Thursday, May 03, 2007
Weird foreign customs
A screen-cap from C-Span's coverage of the debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Valvoline Royal, candidates for the presidency of France. This was an actual discussion between two people who actually knew what they were discussing. The candidates faced each other and talked to each other, paying little attention to the moderators in back. The moderators were there to insure a relatively equal talking time (I think 15 minutes) for each major question, and presumably to control for irrelevance.
Each candidate had a well-formed and consistent set of ideas; both were able to run a question through the prism of their own ideas to form a set of consequences; both were listening and appropriately responding to the other candidate.
None of this should be surprising; a major country should expect its leaders to have ideas, and should expect those leaders to use their specialized ideas to form solutions, on the fly if necessary. In the runup to an election, we should be able to examine the worthiness of those solutions and the discussion and learning abilities of the candidates. We should be able to see how they work with or against each other, since a parliamentary government should be fueled by the tension between contrary sets of ideas.
All of these concepts are totally foreign to American politics, at least since 1968. We now expect each candidate to be a well-organized audio CD of pre-planned stock phrases; we don't expect the stock phrases to be true responses to the questions, and we certainly don't expect any solutions to be mentioned. The only purpose of running several CD players in parallel (which we call a "debate" for some reason) is to watch for glitches. If one player is slow on the Play button, or chooses a track that is obviously meant for a different question, or worst of all, actually speaks to another CD player!!!!! ... we can say Gotcha!
= = = = =
* Yes, I know her name is Segolene, but I like the sound of Valvoline Royal.
¶ 8:45 AM
A screen-cap from C-Span's coverage of the debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Valvoline Royal, candidates for the presidency of France. This was an actual discussion between two people who actually knew what they were discussing. The candidates faced each other and talked to each other, paying little attention to the moderators in back. The moderators were there to insure a relatively equal talking time (I think 15 minutes) for each major question, and presumably to control for irrelevance.
Each candidate had a well-formed and consistent set of ideas; both were able to run a question through the prism of their own ideas to form a set of consequences; both were listening and appropriately responding to the other candidate.
None of this should be surprising; a major country should expect its leaders to have ideas, and should expect those leaders to use their specialized ideas to form solutions, on the fly if necessary. In the runup to an election, we should be able to examine the worthiness of those solutions and the discussion and learning abilities of the candidates. We should be able to see how they work with or against each other, since a parliamentary government should be fueled by the tension between contrary sets of ideas.
All of these concepts are totally foreign to American politics, at least since 1968. We now expect each candidate to be a well-organized audio CD of pre-planned stock phrases; we don't expect the stock phrases to be true responses to the questions, and we certainly don't expect any solutions to be mentioned. The only purpose of running several CD players in parallel (which we call a "debate" for some reason) is to watch for glitches. If one player is slow on the Play button, or chooses a track that is obviously meant for a different question, or worst of all, actually speaks to another CD player!!!!! ... we can say Gotcha!
= = = = =
* Yes, I know her name is Segolene, but I like the sound of Valvoline Royal.
¶ 8:45 AM
