The only good to come of 2001-09-11 is that many learned the meaning of Islam: submission to the god. And they don’t like it.
Not many have learned how submission to (another) the god gives succor to the jihadists.
Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is an ideal 9-11 reading and commemorative gift.
“Five years on” it is time to repeal the security state’s power grabs, stop the trillion dollar fuckup of Iraq and Afghanistan, and finally bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
If tomorrow (or anytime in the future) terrorists again strike within the U.S. jurisdiction will you allow the security state’s power grab that will inevitably follow?
One of the more annoying things political pundits do is to consistently make the case that their candidate or cause is a likely winner, or if too obvious a loser, at least will beat expectations. Surely there is demand for pundits as critical about their favored outcome’s chances as they are about their ufavored outcomes? Perhaps if I watched lots of television I would know of such a chimera.
Fortunately there are again (see Historical Presidential Betting Markets) markets to give anyone who wants one a reality check. However, it is rare (in the U.S.) for a “third party” candidate to be significant enough for an election market to cast any light on their chances. Often “field” will be available (for example, Intrade currently lists the following spreads for 2008 Presidential Election Winner (Political Party): Democrat 49.1/49.2, Republican 47.6/48.4, Field 2.9/3.2) but chance accorded by traders to “the field” has to be based on the expectation that a viable independent will come out of the woodwork (e.g., Ross Perot in 1992) rather than the expectation that a Green, Libertarian, or other minor party candidate has a non-negligible chance of victory. This is too bad in a way, as my casual observation says that minor party backers are more delusional than most when it comes to their candidate’s chances.
It appears that in the Texas 22nd congressional district there is a possibility that “the field” may map strongly to a minor party candidate’s chances — Libertarian Party nominee Bob Smither. Democrat Nick Lampson is the only major party candidate on the ballot. Republican Shelley Sekula-Gibbs is running a write-in campaign.
A Smither press release proclaims that “The Experts Agree” that Smither has the best chance of defeating Lampson, and quotes four sources that say something along those lines. These “experts” aren’t putting anything on the line though — the Intrade CD22 market has the following current bid/ask/last values: Democrat 70.0/90.0/76.0, Republican 12.0/19.9/12.0, Field 2.0/9.9 /0.1.
Traders seem to think a Smither victory is about as likely as Lampson and Sekula-Gibbs photographed together in bed, with a dog. Maybe that isn’t too unlikely. Put your money where your delusions are!
Regarding expert political judgement, I’m planning to read that book soon.
Someone created this Bush eye chart, found at antiwar.com:
Fun idea, though one obvious “word” is missing, and eye charts look old fashioned (nothing wrong with that), so I turned it into a fake tag cloud, with the missing excuse date word:
Click the tag cloud to create your own fake tag cloud.
Last week the NYT ran a story on an exhibition of “International Holocaust Cartoon Contest” “winners” in a Tehran gallery. The reason for this exhibition is supposedly to highlight hyprocrisy “that in the West it is all right to insult religion but impermissible to question the Holocaust.”
If that were true it would be an improvement: the Times article includes a photo of three of the “winning” cartoons. The Times has never printed the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons as far as I know.
But some Iranians have demonstrated, rather weakly, that they support the idea of free speech and consider allowing some speech and prohibiting other speech hypocritical. The obvious next step is for these same to prove that they are not hyprocrites by displaying the Muhammad cartoons. However, I expect they’ll need to be egged on, and here’s an opportunity for an enterprising gallery owner elsewhere — put in an offer to run the IHCC show, preferably alongside the Muhammad cartoons and Holocaust photographs. Gallery owners, imagine the free publicity!
Here’s my “contribution”:
Photo accompanying the NYT story by Shawn Baldwin overlaid with Muhammad cutout from one of the Muhammad cartoons. In the Muhammad cartoon this cutout is taken from Muhammad stands in front of — two Muslim women covered in black!
I learned one interesting thing from the NYT story. There is a Jewish member of the Iranian parliament.
Or demographics of the southern Levant:
Population of Israel: 6.4m
Religious breakdown: 4.9m Jewish (of which half are “secular” and one quarter non-believers), 1m Muslim, the rest Christian, Druze, or unclassified.
Population of the West Bank and Gaza: 3.5m
Muslim birthrates are considerably higher than those for other groups.
There appears to be lots of debate about all of these numbers, take them as approximations. With that caveat, consider that in the territory the jurisdiction of Israel controls or has military dominion over (Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza) there are about 5m Jews and 4.5m Muslims with the latter number increasing faster and more solidly religious than the former.
Clearly the strategies of war, riots, terrorism and demanding a separate state pursued for approximately three generations by politicians of surrounding Arab jurisdictions and Palestinians are incredibly stupid.
All Arabs need to do to end their hated “Jewish state” in relatively short order is to renounce violence and a separate state and demand full citizenship and voting rights in Israel. The best or worst outcomes of such a strategy (which may be flipped if one is crazy) within a generation would be a secular jurisdiction (not Jewish nor Muslim) or civil war, like Lebanon at its best or worst.
Someone who follows the politics of the Insane Land (Christianity and Islam consider it holy, which marks a strong correlation with insanity in my book) could doubtless name many reasons Palestinians and their putative friends do not pursue this strategy. Surely some do. It seems just too obious a winner (but then I have another draft post entitled something like “why is nationalist policy always stupid?”)
Those who wish to maintain a separate Jewish jurisdiction and preempt this strategy would be advised to support the creation of a “legitimate” Palestinian jurisdiction immediately, preferably one that offers citizenship and residence to Muslim citizens of Israel.
If I were a resident of the Insane Land, regardless of religion, I would do no such thing as advocate any of the above. I would concentrate on getting the hell out of the Insane Land. The West offers prosperity and safety, and parts of it offer desert and religious fanaticism, if I really wanted to be reminded of home.
Tim Lee1 (emphasis added):
The relentless march of open standards online continues, as AOL effectively abandons its paid, premium offerings in favor of a free, advertising-supported model.
I’m happy to see open standards win and happy to acknowledge good news — I am, for the most part, an optimist, so good news feels validating.
Time Lee, closing his post (my emphasis again):
Fundamentally, centrally planned content and services couldn’t keep up with the dynamism of the decentralized Internet, where anyone could publish new content or launch a new service for very low cost.
But just how hard is it to imagine a world in which closed services like AOL remain competitive, or even dominant, leaving the open web to hobbyists and researchers?
One or two copyright-related alternative outcomes could have put open networks at a serious disadvantage.
First, it could have been decided that indexing the web (which requires making and storing copies of content) requires explicit permission. This may have stunted web search, which is critical for using the open web. Many sites would not have granted permission to index if explicit permission were required. Their lawyers would have advised them to not give away valuable intellectual property. A search engine may have had to negotiate deals with hundreds, then thousands (I doubt in this scenario there would ever be millions) of websites, constituting a huge barrier to entry. Google? Never happened. You’re stuck with Lycos.
Second, linking policies could have been held to legally constrain linking, or worse, linking could have been held to require explicit permission. Metcalfe’s law? Never mentioned in the context of the (stunted) web.
In the case of either or both of these alternative outcomes the advantage tilts toward closed systems that offer large collections “exclusive” content and services, which was exactly the strategy pursued by AOL and similar for years. Finding stuff amongst AOL’s exclusive library of millions of items may have been considered the best search experience available (in this reality Google and near peers index billions of web pages).
Some of the phenomena we observe on the web would have occurred anyway in stunted form, e.g., blogging and social networking — even now services like LiveJournal and MySpace feel like worlds unto themselves although they are not technically closed and services like FaceBook are closed. Journaling and networking on AOL would have been hot (but pale in comparison to the real blogosphere or even real closed systems, which face serious competition). It is hard to see how something like Wikipedia could have developed in AOLternative reality.
Fortunately aggressive copyright was not allowed to kill the web.2 As a result the march of open standards appears relentless. I’d prefer an even more relentless march, even if it means diminishing copyright (and patents).
1. I’m just using Tim Lee’s post as a jumping off point for an editorial I’ve been meaning to write, no criticism intended.
2. What is aggressive intellectual protectionism being allowed to kill or stunt? Online music is obvious.
I make a brief appearance in a DRM protest video noted by Boing Boing today.
Kent Bye did a good job turning his footage into two minutes of watchable video. At least I don’t look or sound as stupid as I could or should have and his choice of backing music is good and appropriate.
One of the opposing comments on Bye’s blog:
As a consumer you have a choice of who to purchase from; and you must abide by the rules set by who you buy from. If you don’t like those rules don’t buy.
In my view the protest was about informing consumers of reasons they may want to exercise their choice to not purchase DRM content. I don’t think anyone was calling for making DRM illegal.
A brief quote about the inability to transfer rights to DRM content was also misunderstood by come commenters. The point I wanted to make is that consumers are getting a substantially different deal with DRM media than they have gotten in the past, indeed a substantially worse deal.
Only desperate or stupid consumers would lease a home theater from Rent-a-Center. DRM media should be seen in the same light.
Valleywag weighs in (flyweight!) with a sarcastic comment:
With all the hoopla in the tech world over trivia like censorship or the turning of political dissidents over to oppressive foreign governments, it’s good to know that this weekend, brave protesters picketed the San Francisco Apple store for that most basic of human rights — the right to play all kinds of music on the iPod.
Yes, plenty of room to talk with recent posts entitled ‘Google bachelor watch: Larry and Lucy “kissy-faced” in Maui’ and ‘Girl sues MySpace because boys are too hot’ … regardless, Valleywag critically misses the point that DRM and more generally copyright are free speech issues. I find the U.S. policy of encouraging intellectual protectionism abroad appalling. If you don’t think such will be used to further censorship in oppressive states (and supposedly non-oppressive ones) you are sorely lacking in the cynicism department. Go read the recent Bruce Perens essay Is DRM Just a Consumer Rights Issue?. I’ll also repeat two of my favorite sentences in the history of this blog under the subheading What Would Brezhnev Do?:
The Soviet Union took information control to extremes, including prohibiting use of photocopiers by scientists. I suspect that had the USSR survived to this day, the KGB would now be furiously trying to make Digital Restrictions Management work so as to gain access to a few of the wonders of computing without permitting open communication.
I could go on for awhile about why DRM is a bad thing, but in addition to the above I must briefly mention that DRM is deadly for long term data preservation, stifles innovation, is a security threat and doesn’t even prevent copying, the fantasy that it could with just the right legal backing leading to regulatory ratchet.
On the specifics of the Apple protest, see Seth Schoen’s writeup.
In closing, another zinger from Tim Lee:
I think the fundamental disagreement here is one about technology, not philosophy. Attaway believes that the flaws and restrictions imposed by DRM are temporary—kinks that will be worked out as more sophisticated technology is developed. If that were true, Attaway’s argument would have some merit. But the reality is just the opposite: as the media world becomes more complex, the flaws of DRM will only become more glaring. DRM is technological central planning. Centrally planned economies become less efficient as they grow more complex. For precisely the same reasons, centrally planned technologies perform worse as they become more complex.
Another excellent post from Tim Lee (two of many, just subscribe to TLF):
The oft-repeated (especially by libertarians) view that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is actually nonsense. Civilization abounds in free lunches. Social cooperation produces immense surpluses that have allowed us to become as wealthy as we are. Craigslist is just an extreme example of this phenomenon, because it allows social cooperation on a much greater scale at radically reduced cost. Craigslist creates an enormous amount of surplus value (that is, the benefits to users vastly exceed the infrastructure costs of providing the service). For whatever reason, Craigslist itself has chosen to appropriate only a small portion of that value, leaving the vast majority to its users.
As a political slogan I think of TANSTAAFL as applying only to transfers though perhaps others apply it overbroadly. Regardless the free lunches of which Lee writes are vastly underappreciated.
The strategy has another advantage too: charging people money for things is expensive. A significant fraction of the cost of a classified ad is the labor required to sell the ads. Even if you could automate that process, it’s still relatively expensive to process a credit card transaction. The same is true of ads. Which means that not only is Craigslist letting its users keep more of the surplus, but its surplus is actually bigger, too!
Charging money also enables taxation and encourages regulation. Replacement of financial transaction mediated production with peer production is a libertarian (of any stripe — substitute exploitation for taxation and regulation if desired) dream come true.
Put another way, that which does not require money is hard to control. I see advocacy of free software, free culture and similar as flowing directly from my desire for free speech and freedom and individual autonomy in general.
In the long run, then, I think sites that pursue a Craigslist-like strategy will come to dominate their categories, because they simply undercut their competition. That sucks if you’re the competitor, but it’s great for the rest of us!
Amen, though Craigslist, Wikipedia and similar do far more than merely undercut their competition.