Thursday, January 26, 2006
The Melting Pot is Boiling Over?
The title, taken from "The Colbert Report" seemed pretty fitting for this week.
Between a lot of people on Barbara Ehrenreich's forum blaming illegal immigrants for their unemployment woes to Positive Liberty'sposting defending immigration in NC to Bush rejecting amnesty while insisting that immigrants take the jobs Americans don't want, to Hilary's insistence on taking a hard line on illegal immigration, I've seen a lot of people getting worked up about immigrants.
Reading "Lexus and Olive Tree" which seems to be related. Written by NY Times reporter, who claims has best job in the world since he gets to be a "tourist with an attitude". His take at the outset is traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing and to be an effective foreign affairs reporter or columnist, you have to learn how to arbitage information from these disparate perspectives and then weave it all together to produce a picture of the world that you would never have if you looked at it from only one perspective. He points out "Unfortunately, in both journalism and academe, there is a deeply ingrained tendency to think in terms of highly segmented, narrow areas of expertise, which ignores the fact that the real world is not divided up into such neat little beats and that the boundaries between domestic, international, political and technological affairs are all collapsing. " His views are mirrored by physicist Murry Gelman (!) who says "discussion of the big picture is relegated to cocktail party conversation. That is crazy. We have to learn not only to have specialists but also people whose specialty is to spot the strong interactions and the entanglements of the different dimensions, and then take a crude look at the whole. What we once considered the cocktail party stuff--that's a crucial part of the real story."
The title, taken from "The Colbert Report" seemed pretty fitting for this week.
Between a lot of people on Barbara Ehrenreich's forum blaming illegal immigrants for their unemployment woes to Positive Liberty'sposting defending immigration in NC to Bush rejecting amnesty while insisting that immigrants take the jobs Americans don't want, to Hilary's insistence on taking a hard line on illegal immigration, I've seen a lot of people getting worked up about immigrants.
Reading "Lexus and Olive Tree" which seems to be related. Written by NY Times reporter, who claims has best job in the world since he gets to be a "tourist with an attitude". His take at the outset is traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing and to be an effective foreign affairs reporter or columnist, you have to learn how to arbitage information from these disparate perspectives and then weave it all together to produce a picture of the world that you would never have if you looked at it from only one perspective. He points out "Unfortunately, in both journalism and academe, there is a deeply ingrained tendency to think in terms of highly segmented, narrow areas of expertise, which ignores the fact that the real world is not divided up into such neat little beats and that the boundaries between domestic, international, political and technological affairs are all collapsing. " His views are mirrored by physicist Murry Gelman (!) who says "discussion of the big picture is relegated to cocktail party conversation. That is crazy. We have to learn not only to have specialists but also people whose specialty is to spot the strong interactions and the entanglements of the different dimensions, and then take a crude look at the whole. What we once considered the cocktail party stuff--that's a crucial part of the real story."
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