Monthly Archives: October 2007

Videos!

Jackie Mason gets angry — a rant only Repub­li­cans will love. It’s funny but maybe goes on a half-minute too long. h/t Josh — Hip­ster Olympics! I’ll be in the 2008 com­pe­ti­tion myself, I have the album I’m going to pick already picked out. Free alter­na­tive phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals are wel­come, your spon­sor­ship is desired. Clas­sic. Pow­ered by …

October 31, 2007 – 8:50 pm | By ashok | Posted in links | Comments (0)

A Quick Note: Why Voting On Comments Is Stupid

Vot­ing is the end prod­uct of care­fully con­sid­ered opin­ion. Voic­ing an opin­ion on a vote can hap­pen after an elec­tion, includ­ing an inter­me­di­ate elec­tion to fil­ter out choices. But vot­ing on opin­ions while a debate is going on in real time? Are you kid­ding me? The only thing vot­ing is doing in that case is …

October 30, 2007 – 3:43 am | By ashok | Posted in politics | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Self-Interest Rightly Understood: On Harvey Mansfield’s 2007 Jefferson Lecture

The Amer­i­can enter­prise lends itself to the con­duct of polit­i­cal sci­ence today: it is a sci­ence con­cerned with sat­is­fac­tion, util­ity, and power. The rea­son why it is con­cerned with these con­cepts is that indi­vid­u­als can be abstracted into some­thing more gen­eral, and their behav­ior can be pre­dicted. Hence, “self-interest” arises, and it is a loaded …

October 27, 2007 – 11:15 pm | By ashok | Posted in academia, politics | Tagged | Comments (0)

Social Bookmarking and the Communities It Forms

The com­ment below was left by me on chrisg.com on a post con­cerned with what causes some of the nas­tier behav­ior at Digg towards blog­gers: I don’t know that it is jeal­ousy and igno­rance alone. It seems to me form­ing com­mu­nity has a price, and that more tightly knit com­mu­ni­ties are going to have com­mon …

October 27, 2007 – 2:50 am | By ashok | Posted in blogging | Tagged | Comments (1)

Leadership

The expert fails because he knows more than the wise — he has a com­plete grasp on the the­ory and all its par­tic­u­lars, and assumes that alone should be good enough. The assump­tion is rein­forced with a pre­sup­po­si­tion: if the “the­ory*” doesn’t work, some­thing is wrong with every­one and every­thing else. Find­ing that wrong­ness is …

October 26, 2007 – 8:49 am | By ashok | Posted in politics | Tagged | Comments (0)