Homer Simpson:

Can't someone else do it?

Frank Furedi:

Almost every single virtue that makes for public spirit is stigmatized by our society.

Call me old-fashioned, but when I was young you volunteered because you believed in something. You wanted to help people; you wanted, for instance, to give blood. You didn't do volunteering because it looked good on your CV. So, while volunteering certainly has a virtuous potential, it has been turned into a process that you adhere to much in the way that you clock on to a job.

Machiavelli and other humanists feared the professionalization of public duty. If you look at their writings, time and again they point to the danger of their city states relying on mercenaries instead of the services provided by citizens. From their perspective, the employment of mercenaries absolved the people from taking responsibility for the future of their community and served as instruments of the corrosion of public duty. That's more or less what the bureaucratization of public life has achieved today. It leads to a world where even family responsibility can become outsourced to 'carers'. In such circumstances the public can't do anything until a bureaucrat ticks the right box.

I think politicians are in a very difficult situation. It's not their fault.

What I do have a problem with is the fact we don't recognize that ordinary people have been silenced, that we've forced people to censor themselves in terms of what they actually believe and what they think.

Decius:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

David B. Sparks:

Isarithmic maps are essentially topographic or contour maps, wherein a third variable is represented in two dimensions by color, or by contour lines, indicating gradations. I had never seen such a map depicting political data -- certainly not election returns, and thus sought to create them.

The isarithmic depiction does an excellent job of highlighting several broad patterns in modern U.S. political history. First, it does a good job of depicting local "peaks" and "valleys" of partisan support clustered around urban areas. Comparison of these maps across time also underscores well-known political trends, but offers more resolution than state-level choropleths and greater clarity than county-level choropleths.

Interpolating support between elections, I have generated a video in which these maps shift smoothly from one election year to the next. The result is the story of 20th century presidential politics on a grand scale, condensed into a little over a minute of data visualization.

From the archive:

The "Gospel Temperance Railroad Map" is an example of an allegorical map.

The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election. We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population.

On Stefanie Posavec:

Posavec's approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces. It's not often that I am so thoroughly impressed by the depth of an artist's work, but somehow, for me, these pieces do it all.

On religion:

There are few sources of comprehensive data on church membership and religious affiliation for the United States. Perhaps the leading organization to address this gap is the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000. The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource.

John Jacobs:

The Department of Homeland Security must put into place evolving technology and procedures to protect our citizens. This is done in order to stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm. Anything less cannot and will not be tolerated.

Mark Foulon:

We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Timothy Naftali:

There's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them.

"People In Government":

The fine is mostly a deterrent so that terrorists cannot back out of a security check once it starts.

Jordy Yager:

TSA head John Pistole told reporters Monday that he rejected the advice of media aides who advised him to publicize the revised security measures before they took effect. Terrorist groups have been known to study the TSA's screening methods in an attempt to circumvent them, he said.

AQ:

Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you're a fundamentalist.

Bruce Schneier:

It's not much of a threat. As excess deaths go, it's just way down in the noise. More than 40,000 people die each year in car crashes. It's 9/11 every month. The threat is really overblown.

[But] you have to be seen as doing something, even if nothing is the smart thing to do. You can't be seen as doing nothing.

A Little Punk Staffer, commenting on the TSA hearings:

They shot themselves in the foot.

Michael Tomasky:

When the other side is shooting itself in the foot, stand close by and keep handing out bullets.

David Foster Wallace:

Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/1... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Charles P. Pierce:

Truth is what moves the needle. Fact is what sells.

Paul Krugman:

It's true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what's going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By "establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth" and taking "additional steps as needed." What does that mean? I have no idea.

Col. Lawrence Sellin:

I don't hate PowerPoint. In fact, I use it often. I do object to its use as a crutch or a replacement for serious thinking. Also, the overuse of PowerPoint can give the illusion of progress, when it is really only motion in the form of busy work. It can confuse the volume of information with the quality of information.

George Packer:

Last week, a local reporter asked the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey, why tax cuts should be expected to improve the economy when real incomes actually dropped after the original Bush tax cuts. According to the Times, Toomey "brushed aside" the question with the reply that he "did not believe the data." How convenient for him!

David Phillips:

Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's repeated.

Peter Norvig:

Using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

C. J. Chivers:

One day in spring 1968, after a skirmish in a gully near Khe Sanh, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod found an AK-47 beside a dead North Vietnamese soldier. He claimed it as his own. This was not a trophy. It was a tool.

A few weeks later, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod was walking across a forward operating base near Khe Sanh with his AK-47 slung across his back.

A lieutenant colonel stopped him.

"Gunny, why the hell are you carrying that?" he asked.

"Because it works," Elrod replied.

Slim Charles:

It's what war is, you know? Once you in it ... you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight!

The Main Driver

Alan K. Simpson:

It's time to lay it out on the table and let the American people start to chew on it.

Ken Doctor:

It's a box that, once you look inside, you can't not look.

Frank Rich, quoting Robert Frank:

When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we "lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase" for Wall Street riches.

Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva:

"Stocks for the long run," "Globalization is good." We repeat slogans to ourselves, because everyone else does. It is not so much bad luck we want to avoid as being on our own.

Peter Baker:

In the days leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton mocked Republicans for promising to balance the budget while cutting taxes, saying, "They're not serious." In our conversation, Obama used some variation of the phrase "they're not serious" four times in referring to Republican budget plans.

Nicholas Kristof:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.

CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001.

Eric Lipton, Mike McIntire, and Don Van Natta Jr.:

While the Chamber of Commerce boasts of representing more than three million businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors.

Noteworthy:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

Decius:

Your right to freedom of speech is an inalienable right. Even if you are rich. That's what an inalienable right is.

Tim Wu:

Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered up, and that surrender is born less of a deliberate decision than of going with the flow.

Mark Twain:

It is desire to be in the swim that makes political parties.

Clay Shirky:

Here's a 21st century question: What is Wikipedia made of?

We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can't, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.

This shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the former audience. It is also being driven by new news entrepreneurs, the men and women who want to build new kinds of sites and services that assume, rather than ignore, the free time and talents of the public.

This a change so varied and robust that we need to consider retiring the word "consumer" altogether, and treat consumption as simply one behavior of many that citizens can now engage in. The kinds of changes that are coming will dwarf those we've already seen, as citizen involvement stops being a set of special cases, and becomes a core to our conception of how news can be, and should be, part of the fabric of society.

Evgeny Morozov:

If anything, Iran's Twitter Revolution revealed the intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies.

Julian Assange:

We must understand the key generative structure of bad government. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity.

John B. Judis:

This election suggests to me that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced.

When America finally recovers, it is likely to re-create the older economic structure that got the country in trouble in the first place.

America needs bold and consistent leadership to get us out of the impasse we are in, but if this election says anything, it's that we're not going to get it over the next two or maybe even ten years.

Steve Coll:

A democracy is strengthened when its citizens are confronted with the raw truths that follow from the choices of their elected leaders. Whether WikiLeaks will prove over time to be a credible publisher of such truths is another question. If WikiLeaks cannot learn to think efficiently about its publishing choices, it will risk failure, not only because of the governmental opponents it has induced but also because so far it lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media.

Trevor Butterworth:

It is time to stop thinking about the Internet as a kind of liberation theology. The key issue facing everyone in the next decade is figuring out how to use the Internet and how to discern its societal benefits from its over-hyped Utopian promises.

Paul Krugman:

The whole focus on "focus" is, as I see it, an act of intellectual cowardice -- a way to criticize President Obama's record without explaining what you would have done differently.

John Allen Paulos:

If one considers any sufficiently large data set, meaningless coincidences will naturally arise: the best predictor of the value of the S&P 500 stock index in the early 1990s was butter production in Bangladesh.

John Sides:

If you had one thing, and one thing only, to predict which Democratic House incumbents would lose their seats in 2010, what would you take? The amount of money they raised? Their TARP vote? Their health care vote? Whether they had a Tea Party opponent? A Nazi reenactor opponent?

The best predictor by far is none of those. It is simply how Democratic their district is.

Michael Tomasky:

Democrats would probably do far better to invest $200 million in GOTV operations than in soul-searching, who-are-we projects.

Simon Johnson:

Let us hope the White House has learned from the midterms that there are dire electoral consequences when the president shrinks from directly confronting misleading ideas.

George Packer:

I see one of the ugliest political periods in my lifetime, which has seen a few.

Nancy Goldstein:

When Reagan said "There you go again" to Carter during the 1980 presidential debates, voters all over the country said, "At last." It didn't matter whether or not Carter's point about Medicare was legitimate: Reagan's shrugging, monosyllabic response tapped into people's frustration with professional politicians and complicated explanations.

Ian Morris:

When experts disagree so deeply, it usually means that we need fresh perspectives on a problem.

Michael Kinsley:

Joe Scarborough got it right in these pages last week when he argued that the 2010 elections, for all their passion and vitriol, are basically irrelevant. Some people are voting Tuesday for calorie-free chocolate cake, and some are voting for fat-free ice cream. Neither option is actually available. Neither party's candidates seriously addressed the national debt, except with proposals to make it even worse. Scarborough might have added that neither party's candidates had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (except that they "support our troops," a flabby formulation that leaves Americans killing and dying in faraway wars that politicians won't defend explicitly). Politicians are silent on both these issues for the same reason: There is no solution that American voters will tolerate. Why can't we have calorie-free chocolate cake? We're Americans!

Peter Baker:

The first refuge of any politician in trouble is that it's a communication problem, not a policy problem. If only I explained what I was doing better, the people would be more supportive. Which roughly translates to If only you people paid attention, you wouldn't be kicking me upside the head.

Martin Wolf:

Unfortunately, the Republicans have succeeded in persuading a large enough portion of the American public that if the patient had been left entirely alone, he would be in perfect health today. This is surely a fairy story. But voters naturally pay little attention to calamities averted. They focus only on how far experience falls short of what they desire. Mr Obama gains no credit for the former and much blame for the latter. His aspirational rhetoric no doubt worsened the disappointment.

The president's willingness to ask for too little was, it turns out, a huge strategic error. It allows his opponents to argue that the Democrats had what they wanted, which then failed. If the president had failed to get what he demanded, he could argue that the outcome was not his fault. With a political stalemate expected, further action will now be blocked. A lost decade seems quite likely. That would be a calamity for the US -- and the world.

A blogger at The Economist:

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rear-view mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Of course, the past ten years hasn't been lost in the way that the next ten years might be.

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

Michael Chabon:

If only there were a game, whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Dr. King, in 1963:

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Mark Ames:

A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit -- now it's been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners ... Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs -- but the main thing is, the Liberals don't look nearly as stupid as the other guys do.

Louis Menand:

Other people's culture wars always look ridiculous.

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

Ames:

That's it, that's all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay -- nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!

Noteworthy:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

Mark Twain:

It is desire to be in the swim that makes political parties.

Ames:

Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is "not as crazy or stupid as Republicans" is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation's highest value.

The Economist, after election night, 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Decius:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

Ames:

The Rally To Restore Vanity

On 30 September, MIT and Boston Review co-sponsored a debate on the subject of political speech and campaign finance, featuring Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lenz, John Bonifaz, Allison Hayward, and Stephen Ansolabehere. Video of the event is now available.

Lawrence Lessig at the debate:

We don't have a democracy where the Congress depends on people alone anymore.

People have increasingly been replaced by the funders ...

The problem in this Congress is in plain sight.

It is corruption, alive and increasingly sickening.

From a summary of the event:

Just when it seemed the corrosive influence of big money on American politics could not be greater, the Supreme Court gave corporations full license to exercise 'free speech' during campaign season. Renowned legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and his respondents debate the most effective response to the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which, Lessig claims, poses an imminent danger to our democracy.

Lawrence Lessig, in the Boston Review:

Washington is the kind of city where one never writes if one can call, never calls if one can speak, never speaks if one can nod, and never nods if one can wink.

There may be a quid. There may be a quo. But because the two are independent, there is no pro.

Decius in 2010, after the SCOTUS ruling in the Citizens United case:

The thing that sucks about freedom of speech is that rich people can afford more speech than you can.

You want an equalizer? Look to the Internet. The idea that in the era of the Internet we need more control over political speech than we did in the era of broadcast media is insane. People have other sources than television ads to decide who to vote for. We need only encourage them to use those sources.

Homer:

Can't someone else do it?

Decius in 2004:

In my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech.

Decius in 2010, after the launch of Wiki Voter Guide:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Democracy after Citizens United | MIT World