Entries from September 2009 ↓

Kate Harding’s piece in Salon.com pulls no punches, and is not something a minor should read, but she is absolutely right on. I couldn’t agree more. From her conclusion:

Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him, pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is absolutely twisted.

In an effort to illustrate my conflicted feelings about Kim Stanley Robinson’s extremely preachy style of Sci Fi writing, I present a hypothetical conversation between him and his research assistant:

KSR: I’m working on a novel about the rational obviousness of science, its role in all of human progress, and the stupidity of Judeo-Christian belief systems.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: I’ll need you to get me some texts to study: physics, astronomy, planetology, geology, climatology, chemistry, quantum theory, biology, systems theory, and so forth.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir. What about the social sciences?
KSR: Social scientists are just people who didn’t have the SAT scores to get into the hard sciences. Their so-called “theories” are unscientific mumbo-jumbo with no demonstrable usefulness or effectiveness. Human behavior is so complex it can’t even be studied scientifically.
ASSISTANT: Actually, sir, there are quite a few well-validated predictive models of various aspects of human behavior, and empirical research from the social sciences has been responsible for huge improvements in the human condition. Besides, human behavior is certainly no more complex than, say, an ecosystem or a planetary climate. Why, if we simply look through the list of Nobel Prize winners from the last half-century—
KSR: I said it’s mumbo-jumbo and too complex to study.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: And Buddhism is awesome.

So now there’s some dirt on ACORN, and what dirt it is! It’s like an episode of Law & Order; the kind where you shake your head at the TV and say, “This wouldn’t happen in real life.” ACORN leaders (and Nancy Pelosi, FWIW) claim the nastiness was only a few people in low positions, and that the organization itself would never condone such slimy tactics. Exactly like the response of the military and Presidency in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle, actually.

The ever-vigilant GOP has demanded (and the Democrats are on the bandwagon almost as fast) that ACORN be punished. One of our great American traditions is to punish organizations by taking away their federal moneys. And I think that works. For organizations, money is like food and water; removing it gets them where it hurts. Awesomely, however, some overzealous Republicans, who apparently didn’t realize they were not supposed to upset the status quo, drafted a bill that would withhold funds from ALL federally-funded organizations with fraud complaints against them.

As anyone who pays attention might have predicted, this broad criterion turned up a nearly comprehensive list of military industrial contractors (i.e., Haliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, and so on). Some of them have literally dozens of fraud charges against them There’s an unofficial list here, created at the behest of a freshman Congressman from Florida named Grayson.

Naturally, I don’t believe any of those massive, multibillion-dollar corporations will have any of their money cut, even if their fraud amounts to thousands of times more than ACORN’s. The Republicans will howl, and the Democrats will get all conciliatory, and everyone will work out a deal whereby the corrupt community organizers are cut off from the Federal teat, while the corrupt weapons manufacturers will get a maternal nip on the nose and then be ushered back to the privileged sucking spots. The military-industrial complex is implicated in the careers of quite a number of our congresspersons on both sides of the aisle, and (in a not-unrelated note) we Americans, by and large, are more tolerant of organizations that build bombers than of those that build communities, all frauds being equal.

Still, even if the consequences of this little drama are painfully predictable, stupid human tricks like this give me unwholesome giggles of political amusement. It’s nothing more sophisticated, really, than the thrill of watching a 5-year-old get pwned on the playground when he realizes that for every finger pointing at the other kid, three more are pointing back in his own face.

People are sometimes stupid about communism. Maybe the word serves as such a useful blunt instrument of verbal assault (with a nail in it) that they forget communism has a reality outside their witty repartée, and is therefore subject to logical thought. I am not a fan of communism, and I think it is/was a Very Bad Idea, but can we get this one thing straight, please? Pay close attention:

Sharing is not bad.

No, seriously. Communism had lots of problems: the belief that totalitarianism would eventually lead to its polar opposite, the huge means-ends problems, the bizarre insistence that giving a small number of people a huge amount of unrestricted power would lead them to voluntarily go back to farming potatoes, the massive imperialist expansion…

But the sharing was the good part. Sure, forced sharing is a different issue; I understand that; but even there, it’s the forcing, not the sharing, that makes it problematic. Remember kindergarten? Sharing GOOD. Selfishness BAD. The fact that sharing was a key principle cited by a crashed-and-burned misguided utopian movement doesn’t make sharing itself bad.

…blurting out inappropriate things in front of the neighbors.

(awesome)

This “Obama is going to indoctrinate my kids” flap has provided marvelous political theater, especially given that it recapitulates the issues surrounding a similar speech given by GHW Bush in 1991. I think there are some real issues raised, by it, though not of the catastrophic caliber suggested by the Rightest of the Right. I am still researching the issue of the “altered” portion of Obama’s speech (quotes used because I still haven’t found credible evidence that he changed it significantly after the furor started; but I’m still looking).

On some of the conservative blogs and news sites I visited in trying to figure out this controversy and its highly tenuous connections with Oprah’s “Pledge” video, I found some reasonable comments. However, I also found comments that strayed from Reasonable, ran through Questionable’s back yard, and hopped the fence right into Idiotic. Since those are much more fun than intelligent comments, here are some of them (from this blog post, about the “pledge” video):

“… Did you see the two Cubans in the Video-Cameron and Eva? Well screw them! I pledge to keep using plastic at the grocery story and driving an SUV!”

“I pledge to add a few more minutes to my really HOT showers.

“I’m with you. Today I tossed a plastic bottle in my trash in honor of the disgust I felt for this hair raising filth.”

“I pledge to throw perfectly good paper right into the trash.”

“I pledge to walk past the recycling bin at the gym and put my water bottle into the trashcan while horrified people look at me. And I will smile.”

Wow! How awesome is that!? “I disagree with the President, so I’m going to do something generally antisocial, like make my country a little big uglier, a little bit trashier, and a little bit less energy efficient.”  Why stop there? Express your displeasure with others’ ideas through this interesting tactic in other domains, too!

“Did you see the President trying to prop up the American auto industry? Well screw them! I pledge to never buy another American car or automotive accessory!”

“The President thinks he can indoctrinate my kids to do better in school, does he? Then I pledge to have a heart-to-heard talk with each of my kids, on the topic of how stupid school is, and how awesome it is to drop out. Also, I think I’ll keep them home one day a week, playing video games.”

“Obama is still fighting terrorists? Well, I pledge to stop my monthly donations to the United Way and instead give my hard-earned charitable cash to whatever shell organization will launder it and give it to Al Qaeda, while horrified people in the human resources office look at me. And I will smile.”

All joking aside, the most painful comment on that site was the following, perhaps so poignant because I believe the commenter really could not imagine any other point of view:

EXCUSE ME! For 8 years, and still today, our troops (under POTUS GWB) FREED over 50 MILLION people in two wars. Not only that, but we lost many of those troops being patient for those freed people to understand and trust their newfound liberty.

Here’s the situation: The President is going to give an address to the nation’s schoolchildren. Initial reports say he will emphasize the importance of taking their education seriously, staying in school, etc. He’s a controversial President. There is an outcry from the other side of the political continuum. There are fears he will push his political platform through the nation’s children. It sounds like Nazism, or Communism, or some kind of scary -ism.

This happened in 1991. The President was George H.W. Bush. His Department of Education encouraged teachers to broadcast the speech and use it as a teaching opportunity. Bush encouraged students to write him letters, with suggestions on how he could better achieve his goals. The Democrats were upset. The party leader called Bush’s address a “paid political advertisement.” Bush’s supporters said that was ridiculous.

So now we come to the current hullaballoo, suspiciously similar to the above, except the players have all flipped sides. Now the Conservatives are accusing the President of indoctrinating the kids. Some school districts won’t broadcast the speech. Many parents will keep their kids home, rather than risk them hearing it.

Somehow (I am seriously not sure how), this has become confused with the paranoia about “pledging allegiance to Obama.” Here’s my synopsis of both issues, after some internetz researchz: Continue reading →

I was recently referred to a blog post so I could understand better why some parents are concerned about allowing their children to hear the upcoming education speech. I also read about a dozen others, trying to get a handle on all the facts (as much as one can do so via the interwebs).

A long time ago, in a galaxy called High School, a teacher taught me that people who use underhanded rhetorical techniques quite likely got nothin’ else. Of course, it’s possible to use nasty debate tricks and have a good point, but I think the presence of the former does reduce the probability of the latter, overall. There are definitely liberal outlets (*cough*HuffPo*cough*) that use these ridiculous tactics on a regular basis, but I think I find them even more from the Right. Perhaps I should do a structured study to test whether this is just a perception issue.

Anyway, here’s most of the dumb tricks from that blog post.

Why Parents Don’t Trust Educator-In-Chief
By MICHELLE MALKIN | Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 4:30 PM PT

the sneering defenders of Barack Obama – can’t fathom – the cult of Obama – activist language – Obama’s bureaucrats – whitewash – the taint of left-wing radicalism – the Educator-in-Chief and his “comrades.”

The bulk of the post is actually about William Ayers, and is composed of quotations establishing his leftist views. Standard.

All the hip kids these days are debating the whole healthcare crisis thing. And I agree it is a crisis. Yes, we’re living longer than ever before — so one might argue that we have no crisis, because we should just be happy with the way things are — but I would argue that the crisis is not really physical; it’s moral.

As usual in the American political world, the two sides are throwing accusations at each other, packed with unspoken and inflammatory assumptions. Like-a so:

GUY 1: Opposing the President’s healthcare reform clearly indicates that you think it’s okay for people to die just because they’re poor and because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy.
GUY 2: Supporting the President’s healthcare reform clearly indicates that you think the Federal government should take away taxpayers’ freedom to keep their own property and make their own decisions.
GUY 1: You obviously believe that only spoiled rich people have the right to a healthy, pain-free life!
GUY 2: Well, you obviously believe that victims and lazy people should be able to demand honest, hard-working people’s money at the point of the IRS’s gun!
GUY 1: You, my friend, are apparently a Fascist.
GUY 2: And you, sir, are a Communist.

The problem as I see it, as in many political issues, lies ultimately in our oversimplification of the issues. Well, some of us. Others don’t do this. But pretty much anyone on TV is leading the oversimplification army over the cliffs of doom every freaking day. Continue reading →

I basically like Flickr, and use it. However, they’re going the way of other large “communities” that are actually just private corporations with a veneer of community, by practicing aggressive in-house censorship. The story of the above photoshopped image of President Obama, the suspicious timing of its being pulled from Flickr (along with derivative works), and the apparently duplicitous explanation Flickr gave for this can’t be discussed conveniently by Flickr users, because Flickr killed all related discussion threads, after pulling the images. This story is happening more frequently online, mirroring similar historical trends: “Hey, everyone! Join our happy open community! But we’ll kick your butt out if you question us or our arbitrary actions.” If Flickr is a community, perhaps it is located in circa 1970 Czechoslovakia.

The rub is that Flickr isn’t a community; it’s a private company, and can do whatever the heck it wants (within some basic guidelines) with the data on its servers. Users don’t really have any rights, a fact that more than one previously-happy customer has discovered the hard way.

I think carrying on our interactions in private online communities amounts to a collective decision to give a little of our freedom to corporations. Once users are invested in such places, the companies have great power to stifle dissent when they shut down discussion. Since few people in the conversation will be able to contact each other outside the site, it becomes difficult or impossible to maintain coherence or momentum once that happens. It’s kind of like a government raiding the secret meeting place of a resistance movement, only the resistance people are all wearing ski masks and don’t know each other’s real names. Once the meeting place is off-limits and the members have been scattered, they will have a hard time finding each other again.

Users can just go elsewhere (and they should), but there are other possibilities, too. Here’s one:

Non-corporate (nonprofit, public, or grassroots) discussion sites, completely separate from the large “communities” but dedicated solely to discussion of issues relevant to them. Maybe these already exist; if so, they need to be heavily advertised (probably by word of mouth), and they need to be as monolithic as the “community” they are set up to discuss. Everyone knows how to get to Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube online; everyone also needs to know exactly which site to visit if you want to discuss Flickr yanking your photos and canceling your account with a flimsy rationale, or Facebook banning you for having too many friends, or YouTube killing your anti-Scientology videos.

In other words, there needs to be a way to keep the discussion going if the “community” tries to kill it: DiscussFlickr.com, or YouTubeThreads.org, or YahooIssues.net. I would personally prefer that we simply gravitate, as consumers, toward sites that are true communities — sites owned by communities of people, rather than by a CEO and some shareholders — but that’s probably not going to happen, because the true communities would not have as many pretty colors, bells & whistles, or catchy advertisements. We consumers are ridiculously weak in the face of even mild temptation. Therefore, the next best thing might be a “safety net” for each commercial site, a place to keep conversations alive when the private sites shut them down.

Please express your gratitude in the form of checks and cash sent to my usual address.