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Wednesday, February 4, 2004
Making over 
| | Several days ago Tim O'Reilly and I were talking about information, which is a noun derived from the verb to form. We use information, literally, to form each other. So, if we are in the market for information, we are asking to be formed by other people. In other words, we are authors of each other. It follows that the best information is the kind that changes us most. If we want to know something — if we are in the market for knowledge — we demand to be changed. |
| | We have a lot to learn from the Dean Experience. Will we do that? Or will we just punditize at each other? That's the challenge for this coming Monday. |
And the winner of this year's best-named conference is...
The crime of marketing
The Mourning After
| | Kerry took most of yesterday's primary states. Edwards took South Carolina and came within a few votes of Oklahoma too. That one went to Clark, who also came in second in three other states. Dean was nowhere. His sour grape message: |
| | It's way too early for a coronation of the candidate who has taken in more special interest money than any other candidate. |
| | The dude is preaching to a shrinking choir. As I watched the results roll in on the TV above the bar at a restaurant last night, some of Dean's results were sub-Lieberman, single digits down in the Sharpton range. (In fact, Sharpton's support doubled Dean's in South Carolina.) |
| | I remember seeing on TV a meeting of ordinary citizens in Iowa back in November. Most of the people in the room were for Dean. His mojo was huge. Now it's gone. |
| | Who to blame? Or what? Or should we blame at all? |
| | Governor Dean is blaming everyone within pointing distance for the failure of the campaign, including "the Establishment," the media and the attacks by his Democratic competitors. I heard him do it twice today on local radio when he was in Washington campaigning. In reality, a campaign's results are the fruit of its labor and leader. He made the boneheaded decision to give a pep talk in front of a national audience. He made the decision to convert his campaign from an insurgency into a coronation by shifting to an endorsements-based strategy when endorsements mean almost nothing to voters (except endorsements by organizations, of which Dean has his share, but only a share). He chooses to blame others and bring a Washington insider into the campaign while decrying Washington insiders — and, in fact, from what I hear, Roy Neel, the new campaign manager who was Al Gore's chief of staff, has made things run more smoothly and responsively. Nevertheless, Howard Dean is ready to blame everyone but himself for his failure to connect with voters and that's not what I want in a president. |
| | You don't pass the buck when you're running for the job of stopping it. |
| | [Later...] Micah has more, especially here. Check out the Shirky/Weinberger postmortem dialog. Arnold Kling also has the best post I've seen on the matter, period. He says Dean lost because he failed to change people's minds. I agree. He also says a dismissal of the need to do that is a great Liberal Failing. I think that's a bit wrong and unfair, since I think it's a great Conservative Failing too. But I also think it's a base corollary to markets are conversations. |
At last, a purpose for Orkut
| | So Bill is this guy I know by way of Sean and Kevin, Orkut tells me. Bill says of himself, "My fob friends think only white people understand my weird humor. In reality, they do not." He also says he's Asian. But then, his picture shows a Cauc girl with severe cleavage in a bikini. But hey, that's enough to send me to his Web page, which is the blog called yumyumcha. It too featues a bikini'd babe with large melons. Asian this time. His blog is a kind of in the Tony Pierce school, but with upper case letters. (He's young, he lives in L.A., he loves women, he writes in 11-point Verdana...) A sample: |
| | Every karma point i ever earned, intentionally or accidentally probably evaporated today as my friends and I headed off to china, hopefully avoiding pickpocketers, sars and venerial disease. And although it was not my intention for this trip to be a sex tour by any means, sometimes, trouble has a way of finding you. So there i was, during the late afternoon, in this room with a strange glow of a lavendar light sitting down facing a gaggle of girls. |
| | Anyway, he got me started. Maybe you too. |
| | By the way, in case you forgot why Tony rocks, he said this yesterday: |
| | if the earth opened up here in hollywood and sucked this godforsaken building down i would only be sorry for the people who discover chopper one because once they put it back together it will be a shock to them that mankind could create a machine so good while turning their backs on other machinery that could do things like, oh, say, feed starving people or find water in desert areas. |
| | which they could, of course. if there was a way to make money off the poor. |
| | instead they built this beast to keep the madding crowds in line and to steal from the rich and spy on the theives. |
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