Susan Cain posits in her book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” that there is no correlation between people who speak well and people who have the best ideas. In my experience that has been proven true repeatedly. The ideas of the more reserved members of the team are every bit as important as those from the more outspoken members.
Monthly Archives: November 2016
Disastrous Deciding Toward Fascism
In the spring of 2004, Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond delivered a lecture entitled “Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?” in which he discusses the plight of the Easter Islanders. It seems that1 the when the Polynesian people settled the island, it was covered in forest that they relied upon for their way of life. Over the course of their limited time on the island, they slowly forested their way to societal collapse despite the inherent obviousness of what they were doing; a classic application of the frog-in-boiling-water allegory.2
In the US, our Polynesian lumberjacks are facilitating a slow slide into fascism4; death by a thousand axe cuts.
An Electoral Theory
I would like to apologize before you attempt to read this. I’m naturally pretty verbose, but this got out of hand even by my lofty standards. I’ve attempted to trim it back some, but, it remains quite the slog. I, personally, think it’s worth it. I’m also pretty biased.
I would like to begin with a few postulates—a few things that we can assume to be true for the sake of argument. I’m not trying to play any rhetorical games here, so I’ll attempt to show my work as I introduce each postulate (after a few up top that I hope to be relatively uncontested).
Thoughts on a Recent Election
There’s no real post here, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that if I don’t organize my thoughts around Tuesday’s tragic turn of events, I’ll never get back to sleep. That’s all this will be, the text version of thinking aloud.