Tuesday, September 30, 2014

NIcholas Carr is at it Again

Is Google Making Students Stupid?

Outsourcing menial tasks to machines can seem liberating, but it may be robbing a whole generation of certain basic mental abilities.

Nick Romeo Sep 30 2014, 2:55 PM ET

Justin Morgan/Flickr

One of the oldest metaphors for human interaction with technology is the relationship of master and slave. Aristotle imagined that technology could replace slavery if devices like the loom became automated. In the 19th century, Oscar Wilde foresaw a future when machines performed all dull and unpleasant labor, freeing humanity to amuse itself by “making beautiful things,” or simply “contemplating the world with admiration and delight.” Marx and Engels saw things differently. “Masses of laborers are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,” they wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Machines had not saved us from slavery; they had become a means of enslavement.
Today, computers often play both roles. Nicholas Carr, the author of the 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, confronts this paradox in his new book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, analyzing the many contemporary fields in which software assists human cognition, from medical diagnostic aids to architectural modeling programs. As its title suggests, the book also takes a stand on whether such technology imprisons or liberates its users. We are increasingly encaged, he argues, but the invisibility of our high-tech snares gives us the illusion of freedom. As evidence, he cites the case of Inuit hunters in northern Canada. Older generations could track caribou through the tundra with astonishing precision by noticing subtle changes in winds, snowdrift patterns, stars, and animal behavior. Once younger hunters began using snowmobiles and GPS units, their navigational prowess declined. They began trusting the GPS devices so completely that they ignored blatant dangers, speeding over cliffs or onto thin ice. And when a GPS unit broke or its batteries froze, young hunters who had not developed and practiced the wayfinding skills of their elders were uniquely vulnerable.
Carr includes other case studies: He describes doctors who become so reliant on decision-assistance software that they overlook subtle signals from patients or dismiss improbable but accurate diagnoses. He interviews architects whose drawing skills decay as they transition to digital platforms. And he recounts frightening instances when commercial airline pilots fail to perform simple corrections in emergencies because they are so used to trusting the autopilot system. Carr is quick to acknowledge that these technologies often do enhance and assist human skills. But he makes a compelling case that our relationship with them is not as positive as we might think.
All of this has unmistakable implications for the use of technology in classrooms: When do technologies free students to think about more interesting and complex questions, and when do they erode the very cognitive capacities they are meant to enhance? The effect of ubiquitous spell check and AutoCorrect software is a revealing example. Psychologists studying the formation of memories have found that the act of generating a word in your mind strengthens your capacity to remember it. When a computer automatically corrects a spelling mistake or offers a drop-down menu of options, we’re no longer forced to generate the correct spelling in our minds.
This might not seem very important. If writers don’t clutter their minds with often-bizarre English spelling conventions, this might give them more energy to consider interesting questions of style and structure. But the process of word generation is not just supplementing spelling skills; it’s also eroding them. When students find themselves without automated spelling assistance, they don’t face the prospect of freezing to death, as the Inuits did when their GPS malfunctioned, but they’re more likely to make errors.
The solution might seem to be improving battery life and making spelling assistance even more omnipresent, but this creates a vicious cycle: The more we use the technology, the more we need to use it in all circumstances. Suddenly, our position as masters of technology starts to seem more precarious.
Relying on calculators to perform arithmetic has had similar risks and benefits. Automating the time-consuming work of multiplying and dividing large numbers by hand can allow students to spend time and energy on more complex mathematical subjects. But depending on calculators in classrooms can also lead students to forget how to do the operations that the machines perform. Once again, something meant to expedite a task winds up being an indispensable technology.
The phenomenon is not specific to modern technologies; the same concern appears in Plato’s Phaedrus, where a character in the dialogue worries about the effects of the phonetic alphabet: “This discovery … will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Automating almost any task can rob us of an ability.
The difference today is the sheer breadth of mental tasks that have been outsourced to machines. Carr describes a 2004 study in which two groups of subjects played a computer game based on the logic puzzle Missionaries and Cannibals. Solving the puzzle required figuring out how to transport five missionaries and five cannibals across a river in a boat that could hold only three passengers. The cannibals, for self-evident reasons, could not outnumber missionaries on either of the riverbanks or in the boat.
The first group of players used a sophisticated software program that offered prompts and guidance on permissible moves in given scenarios. The second group used a simple program that gave no assistance. Initially, those using the helpful software made rapid progress, but over time those using the more basic software made fewer wrong moves and solved the puzzle more efficiently. The psychologist running the study concluded that those who received less assistance were more likely to develop a better understanding of the game’s rules and strategize accordingly.
As all good teachers know, students need to experience confusion and struggle in order to internalize certain principles. That’s why teachers avoid rushing in to assist students at the first hint of incomprehension. It’s neither necessary nor possible to abolish calculators and spellcheck programs in classrooms, but periodically removing these tools can help ensure that students use technology in order to free their minds for more interesting tasks—not because they can’t spell or compute without assistance.
Carr notes that the word “robot” derives from robota, a Czech term for servitude. His book is a valuable reminder that if we don’t carefully examine the process that makes us dependent on technology, our position in the master-servant relationship can become the opposite of what we imagine

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Finished it for at least the third time. As a general rule I do not read books twice. I am not one of those who likes to read as a adult what I read as a callow youth. When I do read a book twice, there has to be sufficient time between readings so that I forget much of the plot and details. Some people reread their favorite book once each year. That is not for me!

This is a great novel for its lyrical prose, interesting story, and arresting details. It is not The Great American Novel, for in my opinion, there is no such thing.

Too much can be made of this book. It is a love story pure and simple with asides that can go on forever. There are plenty of Fitzgerald fanatics who devote lives to studying this writer. Maybe this is why I never became a scholar. My mind jumps from one thing to another. I could never devote years to one subject.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Bill Maher Tells Cops To Stop ‘Going Mental For No Reason’

I am disgusted by the police officer who shot a South Carolina man for reaching for his driver's license, as the police officer instructed. The police officer said later he was alarmed by the man's sudden movement, thinking the man might be reaching for a gun. This is not the first time this police officer has been involved in a violent traffic incident; and I know nothing about being a police officer. Nonetheless, this is ridiculous. The police too often have acted like militarized street thugs, and blacks are too often the victims, sadly. I am glad that Bill Maher is willing to criticize the police, and rightly so. I don't know about the police having an inferiority complex, but it seems nowadays you have to live scared of being shot by the police.

BY Shannon Barger
Addicting Info
28 September 2014

On his Friday night episode of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, host and political satirist Bill Maher once again addressed the issue of racism, this time turning his attention to America’s police forces, saying that cops need to stop “going mental for no reason.” Maher attempted to begin on a (sarcastically) positive note:

"Now, this week I want to say something nice about the police before we start listing all the people they shot and beat up this week that they shouldn’t have. I totally get it, that this is the most strapped country in the world. We’re armed to the teeth. When you’re a policeman, every encounter might be that kind of encounter."

The somewhat understanding tone was short- lived, though, as the show aired a clip of a police officer shooting and killing 22-year-old John Crawford in an Ohio Wal-Mart for carrying an air pellet rifle purchased in the store. Maher continued during this clip:

"And yet, every week we see police officers going mental for no reason."

The tirade continued, this time with a clip of a South Carolina officer shooting at a man for reaching for the requested photo ID. Maher said:

"This isn’t every policeman in the country, but it just makes me ask, is there any training going on? I mean, [the South Carolina officer] shot this guy four times at point-blank range and only winged him once."

That’s a great point. Four point blank shots and only one hit? Where did this guy attend the police academy, the Barney Fife School of Law Enforcement? I guess the silver lining here is that the cop in this particular situation is off the streets and has been charged.

At this point, panelist Charles Blow chimed in:

"These aren’t equal opportunity shootings. Not everybody is being shot by the cops — when we see these tapes, we’re seeing black men being shot. We have to address the elephant in the room."

Blow is right, of course. The police are afraid of minorities, particularly of black men. This is institutionalized racism at work, and anyone who cannot see that is either willfully blind or ignorant, or racist themselves.

Maher added at a later point in the show:

"Somehow police got it in their head that theirs is the most dangerous job. It’s not the most dangerous job — they have statistics on this stuff. It’s behind electricians, fishermen, cab drivers. Yet somehow they got it in their head that they have to be protected first.

This is why we see SWAT teams breaking up poker games. This is why we see the ridiculous use of Tasers. I feel like in the ’60s people called them ‘pigs,’ and that was wrong, and America’s been overcompensating ever since."

He’s right, of course. It’s as if the police have something to prove with their heavy artillery and overzealous use of guns, tasers, and other forms of excessive force. Unfortunately, their inferiority complex is causing injury and death to innocent people, and something needs to be done about it. The even more unfortunate fact is that the people in the position to do something about it are in the pockets of the organized street gangs that we call our American police forces, and, because of that, the cycle keeps repeating.

The Real Story of Technology in Education

But at the bottom of this rush to place technology in every classroom is the nagging feeling that the goal in buying expensive devices is not to improve teachers’ abilities, or to lighten their load. It’s not to create more meaningful learning experiences for students or to lift them out of poverty or neglect. It’s to facilitate more test-making and profit-taking for private industry, and quick, too, before there’s nothing left.
Kathleen Sharp reports on business and entertainment from Southern California.

The Invisible Rich

Our Invisible Rich

SEPT. 28, 2014

Paul Krugman

Half a century ago, a classic essay in The New Yorker titled “Our Invisible Poor” took on the then-prevalent myth that America was an affluent society with only a few “pockets of poverty.” For many, the facts about poverty came as a revelation, and Dwight Macdonald’s article arguably did more than any other piece of advocacy to prepare the ground for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

I don’t think the poor are invisible today, even though you sometimes hear assertions that they aren’t really living in poverty — hey, some of them have Xboxes! Instead, these days it’s the rich who are invisible.

But wait — isn’t half our TV programming devoted to breathless portrayal of the real or imagined lifestyles of the rich and fatuous? Yes, but that’s celebrity culture, and it doesn’t mean that the public has a good sense either of who the rich are or of how much money they make. In fact, most Americans have no idea just how unequal our society has become.

The latest piece of evidence to that effect is a survey asking people in various countries how much they thought top executives of major companies make relative to unskilled workers. In the United States the median respondent believed that chief executives make about 30 times as much as their employees, which was roughly true in the 1960s — but since then the gap has soared, so that today chief executives earn something like 300 times as much as ordinary workers.

So Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid, a finding very much in line with evidence that Americans vastly underestimate the concentration of wealth at the top.

Is this just a reflection of the innumeracy of hoi polloi? No — the supposedly well informed often seem comparably out of touch. Until the Occupy movement turned the “1 percent” into a catchphrase, it was all too common to hear prominent pundits and politicians speak about inequality as if it were mainly about college graduates versus the less educated, or the top fifth of the population versus the bottom 80 percent.

And even the 1 percent is too broad a category; the really big gains have gone to an even tinier elite. For example, recent estimates indicate not only that the wealth of the top percent has surged relative to everyone else — rising from 25 percent of total wealth in 1973 to 40 percent now — but that the great bulk of that rise has taken place among the top 0.1 percent, the richest one-thousandth of Americans.

So how can people be unaware of this development, or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds.

The exceptions are celebrities, who live their lives in public. And defenses of extreme inequality almost always invoke the examples of movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata. For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.

Most Americans say, if asked, that inequality is too high and something should be done about it — there is overwhelming support for higher minimum wages, and a majority favors higher taxes at the top. But at least so far confronting extreme inequality hasn’t been an election-winning issue. Maybe that would be true even if Americans knew the facts about our new Gilded Age. But we don’t know that. Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

How the Republican Party Became a Nuthouse

Monday, Sep 29, 2014 07:30 AM CST

“Not the true Republican Party”: How the party of Lincoln ended up with Ted Cruz

Once the party of income tax and checks on property, an expert details how the GOP turned into a nuthouse

Elias Isquith Follow

Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Reuters/Tami Chappell/Kevin Lamarque/photo montage by Salon)

Speculative reports of an impending third Mitt Romney presidential run notwithstanding, the Republican Party today is no longer the domain of the genteel patrician with a passion for frugality, as it was for much of the 20th century. Today, the GOP belongs to former Dixiecrats, fundamentalist Christians and devotees of the philosophy of the free market. To put it bluntly, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who in 2012 ran one of the most disastrous presidential campaigns of the modern era, but who’s also an ex-Democrat, evangelical Christian and deregulator par excellence — is taken seriously as a threat to win the GOP’s 2016 nomination for a reason.
If you take a longer view, though, the distance between the GOP today and its previous incarnations becomes even more striking. This was the party of Lincoln, after all; it was Republicans who rejected an absolute right to property (meaning: owning other humans), who initiated the first income tax, who argued government could be used to promote opportunity, and who waged a revolutionary war against the smokescreen of states’ rights. How did the party that was formed in large part to fight the Slave Power become the chief guardian of today’s 1 percent?
In her new book, “To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party,” Boston College professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson offers an answer, claiming that the historically Janus-faced GOP has struggled to reconcile its purported belief in equality of opportunity with its passionate defense of the right to own property. Salon recently spoke with Richardson about her new book as well as the way the GOP’s internal contradictions mirror those of America itself. Our conversation is below, and has been edited for clarity and length.
Why write a book about the GOP instead of the Democratic Party?

I’m a historian of American politics and the economy generally. And if you want to understand American politics and the economy, you simply have to understand the 19th century. So much hinges on the Civil War and the Reconstruction years. You must understand that if you’re going to understand anything else. You have to understand the Republicans because they ran politics for the majority of that century.
For the most part, the major political parties are simply tools that groups of Americans use for political ends; but do you think the GOP has any distinctive characteristics or consistent themes that have endured throughout its whole history?
The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property — which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion — and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn’t any kind of law or codification of those principles.
The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence’s equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.
You put a great emphasis on the roles Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower played within the GOP and how they pulled the party, for a time, at least, toward caring about equality of opportunity as much as the protection of property. But did these men change the GOP of their respective eras, or was it that they happened to be around during moments when the GOP was in general more devoted to equality? Or perhaps it’s not so much an either/or?
The simple answer is that it is both. It’s a reflection of the fact that in each of their times they lived in, the majority of Americans believed that government was controlled by the very wealthy and they were manipulating the government and laws to put more money into their own pockets. Wealth was very stratified in each of those periods, and there were a lot of really angry people. When those conditions were right, you got these three great leaders — and in each case, they were really bucking a trend. They were bucking a world where too many Americans felt that they no longer had the opportunity to rise and to support their families.
All three men were concerned about political extremism in their time, and all three men considered tamping down extremism by promoting widely distributed economic growth a core principle. To flip the coin, are there any figures from the GOP’s history that come to mind when you consider the other half of the American and Republican equation — namely, a “small-government” focus on private property?
There was great — and I hate to say fun, but I am a historian and I do love to see the way patterns work out — there was great fun when I got into the Republican reactions to the Depression. When you hear about the Depression, you always hear about the Democrats; but, in fact, the Republicans don’t roll over and die. They’re still very much there.
When I started reading what they were saying back then, I was gobsmacked, because it was the exact same language that you heard [during the economic crises of the] 1890s and after the crash of 2008: The only way you can fix the Depression is to cut taxes, stop the greedy government employees from making such high salaries, cut the salaries of people like teachers, and people need to go out and be more moral and work harder. If I put quotations in front of you from 1890s, the 1930s and the 2000s — and didn’t tell you when they were from — you honestly could not tell.
I want to emphasize: These people are not evil. They don’t wake up in the morning and say, “We’re going to screw somebody over!” Their belief in the principle of the protection of property, they hold it as firmly, and rest it on the Constitution just as firmly, as people like Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rest on the Declaration of Independence and the idea of equality of opportunity. This is a legitimate, in their minds, position, and they are defending America by holding to it.
To name some people who embody that other tradition, it would be people like Mark Hanna, a senator nobody’s ever heard of who runs for Republican Party in the late 19th century … Somebody from the Harrison administration — or better yet, President McKinley. McKinley was all over this. In the 1920s and 1930s, it would have to be Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover, who are both active in the administrations of Harding and Coolidge.
And in the modern era, you know, start picking. It starts with Buckley and Goldwater, and Reagan … in the present day, I guess I’d go with George W. Bush or Dick Cheney.
Has the GOP ever before been as far along the property side of the opportunity/property spectrum as it is right now?
Sure. It was absolutely this way in the 1920s. In fact, much more strongly [than now] because there are regulatory systems in place now that nobody has been able to dismantle, although they would like to very much … So the 1920s Republican Party was even more “pure” than it is now; as was the case during the 1890s. In each of those periods, the Republican Party was even more strongly dedicated to the protection of property.
That being said, there is a new piece since the ‘80s in the Republican Party, and I would argue that what we have right now is not the true Republican Party. The true Republican Party is a very different construct than where we are right now. The modern-day party has done something the party has never done before — and this kind of throws a monkey wrench into seeing where it’s going to go because the Republican Party has always stood for education. It has always believed that central to American democracy was the idea of education, that you must have an educated population and that the country will only get better if more and more people have access to better and better education.
But if you look at policies in America since the 1980s … rather than focusing on education, Republicans have focused on sort of a populist, religious, in many ways anti-education, anti-science, group of voters and that will change how the next generation of the party plays out.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Not Only

No only is there no there there, there is no here here, which makes it kind of tough to prune the grocery list to fit the budget and keep gas in the car. Alice B. T. says don't worry about it but it's easy for her since she's already written her autobiography. She probably doesn't have to constantly read food labels and trim her toe nails weekly like yours truly. Silly woman.

What I'm Waiting For

What I'm waiting for is a book that ties the Confederacy and its defense of slavery with today's movement conservatives. Both come from the same mind.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Print is better than Digital

Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books

By Rachel Grate September 22, 2014

It's no secret that reading is good for you. Just six minutes of reading is enough to reduce stress by 68%, and numerous studies have shown that reading keeps your brain functioning effectively as you age. One study even found that elderly individuals who read regularly are 2.5 times less likely to develop Alzheimer's than their peers. But not all forms of reading are created equal.

The debate between paper books and e-readers has been vicious since the first Kindle came out in 2007. Most arguments have been about the sentimental versus the practical, between people who prefer how paper pages feel in their hands and people who argue for the practicality of e-readers. But now science has weighed in, and the studies are on the side of paper books.

Reading in print helps with comprehension.

A 2014 study found that readers of a short mystery story on a Kindle were significantly worse at remembering the order of events than those who read the same story in paperback. Lead researcher Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University concluded that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does."

Our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted and created new circuits to understand letters and texts. The brain reads by constructing a mental representation of the text based on the placement of the page in the book and the word on the page.

The tactile experience of a book aids this process, from the thickness of the pages in your hands as you progress through the story to the placement of a word on the page. Mangen hypothesizes that the difference for Kindle readers "might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading."

While e-readers try to recreate the sensation of turning pages and pagination, the screen is limited to one ephemeral virtual page. Surveys about the use of e-readers suggest that this affects a reader's serendipity and sense of control. The inability to flip back to previous pages or control the text physically, either through making written notes or bending pages, limits one's sensory experience and thus reduces long-term memory of the text.

Reading long sentences without links is a skill you need — but can lose if you don't practice.

Reading long, literary sentences sans links and distractions is actually a serious skill that you lose if you don't use it. Before the Internet, the brain read in a linear fashion, taking advantage of sensory details to remember where key information was in the book by layout.

As we increasingly read on screens, our reading habits have adapted to skim text rather than really absorb the meaning. A 2006 study found that people read on screens in an "F" pattern, reading the entire top line but then only scanning through the text along the left side of the page. This sort of nonlinear reading reduces comprehension and actually makes it more difficult to focus the next time you sit down with a longer piece of text.

Tufts University neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf worries that "the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing." Individuals are increasingly finding it difficult to sit down and immerse themselves in a novel. As a result, some researchers and literature-lovers have started a "slow reading" movement, as a way to counteract their difficulty making it through a book.

Reading in a slow, focused, undistracted way is good for your brain.

Slow-reading advocates recommend at least 30 to 45 minutes of daily reading away from the distractions of modern technology. By doing so, the brain can reengage with linear reading. The benefits of making slow reading a regular habit are numerous, reducing stress and improving your ability to concentrate.

Regular reading also increases empathy, especially when reading a print book. One study discovered that individuals who read an upsetting short story on an iPad were less empathetic and experienced less transportation and immersion than those who read on paper.

Reading an old-fashioned novel is also linked to improving sleep. When many of us spend our days in front of screens, it can be hard to signal to our body that it's time to sleep. By reading a paper book about an hour before bed, your brain enters a new zone, distinct from that enacted by reading on an e-reader.

Three-quarters of Americans 18 and older report reading at least one book in the past year, a number which has fallen, and e-books currently make up between 15 to 20% of all book sales. In this increasingly Twitter- and TV-centric world, it's the regular readers, the ones who take a break from technology to pick up a paper book, who have a serious advantage on the rest of us.

A Brief History of the Universe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MrqqD_Tsy4Q

Losing the Left?

Saturday, Sep 27, 2014 05:30 AM CST

Obama loses the left: Why his low approval rating may be here to stay

For many liberals, it's Sen. Elizabeth Warren's party now. After six years, here's why they're ready for a change

Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Yuri Gripas/photo montage by Salon)

Except for the brief interregnum that separated the Republican Party’s George W. Bush era from its current Tea Party incarnation, President Obama has never enjoyed the kind of high approval ratings that used to accompany most two-term presidents. Whether it’s due to his race, our growing ideological polarization, the poor economy, or a combination of all of the above, Obama’s rarely known what it feels like to be a president of whom more than half of Americans approve. According to the Huffington Post, it only took until the tenth month of his first year before his number dipped below 50 percent.
Fighting as he is now to keep his approval rating north of 40 percent, November 2009 probably looks to Obama like the good old days. And mindful, perhaps, of how he’s previously looked on the verge of irrevocably losing the people’s faith, only to bounce back to his usual place in the mid- to high 40s, Obama may also believe that this current spate of bad polling will eventually pass. Anything’s possible; the economy could start booming. Unemployment could drop. Wages could rise. Obama could recover.
But I’m starting to think this time may be different, and that when it comes to Obama’s relationship with millions of former supporters, there’s no going back.
What’s got me thinking this way is a raft of new polls showing not only that the president is unpopular, but that he’s becoming increasingly so in the very places, and among the very people, he could usually count on for support. A release from Field Poll earlier this month, for example, found the president to have only a 45 percent approval rating in über-blue California. Most strikingly, the pollster reported that California Dems’ support for Obama dropped 8 percent during just this summer and was down 11 percent in Los Angeles alone.
The Field Poll wasn’t an outlier, either. This past week, Marist College released a poll from that other bedrock of the Democratic Party, the state of New York. No good news there, either: Only 39 percent of registered New York voters are happy with Obama’s performance, the lowest score he’s registered in the state throughout his entire presidency. As was the case with the California poll, Marist found a big drop in the number of New York Obama supporters in the past few months. He was at a passable 45 percent as recently as July.

It’s easy to see, then, that a good number of one-time supporters of the president are profoundly unhappy, and that their unhappiness has increased dramatically of late. It’s also fair to guess that unhappiness over the crisis in Ukraine, the new war in the Middle East and the decision to kick the can on a deportations-related executive order are all playing a role. But although these developments are recent, they’re not exactly new — liberals have been uncomfortable with targeted drone strikes and record-setting levels of deportation for years. Why only now do these disagreements represent White House failures so egregious that they justify withdrawing support?
Obviously, I can’t give you a definitive answer to that question, at least not yet. Polls aren’t predictions so much as snapshots of a particular moment in time — and they’re blurry ones, at that. We may find out in the future that this summer was a bad one for the U.S. economy, which could explain the president’s troubles more persuasively than a decision about U.S.I.C.E. bureaucracy or the international status of Donetsk. But assuming this summer swoon is no mere blip, and instead represents a permanent change in liberals’ judgment, I think timing may be the reason why.
Put simply, my guess is that a growing number of liberals have decided that after nearly six years, and with no reason to believe a Democratic congress is on the horizon, Obama’s done nearly all he’ll ever do and the verdict is in. And although Obamacare seems to be a policy success, and Dodd-Frank is reportedly working better than many expected, many liberals have concluded that these balms are not enough to soothe the lingering pain of their unmet expectations. Not so much on policy — which most people, including those who’d describe themselves as politically informed, don’t think much about — but on politics, where the contrast between Obama and other professional politicians used to be much clearer.
When Obama first ran for president in 2008, much of the reason he inspired such enthusiasm was because he was willing, at times, to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in a mainstream presidential campaign. He didn’t run away from his past; he refused to wear a flag pin; he gave long, smart, dense speeches about history and race. In retrospect, that bravery looks a little thin — he’d end up donning a flag pin and disowning his former reverend — but it wasn’t a complete fabrication, either. Liberals hoping he’d change some of the dumbest norms of American politics were not insane.
Yet throughout his presidency, Obama’s been more cautious, less willing to fight a losing battle in the hopes of winning the war by changing the terrain. During the first four years, many liberals found this frustrating but cut him some slack, remembering how all presidents make compromises for reelection — and, more importantly, witnessing an often baldly racist opposition seeking to delegitimize him at every turn. We’re nearly halfway through the second term now, however, and as evidenced by his immigration decision and his acquiescence in the face of the U.S. war machine, he’s still acting the same. He remains not nearly as timid as circa 2000 Al Gore, but he’s no Elizabeth Warren, either.
At this point, I think many liberals who once waited for the president to shed his centrist camouflage have given up hope that they’ll once again see the guy they swooned for during the campaign. As president, at least, he is who he is; and there’s little reason to think he’ll change. For a man who so reveres Abraham Lincoln — whose greatest trait, according to the celebrated historian Eric Foner, was his “capacity to grow and change and evolve” — it’s hard not to agree that Obama’s consistency is a shame.

Friday, September 26, 2014

Great Gatsby Quotes

In my younger and more vulnerable days my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, “ he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” P. 1

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. P. 81

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” P. 118

"Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." P. 118

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. P. 120

Gatsby believed in that green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter---tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . and one fine morning---

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. P. 182

Nick Carraway: You can't repeat the past.
Jay Gatsby: Can't repeat the past?
Nick Carraway: No...
Jay Gatsby: Why, of course you can... of course you can.

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