Ta-Nehisi Coates, at That Atlanic, waxes passing eloquent as is his wont on the topic of torture vs the drone-war:
… The president is anti-torture — which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal — which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist to foil a plot against the country he's sworn to protect. But the president would countenance the collateral killing of innocent men, women and children by drone in pursuit of an actual terrorist. What is the morality that holds the body of a captured enemy inviolable, but not the body of those who happen to be in the way?
I present the quote above not entirely in full context – there are other things Coates said that I don't agree with as much. But this paragraph struck to the core of my discomfort with the obvious – to me – fundamental bushcheneyism of Obama's national security policies. Since the main reason I supported Obama in 2008 was his repudiation of Bush's post-ninelevenism, my disappointment, at this point, is complete.
Well, I've lived in South Korea during most of North Korea's nuclear career. They tested another one.
Each time they do one of these tests, I can't help but reflect for a moment how bizarre the whole thing is – South Korea is this prosperous, moderately well-adjusted OECD member nation, but they have this neighbor, you see… a crazy uncle, no less, who throws rocks at passing cars and sits in his yard playing with his gun collection and shooting targets in his kitchen. Further, everyone knows he beats his children and locks them in the basement, and he comes around asking for handouts every few months because he's run out of money.
What do you do with a crazy uncle neighbor like that?
I'm teaching a lot of debate classes, these days: more, by almost an order of magnitude, relative to previous terms at Karma. And I make video of all my students' speeches. And I evaluate the speeches and give scores. This is a laborious process, and part of why I'm feeling overwhelmed with work. But I have decided it's a really great way to get middle schoolers actually talking in English class. The combination of natural adolescent reticence on the one hand combined with the horrifying discomfort of speaking a foreign language they don't feel confident with, on the other, means that getting middle school English students to actually talk is about as easy as pulling teeth from a chicken. But if you turn on a video camera and tell them it's a test, they'll stand up at the podium, shaking and quaking, and give their damnedest. It's a bit coercive, relative to my most preferred methods, but overall I'm pleased with how well it works.
Here's one of my favorite classes, giving some speeches on the debate proposition: "Immigration to South Korea should be encouraged." They complained that this topic was difficult, but they all said it was interesting, too.
As a bonus, this video has a complex connection to an earlier blog post: I'll have to give a door prize if anyone actually identifies the connection. I don't know if I have any blog readers loyal or attentive enough to do this. So this is a kind of stealth-test.
Blogger Michael J. Smith is, as usual, scathingly precise in his analysis of the alleged "filibuster reform" failure in recent US Senate activity. He writes,
It’s a question of supply and demand. If getting something through
the Senate takes sixty votes instead of fifty, the marginal vote becomes
that much more valuable.
Econ 101.
Thus none of the senators have an economic interest in surrendering the filibuster as currently practiced and configured.
It's a little bit "late" – the South Korean elections have passed. It's intended to be a sort of "get out the vote" thing, I think, showing how relevant and important the elections were.
I laughed a lot at the bit where ghost of Park Chung-hee (the game lists his character as Takaki Masao, his Japanese name, which is symbolically very significant) throws the baby off the tank and the baby becomes Park Geun-hye (the new president-elect, now).
So one of the blog websites I most frequently visit, Andrew Sullivan's Dish, is apparently implementing some kind of "leaky paywall" and is hoping readers will pay for content. As I've stated before, I'm not opposed to paying for content, but most implementations of pay-for-content tend to piss me off, not because they're requesting money but because they do so in a pestering or technically inefficient way that requires things like memorizing new passwords and logging on every time I go to the website from a new computer (and my computer is always "new," because I abhor cookies on my browsers), not to mention the dumb-ass implementations of IP-address-based paywall and metering schemes that more often than not get broken by the very existence of such bizarre internet arcana as an oh-my-god-it's-South-Korean (!) IP address – such as mine. It is for reasons such as this that I not only ceased to be a regular reader of all the major US newpaper websites (first WaPo, then NYT, and most recently LA Times all broke my access and thus my heart), but in fact essentially boycott them, normally quickly clicking away from even "free content" on their allegedly leaky-paywalled websites when I should happen to naively land on such.
I pay a monthly "membership" for NPR – which is most definitely pay-for-content – but their website and streaming services are technically easy to access and still de facto free, and the feeling I get as a "voluntary" payer-for-content feels more in line with the open-source spirit behind my particular conception of how the web should be. Another example of a "volunteer" website model is the "donate" button some blogs put up: The League of Ordinary Gentlemen and Brain Pickings are examples of this, where I've come very close to donating and may do so in the future.
I will be conflicted if I pay for Sullivan's blog. On the one hand, I do, in fact, derive value from it – even though I don't always agree with him. I wouldn't begrudge paying for the content in principle, even given my voluntary "life-of-poverty." I think many readers on his site are accurate when they say that they read him regularly because he seems to understand the idea of "intelligent debate" about real political issues more than most current media personalities. I tend to attribute it, at least in part, to to that good old Oxbridgian education I reckon lies at his roots – and it's the same classical rhetorical tradition that I attempt to imbue when I teach debate to my middle-school students.
I suspect my most likely response will be a) pay for the content, initially, because I value Sullivan's voice, but then b) gradually decline in visits and time spent on the site, because of annoyances with the technical aspect of having to be a paying member where usernames and passwords must constantly be resubmitted (again, because my computers don't do cookies because I'm a bit of a security freak), and finally c) ceasing to pay for the membership because I've stopped visiting the website.
I'm going to try emailing a link to this blog post to the Sully-blog team, in hopes of my voice allowing them to consider some of the issues raised – though in the past my efforts to communicate with the Sully-blog have been at best a mixed bag, unlike the usually rave reviews for reader-communication and dialogue as reported on his site.
And with all that said, I'll change the subject completely. This kid plays a mean washing machine.
This embedded video is, appropriately, courtesy Sullivan's Dish. Just remember – music (and art) is where you find it.
The author writes how he doesn't believe in Canada. It's great writing and great satire.
Even many of the comments, following, were brilliant. I laughed a lot at the joke that goes:
Q: How do tell the difference between a Canadian and an American?
A: Ask him a question about American history. If he knows the answer, he’s a Canadian.
And, I especially liked the fractal theory of Canada, by a commenter who goes by the handle of Don Cates. It goes something like this (I will quote from the comment at length, hopefully I will be forgiven, it is sheer brilliance – note that it's not just Canada-humor, but math-humor, which may be lost on some readers):
Given a community A and an adjacent community C, such that A is prosperous and populous, and C is less populous and prosperous, and nonreciprocal interest of C in the internal affairs of A, often C will need ego compensation by occaisional noisy and noisome display of its superiority over A. In this case C is said to be the _canada_ of A, C = canada(A).
For example, it has been previously established that
canada(California) = Oregon canada(New York) = New Hampshire canada(Australia) = New Zealand canada(England) = Scotland
The Fractal Theory of Canada.
For all A there exists C such that
C = canada(A)
For example, canada(USA) = Canada canada(Canada) = Quebec canada(Quebec) = Celine Dion
It would appear that the hierarchy would bottom out an individual. However, an individual is actually a community of tissues, tissues of cells, cells of molecules, and so forth down into the quantuum froth.
I coined the word "ajummocracy" a while back [broken link! FIXME]in this blog. I think today is a good day to return to it – because now South Korea has an ajumma for president – although Park Geun-hye breaks the stereotype in many ways: most importantly, she breaks the stereotype by becoming president, rather than just running things behind the scenes.
I was confident enough in my prediction that she would win to have published that prediction. My prediction was based mostly on following the news, and the atmospherics of my classroom discussions of politics with my middle-school students. I find the electoral map exactly matches the prediction I had made in my own brain, too – not that anyone cares. I think the electoral map is very interesting – I've written about [broken link! FIXME]that before too.
I want to be clear that I didn't "support" Park, however. Most of my coworkers are either disturbingly apolitical ("what, me vote?") or else vocally liberal (and therefore they voted for the opposition, Moon Jae-in). Several of them were rivetted by following the election returns on their web-browsers last night, and they were moaning and crying and gnashing their teeth. "Korean people are so stupid," one of them remarked. Another said, "There are too many old people voting." As you can see by these remarks, Korean electoral politics aren't that different from in US: people get very partisan, and the tropes are similar.
I don't really think it's my place to say which candidate I personally prefer – it's not my country. But I will say I think each of the candidates offered some important things. Park's election is ground-breaking in so many ways: she's a woman, she's the daughter of an asssassinated dictator, she's a leader of a conservative party but she's made several quite progressive proposals, she's unmarried – this last may be more surprising than the fact that she's a woman.
So in February, Park will return to the Blue House – the home where she grew up in the 1960's and 70's. Can you imagine entering the presidential mansion, as president, and recognizing and remembering a closet where you may have played hide and seek when you were 9 years old? That seems novelistic, to me – psychologically interesting.
I'll be intrigued to see how this plays out. I'm sure I'll be disappointed – I almost always am, in politics.
I read recently that 20 children die every hour in Afghanistan from easily preventable health problems. I'm sure many other countries are similar and even much worse, but I specifically mention Afghanistan because the US has a major and specific commitment to that country.
There is nothing wrong with mourning the dead. There is nothing wrong with mobilizing political action (e.g. gun control) in reaction to tragedy. But why are the deaths of 20 children in Connecticut an imputus for such action, while the deaths of 20 children in Afghanistan not? Is it because of how far away they are? I think Hawaii isn't that much farther from Afghanistan than it is from Connecticut, yet I suspect Hawaiians are deeply fixated on the events at Newtown, but not so much by the events in Afghanistan. Is it a matter of shared nationality? Why does shared nationality, in a nation as culturally diffuse as the US, really mean that much? Is it a matter of shared government responsibility? In what way is our government NOT responsible for political and legal conditions in Afghanistan, in this day and age?
I'm making no claim of moral superiority. I suffer the human weaknesses of selfishness and narrowness of vision as much as any person. But I find something distasteful and even morally repugnant in the elevation of these deaths – that is currently obsessiing our media – over so many other deaths that occur without any trace in the media, and where a great deal more could be done to prevent them through political action.
Somewhat relatedly, vis-a-vis the Newtown mediacalypse, but in a very different direction, I also would like to recommend this bit of painful satire: The time has come to arm our 6 year olds.
I watched the last of the Korean presidential debates. I understood almost zero of what the heck they were talking about. Yet I watched it, nevertheless, because politics is interesting to me even when I don't understand it. Because I'm weird.
I remember a lot was made of analyzing the body language of Obamney during the US presidential debates, and at the time, I thought, that's dumb – there are more important things in a debate. I still think it's dumb for serious political analysis to talk about those things, but in watching this Korean debate, I nevertheless basically did more of that than any actual content analysis, given how poor my Korean listening skills really are. Seriously – when I all I understand are the conjunctions and transition words, the debate is a sort of kabuki where I'm looking for nonverbal signals.
Here's one thought – Moon (the male, leftistish candidate) needs to get the stick out of his butt. He's about as charismatic as Michael Dukakis. Uh oh. Did I just say that? Park (the female, rightistish candidate) is much more personable. She will win. Admittedly, I'm bringing other information to the table – not least, the informal polls I periodically conduct in my middle-school classes. Over the years, these have proved remarkably representative of Korean public opinion. I'm not sure of the sociological reasons why tiny samples of Korean middle-schoolers in above-average-income suburbs of Seoul accurately reflect Korean public opinion, I'm just sayin'.
Supposedly, Korea overtook Japan as an exporter of "culture." This is a little bit hard to understand or explain – what it means, or how it happened. There's an interesting article at Quartz online. I also remember hearing that South Korea was a net exporter of culture (in monetary terms – video games and music play a big part in these figures).
So I suspect I might be able to mention Korean rapper and satirist PSY without too many people not recognizing him, at this point. I was slightly ahead of the curve when I [broken link! FIXME]posted about his "Gangnam Style" way back in mid August.
But I recently ran across something interesting. His current social satire is pretty mild. Back in 2003, he as was full-on radical. And angry-radical, too.
In this short video clip, above, he's performing a song called "Anti-American" with a heavy metal band called "NEXT" and he's smashing a toy model of an American tank. Apparently the song included lyrics such as the following.
싸이 rap : 이라크 포로를 고문해 댄 씨발양년놈들과 고문 하라고 시킨 개 씨발 양년놈들에 딸래미 애미 며느리 애비 코쟁이 모두 죽여 아주 천천히 죽여 고통스럽게 죽여
Kill those —— Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives Kill those —— Yankees who ordered them to torture Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers Kill them all slowly and painfully
I did not do the translation, and it seems a little bit rough, but I found it online and it's close enough.
I do not condone, and never condone, violence as a response to violence. I dislike the ease with which people transition from violence they oppose to the idea of retributive violence such as that being espoused by the PSY and his metal-headed friends, above. Having said that, I, too, was deeply troubled by the US behavior in, especially, Iraq. I have long felt that Bush, Cheney, and subsequently the disappointing Mr Obama should be held responsible for war-crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Yemen and Pakistan and other places where drone attacks are still being carried out). So without agreeing with his prescription for retribution, I do agree with PSY's anger as expressed in 2003. And I actually find him more interesting, because he's clearly a politically conscious animal – as indicated by both his recent, milder satire as well as this.
[Update added 2012-12-10] I just noticed that blogger Ask A Korean has a very brilliant post on this same topic. Please read it if you're one of those people who are uncomfortable with PSY's rhetoric. Or even if you're not, but just curious about the context of South Korean anti-Americanism.
I think winter has arrived. I checked my friendly local news website (naver.com) for the weather. Here's the five-day forecast.
So. Winter.
Yesterday, walking around, I saw banners strung across Juyeop plaza, for the upcoming presidential election (December 19). The two main-party candidates are on the two banners: top is Park Geun-hye (conservative) and below is Moon Jae-in (liberal). The daughter of the dictator versus the former student activist (who was once jailed and barred from politics for his activism). I think either candidate would be a milestone for Korea, and both have their merits. But I predict Park will win.
There are some direct relationships between birthrates and immigration rates. But it is also true that in economically prosperous countries where there are high levels of prosperity and education (which the US still is, despite recent downturns), immigration can be a substitute for lower birthrates to ensure continued growth. Setting aside sustainability issues (i.e. is growth even the right way to go, in the long, long run), and ethical issues (i.e. my long-declared position that immigration is, in fact, a human right) immigration still becomes a critical factor in determining an advanced economy's health.
Apparently the US birthrate has recently plunged. No one is sure what exactly is going on – it's tied to lower immigration rates (which in turn are tied to the poor economy and high unemployment), but there seem to be other things going on too. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post writes:
A key contradiction in American public opinion is that many people simultaneously think that immigration is bad for the economy (“they’re taking our jobs!”) and that a low birthrate is bad for the economy. But they basically lead to the same economic problem: too many old people, not enough young people.
This really does capture the cognitive dissonance behind anti-immigration thinking.
… and look at Iceland now – the country most heavily striken by the 2008 global financial crisis, and now it's healthy and happy as can be – not perfect, but it weathered the storm much better than Europe or even the US. Read about it at Washington's Blog.
That's a cool picture I found by randomly searching the interwebs, too.
"…
there’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down
on its citizens from outside its borders." – Barack Obama, November 18,
2012. He was talking about Israel, vis-a-vis Gaza. However… How's that work, vis-a-vis the drone war being conducted by the US in countries like Pakistan and Yemen? It's why I was unable, within the scope of my own moral compass, to vote for the man, despite his accomplishments and the symbolism of it.
It is his only asset. He is also a flower farmer, a vegetarian and an open atheist. Would this be possible in Mexico or the US or South Korea? Um, no. Someday, I want to go back to Uruguay.
"Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can
have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich
societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our
planet." – José Mujica
According to an article in the Korean Herald, South Korea posted its first-ever "cultural trade surplus." This is a very interesting perspective. It's interesting to think about. It's interesting that Koreans are interested in it. They take the idea of being successful cultrual imperialists quite seriously, as a component of their "arrival" in the world as a "developed" country.
The idea, basically: Korea now exports more cultural stuff (books, movies, music, etc.) than it imports, on a dollar-value basis. There aren't many countries that do this – the US is the juggernaut, of course; there's probably some others: France, I suspect, and Japan, and Italy. I'd bet on maybe Egypt, actually, and maybe Brazil. But these are just guesses. Completely wild guesses. I'm too lazy to research it. But it's interesting, anyway.
Blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic website is mediocre when he's bad. But when he's good, he's amazing. Read his post – if only just for the title. It's a bit "triumphalist" vis-a-vis Obamism (specifically, I darkly disagree with Mr Coates with respect to the idea that the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden was ethical), but for all that, I can hardly fault it. It succeeds in being optimistically inspiring and mildly humorous at the same time. Coates can sometimes write very well.
Obama has been re-elected. I think, despite my own failure to have voted for him, this was a foregone conclusion. I did a poll of my ISP7 class (formerly TP cohort) and they predicted that Obama would win without exception, regardless of whether they'd decided to support Obama or Romney in our recently-completed unit on the US election. So none of them were in that bubble who saw the race as close. It wasn't, at the end – not because Romney and Obama weren't neck-and-neck in the popular vote – they were – but because the Obama team had long-ago worked out the electoral math they needed (e.g. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio) and they'd worked their message in those states relentlessly.
So how do I feel about it?
I worry about the civil liberties issues – I think Obama's essential continuation of the Buchcheneyian post-9-11 imperial paradigm is disturbing. I worry about the still-too-aggressive foreign policy – especially the drones and Obama's alleged "kill list" and Guantanamo.
What I'm definitively not worried about is "creeping socialism" or "Obama-as-dictator" or whatever bogeyman the pseudo-Randian right has gotten so worked up about – despite my own mumblings to the contrary. Obama's alleged socialism is essentially a straw-man that somehow took on a life of its own and has come back to terrify its creators. Obama is less socialist than your typical European right-winger, and less socialist than Nixon or Eisenhower. I don't doubt the sincerity of those who believe in this straw-man – but I feel they're deluded at some level.
There were some interesting results in state-level elections. Most interesting to me was the reported fact that Puerto Rican voters approved statehood for PR. This doesn't mean, of course, that PR becomes a state: Congress would have to approve, and that seems unlikely as long as Congress is divided (House Republican and Senate Democrat). I have long thought that PR should try to change its status, although I've felt neutral about whether that should be toward statehood or independence. But the fact that the vote on the island has swung toward statehood is striking. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
Of course, being a political junkie, I was looking at The Atlantic website's liveblog of the election night, on this brisk Wednesday morning in Korea. There was this rather irrelevant picture of Dick Cheney watching the election returns, with the comment below the picture:
"It appears he has a lamp made of antlers."
Why would this make me laugh hard for a few minutes?
xkcd has one of the most amazing timeline graphics I've seen in a long time: the US Congress' left-right spectrum over time.
xkcd has been moving into more and more interesting and challenging graphics, which I really appreciate. It's become a reliably thought-provoking series and not just an occasional nerdy snicker.
Two days until the election. I absentee voted. I voted my conscience, I wasn't able to select the "lesser of two evils." Oh happy Sunday.
What I'm listening to right now.
Lionrock, "Packet of Peace." I think it's a UK dance track from circa 1993. [update 2014-01-26: The video link was broken, so I found an alternative – though it's only the sound, not the video.]
Andrew Sullivan the sullyblogger has an interesting post about George Romney, Barry Goldwater, and the Nixonian "Southern Strategy" that made the Republicans who they are today. One very striking thing: he includes this fascinating 1976 electoral college map (with post-2000 colors so we can understand it):
Comparing that map to current electoral maps is quite mind-blowing. This shift occurred in my lifetime.
And this quote:
We need only look at the experience of some ideologically oriented
parties in Europe to realize that chaos can result. Dogmatic ideological
parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation,
lead to governmental crises and deadlock, and stymie the compromises so
often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress. – George Romney, 1966.
I had an "off-line" day – I forced myself to not go on my computer until now. And I'm not sure I have figured out my new phone, either – so I had a non-technological day. I've been reading a biography of Park Chung-Hee, by Chong-Sik Lee, that my friend Peter loaned to me. It's really very interesting.
Somewhat discordantly…or at the least, unrelatedly:
What I'm listening to right now.
McGinty, "Farewell to Nova Scotia."
I only visited Nova Scotia once. I was 11 or 12 years old.
Yesterday, we had our own presidential debate. The debate proposition was: “Barack Obama should be re-elected as president of the U.S.” They divided about evenly between Romney supporters and Obama supporters, after the dust settled (we’ve been working on this all month).
I gave my most advanced students (ISP7 cohort – all 8th graders) many lists of the “Top 10 reasons to vote for X” style, but they crafted and chose their reasons themselves.
I’m amazed at how my kids have handled this debate topic. It’s incredibly difficult, and hard for them to connect to or understand, too – they’re Korean 8th graders, after all: they don’t know or care that much about US politics. I actually expected a much lower level of interest and dedication to this topic than they have shown – I was doing it more as a prelude to the real fun: we’re going to be tackling the Korean presidential election, next, which votes in December.
I voted for Obama mostly as seeking for (hoping
for) a repudiation of George W. Bush. And so the reason I cannot vote
for Obama this time round is because Obama has utterly failed to
repudiate anything Bush did: Guantanamo still open, drone strikes are
more popular than ever, wars only wind down in defence-industry-friendly
ways, the Patriot Act persists, Bush's tax cuts persist, health care
reform (if it must be done) is in the pockets of the insurance industry
(seriously: let's compare Bush's oft-forgotten humongous new drug
entitlement with Obamacare and try to find philosophical differences),
etc., etc., ad infinitum.
There's some unpleasant irony in the fact that the Right (such as it is) accuses Obama of such things as socialism and betraying American values. To the former accusation, Obama is no more socialist than Bush – which is faux socialist, at best, though certainly more socialist (e.g. "big government") than anyone on the right wants to admit. To the latter accusation, well, I would have to say that GW Bush was he who most "betrayed American values" – Obama is merely continuing that trend. Here's an interesting thought: Colin Powell has endorsed Obama, again. Wasn't he, uh, GW Bush's Secretary of State during that most stunning of betrayals of American values, the Iraq invasion?
This blog post at the website-whose-name-I-hate sums it up most excellently.
It seems I will be voting "third party" this year – back to old ways, I
guess – though I'm a bit hesitant to wear my politics so prominently on my sleave, as posting on this blog inevitably means.
The same blog post points to a somewhat apocryphal quote from Karl Rove, that is utterly stunning in its scope:
We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s
how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do.
Obama will be remembered as only the second emperor of the new imperium that Julius Caesar – ahem, George W. Bush – founded.
Finally, I have come across a comprehensive yet brief synopsis of the last 5000 years in Palestine/Israel/Levant that really contextualizes the current conflict in historical terms.
It all underscores the essential inhumanity that lies behind all nationalisms and especially the cultural fantasies that fall under the rubric of revanchism.
I didn't watch the debate between Obama and Romney, live. But, being the politics addict that I am, I have followed it through that innovative new medium called "live blogging." And the consensus seems to be that Obama blew it, and that Romney did quite well. I haven't formed an opinion, except to say that Obama likes to play the "adult in the room," which rarely plays well on TV. Romney, on the other hand, comes off as a patriarch high on meth – which might not be that inaccurate.
So far the best part was when Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogging at The Atlantic, quoted Alan Ginsburg. I feel compelled to do the same, though somewhat more at length:
…I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury…
From his poem, "Howl." If you're not getting it, the segment of the poem is relevant because the debate was held in Denver.
"You'll
never see a squirrel trapped by a syllogism. He might be cornered by a
dog, or swept up for breakfast by a hawk, but he won't have talked
himself into his predicament." – blogger Michael J. Smith (I think
that's a pseudonym). He's refering, of course, to the false choice that exists within the American political landscape.
"One oddity of the current legal situation remains that the U.S.
government needs some kind of court-approved warrant to intentionally
eavesdrop on the telephone or e-mail of a U.S. citizen suspected of
involvement with Al Qaeda, like Anwar Al-Awlaki. However, using a drone,
a missile, bomb or military raid to intentionally kill that same person
requires no approval from the judicial branch." – Josh Gerstein, in his blog about legal issues.
Talk about understatement.
Meanwhile, despite this (or because of it?) Obama is now at 65% at intrade. The elections market-makers appear to have reached their decision point – only a week ago Obama was under 60% on intrade.
The Los Angeles Times is the last of the major "metro" US newspaper websites that I frequently visit. I'm a news junkie, as many know, and I used to visit 3 or 4 different newspaper websites, daily. But first the Washington Post, and then the New York Times disappeared behind complex paywalls that, as a relatively impecunious international reader, weren't worth my trouble to overcome. That left, basically, only the LA Times. Perhaps my frequent deletion of cookies prevented me from noticing it, or perhaps they've only changed its implementaion recently, but the LA Times' paywall has been popping up more often, now, too. And the consequence is that basically I quit going there, just as I quit going to the NYT or WP in the past.
I'm not opposed to paying for web content in principle – I consume NPR as a donating "sustaining" member, and I've donated to other websites that use that "donor-based" pay model, where I value the content. But I much prefer the "voluntary donor" model of pay-for-content than the "sneakily block some content while teasing other content" model that has become nearly universal at US newspapers, for example. So my reaction to being repeatedly harrassed by these paywall widgets is to go find my web content elsewhere.
I have no idea if my reaction is anywhere near typical. But my own reaction can't be unique. And my consequential, rather low-key boycott of the paywalled media can't be unique, either. And so I am really not surprised at the sustained, long-term decline of US newspapers. Like Hollywood and the music industry vis-a-vis the pirates, this is really an example where the industry itself, in its retrograde movements to protect its traditional revenue streams, is destroying itself rather than adapting.
