Frozen Toothpaste

If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to try something. I’ll present the same argument three different ways. I hope that by the end, you’ll understand why.

First

The length of an argument is directly proportional to it’s strength.

Second

Generally, the length of an argument is proportional to it’s strength. Barring excessively and pointlessly wordy arguments, five words are much less likely to convince than even fifty. Surely five words on taxation can energize those who already agree with you on the topic, but it’s much less likely to convince those that oppose you than is a thoroughly reasoned 500 words. There’s no denying that some may never be fully convinced, but they’re more likely to understand if they hear a thorough explanation than if they hear a sound bite.

Third

I have this idea that the length of an argument is, generally speaking, directly proportional to it’s strength. That is: a long argument is far more likely to succeed in actually convincing someone to change their opinion than a short one. Now, having said that, I should add that not all arguments that are long will be strong. A long and rambling argument is a long and rambling argument. But given a roughly constant rhetorical strength and skill, a short quip is likely to leave the opposition in opposition.

Consider: “A woman has a right to privacy.” If you’re for a woman’s “right to choose” you’re probably convinced that that’s a good argument. But you won’t convince anyone standing outside an abortion clinic with a sign by such an argument. You may succeed, however, if you gave them a longer explanation about how you feel that a woman should be guaranteed a safe medical procedure when she feels it is necessary. And that you also hope that it’s rarely necessary. Surely a sudden conversion is unlikely, but I find it hard to believe that it wouldn’t be more likely.

So too with the argument for “higher taxes,” which the political left in most countries desires. Couched in those terms, it turns off everyone but the most ardent supporters. But expanded to explain all the good that those taxes would empower the government to do on behalf of its citizen, people would become more likely to accept the argument. Soon, they too might take to the streets shouting “higher taxes.” Again, they’re not likely to convince many that way, but they’ll learn.

Much of people dissatisfaction with the “sound biting” or all cultural and political arguments is because they understand the implicit logic of the relationship between length and strength. They understand that you’re much less likely to convince a person in a 30-second television commercial than in a 30-minute discussion. I think that implicit understanding should not only be illuminated, but expanded so that everyone will finally come to understand the argument.

NYTimes.com

A character like William Kristol is often caricatured by America’s left. Since he joined the New York Times’s Op-Ed staff, he’s provoked even more ire for both invading what’s usually seen as “home court” as well as being, well, not spectacular (even if no columnist is). His huge factual error of last week deserved the criticism it got.

And even as I’d like to take pity on such a magnet for criticism, I’m about to tell you how this week’s column is wrong. Though he was far more measured than some of the conservative ideologues he’s often confused with, the one problem — and conclusion — Mr. Kristol had about Barack Obama’s infamous speech on race was absurd:

With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.

To be fair, Mr. Kristol makes the valuable and accurate point that endless accusations of racism traded across massive chasms are useless. There’s no denying that. He also suggests correctly that,

What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. Such policy debates can lead to real change — even “change we can believe in.”

But Mr. Kristol’s failing, the reason his conclusion strikes such a dissonant note, is that he’s misunderstanding “a nationwide conversation about race” to mean “a televised shouting match that does nothing but increase grievance.” I share his opinion that the latter is a bad and useless thing, but I also know that the former isn’t alway code for the latter.

One salient example of how we can really learn and teach something about race was taught to the crew on MSNBC’s Morning Joe by Mike Huckabee, who said:

As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!” I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Mike Huckabee — to the apparent shock of much of America’s left — shows us, in the surprise of the Morning Joe crew, what an honest conversation about race can look like, and teach us.

To his immense credit, Barack Obama has long stood by the fact that a conversation is neither support for the person with whom you are talking (as would be the case if he were to talk to Iran or Cuba), nor is a forum for people to shout grievances at each other and walk away unchanged. A conversation hold implicit within it a finding of some common ground of some, however subtle or unnoticed, new awareness of the commonality between the participants.

Perhaps Mr. Kristol simply missed the point that Jon Stewart made so cogently, while doing his best Walter Cronkite, “And so, at 11 o’clock a.m. on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.”

White privilege, as you may know,

is a sociological concept describing the advantages enjoyed by white persons beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people in those same social spaces (nation, community, workplace, etc.). It differs from racism or prejudice by the fact that a person benefiting from white privilege need not hold racist beliefs themselves.

There is also some noteworthy scholarship on male privilege and heterosexual privilege. All of it speaks to the ways in which being white, male, and straight allows me the freedom to never be asked to speak on behalf of any group in which I was randomly born a member. How my poor behavior is rarely seen as a reflection on anyone but myself. How most people will assume that I’m intelligent, safe, and trustworthy. How history, as conventionally told, is brimming with people who look like me and by people like me. How role models that look like me are everywhere in this culture. How people are unlikely to harbor any negative ideas about me because of who I am.

And aside from the privileges bestowed by being white, male, and straight, I’m college educated. My parents are still married. My parents are upper-middle class. I’m an American. I live in the United States of America. I have little discernible accent (at least to American ears). All of these are seen as things that make me a better person, despite my responsibility for none of them.

And those are merely those privileges that I can enumerate right now without effort. I’m sure there are many more that I’ll discover later and probably untold ones I’ll never be made aware of.

Discussion of privilege can quickly degenerate into theoretical issues and nit-picking on substance. Surely, you might argue, there must be some privilege’s in being black, Latino, or Asian. I wouldn’t contend that there aren’t. But that’s immaterial to the fact that white (or male or heterosexual) privileges in most countries — and especially this one — are far more numerous than those conferred by other identities.

And surely white privilege — even all the privilege’s I possess — doesn’t dictate my lot in life. A poor gay black man from Zimbabwe could make himself far more successful than I’ll ever be. But I feel rather certain that he’d have had to fight a lot harder to get there.

If — or when — one recognizes that they’ve received so many unearned privileges the obvious question is: what do I do about it? One bad answer to that question the easiest to give: nothing. To assert that though you’ve received these unearned privilege’s you should essentially forget about them. Or worse, you can make the absurd and disgusting claim that they’re rightfully yours because “it was earned for you by the hard work and self-discipline of your ancestors and relatives, whom you should learn to appreciate.”

There is something to be said for conscious awareness of it. To recognize and understand what it may be like on the other side of that divide. It wasn’t until I spent fifteen minutes in a mostly-black grocery store near downtown Detroit that I ever recognized what it’s like to be on the minority side of any social situation. Aware that even if these people meant me no harm — and I’m sure of that — there was the immutable fact that I felt out of place. For a white heterosexual male who has lived most of his life in predominately white parts of a predominately white state it was an eye-opening experience.

Real awareness, I think, leads directly to action. Perhaps the greatest action you’ll ever undertake is to spread awareness of these privileges among others. Perhaps you’ll just vote for politicians who you think understand and would do their best to countermand these unearned privileges. Perhaps you’ll become an activist against these privileges.

Perhaps you’ll do absolutely nothing. But I do hope you’ll at least think about what a privilege you’ve been given, to be able to ignore the ways in which you’re privileged. The unprivileged have no such choice.

Jarrod Trainque (flickr)

Signal to noise ratios are something most people are at least mildly familiar with. They’re the reason that you either turn off the radio or change the station as you drive out of the range of the station you were listening to.

But where radio on road trips is the obvious place to begin this analogy, it’s certainly not the end. Signal to noise ratios come in to play everywhere. Maybe you’ve picked up a magazine and had to put it down because the make-up or computer parts ads easily outnumbered the interesting content of the magazine. Maybe you’ve made the same decision about a website. Too many pop-ups, pop-unders, or just plain old ads. Maybe you “detest” “corporate” radio because of “all the ads” — my apologies for three uses of ironic quotation marks in the same sentence.

But advertisements aren’t all this is about. Certainly advertisements are an easy example. When you’re watching television, listening to the radio, reading magazines, or surfing the internet, advertisements are easily recognizable. Because ads are easy to recognize it’s easy for us, as consumers, to decide that they clearly constitute “noise” against the “signal” of the show or article we are seeking.

But advertisements aren’t the only type of noise out there, and I would hardly allow that they are the most pernicious. We know them and clearly recognize them as noise (perhaps excepting those during the Superbowl) advertisements are easy for us to filter out. Product placement, when done well, can be much harder to filter out than traditional advertising — hence it’s premium position in the minds of advertisers.

And that’s to say nothing of the hard-to-find signal in other places. For example, a few years ago I gave up on cable “news.” The signal to noise ratio was creating something far worse than mere advertising or even an out-of-range radio signal. The signal itself was corrupted. Not only were the commercials “noise,” but the content itself was essentially valueless. Were CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News the only ways to get the news I may have tolerated their pettiness, but in a world with so many options in so many mediums sitting through the noise of commercials and the noise of the channels’ shrill commentators seemed a fool’s choice.

Now what I consider “noise” — the churlish pettiness of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann — may be considered by others to be the signal. Surely both men produce shows far more interesting than they would by blindly reading wire stories, and for some that’s enough. And indeed it’s roughly the same calculus — “It’s news and entertainment” — that I use to excuse the regularly petty antics of Jon Stewart’s The A Daily Show.

There are multiple points that one could unravel from all of this, but the most important is this: you’ve always got to consider what you want, and if what you’re looking at is giving it to you. It’s very easy to say “I want to be informed about the news. CNN is about the news. I’ll watch CNN to be informed.” The logic is faultless, but the results are ugly. Anyone who watches Lou Dobbs and thinks they’re being meaningfully informed about the world is severely misguided.

If there’s one societal trend I’m allowed to blindly lament without any evidence it exists, I’ll choose this: People seem less skilled about distinguishing between what’s valuable or not and using those judgments to determine their habits. They seem to flock to people and ideas and then abandon them without ever considering if they’re personally getting anything from either act.

Now I have no basis for that lament, so I must retract it. But I think this advice remains salient: Think before you watch, or listen, or read. Please.

IowaPolitics.com

It’s chaos. It’s a circus. It’s a money parade. It’s undemocratic. It’s pointless. It’s cheap drama. It’s the real American Idol.

That’s right everyone, it’s the middle of America’s presidential politicking season.

I could make a list, but I doubt I need to. You know that many people — in America, but especially in stable parliamentary systems — find this whole mess in which America is now submerged mildly absurd. Myself, I fluctuate between hearty agreement with their bafflement and tut-tutting consternation with the foolishness of the critique.

First, a few points. The way the Democratic party’s contest is held in Iowa is absurd, perhaps even undemocratic. The priority given to Iowa, New Hampshire, (now) Nevada, and South Carolina is, at best, unfair. The rush to have the earliest nominating contest has, this year, been harmfully chaotic but is a direct consequence of the truth of the last sentence. Too much money is raised and spent in the quest for a party’s nomination.

Having made all the necessary concessions to critiques, I’ll now heartily and blindly defend America’s system.

The most important point is that the system I defend is open. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim it’s always democratic, but it usually is. And open and democratic are better than most parliamentary systems can claim in nominating their candidates for leadership.

It’s no secret that Gordon Brown was to be Tony Blair’s successor from the first day that Labour took power in Britain. And it’s also no secret that only politicians determined that point. Lay members of the party had no say in who would lead the party. It’s like the way American Vice Presidents are selected — behind closed doors with unknown calculations being made.

But that’s also the way that parliamentary parties pick their leaders, and thus their analog of President. In America, a candidate has to win the support of a plurality of his party’s members, and then a plurality of the country’s electoral college voters (a chastisable system in itself, but not our topic here). This seems to me far more democratic than a system whose candidates are selected by a small group of full-time politicians whose party is than approved by the people.

In America’s system, a candidate must be liked and chosen by normal people. They can’t merely call in a small number of favors within the party, they must be chosen as the best candidate by a lot of non-politicians. And I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. This circus may be a dislikable result of a system that tries to give people — normal people — a say, but it gives people a say.

And then there’s this: I find this game we’re playing — however over-moneyed, shallow, and pointless — at least a little bit exhilarating. The result may not always be perfect, but it’s more exciting and democratic than any other system I’ve seen.