Bravo to the Boys from Bemidji

I still have one curling match left on my DVR to watch, but I gotta say I’m happy to see that the United States’ men’s curling team beat Great Britain for the bronze medal today, the first American medal in curling. (Granted, curling has only been a medal sport since ’98. Still, a first’s a first.) Yes, there’s a certain amount of home-country jingoism going there, but c’mon, how can you root against a guy who owns his own pizzeria? (Pete Fenson, the team captain or “skip,” owns a couple of places in Minnesota, so you know he was happy to go to Italy.) And according to this news brief, CNBC and MSNBC have been getting a million-plus viewers for their daily curling coverage. Granted, that’s still kind of a niche audience, but those are record numbers for those networks.

Now I just hope someone’s going to televise the Men’s World Championship in April. And that Fenson and his team qualify to represent the U.S.

Can People Handle the Power?

I’m taking a couple of political science seminars this semester, for various reasons too boring to go into here. Both focus on different dimensions of how the public makes its desires known and how government responds to those wishes. I’m probably going to do a set of posts musing about some of the things I read in the process, but for now I just want to pose a question that is the Achilles’ heel of my faith in democracy.

Does the average citizen have what it takes to make democracy work?

Do we know enough to make informed decisions? Do we have the temperament to make good decisions? Are we capable of expressing what we want? And if the answer to any of these questions is “no” right now, do we have a realistic chance of changing that?

Cruel and Unusual Death?

I’m following this death penalty case out in California out of the corner of my eye. There appear to be some concerns that the chemicals used to execute by lethal injection can cause several minutes of extreme pain before taking full effect, which has raised the possibility that lethal injection reaches the level of cruel and unusual punishment. Doctors in California have refused to sign off on the chemicals being used, so the state needs to come up with a different chemical cocktail.

I say I’m following it out of the corner of my eye because part of me thinks that once you reach the point of killing someone, how quickly you do it is almost a side issue. Intellectually I understand that it is not – that minimizing the suffering involved is vital if capital punishment is going to be an issue of justice rather than vengeance. But the exact how-it’s-done is not something that reaches me on an emotional level, because I question whether capital punishment can possibly be made to serve justice. But if this case opens up the field for a discussion of exactly what we hope to accomplish with the death penalty, then I’m all for it.

Dusty Corners of the Web

I will admit that I am occasionally egotistical enough to do web searches for my name. In a small part, this is because I’m looking for folks who might be mentioning or linking to this site. Another large factor is that it reminds me that there sure is not much that gets permanently lost on the web. Since I almost always use my own name on message boards, there are any number of things I’ve said over the last decade floating around in various web archives at this point, and they go further back into my teenage years if you count Google Groups. (I’m kind of glad that it doesn’t look like a lot of FidoNet is archived on the web. I cringe enough at some of the things I said when I was 14 when I’m the only guy who remembers them.)

One thing that I am certainly glad has found an archived home is the collection of chats/interviews that Omni Interactive sponsored back in the day. I spent a couple of months working for Omni right out of college, and it was not my favorite working experience. Omni had been converted from a print magazine to a web site, and the feel of the guillotine was there . . . indeed, a few months after I left, even the site was shut down. Also, the parent company is the same one that owned Penthouse, so when I went to work I was just surrounded by Penthouse-related artwork and publications. It was not the most comfortable of environments. But one thing that did come out of the whole thing is that I got to host some of these chats, specifically within the E-Media series. I got to talk to comics artist Frank Miller about censorship, Babylon 5 composer Christopher Franke about music technology, and someone from the Henson Company Creature Shop when they were pitching this thing called Farscape. Even the Omni site is gone these days, but someone’s archived its contents, including all the chats. So you can check them out if you are so inclined.

Red Star on the Silver Screen?

I feel like blogging some good news tonight. Universal Studios has optioned The Red Star. There aren’t many details i nthat article, and it mostly focuses on the Russian director that is developing the film, but this is great news for Christian Gossett and the folks at Archangel Studios. Not only is it a nifty bit of validation, I have a sneaking suspicion that this option is helping to finance the comics projects that Goss has been dropping hints about on his blog. And believe you me, more Red Star comics is very very good news indeed.

Link Updates

Just a little bookkeeping right now. Mark Wagner’s Educational Technology & Life blog has moved to http://edtechlife.com/ – Mark’s set up his own WordPress site to get some added functions beyond Blogger. Go check out the place while he’s still remodeling.

I’ve also added Robin Zebrowski’s Hyper-textual Ontology to the sidebar. Robin’s a philosopher of artificial intelligence, something I thought I would be once upon a time. Anyone curious about how philosophy, science and other disciplines intersect should check out the blog.

Real World Issues in the Virtual World

I found this article (link) to be fascinating reading, regarding an onling game publisher’s quick action to shut down a gay/bi/transgender-friendly “guild” in a popular massively multiplayer online game, and that publisher’s reaction (or at least what’s being portrayed in the article as their reaction) to be troubling. News flash: online gaming has a social component, and will inevitably bump into some social issues. I’m sure someone will no doubt be saying “But it’s a video game, and anyone signing on to play it should know that it’s almost certainly going to be a testosterone-fest for that very reason.” (I’m assuming that anyone who would say such a thing has never ever heard of The Sims.) Online games which breed communities will have to deal with this sort of thing sooner or later, and by silencing one group trying to provide a safe gaming haven for gay, bi or transgendered gamers within World Of Warcraft, Blizzard has, intentionally or not, implicitly given its sanction to those who would harrass them. It really demands the question “So what’s the message here?” Hopefully Blizzard can be given the benefit of the doubt and will rethink this, and hopefully they just got caught flat-footed on an issue they weren’t expecting to address. And before anyone gets on my case about liberalizing the electronic landscape, take the following into account, an issue uber-conservatives should love: if, as has been charged so many times in recent years, video games are responsible for the decline of our society and for turning kids into killers, shouldn’t we be trying to police this before online harrassment turns into real-life violence…even though we’re talking about a game about hacking and slashing orcs?

Some sadistic part of me wonders why they’re banning any political or other select stripes of social interaction within the game. Just think about it. I’d rather have people who can’t let their political/social/religious differences drop beating each other up in the virtual realm rather than doing their worst to each other in real life. That way I could keep on not playing Warcraft and the real world would be a much nicer place.

Overall, though, I think the heart of the matter boils down to something even simpler:
Earl's comic

Resurrect Dead Tiles

One of the things I love about the Internet is the high likelihood that whatever crazy thing I’m interested in, someone out there has put up a web page. Witness, for example, Resurrect Dead, a site devoted to the Toynbee Tile phenomenon.

What’s that? You don’t know about the Toynbee tiles? Neither do most people I try to point them out, sadly. When I was in college in New York, I started noticing that on several streets, someone had somehow embedded a series of tiles into the street that formed the message “Toynbee Idea/In Movie 2001/Resurrect Dead/On Planet Jupiter.” Over the years, I would see more and more of the things pop up, and I would often exclaim to Pattie, “Hey! See those tiles? Were they there the last time we walked on this street?” And she would give me this look like I was completely deranged. (And now we’ve been married for six years. Who’s the deranged one now, eh?) Then I moved back down here, and was surprised to find the tiles throughout Philly as well, including a business-card sized version right at Temple. I eventually discovered a handful of sites devoted to tracking the tiles, which have appeared in cities all over the Western Hemisphere, including Toynbee.net and the afmorementioned Resurrect Dead. From the latter I learned that the tiles first started cropping up in Philly back in the 80s – I had no idea we were the Toynbee Tile capital of the world.

And in a not-quite-ironic development, as I began researching Jane Addams and Hull House, I discovered that she was inspired to start the settlement house by a visit to the world’s first settlement – London’s Toynbee Hall, named for the very fellow who, according to the tiles at least, wants to turn Jupiter into one jumping mortuary.

Curling for Democracy

I make no bones about the fact that I have been looking forward to curling at this year’s Olympics since, oh, 2002. And you may recall that a few weeks ago I commented on Washington, D.C.’s lack of representation in Congress. Well, not since chocolate and peanut butter got together have I seen a more fortuitous combination than the D.C. Olympic Curling Team. The premise is, other U.S. territories that lack representation, like Puerto Rico, get to send their own teams to the Olympics. So why shouldn’t D.C.? The organizers decided to focus on curling because they figured that was their best shot. 🙂 Right now the site has an online petition urging the IOC to recognize a D.C. team for 2010, a blog, and some other basic info.

Bring on the curling! And bring on the democracy!

Two Poles of Deliberative Democracy

I wanted to start making these posts weeks ago, but got sidetracked. I’ve already tried to put a Deweyan notion of democracy into a nutshell here. I’d like to start talking about a vein of democratic theory that’s seen a lot of activity in the last couple of decades, deliberative democracy. Depending on how you view it, it can be a complement or an alternative to the Deweyan notion, but we’ll have time to talk about that later. For now I want to sketch a definition and present one of the key discussion points within the ranks of those who call themselves deliberative democrats. Continue reading “Two Poles of Deliberative Democracy”