Nuke 'm Hill

Control the Grassroots Conversation

nukemhill — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:58:29 +0000

I originally made this comment over at Ace’s blog, on this post. But I decided it was worth my own post. Ace makes this point, in the middle of a larger post, which is worth reading in total:

Further, not voting, and not getting out the maximum vote possible among conservatives in such districts, also loses out on all those important state legislature slots, those judgeships, those crucial Board of Elections postings, the AG, the Secretary of State…

My response was this:

This is critical. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’ve spoken with a few Tea Party organizers here in Maryland, and some seem to get it. Getting control on the local level is really the key to the process. And it needed to start years ago, given how close to the precipice we are as a country. At this point, it may be too late.

As it is, we need to organize at the local levels, run candidates for local boards, county seats, and state legislatures. Get people into positions where the machinery is controlled. Once we have our hands on the levers, we can bring much more integrity to the processes.

And then we work our way up the ladder. Win the gubernatorial races. Control the legislatures. Defeat the trolls who are our “representatives” in Congress. On both sides of the aisle.

But it has to happen from the ground up. We may very well take Congress back this Fall. But that will just lead to gridlock,which is not necessarily a bad thing; but we need to reverse a shitload of bad actions, and gridlock won’t allow for that. If we don’t reverse the badness coming our way, then the voters will either give up or vote new people in. And we have to have more fire power in place at the local levels to take advantage of the discontent.

This is a multi-year, if not decades long, fight. The only way we’re going to win it is at the grassroots level. We have to control the conversation at the local level.

I will say, in addition, that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Tea Party organizers around the country seem to understand this. I’ve heard about them taking over precincts, running for county seats, etc. It is happening. It needs to happen at warp speed, though. There is so much “bad politics” inertia built up over the years that it is going to take a tremendous amount of energy to overcome.

Hopefully, it’s not too late.

The biggest problem the Tea Party movement is facing, frankly, is the nature of its structure. In spite of the fact that there are several national-level organizations claiming to represent the movement as a whole, it is by its very nature a very localized phenomenon. Yes, there have been country-wide protests on particular days (tax day, 4th of July, 9/12, etc). But I think they’ve only been successful as a sum of the locally organized protests. There is not some huge monolithic national structure that runs the party from the top-down. It is inherently a bottom-up organization. Which is both its strength and its weakness. It’s a fabulous venue for people to express themselves, and feel like they’re making a difference, at the local level. But it’s difficult to enact anything on a national level. Herding cats and all that.

However, the advent of Facebook, Twitter, texting, etc., have lent a great deal of new strength and power to social movements, which the Tea Party is, make no mistake. Given the incredible ease with which people can instantly communicate and organize, the Tea Party, I think, can afford to exist as a loose confederation of many groups. Having national figureheads, like Palin or Beck, can be effective for giving facetime to our messages. As long as they’re truly speaking for the “movement”. On the other hand, I’m getting kinda tired of getting Yet Another Email from Joe the Plumber. He’s a great guy. But he really doesn’t speak for me.

But in the end, the power of the Tea Party lies in its ability to localize. It is the people on the streets, building their businesses, paying their taxes, making ends meet in this hideous economy, who make the difference. And it’s those individuals being engaged in their local politics that will ultimately make the difference. Or not, if they disengage.

That’s where the Tea Party holds all the power. Engaging those people. Getting them to educate themselves. Tracking the actions of the local politicians. Voting their consciences. Being in action.

Controlling the grassroots conversation.

Kafkatrapping

nukemhill — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:07:05 +0000

Wonderful post by Eric Raymond on what he has labelled as “Kafkatrapping”. Here’s the meat of his case:

Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism.

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap.

I see kafkatrapping all the time. And it is particularly infuriating. It’s not too long of an essay, but there are hundreds of comments. All, well worth reading. One almost throw-away comment by Eric is worth pointing out in particular:

The distinguishing feature of bad social-change movements is that they seek coercive power over people who are not themselves coercing. The distinguishing feature of good social-change movements is that they seek to limit and prevent coercion. The tragedy is that good social-change movements almost invariably get seized from inside by high-functioning sociopaths and turn into bad ones.

Entire books could be written on this. So often, legitimate movements are co-opted by people seeking nothing more or less than moral authority and power over others. It is almost always fear-based. It is almost always to suppress different thinkers. And it’s absolutely not about fighting and exposing hatred and prejudice. It is not about seeking racial/gender/sexual equality and harmony.

It’s about power. Not power to free. Power to control.

edit (2010-07-28): for clarity

Webmaster ‘netiquette

nukemhill — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:54:43 +0000

Had to come back for this. Stephen Green over at Vodkapundit has a blog post on nasty things webmasters do: Flash, popup ads, etc. Read the whole thing, including the comments. Some great stuff there. I think, in all my spare time, that I might put together at least a series of articles on this. There’s really no excuse for some of the crappy things webmasters put on their sites.

Good stuff.

AAPL chart with the big meltdown on May 6th

nukemhill — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:50:13 +0000

Love it. It’s so out-of-the-ordinary for a stock chart (well, not anymore; you’ll see the same for lots of the major players on that day).

Missing Links, June 2nd Edition

nukemhill — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:51:55 +0000

Some economics links:

The Use of Knowledge in Society, by Hayek.
The Ronald Coase Institute, online materials.
Gordon Tullock, The Fundamentals of Rent-Seeking, at the Lock Institute.
Armen A. Alchian biography, at the Library of Economics and Liberty.
Harold Demsetz, Barriers to Entry.
The Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian Simon.
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McCloskey.
“We’re Spending More Than Ever and It Doesn’t Work“, at The Heritage Foundation. Secretary of the Treasury for … FDR, in 1939. Yet, the Keynesians persist in their attempts to bankrupt the country.
The Freeman Online.
Why We Spend Too Much on Health Care, at The Heartland Institute. Downloadable PDF.
The Coming of the Fourth American Republic.
Watching The Herd–A Banker’s F. The stress test reveals some “issues”.

Focus and Concentration

nukemhill — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:01:39 +0000

Another Times article: The Science of Concentration. Here’s an extended quote from the later part:

Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”

She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.” [emphasis mine]

Her book is Rapt, at Penguin.com.

Pogue on What’s Really Important in Technology

nukemhill — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:40:14 +0000

NY Times article on what matters in technology–not what they tell you is important:

Camcorders. Out: Zoom; In: Wide-Angle.
SLRs. Out: Megapixels; In: Sensor-size.
Cellphones. Out: Coverage; In: Coverage. The problem is, the coverage claims by the various providers sucks, no matter what.
Computers. Out: Price; In: Value. (Gee, is he talking about Macs? Yep.)

Links for Selection Sunday

nukemhill — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:54:05 +0000

Go Terps!

Better control of Safari through Saft. We’ll see what happens with Safari 4.0.

I need to start researching Wikis for the SEVIS II working groups.

The case for due diligence in research. In particular, around climate research and the public availability of data and code used to perform analysis.

How Harding fought off the Depression of 1920-22. And it wasn’t through massive government expansion.

Privacy settings everyone should use in Facebook.

Normblog: One-eyed in Gaza. Once again, all of the international outrage has been reserved for Israel in its attempts to defend itself.

Reason magazine on Liberaltarianism. As I stated in a comment on VodkaPundit–why the hell should Libertarians be trying to tie themselves to either of the big parties? They’re both corrupt to the core. ”Sleeping with lepers only makes your penis fall off.” I think that’s one of my funniest lines ever. But that’s just me.

Steve McIntyre, at Climate Audit, has some choice words over the use of principal components in the temperature analysis of the Antarctic. I can’t say I have a real deep understanding of the concepts, but it seems to be related to eigenvalues (and eigenvectors), and the attempt to create “virtual” representatives of larger datasets. Here’s a long article on Principal Component Analysis, which is a huge deal in statistics and analysis. I need to read it. Here’s a book written by one of the big minds in the field.

The risk analysis formula that destroyed Wall Street. There’s an old adage–”if everyone else is doing it, you’d better start running in the opposite direction.” A definite truth for the current crisis. Everyone started using this formula to analyze their level of risk regarding the derivatives that were ubiquitous in the markets. Which pretty much made them all subject to any gaps or flaws that existed.

Boyd on Strategy.

Bloggingheads TV on the Stimulus.

Atlas is Shrugging

nukemhill — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:20:21 +0000

And Ayn Rand is rolling over in her grave:

Tim Neal of Miller County was shocked recently when he heard a radio program about a strategic report compiled by state and federal law enforcement agencies to combat terrorism.

Titled “The Modern Militia Movement,” the report is dated Feb. 20 and designed to help police identify militia members or domestic terrorists. Red flags outlined in the document include political bumper stickers such as those for U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, talk of conspiracy theories such as the plan for a mega-highway from Canada to Mexico and possession of subversive literature.

But when Neal read the report, he couldn’t help but think it described him. A military veteran and a delegate to the 2008 Missouri Republican state convention, he didn’t appreciate being lumped in with groups like the Neo-Nazis.

“I was going down the list and thinking, ‘Check, that’s me,’ ” he said. “I’m a Ron Paul supporter, check. I talk about the North American union, check. I’ve got the ‘America: Freedom to Fascism’ video loaned out to somebody right now. So that means I’m a domestic terrorist? Because I’ve got a video about the Federal Reserve?”

Wow. Just … wow.

We are marching down the path to fascism. And it is truly of Leftist origins.

I didn’t support Ron Paul. I think the guy’s a wack-job with respect to foreign policy. I absolutely agree with much of his domestic and economic policies though. And I certainly entertained voting Libertarian or Constitution Party last November. I have enormous concerns about the abrogation of our Constitution by government officials in the name of “internationalism”. Or worse, “domestic safety”.

Further, rumor has it that President Obama is voicing support for the ICC. That immediately puts our military at risk of being brought before international courts for “war crimes”, said crimes being determined by people most definitely not supporting our national self-interest. Which means that any military action contemplated by us will necessarily be viewed through the prism of international “political correctness”.

Where do we go from here, people?