Real Talk

Yglesias on why the US will never risk experimenting with democracy. Oops, I meant China, why China won't risk democracy.

The Drug War Requires a Police State

Interesting thought experiment by Kevin Carson considering how the War on Drugs would fare in a society in which the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution were respected according to their plain meaning and spirit. "Not well" is the short version.

Carson concludes:

If you want the Drug War, you must sacrifice the Bill of Rights and the due process rights of the accused, and submit to a police state in which you have no rights or protections whatsoever.

I would tend to put this the other way round, that the Drug War (like its antecedents, including Prohibition) exists because of its impact on due process rights: if drugs didn't exist they'd need to be invented, because the same rights that are essential to democracy are obstacles to capitalism.

"Privatized" Utilities

Love it: phone companies still cater to the needs of shareholders rather than those of the public, but when it comes to their communications with the government, well that's a state secret or something. State capitalism's privatization of public services once again gives ordinary citizens the worst of both worlds.

I also love love love the argument that any sort of conversation should remain private in the context of defending the telecoms from charges of eavesdropping on their customers.

Google Fails Me!

My street cleaning program appears to be working just fine, except for the fact that for some reason Google never sent me either of my SMS reminders this morning. I looked at the calendar and they're set up and everything; I just never got the message. And it worked perfectly on Monday!

It cost me a $115 ticket for double parking, though thankfully my neighbor alerted me before they could tow my car.

Clearly, I'll need a text-messaging system more robust than reminders in Google calendars. AppEngine will let me set up cron jobs (nullus), which I should then be able to use to trigger a message via Zeep.

Aaaaand we're done here

Aforementioned C4SS blogger Thomas Knapp's credulity towards the "Tea Party movement" is the final straw.

"Little indication" it was an astroturf job? That's the whole point of the astroturfery, no? That it looks like the roots of real grass? Fortunately we don't have to rely on "indications," as the involvement of right-wing and business interests has been well documented.

Not likely to take on an "explicitly anarchist ideology"? I think you might be on to something there...the transformation of authoritarian right-wing populism into anarchism would be odd indeed.

So I'm done with them. It really gets me, as carrying water for proto-fascists who don't want to pay for public schools is exactly the kind of short-sighted tactical blunder for which Kevin Carson has so frequently excoriated libertarians. I had high hopes for C4SS but at this point they might as well be Reason.

Who Is This Fellow?

I subscribed to the Center for a Stateless Society feed when they picked up Kevin Carson...I had already wished he'd post more to his personal blog, and didn't want to miss anything. But now they seem to have a new blogger, Thomas Knapp, whose ideology seems much more in line with the vulgar libertarianism Carson has dedicated so much effort railing against.

For example, take this recent litany of standard libertarian canards...Mussolini never made the trains run on time, public schools suck, USPS sucks, &c. It gets my dander up, though I'll refrain from offering a classic point-by-point rebuttal; if I wanted to spend my time rebutting libertarian cant then there are any number of intertubes I could read, but I don't so I don't.

In any case, Kevin Carson seems to be pretty consistent in linking to his C4SS posts from his personal blog, so maybe I'll just stay subscribed to that.

President Obama: Failure

The Dow Jones Industrial average was down 4% today. Nice job, Obama! We're screwed. Bring back that last guy!

Fish!

The Dallas on military-themed kids' toys. His addendum links to a story about Chinese workers rioting at a Nerf factory. You could do a pretty bleak satirical piece about a toy plant manager mystified by how surrounding employees with tens of thousands of toy weapons failed to produce a light-hearted work environment. Close with an allusion to similar problems at a Malaysian bean bag chair fabricator and boom, I just wrote an Onion story from 1999.

Finally

Obama's new Office of Urban Policy is long overdue. Finally an administration that will meet the problem of teenagers wearing their pants too low head-on.

I Do Not Know What Color My President Is Because I Do Not See Presidents That Way

Jesse wastes his time (as he acknowledges) attempting to explain a rap song to the execrable Michelle Malkin.

Personally, I want to know how this "Young Jersey" fellow can harbor such horribly racist sentiments in favor of blue lambos. Many fine patriotic lambos that have given their rims for our American ideals happened to have been yellow.

Oh Awesome

Sadly, No! finds some of the best wingnut hyperventilating I've seen. Especially loved this bit from Misha:

And here is the good news: At the top of that hierarchy, they have a neophyte empty suit now. A clown who...has absolutely zero experience in how to run a country. Or a hot dog stand, for that matter...He’ll fuck up so bad every day that it’ll almost be too easy to skewer his ignorant ass. That dumbass fuckhead is in so far over his head that it’s not even funny.

Trust me, not nearly as fun as it sounds.

Nicely Done

I've been following the story of Phyllis Schlafly getting an honorary degree from Washington U. Tasteful protest, executed well, it sounds like. Good for them.

Tom Friedman on the Rational Lazy Worker

Lindsay at Majikthise has a good post objecting to Tom Friedman's placing the blame for Americans' economic woes on their own moral lassitude. I'm skeptical in general of this kind of disdain for the general populace. But it is particularly rich that Friedman's delusional neoliberal economic ideology relies in no small part on the assumption that people behave rationally in making economic decisions in their lives. Rational but lacking in moral fiber, I guess.e

AstroTurking

Last week DU told me about Amazon's "mechanical Turk" program, which is basically a framework that allows the hiring of human labor to accomplish very small tasks that are difficult for computers.

The implications are pretty awesome (in the sense of inspiring awe) and extremely creepy, and as DU pointed out its primary application right now is probably using Indian labor to game search engines and other similar sketchiness. Which is nothing new, of course; Amazon is just democratizing something you'd previously have had to contract out for.

In any case, it made me think that a good use for this would be political astroturfing. At one point in 2005 I tried to turn myself into a sort of volunteer Democratic operative on one web community. I created a pseudonymous account, and every day I would look at the DNC's latest press release and then go post a diary echoing the DNC's claims in my own words.

The intent was to help counter the constant drum of GOP talking points propagated by the Right-Wing Noise Machine. This proved essentially impossible, simply because the whole way the Might Wurlitzer works is through repetition: by the time you hear someone repeat some anti-Kerry slur reported by Wolf Blitzer as what "some leading Democrats are saying," you've already heard it from half a dozen Rush listeners, Leno viewers, workplace know-nothings and your great uncle's email list. As Digby reminds me, it's the constant reinforcement of these memes that makes them "stick."

In contrast, when I loaded up democrats.org each day, my first reaction would be "they're talking about what?" Not that their lines of attack were bad, but they just weren't being repeated anywhere: I'd listen to Air America and read a bunch of liberal blogs, and nobody would be focusing on, e.g., deforestation, or whatever the DNC was on about that day. I felt like my efforts were for naught because nothing I said had any resonance.

Anyway, all of this is a long preamble to the idea that something like the mechanical Turk program could be used for this kind of thing really easily. Like, each day have a specific idea or key phrase (say, that John McCain has a history of financial corruption, or just the word "McSame") show up posted by ten different people on each of the ten most popular political blogs or forums. At a dollar per comment that's only $100 a day. And no single comment needs to be persuasive or even really coherent, because the point is to just get it out there and resonating.

Sync these messages up to what campaign surrogates are saying in the media and I think this approach could be really effective. But even when instigated by a single lone actor it would accomplish much more than my solitary shilling ever could.

3-2-1 Compact

I never fucked around with Compact Fluorescent light "bulbs" before. My thinking was that as a single non-homeowner, my lifestyle doesn't really justify buying anything that's going to last five years. But I have cats, so I guess that reasoning doesn't really hold up. And then a couple recent events caused me to take the plunge and pick up a couple.

First, Rob Cockerham posted quantifying the efficiency gains of CF over incandescent, which I found pretty persuasive. A couple days later he posted again with some negative feedback he'd received in response to his CFL essay. These responses set off my right-wing bullshit detector (my detector of right-wing bullshit, that is) right away. They all consisted of lists of the same "gotcha" objections (e.g., you can't use a CFL in your oven) without ever challenging the central assertion (that CFLs are far, far more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs).

It's exactly the style of argument used to dispute the veracity of global climate change, evolution, or the Holocaust: the point isn't to actually win the debate, but rather to make it appear to the casual observer that, first, there is a debate to be had; and second, since it seems to involve all these highly technical points regarding flagella or mercury disposal or whatnot, the layman had best just leave the whole thing alone and not pass judgment one way or the other. "Opinions Differ on Shape of Earth," as the joke goes.

Anyway, down towards the end of the response page someone gives the game away by linking to a WorldNetDaily article (duly sadlynotified later that day). So while I haven't talked to anyone who can figure out what's motivating right-wingers to go after CFLs aside from sheer misanthropic orneriness, it seems pretty clear that I'm now obligated to use CF on principle.

Oh and then when I was helping Andrew move he revealed that he had a couple in his apartment. I had been worried about the light quality of CFLs, but as an artist in the medium of light, his endorsement carries a lot of weight. So I picked up a couple and put them in both my bathrooms.

I'm pretty happy with them so far. They seemed dimmer than the 75W bulbs they replaced at first, but then when I gave them time to warm up they looked okay. Here's my downstairs bathroom, pictures taken just after flipping the lightswitch, and then every 10 seconds after:



So it's really yellow at first but pretty white by the time you're done brushing your teeth or peeing, and you can put on your makeup or artificial tan without concern.

Also the incandescents I had been using were those full spectrum or "daylight" ones, so that's part of the difference. They also have CFLs like that, but they were like twice as expensive, so I went with the regular ones.

Next up will be my bedroom, where I have three incandescents (plus two track lights that I think are halogens) right now. I have one 3-way lamp and one with a dimmer, but they have fancy CFLs on the market for both of those situations. And then my other floor lamp's socket is recessed so far that I couldn't get the ones I got to screw in, so I'll have to see if I can find one that's shaped differently.

The future is now, in any case.