How is it that American troops in Iraq (and British ones?) have been shown to be “acting like thugs”:http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&edition=us&q=cluster:www%2esundaytimes%2enews%2ecom%2eau%2fcommon%2fstory%5fpage%2f0%2c7034%2c9504783%25255E950%2c00%2ehtml? Conservatives in the US blame women, feminists, Muslims, and the academic left. Our own home-grown conservative rag, “The Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/ weighs in “as well”:http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec294.html

the female reluctance to embrace the horrors of war can help to preserve peace. This could not be achieved by a feminised military, which might have the reverse consequence, as de-natured women degrade their sex… by feminising their forces, the Americans may also have brutalised them.

I recently decided to download Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville from “Project Gutenberg”:http://promo.net/pg/index.html to read on my Palm T3 in spare moments so I was intrigued to stumble across L’Amérique, Mon Amour – a summary of de Toqueville’s thought and life which reveals him to be a rather conservative democratic thinker (he opposed the extension of suffrage in France for example) and suggests that he is mainly popular in the US because he is so enamoured of the American way.

Fundrace.org Brings together registered information about US political donors with geographic databases to calculate interesting things like “who is getting more contributions from wealthier neighborhoods”?

Coming to this late too – CBS rejected the ad chosen by MoveOn.org from all the ads sent in to them.

I also learned from Ad Age that that the winning ad was “produced by professionals”:http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=39555. I share the disappointment of Seth Stevenson at “Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2093860/ who lamented that,

Of all the ads, this is the one that most looks like it was dreamed up and executed by the Democratic National Committee. So why bother?

According to the upbeat article “Smile, these are good times. Truly” in the latest issue of the Economist, the drop in living standards for median income Americans since the 1970s which I have oft cited as proof that the US system doesn’t work for most people is due to the number of immigrants.

Strip out immigrants, and the picture of stagnant median incomes vanishes. Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people, inequality is not rising, but falling… [moreover] A quarter-century ago a typical household had three members. Today, it has just 2.6 members. Simply by this effect, median households have seen their real incomes rise by a half.

Before I start looking on the sunny side, however, I would like to take a closer look at The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook which The Economist cites and see in more detail how he constructs his figures – the devil, as usual, is in the details. I hope that some economists will be by shortly to help with this as well.

In any case perhaps the more worrying economic statistic I have come across is about the decreasing chances of improving your lot in the supposedly meritocratic US. As I “blogged earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_us.html#000975 sons from the bottom three-quarters of the socioeconomic scale were significantly less likely to move up in the 1990s than in the 1970s.

An interesting debate – back in ’98 Nike launched a campaign to assert that its sneakers were not made by sweatshop labour. An activist took them to court saying that as this was advertising it had to be truthful. Nike responded by saying it was political action and thus covered by free speech. As of the middle of last year it seems that Nike is losing the case.

Thanks to Utne Webwatch for the link

The TrueMajority Oreo video is to my mind a very well-crafted political ad (done as a Flash animation). It shows dramatically just how much money goes towards US national defence and how much goes to – say – renewable energy programmes or food aid.

It gets around what I see as the biggest problem there is in trying to tackle macroeconomic issues seriously – nobody outside of a few policy wonks can juggle government programs costing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and keep them all in proportion.

“TrueMajority.org”:http://www.truemajority.org was founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s fame and is a broad-based liberal lobbying organization based around getting people to respond to monthly action alerts and send faxes to their political representatives by filling out web forms. I suspect fax deluges are getting to be a discredited tactic as they are relatively cost-free for the participants – I hope that truemajority will take the “Dean Road” instead and start getting these people to organize themselves.

“Pablo J. Boczkowski”:http://sloancf.mit.edu/vpf/facstaff.cfm?ID=17351&ProfType=F&sortorder=name has produced a book that sounds interesting – “Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=C429EE84-02E6-4F1A-A20D-B9B5BC908D9E&ttype=2&tid=10145 a summary of which is provided as part of an article in the Online Journalism Review. He suggests that (in the three news organizations he studied) the online version of the news was more open to the readers’ voices but also that online news was more influenced by advertisers and more focused on ‘micro-communities’ of interest. That said, his choice of organizations to study was at the cutting edge of online news practice at the time and indeed two out of the three projects he highlights – HoustonChronicle.com’s “Virtual Voyager”:http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/voyager/ and New Jersey Online’s “Community Connection”:http://www.nj.com/cc/groups/index.ssf seem to have been closed down.

I take a more pessimistic view – there does not appear to be much of a business model yet for rich interactive journalism and until one arrives nearly all online news (with some honourable exceptions) is likely to remain largely re-publishing of existing old-media product.

I look forward to the book however as it is time we had an academic’s-eye view of how the cultures of existing news organizations may be changed through greater online involvement (to the extent it exists).

Here’s a topic that continues to run and run. Will Davies compares Internet-mediated ‘democracy’ to the ‘democratic’ governance of, for example, foundation hospitals and warns that the quality of the results depends on wide participation. He also says, ‘any democratic society rests partially on an undemocratic element, such as the US Supreme Court’, suggesting that moderators may keep things running in a similar way in online discussions. While apathy is indeed a barrier to widespread political participation online I think Will understates the importance of the digital divide here as well.

His musings were prompted by Clay Shirky’s oddly upbeat musings implying that the occasions where online polls come up with results that are unrepresentative (as with the Radio 4 “let us shoot burglars” poll) are part of the ‘glory of this medium’.

For the gloomier side of this picture, check out this depressing posting from Dan (ex Up My Street) about how vociferous local racists are taking over that brave experiment in giving local communities a voice. He blames a lack of moderators and the fact no system of user-managed moderation is possible.

The “Bush in 30 Seconds”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org campaign sponsored by “moveon.org”:moveon.org has bought broadcast slots around the State of the Union address for an anti-Bush ad created by and to be chosen by visitors to the site. The final 15 have been selected for voting – which one do you like?
Myself I probably liked Wake up America “[hi bandwidth]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/09_large.shtml or “[lo bandwidth]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/09_small.shtml the best but I also quite like ‘Desktop’ [hi] “[lo]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/10_small.shtml and “Hood Robbin’ [hi]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/13_large.shtml or “[lo]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/13_large.shtml as well. “Billionaires for Bush [hi]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/14_large.shtml or “[lo]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/14_small.shtml only hits one issue in little detail but is well-made and punchy.

What these ads showed me above all is just how difficult it is to put across any kind of meaningful message in 30 seconds. Hopefully when they run they will excite editorial comment around the country which will in turn give Americans who haven’t been paying attention the chance to find out more details about what is being said. I was also very impressed at the technical skill shown in the finalists’ ads – I suspect that several of them have been done by moonlighting professionals.