Framing the Debate postscript

Not much from me here, but a great article from Nate Silver on the polling data that supports my position that the Administration is botching the framing of the healthcare debate. I am particularly proud of the fact that he comes to pretty much the same conclusions that I did: That Obama and the democrats have failed so far in selling this to the public, that they need to emphasize what it's going to do for Americans in general, and that Obama can probably only do so much at this point without over exposing himself.

Silver is a better writer than me though, and he's got data. So it's worth a read :-)

Sitting Ducks?

One of my favourite blogs for IR geeks recently ran a post about a report from the Brookings Institution (pdf) about assassination as a means of foreign policy. I haven't read the entire 44 pages from the folks at the BI, so I'm going to consider this strictly in terms of what the Duck has to say about it. Be it resolved that a liberal state can legitimately assassinate individuals without due process?

Of course, assassination isn't a practice one generally associates with liberalism. Even the most vehement market liberals need some kind of harm principle to make inalienable rights like private property stick, and murder is usually considered harm with good reason. On the other hand, consider this little thought experiment: John Stuart Mill is driving down the street and sees little old Pol Pot jaywalking up ahead. Does/should Mill stop? Heck no! I think liberals can justify assassination/murder on the grounds of the categorical imperative, but they must be very careful in deploying it. The categorical imperative (at least the better half, if you ask me), for those who Kant remember, states "act only on that maxim that you would will to become a universal law." In other words, unless you would accept everyone behaving the way you are, what you're doing is wrong.

The tricky part is in formulating the maxim. In the example above, if Mill were following the maxim of "run over all old Asian men", he'd have to pull a u-turn and make roadkill out of the Dali Llama. If the maxim were "run over evil people", it would just beg the question of what's evil, and even it's "only run over those whose decisions caused thousands of deaths", there would be precious few two-term presidents in the States in addition to a doozy of an epistemological problem. So, the maxim of "runover anybody whose role in implementing genocide is indisputable, and don't cause any collateral damage while doing it" will at least serve as a first approximation.

A second, more technical problem is to make sure that everybody else knows what the maxim is. Of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and others are likely to claim a similar right. Not only must you make sure that your maxim is one that fits the situation at hand, you have to make sure it's one you'll be able to live with in the future - even when it might be applied to you.

A third problem is that you might let the cat out of the bag and give everybody license to start killing people with their own maxims, with which you might disagree. The world has seen people who wanted to kill all the rich, and if we can choose our maxims, what's to stop them from choosing theirs (besides our threatening them, which gets us nowhere)?

So I s'pose my answer is a very thin yes, that state-sanctioned assassination can be legitimate, but I disagree with the Duck's justification that "...someone has to have the job of playing cop in the international system." It's more complicated than that, as it should be.

New Media and Politics: Danger ahead

I followed a link from Ben Smith this morning to a peice about a potential Senate candidate posting information about his candidacy on facebook. It got me thinking about the effects of new online media and perception of status in our politicians.

As we've seen over the last few months, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are slowly (or maybe quickly) evolving into media and message delivery devices. I need only mention the twittering of Iran's protests to demosntrate the power that these new forms of communication have to disseminate information to interested readers. An interesting aspect brought up by Bill Simmons at ESPN recently has been the use of Twitter and Facebook by NBA players to break news of trades and firings before journalists even find out. Senators and Congresspeople have been taking Twitter by storm recently. And now we have the case of a potential Senatorial candidate correcting a false news report (which was apparently posted on a Blog based on a text message he sent to them while driving) on his facebook page! Then, his facebook entry is picked up by a few OTHER blogs and it becomes news as well.

Let's set aside the issue of the dangers of texting while driving (which was the topic Ben Smith focused on) and talk about the ways that new media are morphing traditional journalism and reporting. If this kind of trend keeps up, a large part of future journalists jobs will have to be searching through these social networks looking for news straight from the source. Not a lot of investigatvie journalism there, and the fact that any reader who is interested can just log on to Facebook or Twitter or whatever and get the news "straight from the horse's mouth" doesn't really speak volumes about the nessescity of print media and traditional newspapers. How can the New York Times or The Oregonian (for that matter) hope to keep up? Thier only out seems to be to invest heavily in online media themselves (which the NYT has certainly done).

Another point here connects to Mr. Shackleford's comments about responisbility for what your write online. The more news is created by the original source, the more responsibility that source bears. After reading this short Blog entry and Mr. Dumezich's Facebook profile update, we know that he's a dangerous driver, has some freinds that are pumped about him running for senate, and that he gave some misleading (or poorly worded) information to a Blog about his future electoral plans. Is this what i need to know about my candidates for Senate? Being a dangerous driver might not be too bad as far as crimes go, but i could see it coming up in oppo research for Evan Bayh should the election get to that point. One of his friends even asks him his opinion of another potential candidate: "What do you think of Martin Stutzman, who has already announced?"... if he's not careful, Mr. Dumezich is going to be talking campaign strategy right out in the open...and the rest of us (and bloggers) can read right along.

A third aspect that interests me here is the level of professionality that we expect of our elected officials, and whether things like Twitter, Facebook, Blogging and the like are compatible with this. I at least still have an image of sentators as aloof, professional, and relatively responisble parties. Although I know this isn't the case by a long shot (I mean, c'mon, we now have a senator Al Franken) I wonder if this is the kind of behaviour that the public will see as somehow amatuer. If Mr. Dumezich were to be interveiwed by a traditional newspaper or TV station about his plans to run for senate, it would seem legitimate and even professional. By him texting something to a blog, and then correcting it with an entry on his facebook page, some part of his authority as a speaker (as a german rhetoritican would say, his "ethos") seems to be lost. To me he seems to be just another guy writing on his Facebook page. While this might be good for a more populist candidate, it just doesn't seem all that senatorial. So while I might still vote for the guy if he were running for the house of represenatatives, I think this while exchange might have lost him my vote (if I were from Ohio and a republican) for Senate..

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