http://www.flickr.com/photos/therefore/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Yes, that’s right, New Orleans is having an election tomorrow, right in the midst of Superbowl mania and Carnival madness.…
Pronounce the dot.
Tag: Politics
If I haven’t written here as much lately, perhaps it’s because I feel constrained from public discussion of many of the topics which are currently…
President Obama is visiting New Orleans today, so here’s a mix (warning: some dirty lyrics). Presidential from editor_b on 8tracks Radio. This is a silly…
Just got this via e-mail. Here’s an opportunity for some New Orleanians to go to Washington DC in support of the Gulf Coast Civic Works…
Here’s a nasty tale of corporate intrigue. First, check out this editorial from the Urban Conservancy about the Walgreens which is being built at Carrollton…
I got a press release about an interesting event coming up on the fourth anniversary of Katrina. My comments follow. Gulf Coast Rally to Demand…
This is the second installment of three sample documents dredged up from my old Brother WP-500 disks. I think this letter more or less explains itself. I wrote a number of such letters, inspired by author Bruce West, and in fact that was my original motivation for purchasing the WP-500 in the first place. With its daisywheel printer, it produced documents that looked like they were typed the old-fashioned way. Thus, I think it has maximum impact when viewed in its original format. I’m embedding the document here; please use the “full screen” toggle button in the upper right corner to make it legible.
I wasn’t going to post anything about the current e-mail foofaraw down at City Hall, because I figured I didn’t have anything to say about…
It’s stunning for me to realize: Today is a great day in American history. I can recall plenty of dark days. September 11th and Hurricane…
Rather than express my obligatory outrage over Bush’s remarks yesterday on Hurricane Katrina, I’ll simply link to Darwin Bond Graham’s rather excellent rebuttal.
We got our Malik Rahim campaign sign, and it is proudly on display in front of our house. I chatted with Christian Roselund a bit…
I’m passing the mic to Malik Rahim who has sent out the following campaign letter. — B November 19, 2008 Dear friends in the struggle,…
So William Jefferson won the Democratic Party primary Tuesday, beating out Helena Moreno. But we will have to go back to the polls to vote…
I guess what amazes me the most is that Indiana went for Obama. Indiana, which in the 1920s had “the largest, most enthusiastic, and most…
Well, I did it. I broke my promise. I crossed party lines and voted for Obama this morning. Back in 1992 I voted for Clinton.…
Got my sample ballot. Let me take a look at this thing. Fourteen items all told.
I’ve articulated some of my thoughts on the election, yet I see I have left some important stuff out. For one thing, although I’ve been…
A friend recently commented on how our country is politically polarized. Yes, I feel that — but I also feel that many of us are apathetic and alienated from the political process.
How could these both be true? It seems contradictory, paradoxical.
Perhaps the answer, or part of it, has to do with our narrowly circumscribed political dialog. I’ve been puzzling over how to better express the idea.
Say you’re looking at two marks on a wall. If you’re standing very close, with your nose practically touching the plaster, you will see the two marks as rather far apart. But if you stand back and look at the whole wall, you might say that that the marks are quite close together.
Or take a bar graph. It’s a well-known fact that if you chop off the bottom of a bar graph you can exaggerate differences and make them seem bigger. There’s a whole chapter on this in How to Lie with Statistics.
Or say you listened to nothing but grandpa’s record collection. You might think dixieland and bebop represented the absolute opposite ends of the musical spectrum. And you’d be right, insofar as 1940s jazz was concerned.
All of these seem like variations on the same phenomenon. This has surely been observed and documented by those who study human cognition. What’s vexing me is I can’t think of the name for it. The only term I’ve encountered that seems to make sense is “truncated scale,” but that’s hardly ubiquitous.
Anyway, my theory is that some of us are “zoomed in” on two marks on the wall.
From this close view, the differences are vast and passions run high. There is a sense of polarization between these two diametrically opposed points.
“All two-valued systems are false.” — Gene Wolfe
Consider the left-right continuum of political thought. It often strikes me as tired and played-out. Yet at other times it seems quite relevant. It certainly is one-dimensional, by definition, and thus it can’t begin to reflect the rich variation and nuances of political philosophy. For example, Nazis and Bolsheviks would be at opposite ends of this spectrum, but don’t they have a lot in common? Something important is missing.
At some point during my undergraduate years, a professor introduced me to a dual-axis model of politics. It doesn’t abandon the well-known left-right continuum. It simply adds another dimension, call it an up-down continuum. Up represents a more authoritarian tendency; down represents the opposite inclination, which might be called libertarian. (Note the small “l” to avoid confusion with the Libertarian Party.) I’m not sure, but I think this model may have first been articulated by the famous psychologist Hans Eysenck.
The result looks something like this:
This clears up some things. Hitler and Stalin would both be at the top of the chart, but in opposite corners.
Of course you could get even more complex. You could add an urban-rural axis or a pacifist-militant axis, to name just a couple. But that quickly gets cumbersome. This dual-axis model seems to work pretty well for me. I’ve carried this mental construct around for the last twenty years, and I find it helpful. I just wish more people knew about it.
Well, turns out there’s a website that allows you to take a short quiz and plot yourself on this model. No, I’m not talking about The World’s Smallest Political Quiz. I’m referring to The Political Compass.
If you haven’t already done so, hie thee to their website and take the test. See where they map you. Does it correspond with where you’d have plotted yourself?