...i see things differently...

Trading Votes

Picked up on this from a Slate article.

This site lets you trade a vote for Nader in a safe state for a vote for Kerry in a Swing state.

I am conflicted about this because I feel like I would be turning my back on Kerry to vote for Nader. At the same time, if my actions to vote for Nader could influence a Nader voter in a swing state to vote for Kerry, this would be very good. And at the end of the day, of course, either party could secretly back out of the deal and no one would be the wiser.

Anyway, I'm thinking about it...

Feeling A Bit Manipulated

Lately I have started to feel simultaneously popular and completely devoid of free will. This is the result of an ever growing awareness of the different forces that are competing for my attention.

The present feeling of unease started coalescing earlier this week as I was watching The Corporation, an excellent independent documentary about the rise of the modern corporation. The documentary, among other points, does a good job of putting into perspective the power that modern corporations wield. In particular, they point out how much money is being spent to lure people to a corporation's product and how much influence that money can buy.

Trying to turn to another subject, I loaded up nytimes.com, but I quickly came upon an article entitled If Your Brain Has a 'Buy Button,' What Pushes It?, which talks about brain research in the science of product desire.

I guess I was asking for it when I then decided to watch Super Size Me, a documentary about the fast food industry. In my defense, I thought it was just going to make an argument about how unhealthy fast food is. Sure enough though, they snuck in some good points about how the food industry has a lot of influence, which were reminiscent of The Corporation.

The whole reason I had started watching these documentaries in the first place had been to try and take my mind off of the election. Between its Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Farenheit 9/11s and its anti-clones, and even the Presidential Debates, I was already starting to lose my ability to discern truth. I had been taking comfort in the rise of impartial fact checking websites until I realized that they make clear how horribly misinformed we have been up until now.

I mean, the last time I had this much to confront about how I was being manipulated by forces external to myself, it was the revelation that companies used sex to try to sell me things, and that was a long time ago. However, this week I found out that things on the amorous manipulation front are even worse than I had suspected. As this technical article from Nature Neuroscience points out, the love I feel for people around me is probably just the result of my brain becoming addicted to them. Some key passages from this article include:

"When human subjects viewed photographs of individuals with whom they claimed to be romantically in love, their brain activity patterns [...] looked remarkably similar to those observed after cocaine [...] infusions."

"In addition, the [brain shows] substantial actvity [...] during ejaculation in men, paralleling the activation evoked by a heroin rush."

Woohoo. It's not that I thought that I could control who I was in love with before, it's just that no one likes looking at their significant other like a crack addict.

At the end of the day though, while this process of revealing influences on me is unsettling, it does make me feel like I am, at least somewhat, waking up from a kind of Matrix.
Though I am still working out what to do with this information, I still have faith that once you have knowledge about something, you have power over it. As Claire of Six Feet Under said, "I'm trying to break my eye open...Its learning to see things differently without all the same tired associates we've made all our sad lives, blah blah blah". Sounds like a great rallying cry for the people of the 21st century.

Jon Stewart on Crossfire

Jon Stewart, main anchor on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, went on Crossfire this weekend and socked it to the two pundits on the show in an amazing showing of wit and wisdom. Slashdot has a BitTorrent link to a recording of the show which you should really check out. If you don't know about BitTorrent yet, now might be a good time to download it.

One of the Slashdot comments links to another Jon Stewart appearance on NPR.

There is NO DOUBT...

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth. " -- Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002.

If this country does not get rid of this administration, the rest of the world is right to hate us.

I have a tough time buying the "honest mistake" excuse this administration is using to play this mess down. The fact is that the intelligence services in this country are all under the executive branch. There is no classified information that the president doesn't have the opportunity to see. Even if I was, for the moment, to imagine myself believing that the adminstration was just simply "misled" by its intelligence service, is the administration completely unaccountable for being misled? The administration is the superior of the CIA. Telling the American people not to blame the adminstration for intelligence failures is like telling your boss you shouldn't be blamed for failure because it was caused by the failure of your underling. That's just not how accountability in a chain of command should work.

We went to the UN with our intelligence about IRAQ, and they DIDN'T BELIEVE that there was a strong enough case for war. That's because the case we presented was obviously "circumstantial evidence", something which is explicitly labelled in a court of law as inadequate to prove guilt. And our action of breaking with the UN to invade Iraq anyway would logically have suggested that we be extra careful to make sure that our intelligence was right. That break with the UN was saying, in effect, "we don't trust your judgement, UN, that our intelligence is too weak to justify going to war. We're SO SURE that we are right, that we are going to go in anyway". Then we broke U.N. rules specifically prohibiting member countries from attacking each other, while saying that we were upholding U.N. rules on Iraq.

Well, we were wrong.

So then the administration has said: "yup, the intelligence was off. you don't expect us to be blamed for following bad intelligence, do you?" Yes I do, because when you running the most powerful country in the world, you should feel like there is a lot at stake if you invade a country under false pretenses. You should be certain that we aren't going to be proved wrong when we finally arrive there. In short, you should be extra skeptical of the evidence. This administration was not skeptical enough, and therefore it deserves to be blamed for using bad intelligence to go to war.

So now we hear arguments about how a democratic Iraq will be a beacon of hope to the rest Middle East. Even if this comes to pass, a scenario that seems more dire everyday, it doesn't make our screw up ok. What this administration is saying is that the (maybe) ends of a democratic Iraq justify the (intelligence blundered justification) means for going to war. I would trade retaining some semblance of the moral high ground as a superpower for a faster road to Middle East reform any day.

In the American political chain-of-command, the ultimate buck stops with the American people. And if we do not vote this administration out of office, we will prove that we are as irresponsible as this administration has been. We will embrace the unjustifiable actions of this administration and place our stamp of approval on them. We will, frankly, give Al Qaeda more reasons to argue to disgruntled middle-easterners to kill our civilians.

If only the American people had no doubt about that.