let us cultivate our laundry

[eirias]

Something I really despise about modern American political culture: It's time-consuming. It's no longer enough to hold a political opinion and vote or spend money accordingly: now one must also attempt to hold it loudly, where congresspeople and corporations can hear. The chief problem with this is that it's difficult to be heard when everyone else is also yelling. It's an arms race of loud opinions and letter campaigns. Meanwhile, the laundry piles up.

Unfortunately, I am a stakeholder in this overhyped culture war, and so as appealing as sitting it out all Candide-style might be, I feel guilty and nervous if I do that, because next thing you know it'll be no birth control and no evolution in schools and church for everyone and "First they came for the Communists" and blah blah blah.

Really, it's about a sense of perspective, i.e., not having one. How creeped out should I be by the Dominionists? by prisoner abuse in Iraq? by the demise of the filibuster? by North Korea and their nukes? by fuckin' Dan LeMahieu and his crusade against university contraception? Well, I don't know, and guess what? I bet you don't, either. Y'all have a mean age somewhere near 30; and while a small handful have been more careful observers of politics than I and for longer, that's still not enough time to get a feel for, say, how to tell signs of a warning democratic apocalypse from signs that the leadership is too big for its britches and is going to get its ass whupped sometime within the next ten years. You don't get a lot of datapoints on "fascist takeovers of Western countries" these days. As for "fascist takeovers in Western countries in the Information Age and [fill in some other details of modern life I can't think of that might be salient factors in how the political landscape plays out]," yeah, I'm not seeing any datapoints there.

Everyone I know is pissed off and scared these days, when it comes to politics. Don't get me wrong; I'm feeling it too, believe me. But every so often I wonder, isn't this just a huge waste of time, in the end? Don't we have problems to solve and art to create and new countries to visit and music to listen to and things to learn? Isn't that going to give more satisfaction in the end than a whole bunch of inchoate yelling at people who only give a shit if you're giving them money, which you might not have anyway, having already given it away to the eleventh lobby group to come canvassing this week?

Comments

[kirin]

Either that (a good reason for politics), or a good reason to break open the textbook industry. Like, say, move to electronic models where volume no longer matters. (Yes, that requires a lot of infrastructure, but hey, politicians seem to like to throw money at "technology in schools" initiatives...

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

The only issue there is that, at least at my school, I don't get to assume that every student has a computer at home. I can assume they can get to one given time (e.g. at the library), but for something like homework or regular studying, an electronic textbook is still a bit impractical.

[kirin]

Yeah; you'd either be reduced to buttloads of printouts (certainly not ideal) or you'd need school-issued notebook computers of some variety, which is still a bit expensive at this point on the techcurve, and would also require some seriously uber-ruggedized machines, depending on the grade level.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I cannot imagine what you mean by "an electronic model where volume no longer matters".

Writing a textbook is a spectacular undertaking (my father-in-law has written several; I've heard about this). It consumes your life for several years. And that's just the author -- it then consumes the lives of editors, of people responsible for getting photo permissions, reviewers...And these people have to be compensated. (And the photo permissions can be extremely expensive.) In short, it fundamentally takes a tremendous amount of time and money to produce a textbook, and moving it to an electronic model does not solve any of these problems.

[kirin]

You're right, of course, in that I'm vastly oversimplifying. It removes only publishing hurdles. One might hope, though, that it might give someone enough flexibility to publish something not necessarily tailored to CA, TX, or FL. I might be dreaming though.

Honestly, it's not inconceivable that you could amalgamate something of decent quality in an open-source manner. I'm sure it would then be a case of "good luck getting it approved by anybody", though.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I doubt it really works. I don't think that the major costs are in paper and distribution. The whole point of CA, TX, and FL is that you can't afford *not* to capture those markets; I doubt that going electronic reduces costs enough to change that. Even if it did...you're still going to want to capture those markets, because you can make more money from getting them than from not getting them.

Even at the college level, where my father-in-law's textbooks are chiefly used and where textbook adoption is driven at the university, not the state, level, people work hard and consider it a coup to be adopted at big schools with thousands of bio students. I gather the margins in this market are really quite small.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Would it work to write the textbook to one set of specs and then edit it to the specs of the other? Like leave out the chapter on evolution for the anti-evolution states? Just curious... I don't know if anyone would bother but I think it's worth asking, because that strikes me as the only real advantage of electronic stuff anyway - easier editing.