Category Archives: Politics

We’re in the epilogue now

The show is over. Biden won. Trump lost. Sure, there is more to be said, details to argue. But the main story—Biden vs. Trump, the 2020 Presidential Election, is over. So is the Trump presidency, now in the lame duck … Continue reading

Posted in Journalism, Politics | Leave a comment

On Moral Politics

I spent 17 minutes while exercising the other day, thinking out loud about what @GeorgeLakoff says in his 1996 book Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t, (also in his expanded 2016 edition, re-subtitled How Liberals and Conservatives Think). I also tweeted about … Continue reading

Posted in Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Politics | Leave a comment

Choose One

A few days ago, in Figuring the Future, I sourced an Arnold Kling blog post that posed an interesting pair of angles toward outlook: a 2×2 with Fragile <—> Robust on one axis and Essential <—> Inessential on the other. In … Continue reading

Posted in Business, data, Digital Life, infrastructure, Internet, Pandemic, Politics, privacy, problems, Social, Technology | Leave a comment

Going #Faceless

Facial recognition by machines is out of control. Meaning our control. As individuals, and as a society. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance systems, including the ones in our own phones, we can no longer assume we are anonymous in public places or private … Continue reading

Posted in Customertech, Digital Life, policy, Politics, privacy, security, VRM | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Deeper Issue

Journalism’s biggest problem (as I’ve said before) is what it’s best at: telling stories. That’s what Thomas B. Edsall (of Columbia and The New York Times) does in Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists, published in today’s New York Times. … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, history, Journalism, Politics, privacy | Leave a comment

The Great Trivializer

Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a fine documentary, maybe even a classic. (A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast, is a work that “can only be re-read.” If that’s … Continue reading

Posted in Internet, movies, News, personal data, Politics, privacy | 1 Comment

Where Journalism Fails

“What’s the story?” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: The Story. Or, in the parlance of the moment, The Narrative. (Trend. More about that … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Life, Journalism, News, Politics, problems, publishing | Leave a comment

Making sense of what happened to Montecito

Montecito is now a quarry with houses in it: So far twenty dead have been removed. It will take much more time to remove twenty thousand dump truck loads of what geologists call “debris,” just to get down to where … Continue reading

Posted in fire, Geography, Geology, infrastructure, Journalism, Links, News, Places, Politics, problems, Technology, weather, wildfire | Tagged , , , , | 61 Comments

Revolutions take time

The original version of this ran as a comment under Francine Hardaway‘s Medium post titled Have we progressed at all in the last fifty years? My short answer is “Yes, but not much, and not evenly.” This is my longer answer. … Continue reading

Posted in Geology, Law, Life, Personal, Politics, problems, Technology, war | Tagged | 3 Comments

Dear DSCC: unsubscribe means unsubscribe

I have unsubscribed from the DSCC mailing list, which I never joined, multiple times. Here’s a screen shot of my last unsubscribe session, dated 21 October: That’s the third screen, after others that mute the unsubscribe option. At this point, … Continue reading

Posted in Politics, VRM | Tagged , , | 4 Comments