Limited Government, Limiting Thought

Charles Krauthammer writes:

After all, if even Goldman Sachs was getting government protection, why not you? And offering the comfort and safety of government is the Democratic Party’s vocation. With a Republican White House having partially nationalized the banks and just about everything else, McCain’s final anti-Obama maneuver — Joe the Plumber spread-the-wealth charges of socialism — became almost comical.

There’s an incorrect premise here. “The comfort and safety of government” is not the same as a “smart government” that can fulfill its core duties to a people and solve problems. This is not a “smart” reading of the things Johnson got right. No political party, even the hard-core libertarian branches, can claim a definition of “limited” to mean agnostic or bumbling.

I heard someone on FreshAir yesterday claim that the new differences between the parties is a matter of emphasis regarding a reformulated GOP. This seems trite and overly ambiguous. Even Kevin Drum offers wrinkled logic. He writes, “The public face of his [Obama’s] economic policy, after all, was almost entirely based on tax cuts, a distinctly conservative notion.” I must have missed something, but when did either political party grow intrinsic qualities? The last 30 or so years of GOP ideas has not centered on tax cuts but line items on forms. Has the question been: we need to fix the Democratic Party and now the Republican simply because we must? Both sides claim perversion as the problem with the antagonist, as Krauthammer proves above, with lots of vigorous slanting.

The real questions are: how do we put a new roof on that school? How do we use and learn more about the gene?

Government and Social Media

From ReadWrite:

In short, Obama has begun crowdsourcing the political agenda. And when it comes right down to it, isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about anyway? A government of the people, by the people, for the people?

A few weeks ago when Gartner hypothesized that “social networks will complement, and may replace, some government functions,” it seemed almost laughable. But today, in the wake of what has occurred this week, it seems all the more accurate and attainable.

The Obama organization continues to turn the political machine on its ear and continues to shake the conventional wisdom of “political strategy.” If change.gov is any indication, the use of social media appears to have been much more than a gimmick for Obama. It appears to have truly been a means of embracing change.

Reading Leadership

Prior to the second debate between President-elect Barack Obama and John McCain, I sent a tweet to Obama saying “go get him. Don’t stand for cheap shots.”

Now, I’m ashamed of that message. Coolness, measuredness, and calm, intellectual determination was the better way. These past eight years have whittled at my nerves. Professionalism derided, the persistence of anachronistic folly, a cretinous pride in ignorance, derision of international partners and collaborators, and an odd savagery raking at constitutional ontology, as Luckovich illustrates.

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After my initial elation and disbelief at Barack Obama’s election, I’ve now slowed down to thoughtfulness, thinking of family, friends, colleagues, about change and the future. Bilal visited class yesterday and took my World Literature students through the history, contexts, and significant influences of the Koran. He’s a soft-spoken expert, and the students want him to return on Monday to continue the discussion, perhaps exploring different interpretations of certain sura. He persists in a large conversation over the public perception of Islam and the elegance of its ideas. In class we talked about the relations between Islam and T’ang poetry and we learned a lot about how people can elevate or destroy because of ignorance. I made the point that this is why we dig and dig into the poetry, not necessarily to know, but to engage and connect, not to punish but to come away humbled by openness.

The last eight years have not been about being humble.

…Ashamed though I am of my high position
While people lead unhappy lives,
Let us reasonably banish care
And just be friends, enjoying nature.
Though we have to go without fish and meat,
There are fruits and vegetables aplenty.
…We bow, we take our cups of wine,
We give our attention to beautiful poems.
When the mind is exalted, the body is lightened
And feels as if it could float in the wind.

Hypertext 09

Lots of information is up on the Hypertext 09 conference, Torino, Italy. All paper and workshop calls are up and descriptions of the tracks. I’m serving on the Hypertext and Community program track.

The Hypertext and Community track will explore, examine, and reflect upon social cyberculture in electronic media, ranging from literary fiction and creative scholarship to blog and microblog networks, social sites, games, auctions, and markets.

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

* Hypertext literature
* Theory and practice of expression in wikis, weblogs, and social spaces
* Personal journals, weblogs, and social media
* Net art, literary hypertext, interactive fiction, and games
* Behavioral patterns of social linking

Go Obama

Barack Obama is the 44th President, as spoken by the electorate, with both the popular and college vote. It has been a long eight years, and readers of this weblog should know that I’m thrilled but also ready to go to work. There is so much to do.

This is a climax to a long American story, with its triumphs, courage, and shames, and hopefully Langston Hughes is smiling. I’m with Mark with the Babylon Five quote (because B5’s narrative is right in step).

This is not a time for hatreds or disregrets or anger, though. Of course, McCain and his supporters are disappointed, perhaps angry, and the fights will continue.

But I’m ready to work and think. There is so much to do.

Stitiched Crosses

Joshua Radke has posted a new comic titled Stitched Crosses. The first five pages are up for reading.

A former English Templar is hiding from God and his past. The lady of his heart and a noble Hospitaller try to slow his downward spiral to despair. A letter left by a slain mentor acts as the calling that the knight must return to the Land of Christ, and his failures. There he will determine whether God means to set his conscience free from the weight of his burdens and restore him, or whether he must sacrifice himself to attain his absolution…

As Christendom makes a push to retake Outremer from Saladin’s Muslim forces, historical events and exciting period action serve as the canvas to this story of one knight wrestling with his spirit.

Hypertext and the Canon

I’m not really much of a canon thinker.

I’ve moved back to Astrid Ensslin’s Canonizing Hypertext after somewhat of a hiatus and a few moments of time to get back the subject. In any event, Ensslin has supplied the reader with a few criteria by which to judge readings, one of them being afternoon, in the first couple of chapters as she carefully but typically moved through definitions and context. I’ll get to the criteria in a subsequent injection. An interesting note is this and I hope I can develop: much of the language, such the rhizome metaphor, happens with lots of frequency. I wonder if this is necessary, cliched, or something to come back to and challenge.

The metaphor’s have been difficult. Do they have to be?

On Super Systems

This is not a post on strength or the ability to leap tall building, but conjectural guesswork on digital systems. In this post, I did a little bit on next-gen Storyspace but I’d like to keep this thought going. This morning, as I was thinking about some paperwork on course equivalencies, it struck me that our college systems (and most systems) still act like traditional systems of information distribution and access–.

We use a fairly complicated information management system, which integrates most distance learning facilities and intranet-like activity. For example, Banner imports students into WebCT/Blackboard and so faculty and students can get on with their work. In addition, registrations and other necessities happen routinely in Banner. But most students and faculty probably couldn’t tell you where Banner is in relation to the web. If you asked, what sort of system is Banner, most people would have to guess. “Some sort of database.” And there are other available systems. The library, for example, provides people access to research databases. Do these have relation to Banner or Blackboard?

We’ve been dabbling with eLumen for assessment practice at the college. But eLumen does not play well with our existing administrative facilities. We need ldap for authentication, but it’s not that easy to effectuate. And still there’s the question of how core information is entered. All relational databases must get their starter info from initial hand-cranked inputs (pardon the mixed metaphor), either with data entry or scanning.

So, I and my colleagues have been dreaming about the super system. The super system we imagine makes things easy, well, at least elegant in practical terms. It acts as a container in which all other needed systems talk to one another and learn about each other: assessment, learning, and administration. When a students takes a test in Blackboard, the results populate the admin and assessment system. When an ability is added to eLumen, a teacher can find that ability in Blackboard so that a quiz or a test can link to the ability. Such a system, in my view, is not “hypermedia” or “semantic” but something else. It’s organic, but I don’t know how. Yes, Nelson’s document management image still lives.

Models exist. Facebook, for example, is a proto super system. Users are able to organize work, manipulate objects, and it’s an environment for rudimentary applications and games, a sort of digital place or civitas with physical and conceptual real estate (nothing new here, I know). In many ways, Facebook is about “linking” and embedding. An OS is also a kind of proto super system, but of a different sort. Storyspace or Tinderbox are also proto super systems, or metaphors for them, as they create and contain, but Flash is not, Flash being a piece of a larger pattern of apps, a node along the way. I wouldn’t even know how to describe the criteria for a super system or even if super system is the proper word. I have a sense that the image works: it’s a container for apps, a place for people to share and think together, a sea of relations, and a tool that takes anomaly and makes sense of it.