Quote of the day

"Political partisanship is closely allied with absolute stupidity."

Sir Robert Borden (Eighth Prime Minister of Canada)

And this from a politician, no less. I guess he had to live with the reality daily.

Hat tip to The Lotusland Soapbox


Technorati tags: Sir Robert Borden, Political quotes

Quote of the day - cutting the national brain

Amba at AmbivaBlog has eloquently expressed the dangers of political polarization.

The Democrats are an American rival, not a stalking horse for a sinister foreign enemy. The tug-of-war and sometimes cooperation/compromise between liberalism and conservatism makes the country stronger; cutting the national brain down the middle and turning the two halves against each other is suicide. It really makes me angry that the people who claim to defend America most passionately are doing so much to rip it apart.

Technorati tags: Polarization

The fallacy of binary thinking

Binary thinking has become my newest pet peeve. No, wait! Don't run away. It's not as eggheady as it sounds.

Binary thinking is the kind of thinking that says: "If you aren't A, then you are B. End of discussion." Or: "If you don't do A, then you must do B. End of discussion."

It raises its ugly head all over the place, but most especially in politics. It is the thinking of division, of facile labels. It is highly effective for pressuring or bullying someone who has not recognized it for what it is.

It is doubtful whether it qualifies as thinking at all, seeing as it falls short of even one dimension in its complexity, let alone the three (if you're normal) or four (if you have pretensions to scientific thinking) or ten (if you're a confirmed physicist) that the rest of the world lives in.

Let me illustrate. Binary thinking reduces everything to two points, thusly:

A. .B

In politics, especially of the American variety, this means you're either a bleeding-heart, pinko, atheistic commie or a flinty-eyed, redneck, heartless fascist.

This, of course, ignores the possibility of a complete first dimension, which looks like this:

A................................B

There are lots of intermediate points (an infinite number, if you want to get picky) between A and B. There are a lot of gradations of colour, even between the pinko and the redneck.

And all of this conveniently ignores the fact that there is more than one dimension. (No, I am not going to try to illustrate this with a keyboard. You are going to have to draw your own mental pictures.) There is a point C above the line and a point D below it. Now we are dealing with an embarrassing number of points. Because there are, yanno, God-fearing liberals and atheistic conservatives. And generous conservatives and skin-flint liberals.

It gets better. Between you and the line AB, (Yes, I know it's a square now. Don't get difficult.) there is a point E. And on the other side of AB there is a point F. Because there are, yanno, authoritarian liberals and libertarian liberals. And authoritarian conservatives and libertarian conservatives. And the vast majority, who fall somewhere in the muddled middle of what is now a cube.

In all the vast space of the cube, it seems beyond childish to try to pile every single issue into a box on point A or another on point B. I would be greatly in favour of scrapping the terms "liberal" and "conservative" altogether. They generate more heat than light, and obscure thinking more often than encouraging it.

Please note that binary thinking is also a handy tool of salesmen and advertisers the world over. If you don't buy car seat Brand A, your children will die horrible deaths. (Of course, they are a little more subtle about it, but that's the message they want you to get.) Because a couple of cars have been broken into in your neighbourhood, you had better buy my security system, so you won't be facing a raving lunatic with a knife in your dark living room. (Yes, this one was used on me recently. He put lots of sentences in between Point A and Point B so that I wouldn't catch on to the absurdity. It didn't work.)

Reality can almost never be reduced to an either/or situation. Be suspicious of such simplistic analysis whenever it comes along. And look for the intermediate points, because out on the extreme edge is rarely a good place to be.

ETA: After posting this, I found this quote in my Quote of the Day box:

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Technorati tags: Binary thinking, Extremism

Gleanings from the blogosphere, Sept. 20

Steve Janke at Angry in the Great White North is advancing the argument that tolerance is not a good thing. He says it is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself, and then ties the whole thing in to the current kerfuffle over the Pope's comments. A thought-provoking read.


Jared at Total Depravity gives us a wonderful description of a movie theatre full of enraptured children. He reminds me of Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage for his ability to find the wonder and poetry of everyday life. Both are like balm to a hectic soul.


And Alan Stewart Carl at Maverick Views has concluded that there is no vital centre, nothing to pull the middle together between the right and the left. He's not saying that there can't be, just that there isn't. His distinction between centrists and moderates is interesting and even useful.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict

Gleanings from the blogosphere, Aug. 17

Larry Elder is protesting the fact that Mel Gibson has apparently been classified a greater anti-Semite than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hat tip to Booker Rising.

[Update]

Jack Whelan at After the Future is making an impassioned plea for moderates to radicalize and become centrists instead. If he corrects the typo, the link may change. If so, look for the post "Robust Opposition Postscript".

Technorati tags: Anti-Semitism, Polarization

The toxicity of American political "dialogue"

I have led a sheltered life. TV stopped being an important part of my life when I was about 12 years old, a fact for which I will be forever grateful. Spending my formative years with my nose in books, news magazines and newspapers instead of having my eyes glued to a TV set has made a world of difference. TV encourages passive absorption; the written word encourages analysis.

This carried over into my adult life. To this day I have never had cable TV. But last week I spent in a hotel in Pennsylvania, and when we didn't have something better to do (relatively seldom), my husband and I flicked back and forth between CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. On top of the two previous weeks spent cruising the American political blogosphere, the experience was decidedly unsettling.

Everything I have been seeing leads me to the conclusion that the state of American political dialogue is positively toxic. Everything is classified as conservative or liberal, right or left, and is stated in stark, black and white terms. Polarization is extreme and the other side is invariably demonized, with cheap insults being thrown around in a manner reminiscent of schoolyard taunts. Televised interviews (on both sides) make no pretense whatsoever of objectivity, with the interviewer generally stating at the very beginning of the interview which conclusions he or she had already drawn, and blatantly leading the interviewee to support those conclusions. I've often fulminated at biased reporting on CBC and BBC, but they are rank amateurs at spin. American news channels do not report, they wage war.

Peter J ran an article on Blogcritics earlier today on this very subject, lamenting the division of political discussion into right and left:

This, no doubt, will cause underlying confusion and automatic extreme resentment to any one who holds a different opinion than they on the one particular issue that they ponder. The result is, rather than being able to carry a meaningful discussion with someone on any issue, the person indulges in a useless diatribe. The result is that one person loses sight of the subject and enters a contest where there is no longer an issue, there is only a belligerant (sic) attack, and even though they may share same opinions on other issues, there will never be resolve, only more bitterness.

My delight at his perspicacity was short-lived however. He blamed this state of affairs on the current administration, an analysis with all the intellectual depth of "the Devil made me do it." Seriously, does he really expect us to believe that everybody, both famous and obscure, who holds a political opinion has been pressured into extreme, unthinking positions by George Bush's Republicans? This is just demonization done more subtly. Each and every political commentator, from the guy at the corner store to the heavy-hitting blogger to the talking heads on TV has to take personal responsibility for replacing thought with labels, analysis with polemics. There is no political administration in this world that can force me to become an unthinking automaton spouting political dogma instead of a thinking, intelligent person, trying to understand and analyze things on my own.

I'm not too sure what has brought American political culture to this point. Is it the lack of a viable third political party, or the melting pot mentality that equates unity with conformity? Does Canada's history of two founding nations make us more capable of accepting someone profoundly different as still being one of us? While we certainly have our share of toxicity in public debate, in general we are much more open to considering a new idea, instead of trying to simply paste a label on it and dismiss it.

Technorati tags: Polarization, Conservativism, Liberalism