The Google Debate Last Night

I attended the IQ2 US debate last night, on the proposition "Google Violates Its Motto 'Don't Be Evil."

I've added some comment to the IQ2 Facebook group. You can Also check out the IQ2 site to order a video, and the debate is carried this weekend on many NPR stations.

The Washington Post confirms...

Per no less than Howard Kurtz, "A Giddy Sense of Boosterism"

Media Leftists Get Religion?

This, without apparent irony, was Kurt Andersen’s response to the election in New York Magazine:

“In New York, reverence for Barack Obama has long been approaching the level of worship, and last week’s spontaneous eruption over his election had the feel of an ecstatic religious celebration. But the peculiar thing about this faith is that it is rooted in a belief above all in reason—and underlying all the excitement on the streets was the wonder of what it might be like to belong to a reality-based nation again.”

He goes on from there to explicate this “religion of reason” with such illuminating ingots as:

“he was elected both because he was black and in spite of being black”

“Intolerant, ignorant, bellicose cowboy-America is suddenly … not”

“those of us too young to have known JFK’s Camelot are going to have our own giddy Camelot II to enrapture and entertain us”

“in the end we, too, voted for what we take to be Obama’s elegant, clear-eyed, unruffled temperament and personality”

“the potency of this moment is all in its symbolism”

In fairness to Andersen, his piece was the picture of rationalist restraint by comparison with his colleagues at the New Yorker, whose florid eruptions were accompanied by renderings of Obama as Moses, FDR, and Jackie Robinson. George Packer disgorged an unrepentant hard-liberal primer that may be appreciated for its candor, concluding:

“The new era that is about to begin under President Obama will be more about public good than about private goods. The meal will be smaller, and have less interesting flavors, but it will be shared more fairly.”

If the wishful dream—one that occurred in my sleep as well, I confess—of reasonable post-partisanship was the engine of BHO’s sweep of independents, it is being rebuilt as a ripening economic collectivism. We wonder, every one of us from every corner of the spectrum, “how he will govern.” This era strikes me as one in which, as the too-hilarious-to-be-loathsome Sidney Blumenthal put it:

“It’s not a question of transcending partisanship. It’s a question of fulfilling it. If we can win and govern well while handling multiple crises at the same time and the Congress, then we can move the country out of this Republican era and into a progressive Democratic era, for a long period of time.”

Echoed by that paragon of markets, Paul Krugman, who baldly predicted:

“…post-partisan rhetoric will be the means. Solving problems through progressive government will be the end. “

To Begin

I have two winged homunculi hovering above my respective earlobes.

One assures me that Tocqueville was prescient: the fatal flaw of representative government resides in the inevitable witlessness of the people. And, though perhaps Alexis missed this, public education in the spirit of enabling self rule is in the end merely a palatable means to reinforcing elite dogma.

The other insists that worth remains in any attempt to reclarify basic principles, sunder the claims of the superstitious from those reasoned principles, and defend the formative ideas of the republic, namely freedom and attendant self-reliance; negative liberties; and the full functioning of risk and its implications.

Assuming that noone will read this, an expectation supported by the irrefutable economics of time, I plan to use this space to semi-privately work out the ideas of the latter and the emotional tension between the two.