ☀

No doubt, in McConnel’s mind, the GOP “region” is geographical — largely the South and the Mormon Belt. But I think a map that would be even more telling is wherever towns and counties have seen their smartest young people move away, via university and profession, leaving behind those who feel viscerally abandoned, resentful and hurt. I refer to Limbaugh-Land, where citizens have only limited access to diversity, or diverse opinions, but live instead immersed in media voices who preach nothing but indignant fury. And if there is one thing about addictive indignation, we know that it flourishes best in an ambience of unswerving, unquestioned certainty. David Brin ☀

During the first era of our republic, private citizens used to knock on the door of the White House and ask to see their nation’s leader. As recently as the time of Harry Truman, there was a slim chance of seeing the president somewhere in public, buying socks for real, not as a publicity stunt. Not thronged by photographers and Secret Service agents. There is genuine peril in losing this connection between power and everyday life. If today’s president cannot safely venture among us, representatives of sundry outlooks should have a route to him or her. With this precedent set, not just public figures, but individuals from the ranks of the poor and dispossessed might win a chance to plead their case before the highest official in the land. David Brin ☀

Reinstate something like the Fairness Doctrine of the airwaves. It doesn’t have to be the old one. But something! My reason is deadly serious and has nothing to do with party politics. Today, you can drive across many parts of the country — and it is no coincidence that these sections are “red” — without hearing any breadth of opinion, news, fact or commentary. Radio, in these regions, features only the most bile-drenched and horrific hate fests. We need to remember what happened in the years that led up to the first American Civil War. Before the breakout of hostilities in 1861, there was a similar absolute uniformity of rabble-roused opinion, all across the South, where even a slight effort to widen the debate led to the mob-torching of newspapers and the smashing ot their presses. (In contrast, there were “copperhead” or Democratic Party newspapers and broadsheets available in most Northern areas.) Remember, also, that Timothy McVeigh lived immersed in such uniformity. If we want to end this phase of the Civil War, instead of seeing it burst into conflagration, the best tool is to encourage diversity of input and a spirit of peaceful argument. David Brin ☀

The Internet was originally designed to network messages around areas of devastation, agilely re-routing them anywhere, under any circumstance. So, why won’t our cell phones work when we need them most, if the nearby cell towers fail in a disaster? During Hurricane Katrina a quarter of a million people were cut-off, with sophisticated-but-useless radios in their pockets. Even worse, almost nothing has been done, since then, to correct a potentially devastating design flaw. But let’s imagine. What if mobile phones were empowered to simply pass along text messages, from one to another, via peer-to-peer packet switching, all the way out of any affected area? (Until finally reaching an intact cell tower.) This simple bypass capability could ensure coast-to-coast messaging, even during substantial nationwide havoc. It would cost little to implement and the cell companies needn’t suffer any loss of revenue. (Not if their billing departments have any imagination, at all.) In fact, failure to implement such a simple fix could constitute deliberate sabotage, since its potential benefits, during any disaster, are simply overwhelming. David Brin ☀

In fact, what I have found most amazing is the look on some ostriches’ — and especially the non-ostrich True Righters’ — faces when they realize how ANGRY blue americans are, right now. They blink in surprise, as if we have somehow usurped their God-given license to wallow in selfrighteous indignation and culture war, amazed that our habitual, long-suffering patience and smarty-pants intellectual attempts to use reason have given way to a state of barely-contained rage. A fury that is fundamentally-based upon a patriotism that used to be far more restrained and genteel than theirs, and superfically less fervid — till now — but that is based far more deeply upon a love of what America really stands for… …than the insipid, frenetically flag-waving, dionysian-masturbatory kind of “patriotism” evinced by good-old-boys who — if you scratch the surface — would much rather the South had won the Civil War and who would (if they ever got their hands on a sci fi time machine) leap back in an instant to provide Claymore mines and AK47s to Nathan Bedford Forest. David Brin ☀

It truly was a pivotal moment in American politics. About half of my (minor) reservations about BHO were settled by this speech — and by the way he handled the entire convention. For example, I counted six times that he referred to science and technology as pressing national needs. Once, my friends, is perfunctory. Twice is policy. Six times is a call to action. That wasn’t for political impact — (what fraction of the TV audience cared?) — but an expression of perceived importance. My remaining quibbles are mere motes that I can wave aside for other times, after the republic is saved and conditions return for normal argument. What matters is that I know this fellow will do the basic things that I want and need, simply by ejecting knaves and traitors and thieves from their grip over our throats and wallets, and allowing civil servants and officers to do the jobs we hired them to do. David Brin ☀