Tag: thoughts

Categories
meta

Picking Up the Pace

I realized yesterday that I have been losing steam on my review of the Federalist papers partly because the idea of 84 posts is rather daunting. I also realize that I am not obligated to break them up exactly as they were published. I have determined that I could have covered 2 – 5 in one post 6 & 7 in another and 9 & 10 together as well. Right there I would have cut the number of posts so far in half. In the future I will combine papers as it seems appropriate to me.

Another realization was that, while I hope to generate some discussion and even awareness of the contents of these founding documents, another result of this undertaking is to solidify the foundation of my own thoughts on issues of government so that I can write more soundly as well as return to a record of my conclusions.

Categories
politics

Political Spectrum

I liked the discussion over at KVNU’s For The People about how labels can be misleading regarding someone’s political philosophy. As always, there are quizzes to help someone figure out their own philosophy. KVNU linked to The Political Compass. Another popular one is Worlds Smallest Political Quiz.

I’ve seen both of them before, but it’s always interesting to see how I score on a particular day. As I took each test I was reminded about the biases inherent in one, and the frustration that I always feel because of the vague questions on the other. The other thing that caught my attention was the way that their scales are not directly compatible with each other. Here are my two scores from the same time today:

Political Compass ScoreWorlds Smallest Political Quiz Score

After looking at the results I wondered what it would take to accurately compare the two. So I did some manipulation.

Continue reading “Political Spectrum”
Categories
life meta

One More Dimension

As I search for things to write here I always hope to convey a perspective that is broad enough to invite discussion. One of my major goals in writing is to receive feedback on my positions and ideas that will help me to refine my positions and my thinking process. Of course I strive to create a profile of myself here that is consistent with my own values. Part of that has been that I try to put away most thoughts that are primarily political in nature on Sundays so that I may focus y attentions on more spiritual/religious/family oriented topics. This has often put me in a bind because I don’t want to dilute the focus of my writings. That is why the day of the week most likely to not have anything written is Sunday.

When I do write on Sundays it has generally been generic in nature and not specific to my own Latter-day Saint background. Today I read the commencement address given by Elder M. Russell Ballard at Brigham Young University – Hawaii. He invites the graduates, and all church members, to make their voices heard in the many discussions about the church that are taking place online.

There are conversations going on about the Church constantly. Those conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the Church teaches. While some conversations have audiences in the thousands or even millions, most are much, much smaller.  But all conversations have an impact on those who participate in them. Perceptions of the Church are established one conversation at a time.

As I read that I realized that my efforts to keep my writing more broadly appealing had resulted in me stunting my voice online by whitewashing a key component of my perspective from the voice I have projected. Many (possibly all) of my readers are aware of my firm convictions of the Book of Mormon and the LDS church but I have decided that leaving that part of my character and life in the background projects an incomplete perspective on what I am thinking which denies people the opportunity to comment on whatever part of my thinking is based on my theological perspective.

I have no intention of turning this into a Mormon blog about politics but I expect that my LDS perspective will be more transparent and might be altogether naked in Sunday posts that are non-political in nature. It also means that I will be more likely to comment on religiously themed posts that I read elsewhere which I have sometimes avoided rather than “dilute my focus” online.

Categories
culture politics

Liberty is the Priority

Much of what has gone wrong in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam is a result of a culture that is very different from ours. As I thought about that recently it occurred to me that Iraq is typical of all (or virtually all) of the fighting that the U.S. has engaged in since the end of World War II in that our goal has been to establish or protect democracy. It would seem that democracy is our standard for measuring the relative liberty found in various nations.

The problem that we generate when we confuse democracy with liberty is that we get so focused on the structure that we forget the fundamental principle. The truth is that I would much rather live under a dictator who enforced law with consistency and equity than vote regularly to determine who would take the lead in telling me what to do and suppressing my freedoms as they deemed appropriate.

I believe that the last half century has offered conclusive proof that we cannot enforce liberty by the installation of democracy. Instead we should be spending out resources of time and energy towards the perfecting and perpetuating of liberty here so that our nation can stand as an example of liberty to the world. Rather than going out and policing other nations we would find that by policing ourselves, other nations would seek our counsel when necessary after they were able to support a free society.

Right now China, which is a fully communist country, seems more prepared to sustain a free society than Iraq even since we toppled their dictator. In fact, Iran might already be more prepared than Iraq is currently. Liberty cannot be imposed from outside. Our nation would not have survived its own founding if the society in the 13 colonies had not already been prepared to maintain the principle of freedom upon which our country was founded.

The question for each succeeding generation will always be – are they still prepared to maintain the freedom they inherited?

It is a question without a pre-determined answer.

Categories
culture National politics

Media Outlets Are Focused On Future Business

I’m not big on conspiracy theories nor do I subscribe to the belief that our elections are largely determined by the media so I don’t generally pay much attention to things like the dust-up between Huckabee and Romney. On the other hand I recognize that the media does have a good deal of influence on our culture and political discourse so I thought it would be worth posting this insight from when I was reading some of the recent Huckabee/Romney commentary.

Contrary to the beliefs of some, the media does not care who wins the election. All they care about is having profitable stories to run during the campaign and for the months between presidential election cycles. To prove my point let me run through some stories about each of the front runners in both major parties that would be written if they win in November. (Notice that all but one of them were among the front runners last year.)

Rudy Giuliani –

    • Mr. 9/11
    • Where Did All the Social Conservatives Go (even cross-dressing and 3 messy marriages couldn’t stop him)

Hillary Clinton –

    • Wife of Bill Clinton (gives 8 years of history against which to compare her every move)
    • First Female President
    • The Dynasty (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton) storyline

John McCain –

    • The Comback Kid
    • The Maverick

Barack Obama –

    • First Black President (this is even easier to peddle with the public support of Oprah)
    • New Kid in Politics

Mitt Romney –

    • First Mormon President (overcame the anti-Mormon sentiment in the country)
    • The Real Executive President (as opposed to GWB)

John Edwards –

    • Five Years of Campaigning Paid Off

    (notice that this weak storyline goes with the weakest of the 7 candidates)

Mike Huckabee –

    • The Baptist Minister
    • Second Man From Hope (just like Bill Clinton but they will focus more on the minister than the former governor because the former governor is just like Clinton, Bush, and Reagan before him)
    • Anti-Mormons Control the GOP (that’s why they play up every religion question whether Huckabee or Romney believe they’re on the record or off)

If anyone thinks I’ve forgotten Fred Thompson among the front runners they should notice that almost nothing is said about him anymore outside of his schedule and where he sits in the polls. They thought he’d make a good story as the evangelicals flocked to him, then they discovered that there was not much real interest in him. This made Huckabee all the more attractive to write about once he started making a mark on the race.

Categories
life

IKEA

Six months after the well-hyped grand opening I made my first visit to IKEA. I had heard many good things (and nothing negative) about IKEA from a variety of sources. The reason that I didn’t go to IKEA before was that I felt no need to go browsing through a bunch of stuff that would make me want to spend money. I was right – and wrong.

IKEA is not a Home Furnishings store as the building states so simply. It is a design philosophy, and a perspective about how we should live life.

I had heard about what great furniture they have – and they do, it’s just the kind of furniture that suits me. I had heard about the children’s play area that makes it possible for parents to shop without boring their kids. Two of my kids could not go there because of the “they must be potty trained” rule (which is perfectly reasonable) so we learned that it is actually fun for the kids to go shopping at IKEA too. My older daughters don’t know what they are missing by staying in the play area – and I don’t plan to tell them for a few more years.

What really sets IKEA apart from other manufacturers is that their understanding of life comes through in everything they do. All four wheels on their shopping carts rotate so you can move the cart in any direction and avoid the 20-point turnaround if you get in a tight spot. Their furniture is modular, so they don’t have to define how large a bookshelf you get to buy – you can just add 30 inch sections to your heart’s content. Everything they sell just begs to be used in real life, and not just in photo-shoots and movie-sets. And they sell all this furniture (which I would be tempted to pay premium prices for) at prices that compete with Walmart.

For people like me who like to design custom solutions it’s nice that I have more options than just taking my pick of what I see in the showroom. Some people might not like it, but I love the fact that I get to assemble the furniture myself after I get home.

In short, I don’t think I’ll even look at furniture at other stores in the future.

Categories
culture National politics State technology

The Government Hammer

My father-in-law is known for saying, “When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Thomas Sowell talks about political crises created by Political “Solutions.”

Government laws and policies, especially the Community Reinvestment Act, pressured lenders to invest in people and places where they would not invest otherwise. Government also created the temporarily very low interest rates that made the mortgages seem affordable for the moment. . .

As for the flames sweeping across southern California, tragic as that is, this has happened time and again before — in the very same places in the very same time of year, just like hurricanes.

Why would people risk building million-dollar homes in the known paths of wildfires? For the same reason that people choose to live in the known paths of hurricanes. Because the government — that is, the taxpayers — will get stuck with a lot of the costs of dealing with those dangers and the costs of rebuilding.

Why is there such a huge amount of inflammable vegetation over such a wide area that fires can reach unstoppable proportions by the time they get to places where people live? Because “open space” has become a political sacred cow beyond rational discussion. . .

In other words, government preserves all the conditions for wildfires and subsidizes people who live in their path.

As for water shortages . . . The federal government’s water projects supply much of the water used in California that enables agriculture to flourish in what would otherwise be a desert.

We have created a culture where government is the solution to every every social “problem” (many time government is used to address preferences like open space which are not actually problems) just as technology is the solution to every technical problem. Lawmakers don’t intend to create crises, but crisis is the natural result when government gets involved in things that it was not designed to address (things like the cost of water or the price of home loans). In other words, if you have a hammer everything may look like a nail, but no matter how skillfully you hammer on a screw it won’t work like a screw – you need a screw driver to succeed with screws.

Categories
life meta

Another New Feature

I got a new plugin called In Series today. There have been a few times when I have written a series of posts that should be linked together. In the past I have tried to tie things together by referencing previous posts in the series, or by manipulating the tags so that the other posts in the series dominated the list of related posts. Neither of these methods is completely satisfactory because I prefer to avoid the “(here, here, and here)” links (not my style) and it’s hard to work in references to all the old posts if a series gets long – like my candidate endorsements series. Manipulating the related posts list only works for a series of less than 8 posts and it skews my tagging so that it is not truly representative.

After installing the new plugin I went back through my posts and added posts to various series’ as appropriate. I learned something interesting about my voucher posting, all my voucher posts have been in the last six weeks and I have written 15 times on the issue. Also, as I have read the news I have discovered that I am no longer interested in writing about vouchers ever since I came to my final decision. Like some other people I am ready to put this referendum behind us so that we can move forward on something better than HB148 and HB174.

Categories
culture life

Are We Willing to Change?

We took the kids to Timpanogos Cave a couple of weeks ago. One of the people on our tour with us was a soldier who we learned was recently back from a tour in Iraq. At the end of our cave tour Laura took a moment to point him out to our girls and told them “He’s a soldier, he has been fighting for our country.”

He overheard her saying this and commented “Right, fighting for oil.”

This obviously stuck with Laura more than me because she brought it up again recently with this insightful observation, “What is he willing to do about it?”

This is not an indictment against this soldier, or any who feel as he does. This is a legitimate question for all of us, especially those who complain about our war for oil. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his crusade about the environment. He has obviously determined that he is willing to give speeches, make movies, and organize concerts to raise public awareness. So far he has not been willing to reduce his own consumption. (Purchasing carbon offsets is nice, but it does not actually reduce consumption – it’s like buying indulgences.)

It’s fun and easy to participate in publicity stunts like Live Earth or Lights Off Utah but beyond their potential for raising awareness, these events are insignificant unless we change our lifestyles to match our rhetoric. We may want to see the state go dark, or attend a popular concert, but are we willing to drive less, use public transit, bike more, walk more, turn off unused lights at home, and use CF light bulbs or other energy efficient alternatives where we do consume natural resources.

I’m not saying that everyone has to do all those things. We have done many of them in our lives, but the real point is that there is no reason to believe someone is serious about the environment so long as they continue to consume as if they are not part of the solution.

Categories
National politics State

State vs Federal

Today is not the first time that I have heard this argument:

Ronald Reagan is not running this year. Then again, even before he was president, Reagan did not live up to the standard of President Reagan. . . He enacted tax increases and expanded abortion rights when he was governor of California. Yet conservatives now rightfully recognize him as one of the greatest presidents in our country’s history.

The difference today was that a new thought struck me – we should expect differences in what a candidate will do in a federal position compared to what they might have taken in state offices. These two levels of government are different and serve different roles. Our states are not meant to  mimic the federal government – they are meant to serve functions in our lives which have not been (and often should not be) addressed at the federal level.

Not only are those levels of government different but no state is an accurate reflection of the nation as a whole in all areas of policy. Our government is – and should be – a reflection of the people it governs; when those people differ so should their government. We rightly expect different solutions to come from Arizona than we would find in Delaware.