Category Archives: Politics

The causes of a problem cannot total more than 100%

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There is a lot of blame going around the world these days.   I think it would be helpful if people blaming others for a problem would first define the problem and then assign blame to all the parties involved, with the total blame equalling 100%.     The conflicts in the Middle east come to mind as an area where this might be helpful.     If a car bomb planted by insurgents kills 100 people how do you rationally allocate the responsibility?    I see all the following parties as having at least a measure of responsibility:

The insurgent bombers themselves
The insurgency who helped the bombers
Iraqi govt security forces (for failing to protect)
USA Govt military (for helping to destabilize the region)
Foreign funders of insurgency
Iraq citizens who support insurgency
US Citizens (for funding the inital conflict)

A reasonable list goes on for some time, though I wonder if you could simplify things by grouping political allies and adversaries?    At first this excercise seems somewhat futile, but I think it forces people to address issues that are usually left off the table such as “how much responsibility does an individual have for their direct violent actions?”.       I’d suggest that however you allocate responsibility you cannot rationally say the total is greater than 100%.

My working assumption is that people generally fall into two camps on this – one that says individuals have a lot of control over themselves and therefore bear most of the responsibility for their actions.  The other group suggests people’s actions are best viewed as the product of complicated forces that are usually out of the individual’s control.   These folks look at individual behavior more forgivingly and see societies as responsible for problems far more than individuals.
In the USA, and even internationally I think, individual accountability people tend to be politically conservative while society accountability people tend to be liberal.

World Peace through Blog Evangelism

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Hey Matt, I think I’m becoming a WordPress Blog Evangelist.   I’m telling everybody with anything to say to get a WP blog going ASAP.   Oddly (or not?) they all want their hand held while setting it up rather than just logging on and following the excellent directions and support here (there?) at WordPress.

The good news is that while blogging in many technology sectors  is going strong now, in travel (in fact in almost all of the non-tech sectors) I think blogging has not even reached that powerful upward inflection point.

Thus my dream of creating a huge, unstructured global travel blogging network is still attainable.    In fact wouldn’t it be neat if people started getting specific travel advice from local bloggers who they’d then take out to dinner to say “thanks!”.    Friendships would blossom, tourism would bring prosperity to every corner of the globe, and we’d have world peace through blogging.     (insert violin holiday music here)

China – Lenin had it backwards

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This note from the China Venture News:

… nearly 75 percent of Chinese employees would prefer to work for wholly-owned foreign companies rather than joint ventures companies and wholly-owned Chinese companies according to Manpower research.

Lenin is often quoted as suggesting that capitalists would sell to communists the rope the communists would use to hang them. Sorry Vladimir but you had it pretty much backwards. Communism in both Russia and China is in the process of evolving into a new form of capitalism, and the workers of the world are uniting with … us (aka the capitalists),  preferring the stability of US capitalism to the challenges of neo-capitalist communism.

There goes the neighborhood Mr. Lenin dude!

Pope on Global Economic Injustice

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I don’t think the Pope is the best source of inspiration about how to structure the world but I certainly respect the fact that’s he’s sincerely interested in alleviating suffering and is a very sharp fellow.    Here, the Pope has suggested we need major structural changes in the global economy to stem the tide of poverty.

My working assumption has been that globalization is, on balance, a hugely positive force as well as an inevitable one.   In simple terms I believe this because as I travel and look around me it is the highly capitalistic and globalized environments of the USA and western democracies that  provide for their people better than the “anti capitalistic, anti westers globalization” economies of Cuba, North Korea, etc.

Socialists suggest that our higher standards are a result of exploitation of the underdeveloped countries, but if this were true we’d tend to see a LOT more flow of goods and capital from, for example, Africa to the USA.   In fact we see that Canada and Europe, Japan and China are the huge trading and economic partners of the USA rather than the suffering countries.  In fact the striking thing about US interaction with the poor is that it’s non-existent rather than exploitative.

The Pope’s comments notwithstanding, clearly it seems we should be working to bring the poor into the globalization loop, rather than do things that might destabilize the capitalistic global goose that lays so many golden eggs.

We don’t have a crisis of economy, we have a crisis of indifference.

Let Freedom, and our precious Advertocracy, Ring! Cha-CHING!

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As a general rule I’m optimistic about the intentions of those who govern because I think in general good people go into politics with the sincere intention of making things better. That said, I favor the type of small government intended by the founders, who roll over in their graves which each election, staggered by the scale and sweep of modern governments here and in other “democracies” around the world.

Power was supposed to rest in the hearts and minds of an informed populace, yet we the people have chosen to distance ourselves from government to the degree it’s become an abstraction for most of us at the local, state, and national levels.

The outcome of this election clearly “proves” our system really does allow for significant and peaceful change. Yet it also suggests that our choices are confined to only two — and to my mind somewhat equally inadequate — visions of how we should step into our uncertain American future. Why can’t the pendulum swing sideways for a change rather than back and forth between these two inadequate visions of the right path for America?

Is “democracy” the best word to describe the American political experience? I thought I’d coined the term “Advertocracy” but found a nice Canadian article here about the concept back in 2004.

Clearly our elections, the outcomes of which seem increasingly to depend on razor thin margins, are best described as marketing productions rather than the product of a well-informed citizenry acting on democratic principles.  I’m not as alarmed by this as many “anti-advertising” people who fail to see that we all practice forms of advertising in one way or another whether we are telling a fish story about a life experience, beefing up a resume, talking up our favorite movie, or buying time on TV to say “Vote for Me!”. If you blog for your favorite candidate is that advertising? Of course it is.

Communication categories are breaking down quickly, I hope in favor of transparency. Transparent, full disclosure is a better way to measure integrity than “commercialization”, which we all practice to varying degrees of success.

Yet the fact remains that our election results are largely the product of last minute activity by those least concerned about the outcome based on their perceptions of last minute “sound bites” and largely negative ads. There has GOT to be a better way but in the meantime …

God Bless America, and God Bless Advertising.

Blog readers vs writers, redux VIII

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My Cicarelli test of a few weeks ago, where I blogged about the top Technorati search term, sent a few hundred  visits total over the two week period.    It’s not clear they were “extra” visits though I think they were, but it would take more analysis than I want to do to determine if placing high for that term meant I was lower ranked for the more common technology themes you’d find on this blog.

 

Technorati still shows that very  interesting imbalance between readers and writers.  In fact I’m again hard pressed to explain many of these top searches without looking them up:

Top Searches

  1. Larry Craig- Congressman accused of having gay affairs
  2. Edelman- Wal-Mart’s Ad Agency accused of fake blogging
  3. In Vodka Non Ve… ?
  4. Barney and Baghdad – Tom Friedman on GW Bush in Iraq
  5. Torbe ?
  6. Youtube- Video sharing bought by Google
  7. Google- HEY everybody knows this one
  8. Video – Generic, presumably YouTube
  9. Internet Explorer – Microsoft.  I’ve heard of them.
  10. Paginas Da Vida – ?
  11. Iraq – don’t go there
  12. Myspace-Social network extraordinaire
  13. Ipod- Apple’s Music Gadget
  14. Second Life- Virtual lives online, Congress may tax this online, somewhat nonexistent world.
  15. Project Runway.  Heidi Klum’s fashion hit

Top Tags –

See, these technorati top tags (below) are really different from the searches, reflecting the tech emphasis of most bloggers.   In fact  I find that I tend to blog about tech stuff in great disproportion to things I find more interesting simply because that’s the most common theme in the blog community and the conferences I blog about.    I’m reading and living that stuff more than, say, political stuff which in many ways is more intriguing.

Blogs and tech sort of “go together”.     I’d like that to change.

  1. wordpress
  2. WP
  3. youtube
  4. Bush
  5. iPod
  6. tagshare
  7. Microsoft
  8. Iraq
  9. web-20
  10. Advertising
  11. rss2
  12. Security
  13. showjournal
  14. China
  15. Yahoo

Iraq Death Study indicates a staggering new death toll but needs clarification

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Here’s an excellent summary of the very alarming new medical study on Iraq War deaths by the BBC’s Paul Reynolds. This study indicates that some 655,000 *more* people have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war than would have died without the war.

The study has really been bothering me because if true it means the toll from the war is far, far greater than even the harshest critics of the US Iraq policies have been suggesting. If true it defies reason even for the most Machiavellian nationalist to suggest that this scale of death is justified under the circumstances. If false it shows a remarkable lack of quality in a scientific, peer reviewed research project.

Reynold’s points out the key aspect of the study that is very confusing and must be reconciled by the researchers:

That supposes a huge failing by the Iraqi health ministry, a failing the report did not hint at, because it said that death certificates were readily available for most of the reported deaths in the households surveyed.

For the study’s conclusion to be valid it seem that the death certificates they say were produced 92% of the time [I’ve also seen 80% ] *were not counted* by the health ministry. This seems highly unlikely. If they were counted and the count reflects much lower numbers (as I think it does – trying to find that out) then the study is internally inconsistent. The study cannot note 92% certificated death among those interviewed and then reject certificates as a good proxy of actual deaths.

I hope Reynolds and others with key contacts are able to follow up on the Iraq report. If true, it’s a horrific finding of great historical significance. If false, it challenges our reliance on this type of high level, academically supervised research in other sectors.

Why this matters: Ironically, many people who hold strongly held beliefs both in favor and against the Iraq war are suggesting “hey, the numbers don’t really matter”. Those supporting the war think that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and collateral damage is something to sweep under the rug. Those against the war seem to feel that USA should pull out without much regard to the fate of Iraq or to the potentially catastrophic civil war that could follow a US withdrawl.

The death toll is hard to review but it is arguably the best measure of the costs of a war. Ignoring death as a key measure is fundamentally immoral.Also, suggestions to make decisions without taking count of the death toll are not only naive and irrational, they dangerously support the status quo of making decisions without enough information. The world is complex and many life and death decisions must be made every second. Precious lives and resources are being deployed daily to build hospitals, fight wars, teach, drill wells, etc.

Sadly, these allocation decisions are almost always made politically and emotionally rather than being rooted in a careful examination of the costs and the benefits of various courses of action. It’s human to make this mistake, but it’s algo tragic, and results in millions of unnecessary deaths, especially due to the lack of rational allocations in favor of health care in developing world.

Update:  This is an outstanding analysis by the Iraq Body Count, an organization very unsympathetic to the war, of why the findings must be viewed with skepticism.  If the Lancet and the study are to maintain credibility I would hope these concerns will be addressed.

Related links:

Iraq Body Count

BBC on Iraq Body Count project counts

Some Iraq Health Ministry Numbers. Lower than the new study would suggest.

USA Today: Iraq Health Ministry told to stop counting deaths in December 2003 but it appears they started again after this controversial decision which came after they were coming up with counts that are consistent with other studies but do not appear to support the huge tolls in the new study.

You call mainstream “news” Journalism? I call it an intellectual wasteland.

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Over at Jeff Jarvis‘, as well as all over the world, there’s a debate about how online news will affect offline news.
An anonymous comment notes:
>>news organizations AREN’T the ones keeping democracy alive. And maybe they haven’t done so for awhile<<

Exactly correct. “News organizations”, even at their best, reflect a highly commercialized, narrow focus on events of usually superficial and passing interest. More time’s been given to the Yankee pitcher plane crash than, say, the recent study suggesting an enormous death toll in Iraq or developments in Darfur.

Even politics is covered by almost all major outlets as scandal and personalities more than issues and substance. The stories of the century, often in the developing world and rooted in the life and death struggles facing *hundreds of millions* are eclipsed by Michael Jackson and Madonna. A notable exception has been Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN with an outstanding effort by that team to cover the African nightmares of war, famine, and AIDS.
The journalistic high road, for the most part, was left far in the distance decades ago when Ed Murrows were replaced by Geraldos and Bill O’Reillys.

Modern “journalism” … isn’t journalism. It’s a wasteland of superficiality and celebrity ruled by ratings, circulation, and money.

The internet may not make things better, but it can’t get much worse.

More on this story from:
Dave Winer
Dan Blank
BuzzMachine

Prediction: Google will buy Facebook for about 1.1 billion

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Irrational exuberance in the dot com shopping aisles?

No, it’s a chess game and Google’s winning….again.

I’m really starting to understand what seems like irrational exuberance on the part of Google and the major players. A Google aquisition of Facebook would be consistent with what Robert Scoble suggested is happening: Google is building a moat around it’s advertising business.

Steve Ballmer also suggested this notion in his recent BusinessWeek interview, ironically fretting that Google could monopolize the media business. Yikes, Steve would really run out of chairs then?

I can almost hear Ballmer to Schmidt:
“Hey Cowboy, there’s only enough room in this here internet for ONE monopoly you, you, you dirty monopolistic sonofabitch BASTARDS!”

Schmidt to Ballmer:
“HEY! DROP that chair and step AWAY from the Vista Browser!”

Google, with tons of cash to burn and a staggering market cap, has far less to lose in the high stakes internet poker game than Yahoo, Ebay, or even Microsoft. Microsoft is bigger than Google and theoretically richer, but unlike Google Microsoft has yet to figure out good ways to monetize their (improving) search services and (not improving) content services.

Ballmer’s juggling how to preserve his big ticket MS Office and Vista projects. Yahoo’s worried about plunging valuations and people leaving and the fact that a billion represents a lot more to them than it does to Google.   This is almost certainly complicating the Yahoo Facebook negotiations right now.  Ebay’s pretty fat and happy where they are. Meanwhile, Google can focus in laser-like fashion on keeping Google in the driver’s seat with it’s superb contextual advertising monetization.

The best defense is a good offense, so they are buying up properties to increase their control over the advertising space and keep those hundreds of millions of eyeballs out of the hands of MS and Yahoo.

Will this work? I say probably not for similar reasons it was stupid for Yahoo to buy Broadcast.com years ago. Video is junky and won’t monetize well. It’ll be more of an encumbrance to Google’s core competencies than an asset. But … things change, and in the meantime it’s fun to watch this high stakes game of chess unfold.

It’s a show you won’t see on YouTube.