Thursday, December 20, 2012

Statistics: the ecological fallacy

Apparently I'm putting statistics on this blog.  Maybe this will turn out to be a modeling blog; it kind of feels like it already.

The Ecological Fallacy is attributing features at the individual level based on statistics and trends at the group level.  It's not always easy to recognize.

Review of Nate Silver's book

Wow, this is a great review - of how Silver overestimates his own expertise in the financial and medical fields, essentially by failing to model the context in which numerical models are originated and used.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Why Coke cost a nickel for 70 years

The answer: the original founder didn't think bottled Coke would catch on, so when a bunch of lawyers made a proposal to buy syrup at a given price forever, he took it just to get them out of his office.

Bottled Coke took off, and Coke couldn't raise the price of syrup - but it could put the nickel price prominently in every ad it published.  It took the syrup buyers 70 years to capitulate.

The real war within the GOP

Nice insight: Limbaugh does better financially if the Republicans lose.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Politics and depression


God grant me the courage to change what I can,
the serenity to accept what I can't,and the wisdom to bury the bodies where they won't be found.
I started the Politics and Propaganda blog this election season in order to write some thinking down about that morass of politics, economics, propaganda, religion, and so on that I lump together in my head as "how society works".  This allowed me to ignore it and get on with paying work, and the programming that I expect to improve my life.

There is evil in the world.  It causes me considerable pain to see people I love and respect eaten by it, knowing that there isn't one single thing I can do about it. Hence the second part of the title of this note: depression.

I've struggled with depression since adolescence.  It's a useless way to live. It makes everything feel insurmountable, sometimes even taking the next breath. You can game yourself into a manic state and plow through things, but in the end you slump back down into the darkness.

The only way to avoid depression is to deflect it.  You focus on things you can do, things you know you're good at, and you just ... watch the depression go away.  It does, every time, but it's like relaxing your leg when you wake up with a charlie horse - it doesn't feel natural or even possible until after the fact.  And the cramp still hurts for the rest of the day.

Politics is something I can't do.  Encountering wrongness at the personal level is just too much for me.  Like a leg cramp, where the muscles knot up and fight themselves, my emotions and ideas snarl together into a morass.  The outrage is just too painful, and it drains away my life.  A single off-hand remark from someone I respect can kill a day or more, and I can't afford it.

It's my hope that the ideas I explore on this blog will someday allow me to comprehend politics at a scientific level - an automated level - safely removed from the personal conflict that I have such difficulty with.  Because there really is evil in the world, and I see it as my duty to counter it in whatever small way I can.

But in the meantime, when somebody is wrong on the Internet, I'm just going to let it go.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Donald Trump and a tax on China

Today I learned Donald Trump thinks the problem with the American economy is insufficient protectionism.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

God's eternal Word

In 1970, God's Eternal Word still said that abortion was OK.  In the late 80's, though, Jerry Falwell decided God's Eternal Word said that life begins at birth - and now, people believe that because "it's in the Bible".

Which, of course, it isn't.

Cretaceous shorelines and voting

Cool post!  The upshot: during the Cretaceous, an arc of what is now the Deep South was the shore of a warm, shallow sea, and plankton died there for millions of years, settled to the bottom, and became chalk.  The result: some of the most fertile soil in North America. So fertile that cotton yields were enormous, so plantation owners needed a lot of slaves to harvest it.  And their descendants are still there, and voted Obama this week.

I love this kind of analysis.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Karl Rove's demise du jour

Karl Rove really didn't want to believe the data guys at Fox (! Fox has data guys?!?) who called Ohio for Obama last night - and was soundly schooled.  This is interesting.  Rove is a pundit at Fox while simultaneously being a mover and shaker in the election itself, and he talks a fast game that has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with narrative.

Rove gets narrative.  He swims in a sea of narrative.  And since the Clinton era, Rove's narrative has driven this country, so it is truly amazing to me that the data guys, of all people, showed him up.  It makes me hope that maybe America's love affair with vacuous narrative, instead of the actual study and science that made us great, may be waning.

A guy can hope.

Anyway - the article at Alternet that sparked this musing.

Monday, November 5, 2012

The Long Con

A fantastic post by Rick Perlstein at the Baffler: The Long Con looks at the Republican snake-oil machine - in an incredibly literal sense.  They really have no shame.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

The Forer effect

The Forer effect: people assign high accuracy to descriptions of their personality that they perceive as tailored just for them - but that are actually general enough to describe anybody.

The fantasy world of the persecuted rich

Two for one!  New York Magazine on the fantasy world proper (with statistics!) and AlterNet, bemoaning the ability of the rich to forget the context in which they were able to become rich.

So how did the rich get this isolated from reality?  Self-propaganda?

Speaking of moochers

How did the GOP come up with that, anyway?  Michael Tomasky thinks he knows.

Social programs for the wealthy

Washington Monthly has an article on tax moochers I'd like to finish reading.

American culture war

...can be construed as a conflict between Yankee Puritan nobility and Barbadian Southern nobility.  That's pretty interesting!  Two books to read:

  • Albion's Seed - examines four British cultures in America; the first volume of a new history of America
  • American Nations - a more detailed analysis of eleven regional American cultures.
Both sound utterly fascinating; neither is available in ebook format.

Friday, October 26, 2012

CS researcher warns of social media manipulation

(Film at 11).  [here]  The interesting point being that people tend to believe things they read on the Internet.

Which is mind-boggling, but apparently true.

Monday, October 22, 2012

Workplace electioneering

Citizen's United permits employers to recommend candidates to their employees, another oddity of the American system of democracy.  The problem is that employers lie.  Take a look at the flyer the US Chamber of Commerce has written about Elizabeth Warren!

Friday, October 19, 2012

Anatomy of a Hoax

Now here's a fascinating little post - some guy, who has apparently elected to remain nameless, did a model of a non-existent phone and uploaded the resulting generated pics to Picasa.  Then did nothing else at all.

Within a few days, over 500 articles were written and the pics were finally debunked.

As he says in conclusion (and I quote this much really only because I fear it might go away):
After the immediately observable stuff, I began thinking about these news articles as products of individual journalists. As of now, there are around 1,000 news articles on the “Sony Nexus X”. Let’s say it takes an extremely unscientific average of 15 minutes to research, write, edit, and publish this kind of article;that’s 15,000 minutes or 250 hours of human capital that I mobilized by sitting here and moving my hands a bit on a Sunday evening. This doesn’t even take into account the number of non-journalists who devoted time to reading about, discussing, or debunking this story (most likely during work hours). Let me reiterate: I, an individual with no previous worldwide recognition save for a frontpage Reddit post, managed to alter the behavior of people in Russia, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Italy within the course of 24 hours, all from the comfort of my home while exerting next to no effort. If you are nothing short of absolutely blown the fuck away by this, then the music died for you a long time ago.
So next time you want to talk about a tech bubble, Ms. Tech Writer, or decide to invest tens of millions in another “safe” hipster filter photo app, Mr. VC, stop and really think about the amazing things we take for granted. Casual acceptance of the products of human genius keeps us all thinking small. The internet is still in its infancy. The mobile space is a goddamn zygote. Stand tall, Mr. Dev and Mrs. Entrepreneur; don’t be discouraged. I get it, you’re burnt out, but there’s so much more we can do in this space. We can all make our marks, make some money, and change peoples’ lives.And finally, this whole affair served as yet another data point to validate what I already know. Human action cannot be predicted. People are not a series of inputs and outputs that a masterful technocrat can manipulate to any degree of accuracy. This exercise was a shot in the dark. Those images could have remained undiscovered or passed off as fakes immediately. What if I refrained from uploading them at all? The over 250 hours of skilled labor that I diverted to the coverage of this “story” could have gone to more productive uses. Thousands of tech geeks the world over would have done something else with their time.
Many people have this unrealistic expectation that relatively small groups of intelligent people can and should use whatever tools they have at their disposal to manage the whole of society. The economy, which is essentially a word used to describe the various dynamics of human interactions, is too complex to model or simulate with the end-goal of producing actionable policy recommendations. This insignificant non-news event had a disproportionate effect on the outside world. Imagine what kind of terrible damage one can do by artificially diverting resources from one sector of the economy to another through legislative fiat? We all know what happened when corn became a subsidized crop: High fructose corn syrup supplanted cane sugar as the dominant sweetener. This was not by design, but simply an unpredictable result of artificially tampering with the economy. A committee of the brightest economic minds in the history of the world could never have predicted the Internet, Facebook, the rise of the mobile app ecosystem, or Bieber Fever. Yeah, all of this from a stupid hoax.

tl;dr - Gradual seriousness.


Amen.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Venice's downfall: La Serratura

When Venice's ruling class closed their society to upstart newcomers in the 15 century, it began a slow process of death for their society.  Interesting Sunday piece in the Times.

Friday, October 5, 2012

Working class uprising

A nice historical article on the largest working class uprising in American history - and why it's not taught in schools.  Ever.  I'd certainly never heard of it.

The economics of stolen bicycles

Economics.  It's so cool.

The untouchable economy

The Atlantic weighs in on a trend that ... well, we'll see if they're right, that younger Americans are thinking more entrepreneurially in reaction to and rejection of consumer culture.

Maybe.  Interesting thought, though.

Another jewel from Steven Barnes

I should just post this somewhere where I'll see it every day:
I think we've all seen this before. In writing: people who deliberately follow pathways their mentors have told them will cause failure (like writing huge novels without ever having published a short story. You can burn up YEARS with this one.)
In relationships: following old, negative patterns of behavior, or refusing to pay attention to indications that a prospective partner is pure poison. (Prospective partner is pure poison. Say that five times fast!)
In finances: skipping your Quicken sessions, or refusing to balance your checkbook. Not answering creditors' calls. Continuing to spend money on consumer items that depreciate instantly.
In other words, you know what you should do, you are afraid to do it, so you take actions that look kinda sorta like forward progress, but are actually designed to create the illusion "I'm trying! I'm writing/exercising/working/dating but the world just isn't cooperating!"
Until you are certain that your unconscious supports your external goals, you are operating with your brakes on, and the results can be dreadful...
Lying to yourself and others.
Breaking promises to yourself and others.
Distorting incoming or ourgoing information.
"Forgetting" important details of your process.
Vague, unfocussed fears and negative emotions.
Procrastination.

Any and all of these can be symptoms of "fighting" internally, competing beliefs and emotions. And they can sabotage your life.

1) Where do you recognize the above behaviors in your own life?
2) Where have you seen them in other people?
3) Where have you seen them create dysfunction within organizations or political bodies (conflicting goals leading to gridlock)

15 styles of distorted thinking

Steven Barnes shared an interesting post on Facebook last week that struck me as useful.  As are so many useful things on Facebook, though, it's a graphic. So I'm retyping it here.  It's 15 styles of distorted thinking - very germane to a study of political rhetoric.

  1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.
  2. Polarized thinking: Things are black and white, good or bad. You have to be perfect or you're a failure. There is no middle ground.
  3. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again.
  4. Mind reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you.
  5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start "what ifs". What if tragedy strikes? What if it happens to you?
  6. Personalization: Thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who's smarter, better looking, etc.
  7. Control fallacies: If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you.
  8. Fallacy of fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair, but other people won't agree with you.
  9. Blaming: You hold other people responsible for you pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem or reversal.
  10. Should: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you and you feel guilty if you violate the rules.
  11. Emotional reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true - automatically. If you feel stupid and boring, then you must be stupid and boring.
  12. Fallacy of change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure them or cajole them enough.l You need to change people because your hope for happiness seems to depend entirely on them.
  13. Global labeling: You generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment.
  14. Being right: You are continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness.
  15. Heaven's reward fallacy: You expect all your sacrifices and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You feel bitter when the reward doesn't come.

Revolt of the Rich

The American Conservative published a new article by Mike Lofgren that is once again well worth the reading: Revolt of the Rich.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Ecological consequences of economic pressures

Human society is a complex system that consists not only of the cognitive structures we all share, but the biological substrate it runs on - biological and ecological systems are, of course, just as complex (maybe more so) than the politics and propaganda this blog is nominally about.

So ... that's a long way to say that biology is going into this blog, too.  Really, it's "complex systems" I'm looking at.

But this post is about the ecological consequences of economic pressures.  Specifically, Colony Collapse Disorder, the disappearance of about a third of the commercially operated beehives in the States over the past few years which, new studies seem to imply, looks very much due to neonicotinoids, a class of pesticide sold by Bayer.

As usual, I don't have time to do this justice.  It's been a busy week at home and I'm behind deadline on the paying work.  So ... TODO: patch this up.  The interlocking complexities are fascinating.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Look who parks their cash at Bain

OK, here's an op-ed from the NY Post that a friend posted to Facebook.  It lists organizations who invest in Bain Capital - as evidence of the hypocrisy of liberals.

This post will change as time goes on, because I want to try to dissect every meaning I can find in this article - even, and especially, things that aren't stated directly but rather implied.  This is a sort of a test run.  Later I can attempt to derive a systematic approach; this one is just going to be informal.  And today, of course, it's just a placemarker anyway.  It's midnight here in Budapest and I've had a long day.

It's just 585 words, 130 of which are a list of organizations (i.e. data).  That leaves us only 455 words of politically charged text to dissect, plus the seven-word title.  You'd think that would be short, but I'm guessing it won't be, once we really tear it open.  Political text is fractal in nature.

I plan to run this by some other people later.  Especially if you're conservative, if you're reading this, your input will be extremely valuable.  Since I'm not conservative (well - that's complicated), there will be things I miss.

In the end, I very much doubt that a blog will be the right place to do this kind of analysis.  This is more of a semantic database thing - unfortunately, the only common tool I know of that meets that description is a Wiki, which I suspect is too coarse-grained for this purpose.  So I'll probably end up having to write one.

A short note on "implied meaning", which I slid right past up there.  Language consists of two sets of "propositions" (logical jargon that mostly means "statements").  Well, that's oversimplifying.  But by and large, there are the statements on the surface (in the article, "Democrats convened in Charlotte" is a phrase that states a fact - the Democrats demonstrably convened in Charlotte and the vast majority of people are probably not going to dispute that), and the implied statements.  An implication in this article might be "will double down on their claim", which means a couple of things: 1. They claim a state of affairs that the author implies is not true (otherwise it wouldn't be a "claim", it would be an insight, maybe, or their knowledge), and 2. they are playing it like a game, "doubling down" meaning not only the gamesmanship, but also the fact that they are embattled with this claim (implying the Forces of Good who are successfully showing their claim to be false) but stubbornly pushing it through because it's all they got, thin reed that it is.

That's 85 words I just wrote about 6 words of the article, and it's not even all I can pick out of it.  But my point here is not that the implied meaning is voluminous - but that it is by its very nature controversial.  Other people will see other implications (I think - maybe not here, but they certainly must elsewhere).  So really, there should be a way to indicate who drew a particular implication and what that shows about the lens that person is reading through.

It's probably not even doable, is it?

A pause for breath

OK, so that's the list of links that have been piling up lately with nowhere to post them.  And I appear to have just outlined about four research programs that could each consume a lifetime, to wit:
  • Semantic analysis of political writings using an as-yet-unwritten NLP tool
  • A catalog of ideas permeating our present-day society: what are they, where do they come from, who believes them, who denies them?  Along with a catalog of organizations (formal or not) and pundits, I suppose.
  • Menagerie and simulation of alternative economic systems
  • Declarative description of organizations, including business models
And that's just the academic research - it entirely leaves out the construction of a new political movement based on improving the world by rejuvenating democracy and a sense of community!

So I leave you on that note, and get back to work.

Distributism

Distributism ... hm.  How to put this?  As economic/social theory, distributism ain't half bad.  Distributism, and I quote Wikipedia here, posits that "property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or by an elite of wealthy property owners (laissez-faire capitalism)."

The only problem is that existing distributists appear to be crazy people, judging by the first few Google results.  But an examination of possible alternative economic systems would be an interesting thing to contemplate, wouldn't it?

Open-source tools for government

More of our existing, offline social mechanisms are being reflected in software, some open-source.  That has some relevance for this blog as well.  Madison is a collaborative document-preparation tool that can be used to agree on a statement or law in a decentralized fashion; it remains to be seen how helpful it will be in fomenting democracy, but I've long thought this was a good place to start.

Open-source governance tools are another overlap with the programming blog, of course, under open government (but the tag is relatively new).  The recent SOPA episode galvanized a lot of people in the open-source community to pay attention to government.

Zynga

And then there's Farmville, or Scamville, as Michael Arrington called it in 2009.  He sketched out an entire ecosystem of empty gamification on Facebook, most of which is still happily chugging along as I write this - although this particular form seems possibly to have run its course with Zynga's troubles on the stock market.  (But here's another article just this week describing Farmville as a game that has simply dispensed with gamification in favor of simply being a straight-up virus.)

The point of including all that is that Zynga is exploiting systems that come perilously close to ... well, society.  And their social games do, in fact, act like biological and metaphorical viruses.  They're a pure form of simple meme. The fact that they made Zynga boatloads of money is what drew my attention (along with the entire industry, giving rise to the term "gamification" in the first place), but the phenomenon is in itself interesting.

A GOP operative who left the cult

Oy.  What a title - that's Truthout for you.

The article, though, is seminal.  Again, no time to do it even cursory justice; I'll come back to it later.

Joining the reality-based community

Back to politics per se for a bit.

Back in the Bush days, a Bush functionary famously denigrated liberals as the "reality-based community" ([wikipedia], and it turns out this was later attributed to none other than Karl Rove).  His meaning was that he perceived Democrats as looking around, discovering the facts, and adjusting their actions accordingly, while the (to him heroic) Republicans instead defined their own reality and took actions in accordance with that reality, thereby making that reality ... reality.

In retrospect - and this is referenced in the article I'm linking here - this didn't work out well, which is why it's generally considered saner to, you know, stay within reality to start with.  Forging reality de novo turned out simply to result in a lot of organizational incompetence.

This article on HuffPo is one man's journey from Chicagoland Lugar-like Republicanism to the realization that the GOP has gone off the deep end.  It's worth reading and re-reading.

Bubbles on the Internet

"The Internet is not free." Eli Pariser talks about the fact that Google's search results are increasingly targeted to what Google thinks you want to see.  Similarly, our blogrolls all point to places we feel more comfortable.

Instead of being exposed to the views of random strangers on the street simply by virtue of the fact that we all share a common physical space, the Internet is increasingly making it possible for us simply to listen only to those people we already agree with.

That's a bubble.  And that belongs in this blog.

Business models

Business models already have a posting home in my programming blog (I suppose because I tend to read things about programming in the context of startup culture), but they are certainly welcome here as well.  A business model is a declarative description of an organization and how it fits into its social and economic context.  So business models are kind of a subset of a more general organizational descriptive mechanism that I'd like to explore.

In the programming blog, business model things are filed under Startup::Declarative.

Austerity versus stimulus: procyclicalism

Then there's economics.  I keep running across economics posts like this one revealing that America always seems to be pulling the wrong direction when it comes to austerity versus profligacy - and somehow they need to go into the pot as well.

Economics has the advantage of having obvious ways to draw graphs.  This makes it easier to follow, when it's not trying to be obscure.

Pedestrianism

I'm not even sure this one belongs here.  It's the story of Edward Payson Weston, once America's most famous pedestrian.  Pedestrianism, you see, was a public sport in 1890 in much the same way marathons or basketball are today.  And that's weird.

It's partly germane here because it demonstrates that societies can change significantly over time, and yet that the same sort of mechanisms are always at work (the fad, or something).  This is surely not a groundbreaking insight, but ... well, it goes into the broth.

Second recent link: the death of the American university

I'd like to come back to some of these articles and think about them in greater depth, but here's a good one about how to destroy the American university system in five (completed) steps.  ([academeblog]) Those steps are: 1. Defund public education; 2. Deprofessionalize and impoverish professors; 3. Move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance; 4. Move in corporate culture and corporate money; 5. Destroy the students.

Mission accomplished!

There's a lot of thought in that post.  I'm not accustomed to analyzing things like this and then writing meaningful things about them, so I'm going to have to ease into it.  But I can say a few reasons (beyond the personal) that it caught my attention.

First, it addresses what amounts to a conspiracy at the highest levels of government and society.  That's interesting.  What evidence can we trace?  What meaning has this group injected into the meme pool of America?  We know some of it: it ties into universities being "liberal" in the sense of "dangerous".  These are the things I'd like to explore, in short words and simple statements.  I can almost envision a kind of database or Lexicon of .. terms?  Concepts?  Memes that aren't just pictures of cats with captions on them?

What popular opinions and statements can track the changes?  We can also model the effects economically and sociologically.  People have to have standard tools for this kind of modeling that I should learn about.

Incidentally, Al Jazeera has another short piece on the plight of the adjunct - not only are they cut out of life benefits like health care, job security, and pensions, but also from professional benefits such as conference participation that is essential to their continued existence as academics.  None of these facts are in dispute, yet drawing attention to them brands you an Unserious Thinker.  Why is that?  Why can such a cutting indictment of American life only appear in Al Jazeera?

Again - what I would like to do with this article, like others, is to analyze it thoroughly at a semantic level.  Map out precisely all the facts and assertations, and group them into politically salient ones, and politically irrelevant ones.  (I'm not terribly interested in the fact that an anthropological association met in Quebec, for example - but it's an assertion in the document and so it should appear in the analysis.)

This part of The Plan, insofar as there is a Plan, is a pretty straightforward, if ambitious, NLP task.  It is amenable in part to automation, and that is certainly one thing I hope to explore going forward.

With that, I leave the topic of academia for the time being.  I'll be coming back to it.

Politics as psychopathology

Here's a different take ([n+1 magazine]:
If once upon a time people imagined a public sphere of more or less reasonable and honorable people leading one another toward ever greater reasonableness, this entailed a tacit anthropological specification: namely, that the citizens of a liberal democracy belong, as it were, to the same tribe or people. Not so today, when the object of politics is to place your opponent in another and non-American tribe entirely, defined by its repugnant customs and insane beliefs.
That hits home.

Politics and propaganda

The purpose of this blog is to aggregate the articles and thoughts I've been finding/having related to ... I'm not entirely sure yet.  The behavior of humans in large groups, I think.  Or small groups.  Sociology, politics, economics, propaganda, organizational management, anthropology.  Even biology, evolution, and systems thinking in general.

All these things fascinate me, but I haven't had a good place to blog about them, and today I had the epiphany that really, all of my academic interests have some ineffable core in common.  Programming, NLP, and machine learning (at my semantic programming blog), human language, and ... all this stuff here.  It's all the same thing: intelligent or adaptive systems, or something along those lines.

But then there's the macro end.  It's an election year.  Americans are at one another's throats in an election year in the best of times, but these are not the best of times.  We are fragmented, isolated - divided.  This benefits certain elements of society, and that benefit can be documented.  The ways in which we fool ourselves about their - and our - complicity can be understood.

I remain convinced that we can design a better world - by understanding the world we live in.  That, under some weird American calculus, makes me a liberal.  Unfortunately, the most vocal and influential Americans aren't.  The people I grew up with aren't.  Large parts of my family aren't.  And many of my friends aren't.

One friend in particular accused me of hit-and-running in political debates on Facebook. And you know, she's 100% right - I am so programmed to assume I should keep quiet about my political and religious views that I simply engage in drive-by propaganda, then leave a thread, never to return lest I get too angry at the responses.

That's stupid - so I started thinking about the meaning of political speech.  About the propaganda that permeates current American "discourse", as though what we have were some kind of real discourse instead of a degenerate shouting match of empty slogans and dog whistles.  It all has meaning, though, buried though it may be.  And I'm running into some interesting thinking about it.

I have been convinced for many years that understanding the propaganda (and by "propaganda" I don't actually mean the pejorative intentional kind that is the actual meaning of the word, but rather the deliberate or random mutation of the semantics of words) within our political discourse would result in the ability to change it, or at least to deflect it.  So that's one thing I hope to explore in this blog, starting with the dump of a few links, followed probably by a long dry spell.  We'll see.