Predictable Unpredictability: A Political Paradox

This is what clever political shenanigens look like:

Flaherty's announcement is a brilliant piece of political one-upmanship.

Mayor Rob Ford - already the subway hero in Scarborough - now takes on godlike proportions in the 'burb.  It assures his re-election.

And it caught the provincial Liberals flat-footed.

And here's the sort of thing that makes investors skittish, unwilling to commit to things like, say, investment in R&D:

If both sides understand each other, it makes for more predictable outcomes.  It is when they do not - when investors think policy will stay loose, say, just as it is tightening - that accidents happen.

Blame is boring - besides, every Party is equally guilty of putting partisan wins ahead of the best-interests of the people they were elected to represent.

That, in itself, is a systematic problem.  Pointing fingers clearly isn't getting us out of the burgeoning mess, nor is political one-upmanship.  If our politicians - and they are ours - maintain their focus on winning at all costs, we all lose.

Fortunately, there's some good news out there, too.  If the Ontario Liberals and the Ontario PCs can find it within themselves to work together and share a win that benefits all Ontarians, then anyone can do it.  After all, compromise has always been the solution to gridlock.

That's the example we should be encouraging our leaders to follow.

RELATED: It is also a matter of trust.  The Harper government doesn't enjoy much of that in the native community these days. 

UPDATED: So what if this feeds distrust between the federal government and the government of the largest province?  This is all about politics.

Ayn Rand would be proud.

Employers: How Do You Define "The Best Person?"

For example, a middle-aged man with lots of industry knowledge and experience might still have trouble identifying with the way an African-American teenage girl makes purchasing decisions.  A twenty-something, or a twenty-something African-American woman, might have an easier time targeting the needs of that particular client base as they can better relate.  Working together, the two could put together a strategy and solution that works best for both the company and the customer.

One of my favourite topics, this, because it's that important.  There are still those who assume immigrants are stealing their jobs and that the hiring of employees of diverse backgrounds is biased against them.  They seem to think that skills are written in stone, immutable, and that the people involved in any transaction don't matter.  Or, they figure that sales is sales - if you're competitive enough, you can sell anything to anyone

Equally, there are those who blame residents in marginalized communities for not taking some risk and fighting back against criminals in their midst, or blame those of different faiths of disrupting social norms.

There's an old saying that bears repeating - don't judge someone 'til you've walked a mile in their shoes.

The same applies - or should apply - to everything we do in life.

When we learn about other cultures, speak other languages, eat other foods and practice other customs, we open up windows of understanding that enable to us do whatever social activity we're engaged in better.

Put it another way - you can't lead if you aren't willing to listen.  If you can't penetrate the world view of a client or a competitor, does it not make sense to gain some inside perspective?  New Canadians, those kids who "don't get how the real world works" and those who think different aren't problems to be solved, but rather opportunities to be harnessed.

That's not pandering; that's working smart.

Extreme Political Attitudes May Stem From an Illusion of Understanding (Amanda Mikulak)

 

One of the great, tragic paradoxes of our age - the most aggressive people, the ones most likely to seize positions of influence through charm and confidence are among the least likely to really know what the hell they're doing.  Yeah, they make money and build brand, but they leave a trail of corpses in their wakes.  Oops, must be their fault, carry on.

 

They will, of course, disagree with me.  They'll say that avoidable problems like Ipperwash, Walkerton, Project Orange, ORNGE, vikileaks, "political truths", fired domestic workers and hired foreign workers and any political scandal ending in "gate" are mistakes that other people make, not them. 

 

Yeah, well my grandpa was a bomber pilot and he always told himself it would be someone else who got shot down, but that's not how it worked out, did it?

 

Politics is tribal - it pushes us into us and them categories and tricks us into emotional positions which we then delude ourselves into believing are fact-based. 

 

Until we become conscious of this fact - that we are, each of us emotional creatures that must work to be factual, we're trapped.

Extreme Political Attitudes May Stem From an Illusion of Understanding

Related Topics: Attitude, Causality, Decision Making, Judgment, Policy, Political Psychology, Psychological Science, Thinking

Having to explain how a political policy works leads people to express less extreme attitudes toward the policy, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research suggests that people may hold extreme policy positions because they are under an illusion of understanding — attempting to explain the nuts and bolts of how a policy works forces them to acknowledge that they don’t know as much about the policy as they initially thought.

Psychological scientist Philip Fernbach of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his co-authors were interested in exploring some of the factors that could contribute to what they see as increasing political polarization in the United States.

“We wanted to know how it’s possible that people can maintain such strong positions on issues that are so complex — such as macroeconomics, health care, foreign relations — and yet seem to be so ill-informed about those issues,” says Fernbach.

Drawing on previous research on the illusion of understanding, Fernbach and colleagues speculated that one reason for the apparent paradox may be that voters think they understand how policies work better than they actually do.

In their first study, the researchers asked participants taking an online survey to rate how well they understood six political policies, including raising the retirement age for Social Security, instituting a national flat tax, and implementing merit-based pay for teachers. The participants were randomly assigned to explain two of the policies and then asked to re-rate how well they understood the policies.

As the researchers predicted, people reported lower understanding of all six policies after they had to explain them, and their positions on the policies were less extreme. In fact, the data showed that the more people’s understanding decreased, the more uncertain they were about the position, and the less extreme their position was in the end.

The act of explaining also affected participants’ behavior. People who initially held a strong position softened their position after having to explain it, making them less likely to donate bonus money to a related organization when they were given the opportunity to do so.

Importantly, the results affected people along the whole political spectrum, from self-identified Democrats to Republicans to Independents.

According to the researchers, these findings shed light on a psychological process that may help people to open the lines of communication in the context of a heated debate or negotiation.

“This research is important because political polarization is hard to combat,” says Fernbach. “There are many psychological processes that act to create greater extremism and polarization, but this is a rare case where asking people to attempt to explain makes them back off their extreme positions.”

In addition to Fernbach, co-authors include Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School; Craig R. Fox of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Steven A. Sloman of Brown University.

For more information about this study, please contact: Philip M. Fernbach at philip.fernbach@gmail.com.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

Why exploration matters—and why the government should pay for it (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

 

Giant research efforts like the one that put a man on the moon produce the kinds of technology that can lift an economy and protect citizens in times of war or disaster. It takes a government-size budget to fund those efforts, but the payback can be enormous.

October 2012 | by Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

Twentieth-century America owed much of its security and economic strength to national support for science and technology. Some of the most revolutionary (and marketable) technologies of the past decades have been spun off research done under the banner of US space exploration: kidney-dialysis machines, implantable pacemakers, affordable and accurate LASIK surgery, global-positioning satellites, corrosion-resistant coatings for bridges and monuments (including the Statue of Liberty), hydroponic systems for growing plants, collision-avoidance systems on aircraft, digital imaging, infrared handheld cameras, cordless power tools, athletic shoes, scratch-resistant sunglasses, virtual reality. And that list doesn’t even include Tang.

Although solutions to a problem are often the fruit of direct investment in targeted research, the most revolutionary solutions tend to emerge from cross-pollination with other disciplines. Medical investigators might never have known of X-rays, since they do not occur naturally in biological systems. It took a physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, to discover light rays that could probe the body’s interior with nary a cut from a surgeon.

Why not ask investigators to take direct aim at a challenge? My answer may not be politically correct, but it’s the truth: when you organize large-scale, extraordinary, inspiring missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not happen to have been inspired by, or attracted to, the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.

Today, cross-pollination between science and society comes about when you have ample funding for ambitious long-term projects. America has profited immensely from a generation of scientists and engineers who, instead of becoming lawyers or investment bankers, responded to a challenging vision posed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. Proclaiming the intention to land a man on the moon, Kennedy welcomed the citizenry to aid in the effort. That generation, and the one that followed, was the same generation of technologists who invented the personal computer. Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, was 13 years old when the United States landed an astronaut on the moon; Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, was 14. The PC did not arise from the mind of a banker or artist or professional athlete. It was invented and developed by a technically trained workforce that responded to the dream unfurled before them; they were thrilled to become scientists and engineers.

Yes, the world needs bankers and artists and even professional athletes. They, among countless others, create the breadth of society and culture. But if you want tomorrow to come—if you want to spawn entire economic sectors that didn’t exist yesterday—those are not the people you turn to. It is technologists who create that kind of future. And it is visionary steps into space that create that kind of technologist. I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard—explored not only with robots but also with the mind, body, and soul of our species.

When I stand in front of eighth graders, I suppose I could say to them, “Become an aerospace engineer so that you can build an airplane that’s 20 percent more fuel efficient than the ones your parents flew on.” But imagine if instead I said, “Become an aero-research space engineer so that you can design the airfoil that will be the first piloted craft in the rarefied atmosphere of Mars.” “Become a biologist because we need people to look for life, not only on Mars but also on Europa and elsewhere in the galaxy.” “Become a chemist because we want to understand more about the elements on the moon and the molecules in space.” When you put that kind of vision out there, my job as science educator becomes easy, because I just have to point them to it and the ambition rises up in the students. The flame gets lit, and they’re self-guided on the path.

NASA’s current budget sits just below $20 billion—sounds large. But the National Institutes of Health has a $30 billion budget. That’s fine. They ought to have a big budget, because health matters and everyone wants to live a long and healthy life. But most high tech medical equipment and procedures—EEGs, EKGs, MRIs, PET scans, ultrasound, X-rays—work on principles discovered by physicists and are based on designs developed by engineers. So you can’t just fund medicine; you have to fund the rest of what’s going on. Cross-pollination is fundamental to the enterprise.

What happens if you double NASA’s budget? The vision becomes big—it becomes real. You attract an entire generation, and generations to follow, to science and engineering. Nowadays, everyone who spends even a minute thinking about the next few decades knows that all emergent markets in the 21st century will be driven by science and technology. The foundations of every future economy will require this. And what happens when you stop innovating? Everyone else catches up, your jobs go overseas, and then you cry foul: they’re paying them less over there, and they’re giving huge subsidies to new industries, and the playing field is not level. Well, it’s time to stop whining and start innovating.

Let’s not just talk about inspiration. Let’s talk about true innovation. People often ask, “If you like spinoff products, why not just invest in those technologies straightaway, instead of waiting for them to happen as a secondary or tertiary benefit?” The answer: it just doesn’t work that way. Let’s say you’re a thermodynamicist, the world’s expert on heat, and you’re asked to build a better oven. You might invent a convection oven or an oven that’s better insulated or one that permits easier access to its contents. But no matter how much money I give you, you will not invent a microwave oven, because that came from another place. It came from investments in communications, in radar. The microwave oven is traceable to the war effort, not to a thermodynamicist.

That’s the kind of cross-pollination that goes on all the time, and yes, it’s wacky. It’s surprising. There’s no reason it should happen. But it does. And that’s why futurists get it wrong more often than not—they observe current trends and just extrapolate. They don’t see surprises. So they get the picture right for about five years into the future, and they’re hopeless after ten.

If you double NASA’s budget, whole legions of students will fill the pipeline. Even if they don’t become aerospace engineers, scientifically literate people will rise up through the ranks—people who might invent stuff and create the foundations of tomorrow’s economy. But that’s not all. Suppose the next terrorist attack is in the form of biological warfare. Who are we going to call? Not the Marines. We want the best biologists in the world. If there’s chemical warfare, we want the best chemists. And we would have them, because they’d be working on problems relating to Mars, problems relating to Jupiter’s ice moon, Europa. We would have attracted those people because the vision was in place. They wouldn’t have become lawyers or investment bankers, which is what happened in the 1980s and 1990s.

So this $40 billion starts looking pretty cheap. It becomes not only an investment in tomorrow’s economy but also an investment in our security and in our dreams. Our most precious asset is our enthusiasm for what we do as a nation. Marshal it. Cherish it.

 

 About the author

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he is also the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. Tyson has authored ten books and served on two presidential commissions on the future of space exploration. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

Politics Now

7. The songs I write for SFH, SFH will tell you, are all ultimately about self-loathing and loss of faith. There’s a reason for that.

 

 

Speaking from my minimalist experience, I can tell you politics is a blood sport; loyalty is demanded but scarcely returned, partisan benefit regularly (and increasingly) squeezes out broadly-based good public policy and individual human value counts for nothing.

 

It's funny - for all the attention paid to developing human narratives in support of partisan ambitions, politics is ultimately a dehumanizing process.  Comparisons to warfare are spot-on except instead of your life, it's your reputation that is constantly on the line. How many front-line staff have had their names torn to shreds in the media, sometimes just for following orders?  

And that's just the external risk.  Political campaigns (which never really end, these days) are kill-or-be-killed scenarios.  When you work an election, you get to see the uglier side of our democracy under high-pressure situations with little food and sleep. Frequently, you are given ample reason to question the people and beliefs you are fighting for. In your devotion to the bigger cause, you'll sometimes even find yourself justifying lapses in your own moral standards.  Unlike war, though, you can't always count on your teammates to have your back; they're just as likely to stick a knife in it if doing so serves their interests.  Where reputations and future success are at stake, you pretty much expect to be abandoned should ever you fall.

A lot of folk in politics believe that empathy is for the weak. These are the political Bill Kilgores that talk about victory but really see nothing but the battle. They will pathologically throw colleagues, staff and even leaders under the bus or download responsibility for their actions, never thinking twice about the consequence for others. It's kill or be killed, they tell themselves. We're doing what everyone else is doing, just more effectively. This probably comes as a surprise to nobody - there's a reason why we don't trust politicians. What's more of a surprise, I'd warrant, is just how many people in politics do have a conscience.
 

These aren't the folk that are in politics primarily for prestige or position, but because they (perhaps naively) actually believe in the system.  Most of them don't last long.  Those that do invariably end up with at least some innocent blood on their hands.  If you have any shred of decency, the things that you have endured and done to stay alive or support your cause will haunt you long after the election has ended.  Operators likes this wear their political sins like a chain, unseen yet chafing.

There's a reason dedicated campaign staff emerge from from the shadows of elections looking a bit like wraiths themselves, expressing PTSD-like symptoms.  Somewhere along the journey they've started to lose faith in the vision that motivated them in the first place and, therefore, are left to question just what it is they believe in and what they have sacrificed in support of that cause.

 

Why do we fall, though?  Because sometimes it takes feeling like you're in the bottom of the pit before you can really look around at the every-day people impacted by politics.  You also have to reach the bottom before you have reason to look up and see the light.  I can think of a couple high-profile people who have seen their entire lives dissected on the public stage - that kind of deconstruction invariably leads to some painful introspection as well.  One fella I recently had coffee with is in the process of re-findging himself and trying to figure out what his life should mean.  That was the key thing, though - it has to stand for something. 

Although these folk might not always have faith in themselves, it's the people who question the status quo and suffer from self-dout that give me the most hope. 

Why's that?

Because while things end, endings don't always mean what we expect them to.

Individual Right to Choose / Society's Responsibilty to Think Ahead

Oh, Lorrie...

(2) NDP godfather Tommy Douglas was advocating mass sterilization and special colonies for "defective" and "sub-normal" families -- including those whose ancestors were "French-Irish" and "low type of woman" -- right around the time Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany.

But the fact a politician today can't even raise the issue without being smeared by the liberal political/media establishment speaks volumes.

Yes, the first quote is not a reference to the second.  Yet, they are in the exact same article.  Should a politician be allowed to raise eugenics as an issue today without reprimand?  What about segregation, which is what "firewall" could very easily amount to?  What about indentured servitude?  Where do we draw that line?  What are the risks if we don't?

It's not enough to say "there's no appetite for a debate on (insert contentious issue here)."  There was no appetite for genocide in 1930s Germany, either - only a bitterness against others and a need to come across as dominant.  Feelings can be manipulated and, when the manipulators continually get away with ignoring societal standards, they open the door to all kinds of abuses.  Somewhere, someone has to say "enough;" the successful perpetrators aren't going to regulate themselves.   

Along the same theme; a very common post-war response from these perpetrators is denial.

Another quote, again from the same article:

In the real world, the death penalty isn't coming back because no political party supports it and because, even if they did, our courts view it as cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional.

How many selection-of-the-fittest, Far Right (not Conservative, because Conservative is a much broader category) folk feel the courts have too much power?  How many of them are sceptical about immigration, think tough-on-crime is the way to go and don't believe in "social handouts?"

One last Goldstein quote:

On abortion, polls show most Canadians support a woman's right to choose, but are conflicted on issues such as whether the state should pay for non-emergency abortions in the latter stages of pregnancy. But again, among liberal elites, there is only one "correct" view for a politician to hold -- abortion on demand, regardless of the circumstances.

Individual responsibility and personal feeling trumps all, I get it.  What about when that doesn't work?  Less public education means less educated people.  Less information gathering means less informed decisions.  Less central coordination?  That's proven to lead to unnecessary duplication, waste and missed opportunities.

Let's stick with education for a second, though.  Less educated people reproduce more - that's not speculation, but a lesson from history.  When you don't have facts, you rely on feelings, which rarely take into account such things as long-term costs.  That's one of the main reasons we bother to learn at all; so that we can avoid repeating mistakes.  Uneducated people tend to be more likely to experience poverty.

What do you think a lack of knowledge, a tendency to reproduce more and less easy access to birth control methods (and yes, abortion) leads to?

The more poor, uneducated people you have, the more poor, uneducated people you're going to end up with (keeping in mind that wealthy, educated people reproduce less).  Now, correlate poverty and crime rates.  Then, crime costs on the economy and the price of punishment and incarceration - both fiscally and, over time, socially.  Then look at natural resource dependence in places like Easter Island or Central America.  In fact, look at any failed civilization and you'll see short-term, resource-intensive and elite-centric policies at the root of the collapse - including the Soviet Union.  Where you see successes - like here in Canada - the reverse is true; more shared services, more planning, better education and a broader economic basket with a decent focus on production lead to better, lasting results for all.

The Far-Right, Two-Row Wampum conceptualizers seem to feel they can do it on their own and everyone should be left to their own devices, despite shared geography.  They appear to believe that helping others through centrally coordinated social services is too much like rewarding failure.

It's reactive, not proactive thinking - and it's doomed, time and again, to fail.

You can't consider the individual's right to choose without considering society's responsibility to think ahead.  Consider it a quality over quantity thing.

Maybe the proactive, liberal approach doesn't feel right to the Far Right - but that's the point, isn't it?  The best decisions aren't made based on gut-instinct alone, but are informed.

Those who fail to understand history, etc.

Buyer Beware: If Your Trade is Money, You Still Have To Deal With People

What disturbs you most about this picture; that people are walking by nonchalantly, or that the homless guy has a pet he can't take care of?  We revist this at the bottom.

“It would be refreshing to have political leaders who connected the dots. This is important because if governments don't understand the causes of their troubles, then they cannot fix them.”

 I got all excited about the title of this article – then saw how clearly its author wasn’t connecting the dots herself.  It was, to say the least, disappointing.

Francis’ approach is not an atypical one for someone with an aggressive, pro-capitalist mentality.  She talks about economy and policy through a focus on commodity prices, the tax base, export markets, etc. 

The only time she talks about actual people is through a financial lens.  Health care costs, education costs, social expenditures outpacing economic growth, etc.  Immigrants are equated with additional taxpayer expenses.

“Tough-minded” folk like Francis take the approach that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, you have to stay competitive to get ahead, etc.  The only people we should encourage are the ones willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.  When it comes to business or politics, caveat emptor is the name of the game.

Of course, it’s this mentality that led to the spectacular rise and rapid decline of the capitalist system, just as it spurred the growth of and has now spurned support for the Conservative Party of Canada.

The big “risk takers” in the capitalist system aren’t the bravest – they’re the trickiest.  They’re the ones who find ways to download the consequences of risk to those with less money or less guile; that is, the lower-class, the disposable employee, the uneducated who spend without proper planning.  This might have been a model that worked back when Western feudalism or early in the industrial age, but it doesn’t cut it any more.

In the days where the rich sold products made on the back of cheap leabour to each other, crime was a bigger issue, as were epidemics.  The more condensed communities got, the worse the problem became.  Conversely, as public health care and centralized social service delivery grew, life got better.  Income disparity shrank as education, diversity, health and safety were regularized.  This trend led to the development of the modern middle class; the very group that is currently being squeezed.

As the “tough-minded” people sought ways to get ahead, they found increased justification for doing so at the expense of their less hawkish social peers.  What has resulted?  An increasingly polarized society with both ends embittered against each other.

Yet, the 1% simply cannot exist without the 99%.  You can’t run a business without people; you can’t compete in today’s emerging markets without properly developed and accommodated cognitive skills.  Labour is a transaction – a person sells their skills to an employer who benefits from the resulting products or services.  In this case, it’s the employer who needs to keep “buyer beware” in mind; if you’re not willing to invest in your human resources, it’s your own productivity that will suffer.

If you said that the homeless guy isn't fit to have a pet - what say you to the countless employers who are routinely causing stress-related illness in their employers, reducing their own productivity?

It's time for a systematic rethink.

Did Vic Toews Think Before He Spoke?

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do." 

Think fast – is Vic Toews anti-privacy or pro-safety?

There’s been a lot of discussion about Toews’ lawful access bill, well represented (in my opinion) by John Ibbitson.  I won’t try to retread ground already well-covered – especially when there’s something more interesting to consider.

Above, I asked you to make a snap judgment – for or against.  This is, essentially, a repeat of the “with us or against us” argument Toews himself used to defend his bill and attack its detractors.  An argument he denied making in an interview with Don Martin.

Watch the video and see for yourself:

Toews’ second statement is clearly a misrepresentation of the first; the words he suggests are a “far cry” from what he actually said are, in fact, the exact words he did use.  Did he tell the truth?  No – but I don’t think he consciously lied, either.

Say what now?

There was no pause between Martin’s question and Toews’ response.  I’m willing to bet that Toews didn’t sit down and rehearse answers to questions like this beforehand (and for his sake, I hope I’m right); he therefore didn't have the answer ready prior to the question being asked.  His false statement wasn’t a response to the question, but rather, a reaction to it.  It’s like a reflex test at the doctor’s – the response is autonomic, happens without your even thinking.  Except in this case, Toew’s response was verbal.

Is that not a facetious thing to say?  How can you speak without your conscious being involved?  The answer is counterintuitive – as discomforting a notion as it is, consciousness is not as big a determinant of thought as we give it credit for.  If you’re not convinced, take a couple minutes and read this.

South of the border, Barack Obama has often been criticized for pausing before he answers questions.  Some have even suggested it’s indicative of shiftiness, or a lack of intelligence on his part.  Even his supporters have urged him to get angrier – be more reactive – on certain issues.  Issues like Iran, which one would think deserve more careful consideration than others.  Logic tells us to think before you speak, but how often have we felt that thinking before an answer is disingenuous?

What Obama does when he pauses is think.  He absorbs the question, considers its implications, draws from his experience and positions then answers.  He doesn’t shoot first, ask questions later – he makes sure he understands and addresses the question, rather than focus on what the question says about who is asking.

Obama, you see, isn’t selling a message – he’s communicating.  There’s a big difference between the two – when you’re selling a message, you react to anything you feel challenges it and embrace anything you feel is for it.  We can all relate to this – we’ve all had to back down from positions we’ve taken in high emotion.  It’s not easy; our pride, our sense of self, is at stake. 

Communication, on the other hand, isn’t about selling a message; it’s about creating mutual understanding and finding common solutions.  It’s a tough process, but ultimately, it’s often the only way forward in a social setting.  Even Toews and the Tories are now expressing willingness to budge from their previous “with us or against us” stance.

Politics isn’t about communicating – it’s about selling a message.  Political science is all about developing tools to get your message across at the expense of your opponents.  Policy, on the other hand, is about finding common solutions to social challenges.  The two spheres have different objectives, yet are joined at the hip.

Toews isn’t the only one with a communication problem to resolve.  At least, that’s my perspective.

What do you think?

UPDATE DEC 1 2014:

 

When it comes to launching attacks on enemies, Ezra’s mind and words inhabit a demagogic verbal netherworld in which facts don’t matter in the way they are supposed to matter for ordinary journalists.

 

But Levant believes what he says because it feels right to him.  Interesting, is all.