Dr. Paul,

I just watched your interview with Rachel Maddow, and first of all thought you did an admirable job of trying not to let her pin you down on the political point she was trying to make.  As I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s her show and she was going to make the point she wanted to make regardless, but you did very well, I think, in distinguishing the racial issue from the federal/private one.

In general I found myself agreeing with  you, but I wanted to offer a philosophical twist for your consideration.  I agree that the federal gov’t should not unilaterally decide how someone can run their private business, but at the same time I think that we the people are collectively responsible for deciding what kind of people we are.  For example, most of us agree that cold-blooded, first degree murder is not only abhorrent but morally wrong to the point of tolerating a law that abridges one man’s personal freedom to act in order to protect another man’s right to live.  We as a people and a culture have decided that this is an acceptable and even desirable limitation.  And so I think that overall, it’s not a question of whether laws exist that restrict private freedoms, but rather a question of where we draw that line.  I don’t agree with laws that seek to take a minority moral position and impose it on everyone, but I think there is potentially a place to say that if a significant majority of us collectively agree that a given law protecting something as foundational as the inherent dignity of an individual reflects who we are as a people and a nation, then perhaps that may be acceptable.

Now with that said, I’m inclined to observe that to my knowledge the legal definitions and prosecution of murder occurs at the state and local levels rather than federal and that is perhaps more appropriately where such laws belong.  However, in that view nothing would have changed in the 60’s because the states in question were more than happy to continue business as usual with their Jim Crow laws intact, so I’m not sure how useful such an observation is to the current issue.

In any case, congratulations on your primary victory, and best of luck in shaping the political conversations to come rather than allowing them to be shaped for and against you.

- Joel Fouse

More specifically, I realized that what’s been happening in the software world for the past 10-20 years may be a useful and perhaps instructive analogy.  You could substitute “Microsoft” for “Democrats”, “IBM and others” for “Republicans”, and “the Free/Open Source Software movement” for “the Tea Party movement”, and write a very, very similar analysis of the world of software maybe 10 years ago.  The open source movement is very disparate, organic, passionate and apathetic by turn, lively, contentious, frequently at odds with itself, and above all wildly successful, with emphasis on “wildly”.  It is not a company like Microsoft or IBM, does not enter into contracts or make business deals, does not have a spokesman or PR department, and does not in any way have a board or any other semblance of centralized control structure.  It is comprised of folks from any and every demographic you can think of, and probably a few you can’t.  Genders, ages, religions, philosophies political and moral, skills, geographies, economies, you name it, all are represented in the open source community.  Its single defining characteristic is the emphasis on freedom — freedom to tinker, freedom to learn, freedom to create, and freedom to give that freedom to others.  Anyone who wants to be involved doesn’t have to apply, doesn’t have to get permission, doesn’t have to go through volunteer training.  You just jump in and do it.  If you want to see how something works, pop open the hood.  If you want to figure out why someone else’s open source program has a bug in it and see if you can fix it, knock yourself out.  If you think you can do a better job than what someone else put out there, by all means roll up your sleeves and go for it.

So what’s the point here?  The point is that open source’s very strength comes from the fact that it’s almost a free-for-all, a community of folks who have similar ideas but are free to put flesh around those ideas in any way they see fit.  Any given project will naturally have its own control structure, with the creators and maintainers accepting or declining input from others and generally running the project as they like.  But that has no bearing on what anyone else does with any other project, and shouldn’t — other projects have other goals, other considerations, other priorities.  Sometimes mutual goals foster collaboration, other times there is direct competition or even confrontation, and that’s okay.  It is a living, vibrant, active community, not a machine.

Which brings me back to the tea party folks.  They may all agree on certain Libertarian-esque ideals, primarily freedom from as much government intervention in their lives as possible, but what that looks like in Florida may be entirely different than what that looks like in Montana or Indiana or New Hampshire, or for that matter Washington, DC.  It certainly looked different between New York and Massachusetts recently.   Tea partiers in this state may want the Republican, while those in that city may want the Democrat given the options available, while some other congressional district may support the Independent against both major parties or even write someone in.  These folks are passionate about what they’re doing and individualistic by nature, and they’ve seen the power of getting involved.

The Obama presidential campaign of 2008 was ground-breaking in a number of ways, but one that has been analyzed and celebrated again and again was how well it gathered and harnessed the collective interests and passions of millions of supporters into a somewhat cohesive whole.  A second and closely related way is how well it controlled its message and presentation.  Everywhere you looked you saw the same images, logos, fonts (for those who notice such things), colors, and talking points.  Everything was efficient, engineered, and expertly driven.

The answer to that is not a Republican copycat campaign, mimicking the methods and control of the original (though they may well try).  The answer is the antithesis of all of that.  It’s people saying what’s on their minds, not what they’ve been told to say.  It’s voters supporting a candidate because they like her ideas, not because her name’s in the right column.  It’s citizens expressing their views in any way, medium, and method they see fit with no concern for approval channels or whose interests they might offend.  The Tea Party movement is open source politics.  It’s we, the people, waking up.

Maybe my impressions are off.  I haven’t met with any tea party groups or talked to an of its leaders or anything.  But from what I see, trying to take what’s happening and stuff it into a well-formed political suit misses the point, and runs the risk of robbing it of the very thing that makes it alive:  freedom.

In a mini-replay of the popular-vote-vs.-electoral-vote difference, this page seems to indicate that even though he got more votes, she’s getting more delegates. Isn’t that what counts after all? I doubt this fact has escaped her campaign folks; I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen any “Well, actually…”-type spin from her camp yet.

If McCain were on top, on the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he picked Lieberman for veep. Unfortunately, while there’s the whole bi-partisan appeal going for it, I don’t think it’s as compelling a ticket overall and would most likely fall to Obama-Hillary.

Scratch that. She’d never accept veep.

What’s so striking to me is not the production quality of the video mashup, which is very good, but rather how much this furthers the trend begun by blogs, where everyday people suddenly have a voice, and a potentially powerful one at that. This is the promise of the Internet, coming of age in ways both promising and perilous. Anyone can say anything they want (true or otherwise) and have an audience, and I believe the impact on this election cycle is going to be remembered and talked about for the next 20 years the way Apple’s “1984″ ad has been for the last 20. Howard Fineman gets it:

The candidates don’t really control it anymore. It is not something they do; it is something that is done to them. They have to learn to ride the beast like a Fremen riding a sandworm in “Dune.” If they master it, they can speed across the desert; oblivion awaits the unskilled.

We are in the middle of a fundamental shift in the way the world works, and it’s not all going to be pretty.

As the Washington Post reports this morning, polygamists are piping up right on cue. And while I don’t agree with them, I can’t say I blame them for speaking up given the current social, legal, and political climate. It’s worth noting, as the Post does, that a distinction is being made not only in the movement itself but more significantly in the Utah attorney general’s office between “regular” polygamous practices (one adult man marrying multiple openly consenting adult women) and those of Tom Green, Warren Jeffs, and others involving things like rape, incest, and forcing underage girls into marriage. This distinction is based on the flipside of the premise of Lawrence, opting to focus on behaviors with real harm to minors which are addressed by non-polygamy laws rather than private actions between consenting adults.

One has to wonder, though, given the potential slippery slope provided by Lawrence, how soon we’ll have men trying to marry their dogs…

George Monbiot over at The Guardian has provided an attempted debunking. “Debunking” because he raises several valid points and provides enough information to bring the certainty in Monckton’s piece down a peg or two; “attempted” because it doesn’t seem to provide quite enough to swing one’s certainty the other way, and smacks a bit of the “you unwashed masses couldn’t be expected to understand” bearing which rarely elevate’s one’s cause in the eyes of the intended audience.

Anyway, I’m sure there are valid and insightful responses out there to this guy’s position (at least I hope so — this can’t be all political, can it?), but this at least shows me that this issue isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as some would have us believe.

Many of us who identify in some way with the ‘Conservative Christian’ stereotype have become accustomed to questioning and even challenging the ’scientific establishment’, if you will. Two particular issues that come to mind are evolution (about which the Washington Post printed a thoroughly useless opinion this past Sunday) and embryonic stem cell research. We know the positions we’re working from, and think we have a pretty good grasp of the other side’s positions, so when some opinion or statement or study or whatever comes out we’re halfway through the argument before we’ve even opened our mouths. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either — slavery was abolished largely as a result of the tireless, vocal efforts of abolitionist Christians.

But the ideology obviously can’t say that all science is bad. When my daughter is sick, I take her to the doctor. A doctor who has studied the medical sciences extensively, and gained knowledge gathered from years and years of scientific research. He tells me what he thinks, and I listen to him because I trust him. If I didn’t, I’d find another doctor. The whole point of the relationship is that he has extensive knowledge that I will never have, and I simply need to trust him to care for my daughter to the best of his ability. We’re supposed to trust our doctors, and specialists, and surgeons. If we have a concern we can get a second opinion, but we can’t go through life second-guessing every medical professional we encounter. This stuff is science, but it’s real-life, everyday science.

So the ideology says that life is sacred, and so she must be allowed to live. But the real-life everyday doctors and specialists say that, regardless of what it looks like, there really isn’t any life there left to save. And as I have no reason to believe that that many doctors (and throw in a judge, too) are in some way enamored with killing off patients with otherwise hopeful prognoses, I have to trust that they know what they’re talking about. And yet, sometimes doctors are wrong. They are human, after all. Thus you have the tension between ideology and reality — a life should be saved, especially when it would be so easy to do, but is the life even really there? Are you trying to keep an old clunker running, or are you pumping gas in the tank to keep the wheels rolling while the car sits upside down in the bottom of a ravine?

And what bothers me the most is that some people on either side aren’t even wrestling with this. Either it’s that “you religious freaks need to just sit down and shut up because there’s obviously nothing they can do for her,” or it’s that “all those doctors are lying or stupid and her life should be saved for it’s own sake.” I don’t think either position is healthy or wise, and both could stand a good bit of humility and introspection.

This is not clear-cut, black and white. It’s messy, and we need to acknowledge that. Home videos notwithstanding.