johnfulwider.com | polisci

There’s a new mind-mapping service called bubbl.us. I’ve taken to using mind-mapping for starting new research projects and papers. It helps me order my thoughts and increase productivity because I dump everything I can possibly think of onto paper before I start nosing around the Internets and getting lost in its series of tubes. Not only does my mind map almost automatically produce good search terms, it gives me organized places to put notes about material I find on JSTOR or Google Scholar.

Eszter Hargittai’s Stata Goodies Page has a number of resources including a Stata program that splits a continuous variable into a number of categories.

Here’s a place to post comments and ask questions about my One-Day Consensus Conferences, other similar forums, and deliberative democracy in general.

Well, “memetic phylogeny,” anyway. Did you know that the
apparently very much modified phrase, “I, for one, welcome our robot overlords,” didn’t start out that way? People have been sampling the Simpsons:

Kent Brockman reports on Channel Six.

Kent: We’re just about to get our first pictures from inside the spacecraft with “average-naut” Homer Simpson, and we’d like to — aah!
[Camera shows a close-up of an ant floating in front of the three astronauts]
Everyone:Aah!
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we’ve just lost the picture, but, uh, what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over — “conquered”, if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

As I do the preliminary reading for a dissertation on ideology, I have to make some tough choices about what counts as an ideology and what doesn’t. A book I just finished, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, calls nationalism a “thin ideology” because it has

… an identifiable morphology but, unlike mainstream ideologies, a restricted one. … It does not embrace the full range of questions that the macro-ideologies do, and is limited in its ambitions and scope. Take nationalism, an ideology that concentrates on the exceptional worth of a nation as the shaper of human identity while often emphasizing its superiority over other national entities, and that justifies the demands a nation can make on the conduct of its members. The point is that it does little else (p. 98, emphasis in original).

So under that definition, is the economic nationalism of some Congressional Democrats mentioned in this Slate story a paper-thin ideology?

There is an important distinction to be made between economic populism and economic nationalism. Many of Tuesday’s Democratic victors stressed familiar populist themes: the little guy against the big guy; corporate misbehavior; and tough times faced by working people. Al Gore ran in 2000 as an economic populist and so, implausibly, did John Kerry in 2004. Raising the minimum wage (which Republicans stupidly failed to do before the election) is a classic populist position. Opposing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is another. But in places where Democrats made their most-impressive inroads this year, one heard a distinctly different message of economic nationalism. Nationalism begins from the populist premise that working people aren’t doing so well. But instead of blaming the rich at home, it focuses its energy on the poor abroad. The leading economic nationalist today is probably Lou Dobbs, who on nights other than Election Night natters on against free trade, outsourcing, globalization, and immigration on CNN.

By the way, if you click through to the ideology book mentioned above and are intrigued, note that Amazon is having a buy three, get one free deal. I was very satisfied with my first Very Short Introduction and have four more (Human Evolution, The Brain, Intelligence, and Psychology) coming Thursday.