Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular
The Pragmatist
-
If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days,
"ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted
logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the
blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the
slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.
But privileging pragmatism over ideology, while perhaps understandable
in the wake of the Bush years, misses the point. For one thing, as Glenn
Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead
decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting
conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests. -
Principle is often pragmatism's guardian.
Particularly at times of crisis, when a polity succumbs to collective
madness or delusion, it is only the obstinate ideologues who refuse to
go along. Expediency may be a virtue in virtuous times, but it's a vice
in vicious ones.
There's another problem with the fetishization of the pragmatic, which
is the brute fact that, at some level, ideology is inescapable. Obama
may have told Steve Kroft that he's solely interested in "what works,"
but what constitutes "working" is not self-evident and, indeed, is
impossible to detach from some worldview and set of principles. Alan
Greenspan, of all people, made this point deftly while testifying before
Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee. Waxman asked Greenspan, "Do
you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish
you had not made?" To which Greenspan responded, "Well, remember that
what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal
with reality. Everyone has one. You have to--to exist, you need an
ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not." - 1 more annotations...
Overcoming Bias : Moral Rules Are To Check Power
Three recent papers from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology combine to tell an interesting tale: We fundamentally care about outcomes, but have rule morality to keep powerful folks from doing bad things to the rest of us.
Open the Future: The "End of Politics" Delusion
...there's a profound ignorance across the tech advocacy community of the importance of politics to human society. Politics means conflict, debate, and frustration. It also means choice. A world without politics is a world where disagreement is illegitimate. It's a world where your ability to choose your future -- to make your future -- has been taken away, whether you like it or not.
-
The core of the argument is straightforward: Politics is part of a healthy society -- it's what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It's not about partisanship, it's about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space -- they're symptoms of politics, not causes.
The War We Can't Win by Andrew Bacevich - Commonweal - A review of religion, politics and culture
Joe Bageant: The Bastards Never Die
A short history of why we eat oil, can't smoke pot, and why assault weapons are so expensive in our hour of need
Jane Hamsher: Did Barack Obama "Kill" the Progressive Movement?
But that's only part of the story of why the progressive movement languishes, and I agree with Milbank that it does. I love the sausage-making process much more than the bomb-throwing, and I find taking part in incremental victories on issues like social security, cramdown or oversight of the Fed more satisfying than thundering defeats. But I have come to understand that the institutional forces that prevent real change from happening are more formidable and more structural than I anticipated.
Paranoids have enemies too | TPMCafe
There is no lack of irrationality on offer in the behavior of those who make up "the market." And the consequences certainly entail chaos. But the historical record of bubbles is too long and repetitive to ascribe behavior to individual deficiencies...
What's missing from the meliorist framework of my fellow bloggers is the concept of Power. We're getting progressivism when we need populism.
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: How to Stage a Revolution
Social scientists have studied the nature of effective leadership for centuries with limited success. Physicists, on the other hand, are new to the party, which gives them a chance to nab some low-hanging fruit. Today, Hai-Tao Zhang at the University of Cambridge, in the U.K., and a few buddies say that they have grabbed a particularly juicy piece by revealing a key strategy of effective leadership.
Clio Bluestocking Tales: Abolition as a Self-Help Movement
More specifically, I find that the students who cling to this achievement narrative are unable to fully comprehend the material of the class. In understanding success and failure as a simple narrative based upon the character of an individual, they fail to understand the connection between the anti-slavery movement and the end of slavery.
TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | The politics of scepticism
-
It is my contention that scepticism should be more of a factor in public life. Unquestioning belief is currently pervading global culture, and unless we set about countering its advance there’s a very real danger of drifting into an age of dogma where belief-systems dictate what we should think and how we should live. Doubt is a positive phenomenon, because applying a criterion such as reasonable doubt to our beliefs, particularly our religious beliefs, rarely generates absolute certainty.
-
The theory of agonistic pluralism put forward by the post-Marxist theorist Chantal Mouffe, building on the work of the American political scientist William E. Connnolly, provides some interesting ideas in this context. The major objection that Mouffe has to democratic politics as usually practised in the West is that it lacks real oppositional content, being based instead on a system of collusion between the main parties involved in any given country (usually two, with the UK and the US as prime examples of that model). These parties are seen to have more in common than not, and the result is a politics based on compromise and consensus.
- 5 more annotations...
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project: A critical technology for controlling climate change
[0902.0878] The backbone of complex networks of corporations: Who is controlling whom?
We present a methodology to extract the backbone of complex networks in which the weight and direction of links, as well as non-topological state variables associated with nodes play a crucial role. This methodology can be applied in general to networks in which mass or energy is flowing along the links. In this paper, we show how the procedure enables us to address important questions in economics, namely how control and wealth is structured and concentrated across national markets. We report on the first cross-country investigation of ownership networks in the stock markets of 48 countries around the world. On the one hand, our analysis confirms results expected on the basis of the literature on corporate control, namely that in Anglo-Saxon countries control tends to be dispersed among numerous shareholders. On the other hand, it also reveals that in the same countries, control is found to be highly concentrated at the global level, namely lying in the hands of very few important shareholders. This result has previously not been reported, as it is not observable without the kind of network analysis developed here.
Does President Obama have the Motivation to Succeed? | Psychology Today Blogs
Obama's high power and only average achievement motivation suggests that he will continue to demonstrate political effectiveness and charisma. (Achievement motivation often leads to success in business, but usually is associated with frustration and failure in politics.)
How to Build (and Use) Thick Power - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
Obama's power is thick power. Thick power is a distant cousin of soft power. Like soft power, it is built by setting an example. When we can set an example that inspires others we are able to lead — and others follow.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in power
-
Iran
A focus on Iran's nuclear t...
Items: 85 | Visits: 387
Created by: liveinfreedom .
-
WordPress Plugins
A list of useful wordpress ...
Items: 6 | Visits: 134
Created by: Suzannah Porter
-
TEXT TO SPEECH
All the best sites harnessi...
Items: 36 | Visits: 147
Created by: eflclassroom 2.0
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo