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Half Full or Half Empty

Half Full or Half Empty

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The trouble with philosophical abstraction is that it tries to create a space separated from the world.

The metaphor of the slippery slope, for example, has become almost literal. That’s why it is often effective. Who wants to slide down a slippery slope? What is unstated but operative is that this metaphor encourages the reader/hearer to assume – without question – that there exists a place that is not slippery, where one cannot slide or fall.

In our complex world (and especially with regard to ethical and legal questions that affect people’s lives), we seem to have a craving to be able to state our understandings in a universally-applicable and absolute way, even about topics that are not absolute and cannot be absolute. That’s why “top-down” understandings must play against “bottom-up” ones, where a multitude of examples and perspectives of experience can realistically inform both theory and practice.

Why am I having these thoughts today? It’s all about the old question of whether the glass is half empty or half full.

I’ve heard a lot of answers to that question. Some will say it is both half empty and half full, or even that it is neither half full nor half empty. Your personal preference of interpretation can be used as a measure of optimism or pessimism. There are hundreds of jokes.

Last night I read the hands-down best answer to the question of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. That answer illustrates a kind of blind spot for absolute abstraction and universalizing. It illustrates the importance of perspective and context in a completely different way. Just by the wayside, it made me laugh so hard that I felt compelled to share the joy. I think that only a woman could have come up with this answer. In this case, a grandmother.

I didn’t find it in a philosophy book, but in a chapter on grandparents in Cosbyology: Essays and Observations From the Doctor of Comedy, a short book by Bill Cosby. At Temple University, he had been assigned to debate one side or another. The question seemed unanswerable to him.

So I went home that night — and my grandmother was there — and she saw me concentrating and so she asked me what was the matter.

“I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.

Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said:

“It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.”

Do Political Blogs Change Your Views on Issues?

Do Political Blogs Change Your Views on Issues?

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In answer to NOW’s Question of the Week: Do you read blogs? Tell us if blogs change your views on political issues.

Blogs are of many kinds: scrapbooks, personal journals, advertising spaces, photo logs. Political blogs are only one form of the blog. The blogosphere is about freedom of expression – dittoheads, propaganda portals, soap boxes, fake identities, but also debate, discussion, original ideas, and scrapbooked information/evidence/argument.

Some political blogs actually investigate and report news. Some are focused tightly on one specific topic so that there is a constant flow of targeted and detailed information. Others are like a scream of despair, or a series of billboard advertisements.

Blogs do affect my political views, if for no other reason than that they are a valuable supplement to the information and perspectives that I am able to glean from other media. If you are interested in a particular topic, you can search for related keywords (using search engines or more specific tools like Technorati) and get the latest range of feedback and opinion. Subscribe to your favorite blog rss feeds, and it’s like building your own newspaper. Through a service like Feedblitz, you can even have the feeds delivered via e-mail.

What is still more powerful, however, is that because of the ease of blog publication, more people are writing and publishing. There is a sense of political empowerment that comes from dwelling with your thoughts and observations long enough to claim your own distinct perspective – and then to express it, to “offer it up” to others. Blogs encourage this. People who might never write an article or book for print publication can still have a syndicated column as a blogger. Blogs are used for political opinion, activism and reporting. Blogs can distribute information, and calls for political action. Bloggers can report on things that even investigative journalists never observe – and they offer the viewpoints of many who are otherwise never heard.

Blogs encourage people to read, think, write and debate – all in mutally reinforcing feedback loops that make them better at doing all of them. What’s not to love?

As opportunities for real political discussion in public spaces dwindle, the blogosphere offers one form of the social arena for information exchange, conversation, and debate that in other times and places might have been held at the local pub or cafe or quilting bee or bowling night or barbeque. In many cases, we simply don’t have the places or the occasions for those discussions, but we need them more now than at any other time in my life’s memory.

We need more debates in the public sphere. We need politicians to debate in front of us rather than simply reading their statements to the press. Pundits and spokesmen and think tank representatives aren’t enough for us anymore. Americans do smell mendacity, and we are working it out for ourselves as best we can. Political blogs help us to do that.

What’s your view on this question? Post it there, post it here, post it at home.

USA’s National Debt

USA’s National Debt

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Interesting to see it from another point of view: this one from the front page of the leading Russian paper (and website) Pravda.

The USA’s National Debt Clock can’t keep up with Bush’s spending – Pravda.Ru
Front page / World / Americas
30.03.2006

The USA’s national debt is increasing by $2.43 billion everyday. People expect the state debt to top the ten trillion dollar mark in the next few years.

A special huge electronic display in New York which shows in real time the size of state debt will not be able to cope with such a high figure. In 1989 the national debt clock was placed in Times Square so that Americans could see how effectively their government was working. At the time the national debt stood at 2.7 trillion dollars.

Yesterday at midday Moscow time the debt stood at $8 369 526 197 055.36. It even rose yesterday by $604 million. If the figures are to be believed, yesterday every American family bore a debt of almost $90 000.

Developer Douglas Durst owns the clock and his father erected it. He hoped to make Americans understand the economy better. The clock worked fine for ten years but in the run up to the new millennium it crashed. In its final moments the clock read that the national debt was $5.7 trillion and that the family share of the debt was $74 000. Durst believed that such a level of debt would not last long and he was right. Within two years the debt had started to grow at an unprecedented rate.

Durst pulled the plug on the clock in 2000, but it was switched back on in 2002 when debt started to once again increase. In 2004 a new model replaced the original clock which was able to express the figure in a shortened term in the event that in the future the debt suddenly started to rise at an unthinkable rate. Now the figure on the clock goes up by $20 000 every second.

So what is to be done? It is expensive being the “light of democracy” in Iraq and Afghanistan, keep revolutionaries at bay and to “teach” the rest of the world how to live their lives.

Anton Struchenevsky, an analyst from management company Troika Dialog says, “Even when the state debt reaches the 10 trillion dollar mark, an economic crisis will not occur in the USA and the dollar will not crash. It is in the interests of the USA’s main creditor, China, to have a stable American currency and protect the American market.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda

Translated by Michael Simpson

Read it again.