Today's Brain Dump

1. I'm interested some changes to American governmental structure to improve management and to make a more natural training/experience ladder to the presidency. Here's the proposal, which hinges on diversified experimentation (as opposed to "libertarianism" or "socialism", or "market-oriented liberal democracy") as a governmental model. I think that we should think of orders of magnitude for management. The top order of magnitude is the USA, with a President at the top serving as chief executive for 300 million people. The bottom order of magnitude is the equivalent of a neighborhood association president, serving as chief executive for 300 people. The people at each stage elect the people at the next stage higher (representing an order of magnitude higher of people). The number of states would be reduced from 50 to 10, each with a 30 million population. It would probably be something like California, New York, Florida, Texas, Northwest, Midwest, Southwest, South, New England, MidAtlantic, with some smaller states merged into the 4 big states rather than into the new regional block states. At every level of executive governent experimentation would be strongly encouraged. Some experimentation (of limited effect) would be directed at the national level. Some nonexperimental policy would be directed at the national level. However, no policy would be imposed on 100% of states or lower levels of government. Nor would it be allowed for 100% of states to engage in the same policy, where there might be benefits to force states or lower levels to try new things. This probably comes close to paternal libertarianism in some ways, except that I don't care for the libertarian part beyond its utility (I don't care for it as a "natural right" or that sort of thing). Enough of this messy shit. Let's get scientific and experimental and diversified in our governance and figure out as best we can what works.

2. I think the OJ model helps us understand why big events that cause people to pick sides helps actively construct popular culture norms of concepts like race, gender, religion and status hierarchies and alliances. For example, Howard Stern would often ask people "do you think OJ killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson?" and show even most liberal whites saying yes while liberal blacks say no. It was a stigma production moment for black americans while helping reify whiteness for jews (and for women perhaps). I see similar dynamics at play in this and past elections, except that Sharpton is a stigma producer that many blacks saw as a rejection opportunity in 2004 and Obama resists easy stigmitization with game so good that he's separated from most of what other blacks are doing, like an outlier point way positively deviant to the rest of a bell curve. I also see some parallels with arabs/middle easterners. Many in the US perform excellent positive integration game, much better than many black americans, but ran into a shitstorm when Bin Laden's celebrity rose post-9/11. here's where I think game theoretic approaches to understanding race (and the many other identifiers) construction, negotiation, and stigma can be helpful -Bin Laden chose an option that may have harmed people that looked like him and had his ancestral narrative as a whole, but helped him as an individual in terms of maximizing his celebrity. okay, I'm out of time. I'll try to flesh these out further and comments as always are welcome.

Comments

[Hopefully Anonymous]

An interesting data point regarding paragraph 2. in the post above:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D93AIV882&show_article=1

[TGGP]

I've long favored a lot more states (breaking up heavily populated ones into smaller ones) as well as the dissolution of the U.S into its constituents.

There were lots of women on the O.J jury. But they were black women and their race trumped their gender.

Kevin McDonald has a surprisingly long preface to Culture of Critique which reminds me of some of your ideas on Jewish group strategy.

I'd like to see more data from the poll cited in the Breitbart article.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

"There were lots of women on the O.J jury. But they were black women and their race trumped their gender."

Good and relevant factoid. I think that was a component of the socializing narrative. White woman and white jewish guy as victim, blacks siding with OJ, whites siding with Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson. It would be interesting to drop 2004+ Obama into that cultural moment and see how he would innovate in the middle of a senatorial or presidential run.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

to my proposed governmental structure I'd like to add the excellent idea of staggered terms, allowing higher powered executives to be more resistant to changes in mass attitudes and lower powered executives to be more responsive and reflective of it.
1st two levels: 4 year terms (limit of 2)
2nd two levels 2 year terms (limit of 4)
3rd three levels: 1 year terms (limit of 8)