In an interesting read, Jack Shafer wonders about the state of our politics “now that we have dirt on everyone.” While some debate the power of the Internet to democratize even the most authoritarian regimes, we should consider its role in making our politics dirtier than ever. Shafer describes the shift by comparing a campaign’s opposition research to mining for gold:

The past no longer matters to the political present the way it once did, because we have such better access to it today. Just 15 years ago, investigations of politicians and opposition research were largely limited to professionals with access to Lexis-Nexis or those who knew how to conduct a document search at the county courthouse. Digging dirt back then was like mining gold in the 1800s: labor intensive, and requiring both expertise and expensive tools. Widespread digitization and cheap information technologies haven’t eliminated the professionals from political dirt digging, only lowered the barriers to entry.

Leaping over those low barriers this cycle is Andrew Kaczynski, a 22-year-old history major at St. John’s University, who quarried C-SPAN archives for political gotchas and posted more than 160 of them on his YouTube channel, alerting the press to the best, he tells me.

It isn’t just the dirt. We’re also awash in data or dirt masquerading as data. The information costs of a wold-be knowledgeable citizen are skyrocketing!

David Weinberger takes on this question from a scientific perspective in a book with a great title, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. He points to a scientist’s lament from 1963. That scientist, Bernard K. Forscher, titled his famous letter “Chaos in the Brickyard” and complained that science was churning out too many bricks (facts) without the ability “to complete a useful edifice because, as soon as the foundations were discernible, they were buried under an avalanche of random bricks.” Weinberger explains the problem today is much larger than Forscher could have imagined. Our brickyards are networked!

He offers three reasons today’s brickyards are galactic in scope and they’re worth considering in the context of political dirt. I’ll list them here but recommend visiting Weinberger’s post on The Atlantic for a more detailed discussion. 

1. The economics of deletion. Little data is ever discarded now that massive amounts of storage are easy and inexpensive.
2. The economics of sharing. It’s easier than ever to share everything. From the 160 hours of video on YouTube mentioned earlier to terabytes of data.
3. Computers are smarter. The processing power of the average desktop has increased exponentially.

For science, this means the data grows more and more distant from hypothesis-testing and model-building. Data is made accessible in the hope that someone will eventually make it usable. For political life, this creates a chasm between news that matters and news that’s entertaining. You want news you can use? Well, that’s your problem.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed while trying to sift through fact and fiction to find the information that makes a difference in vote choice, policy expectations or even the decision to get involved. If journalists once dug for gold to help their audiences navigate these turbulence, they’ve sacrificed that role as they’ve competed to throw bricks, to throw lots of them and to throw them before anyone else does.

A flurry of web activity demonstrates just how little help one can expect from the press. In a recent post to the New York Times Public Editor’s Journal, Arthur Brisbane asked, “should the Times be a truth vigilante?”

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

The earliest comments on the site hit along the same theme… how could this even be a question? If the Times isn’t a truth vigilante, what else could it be? Perhaps our media outlets have considered themselves to be purveyors of petty insults and meaningless drivel this whole time. Jay Rosen, a NYU journalism professor, has relentlessly called out the media for their “view from nowhere” and offers an excellent analysis of this latest installment.

There are many reasons to expect this deluge of dirt and date to only get worse. I hope this all hits home the next time you see a headline lampooning what little information American voters know. Too many of us enjoy the chuckle and assure ourselves we’re different. There’s an important follow up questions we should require… how the hell are we supposed to know anything? And what news are we missing because this headline was funny?

*** Our next post will look at how to ditch dumb headlines and demand better. If you have a strategy that works for you, please share it by commenting on this post.

Politics is inescapable. It’s embedded in every effort to understand who we are as a community, what we value and how we resolve conflict. L.A. muralists believe their work to represent their community is now challenged from two different directions with everyone claiming their right to free speech is in jeopardy.

I found this video through Open Culture so I’m going to recommend you visit their site for a bit of background on the conflict. I find it interesting that the muralists claim their work represents the community while graffiti artists only promote themselves. Graffiti has a long history associated with public protest, and I’m not interested in arguing that point here. The interesting part is that, in this assessment, the community outweighs the individual. This criticism is presented as everything you need to know to understand which work has value and which work doesn’t. These value judgments are tricky when you compare a real Rembrandt work to one from “the school of Rembrandt.” It might just be impossible when comparing museum pieces, public murals and graffiti.

What is informing the value we assign to L.A’s murals and their challengers: the city’s commercial ordinances and the local graffiti artists?

You can watch the video here:

Behind The Wall: The Battle for LA’s Murals from Oliver Riley-Smith on Vimeo.

Bonus Points: Open Culture is an excellent resource for free educational media on the web. They have a directory of free university course on the web, free ebooks, free videos, free language courses… you get the idea, right? If you’re not the type to keep up with a website through an RSS feed, you can “like” them on Facebook and pull their posts into your newsfeed. Super easy.

Eric turns to an infamous spaghetti diagram of the American strategy in Afghanistan to demonstrate his point. Is it possible to truly know anything without also knowing how it is interconnected to everything else? And isn’t that what we’d call constitutional thinking?

As you watch this 3 minute video, consider how Madison’s work on ancient and modern confederacies or the vices of the U.S. political system both represent similar exercise in understanding the nature of questions and answers through zooming in and zooming out.

TED: Eric Berlow, How Complexity Leads to Simplicity

Facebook Visualization

An intern at Facebook wanted to see the geography of our online friendships. With a sample of 10 million friendships, Paul Butler paired their current cities and summed the number of friendships between each pair. You can read much more about his process here, but consider that there isn’t a single coast line, river or physical boundary added to the map. The data identified the continents and the space between them through our connections that transcend oceans and political borders

The next day, however, we discussed how many questions students had to answer correctly to achieve this success. Less than 50%. They wanted to know why so little was expected of them. This is my concern… if we don’t find a way to resist the most virulent pieces of the testing regime, we’re robbing our students of knowing true success. Erica Goldson, Valedictorian at Coxxackie-Athens High School, knows this ugly truth too.

Her full remarks are available at Sign of the Times. Here’s just an excerpt to show what she thinks of the success she achieved:

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn’t you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker.

And, in the effort to partner criticism with constructive ideas, watch this short video from Professor Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard. He saw the dark shadow of memorization of facts with little understanding of concepts in his classroom and decided to do things differently. One of my favorite pieces in the clip shows students talking to one another about torque to identify the right answer to Professor Mazur’s questions. A young man asks., “how do you know that?” Our students need to know the answer to that question as well as have the drive to ask it of themselves.

Without that question, what we know is shrinking each day and it’s happening in our classrooms too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Colbert’s question: What do these three things (democracy, human rights and labor) have to do with one another?

Posner’s answer: They are very much related. Human rights is the way in which people have a democratic experience. People need to speak publicly and to participate in the political process. They need to be able to organize themselves.

The blue box may have just swallowed a couple of the others if it’s all about the political process. I wonder if our foreign policy makes more sense if you start with this impoverished understanding of human rights. My very next thought was that Academy alumni could do better than that. What do you make of these three components of the Secretary of State’s title? How should officeholders think about each component as well as the connection between them?

The interview begins at 14:30 if you click the link above. Don’t miss Colbert’s effort to make a distinction between human rights and American rights. Apparently American rights are best understood as purchasing power. He supports his position by asking, “at what point do human rights in these other countries get in the way of my ability to buy two dozen tube socks for $1.29?”

Colbert often cuts to the quick and it’s interesting to see when the interviewee realizes it… and when they don’t. I’d put Posner in that second category.

Cicero -  The Ideal Statesman

Scipio: Why, he should have virtually no duty apart from this, for it embraces all the rest — namely that he should never cease inspecting and examining himself, challenging others to imitate him, and by the splendour of his mind and conduct offering himself as a mirror to his fellow-citizens.  Just as with string instruments* or pipes or in singers’ voices a certain harmony of different sounds must be maintained (and trained ears cannot bear the effect if that harmony is thrown out or becomes discordant), and as that harmony though arising from the management of very different notes, produces a pleasing and agreeable sound, so a state, by adjusting the proportions between the highest, lowest, and intermediate classes, as if they were musical notes, achieves harmony.  What, in the case of singing, musicians call harmony is, in the state, concord; it constitutes the tightest and most effective bond of security; and such concord cannot exist at all without justice.

[About a dozen leaves are missing. Augistine (De Civitate Dei 2. 21) says that Philus asked for a fuller discussion of justice in view of the common opinion that no state could be governed without injustice.]

Scipio: I do agree, and I would stress that what we think has been established so far about the government of the state amounts to nothing, and that we have no basis for further progress, unless we refute the contention that government cannot be carried on without injustice, and, more than that, prove conclusively that it cannot be carried on without the highest degree of justice.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The Re-Write

The ideal statesman has qualities that should be embraced,
a rational model of intellectual conduct and of natural grace.
Harmonious are his thoughts and actions which shall govern sound,
constantly seeking wholeness, while being order-bound.

A musical conductor of life, striving for melodious consonance with each class,
whether strings, or pipes, or voices gathered to join together amass.
Each role has a part to play, whether performance or to sing,
no greater than each other, proportional equality each role shall bring.

Security is sought from these notes, and justice from its voice,
Melodious is its overture, bringing good government by our choice.
Sing out to all who hear our words, and let the bells ring tried and true,
for injustice shall not tarry here, where justice constitutes anew.

This is one of the easiest ways to share your ideas on Politicolor. Every week we ask our contributors two questions and post their answers in an effort to help you find good ideas on the web. Because effective citizens are informed citizens engaged in sharing ideas…

What didn’t you know last week?

Gravity is an illusion. This story from the NY Times also suggests some of our best ideas  come to us when we have to change our plans. (Stepwinder/Shellee)

Most of the crew has gone on vacation. Leave your responses in the comments below and help fill this space!

What are you reading?

American Dream is Elusive for New Generation. I certainly have my own story when it comes to coping with the current economy, but I’m concerned about how it changes our ideas of the American Dream and what is possible too. It’s easy to read stories like this with a “kids today!” filter. I’m working through this longer read, however, wondering what it reveals about who we are and who we might be as a society and the problems aren’t always a question for the younger generation! (Stepwinder/Shellee)

This string without attribution or much commentary comes from discussions at the National Academy in Los Angeles this week:

Mel walked us through constitutional interpretation using Bob Jones University v. United States (1983). This is the university’s current statement about race under a broader category of “Who We Are.” Sarah, a 2010 participant, pointed us to this statement in addition to Stanley Fish’s column asking “Is Religion Special?”

In our discussion of “user’s knowledge” vs. “maker’s knowledge,” our afternoon groups turned to considering the worlds built through a good book. Nicole, a 2010 participant, was a bit startled to find an author she knows was contemplating something similar on his blog. We’re going to repost his thoughts in their entirety but his latest post considers democracy, capitalism and choice.

And lastly, as our models of political order came into view these last two weeks, we had several discussions about the promise and perils of pursuing one transcendent truth. Another NYT Opinionator post,”Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys,” seems to be thinking along a parallel track.

What didn’t you know last week?

Arachne at her loom, after an admirer said her working was as beautiful as her work, “It is the same thing.”  Beautiful notion; one that will frame my teaching this year. (Hobbes21/Keith)

Didn’t know that only 30% of seersucker fabric in a garment actually touches the skin or that it was invented in New Orleans. (Puck/Puckermom/Laura)

Rousseau isn’t as completely strange as I thought he was. He sees the same problem as Hobbes, i.e. collective decision making and rejects the artificial notion of representation. It’s genuine participation or it’s slavery. Well, that’s still a little strange from this American perspective! (Stepwinder/Shellee)

What are you reading?

The first quarterly edition of the 2010 edition of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography was devoted to Dolly Madison and her efforts to publish her husband’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. “A Constant Attention: Dolly Madison and the Publication of the Papers of James Madison, 1836-1837” by Holly C. Shulam, deals with Dolly, and her efforts, either directly or through various family connections or friends to secure publication. The more interesting, and perhaps more controversial article, “Securing a legacy: The Publication of James Madison’s Notes from the Constitutional Convention” by David. W. Houpt deals more with the efforts of Dolly and her agent Nicholas Trist to secure Congressional publication of the manuscript. Reading like a “whose who’ of Jacksonian America, Houpt recounts the debate and vote in the Senate that led to Senate approval of publication. Houpt asserts that John C. Calhoun, SC, still smarting from Madison’s public denunciation of nullification, voted nay out of spite. Calhoun, Houpt suggests, believed he was the intellectual heir to Madison’s legacy. Jefferson, maybe, but Madison? Check it out here. (Brenda)

A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck (sequel to A Long Way from Chicago).  Grandma Dowdel is a terrific character; this is great kids’ lit.
The really super-cool Geography Coloring Book by Wynn Kapit.  I dig the little arrows to indicate river direction: very helpful to students, even though they understand that rivers flow downhill. (Hobbes21/Keith)

Reading “Everything’s an Argument” (Puck/Puckermom/Laura)

Based on Heidi’s recommendation and my new found love of soccer, I am reading How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer. His subtitle is “an (unlikely) theory of globalization,” but I think it is less about globalization and more about regionalism and the way in which soccer explains cultures around the world. I just finished the chapter on Barca – the team from Barcelona. His discussion of Catalan identity felt a lot like our recent discussions at Montpelier about American citizenship – that citizenship is about comitting to a set of ideas – it’s about how you see and understand a place and a people. I recommend it, particularly for any new soccer lovers out there. (conteach/Shayne)

I attempted to read Res Publica: An International Framework for Education in Democracy in tandem with this year’s National Academy reading. My progress has stalled considerably now that we’re in our second week. But, I’m still interested in reading this presentation of the fundamentals as though it’s a completely strange. I guess I had a theme this week! This one has been provoked by our international participants this year–from South Africa and China. (Stepwinder/Shellee)

*****

You can make this a conversation by sharing your thoughts as a reply in the comments section on this post or any of the others. If you’d like to join us as a regular contributor, drop that note in the comments and we’ll let you know how to get started.

Teachers & the Temple

Adjusting to the real world after a week at Montpelier can be challenging. There are real pressures to be ready for the next school year but an equally real mission to teach the substance of the ideas present in our curriculum. Several participants have shared their gratitude via e-mail or the Facebook group. I wanted to share those ideas here and invite you to add your own thoughts.

Whether you left Montpelier last week or two years ago, how will you use it to super charge your teaching?

Sherry Willis wrote this poem to commemorate our time together. I especially like that last line…

They came from everywhere all across this great land
…West coast, east coast, the north, and the south
Dark hair, light hair, young and mature
All thrown into the Madision melting pot
Scholar, teacher, and student
Listening, discussing, thinking, and learning
All in the Madision way
Laughing, walking, feasting, and fellowshiping
Honoring not only the man but the work he had done
Revived, renewed patriotism and passion
Diverse yet joined in the Spirit of the Union that is greater than themselves

The James Madison Workshop June 20-25, 2010

From the second week, Paige forwarded her thoughts on the week by e-mail:

I realized to an even greater extent than before that we really have to find the time to focus more on the founding using primary source documents.  Perhaps by empowering our students with that “maker’s knowledge” we can best fight the cynicism and lack of political efficacy that seem so prevalent today.

Works in progress are welcome too… so, alumni from previous years, tell us what you did and how it worked.