Since mourning the deplorable state of American politics is the cool thing to do nowadays, I thought people might be interested to hear about Unity08. As the name implies, the idea behind it is a dissatisfaction with the current polarization of the two-party system. Apparently, a number of veteran campaign coordinators, instrumental in the early days of television campaigning, are just as sickened by what the system has become as much of the voting public, and their solution is to try to intervene using the internet, and hopefully prevent it from becoming equally detrimental. The way they settled on is creating an online movement to form a bipartisan ticket based entirely on small donations, with the aim of entering it as a temporary third party on a national level. It’s an interesting idea, and at least promises to shake things up over the next 22 months. Read about it in this Atlantic article, “Surprise Party,” and if you like what you hear, spread the word at work, school, among friends and family, etc. I’m curious to see how far this will go.
It seems a researcher named Charles Roselli at Oregon Health & Science University has been conducting experiments to understand what makes sheep gay. This already sounds like a good idea. Apparently, it’s drawn a lot of fire from certain circles, notably
For a while this semester, the Milgram experiments kept coming up in the readings for different projects, being interpreted in different ways in each sphere. This was intriguing enough to me to make me want to post my own thoughts on it, which I’ve yet to get a chance to. Maybe I’ll do that this week. In the meantime, a new study found that people behave the same way with a virtual “learner” (which they know to be so) in the teaching task. Neat! (Via LeiterReports)
Maybe it’s not fair to pick on Newsweek. Maybe it’s like expecting solid, hard-hitting journalism from USA Today. But I haven’t posted since the end of the YLTLSWC, so I’m going to go ahead and take aim at an easy target.
The cover story for the Dec. 25, 2006 – Jan. 1, 2007 issue asks a question that, in the right hands, might be very interesting. I’ve often wondered myself, “Is America Ready for Hillary or Obama?” Unfortunately, the author appears to be more interested in the stunning the reader with each paragraph than in building a coherent essay. F’rinstance:
A black president in a country that fought a civil war over race might even prove cathartic. And a woman president would show the rest of the world that the United States is not a sexist nation. [...] If neither Clinton nor Obama wins, it won’t necessarily prove the United States is closed-minded. Their failure would likely be the product of their own shortcomings—or the emergence of one of the several white (and one Hispanic) male Democrats who still have a shot at their party’s nomination.
Sweet! If they win, America is awesome, but if they lose it’s on them! This is a total win-win. And totally absurd, too! For instance, it’s ridiculous to think that the election of a female president says anything at all about whether or not the nation is sexist. You could even come up with reasons why a sexist nation is more likely to elect Hilary Clinton. Reasons like, say, this one:
The willingness of so many voters to support Hillary because they admire her husband and think he would guide her is old-fashioned—even sexist—but still a powerful asset. Now Clinton partisans are happy to encourage the idea that a Hillary presidency would constitute a third term for Bill.
Now we have to wonder: Is Mr. Alter reading his own piece? Does he have any idea what he wrote a couple of thousand words earlier? Or is he just absent-mindedly pasting together bits and pieces of ideas with sensational statements for glue? Either way, I should probably find something more interesting to read over breakfast.