I don't know exactly why, but political and economic camps remain just that - with little or no common ground. There is democracy, and there is communism. There is capitalism, and there is socialism. And, for reasons that defy explanation, they are often viewed as polar opposites.

Consider a democracy like the United States, which also is capitalist. The religion that is dominant in the United States is Christianity, which has the Sermon on the Mount as one of the teachings (in at least some versions of Christianity). So, 'the meek shall inherit the Earth'. Is that statement socialist or democratic? Both. And neither. Democracy gives power to the mob. So does socialism. Where it varies is in the 'how'. Capitalism, as we see it working, takes money away from the mob and gives it to the few. Socialism takes money away from the mob and takes care of the mob.

'All men are created equal'. Socialism? Maybe. Egalitarianism? Yes. Democracy? According to many nations, yes. Communism? Yes.

And yet, each political and economic ideology seems to have trouble coming to grips with all of this. Why? Perhaps because people are too busy defending their camps and attacking the other camps to actually try to find the common ground and move forward.

Random pointer: mobile vulgus is the origin of 'mob'; the movable common people.

The roots of economic and political ideologies all tie to a common factor - people. And each method has it's strengths and weaknesses in either theory or, more usually, practice.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to toss the labels to the wind and actually focus on what is most important to people- after all, that's what started this mess. A return to sanity would be refreshing; all too often I hear that one ism or acy is bad and another ism and acy is good. { Read more }

I have to start this off by saying that Barack Obama's win has cleared some dust from my soul. The last time I was so proud of the country of my birth was between 17 and 20 years ago, perhaps because I was looking at a nation I had longed for through my teenage years. The years in uniform and afterward did not have that feel; surrounded by a sea of fellow young people 'on the college program' did little to maintain that feeling.

Tonight, that changed in a very fundamental way. It changed in a way that astounded me. And really, it has very little to do with Barack Obama himself as much as a new trust in the democratic system which I have been revisiting through Alexis de Tocqueville. Where I once was jaded by my former understanding that the United States ran on lobbyists and fickle voting procedures and machines, I became even more jaded over the last 8 years. I could not explain to myself, I could not rationalize, I could make no sense of why my former brothers-in-arms not only risked life and limb but lost them. I could not explain how I could have worked with navigation systems that should have been accurate and how there was so much 'collateral damage'. It made no sense, unless one connects the dots in a way that makes locking one's tapioca pudding in a refrigerator sensible.

And that's uncomfortable. { Read more }

Via ThinkProgress, it seems that Sarah Palin doesn't recognize the importance of some forms of research.

Richard Feynman's The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist springs to mind in an odd sort of way; while Feynman spoke of the need for scientists to be guided by the conscience of a larger society it seems that politicians should also be implicitly doing the same while being better informed. The quick dismissal of research on the fruit fly demonstrates a distinct lack of knowledge when it comes to science: fruit flies are one of the cornerstones of biological research.

There is epic danger when people in the public eye belittle research without being knowledgeable on the topic. Funding pulled from projects on the say so of the ignorant public can work to the detriment of society... and in the realm of politics, one has to wonder how much social responsibility is sacrificed for votes. { Read more }

A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology. { Read more }