Monthly Archives: April 2016

Rachel Maddow: “Activism is a very specific and technocratic thing.”

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Rachel Maddow’s interview with Ezra Klein on her life and HIV/AIDs activism for prisoners has this amazing extended riff starting around minute 53:

“What I tried to do as an activist was to approach each thing I wanted to get as a math problem.

So, here’s a thing that I think should be different in the world: I want people who are dying of AIDS in prisons to be allowed to die in secure hospices rather than dying in jail infirmaries. That’s what I want. Me just saying that and expressing the moral righteousness of that is not enough.

Who is the person who can decide to make that happen? The hospices need to be good with it, so, okay, let’s go to the hospices. Who is the person who makes the decision about who goes to the hospices? Well, there’s a category of decision-making here that is for people who do not have life sentences; they’re susceptible to these kinds of decision-makers. And then there’s a whole another category of decision-makers who say as a matter of policy … so let’s change the local decision-makers; now let’s change the law.

And just doing it piece by piece by piece, why won’t this law change? Because the committee chairman who is responsible for this as an issue doesn’t care about this. What does he care about? He cares about golf. Okay, let’s find whoever he golfs with’s wife, and find who his pastor is and talk to her about this.

…Activism is a very specific and technocratic thing….

On a lot of the activist issues I worked on it was very important that we get no press. And I think, from the outside, one of the things people assume about activism is that you’re trying to consciousness-raise around an issue, and get public discussion and raise public awareness and raise the profile of an issue–not if you’re talking about the comfort of death row prisoners. You don’t actually want that subjected to a popular referendum, because that’s going to be a kneejerk, regressive response.

And so sometimes what you need for people to be brave is to limit their risk, and some of the ways you limit risk is by keeping things quiet. And that has ended up being an interesting thing to know and thing to believe in, given that I’m now a person who’s in the business of making national news of that stuff.”

Compilation of Election Resources!

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The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship has compiled a variety of election and related resources that may facilitate instruction on this most important of elections. We have broken down the resources to make it easier to decide what you want, listed below, and this post will provide you with an overview of what you may find within each section. Please keep in mind that the Lou Frey Institute, the Bob Graham Center, and the FJCC do NOT take a position on any individual or candidate. 

You can find all of these links through our site!

election2016

Main Party Presidential Candidates

MPC

This section covers the five remaining major party presidential candidates. By the general election, we will have only the two major party candidates AND the ‘major minor’ party candidates that are likely to appear on multiple state ballots. Only the major parties were included here because many of the ‘major minor’ candidates do not have individual campaign sites. We HAVE provided links to party websites elsewhere on the page.

National Convention Information

NCI

As this section suggests, you can find information concerning party conventions here. Each party listed here is likely to have their candidates on at least ten state ballots. Some are more detailed than others.

National Political Party Websites

NPW

Before you ask, both the Communist and Socialist Parties are included here because they are included as part of Florida’s Civics Benchmark SS.7.C.2.28 (Identify America’s current political parties, and illustrate their ideas about government, within the content focus terms).  Excluding the two left wing parties, each party will likely appear on at least ten state ballots.

Senate 2016 Election

Ted

 

This site contains an overview of the 2016 election campaign, with a focus on the Senate races. Certainly a significant factor in determining the agenda of the president no matter the party.

State of Florida Election Information

State of Florida

Just what the title suggests, in this section you will find resources on registering to vote, candidates and offices, election supervisors, district information, and more. Obviously, applicable mainly to Florida, where we never have issues with elections.

Presidential Candidates and Issues

candidates and issues

Where do the candidates stand on the issues of the day? What is their position on what matters to you? Check out these resources to find out. Ballotpedia also has some excellent resources on non-presidential races.

Lesson Plans

lessons

Looking for a lesson relating to the race and elections? Check out what is available here! They are pulled from a variety of places from across the Web, with a heavy focus at this point on primaries and caucuses. Something that the candidates and their supporters may themselves need help understanding!

Videos

videos

Looking for a good video that can be used to teach about the election? We have collection of them here for you. I highly recommend The Living Room Candidate to help kids understand the power of political advertising. And our own Dr. Terri Fine did an excellent video on elections in collaboration with the Orange County Supervisor of Elections.

Online Interactives and Games

online and games

Of course you will find iCivics here. But there are also a great many other online resources and games that you might find useful in getting your students engaged with the election! Not listed here, and it should have been, is our own election simulation site, which you are free to use not only for this election but for any sort of vote you wish to do with your students! 

General Election Sites

GE2016

What kind of data can we look at about the election? What are some things you need to know? Check out these general links about the general election!

Elementary Trade Books

trades

We need to be teaching our kids about voting and elections as soon as possible. Check out some of the books you can use with elementary kids of all ages!

We hope that you find these useful. And, again, we do not endorse or take a position on any candidate or issue! Except on civics. We believe that civic education should get all of the money. You can find all of these resource links on our site!  And thank you to our own Val McVey for getting these together!


Fitness Landscapes and Probability Distributions

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Imagine trying to solve a problem of unknown complexity. You have to start somewhere, so you try a solution more or less at random. If you’re lucky, you know enough about the situation to start with an educated guess.

Regardless of how successful – or unsuccessful – your attempt was, you learn something about the best way to tackle the problem.

Next time you do a little bit better.

Perhaps there are other people around you trying to solve the same or similar problems. You can learn from their efforts as well.

Eventually you converge on what seems like the best possible solution, and then, problem solved, you keep deploying the same solution.

In several disciplines, this process can be described as exploring a fitness landscape. There are optimal solutions, really bad solutions, and everything in-between. Some combination of a priori knowledge and learned exploration gives you an intuition of what the fitness looks like.

Imagine the quick calculations you do in your head when trying to figure out how long it will take you to get somewhere. If you’ve gone there before, you might have a sense of the average length of travel. If you’re familiar with an areas traffic patterns you might have a sense of how much traffic to expect, or what routes to avoid. You may also have a sense of whether it would be more socially proper to arrive a little bit late or a little bit early.

You almost effortlessly predict an optimal solution to a complex problem.

There’s a great deal of interesting research being done to understand how individuals and groups explore or exploit these complex landscapes. As a matter of simplicity in an already challenging problem, it is common to study problems for which an optimal solution is universally an optimal solution.

That is – if every person had perfect knowledge of the fitness landscape, they would each make the same normative judgements about what solutions are “good.”

For my own research interests, this is an important piece of the challenge. One’s definition of “good” or “optimal” is a crucial piece of what policy solutions one might seek – or, more generally, how one might interpret the “fitness landscape.”

If two or more people are exploring the same landscape but have different normative judgements as to what is optimal, this poses a huge challenge.

One solution to this challenge is to hope for the convergence of opinion – so a group may not start with normative agreement on the fitness landscape, but with good deliberation they will come to collective agreement eventually.

There’s a great deal of social science research looking at how consensus forms in groups, with an eye towards possible biases and poorly-formed consensus. Does a group agree with the loudest voice in the room? Does it converge on whatever idea was most popular before discussion began? Did it give full attention and weight to all possible alternative before a final decision was reached?

Yet, on top of all the things that could go wrong in consensus forming, one of the most disconcerting thoughts is that such ideal consensus is not possible at all.

Examining such a question means understanding just what causes a person’s opinion to form in they first place – an understanding, I’m afraid, we are quite far from.

Some opinions may be formed on the spot, with no clear reason why. Other opinions may have cemented through some past series of experiences.

But here’s a thought experiment – imagine dozens of clones of the same person, each starting their life in an identical setting. With every event they encounter – on whatever time scale you prefer – the effect of that experience on them is given by some probability distribution.

If one were so inclined, you could build your favorite sense of nature vs. nurture into this probability distribution.

After some series of n events, the people produced…would be different?

If that were to be the case – even among a starting group with all the same initial conditions, it would pose a significant challenge to the idea of consensus, and ultimately would require some method to make sense of overlapping conceptions of a similar fitness landscape.

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the Chicago police and NY State prison scandals reinforce the need for countervailing power

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The past week has seen scathing reports of pervasive brutality in New York State prisons and the Chicago Police Department. Racism is clearly a factor, but I would like to highlight a different one. We must count on human beings to have bad motives. Racial animus and supremacy are important examples, but even in a racially homogeneous context, people cannot be trusted. Nor does it matter which principles we adopt or even sincerely espouse. It matters whether we are checked and limited by other people.

For example, no entity in the history of the world has had a stronger stated commitment to equality–or as much power and scope to expand equality–as the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao. And yet that same Party is now an active proponent of the most rapacious and predatory forms of capitalism and is closely associated with billionaires. Why? Because it is in the interest of a ruling group to capture a lot of money, and a party without any rivals or limitations can do so–utterly regardless of its mission and philosophy.

In general, I am a fan of labor unions. They have several important advantages, one of which is countervailing power. In a unionized workforce, there is no longer just one institutional power (the owner); there are two. Gov. Scott Walker is trying to break the public employees’ unions in Wisconsin because they bring countervailing power against him.

But a public sector union that closely collaborates with a state government can obtain somewhat troubling monopoly power. Give the members of that union guns and handcuffs, and the dangers increase. Sentence individuals to live completely under the control of that group, insulated from public view, and the threat becomes alarming. In the US context, the specific content of the injustice may be racism, but a case like China reminds us that even in a racially homogeneous society, armed monopoly power never works out well.

Thus it is crucial to the New York case that the “New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision … has long been seen as subservient to the union,” and “the union is a formidable political force, protected in the Legislature, primarily by upstate lawmakers in districts where prisons are the biggest employers.” And the Chicago report, after citing racism and ends-justifying-the-means as two causes of police violence, cites a third: a lack of external accountability. “The collective bargaining agreements provide an unfair advantage to officers, and the investigating agencies—IPRA and CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs—are under-resourced, lack true independence and are not held accountable for their work.”

Note that both New York State corrections officers and Chicago police officers work for democratically elected governments. That is a check but an insufficient one because it isn’t pluralist. One government is one power with interests of its own. To the extent that we see progress in either case, it’s because of the countervailing power of other levels of government, the press, and social movements.

I support deliberative democracy. It is a much higher ideal than simple majoritarianism. I still don’t want everything governed by one big conversation, no matter how fair, free, and informed the discussion may be. We need organizations and groups that are impervious to public opinion, even reasonable and fair public opinion. I would also vote for social democracy, at least in a European context, but only on the proviso that it is shorthand for a mixed economy with multiple power centers, including autonomous firms. One Big Anything scares me, and our prisons and police forces just reinforce that fear.

Political Parties

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Much has been made this election cycle of the influence of the “political establishment.”

On the Democratic side, some are arguing that unpledged delegates – “super delegates” – are polluting the democracy of the system. On the Republican side, at least one candidate has been crying foul over party rules, and it certainly does seem like there’s been a concerted effort by the Republican establishment to prevent the nomination of the current party frontrunner.

My impression is that most people’s opinion on this topic is driven largely by how a party is treating their favored candidate. A reasonable reaction, I think – as a general rule, things seem fair when you’re winning and unfair when you’re not.

But, this debate introduces a more broadly interesting question: what should the role of parties be in a democratic society?

While the role of a political party in determining its candidates is arguably less than democratic, there’s simultaneously something laughable about outrage over their influence. That is – this is exactly the way U.S. political parties are supposed to work.

Our political parties are not unbiased voices of the the people – they are organizations, designed to advance a given platform.

Again, one may still have qualms with the democratic nature of this system – there’s no democracy in system where the only choices are Pepsi and Coke – but this is the way our system is designed to work.

And that’s not inherently a bad thing. Representative democracy is more than a practical alternative to pure democracy – there are, in fact, some benefits to a system which (thoughtfully) aggregates the breadth of public views.

It strikes me that, as much as the party infrastructure is decried as unjust, the real problem here is that – in the United States – we are deeply entrenched in a two-party system. No doubt Parliamentary systems have their own challenges – but this is a big challenge of the U.S. system.

The problem, that is, isn’t that political parties have too much power over who their nominees are – it’s that a dramatically sparse field of political parties have too much power over our system.

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Machizukuri

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Method: Machizukuri

Apr 14 '16
Author: 
Scott Fletcher
Definition Machizukuri has existed in Japan since the 1960s and was used to engage residents in bettering their own communities, and to engage in dialogue with the local government in order to create accountability. The Japanese term Machizukuri translates to mean town or community building process . “A machizukuri council...

a great day for the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life

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Taylor McNeil writes:

As the nation continues to engage in increasingly fractious political discourse, it’s more important than ever to develop a community of leaders who are able to rise above the fray and bring positive change to the public sphere. Fostering such change has been a cornerstone of Tisch College, and now, with a $15 million gift from Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, A76, and a new name that more clearly describes its mission, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life is poised to extend its reach, both on campus and in the world.

The Tisches’ gift, announced on April 14, will endow professorships in the emerging field of civic studies, which examines why people get involved in causes and what happens when they do; support ongoing research on youth voting and political engagement, among other topics; and expand opportunities for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in service learning and leadership development programs as well as internships.

…

The new professorships that will be created through the Tisches’ philanthropy are part of an ongoing effort to advance Tisch College as a national leader in civic studies. Faculty in these positions will hold joint appointments in Tisch College and in another school at Tufts.

The Tisch research program, including the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning (CIRCLE), the nation’s leading center on youth voting and political engagement, and the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, which is conducting a first-of-its-kind national study of college voting rates at 800 participating institutions, “is on a growth trajectory,” says Peter Levine, the college’s associate dean of research. “We have 10 social scientists on staff doing research. We have an agenda of trying to change civic life in America.”

And Daniel Nelson writes:

[the] recent gift will be used to grow Tisch College’s programs, including further developing its research and academic initiatives. Tisch College is home to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which is “the leading source of authoritative research on the civic and political engagement of young Americans,” according to the program’s website.

“The research is really an area of huge new interest,” Solomont said. “It’s a real expansion.”

He explained that the gift will help Tisch College and CIRCLE expand its research of young voters, a voting bloc he believes could be extremely powerful so long as it engages in its civic duties.

“You could change the political landscape dramatically,” he said, referring to eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29. “But you’re not showing up to vote.”

Tisch College’s current research initiatives investigate what drives the influential youth voting bloc to the polls, and how to better engage young voters in the overall civic system, Solomont said.

“What we’re seeing here at Tufts is that young people today want to be engaged,” Jonathan Tisch explained in the press release. “They want to make a difference. Hopefully they will bring the experience and knowledge from Tisch College with them as they work with others to create an even better world.”

A portion of the gift will also go towards the Tisch College’s establishing of professorial endowments “in the emerging field of civic studies,” according to the press release. These endowments will help Tisch College, provide opportunities in civic engagement across all seven of schools at Tufts, Solomont said.