What do liberals do when they lack substance or lose the argument on the merits? They resort to the Compelling Life (or in this case dying) Story. It’s like the world is one long After-School Special to leftists–all weeping tears and make-it-better-actions by government.

The only problem is that these stories are often bogus. Michelle Malkin exposes the latest leftist tear jerker as a fraud. Really, it’s not a surprise. Here’s the story:

Click here for the rest of the story…

Abortion and ObamaCare

The Senate votes to keep abortion funding in the health care bill

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2009/12/senate_rejects_abortion_amendm.html?hpid=topnews

Disgusting

If the early reports about “Safe School Czar” Kevin Jennings didn’t scare you enough, check out the new reading material approved for our children (I do not recommend reading this after eating)

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/04/explosive-the-not-safe-for-school-reading-list-of-the-safe-schools-czar/

also a list of GLSEN’s sponsors

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/07/whos-funding-glsen/

A Personal Look at Rush Limbaugh

As always, Rush is excellent

Update: Frank Lombard

More on the Duke administrator

http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeAdams/2009/12/07/wral_white_rapists_and_lombard?page=1

Smoking Guns

Coulter on ClimateGate

http://townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2009/12/02/do_smoking_guns_cause_global_warming,_too

Chris Matthews Does it Again

This time he calls West Point “the enemy camp”

Just Plain Lies

Readers of the NY Times give the staff a lesson in factual reporting

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/11/30/a-doctors-message-for-nick-kristof/

More on the fake story

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/11/30/quite-possibly-the-crappiest-nytimes-column-for-obamacare-ever/

FYI- A Little Trivia

14 laws everyone believes are real, but aren’t

http://onlineparalegaldegree.org/14-laws-everyone-believes-are-real-but-which-arent/

Huckabee’s Deadly Mistake

More proof that Huckabee lacks a back bone, a truly tragic story

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/11/29/violent-felon-granted-clemency-by-huckabee-now-sought-in-lakewood-wa-police-ambush/

The State of the Revolution

The fight against liberalism in universities

http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeAdams/2009/11/30/the_state_of_the_revolution

Lieberman Digs In His Heels

From Wall Street Journal

Says “No” to Public Option under any circumstances

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125900412679261049.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

Solving Whose Problem?

The true beneficiaries of government “assistance”

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTEzYTIzYjhlZDQzZTJiYzI2OGRjNWI3OWJjYzZmMmM=

Margaret Thatcher on Socialism

I hope the President sees this…

Americans Say “NO” to ObamaCare

Support drops to 38% !!!!

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/september_2009/health_care_reform

Another Party

Obama plans yet another lavish party for the only people who still think he’s cool,  Hollywood libs

http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/obama-thanks-hollywood-with-coveted-invites-to-his-first-white-house-state-dinner/

At the "Half the Sky" book party on October 27, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt serve as the bread in a delicious Nick Kristof sandwich.

Recently I was sitting in Prospect Park rereading Ovid’s Metamorphoses when a strong gust of wind blew a copy of a magazine called “US Weekly” into my hands. Despite myself, I opened it up out of curiosity, and before I could toss it away in disgust, I happened to read a few paragraphs of an article about the shocking lives of some American actors named “Brad Pitt” and “Angelina Jolie.”

Har har. Anyway, here is the first surprising excerpt:

Their love was on display at an October 27 West Hollywood dinner with their friend, “Half the Sky” coauthor Nicholas Kristof. “They’re attentive to each other. They listen, they’re respectful and sometimes finish each other’s sentences,” Kristof tells Us. “When we walked into the restaurant, Brad kept turning around to make sure that Angie was OK.”

A few paragraphs later, their friend is back:

“They’re both proud of their kids and clearly care a lot about them,” says Kristof. “Angie talks about how she and Brad juggle their schedules so somebody is always looking after them. She is incredibly attentive of how their careers will affect them”

And here’s the conclusion of the piece:

While [author Ian] Halperin says he feels he’s watching “a fairy tale in reverse,” Kristof predicts a happy ending: “They’re a great couple. They are both very down-to-earth and very funny. They like to just talk about their family. Every time I see them, they’re just very close.”

In fact, this Kristof character is the only new on-the-record source cited in the six-page piece, which is this week’s cover story. (Jolie’s dad, Jon Voight, is quoted in a sidebar.)

Now, I understand that Nick Kristof — New York Times op-ed columnist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, champion of human rights in the developing world — has a book to promote. And though “friend” may be stretching it, he has appeared with Jolie at several events and panel discussions, so he at least qualifies as an acquaintance.

And Kristof has come to Jolie’s rescue in print before. About a year ago, the Daily Beast published an overwhelmingly positive piece on Jolie’s speech on Darfur at the Council on Foreign Relations. The piece was cheekily titled “She’s Actually Smart.” Kristof responded huffily — and at length — on his “On the Ground” blog, which is an extension of his column for the Times:

Well, of course she’s smart. I find the snarkiness condescending, a reflection of the general snobbiness in the humanitarian community about celebrities trying to do good work. The assumption is that if the tabloids have an interest in who someone might be sleeping with, that person is an airhead.

… Angelina Jolie has traveled and visited with refugees and desperate people all over, including three trips to the greater Darfur area, if I remember right. That’s two more trips than Condi Rice has made. … I once was on a panel where Angelina’s eyes filled up as she spoke of Iraqi refugees she had met in Syria; for anybody who was there, that scene was worth 100 of my columns. And ditto for her speech on Friday at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Then there’s this, which Kristof posted to Facebook the day after his book party:

I don’t disagree! Let me be clear: Angelina Jolie is by all appearances a sincere and dedicated advocate for refugees and other needy people all over the world. I have no reason to believe she’s not actually smart. And it should go without saying that Kristof’s work in the Times is invaluable.

That said, aren’t these quotes for US Weekly a bit much? Let’s assume Kristof agreed to do a brief interview as a favor to Jolie and to promote his new book. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, even if that includes giving interviews to a magazine whose recent cover lines include “My Plastic Surgery Nightmare” and “Growing Up Suri.”  I’m in no position to judge, having paid $4 for the thing myself.

But there’s something about the quote itself — the way he goes on about the way the couple finishes each other’s sentences, and how Brad kept turning around to check on Angelina — that smacks of those BS “body language expert” sidebars. He could have said something much drier, something like “They seem perfectly happy together” or “The dinner was lovely.” He could have just plain said less. The gushing play-by-play and the earnest predictions about the future of Brangelina don’t seem quite Timesian, or Pulitzerian, or, well, Kristofian.

That said, maybe the answer is just that he’ll talk to anyone?:

This review of Nick Kristof’s book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide was written by Jutta Tobias and originally posted to her blog, From Washington to DC, on Thursday, September 10th, 2009.  Jutta is a psychologist and a traveler, trying to help improve the status quo, and currently working in DC as a lobbyist with only social science as ammunition to influence (some) Congressional staffers. She is proud to have had a couple of lines of legislative language included in the behemoth health care reform bills, making them even less environmentally-friendly to print out. Her heart belongs to the rocks and skies and seas of the American Northwest, so she may keep oscillating between Washington and DC for a while yet.

Nick Kristof had me at hello, so to speak, years ago. Not that I really met him before today, and I cannot even say that I genuinely met him this afternoon. Though we did exchange some polite words after his book launch event at the Woodrow Wilson Center, of the most readable Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. And thankfully I only figuratively fancied the man anyway; his wife Sheryl WuDunn, co-author of the book, was also there – and she is everything any sane woman would shudder to get into competition with: beautiful, eloquent, elegant, a super-smart Pulizer-prize winning philanthropist investment advisor, but it gets worse still: she may even be extremely warm, nice and funny, judging from her remarks at the event.

The reason why I’ve liked Nick Kristof for years now is that he’s simply a brilliant New York Times columnist who reports on what I most like to know more about: people in countries all over the world, especially those in upheaval and unrest, and what we in the northwestern hemisphere can do about it. And then, about three years ago, he started the annual tradition of taking a lucky young person with him on a reporting trip to Africa, after a selection process that involves writing an eloquent application essay (google ‘win a trip with nick kristof’ to apply). I had just come back from my first trip to Rwanda when I found out about this amazing opportunity, and applied, knowing that I hardly had a chance, utterly independent of my writing style – because of my extreme luck, having already spent a summer in Central Africa meant that I would not have selected me. But in my application essay, I urged Nick Kristof to take a woman with him, independent of who he’d choose. I had the sense that young women in the US would have fewer opportunities to go and experience real Africa, and that the multiplier effect of a chance to travel with Nick Kristof would somehow be greater if he chose a woman as his travel companion. No idea if he ever read my essay, or took to heart what I had to say. Yet he did make the perfect selection: he took Casey Parks with him, a young woman from an underprivileged background who hadn’t spent much time outside the US and who had all the potential that all underprivileged women hold. It’s almost unnecessary to say that Casey Parks shined her way through the 2-week trip, reporting back to us in a beautiful style that brought into full limelight her great talent.

And then Nick and his wife Sheryl wrote this book on women’s empowerment and achievement, despite all the extraordinary challenges they face, especially in developing and transition countries. The stories are colourful and moving, and they make us want to help more women, get them to believe in themselves and claim their rights. It makes so much sense to support women in development, from a humanitarian standpoint, and also from an investment perspective. Women are much safer to invest in than men, Sheryl says. Sheryl and Nick also talked about the sad fact that in so many places, women don’t have the confidence to speak up about their needs, and so their rights come last, time and again. We need to support these women in developing a voice, perhaps by speaking on their behalf until they feel safe to do this themselves (in addition to all the things they do day in, day out, to keep families and communities together and functioning).

Yet the clincher for me, and for my continued cultivation of my Nick Kristof cult, was that Nick’s first comment at the book launch was on making our advocacy on behalf of women worldwide more effective – and he referred to some of the great social psychology insights that are, sadly, underused by the humanitarian community. That made my social psychologist’s heart sing. Nick and Sheryl’s book is so moving because it allows us to make an emotional connection with the people in the stories, and in this way it helps build emotional commitment within the reader “to do something”. Nick says, the humanitarian organisations ignore the fact that people don’t get moved by issues pertaining to groups (and it’s true, even just 2 people are considered a group – so the personal connection with their individual strife is lost right there and then). And, we want to be part of something that’s successful, rather than being presented with a cosmic problem that is far too complex for us to wrap our head round (gives me a headache just to think about that one). So Nick and Sheryl, in their book, focus on different stories of different individuals (in addition to presenting all the facts and figures that would help with grant-writing and official reporting) – because they know that it’s the personal story, and the emotional bond that it creates with us, that motivates us to get involved. Sheryl was right in pointing out that the corporate world has been using this little trick so very profitably for decades, by “selling from the right side of the brain”.

These tactics can be used ethically, and help promote pro-social causes, and they don’t require expansive advertising budgets. The main thing that’s required here is a mental shift from trying to persuade an audience with lengthy, logical arguments, to appealing to the values and feelings that we all share in this world. Compassion, concern, commitment. I’ve recently created a brief summary of this type of advocacy message re-framing, available here.

Social change agents with a mission, listen up. Use the methods Sheryl and Nick apply so effectively, and grab a piece of that sky for your cause.

Today, a great talk by Helene Gayle at the Council on Global Affairs, urging her audience to appreciate the significance of girls and women on development.

My next project: to pick up a copy of Half the Sky.

It took me quite awhile to decide what I’ve been wanting to blog about. I started up quite a few before deleting them, on a multitude of subject; folk music, sustainability, even sci fi and fantasy fiction were some of my initial ideas. But I had trouble justifying these ideas with a reason for my readers to follow my blog. What can I say about these things that will make them not only just interesting to me, but to a general audience? Although there were many answers to this question, I didn’t feel like any of them were good enough to serve as an explanation to why I blog.

I then looked to one of the only blogs that I really follow, which is that of Nick Kristof’s, a blogger for the New York Times who focuses on humanitarian crisis and social injustices across the world. I started following it after seeing the documentary “Reporter” which followed him into Africa and other reporting assignments. He’s also just recently published a book, “Half the Sky” which has started a movement for womens rights cross the world. Although his methods of choosing what stories are told are questionable, at least they’re getting told. One of my favorite lines from the movie was when he talked about how people don’t wake up in the morning and “google genocide, or famine”. Thinking back to that line and his blog, I realized that raising awareness about these issues was something I was passionate about, it’s something that I love talking about. So why not blog my thoughts?

There are so many social justice issues going on out there right now. I’m not going to focus on one. And I don’t expect to change the world with my blog. I just want a reason to research these things and and way to tell people about them. Feel free to comment with your thoughts, or with any suggestions of subject matter. Thanks!

Somehow, in my post below on the advancement of women, I missed that the New York Times Magazine this week is entirely dedicated to stories about advancing women’s rights.

Here’s a multimedia taste of what the magazine has on offer, courtesy of Nick Kristof, whose blog is here.

Two more quotes on this theme.

From ‘Abdu’l-Baha, in a talk of 1912:

When all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be utterly destroyed. Without equality this will be impossible because all differences and distinction are conducive to discord and strife.

From a Tablet of Baha’u'llah:

Women and men have been and will always be equal in the sight of God. The Dawning-Place of the Light of God sheddeth its radiance upon all with the same effulgence. Verily God created women for men, and men for women.

So GOP Congressman Pete Hoesktra got all whiny on Twitter yesterday:

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House. (Source)

Bad move, Petey. In true internets fashion, legions of Twitterati responded in kind to his inanity by posting things like:

paganmist: @petehoekstra Had to move all my stuff to a new office w/o a corner view. Now i know what the Trail of Tears was like. #GOPfail

JustinHook: “My boss left work early today, won’t be back for three days. Now I know how the Christians felt. @petehoekstra”

These and other glorious gems have been captured and lulzed at Pete Hoekstra is a Meme (*hat tip* to NYMag).

I don’t do anything all day, so I just had to dive in. Here’s what I came up with:

Basically, if Nick Kristof is the one calling you out, you know you effed up.

A few things re sexual violence (in conflict and otherwise):

Nick Kristof  on a new initiative called Silence is the Enemy

Bec Hamilton’s reservations on same.

News from IRIN that rape is on the increase again in South Kivu, DRC.

Been celebrating for 2 days now, SHE is featured in Nick Kristof’s blog “Getting Girls in School in Africa”.

Comments are fascinating: why are American women wanting African women to use reuseable pads when they do not use them themselves? Hypocrisy!  The beauty is that SHE’s market-based approach will prove that if women want the product, they will buy it, plain and simple.

Well, in one of my many thesis interviews Jene O’keefe Trigg gave me a very good tip about using press coverage like this:

• Ask everyone you know to comment on the article, it will show the journalist its a hot subject
• Analyze the comments for new leads and ideas
• Use some of the comments in your materials to demonstrate need and interest

Please show your love and  add your own comment on NYT site.

Just wrapped up the Women’s Funding Network conference in Atlanta. One theme I heard throughout  was the need for foundations to use strategic communications to tell their stories, influence policy, raise more money etc.   Nick Kristof, the conference keynote, summed it up when he said, “the average toothpaste has better messaging than humanitarian organization.”  Here, here!

So, I have been waiting for my chance to meet Kristof for years. In his remarks he talked about the most effective interventions for keeping  girls in school – things like de-worming medication or sanitary napkins as opposed to building more schools.  Well, he said the magic words for SHE, and I had a chance to go up to him afterward and make the pitch:  SHE is launching women-led businesses in Africa that keep girls in school by selling low-cost locally made sanitary napkins!   He wanted to know how much it costs to keep a girl in school by providing a sanitary napkins – he is all about the best return on investment.

Fine.  But then my new favorite woman Yassine Fall from UNIFEM took the mic and told him the reason why girls don’t go to school was that structural adjustment from the IMF has stopped governments from investing in public goods like education and eliminating school fees.   Policy is the problem, not as Kristof suggested, men spending less of the family income on alcohol and entertainment and more on education and health. She said his analysis was demonizing African men as irresponsible fathers who only drink beer.  The confrontation was an exciting moment in the fancy hotel ballroom.

Well, its too late for Kristof to add Yassine’s perspective in his upcoming book called “Half the Sky” all about women’s rights.  He both opened and closed his speech saying: “I truly believe the struggle of the 21st century is a struggle for greater gender equity in the world.” Good messaging — take note women’s funds!

Last February, New York Times columnist, blogger, and author Nick Kristof visited Miami University. I had the privilege of attending both his lecture and a small group discussion with about 12 students before the lecture. I sat right next to him and my stomach growled VERY LOUDLY the entire time.  I had been reading Kristof’s columns for a while before I heard about his visit.  Internationally, he specializes in “on the ground” reporting in places where most journalists would rather not stay, let alone visit.   He covers stories which he deems important for ethical or moral reasons; often, these are stories ignored by popular American media.

His book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, was co-authored with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and will be released this September.  He spoke about women in the developing world during his time at Miami.  It came at a time when I was learning a lot about development in my classes, but more importantly, at a time when I was thinking a lot about how to view international issues through the lens of gender.  I don’t habitually make every issue a “woman’s issue” in my perspective on the world.  I feel like a lot of women in the most developed countries are concerned with being professionally equal to men and at times feel hesitant to isolate themselves as specifically advocates for women’s “issues.”

However, when it comes to long-term development, the greatest return on investment won’t be in infrastructure, or agriculture, or foreign aid.  Strengthening women will –and I mean strength in terms of health, education, economic opportunity, political power, social status, and self-esteem.  Here’s why I think this is true:

In terms of health, it’s pretty straightforward.  A healthy woman can be a healthy mother, who has the best chance of having a healthy child.   I think we can imagine that a sick child is less likely to be the one chosen to be sent to school, more likely to have a harder time socially, might be told not to expect too much from life, and so on.  A family will likely invest in their most promising children, who are likely to turn into healthier adults.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: the adult without their most basic (physiological) needs met will not be concerned with other “higher” needs. In other words, health is a pre-requisite for all other kinds of development.  Improving women’s health is the fastest way to fulfill this pre-requisite and prepare a healthy next generation.

Educating girls means educated mothers which means educated girls.  Same concept as before.  Education does not simply entail learning to read and count, but for instance, learning what causes various diseases and how to prevent them.  Education gives us resources, widens our scope of understanding, expands our possibilities, teaches us to solve our problems in more efficient ways, gives us confidence in our ability to face the future, moves us up a step in Maslow’s pyramid.  A mother who moves up will bring her children with her.  If a society leaves women to raise their children but educates only men, they will lose that exponential return on investment.

Women in Wage Employment (non-agricultural): World Bank 2005. (red is highest %, blue is lowest)

Additionally, educated women can sometimes leave the home to work.

Moving women into the workforce (or increasing the “labor force participation rate” of women) has stunning effects.  I did some research on this last year and was amazed at the impact of a woman earning her own income.  In my readings (see Blumberg below for example), I found data that shows that women allocate income efficiently in terms of development.  They allocate more money to educating children and keeping them healthy than men do.  That dude who’s out in the fields all day is stopping for a drink on his way home, losing money in card games with pals, picking up a snack after all his hard work… No, but seriously!  The research showed that mothers use their money for what matters much more consistently than fathers.

Besides spending their incomes more wisely, women reap other benefits from earning an income independent of the man of the house through formal work:

• There is a negative correlation between the labor force participation rate of women and the number of offspring.  Now, this isn’t just because they’re busy with work.  Their children are born and grow up healthier (because they could pay for a doctor and so on), so there is no need to have lots of children just to ensure that some survive.  They also don’t need 8 kids hanging around to help keep up the family farm, because mama’s got a job.
• When a lady gets out of the house to sell some things at the market, or goes to a factory where she has a lot of galpals to talk with on break, she is going to have a better social life.  She might even be able to see the “bigger picture” in her community and feel motivated to start some political action in her own way.
• When a woman has the power to provide for herself and her family, you can bet it feels good.  Self-esteem affects how we interact with the world, right?  It can affect the people around us, our sense of hope and optimism, our beliefs about our own power.  And this may be a stretch, but I daresay that a person with a good sense of self-worth can gain the confidence to pursue her gifts and talents.  Doing what she has a comparative advantage in.  That makes excellent economic sense.
• An independent income gives a mother more bargaining power within her household.  Papa might have made all the decisions when he was the one bringing home the bacon, but a woman contributing money has more room to exert influence.  And as we learned before, she makes decisions for the good of the family.

Now, listen here!  I know those seemed like a bunch of hasty generalizations, but I assure you I have done some research, and besides!, I graduated college and am not here to be scholarly.  I think these ideas make sense logically, and just wanted to point them out in an organized way.

The point of this pointing was to plant the idea that a focus on women in development is appropriate, efficient, and smart.  Are you guilty of complaining that all our foreign aid gets thrown into some cyclically poor sub-Saharan country only to be spent on some crazy dictator’s leopard skin rug?  How about handing it over to women instead of men?  Betcha it would make a difference.

[to make your own impact, try lending aspiring female entrepreneurs some cash.  according to the 2005 Microcredit Summit Report, 83% of micro-loan recipients are women, and they default less on loans.  www.kiva.org is easy to use --browse micro-loan applicant profiles, see what she wants to invest in, and pick somebody to loan part or all of the money she needs to start her own business.]

Non-Stephanie, Scholarly Thoughts on the Subject:

Women do it better:

Blumberg, Rae Lesser. “Income Under Female Versus Male Control: Hypotheses from a Theory of Gender Stratification and Data from the Third World.” Journal of Family Issues. Vol. 9, No. 1. March 1988: 51-84.

Women and Micro-Credit:

Khan Osmani, Lutfun N. “A Breakthrough in Women’s Bargaining Power: The Impact of Microcredit.” Journal of International Development. July 2007. Vol 19, Issue 5. (695-716).

Panjaitan-Drioadisuryo, Rosintan D.M. and Kathleen Cloud. “Gender, Self-Employment, and Microcredit Programs: An Indonesian Case Study.” The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. Vol. 39 (1999): 769-779.

Using gender as a macroeconomic variable:

Seguino, Stephanie. “Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Analysis.” World Development. Vol. 28, No. 7. 2000 (1211-1230).

You can find Kristof’s NYTimes blog here.

Pax Arcana

Nicholas Kristof has something to say. It’s about the Internet, I think. I’m not sure. We’ll get to it in a minute, but in the meantime I just want to reassure people that this will not be a reprise of my hysterical ranting against Tom Friedman and his enablers.

While I disagree with Kristof often, I also think he’s a sincere man and one who does what he does for the right reasons — he has a bully pulpit at the NY Times and istead of using it to hobnob with the crowd at Davos (FRIEDMAN!!!), Kristof tries to stop things like sex trafficking and genocide.

That said, I’m really not sure what this is:

Some of the obituaries these days aren’t in the newspapers but are for the newspapers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest to pass away, save for a remnant that will exist only in cyberspace, and the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online.

Sounds about right. In fact, I have never, in my entire life, read a Kristof column in print. I grew up in New Jersey reading the New York Times, but in the past 10 years have only read the print edition while on vacation or while killing time at Starbucks or something.

The Internet: It’s like spaghetti coming out of your computer

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

I know — it’s awesome right?

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

Oh… so it’s not awesome?

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

Right. Humans have always been that way. I’m confused, though — what does this have to do with the Internet?

One classic study sent mailings to Republicans and Democrats, offering them various kinds of political research, ostensibly from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that strongly corroborated their pre-existing views.

Nothing confirms a story about the Internet like quoting a study involving “mailings” to registered Republicans and Democrats (aka “old people who don’t use the Internet”).

There was also modest interest in receiving manifestly silly arguments for the other party’s views (we feel good when we can caricature the other guys as dunces). But there was little interest in encountering solid arguments that might undermine one’s own position.

Thankfully, the Internet provides quick access to all manner of silly arguments, so no more mailings please Mr. Kristof!!

Let me get one thing out of the way: I’m sometimes guilty myself of selective truth-seeking on the Web. The blog I turn to for insight into Middle East news is often Professor Juan Cole’s, because he’s smart, well-informed and sensible — in other words, I often agree with his take. I’m less likely to peruse the blog of Daniel Pipes, another Middle East expert who is smart and well-informed — but who strikes me as less sensible, partly because I often disagree with him.

This just in — Nicholas D. Kristof is, in fact, a human being and not immune to his own biases. We must return him to the lab post-haste and replace his central processing unit with a more mincing version. Early tests indicate the subject believes it was the Internet that scrambled his wiring:

The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. One of last year’s more fascinating books was Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” He argues that Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do.

Is the Internet a club? A church? A community? Did I wake up in the matrix?

Almost half of Americans now live in counties that vote in landslides either for Democrats or for Republicans, he said. In the 1960s and 1970s, in similarly competitive national elections, only about one-third lived in landslide counties.

The Internet of the 1960s and 1970s did not force people to move their families into like-minded communities like today’s Internet does. Just last week a giant moving truck from the Internet Relocation Administration carted off my neighbor’s belongings to Nebraska. I think he must have clicked on Rush Limbaugh’s Web site or something.

“The nation grows more politically segregated — and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups,” Mr. Bishop writes.

Mr. Bishop wrote it, but I read it three times. And I still have no idea what the fuck that sentence means.

The result is polarization and intolerance. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor now working for President Obama, has conducted research showing that when liberals or conservatives discuss issues such as affirmative action or climate change with like-minded people, their views quickly become more homogeneous and more extreme than before the discussion. For example, some liberals in one study initially worried that action on climate change might hurt the poor, while some conservatives were sympathetic to affirmative action. But after discussing the issue with like-minded people for only 15 minutes, liberals became more liberal and conservatives more conservative.

It’s almost as though humans conform to the prevailing social cues of the group. I call this new kind of science “Sociology” and plan to publish a paper on this subject. I’ll call it “Conformism: People Usually Start to Think Like Other People in the Same Group.” I’m really prepared to break some new ground with this one, people.

But wait, wasn’t this piece about the Internet? All these studies seem to involve real people receiving mailings or discussing things in real live groups.

The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.

So all these studies that show that humans tend to replicate the behaviors of their peers in real-live social groups means that they will do the exact same thing on the Internet? I’d say that’s kind of a stretch, Kristof, but I suppose that would just be me reconfirming my bias against your argument — which I found on the Internet, where I normally only read things I agree with. OH MY GOD I’M SO CONFUSED!

So what’s the solution? Tax breaks for liberals who watch Bill O’Reilly or conservatives who watch Keith Olbermann? No, until President Obama brings us universal health care, we can’t risk the surge in heart attacks.

Bill O’Reilly = Not Internet
Keith Olbermann = Not Internet
Barack Obama = Not Internet

So perhaps the only way forward is for each of us to struggle on our own to work out intellectually with sparring partners whose views we deplore. Think of it as a daily mental workout analogous to a trip to the gym; if you don’t work up a sweat, it doesn’t count.

Now excuse me while I go and read The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

Hokay, have fun Nick. I’m going to spend the rest of the day reinforcing my narrow belief system at Random Things Like Vikings and Zombies Mets Rule Science is Funny and Scotch is Delicious.com.

The Daily Me [NYT]

The Slate 60 came out today – the 60 biggest American charitable gifts of 2008.  The article notes, “Education, health care, the arts, and eponymous giving—gifts that get the donors a building or school named after them—are usually big priorities among the donors we track but never more so than this year…  [T]here is less philanthropic innovation on the 2008 list than in years past.”

This video conversation between Nick Kristof and Bill Gates contains some wise advice for aspiring philanthropists who have “tens, hundreds, or even thousands” to give away.

And, this Times article discusses an upturn in volunteering during a down economy – how it can help the nonprofits AND the volunteers…

Hey guys.   So here’s the deal:  Nick Kristof of the NY Times is holding a contest whose winner will get to accompany him on a trip to Africa to do some reporting.  The link to the post announcing the contest is here. All I need to do is submit a 700 word essay or a short video detailing why Nick should choose me.  I’ll be shooting a video.  I would like to have as many eyes view this thing as possible before I submit it; after all journalists have diverse audiences.  Anyway, I’ve included a draft of my script after the jump and if you guys have the time, I’d love for you to take a look

Win a Trip with Nick Script </rhyme>

Me standing near a blank wall or walking down Skiles

Hi Nick! My name’s Mike Donohue and I’m a Public Policy major at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. I’ve always enjoyed following you and your fellow columnists in the New York Times so when I saw your column announcing the chance to go on a trip with you, I had to jump on it.

So why should you pick me? Simple!

Shot of Earth or something similar

Because

I want to change the world

Through law and diplomacy

Driven by an undying sense of justice.

Me walking somewhere

Alright, I’ll admit this sounds like empty rhetoric. But everyone needs a grand statement that guides them through life, and this one’s mine.

Allow me to take you along with me through my mission statement.

Different shot of me or some other establishing shot

Until recently it was the chief job of people to grow, learn a trade, and provide for a family. Only the elite could affect the world and only in a slow, clumsy way.

Shots of communications, cell phones, and computers

Then came the age of fast transport and telecommunications and all of a sudden the world shrank to the size of a transistor. Corporations went multinational, distance ceased to be a large issue, NGO’s appeared, and citizens found their voices through blogs, online video, and social networking.

Shots of Service/Journalism

These tools enable people like me to affect the world through direct methods, such as service projects, and indirect methods, like journalism. I am in an especially well- suited place to do good because of my good fortune to be receiving a quality education and to be living in a country as free as the United States.

Another shot of me

Different people change the world in different ways. Some do it via new products, others through journalism, and others, like me, wish to use the law and the relationships between governments to help people.

Courtrooms/UN

We’ve come a long way from the global wars of the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries. Wars are often regional now, and very seldom between nation states. Different countries, with a few notable exceptions, negotiate with words and economics, not bombs. This changed world-state requires diplomats and lawyers in order to help great swaths of people. I intend to be one of those.

Me again

All of these goals and plans mean naught if they don’t have some sort of motivation. Call me idealistic, but my motivation isn’t money, or power, or even a desire to help the little guy. My motivation is to see justice done.

Declaration of Independence

My feelings are best put into words by Thomas Jefferson that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I believe that all men and women deserve the chance to enjoy these rights. What they do with them is a matter for them to decide.

Me once more, perhaps switching

Now I’ve talked a lot about who I am, but not really why I should be the one to go with you on this trip. I’m a public policy major, or as I like to think of it at Tech, I’m a people engineer. I solve people problems using the tools of technology, policy, economics, and diplomacy. I will be an asset on your trip to Africa because I am a technically minded policy analyst and I feel that such a viewpoint will uniquely suit me for reporting on the situation in Africa and how the developed world can help with technological assistance and appropriate policy decisions.

Whoever you decide to take with you this summer, I wish you the best of luck and safe travels. You give these people a loud clear voice in the West amongst the noise that is our busy lives.

Farewell and good travels.

]]> http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/amend-that-sweatshops-are-ok/ Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:08:40 +0000 stephencrose http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/amend-that-sweatshops-are-ok/

I suppose Nick Kristof is right. Compared to the garbage heaps of Cambodia, sweatshops are a big step up. I remember arguing with Charles Stith, my pastor at the time, about the value of negotiating below-union rates for minority workers in Boston. He would have none of that. Thus do we play God without having to breathe the air of the dumps or fight for better pay. Sometimes I really do wonder.

But read Nick’s column, and you may agree:

To do smart international development and survive on the Home Front, the Obama Administration would do well to practice some real transparency in dealing with issues like extreme poverty as opposed to developing nations’ nasty working conditions. The nuance that Kristof brings to the table needs to be appreciated, registered, taken account of.

On that matter, why are today’s accounts of our Capitol Hill efforts to sway Congress bailout-wards so secretive? Transparency means never having to say you have the true clue.

The website has collected hundreds of video appeals for Darfur,  including Mia Farrow, John Edwards, Nick Kristof and many other not so famous people.

This morning I met with Nick Kristof and Naka Nathaniel at The New York Times.

Kristof and Nathaniel have been very aggressive in trying to use video in their reporting for The Times. You can see the best of their work at the NY Times site. (I particularly recommend ‘Between Love and Death‘, but there are a lot of very powerful pieces). I have posted one from ‘youtube’, but there are many, many more to see.

Kristof is a journalist and columnist for The Times.

Nathaniel has been with The Times for almost a dozen years. He started on the website, NYTimes. com and has been at the paper ever since. Nathaniel carries the video camera (he uses a Sony PD150), and edits on FCP.

(Full Disclosure: I was the founder and first pres of NY Times TV. We tried to introduce small cameras and edits into The Times. Kristof and Nathaniel have pulled it off brilliantly).

Kristof and Nathaniel are in a unique position to develop a new kind of ‘digital journalism’, a story telling that carries the impact of video, but is about really important issues.

I met them when I wrote to Kristof, after screening a few of his pieces from Darfur.

It was refreshing to see video work that was not ‘mentos and coke bottles’.

I wrote and said that I thought it was possible to create video that could be a powerful as his writing. Their access to people and stories is unique. Their platform, NYTimes. come, is widely read. And The Times is paying them and backing them… and they have access.

The opportunity is there.

The question is if they… or anyone.. can now transcend simply reproducing conventional TV for online use (gramatically at least) and start using video and digital technologies as a primary recording and story-telling tool. To take the viewer into the story as opposed to just reporting it.

And to see if it can be done about stories that really matter.

Television news rarely deals in ’significant’ issues. This is for a number of reasons – first, it is extremely expensive to commit to send a full ‘crew’ to place like Darfur. Second, real reporting (the kind of reporting that Kristof does regularly for The New York Times) takes time on the ground. It is fine (I suppose) to send Katie Couric to Iraq for the photo-ops, but at $14 million a year, no one is going to release Katie to ‘go wander around and find a story – or spend days working a source to get it right). It’s just too expensive – particularly with the crew, producer and make-up person in tow.

(If you want to see a stunning example of time spent = great reporting, look at the video of the woman in Africa in need of an operation. Kristof and Nathaniel find her in a flea-bitten hospital, donate their own blood to help her, and then spend the night at the hospital and the next day to follow the tragic story. )

The upshot is that television, for all its impact, cannot afford to commit to doing ‘real’ on the ground journalism in far away place (or often in nearby ones, either).

Remove real reporting from the TV fare for a 30 odd years, and you create a generation that is just not educated in foreign affairs, nor used to seeing it on TV… or in their lives at all. That is why what Kristof and Nathaniel are doing is so very important.

(It’s on days like this that I wish I were still at The Times).

This web site lists numerous polls carried out in Iraq.  Be sure to read the section on analysis as well.