Feb 12
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/12/nick-cohen-twitter-facebook-screcy?CMP=twt_gu
"Now, potentially anyone with access to the web can find embarrassing photos, evidence of minor crimes and foolish Facebook updates or tweets. The gawky girl is no longer bullied only by her vile classmates but vile strangers too. Iranian revolutionaries learn that the apparently liberating web allows the secret police to monitor them and discover their contacts. An employee such as Adrian Smith, a Christian working for the Trafford Housing Trust, finds that opposition to gay marriage on his Facebook page allows his employers to lop £14,000 from his salary. They do not try to argue with him or warn him that he must not let his prejudices affect his work. He has uttered "controversial" opinions his colleagues do not like and that is enough to damn him.
The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer says we should welcome the exponential increase in the possibilities for surveillance. If others know more about us, we know more about them. We will move to a free and open society. We will be less ashamed of our secrets and less censorious of our neighbours. Disclosure will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
Although many want to share details their ancestors would have regarded as private, Singer does not understand that western democracies remain hugely hierarchical. The managers of private and public bureaucracies justify their elevated status and salaries not only by attempting to run efficient organisations (a task that is often beyond the poor dears) but by monitoring and intimidating those beneath them. The web gives them unprecedented power to police information that once would have been beyond their reach."
Jan 24
http://www.scotsman.com/news/cartoon/peter_jones_england_learning_to_fly_its_own_flag_1_2073701
Not surprisingly, when you dig down through the IPPR report, you find that around four-fifths of English voters reckon that some parts of England are looked after better than others, with London and the south-east being seen as the main beneficiaries. And when you consider what might be the political answer that would deal with that problem, it is not at all clear why it would be an English parliament or even voting on English-only matters at Westminster being confined to English MPs
I think hidden in there is an assumption that an English Parliament would have to be based in London. That there's quite strong arguments against putting it there is why the idea is radical in terms of ideas of England as well the ideas of the UK.
Full report here:http://ippr.org/publications/55/8542/the-dog-that-finally-barked-england-as-an-emerging-political-community.
Jan 19
http://coreyrobin.com/2012/01/19/from-the-slaveholders-to-rick-perry-galileo-is-the-key/
Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, famously invoked Galileo in defense of the slaveholders’ conviction that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The comparison between Galileo and the slaveholder was as far-fetched as Perry’s, but like Perry, Stephens defended it on the ground that his position was a fugitive knowledge, a heresy that would one day become orthodoxy. “This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”
Other slaveholders (Josiah Nott, John C. Calhoun) made the same comparison; Calhoun also invoked Francis Bacon, Stephens also invoked William Harvey. Their point was that like those great heresies of early modern science, the southern science of race would one day triumph and be recognized the world over. It’s the way the white southerner has always negotiated his contradictory self-understanding of being both victim and victimizer. Again, Stephens:
As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?”
And so, I assume, says Rick Perry to himself and his followers about their equally dubious science of climate non-change.
Jan 4
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-users/
To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.
...
Paywalls held out the possibility, however illusory, that if all readers could be treated as customers, the organization wouldn’t have to pay much attention to them, except in aggregate. Threshold charges blow that up; a single fee-paying user will generate hundreds of times the revenue of the median, ad-viewing reader. This subjects the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? Here are some things that won’t: More ads. More gossip. More syndicated copy. This is new territory for mainstream papers, who have always had head count rather than engagement as their principal business metric.
Dec 29
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/15/facebook-timeline-social-media-giant
While I'm sure that privacy concerns will again be raised (it's good people care about their privacy), the new timeline doesn't make any more of your content available, it just makes it easier to access.
This is a frequent comment from facebook justifying changes, but privacy through obscurity is a form of privacy in itself.
Dec 28
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/imposing-political-correctness.html
I guess I just don't see why that is considered to be libertarian. Just because you break up state power into fifty entities instead of one, it doesn't make their infringements on liberty ok, does it? On a philosophical and ideological level, libertarians should be clear that infringements of people's rights should never be subject to the whims of the state --- whether it's Hawaii or the United States of America. So why doesn't Ron Paul say this? There's no reason that his quixotic career couldn't also entail a drive to change the constitution, or ensure that all 50 states overturn drug prohibition. He has nothing to lose by stating the libertarian principles and saying that basic individual rights are inalienable.
But he doesn't. He defends states' rights to infringe on individual liberty as being under the Constitution but what he's really defending are the Articles of Confederation. This isn't libertarianism. It's "tentherism" disguised as libertarianism.
Dec 28
http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/12/28/oddly-passive-in-the-world-of-drone-killing
But I am interested in the implication Greg Miller leaves as a result. Obama is passive, and so his senior aides control the program (perhaps one of the aides denying that Obama is passive?), and they, in turn, basically support the “the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.”
Here’s what that senior aide had to say to try to deny that we’re letting a fondness for drones drive our counterterrorism policy.
“People think we start with the drone and go from there, but that’s not it at all,” said a senior administration official involved with the program. “We’re not constructing a campaign around the drone. We’re not seeking to create some worldwide basing network so we have drone capabilities in every corner of the globe.”
It seems there’s a third option, an alternative to “we’re building so many drone bases because we like drones” and “we have so many drones because there are so many possible targets for them.”
That third option is that JSOC and CIA have certain “institutional agendas” that center on wielding the power of drones anywhere in the world to implement a policy they’ve dreamt up rather than their civilian Commander-in-Chief. There’s a hint, at least, that drones not only take the human out of the cockpit, but also take the Commander-in-Chief out of the cockpit as wel
Dec 28
http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-16-brutal-logic-and-climate-communications
There's this pretense among Very Serious People that the vast and wise middle "tunes out" the intense on both ends -- that the extremes cancel each other out to no effect. That's about half true, but it doesn't mean what VSPs think it means.
VSPs tend to think the middle is full of commonsense folk looking for calm, measured, and sensible messages. But there's no evidence for that at all. The great mass of Americans believe all sorts of crazy, wrongheaded, and mutually contradictory sh*t. What the average person wants is simply to take the path of least cognitive resistance, to believe what's socially acceptable to believe, to believe what People Like Us believe. In a world filled with more information than any human being can absorb, it's a sensible enough heuristic: believe with the herd. (I don't mean that pejoratively; the vast bulk of my beliefs, and yours, are developed this way. There's no other way to do it.)
The reason climate is such an uncomfortable topic for so many Americans is that it's unresolved. There are these two opposing camps battling it out and it's not yet clear what Normal People are supposed to think. That, not the "extremity" of any particular view, best explains why public opinion is shallow and fickle on the subject.
So it very much matters who wins that battle of intensity. That is how the Overton Window is shifted, how views from outside the mainstream come to be inside. The right gets this. Forty years ago, supply-side economics and opposition to basic social safety net protections were crank, extremist views held by a small minority of hardcore conservatives -- the folks who rallied behind Goldwater in 1964 and lost. But as historian Rick Perlstein recounts in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, they didn't stop. They kept organizing and pushing, organizing and pushing. Then came Nixon, Reagan, GW Bush, Sarah Palin. Now extremist conservative views are part of the mainstream fabric.
What if they'd given up after 1964? What if they'd looked at surveys, concluded the American middle didn't favor their views, and spent the next decades trying to tone down and soften those views?
