DISQUS

Hmm.. I don't know how much of this response is that I've drank too much of the Clinton cool-aid but..

Hillary actually has the endorsement of parts of the conservative foreign policy establishment. I've watched C-Span hearings with the Generals and Rumsfeld.. Normally in these hearings the Generals and the secretary of state runs rings around senators, mainly because of the complexity of what's going on.. and because in that level of complexity its easy to manipulate people who don't yet really know what's going on.. And when Hillary started asking the question you could see the Generals and Rumsfeld shaking in there boots. That always impressed me.

The other issue is the strength of the Clinton political machine.. The Republicans, with there Fox News and there Talk Radio have a very powerful public relations machine.. On the democratic side you don't have that.. so its up to each candidate to build a machine that's strong enough to take that on. If there's any reason why I think Kerry lost.. a lot of it seems to come down to this. This and the media environment of the moment..

Anyway.. what I hear is many of the Republican professional activists are in the habit of looking at the Clinton machine with a certain degree of awe. So I think this must figure in there somewhere.

Here's where I think the Clinton cool-aid might be influencing me too much:

It seems to me that a very significant degree of the scandal's surrounding the Clinton's was not actually made by the Clinton's but by Republican smoke machines.. and if you were to buy into this sort of view then it really doesn't matter what Democrat might get into office, there will be lots of smoke. The swift boat shtick ought to illustrate this.

That's not to say Bill's fidelity, or character flaws, are not issues. But I think this gets into a larger series of questions like.. What exactly do we expect from political leaders? Bill's behavior is not exactly abnormal, and that would seem to be why political opinion seemed to sorta cut his way. More deeply, everyone of us has a dark side of the soul.. a part of us that lives in a kind of shadow.. a kind of Freudian unconscious if you will. Our society is not interested in develop whole people after all.. And so we have this issue. On a collective level this is one of our biggest challenges.. the kind of American Immaturity of not being able to wrestle with our own dark side.. The issues surrounding race in America cast a spotlight on this issue.

To create a whole person, believe it or not, requires a little of the dyonesian. There's this notion in Nietzsche of master slave morality.. which perhaps we could transpose into a thinking of morality stratified along social economic lines.. or perhaps having something to do with power. In female dominated primate groups social hierarchy is primarily defined by merit.. where as in male groups there tends to be politically orientated power alliances and intrigues.. Morality in the merit based system is directly related to the needs of that society, and so the social hierarchy is related to your contribution.. When power relationships are playing a chief roll.. then the needs of maintaining the power relationships disturb the equilibrium... so that morality has something to with the needs of power. You can see this playing its self out in a verity of ways with respect to the unfolding story of race. If you can imagine history as a hard science, where we look at the unfolding of events as systemic effects.. then to understand the plot just look at the conflict.. I don't know if I'm making sense here.. but this is my interpretation of the prophetic tradition..

Anyway.. so what I'm saying is Bill Clinton = Funk, at least on a certain level. In the sense that his behavior is basically something that comes out of his shadow side.. his immature side.. his side that is not allowed to be fully whole.. A side that you're not allowed to develop if you want power. If we as a society become more tolerant of human flaws.. then on some level we are creating a situation where people have more of a license to become whole people.

Leaders and Celebrities are, after all, projections of our own inward potential.. on one or another level. So in watching how there lives unfold we are in someways engaged in a collective psychodrama where we, in a strangely democratic sorta way, evolve behavioral norms. In this sense Bill Clintons sexual adventures and there fall out might have actually benefited us...

I don't mean to go on and on and on but..

The other thing is probably no one has done more to damage the Republican party then Karl Rove and Bush since Nixon. I mean Bush and Karl Rove are the people responsible for building up all that kinetic energy in the pendulum that's now swinging in the Democrats position. So I wonder what this means for the over all political climate moving forward..

The secret of so much Republican success seems to be the Gerbils formula: Repeat the lie enough and people will start to believe it. In the Kerry V Bush election you would have political debates that were "he said she said" in such a way that the relative merits of he or she were not considered.. you were equal regardless of merit. And then John Steward participated in the cancelation of Cross Fire.

The Bush political machine started to crumble because Katrina because suddenly it was totally obvious, even to people who weren't paying to close attention, that Bush was full of shit.. and it totally changed the way they were perceived..

I wonder if the internalization of these basic things, by the media, might in someway effect the way news is reported... And if so what would that mean once Hillary, or some other democrat for that matter, came to power?

I mean I'm probably one of the harshest media critics around.. on some level.. I mean I think Chomsky's Manufacturing consent pretty much nails the situation.. I borrow a lot of my politics from Cornell West.. I guess..

Another thing I'll say is I've actually read the auto biographies of Bill and Hillary.. As well as George Stephenopolous.. or however you spell his name.. and Madalline Albright.. And I've read any number of related books as well as the books trashing the Clintons.. And I'm not sure I'm ready to trust the Clintons.. I actually went to a book signing with Bill at the Barns and Noble at the Prudential Mall during the Democratic national convention.. And I got a kind of dark feeling about him.. And I still don't know how to think of that.. And I just don't know...

A lot of what you bring ups is stuff I think you're following a lot more closely then I am.. I could probably recite Clinton PR spin.. But I haven't followed it closely enough to know where the Clinton line breaks down.. which of course has a lot to do with the mechanics of Clinton power.

Right now American Foreign policy seems like one of the big issues. What's up with Iran, what's going on with Puttan, what's are we going to do about Iraq.. And God, what about Pakistan? What about terror? I'm not sure I'm ready to trust the Clinton's with Hati. I mean I guess I think that the definition of "American Interest" ought to somehow be aligned with "Humanities Interest." I mean Henry Kissinger style maintaining the status quo makes no sense in the war on terror situation.

I guess I tend to go with Thomas Barnett's shtick that level of hot spots in any given region is in someway a function of GDP.. So that basically the best way to think of what our job is is as "exporting security" which is a notion that is like.. looking at war in the context of globalization.. But I'm a little more skeptical of the night side of globalization then he or Tom Friedman..

You know.. a big part of it is that ultimately politicians operate pragmatically in the context of political reality.. and the only time anything good ever gets done is when the people actively play a roll in the shaping of those political realities.. I guess that's my hope for this social media space.. that we can leverage it to create the Progressive era 2.0 or something. It kinda seems like this is more important then who gets elected president.

Anyway.. sorry about this crazy long rant in your comments. I'm def feeling more then a little self conscious for it. But ether way I hope it adds something to the conversation.... lol, Hopefully I can avoid showing my face in public for a lil while till it all blows over..

I wonder about underlying reasons / dynamics. If ethnic group X has a history of not being able to trust the police, I can't imagine that does wonders for recruitment... To say nothing of institutional racism. But then I think, when I tune into race politics stuff on C-Span there's such an emphasis on community that it leads one to think you'd, at least, have a higher percentage of black folks wanting to get involved with law enforcement.

And why would 40% of police be domestic abusers? Is there some kind of massive systemic mental health problem built into the law enforcement? Is it like soldiers coming back from Iraq not getting proper treatment for PTSDO? Or are there just a lot of evil that's a part of police culture? I mean yeah, it kinda always seems that way on the surface but.. I mean I've listened to those old hip hop records to but.. idk..

It's not Tishiro Mifune, but it's pretty damn awesome anyway.

When I first heard this fish bowl theory it was via podcasting.. sorta podcast centric. Anyway, here's some of my thoughts.

#1 There is some group think to the fish bowl.. I think a lot of that is do to a lack of diversity.. social economic ethnicity sex... Too many white guys of a certain age who are into tech with certain career ambitions.

#2 This social media is still in a an experimental mode, a side effect being that its a little less approachable to a newbie then it might be if it where a more streamlined thing. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing.. I mean shouldn't we still be collectively inventing this stuff? It's maybe just the life cycle of the space...

#3 For podcasting it would probably be nice if there was something simpler on the PC side.. that came with your computer, like iTunes does on the Mac..

#4 A big part of the perceived value of content has to do with the presentation of the content.. and even folks who are often called "a listers" have presentations that ether scream "DIY" or aren't real competitive with what big media seems to be doing. I think there's a level on which the DIY aesthetic can makes the voice of your content seem more authentic.. but my guess is that people who aren't yet tuned into social media... this probably impedes there consumption.

#5 Related to #2: A lot of people who I talk about social media to, who are not currently consumers, are perhaps interested but don't know where to begin. There seems to be an absence of starting points that are real approachable for newbies.

#6 Social media folks might benefit from better promotional skills: My shtick has always been to synthesize guerilla marketing, pr, and publicity skills, with the kinda old school internet strategy stuff, and the more new media / social media strategy stuff. Inside the social media space the "new media / social media strategy stuff" is, if not common knowledge, at least not too hard to come by.. the old school internet stuff is perhaps not as common, and the kinds of marketing, pr, and publicity stuff of the guerrilla is nearly unknown. The more that new media folks know this stuff the faster the audience is likely to grow.

#7 Social Media represents a fundamental shift with huge disruptive implications who's long term implications are probably much deeper and more far reaching then even most futurists are yet fathoming, at least in my opinion. I believe its a kin to a shift from Newtonian Physics to Quantum theory: It's like moving from a Platonic conception of the transcendent to a Buddhist conception.. Here we are talking about the very foundations of civilization.. things that underly the conceptual frameworks we use to understand reality. There is the question of nature versus nurture.. how do you distinguish between the the roll of nature and custom in understanding a people.. in understanding an identity? There are certain historical forces that where swept into our world.. from the Reformation, the French Revolution, Industrialization, Globalization... all of which had fundamental implications to the organizational principles of human civilization. What are the long term implications of moving from the Dewy Decimal system for organizing information to meta data.. folksonomies, etc? If innovation comes from a resynthesis of formally desperate fields of knowledge, what does that mean in relationship to the web 2.0 mash up? Particularly if this is fundamental to the future of web application architecture...

We fish bowl dwellers, the New Media Vanguard, are still only dimly perceiving this stuff.. our understand seems to me to be shallow.

At any rate, we are creating a new environment for which to live, for which to evolve into, to evolve to us.. we do not understand the long term demands this will place on us or how, exactly, to meet those demands. Many of us cry out "there's too much information," but much of this seems to me have more to do with the transitions in our own attitudes toward how to live and think about these things.. in just how to understand reality. This jump, it seems to me, is one that intimidates not a few people.. and is a part of what's slowing the transition.

#8 The tipping point just hasn't quite happened yet.

what's "itpc:// and pcast://?" I imagine a lot of readers might not be familiar...

Good web design should use standards and Safari is a standards compliant browser.. so one should imagine that if you're doing your thing right.. it should work out of the box.

Arguably.. you might want to play with iPhone versions of your site.. perhaps a special layout just for iPhone.. One of the advantages to this sorta thing is that in many ways Safari is a superior browser.. with a more powerful CSS implimentation then what is commonly used today.. because when one designs for all browsers.. these features don't get used.. and of course.. if you want to make web apps special for the iPhone, you'll have to go down that route anyway.. indeed you might want to consider this.. and I dare say that if you believe the mobile web is a hot emerging area you want to jump into.. it seems like the iPhone is a very compelling platform to explore.. Did I not see that every iPhone user will be forced to subscribe to an unlimited data plan? The upside of this is you'll have a huge user based that will be well disposed for mobile web apps in a way we probably haven't seen yet.

But then, I suppose, I'm a fan boy.

Also.. Final Cut Studio's compressor handles the file format stuff pretty well.. which I imagine is true of most serious media creation tools these days.. and if not Quicktime Pro for.. around $30-ish, or even just good old iTunes.. will do it for ya..