Category: Current Affairs

Something for everybody

I’ve got to see the latest bin Laden video, it sounds seriously funny:

An address that contains less than 2,500 words mentions “large corporations” eight times, and blames all the ills of the world on them and the “capitalist system” they represent. The warmongers killed Kennedy for trying to end Vietnam and they’re keeping America in Iraq, he claims. Capitalists are melting the polar ice caps, miring hard-working Americans in debt, and have even got the Democratic Party in their deep pockets, he suggests. And the only one who’s crying wolf in America is, according to bin Laden, American linguist and left-wing political activist Noam Chomsky.

Swings For The Stands

At this point — with 95 percent of the American public hopelessly lost in his video address — bin Laden the anticapitalist unveils the only solution that could possibly alienate the remaining 5 percent: religion. Your mistake, he tells Americans, is that “you have separated church and state.” The way out of this problem is conversion to Islam.

Here, bin Laden swings for the stands of transpartisan weirdness and connects, combining in a single sentence religious fundamentalism, anticapitalism, and a nontax flat tax: “Islam will deprive [the war profiteers and owners of large corporations] of the chance to swindle the people out of their money through arms deals and such, for Islam has no taxes and only limited alms that stand at 2.5 percent.”

There’s something for everybody in this: low taxes, anti-capitalism, and religious fanaticism. What a deal.

Making progress in Iraq

I don’t know what to make of the claims that we’re finally making progress in Iraq, because we’ve been lied to so many times already. So this is significant:

U.S. Rep. Brian Baird said Thursday that his recent trip to Iraq convinced him the military needs more time in the region, and that a hasty pullout would cause chaos that helps Iran and harms U.S. security.

“I believe that the decision to invade Iraq and the post-invasion management of that country were among the largest foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation. I voted against them, and I still think they were the right votes,” Baird said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

“But we’re on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work.”

…Baird said he would not say this if he didn’t believe two things:

• “One, I think we’re making real progress.”

• “Secondly, I think the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves, to whom we have a tremendous responsibility … and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security.”

Baird was my Congressman when I lived in Washington, and I’ve been getting his constituent e-mails for years. If he believes we’re finally making progress in Iraq, then so do I. It’s one thing for invasion-boosters (as I was) to claim progress, as they’ve pretty much been doing that all along, but when invasion-bashers make these claims, it’s news.

Link via Protein Wisdom.

Enlightenment fundamentalist

The latest criticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is that she’s an “enlightenment fundamentalist:”

Having in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism, under the influence of an inspiring schoolteacher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist. In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone from one extreme to the other, with an emotional energy perfectly summed up by Shakespeare: “As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive.” This is precisely why she is a heroine to many secular European intellectuals, who are themselves Enlightenment fundamentalists. They believe that not just Islam but all religion is insulting to the intelligence and crippling to the human spirit. Most of them believe that a Europe based entirely on secular humanism would be a better Europe. Maybe they are right. (Some of my best friends are Enlightenment fundamentalists.) Maybe they are wrong. But let’s not pretend this is anything other than a frontal challenge to Islam. In his crazed diatribe, Mohammed Bouyeri was not altogether mistaken to identify as his generic European enemy the “unbelieving fundamentalist.”

Christopher Hitchens disputes this charge:

In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?

I would embrace the “enlightenment fundamentalist” label. There’s no shame in being a fanatic for tolerance, secular democracy, science, and reason, and these are the fundamental values of Western civilization. Or were, once upon a time.

BONUS FEATURE: For no extra charge, see today’s Opinion Journal on Ms. Ali:

This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. “I have my ideas and my views,” she says, “and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically.” As to the charges that she is an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.

Amen.

No good deed goes unpunished

Ayann Hirsi Ali is a hero to many who want to see the war on Islamic terrorism end in a victory for the West. But every hero has her critics, and Ali is no exception. For some of the most mind-bending perverse logic you’ve ever seen, check the Newsweek article attacking Ali from the pro-Muslim and pro-feminist (!) point of view:

Other Muslim women interested in reform aren’t exactly in step with Hirsi Ali. “I wish people had been nicer to her,” says Muslim author and feminist Asra Nomani. “But I don’t blame Islam. I blame really messed-up people who’ve used religion to justify their misogyny.” As staunchly patriarchal strains of Wahhabi Islam infiltrate Muslim cultures outside the gulf region, many modern female followers are wondering how to embrace their religion without succumbing to its more sexist demands. And they’re coming up with answers that don’t require them to abandon either their religion or their culture. In the Middle East and South Asia, a strong majority of Muslim women recently polled by Gallup believed they should have the right to work outside the home and serve in the highest levels of government. Here in the United States, dozens of scholars like Ithaca College’s Asma Barlas, Harvard’s Leila Ahmed and Notre Dame’s Asma Afsaruddin have challenged widely accepted interpretations of the Qur’an. “They are Islam’s Martina Luthers,” jokes Nomani. “They are my heroes.”

It’s not clear what “being nicer” would have meant: no clitorectomy, fewer beatings, and a better arranged marriage, or not being disowned? Some people are just so hard to please.

Linklove to Roger L, Simon.

Recruited again

This is funny:

Hi Richard,

My name is XXX XXXXXX and I am a Recruiter for the Google.com Engineering team. While searching the internet, I came across your name. We currently have positions available at Google that may be a good match for you. If you are open to exploring these opportunities further, please send an updated version of your resume in Word, HTML, or PDF to me as soon as possible.

All positions involve working in our infrastructure team, know as Google.com Engineering (which is different from our Operations group). Our Google.com engineers hold the beating heart of Google and are very well respected. They are responsible for keeping the google.com website up and running as well as building new automation infrastructure. We are seeking Extraordinary Developers, UNIX (Linux) System Administrators, and Managers/Directors to add to our exciting team and growing organization.

*****We have multiple openings located in various places in the US (Mountain View, CA, Kirkland, WA, Santa Monica, CA, Mountain View, CA, New York, NY ) and Internationally (Dublin, Ireland and Zurich, Switzerland).****

I hope you are not bothered by my networking attempt. If you are not interested or available, but would like to forward my name and contact information to your friends or colleagues, I would be most delighted.

For more information, go to:

http://www.google.com/support /jobs/bin/answer.py?answer =23594 (see various locations)
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=23591 (see various locations)

Thank you and hope to hear from you soon.

XXX

P.S. If this is not a good time or if you are not interested, please reply and let us know. We will update our database and you will not be contacted again in the future.

I know very few people read this blog, but it surprises me that despite all the mean things I’ve said about Google ( their collusion with the government of China and their evil attempt to stifle the development of the Internet through Net Neutrality legislation, their lack of originality, etc.) I’m still getting such queries on a regular basis. I guess they’re less organized than I thought.

Sigh.

Netroots Legislative Agenda

I like a good fight, no matter who’s fighting. Matt Stoller, the MyDD blogger who’s wasted so many electrons on the dubious cause of net neutrality, wrote a post immediately after the recent election in which he declared that the “netroots” legislative agenda begins and ends with his pet cause. A somewhat more serious thinker, Bob Fertik, quickly listed 140 agenda items and asked his readers to vote on them; his list includes things like raising the minimum wage, signing Kyoto, restoring habeas corpus, and all that sort of trivia. Net neutrality came in at number 14. Here’s the explanation:

Bloggers who work mainly with text and photos (and that’s most political blogs) could blog without net neutrality; it would mainly affect video bloggers since they consume far more bandwidth, and that’s what the monopoly gatekeepers want to tax.

But Bloggers couldn’t do what we do without the First Amendment…

Now that seems awfully sensible, especially for somebody who drinks the Kool-Aid. Why is it that Stoller has such a hard time keeping things in perspective?

What does Tim think?

According to reports from BBC and The Guardian, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee thinks his baby’s in danger. BBC News:

He told the BBC: “If we don’t have the ability to understand the web as it’s now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad.

“Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.

“Studying these forces and the way they’re affected by the underlying technology is one of the things that we think is really important,” he said.

And The Guardian:

The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, “bad phenomena” will erode its usefulness.

His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.

But he warns that “there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way”. He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.

But Tim says he was misquoted both times, and the web is really in fine shape:

A great example of course is the blogging world. Blogs provide a gently evolving network of pointers of interest. As do FOAF files. I’ve always thought that FOAF could be extended to provide a trust infrastructure for (e..g.) spam filtering and OpenID-style single sign-on and its good to see things happening in that space.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, alas, my attempt to explain this was turned upside down into a “blogging is one of the biggest perils” message. Sigh. I think they took their lead from an unfortunate BBC article, which for some reason stressed concerns about the web rather than excitement, failure modes rather than opportunities. (This happens, because when you launch a Web Science Research Initiative, people ask what the opportunities are and what the dangers are for the future. And some editors are tempted to just edit out the opportunities and headline the fears to get the eyeballs, which is old and boring newspaper practice. We expect better from the Guardian and BBC, generally very reputable sources)

So what’s going on here, was the venerable scientist misquoted by a sensationalist press? I think not, as both BBC and The Guardian are well known for the sobriety of their analysis of technical subjects. At this stage in his career, Berners-Lee is more a politician than a scientist, and he needs to learn the politician’s skill of talking to journalists so they can understand what, if anything, he thinks. He tends to speak out both sides of his mouth, as he’s done on network neutrality. He claims to support the principle while endorsing commercial arrangements that happen to be forbidden by proposed neutrality laws, and that’s hard to dance around.

The web, like any number of things, is a mixture of good and bad, and the challenge is always to maximize the one while minimizing the other. That’s not too hard to express, is it?

It never stops

George Lakoff, the Chomsky protege wannabe* who’s a big fave with Democrats these days, has a new book out urging leftish politicians to spin more. Steven Pinker is not impressed:

There is no shortage of things to criticize in the current administration. Corrupt, mendacious, incompetent, autocratic, reckless, hostile to science, and pathologically shortsighted, the Bush government has disenchanted even many conservatives. But it is not clear what is to be gained by analyzing these vices as the desired outcome of some coherent political philosophy, especially if it entails the implausible buffoon sketched by Lakoff. Nor does it seem profitable for the Democrats to brand themselves as the party that loves lawyers, taxes, and government regulation on principle, and that does not believe in free markets or individual discipline. Lakoff’s faith in the power of euphemism to make these positions palatable to American voters is not justified by current cognitive science or brain science. I would not advise any politician to abandon traditional reason and logic for Lakoff’s “higher rationality.”`

I’ve always been amazed that anyone takes Lakoff seriously, but he does have a following. Doc Searls, for example, practically worships him. Some Democrats, frustrated by a decade of Republican rule seek a magic bullet that will put them back in power, and Lakoff claims to have one. The Republicans are all set to relinquish the government this election regardless of what the Dems do, so Lakoff and his ilk will no doubt claim credit. It’s best for Republicans if Democrats believe Lakoff, but not so good for the Republic.

The ultimate issue is whether the Democrats have failed for the last decade because the public rejects their policies, or because they simply haven’t packaged them as well as the Republicans have packaged theirs. It’s seductive to believe it’s all matter of packaging, but ultimately wrong. The Democrats haven’t had a new idea since Roosevelt, but the world has changed substantially.

The Democrats are going to do very, very well in this year’s elections, but not because of better euphemisms, more blogs, or louder screams. They’re going to do well because the Republicans are corrupt and incompetent. This isn’t going to be an election about policy or language, it’s going to be decided by the public’s lack of patience with an endless string of failures and broken promises.

Don’t be deceived.

Here’s Lakoff’s response to Pinker.

*UPDATE: See commentary on the meaning the term “protege” and Nunberg’s complaints. For clarity, I’ve re-worded the first sentence. Chomsky and Lakoff disagree on some fine points of linguistic theory and political ideology, but from the layman’s perspective they’re essentially interchangeable.

Bill Moyers and the Mythology of the Internet

Bill Moyers is the ordained Baptist minister who was LBJ’s Chief Propagandist during America’s descent into the Viet Nam quagmire. He made a name for himself by pushing Joseph Campbell’s loopy theories about the alleged universality of mythology on PBS and giving a megaphone to voices on the lunatic fringe of American politics such as Noam Chomsky. He’s jumped into the Net Neutrality fray with both horns, airing a 90 minute ad for Bob McChesney’s Save the Internet campaign that trails off into odd conspiracy theories toward the end. PBS has set up a web page to promote it, where you’ll find this gem:

The future of the Internet is up for grabs. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) effectively eliminated net neutrality rules, which ensured that every content creator on the Internet-from big-time media concerns to backroom bloggers-had equal opportunity to make their voice heard. Now, large and powerful corporations are lobbying Washington to turn the World Wide Web into what critics call a “toll road,” threatening the equitability that has come to define global democracy’s newest forum. Yet the public knows little about what’s happening behind closed doors on Capitol Hill.

Some activists describe the ongoing debate this way: A small number of mega-media giants owns much of the content and controls the delivery of content on radio and television and in the press; if we let them take control of the Internet as well, immune from government regulation, who will pay the price? Their opponents say that the best way to encourage Internet innovation and technological advances is to let the market-not the federal government-determine the shape of the system.

Kindly note that this goes beyond the usual refrain of “Big Telco is stealing the Internet and our Democracy will soon be lost” to assert a conspiracy of Big Telco and Big Media. In fact, the last 30 minutes of the show isn’t about the Internet at all, it’s about media consolidation, McChesney’s favorite hobby horse.

Is net neutrality a legitimate part of the media ownership debate, or simply a fear and smear campaign devised to enhance the influence of self-promoters like McChesney and his ilk?

You can probably guess what I think about that.