From MLW, Greetings Booman Tribune


...

In light of Maryscott's birthday, and how all of blogland loves to get together in real life meatspace person, here is a key tape from the body language series from the Vid-ucate language instruction series. Understand what you are saying with your body.	I don't really need a reason for this one. Note, that is not a cartoon of the band... that IS the band. Welcome to the twenty first century...
(6 min 7 sec)	(4 min 33 sec)

We are part of a mighty exodus of the exiled returning home... the land of our freedom, a land of potential, America, yearning always to be free, awaits us now.  These last years we have marched back to her, and the way is long and grueling. Along the way we have picked up refugees, those that trusted the Republicans, who didn't recognize their state of exile as readily as we. Now they are we. They've realized.

Together we march Back to America. We reach the gates tomorrow, November 7. Yes, it's true, they have built a gate where citizens used to pass freely, and we will reach there tomorrow, our long journey to the gate is nearly complete. If we reach the gate and are rebuffed... we will not relent nor lose, victory will still be ours and shortly. We will still go forward, a mass of exiles stands before the gate and history says the gate will yield.

(from mlw)


Kos writes on John Cole's disillusionment... John still thinks of himself as a Republican in some nominal sense, and hates turning on "his party"... Kos sympathizes, having hit a similar transition around 1993, leaving his days as devout Republican youth behind, sort of.

Cole will obviously have to figure out for himself where he goes from here. He can decide to fight for his party and hopefully restore some sense of sanity in those quarters. He can join us. He speaks approvingly of Jim Webb. He can help us find more Jim Webbs (who has admitted, quite openly, that he would not exist as a candidate if it wasn't for the netroots). They are out there. He can tune out. Or become a dispassionate, "independent" observer of the political process.

I'm sorry, I know of no other way to read that.  More Jim Webbs. More Jim Webbs? Are out there? Come on in, the Jim Webbs are in here? The way I read, this is an admission that kos is part of a conservative wave we are seeing not only come to the Democrats for refuge, but coming also to turn it into the party they need refuge from. They want us to be the party the Republicans should have been! They don't understand the Republican illness is the failure of conservativism itself. Conservativism will lead to the same problem in any party endorsing it.  Stupid wars, a poisoned economy, environment.

Conservativism is not as it claims! It is a self contradictory lie... "low tax me-ism" leads to what you see in the Republian Party. Respect for authority leads to abuses like this!

Question Authority! That's not a conservative ideal, my man, but it's what we need.

Ok, I'm prone to idle (um, long term) philosophical questions, but this isn't one. This question is philosophical but also quite practical.  The question has material implication.

I'm curious, there is a "kos boycott" of Fox, a sort of hopeful idea that if no progressives go on fox then it goes away or is less damaging to Democrats somehow. This is kos' policy, and I believe that of many, if not all (I don't know) dKos front pagers. I don't know Atrios' policy, or that of other prominent bloggers.

Not everyone feels this way, I personally am sure they will merely hire actors to play "Democrats" if they have to.  They will promote their own Holmes' All Star Democratic Celebrity League.

But who here is willing to appear on Fox?  Are you a well respected liberal blogger?

Update [2006-2-27 16:9:17 by pyrrho]: To be clear, and I've mentioned in a comment, I really am interested to know WHICH of you would consider it, and which are in on a boycott, from the point of view that saying you would consider it means you MIGHT BE ASKED. I didn't emphasize this to begin because no, I'm not a fox producer, I'm not asking you, I am not in charge of booking, HOWEVER, it's that close and real, you may be asked. Fox is going to stay around, blogging is getting bigger and bigger, and other conservative outlets are going to want a piece of you too. Booman, you will be asked if you have not already. further: At dkos there is some objection to the idea of using the term "boycott"... which I am using loosely, or "policy" which again, I did not mean technically. Surely there is some term to decribe the status of this, eh, "feeling"?

It has long been my belief that you could not convince anyone online of anything. That's extreme, the sort of rule that admits a lot of little trivial exceptions, but in general it holds. The rise of the popular use of online communication and of the political blogosphere pretends to threaten my theory, and frankly, I don't know its real status — but from what I see things are unchanged and I suspect they will remain so for it is not a feature just of the net.

A great philosopher once made the point that he could not, in fact, really enlighten his readers, for the readers would not understand anything he said except that which they had already more or less formed in themselves. If he spoke an idea that made a reader think, "aha! yes!", that was a matter of him having expressed something such that the reader recognized his own belief.

But this is not to say that people don't change as a result of their reading and conversation, not at all, it's to put the emphasis on how and why they change and who does the changing, people change themselves.

I'm not into having a War on "Terror".  I don't object to war on a feeling per se, (well I do, but that's not it), it's just that I see it as a police matter, a global and serious police matter, but not like a "war". I'm trying to get to a part of history where war plays less and less a role, not a world where it's a metaphor for every project we tackle.

So I think we want this to be about "a global struggle against extremism" because it suits progressive goals in the matter. For one, it conveys the message right away, people know you are talking about this fight against terrorism, and yet the emphasis is on extremism.  It's a secret way to also say... "and we are not forgetting our own extremists".

It emphasizes that we are not fighting a religious sect, we are fighting "extremists", which are to be found in any religious sect in some number. It emphasizes what we really struggle with (or "fight against" if you like)... namely intolerance, namely the sort of dogmatic fantasies that lead to extremism. The lack of realism and a refusal to be reality based is behind extremism, and that is what we would be fighting, rather than dispossessed people, oppressed peoples. We would with rhetoric be bound to also fight the extremism of others (e.g. of the Saudi government, or the former Shah of Iran, etc) which provokes further extremism.

I despise elitism, and who doesn't?  Who endorses elitism? No one, practically, elitism in the closet currently, isn't it? It's traditionally NOT an American value, and yet, in reality, and in America, it flourishes around us like... something flourishing really well. Elitism is ubiquitous. So there must be some concept which is propping up elitism.

Some might say that those in power, the "elite" are merely holding onto power, and the people no longer believe they are actually, legitimately "elite"... that elitism has been beaten but they have momentum.  But no, elitism is alive and well and belief in it is spread far and strong, even among progressives.  It's ubiquitous, it needed only find some other terms, other framing, in order to survive the assault.

Elitism lives in the myth of meritocracy.

Specifically a man.

What makes a good man? I think I have good answer, but I don't want to give it because then this is a diary about my idea.

You know a good man, don't you, what's he like?

Can a good man have faults? can he lie?

He has  responsibilities, what are they to his family? What are they to his life choices, should he contribute to society? or is it also sufficient to simply not be a drain on society, but wait, certainly, some good men have been a drain on society, and it may well have been worth the price, if he truly was good. Was he?

My interest here is due to the fact that some of my best friends are men, I am one, and I am curious what makes a good man.

Firstly... I only engage Booman on this out of respect.  From my point of view we are using the classical philosophical/scientific/intellectual dialogue method. When Einstein said, "God Doesn't Play Dice" in criticism of Niels Bohr's theory, it was out of respect... he didn't debunk the nutty theories of just anyone. When Bohr said "don't tell God what to do"... the debate was very clarifying. The issues are still not really resolved, but the dispute is a part of the argument, helping to illuminate the dispute still.

Well... we're not Einstein and Bohr, but my point is... I take contrast with Booman because I think it's worth it. Booman's position is relevant, it's clear, it's intentional... it's well thought out (but mistaken), all good things in a position used to contrast its anti-pode.

Framing is about ideas, the ideas are everywhere, they are the engines behind what we say... to say "don't frame, just do" is to say "don't have an engine in your car... just go"... frames are the programs of the mind. To say, "don't frame" is to say, "don't run a word processing program... just word process".

You cannot speak without framing.

The simplest perspective to have on framing is to understand that frames are made of the metaphor we think with, from which we draw conclusions. Asking progressive to frame is asking us to think about which metaphors we use, to know why we use them, to create new metaphors and refine those we use, and to never use metaphors rigged against us. That last one is important, the advice is to recognize rigged, dishonest metaphors, when we see them.

Booman is actually quite good at this! So I have sought out the frames in his good work at dkos debunking the "defense" of the WH by the WSJ.

Benford's Law.  Here it is described at Wolfram's Mathworld... a great resource on mathematical concepts:  Benford's Law.

In short, it turns out there is an unintuitive distribution of digits in the FIRST DIGIT of random numbers, especially justified in the case of counting up to a random number, such as a number of votes.  It's weird, but makes sense... the digit one has a kind of head start on appearing in the number... and the likelihood that a first digit is a 1 in a random number is ~30%, not the ~11% you would think from the fact that 1 is one of nine possible values for a first digit.

Sorry, this is probably not going to be a good idea for a diary.

But twice I came here to read a diary that I hear Armando posted here, or actually, more to read the comments which have been referred to.  I'm burnt out on this too but I'm still sure that it's important and goes beyond blogland and into the roots of our difficulties with keeping our progressive coalition strong the last few decades.

The second time I came I realized... oh yeah, I didn't read that because it was deleted/missing.  

Does anyone have a link... Armando's Booman Tribune diary stack is empty, so I guess it may have been deleted?  Is it under another user... or what?

Honestly, politics 101: you make a coalition of compatible interests. You forge bonds of understanding for the concerns of others.  I mean, that's in ANY political alliance, but in a progressive alliance, especially so, because ours is a philosophy of compassion. We know that if you know where someone is coming from, you can much better live and work together. Don't we?

The problem isn't single issue voters, it's "Zero Issue Voters". They just want to win, but what can they do for me? All they can offer is just what Republicans offer but less so. I get 97% of Republican judges confirmed instead of 100%...

For me the real struggle is between:

• those that want to let other people do their own thing,
  
• and people that want to control other people.

That is the basic conflict for me.  

I know that there are other more important things from a material perspective but these all follow logically from letting people do their own thing.  The word follow is misleading because in fact the examples precede the logical connection, which is deduced from the evidence at hand.  There is a connection between having the right to liberty,  

The issue of labor is people doing what they think is best, they want more control of the workplace because of the time they spend there.  That's the right to do your own thing... wherever you are, however you are spending your time, because it is your time and you have a finite supply of it.