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September 14, 2002
AKMA sends along the following lovely snap of Margaret, Pippa and Si, and fellow bloggers Halley Comment Suitt and Steve OnePotMeal Himmer on a lovely Sunday afternoon in a park in Boston, thinking of me.
Margaret, Pippa, Halley, Steve, and Si.
AKMA is behind the camera, also not giving me the finger.
John D. Erickson took issue with my entry on why being a liberal isn’t fun, writing in an email:
Someone in “Slate” posed the same question a week or two ago. I would say it should be fairly obvious why it’s no fun being a liberal in a nation in which a fascistic, if not a fascist, government is running the show. ..[L]iberals were the most fun during the Kennedy-Johnson eras.
Say, you don’t suppose this has anything to do with being somewhere around 20 years old, do you?
Yeah, I suppose, maybe, mumble mumble. I.e., nail on the head, John.
September 13, 2002
The scene: a conference room in the White House
The players: All the president’s men and women
The topic: Getting to Yes when it comes to war
“Look,” says the senior advisor, “They won’t let us take this bastard out unless we have [making air quotes with fingers] an ‘international coalition’ behind us to cover our ass? Fine. Let’s go to the UN.”
The air pressure in the room drops as people gasp. There are outraged murmurs of “The UN??,” and “No freaking way we’re going to there!” and “My heavens, why on earth would we cede any authority to that illegitimate attempt to destroy our national sovereignty?”
“No, you’re missing the point. We go to the UN and make our case. But here’s the beauty part. Since we don’t have evidence connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda…”
“Hell,” interrupts someone, “We’d have to bomb Saudi Arabia if that were the point!”
“… And since we don’t have evidence of plants building weapons of mass destruction, we’ll say this is all about his failure to abide by UN resolutions. And we’ll get the UN to issue our ultimatum for us, one that Saddam can’t and won’t honor…”
“Besides,” adds a voice, “‘honoring’ is such a subjective term.” [Snickers]
“… And then we go in with full UN backing.”
A chorus of voices responds:
“Brilliant!”
“We get Saddam and we pervert the UN at the same time!”
“And all without even paying the money we owe to the UN!”
“And we can get Russia to side with us in the Security Council by agreeing to look the other way as they bomb the crap out of Cechnya!”
“Pooty-poot will eat it right up! Sweet!”
“Gentlemen and lady, a toast! To the United Nations, at last showing its value by making the world safe for war.”
I just heard from a subscriber to my newsletter (which you could be for free if you clicked here) that SpamAssassin and its Windows version, Spamnix, decided that my latest issue was spam and didn’t deliver it. So, now I may have to send a follow-on notice to all my subscribers asking them if they received the issue, the type of needless annoyance we use spam filters to prevent.
By the way, my 70K ASCII newsletter apparently got flagged because I put article titles in caps, because a robot found it pornographic (probably because of my Freudian analysis of Bush), and because it thinks I use “\#” as a filename (I don’t).
You know what? False positives are unacceptable in a spam filter, especially one that doesn’t even tell you what it’s filtering out.
If you subscribe to my newsletter and didn’t get a copy yesterday, please let me know. I bitterly thank you.
I’ve published a new issue of my newsletter. Here are the contents:
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Palladium and the Real World: Microsoft’s bid to make our computers secure will also make them vulnerable to thick-fingered copyright holders. The 3 Rules of Digital Rights Management: There’s nothing wrong with managing copyrighted materials, if you do it right. Real World End User Licenses: Defaulting to Stupidity: The importance of leeway. The Pop-under that Ended Terrorism: Find Osama! Why Vacations Suck: Ten reasons. The Anals of Marketing: Stamps, End User Abuse License, and protecting Godzilla Walking the Walk: Maybe conversation actually is important. Cool Tool: LeXpert and StartUpManager What I’m playing: Clive Barker’s Undying Internetcetera: Spamming the dead Scandal Central: A picture is worth 10-20 years. 4 Conferences, No Wedding: I’m plugging them, even if I’m not going to them. Links: You found ’em. Email, Random Slights and Unsightly Growths: Your excellent emissions. Bogus contest: Open Source Conspiracy Theories, Or Oedipal Bush |
Clay Shirky‘s written another sterling essay, this time on the nature of communities vs. broadcasting and why only fools think they’re going to take their broadcast audience and build a really cool community and everyone will come and like hang out and then they’ll be like all popular and everything.
The essay make five points:
1. Audiences are built. Communities grow.
2. Communities face a tradeoff between size and focus.
3. Participation matters more than quality.
4. You may own the software, but the community owns itself.
5. The community will want to build. Help it, or at least let it.
Clay is one of my favorites.
September 12, 2002
I confess to being a knee-jerk, pacifist-leaning, NPR-listening, white-wine-swilling, heart-bleeding, Kennedy-voting, cigarette-banning, tie-dye-wearing, Mondale-mourning, Vineyard-vacationing, West-Wing-Tivo-ing, decade-old-spare-joints-in-a-bottom-drawer-stashing, male-distrusting, race-apologizing, criminal-coddling Jewish atheist pointy-headed bleeding-heart middle class middle aged Liberal.
So, Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe today was thought-provoking. (I usually find his writing just plain old provoking.) He points out that the Conservatives have much more fun than we do. They get to drive in their SUV’s, blow up bad guys, and rant on talk shows about how the media don’t give conversatives any air time.
There’s something to this. They’re the Bad Boys/Girls. We’re the scolds. It’d be real good to make Liberalism fun again.
Again? Yes, kiddies, there was a time when being a lefty-liberal meant that you were cool and the conservatives were squares. We got to smoke dope while they watched John Wayne movies. We got free sex while they reproduced via the missionary position. We got to rethink the world while they were pledging their allegiance. If nothing else, the left was the happenin’ place to be. Now it’s as glamorous as sensible shoes.
We should work on changing this. Maybe a new hairstyle or something.
There’s a particularly thoughtful article by Renee Tawa about blogging and Journalism in the LA Times today. Best of all: Not a word about “teenagers writing about what they had for breakfast.”
I like the idea of CNN’s breaking news service. When there’s news that’s significant and urgent, CNN sends me an email to let me know. Thus has email replaced PointCast as the “push” technology of choice for me.
So, yesterday is September 11. In addition to the grief, occasionally overwhelmed by the beating of the war drums, there was the “heightened state of alertness” posted by everyone’s favorite bluegrass group, Tom Ridge and the DC Fear Boys. So, when an email came from cnn.com with the subject line “Breaking news!,” I tore it open expecting to read about a new outrage or calamity.
It was with more peevedness than relief that I learned that the urgent, significant news was that Johnny Unitas had passed peacefully from us. I should have known: cnn.com’s news alerts routinely are trivial, no-need-to-know items with no long- or short-term bearing on my life.
What next? “Britney Reunites with Justin!”? Stop the presses! “Jack Welch Had Another Affair!”? Hold my calls! “Matt Lauer Regrets Haircut!”? Alert the media! Oh, wait, you are the media.
Oh, please.
And, no, there is no way to set preferences at cnn.com for this “service.”
September 11, 2002
I’ve got nothing worth the electrons today.
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