Category: Uncategorized

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We live in post-truth politics

[Update 2010-04-01, 7:45pm] David Roberts also has a new post specifically dealing with Obama’s offshore-drilling announcement.

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The political landscape is in transition right now due to the healthcare fight being over. That means it’s time to come up for air and reevaluate how we should think about political fights, and change our thinking in a way that will enable us to actually win. Unfortunately, the President decided he should take this opportunity to make a political move so egregious from a policy perspective that it feels more like an announcement from our previous head of state. Chris Bowers has a good summary of the political considerations that lead Obama to make this offshore-drilling announcement. It’s depressing, because it makes sense.

This painful betrayal heightens our resolve to push legislative practices that are effective from a policy and politics perspective. Luckily, there are two good articles out today making recommendations in that regard.

Mike Lux writes about the inherent connection between banking reform and job creation:

With so much of America’s wealth concentrated in six mega-banks, and those banks investing in little that’s creating jobs, we are not going to create real private sector job growth.

What really needs to happen, Lux argues, is breaking up these big banks. He then goes on to highlight three instances of fiery language from Democrats on this issue. Read it.

David Roberts writes on Grist about the confusion of politics and policy in Democratic tactics. The best part of the article is a quote from John Holbo conceptualizing the political environment where one party has poor discipline (frequently works with the other party) and the other has strong discipline (doesn’t):

Over time, both parties will push positive proposals/legislation. Quite obviously, the Bipartisan Party will be at a tactical disadvantage, due to its lax discipline. Less obviously, it will have an ongoing optics problem. All the proposals of the Partisan Party will be bipartisan. That is, a few members of the other party will, predictably, peel off and cross the aisle to stand with the Partisans. None of the proposals of the Bipartisan Party, on the other hand, will ever be bipartisan. No Partisan will ever support a Bipartisan measure. In fact, all proposals of the Bipartisan party will face bipartisan opposition — as a few Bipartisans trudge across the aisle (there are always a few!) to stand with the Partisans. Result: the Partisan party, thanks to its unremitting opposition to bipartisanship, will be able to present itself as the party of bipartisanship, and be able to critique the Bipartisan Party, with considerable force and conviction, as the hypocritically hyperpartisan party of pure partisanship.

This is, of course, a pointed description of the Democratic and Republican parties right now. Roberts advises treating policy and politics separately as much as possible, so that good policy doesn’t get thrown down the crapper for the sake of political victory that never comes. I’m not sure how that would manifest in reality, but I heartily agree.

Whatever the course, we need people across the country who care about fairness and empathy and equality to be active and work hard for a better society.

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Contentment vs Happiness

I had a revelation the other evening about happiness, a topic I’ve thought about a lot since taking a senior seminar with that title my final semester of college. My revelation was on the distinction between contentment and happiness. In my thinking, contentment is about routines that you find gentle pleasure in, whereas happiness is more about the emotional peaks in a contented life. Another way of looking at the difference is that contentment is an attitude that allows you to enjoy ordinary events fully, whereas happiness is an attitude that allows you to enjoy unusual events fully.

My inspiration for writing this post comes from the fantastic mnmlist.com post by Leo Babauta “on finding contentedness”:

Most of all, I stopped the endless cycle of wanting more, of wanting
better, and realized I already had everything. I’m so much happier now.

I think the two terms can be synonymous, or at least ambiguous siblings frequently mistaken for being identical, but I think Leo’s path of minimalism and mindfulness is a fantastic path to at least contentment, and probably happiness too.

Apply a Cartesian attitude to your quest for happiness & contentment: reduce your emotional and physical baggage to a minimum, to what’s enough. Give it a try! Tell me what happens!

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Are Freshmen Grown-ups?

Last night I visited my cousin at college. I’d only interacted with her as a child before this. Therefore, I was excited to finally interact with her as I interact with peers and adults. She’s doing impressive things, and I was full of hope.

While it’s great to see family, and she has significant accomplishments already, I think my expectations were a little unreasonable. I forgot that this is her first year at college. She has freshman problems with academic stress, freshman roommate problems, and a freshman boyfriend. In many ways, first-year college students are more like high school seniors than they are like new college graduates. This should not be surprising, and isn’t, but I lost sight of it in this situation, and am feeling crummier this morning as a result.

Interact with people as they are, not as you would like them to be. You’ll be happier for it (and so will they). If your assumptions are wrong, change your assumptions.

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What we have

I would like to feel thankful more often. I think thankfulness is a quick route to happiness (because if you’re truly thankful, how can you avoid feeling happy?), and thus I really enjoyed seeing this quote on The Happiness Project:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”
–Epicurus

May we all remember that today.

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Climategate

I feel the need to write my thoughts on the “scandal” being referred to as “Climategate.” In case you’ve missed it, here’s a summary from Brad Johnson of Think Progress’s Wonk Room:

Two weeks ago, thousands of illegally hacked emails from a British climate research center were dumped on a Russian webserver, timed to influence the politics of of the international climate negotiations commencing next week in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beginning Thanksgiving week, conservative media and Republican politicians have compared the climate scientists whose private emails were hacked to Hitler, Stalin, and eugenicists, saying they are involved in a global conspiracy to defraud and possibly take over the world. The Climategate “scandal” — a swiftboating intimidation and smear campaign against science — is the right-wing rage from Stephen Dubner to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck to Lou Dobbs. Like the original Watergate scandal involving right-wing operatives who burglarized the offices of their political opponents, the real crime is the original break-in.

Now, I haven’t been reading that much about this, because after determining that it wasn’t a big deal, I was not interested in hearing more right-wing hysteria. But as I understand it, the scientists in question were merely sexifying their data in order to make trends clearer. Furthermore, they weren’t doing so arbitrarily like so many of us would be prone to do, but instead were applying specific algorithms.
Also, as Jeff Masters of Weather Underground is quoted on Climate Progress, “Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change—which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines—is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists.”

Frankly, I’m pretty frustrated with our country’s traditional media for not asserting this point more into their conversations. David Roberts puts it really well (as he always does):

[The right-wing noise machine] is an industry that uses dishonesty to defend corporations. Plain and simple. Everyone ought to know that by now and it ought to frame media coverage of these dreary “skeptic” controversies. Yet the press seems to think that every new claim or contrived controversy from the industry deserves to be met with the same furrowed brow, the same quote and counter-quote presentation of “sides,” the same chin-scratching atmospherics of doubt. It’s always the world’s scientists and scientific institutions being asked to defend their integrity, not the professional dissemblers and character assassins.

We just need to keep these points in mind when we watch, read, or listen to the news these days, I guess.

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Extreme Material Simplicity

I have been pursuing a radical course in the past few months, related to my aesthetic preference for minimalism, my upbringing with values of voluntary simplicity, and my philosophical interest in happiness. I have been Getting Rid Of Things. This sortie has been inspired by several assumptions/understandings:

  • Material objects do not bring happiness. In fact, they sometimes impede it.
  • The most aesthetically pleasing interiors for me are those with smooth, bare surfaces. Hard to have those when you have clutter.
  • I would like to spend a significant junk of my young adulthood being itinerant. Heaps of possessions don’t do you much good when you need to pack up and move frequently.
  • Waste sucks, and having things you never use is wasteful, of space, of your energy, and of manufacturing to create those things.
  • It’s easier to clean your space when you have less stuff!
  • To survive, we need little in the way of material objects. Beyond what’s necessary, stuff takes up mental energy.
  • Less stuff allows you to focus on things that make you happy! Like food, and friends, and games, and music!

So! After several months of rejecting objects bit by bit, I finally got to the point where I felt I could inventory all of my belongings. I did this several years ago, perhaps before going abroad. It’s really interesting seeing how much stuff you really have.

Now, the majority of my clothes are out on the line drying, and I grouped some items together (socks, pens, contents of file folders), however:

I have roughly 260 things.

Does having so few things make me happy? No. But it does feel liberating. And liberty feels pretty darn good.

Have you had similar experiences with flushing unnecessary junk out of your life? Are you shocked from disagreement? Do you have other thoughts on this matter? I’d love to hear them!

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Upgraded Design

I just made some minor changes to the site design, noticeable mainly in the menu. It’s bigger now, easier to read, no longer has the old drop-down (which didn’t work in IE anyway), and is generally more aesthetically pleasing. Also, see my new bio here.

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Wisdom from the Past

In cleaning out my room, I’ve encountered a number of thoughts I wrote down in the past. Here’s one:

“All the (events, experiences, information) that shape what/how people think/do, they all come in order. But when a person is going through their life, having experiences, learning, all this stuff comes in in a different order than it does for other people. So if I’m reading a book, and there’s this movie I haven’t seen, and the author saw the movie and was influenced by it, I come out of the book getting something different than if I’d seen the movie.” 6/8/04 11:40pm

I think what I was getting at was that there’s no way that two people can perceive the same thing in precisely the same way, due to this mere difference in the order of our experiences.

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Senate GOP Crosses Its Arms and Pouts

According to Politico, Senate Republicans won’t be engaging in too much badmouthing of Obama’s Supreme Court pick:

GOP officials say they realize the party needs to improve its standing among Hispanic voters in order to have any hope of winning a national election, and they admit that trashing the first Latina nominee to the court could cement stereotypes or further alienate minorities.

This reality limits Republicans’ options dramatically and virtually guarantees they would be called racists if they said anything that smacks of being out of bounds about such a qualified nominee.

The problem is, they (or at least the conservative pundits who fuel their fire) have already said things that “smack of being out of bounds”. Ridiculous and offensive assertions abound in the Right’s treatment of this pick, not just since it was announced, but since Souter announced his retirement. They need to do more than surrender a few fights if they want to repair their image with demographic groups they’ve been disrespecting for years.

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The Solution to Climate Change

Joseph Romm is one of the most respected writers on climate policy. Here is a summary of his thoughts on what is necessary to avert catastrophic warming:

We have to bring down the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to between 350-450 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the hellish worst of climate change. Economically and technologically, this is quite doable. However, it is not plausible in the current political climate. Because the alternative is unacceptable, we will get there, but to do so we must all become familiar with the best solutions, and then loudly push our political leaders toward them.
Continue reading “The Solution to Climate Change”