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| Thursday, June 5, 2003 |
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Re-uptime 
USA Today, yesterday and last year
| | Just looked up FTC "record industry" overcharged CDs and found this USA Today piece from September of last year. That means USA Today keeps its archives open and welcomes search engine crawlers. We need more papers to do the same. |
Dyslabelization
| | I normally don't like reading a techies take on politics or even a politicos take on the tech world. However, I thought that Doc Searls' post was a pretty good lefty analysis about the fallout from Iraq. |
| | Joy describes herself as One tech obsessed G33k girl with black rimmed glasses opining about technology, current events and herself. And she's got a fine blog, too. |
| | But I'm wondering about all the labeling here. Is there anything more unavoidable yet misleading than a label like "Techie" and "Lefty?" |
| | I have friends who are engineers, programmers and other varieties of true technologists who believe I barely deserve the label. Writing about technology hardly qualifies one as a technologist, they'd say (if they were so impolite, which some of them are). Hey. Wanna prove your chops? Design a product. Write some code. |
| | As for politics, I'll cop to being a lefty of the sort that George Lakoff describes here, since the conceptual metaphors that induce my politics are primarily derived from the nurturant family model that Lakoff says we'll find deep (and largely unacknowledged) within liberalism. And perhaps it's because Dubya's politics and rhetoric (e.g. "homeland" security) come so clearly from the strict father model that underlies political conservatism (or so Lakoff says) that I find the dude so insufferable. |
| | But I'll also say that there are things about Bush's no-nonsense strict-fatherism that I find refreshing after eight years of nigh-unquotable nurturant blah-speak from the country's Philanderer in Chief. Bush may fall over his tongue at times, but it is a large convenience have a president whose mentality and politics are unambiguous. Unfortunately, he became unambiguous after we (or Florida and the Supreme Court, actually) elected him. I doubt any freshly elected president has made a faster move from the middle to the right. |
| | By the way, I suspect that the simple reason we now appear to verge on something like peace between Israel and the nascent Palestine is that Bush (a) isn't a complicated guy; (b) isn't afraid to use his muscle, regardless of opposition; and (c) recently blew up a couple of neighboring governments. If peace comes out of this, Bush will deserve plenty of credit. |
| | Anyway, in spite of (or in addition to) all the above, I consider myself a libertarian as well. Like a lot of techies, I dislike regulation and distrust government. So far it's done a lot to fuck up the Net. |
| | I also can't help seeing the gray. Amost always, issues are more complicated than they appear. Labels don't always help. |
Off Guardian
| | Thanks to Mike Sanders for the Guardian pointage, and also for this from Andrew Sullivan: |
| | One reason I find some of the grand-standing over WMDs increasingly preposterous is that it comes from people who really want to avoid the obvious: more and more it's clear that the liberation of Iraq was a moral obligation under any circumstances. People say to this argument that if we depose one dictator for these kinds of abuses, where will we stop? But the truth is: very few dictators have resorted to imprisonment or mass killing of children. Saddam's evil was on a world-historical scale. Ending it was one of the most prgressive things the United States and Britain and their allies have ever done. |
| | Hmm. Does that then make our lack of intervention against other genocidal regimes among the least progressive things we've ever done? |
| | I think both sides are being highly selective in their arguments here. It's bullshit on the right to insist that oil was irrelevant to the war, and it's bullshit on the left to insist that oil was the only reason we went to war. Other oversimplifications on both sides also don't wash. We went into a complicated mess when we started this war, and it's still a complicated mess. Much better in many ways, but how much worse in others? We won't know for years. |
| | To his credit, Tom Friedman says he's "always been fighting my own war" within himself over the decision to intervene in Iraq. On Terry Gross' Fresh Air a few weeks back, he said he was something like 51/49 in favor of the war, in his own heart (I forget the numbers exactly, but he was deeply ambivalent about it). I was something like 90/10 against it. But that 10 is glad that Saddam is out of power, and probably dead. |
| | Again, this thing is far from over. We've taken on a responsibility, and we need to carry it out. Maybe, if we're wise and lucky, Iraq will hold together and a progressive democratic society and governent will emerge. But that's going to take a long time. Which means the jury isn't just out on this thing; the trial has barely begun. |
Under destruction
| | I'm still getting some mail at the old server, so I'll make that my excuse for not replying. That server should be down by the weekend, and we'll be ready to move on to the next crisis. |
Founding a Hitchery
| | Today, in the name of investigative journalism, I became a minister in the Universal Life Church -- which is legal in all 50 states -- and I could marry you now. Here's my certificate. The literature accompanying it says I can now legally perform every rite except circumcision. (I'd have passed on that one anyway.) |
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