Sarah Davies

Mark Kleiman and Andrew Sullivan are discussing who in America has moral authority. My immediate reaction on reading the headline was the Dalai Lama. He fills cheering stadiums to capacity in Seattle, while most Seattlites, I imagine, would as soon spit on the pope as look at him. However, Kleiman clarifies:

I took this to mean both “moral authority you are prepared to accept” and “enough public standing to be an actual force.” Tom Schelling, for example, has the intellectual force, the moral clarity, and the nerve, but not the notoriety, nor the impulse to seek it out.

That seems to square with the Dalai Lama more or less, but in reading some of the candidates I saw that “in America” is meant to mean “live in America” not “have influence in America.”

A few of the nominees so far:

• Barack Obama
• Bob Dylan
• John Lewis
• Jimmy Carter
• Ralph Nader
• Bill Clinton
• Colin Powell
• Jon Stewart
• Oprah Winfrey
• Al Gore
• Elie Wiesel
• Tom Brokaw
• Bill Gates
• Warren Buffett

(I linked two of them because I had never heard of them, and assuming my audience is roughly the same age/education level as I, you probably haven’t either)

I’m loathe to accept the moral authority of politicians or the richest people in the world. Of those listed, Jon Stewart would be the closest to having moral authority for me. Personally, I’d also include Dan Savage, Andrew Sullivan, and Cornell West, though none of them fulfill the public standing requirement, and obviously much of the country would disagree. I don’t think there is any one person who would fit the bill for such a divided country.

Thoughts?

Barry’s New Posse – Rigoberta Menchu Tum, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Betty Williams, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Jody Williams

I was shocked to find out this morning that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like some “unnamed white house aides,” my initial reaction was to check the date and make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Nominations closed only two weeks after he was sworn into office.

Last I checked, we’re mired in two wars that have no chance of success because we have no clue what success looks like, we have the highest military spending in the history of the world (over seven times as much as the next highest spender in 2008), and we’re refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama because we luuuurv China. Peace? Not so much.

However, if the intent of the award is not, in fact, to award achievement, but rather to advance the cause of global peace, then the question before the committee becomes “who has the most influence? who can do the most good with the blessing of the well-regarded Nobel name?”. And I don’t think that any of you, dear readers, don’t know the answer to that question.

My friend Barry has been having some trouble lately. It seems his spine, which was so straight and strong last November 4th, is bending and crumbling. I think he needs a good old fashioned left-coast pep talk. I keep telling him to come out to Seattle so I can read the definitions of the words “fierce” and “advocate” to him from my Oxford English Dictionary, but apparently he’s a busy man.

So I’ve booked my flight to Washington. I’ve tried repeatedly to make appointments, but his secretary doesn’t realize who I am, so that hasn’t panned out. However, I hear he frequents modern dance performances, so I’ll have to attend those regularly. Posh restaurants might be a good idea too.

I’ll be telecommuting to my day-job, and never fear, I’ll be back to Seattle in the fall. My partner Brian got some dead-end fellowship to work for a scrappy little nonprofit called Public Knowledge, so he’ll be tagging along. And I figured I’d better bring the geekling for cover when I’m attending children’s events on the lookout for Malia and Sasha.

So ping me if you’re in or around DC. I won’t be spending the whole time harassing my backwards elected officials. I do like some of them – like that dreamy Jim McDermott and his fantastic single-payer health care plan. I should bake him some cookies. I will be hopping around the east coast some while I’m out there, and you should be able to find me at local tech or storytelling events (BarCamp, PechaKucha, Ignite, etc.)

Bon Voyage!

Since when has due process been a “legal tradition“? I’m sorry, Mr. Glaberson, but this isn’t like dancing around a Maypole, or saying “trick or treat.” Using a gavel in courtrooms is a tradition. Locking up humans indefinitely without any hope of a trial is a gross violation of the very foundations on which our country has rested for the last 232 years.

Dawn Foster, BarCamp Portland Organizer
photo by Josh Bancroft under CC-BY-NC

I’ve been doing some reading for a discussion group that I attend in Seattle semi-regularly. They would call what we talk about “transhumanism” or “H+”, I would call it philosophy of technology, particularly with regard to the future.

This week we’re talking about leadership. To what degree do we (Gen Y) have it? To what degree do we need it? How does the increasing pace of technology affect our need for leadership?

I think this topic is particularly interesting in light of the Obama campaign. It was a true grassroots campaign. I would say that it had many distributed leaders, with one person (or maybe a few people) setting the goals and direction. That was without a doubt made possible by technology.

What Obama is doing now – listening – worries me slightly. Don’t we know by now what the problems and concerns of the American public are? I think it’s concerning that the campaign spent two years organizing a distributed leadership and engaged volunteers, and now, rather than switching those people’s goals immediately from electing someone to going out and solving the problems, we are asking them to have fireside chats with their neighbors about healthcare?

I have faith that Obama is a good leader for Generation Y, and I suspect that there may be other motives behind listening. For instance, a majority of the listening he is doing is online. Online communities skew vastly younger and more liberal than the rest of the country. So perhaps he is trying to compile evidence showing that Americans want liberal policies. Perhaps it is a diplomatic nod toward W, to not start picking up his mess before he’s done playing.

I think that the Obama campaign changed our concepts of efficient effective leadership to include Generation Y, and I see potential for the Obama administration to do the same. I hope all that innovation was not engineered to win an election, only to be abandoned when the real fight begins.

Then and only then are you allowed to run around town picking up your free coffee, ice cream, and vibrator.

If you’re not getting Harper’s Weekly Review in your inbox each Tuesday, you should be. Here are some gems from today’s:

Obama … claimed victory before a crowd of almost 20,000 people in St. Paul, Minnesota, knocking knuckles with his wife, Michelle, in a gesture known as “dap.” “It thrilled a lot of black folks,” said author Ta-Nehisi Coates. “He wears his cultural blackness all over the place. Barack is like Black Folks 2.0.”

After reading that amusing quote, I googled Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it turns out he’s got a pretty funny blog.

And regarding the McCain speech:

Pundits were surprised by McCain’s clumsy rhetoric, by his lack of teleprompter skills, and by the fact that he stood in front of an ugly green backdrop. “Content better than delivery,” said Karl Rove. “John McCain,” said Mort Kondracke of “Roll Call,” “sounded old.” A messenger delivered a handwritten note from McCain to Obama’s Chicago offices inviting the Democratic presidential nominee to a series of Goldwater-Kennedy-style debates. Bill Burton, an aide to Obama, told the messenger, “You know, you could have just emailed this.”

That’s a pretty decent summary of how I feel dealing with old people in the tech field sometimes…

For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit.

Hmm… I’ve felt that way too.

More than two dozen vandals who hosted a party inside Robert Frost’s former home were ordered to take a class on his poetry, taught by Frost’s biographer. “This is where Frost is relevant,” Jay Parini said to the class, speaking about Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” “You come to a path in the woods where you can say, ‘Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?’ Everything in life is choices.”

It’s like Harper’s is reading my mind!

Haley, an eight-year-old Indiana girl who had emergency surgery after eating more than 10 magnets and 20 steel balls, said she swallowed the pieces because they “looked like candy.” Her parents said they were confused about how she could have done such thing because “she gets A’s and B’s.” Scientists located the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm.

I don’t know about you, but those two pieces of news seem well paired to me.

Also in the realm of comical lefty news reviews, did you know there’s a free podcast of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me? I’m saving them up on my ipod for long car trips this summer. My six-year-old is going to hate me…

Correction: Said six-year-old would like it to be known that she is six and a half.

She finally gave up! I just watched the speech. She was saying all the right words, but she looked like someone had just told her she couldn’t have a pony.

I thought it was odd that she brought up “universal” healthcare for “every American” twice. That’s one of the few policies where she and Obama differed last time I checked. Obama’s healthcare plan is voluntary, so healthy Americans don’t have to join. Clinton’s would have forced those healthy Americans to join the plan to subsidize those with large healthcare bills. I actually prefered Clinton’s plan to Obama’s, because I’m a dirty socialist because those healthy Americans are merely subsidizing their future selves after an accident or the toll of old age, that’s hardly too big a burden, particularly when spread so wide. But it’s strange that she called on Obama to continue that fight, when he’s not fighting it in the first place.

One of the reasons I like Barack Obama is that he has class and grace. He does not engage in ad hominem attacks or accuse his adversaries of opposing him merely because they are biased. Clinton’s vision of the glass ceiling with eighteen million cracks in it was telling me, and all of my Obama-voting ilk that we are too shallow to have voted her down because of her policies and her style of campaign. I have heard Barack Obama say many times that he does not consider the nomination to be a fight for the presidency, but an opportunity for the American people to hear the policies debated and choose the policies they agree with. That’s change I can believe in.