My web host (friends of mine) unplugged the comments module after the first 1,000 spams came in within two hours. I think you can still read comments but you can’t write them. I’m going to try installing David Raynes’ script that lets you turn off comments on scripts older than n days until I can install James Seng’s script that will require commenters to type in a verification code displayed on the page. Thanks to BurningBird, who also offers a MySQL command that will strip out all comments between two named times.

In the meantime, if you need to reach me, I’m at my usual emai1 address, which you can construct by connecting self to evident with an at thingy in the moddle and a dot and a com at the end.

Damn spammers.

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I just got 500+ comment spams (mainly for zoo sex, apparently) from someone who changes IP addresses every 3 msgs and changes the offensive link in every message. This defeats the MT Blacklist program I’ve been relying on.

Help! I don’t have time to manually strip out 500 spams. I will have to close comments (if I can figure out how to do so for all previous entries).

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So, the Club for Growth runs this ridiculously nasty commercial that slips into self-parody as a couple says: “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving…[etc.] freak-show back to Vermont.”

The Dean blog responds by posting the ad and a new version with dubbed voices so that the couple is now explaining why they’re supporting Dean. It’s a totally amateur job, and is intentionally funny because of that.

Now the blog is hosting a make-your-own-postcard page where you can make your own list of the sort of Dean supporter you are.

The blog notes that “frequent blog commenter ‘jc’ has been collecting more responses than we can publish here,” so it links to her page where you can read postcards that are funny, touching and completely human:

Niece-spoiling
chai-drinking
Jeep-driving
Springsteen-listening
Dean Supporter

Trail hiking
Nature loving
Honda driving
Sushi eating
Blog reading
Hard working
Healthcare lacking
Dean supporter

Take all this together and you have a real Webby way to respond to the mass media!

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Jeff Jarvis has some excellent transcriptual commentary on the unintentionally hilarious Tim Russert segment on blogging.

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David Isenberg is thinking about holding a real world get-together — he’s calling it WTF — for his readers and people like his readers. I’ve been to get-togethers David’s put on and they’ve all been great experiences — I met wonderful people and learned lots.

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[NOTES: 1. At no point in the following do I compare George W. Bush to Hitler. 2. All those who take quotes out of context will be prosecuted, or at least whined about.]

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, suggests a New Year’s resolution in her Boston Globe column today (which will be de-linked by the Globe tomorrow):

No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike. Unless, of course, those policies include actual mass murder and torture, or those politicians who engage in such acts.

Likewise, Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby thinks any comparison to Hitler is hate speech. Not to mention the field day the conservative groups are having with the fact that two of the 1,500 entries into the MoveOn.org ad contest compared some aspects of this administration’s policies to Nazi Germany’s. (Oddly, none of these commentators have complained about the Bush administration’s repeated characterization of opponents of the Iraq war as “appeasers,” a direct reference to the British policy of appeasement that failed to stop Hitler, or about its use of the phrase “Axis of evil” with its implicit comparison to WWII’s Axis.)

So, let me come out firmly against stupid, thoughtless comparisons of anyone to Hitler. Often such comparisons commit an informal fallacy: Because person A is like Hitler in property P, A is like Hitler in property Q, where Q is Hitler’s evilness. That’s not only fallacious, it trivializes what is important.

But ruling out all comparisons with Hitler and Nazism can also be a way of forgetting what should be remembered.

Here’s one thing I think should be remembered: Nazi Germany’s unfathomable evils were perpetrated by one of the most civilized of cultures. Yes, “civilized” is a loaded term. Deconstruct it as you will, Germany — a country that gave us many of the West’s most revered artists and philosophers — seemed to be operating well within the norms of Western politics and culture. Yet it democratically voted in Hitler and watched (or worse) as it murdered its children and rolled tanks into its neighbors’ cities.

I don’t know, and I don’t believe it can be known with certainty, whether there were particular aspects of the German situation that made it susceptible to turning evil. Certainly Germany’s particular way of being evil was rooted in the particularities of German history and culture. But one big lesson I take from this is that cultures that are convinced they are good can nevertheless become evil. And they can be evil when they think they are at their greatest.

That’s why I think Cathy Young is profoundly wrong. We should learn from the horrors of Nazi Germany that it can happen anywhere, even here. But, we should not expect it to happen in the same way, with concentration camps, jackbooted soldiers and a hypnotic demagogue. In fact, we are so aware of those particular forms of evil that we’re less likely ever to fall for them. We need to remember Nazism especially when we’re looking at the forms of evil that do not mirror the particulars of the Nazi expression of evil.

Before the death camps and the invasions, there were the steps that somehow led a country to embrace great evil. The Nazis came to power not by military takeover but through an election. Each subsequent step seemed justified or was at least so palatable that there was no civil uprising. We honor those who fought Nazism and we remember those whom Nazism murdered by being vigilant about the steps we take, for we understand that some steps can lead a country from good to evil.

So, yes, comparing Bush to Hitler is worse than stupid. But we forget the lesson that we should have learned if we don’t publicly notice that some steps our country has taken could lead our great nation into evil:

Demonizing enemies

Questioning the patriotism of dissenters

Monitoring the political expressions of citizens

Establishing a special class of offenders who are removed from the protections of the judicial system

Lowering the intensity of the threat required to justify preemptive action

Disregarding world opinion

Playing on fear in order to sway public opinion

Lying in order to get us to invade another country

Do these acts make us into Nazi Germany? Of course not! Is any of these acts on a scale with death camps or the invasion of Poland? Not in the least! Each may be entirely justifiable: It may be the responsibility of a courageous country to ignore world opinion in some instances. Some dissenters may actually be unpatriotic. It’s possible that our enemies are demonic; I have nothing good to say about Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Even so, we should take such steps with open debate and genuine trepidation. Shutting off the conversation does not help us preserve our genuine American values. We should remember that it can happen here because it did happen there…and also that if were to happen, the it would certainly be different. Is it happening here? That’s exactly what we should be talking about, even if our answer is a resounding No.

If all comparisons to Nazi Germany are out of bounds, then we’re saying Nazism was sui generis, unique, something from which we can learn nothing about how we humans can go so astoundingly wrong. And that truly dishonors all those who suffered its horrors.

Mitch makes a good point about why MoveOn’s open posting of ad entries is as American as multimedia pie.

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Type “old fart” (no quotes) into the search box at Amazon. Act now! (Thanks to Dan O’Neill for the info.) (If that doesn’t work, try here.)

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Dean opted out of the campaign finance reform law because its cap on fund raising would have meant that this spring, even though he’d raised the maximum allowed, he’d be out of money. He might have the nomination sewn up, but he’d have to sit on his hands as Karl Rove spends $150M against him, right up through the Democratic Convention in August. What candidate could survive that type of blitz?

So, let’s say Gen. Clark wins enough primaries to become the nominee. Clark has opted into the campaign finance reform law, so he’ll be out of money in March. Or maybe in May. Either way, how is he going to win the general election? What is the Clark strategy for winning? Does anyone know?

(If you tell me that blogs will enable a candidate to withstand a $150M negative TV campaign, I will ask you to send me a sample of what you’re smoking.)

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George Dafermos has posted a paper titled “Blogging the Market: How Weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations.” Given that nothing is truly comprehensive, this paper edges in that direction. It begins, in the Abstract, with these words and in this tone:

Weblogs, in other words, envisage a hierarchy circumvention mechanism, which empowers knowledgeable employees to indulge in conversations with the market rather than communicating solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases

and it ends like this:

YOU CORPORATE BUREAUCRAT, STANDARDISED VOICE IN THE MARKET WILL BE ASSIMILATED OR ANNIHILATED. THE CHOICE IS YOURS: SPEAK WITH A REAL VOICE, TELL US A STORY AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION OR BECOME DEFUNCT.

In between it covers a huge amount of ground. I’m sure I’ll be returning to it frequently as I try to remember who said this or that insightful thing about weblogs.

Besides, how could I not like a paper that refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto as “infuriating”? :)

(Thanks to John Robb for the link. Also, here’s a PDF version that doesn’t have some of the formatting problems of the HTML rendition.)

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On my first trip with my Garmin navigation system (Model 2610), I got lost within a quarter mile of home.

Well, I didn’t get lost because that doesn’t happen when you have an omniscient navigator. I did manage to make a wrong — unindicated — turn, I think because I was not used to how far away an intersection is when the navigator says that I should turn left in 400 feet. A few seconds after you make the wrong turn, the navigator calmly says that you are “off course” and recalculates the route. As a result, it took me through back streets all the way to my destination (Halley‘s apartment), a route substantially different than the one it plotted for me when I came back and didn’t make wrong turns.

That aside, it’s pretty damn impressive. The pre-turn instructions are timed well. The map zooms appropriately so you can see where you are and where you’re supposed to be going. It would help, though, as Halley pointed out, if it gave you a verbal “Right on!” when you’ve managed to make a turn correctly; some of us (me) are so pathetic that we need the encouragement.

It did route me home in a sub-optimal way. I’m sure the route looked like the fastest on paper, but you really don’t want to go through Harvard Square at 6pm on a Saturday night unless you have to. Also, while it’s legally possible to make a left onto Comm Ave the way it told me to, you’d have to violate the laws of physics to do so, particular the clause that says two bodies can’t occupy the same space at the same time.

I’m still finding it confusing to create routes. It’s a highly compressed UI. But I’m getting better at it.

The weirdest thing is, though, that while it certainly is getting me from A to B better, I now have even less of a sense of where I am. I don’t know how what cities I passed through or what roads I’m on. All I know is that I have to make a right turn in 400 feet.

[Episode 1. Episode 2.]

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