Tag Archives: Democracy

Links: The intellectual foundations of American democracy, parking costs, more on “Mate,” Neil Strauss of “The Game” is back, and more

October 10, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

* “American democracy is doomed;” don’t attend too much to the clickbait headline, but this may be the most important thing you read all day, week, or month.

* Parking costs are eating our housing.

* Robin Hanson on Mate, and also Tyler Cowen on Mate (see also me on Mate, though note too that I was the precise target audience for this book when I was younger).

* Why aren’t America’s ports automated? Short answer: Unions.

* “How Tasteless Suburbs Become Beloved Urban Neighborhoods.”

* “America: Abandon Your Reverence for the Bachelor’s Degree: Many high-school graduates must choose between two bad options: a four-year program for which they’re not academically or emotionally prepared, or job-specific training that might put a ceiling on their careers.” This should by now be obvious, and I argued the same in “Taking Apprenticeships Seriously: The need for alternate paths.”

* “Soldiers of Reddit who’ve fought in Afghanistan, what preconceptions did you have that turned out to be completely wrong?” The answers are fascinating throughout and demonstrate the total folly of trying to impose democracy on a country that in some respects resembles many “countries” of 3,000 years ago than countries of today. Sample:

I’d have to say this is not a perception but rather a culture shock. I was never part of any interrogations but I was told that some of the Taliban we had been fighting believed we had force fields that were causing their weapons, most notably RPGs, to not hit us.

It had nothing to do with skill of the user or the weapons capabilities. They actually believed our technology was that superior.

And a follow-up:

One of the guys in my unit was monitoring enemy radio traffic with an interpreter. They were flying around a Raven, and listening to the chatter about it. The conversation went something like this:

“Where do they find pilots to fly such a small plane?”

“They have trained mice to fly them, you fool!”

* Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, is back with a new book and publicity for said book: “Neil Strauss: ‘My thinking was: If this woman’s going to be naked with me – I must be OK. It doesn’t last.’ His book The Game made him a fortune, but left Neil Strauss in treatment for sex addiction. Ten years later, he’s a changed man.” Here is another review / discussion on Slate. Here is a post in which I discuss The Game.

I’m not convinced “sex addiction” exists. I did pre-order The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships.

Breaking the News follow-up

October 10, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links, News Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

My post on James Fallows’ Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy generated a fair amount of e-mail and commentary. In the comments section, Steve Karger pointed to The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get, which rehashes of some of Fallows’ points but without acknowledgement except at the top, which has a quote, and the very bottom of the page, which says “With fond apologies to James Fallows.” Nonetheless, it’s worth reading.

I found What should be “the new rules of news” in The Guardian, one of the UK’s major newspapers. I especially like this rule:

3. Transparency would be a core element of our journalism. One example of many: every print article would have an accompanying box called “Things We Don’t Know,” a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting. TV and radio stories would mention the key unknowns. Whatever the medium, the organisation’s website would include an invitation to the audience to help fill in the holes, which exist in every story.

Sadly, its recommendations seem unlikely to come to pass: the incentives against better journalism seem too deeply entrenched, especially compared with the cost of real journalism.

Salon.com reports that “Journalists like Evan Thomas now admit the Clinton scandals were bogus. When will they admit they played along?” And the answer appears to be “never.” These kinds of retrospective pieces remind us of what’s wrong with the news business: reporters are participating in the practices that weaken confidence in the business, much like individual investors who make decisions that collectively shake the market’s foundation yet are personally beneficially.

Finally, Fallows himself caught my post and wrote in reply:

I have thought several times about revising or updating the book but have held back for two reasons. One is the shark-like instinct that it’s worth always moving ahead to new territory. The other, that the central points to make remain the same; the details would differ and be more depressing.

He’s correct, and others have been gathering plenty of fresh examples, as “The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get” shows. I have no idea what arrangements he has with his publisher, but perhaps a new edition with a new forward/afterward would a) give a reason for additional coverage of the book and b) give the benefit of a small number of new examples without having to overhaul the entire thing. Then again, as far as I can tell, Breaking the News got a fairly loud reception the first time and the problems it discusses are fairly well-known, so maybe this wouldn’t matter much.

As I said in my first post, I think the individual’s response to lousy news is likely to be limited, since I can’t immediately make structural changes in the big news organizations that produce lousy “news,” which some people seem to prefer, like Fox News. But if you are interested in better news, try The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal (which still seems pretty good) and the New York Times.

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