e.thePeople : Article : Under 25 voters need a reason to believe Over at E-The People, there’s a lively discussion about why young Americans don’t vote. Many perspectives are represented, and it’s hard to generalize. However, I am uncomfortable with the idea (expressed by several participants) that young voters are especially skillful at detecting hypocrisy and thus turned off by politicians, with the exception of John McCain and possibly Howard Dean. I would reply that: 1) No one can tell who’s phony through the filter of the mass media. Thus young people are deluding themselves if they think they’re excellent judges of character. 2) A cynical press corps makes us think that our politicians are generally more hypocritical than they actually are. If this impression causes us not to vote, we’re the ones who lose power as a result. And 3) you can be a phony with good ideas, or a highly principled and consistent person who’s a complete nut. Therefore, I don’t think there’s any substitute for forming opinions about issues and then voting accordingly. The low level of knowledge among 18-25s is thus a bigger problem than their intolerance for phoniness.
Author Archives: Peter Levine
blogs before the Internet
I love Pepys’ Diary, a website that reproduces an entry from Samuel Pepys’ seventeenth-century journal every day, in blog format, with lots of hyperlinks so that you can learn about everything from the buildings of London to the (supposed) medicinal qualities of Wormwood.
There are other interesting predecessors of blogs. For example, I have on my shelf two books edited by G.P.V. Akrigg, A Jacobean Journal for the Years 1603-6 and A Second Jacobean Journal. Akrigg reproduces one real London diary entry for each day of each year in the early 1600s. The entries comment on major events, sensational crimes, foreign and military news, and recent publications. I do not know to what degree the diarists expected their writing to be public, but there was certainly no right to privacy under King James, and these diaries were all deliberately preserved.
libertarians and socialists have something in common
I see libertarianism and modern democratic Socialism as flawed for similar (or parallel) reasons:
Protests from London to NYC
Reading about anti-Bush protests in London reminds me that the Republican National Convention will be held next summer in New York City, where a lot of people are Democrats, against the war, and angry about federal economic policies, from the big tax cuts to the scanty post-9/11 aid for New York. I hope there will be massive protests, but I hope that the organizers will heed the following message, which Harry Boyte saved from the March on Washington in 1963. In the program guide, Dr. Martin Luther King and the other organizers wrote: “In a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words, and even hot insults; but when a whole people speaks to its government the dialogue and the action must be on a level reflecting the worth of that people and the responsibility of that government.”
using Movable Type
On the advice of Frederick
Emrich (who runs an excellent blog), I’m switching over from plain
old html to the fancy and free blog software provided by Movable (sic) Type.
The disadvantage is that I’ve had to change the address of this weblog.
Please change any bookmarks or links that you’ve established. The advantages
are: an easy way for me to blog from any computer anywhere; opportunities
for visitors like you to post comments (which I welcome); a search function;
and permanent URLs for each entry, so that people can more easily link
to specific posts.