Money is not the way to motivate

(((Ayn Rand is wrong; more money does not lead to better performance in skilled work; autonomy, mastery, and making a contribution matter more.)))

American-style capitalism, particularly as it is instantiated in IP laws (see especially the DMCA), operates on the basic assumption that innovation only happens with the promise of a financial payoff. Never mind that money did not motivate Einstein to work out relativity, or Oppenheimer to develop the bomb. Why is it that we think the people who really do everything for money (if there even are such people) are the people we want making decisions?

In any case, Dan Pink has a really interesting, very short talk (animated by RSA), in which he makes the case that, when you put enough money on the table that work is no longer about money (a point you reach fairly quickly), then the other factors matter more: autonomy, mastery, and contributing to something bigger than yourself. I don't generally go in for the sort of stuff that Pink does, but there's something really interesting about this when I think of it in terms of those of us in academics. Specifically, we get scared and angry about financial insecurity; we do things often for the express purpose of getting more money, but that doesn't mean we do it completely or entirely well; we get frustrated at how undervalued we are by society, when no one expects doctors to work for peanuts, but we're supposed to because we "believe" in what we're doing. But the truth is, we keep doing it. For some of us, it's partly because we have no options. But I think Pink's analysis gets at the heart of the frustration of teachers when people who aren't us start trying to tell us how to do our jobs, as if our jobs are the kind of menial labor where an increase in pay would improve performance, but instead of increasing our pay, they take away our autonomy (teach these things, teach them this way), our mastery (no one *needs* mastery like you have, certainly not your students, and by the way, you're not any good at it and we're not going to pay you either money or respect for extending and maintaining your mastery), and our contributions (we in the humanities are a smaller and smaller and smaller part of even ostensibly "liberal" education, because we are not "practical" in that narrow utilitarian way).

If people want better schools, and I'm betting this applies in some way to K-12 also, stop telling us how to do our jobs. Stop making us feel incompetent or lazy for wanting some control over what we do, especially when you're going to hold us responsible for it. Stop treating education like a factory whose output is functional, healthy, normalized, trained-for-the-workforce-but-also-fully-actualized people. Not only are these contradictory sorts of goals, but people are not factory outputs, not widgets, not burgers, and not the customers who ordered the burgers or buy the widgets. Analogies of liberal education (which is to be distinguished from job training) to manufacturing or service utterly obscure the truly human aspects of the process.

And they only make us hate our jobs more, because it's not what we signed up for. It's not what we spent years in grad school for. And it's not what many of us are still paying off thousands of dollars of debt to have gotten.

Activist Judges Threaten CEO Compensation

(((Richard Posner as "activist judge;" the market is structurally incapable of setting CEO compensation and mutual fund fees; and this according to none other than Posner.)))

Eliot Spitzer (srsly?) has a piece in Slate examining Chicago School free-marketeer Richard Posner's comments in a recent decision:

In an opinion dissenting from the "denial of rehearing en banc"—a sequence of words only a lawyer could love—Posner wrote that there are growing indications that CEO compensation "is excessive because of the feeble incentives of board of directors to police compensation. … Directors are often CEOs of other companies and naturally think that CEOs should be well paid. And often they are picked by the CEO." He then examined the conflicts inherent in the process of CEO compensation determination, concluding that "[c]ompetition ... can't be counted on to solve the problem because the same structure of incentives operates on all large corporations and similar entities, including mutual funds" [emphasis added]. [ . . . ]

In other words, there is precisely no check within the market, because the people deciding how much the CEO should make are the same people who stand to gain if CEOs are highly valued, or -- dare I say it? -- overvalued.

Spitzer continues:

Posner concluded that while judges shouldn't directly review corporate salaries, evidence of unreasonable compensation could be evidence of a breach of fiduciary duty. Yes, these are legal words, but they reveal a remarkable conclusion—courts should take a hard look at private-compensation issues—and demonstrate how far, and rapidly, the world has shifted.

So in other words, the solution is for courts to keep an eye on the situation and to consider compensation and fees in the context of, or as aspects of, the fiduciary duties of governing boards. So here come the activist judges once again threatening the American way of life, at least, if that's understood as the right to marry only someone of the opposite sex, or the right to make as much money as you can legally convince someone to pay you.

Isn't it ironic, though, that the activist judge in this case is Judge Posner? It sounds so Adam Smith, so old school capitalist, so . . . moral. So much of the socialist objection to capitalism is the tendency to socialize costs while privatizing profits (see the bailout), but here's Posner acknowledging that it's not all about how much money you can make.

The Wikipedia page on the Chicago School quotes this interesting little snippet from Posner: "[the central] meaning of justice, perhaps the most common is – efficiency… [because] in a world of scarce resources waste should be regarded as immoral." We don't have to agree with this conception of justice to see that, in its terms, CEO compensation and mutual fund fees have become essentially wasteful and, hence, immoral. And that the inability of the market to account for this means that the market is, to that extent, inefficient and, well, yeah: immoral.

Michael Perelman on the Bubble and the Bailout

(((Nice rant; physicists can't make something out of nothing, but financial whiz-kids keep trying, and the rest of us pay when they fail; all that is solid melts into air.)))

Michael Perelman has a great, succinct rant on the sorry, avoidable mess we're in.

Skilled physicists do not know how to take nothing and turn it into matter and antimatter, but finance behaves as if it had the capacity to do something similar. Imagine a simple market economy about to create a bubble. I want to tell the story of this bubble, only to put the current, crazy stimulus package into perspective.

Somebody says to me they have a piece of paper worth $1 million. I can buy for half the price. I borrow the money to cover most of the cost. People are willing to lend me the money confident in the belief that my paper will increase in value. Other people are engaging in the same transaction, spreading confidence that these papers are now increasing in value, say to $600,000.

The seller of the paper now has a half-million dollars, having given up nothing but blank piece of paper. I have a capital gain of hundred thousand dollars. My lenders have a credit with a half-million dollars. We are all better off, even though nothing has been produced. [snip]

At some point, people realize that this paper is nothing more than a blank sheet of writing paper. The bubble may have stimulated some investment that is capable of producing real economic benefits, but mostly it has induced people to consume and commit themselves to pay back debts.

There Is Only One World

(((Alain Badiou on what it means to be communist today, the necessity for courage, a distillation of a communist "hypothesis" in the form less of a manifesto proper (communism already has one) but maybe a sort of post-manifesto?, communism is not properly speaking utopian (or religious for that matter :-))))

From a Badiou essay mainly about Sarkozy in the New Left Review:

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state.

Note that "state" is used here in a historically specified sense, but understood this way, communism is surely an essentially contra-statist idea, a reaction to (and against) the state-formation as a mechanism of oppression and repression, which it can hardly not be, to greater or lesser degrees. Of course, communism has become bound up with statism even more than Nazism (an expressly statist ideology), for reasons that require no explanation. The question before is us how to proceed in the world as communists while leaving behind (we might say, negating, in that technical sense of Badiou's) the statist/party politics of the 20th century. That's the challenge, and it is of course both a theoretical and a practical challenge, a universal and a local challenge (how can it possibly be one and not at the same time the other?). So what we set ourselves is not the proverbial ideologue's task (to figure out what is wrong with the world while maintaining our theory), but the goal of rethinking the theory and the practice together. Again, what does it mean to do anything else? What we DO maintain is the idea, the hypothesis, that another world is possible; indeed, that one world is possible.

The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the ‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improving its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable—within the ideological sphere.

What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of ‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of globalization is a sham.

We maintain the idea of one world against a contradictory capitalist idea of division deserved and unification deferred. Capitalism, liberalism, insists that it is the best way to achieve the goal of one world, despite all the evidence to the contrary, but also despite a hypothesis that insists that such class divisions as there are, are the fault of the world—lazy people who don't work hard enough or at all, for example, and so do not deserve to live in the upper classes, if they deserve to live at all—and at the very same time the very meting out of justice according to the hypothesis. Extraordinarily, capitalism (usually, I think, by means of economic growth) is both supposed to spread the wealth to everyone and at the same time (by means of its meritocratic logic) to redistribute wealth from the undeserving (the sign of whose moral bankruptcy is their very poverty) to the deserving (the sign of whose moral superiority is their very wealth).

In its compassionate, liberal moments, it recognizes the falsity of that claim, but insists instead that, in Thatcher's words, there is no alternative, or at least no democratic alternative, no alternative compatible with the idea of the individual. But I've run out of the steam right now to respond to that. So go read the essay. Maybe, probably, I will take it up soon. But surely we can understand that the constitution of identity under capitalism is woefully underformed and binds us each to our several worlds, worlds in which our identity is often already constituted for us, but that even when we participate, we do so in the only way we can in a world of competing worlds: we pick a world.

Rob "Mr. Ironic" Riggle

(((Rob Riggle; The Daily Show; Budweiser; Advertisements; Shilling; Major brewer horse-hockey)))

Okay, I remember Budweiser being the only brand I knew to brag in a TV advertisement about the quality of the rice they put in their beer. Unfortunately, that spot seems not to be available on YouTube, unlike some of the Rob Riggle ads I'm about to bitch about. I just saw on CrookedTimber, of all places, a baroque defense of the use of rice in beer, one point of which was that Sapporo and Kirin do it, too . . . riiiight, the Japanese putting rice in something; that's crazy!

Anyway, here's Rob Riggle shilling for Bud. Okay, never mind that no other Daily Show "Senior Correspondent" of anything has to my recollection done a beer ad, or a car ad, or whatever. Forget also that here was right in the middle of the writer's strike doing just fine, thanks to our friends at Anheuser-Busch.

All of that I noted. But whatever. We can let that go.

It was when, in one of said ads, he made this bizarre and misleading claim that the dark colors of certain "foreign" beers can "mask imperfections." Whereas Bud, since you could get a rainbow out of it as if it were a prism, is clearly . . . what? The ad never says. Perfect? Not imperfect? Fucking awesome?

So basically, the argument is two-fold. First, you shouldn't trust a foreign beer. Nice work, Ironic Rob, whose irony comes full circle in an ad like that. Second, don't trust beers that are "too" dark, because they're, you know, shady. Dark. Deceptive. Trying to trick you with their darkness. Because, you know, dark malts are used in beers to hide flaws. That's why I always used dark malts in my brewing. It had nothing to do with the fact that I was making a porter or a stout. I was afraid of screwing up my porter or stout, so, yeah, dark malts.

God I hate capitalism. Yeah, blah blah progressive blah blah Marx thought so too blah blah. But how can anyone with a good conscience do this? And frankly, how can Jon Stewart watch it and still employ Rob Riggle? Maybe he's under contract or something. But at least I'm not the only one who thinks these ads are crap.

Quote of the Day: Be Happy in Your Work!

(((That's right, I said "bourgeois;" moralizing about how menial labor can be fulfilling to the individual in an individual way is crap whichever way you cut it, a classic Gramscian hegemonic move, but here I think the target is the upper classes)))

I clicked a link today to a Forbes story on airlines and got this at the top of the splash screen:

"No task is so humble that it does not offer an outlet for individuality."
-William Feather

And all I could wonder was how pushing a broom offers an outlet for individuality, particularly if it is to be undertaken with Fordian efficiency. Anything that offers an outlet for individuality will be inefficient at some level, unless you want to make the twisted argument that machine-like (not to say machinic) efficiency is an outlet for individuality. Good luck with that one.

Still, it's striking that a moralizing work-ethic platitude like this shows up on Forbes, where one expects the readership is comprised primarily of well-off management types. Is this really about how important their paperwork or spreadsheets are? Is it an exhortation to management to take pride in their own menial labor? One suspects not. It smacks rather of reminding them how they are to think of the work assigned to the people who work for and around them.

Make sure you keep management on the capitalist work ethic program!

Quote of the Day: Coke is Hardwired

(((Coke / Coca-Cola; underlying psychology of soft drinks; advertising; selling caffeine-sugar drinks that are, admittedly, pretty tasty, but, really, who are we kidding that there's a "time" for Coke?)))

Coke's head of marketing Mary Minnick, sez:

We believe there are times or a moment in the day when only a Coke will do.

How can they make such a statement, you wonder? Well, "Ms Minnick said Coke had been studying 'the underlying psychology of beverages' to understand 'why consumers are drinking what, when and where.'" This is the realm of scientific soft-drink studies. It turns out that evolution has favored those species who drank Coke at certain times or moments in the day (which have turned out to be the "right" times), and this explains why, in the underlying psychology of humans, there is a right time to drink Coke. And the science says Coke, by the way, not RC or Diet-Rite or Pepsi "colas."

Stay tuned for further developments. Speaking for myself, I'm pretty sure there are times and moments in the day when only a Guinness will do. Indeed, that might be pretty much all day . . . except for the Coke parts, I guess.

Ms. Minnick did not say but surely would have, given the opportunity, that for all those other times and moments, there is Dasani. And PowerAde. And Sprite. And don't forget Diet Coke and Coke Zero. They're working on a gcal calendar that you can subscribe to, once they've got all the moments in the day figured out. Of course, it'll be wrong because it's not Guinness, but whatever.

Quote of the Day: True Love Is Dead, Dead, Dead

(((Asinine FreeCreditReport.com ads; the whole credit racket; gender, pre-nups, and credit; man's best friend: dogs or FreeCreditReport.com?)))

If we'd gone to FreeCreditReport.com, I'd be a happy bachelor with a dog and a yard.

Run credit checks on potential wives, before they wind up stomping around her parents' basement (doubling as your apartment) while you pick up some extra cash filming an ad for a credit monitoring service that purports to be free but will cost you money when you sign up. Yes, because your real dream girl would never default on a credit card, which is such a character failing that it would be much better to write her off (like bad debt) and buy a house for yourself to share with your dog, since (a) credit is irreparable, and (b) the only alternative to getting a loan for a house is the parents' basement (you can't rent if your spouse has defaulted on a credit card).

There are so many repugnant elements to this ad that I can hardly organize them to spew venom about them: assumptions about the nature of credit and responsibility, about marriage, about finding and working with life partners, and you did notice the way the ad perpetuates gender stereotypes about women spending money they don't have and then pouting around the apartment? And, for that matter, about men and how much better it is to just have a dog and a house than to have to deal with a woman (heh, all you guyz out there no whut i mean, rght?).

Oh, I'm such a stick in the mud. Just read the comments below this post on YouTube.

[word verification for this post: cvedr]

NuTV: Really Actually Truly Actually Real

(((Reality TV; tortured semantic gymnastics; CourtTV-->truTV; the really real and the actually actual; "Truthiness TV" already kind of taken)))

CourtTV is now advertising that they are about to become (on January 1) truTV. Their tagline is, "Not reality. Actuality." Because "reality" TV has forced the notion of "reality" into such contortions that we have to use another word to mean real things.

Er, wait. I mean, we have to use another word to sell the same crap as if it were more real than "reality TV." Right. That's it. "Actuality TV" = "(Really real) reality TV."

What enquiring minds really want to know, though, is when FOX New Channel is going to change their name to "Truthiness TV."

Quote of the Day: Mr. Sodomsky [sic] Knowingly Exposed Himself

(((child pornography; expectations of privacy when you hand over your computer to a third party for maintenance, repair, or hardware installation: specifically, you have none; is the name "Sodomsky" a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?)))

The Pennsylvania Superior Court states, in overturning a ruling on the admissibility of files discovered by a Circuit City tech in the process of installing a DVD burner in the defendant's PC:

Our result in this case is consistent with the weight of authority in this area. If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents...

This is plainly bullshit. As Ars Technica notes:

When you drop your PC off at Circuit City for a hardware upgrade (and you do use Circuit City for all your hardware upgrades, don't you?), you probably don't expect the techs to rummage around your hard drive, dredging up "questionable" files and showing them to law enforcement.

Okay, back up. What happened? In short, Sodomsky (o, to change that name!) left his PC at Circuit City for installation of a burner. The tech installed the hardware, then searched Sodomsky's computer for video files to use for testing the burner. He saw video file names that indicated pornography, and then, as AT puts it, "Richert clicked on one that had listed a male name and an age of 13 or 14 and found a video he believed to contain child pornography." He then called the police, who seized the computer and arrested Sodomsky when he came to pick up the laptop.

In the use of what seems to me an important (and telling) phrase, the Court observes that the tech was testing in a "commercially accepted manner," insisting further that "The employee testing the burner was free to select any video for testing purposes, as appellee had not restricted access to any files. Therefore, Mr. Richert did not engage in a fishing expedition in this case..." (emphasis added).

It could be added that you can burn any file to a DVD, not just movies, so using this logic, the tech was precisely free to search for any file, not just a video file, so he had in effect the run of the customer's computer. So, wait, is it possible that the court's decision is vitiated by its ignorance of basic technological aspects of the case? Declan McCullagh, in the C|Net article linked above, notes that the Court's decision refers to "codecs" as "Code X." Clearly, the court knows next to nothing about either burning DVDs or playing or encoding videos. The end result is a decision that says that computer store installation or repair techs have unfettered access to your computer, and whatever they find is admissible in court against you.

Unless . . . you tell them not to run around your computer for files? Even if this is commercially accepted practice, that by no means makes it either legally acceptable, or widely understood, and it strikes me as very odd for the Court to engage in this kind of reasoning. Why isn't the store required instead to tell you that that's what they'll do and give you an opportunity to establish limits within which they are allowed to work? Or, better still, why don't they have, using this case as an example, a standard process that includes a file on a flash drive, which they can insert in the USB [drive] port and burn straight from that drive to test the burner. No use or viewing of the customer's files is required, nor is any copying of files (beyond necessary drivers, user manuals, help files, etc.).

Finally, it's not at all clear what the rationale is for the tech's selection of a video to use for testing. I would argue that his selection of the particular video was itself a fishing expedition. Why does his spotting a file name that seems to indicate pornography give him the right to open that file? Well, it doesn't, unless you say there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, which position I think I have already established is based on specious, indeed pernicious, reasoning.

Let's think analogically: if I spot what appears to be meth lab equipment through the window of a neighbor's house, do I then have the right to sneak into their house to examine the equipment, then grab it to hand it to the cops if I think (rightly or wrongly) that it actually constitutes meth-manufacturing equipment? Surely not (although I might in that case call the cops and tell them I think my neighbors are making meth, but then we would need more evidence for a warrant than my thinking I saw equipment through the window). Let's go a step further and suppose that my neighbors have given me the key to their house so that I can let them in if they lock themselves out. Have they then given me the right to use those keys if I spot through the window what appears to me (ignorant bugger that I am, never having made meth) to be meth equipment? I don't think so.

The long and the short of it is this. First, there are holes everywhere in the Court's logic. Second, I can't believe I'm only seeing coverage of this right now in C|Net and Ars Technica. Third, um, don't be a stupid lUser when you take your computer to Circuit City: set up passwords and guest access and protect your files, since, let's face facts, it's a little bit like trusting the parking garage attendant with your keys. I mean, do we really think this is the first time this tech or some other has accidentally discovered porn on a customer's computer?

tags technorati : Privacy, Sodomsky, Civil Liberties

Doping: It's not Just for Cyclists Any More

(((Steroids in major sports; naming names; test for real or drop the pretense)))

So George Mitchell released his report, counting 89 drugged players. That's really all? Wouldn't it be interesting to see the trends? But that would take real testing, wouldn't it, to really know the extent of the situation and the way it's changed over time. It's pretty obvious, too, that we can only expect more of it in the future, since high school and college athletes are doping like never before.

The FT notes:

Several players were angered that Mr Mitchell opted to disclose names in his report even though the evidence was based on limited sources.

Of course, there's one easy way to fix that thing about sources, if the players really care about this: genuine, effective testing. Like the way cycling actually busts people and bans them from the sport. Of course, a lot of people would say that doping has destroyed cycling's potential for growth, and that they would be better off if they were more like MLB and just pretended to test. Or gave up on banning performance enhancement altogether. There's that.

But if people are going to talk the talk about how awful steroids are, then they need to walk the walk. I frankly don't believe the athletes are worried about false positives with WADA/UCI-type testing. I believe they're worried about genuine positives.

On the other hand, it's also clearly an arms race: testing vs. advances both in the performance enhancing techniques and in masking their use. One wonders if fighting it like this is really worth the effort.

tags technorati : steroids, Mitchell Report, baseball, politics, sports, cycling

Quote of the Day: Wash That Mitt Right out of Your Hair

(((neuroscience; marketing; politics; mind-reading; electorate of one; appealing to emotion at its most basic, anti-democratic level; the truth about modern political campaigns: they're marketing campaigns, duh)))

"I'm looking at a package of shampoo the same way I'm looking at my next leader."

Turns out some former MIT students have developed some cool stuff that lets them essentially read your mind while you're playing a video game, watching tv ads, or, say, listening to politicians. So the same tricks they use to make a bottle of shampoo appeal to you at a pre-rational, sub-conscious level, they will be using to "help" you "decide" who to vote for.

"Political marketing is a fairly pure analog to commercial marketing," says David Remer, chairman of Lucid Systems. "I'm looking at a package of shampoo the same way I'm looking at my next leader."

Well, I guess that's one way of conceptualizing democratic political processes. Habermas is rolling in his grave, of course, but he's old-fashioned, anyway, and believes a public sphere is something more than the neocapitalist market applied to voting for candidates.

This isn't any better:

Mr. Westen, a clinical psychologist who specializes in personality disorders, is author of a 2007 book "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation." In his studies, which have involved placing partisan voters in brain scanners, he found that when voters look at pictures of candidates or listen to their statements, the regions of the brain associated with emotion are more engaged than the regions governing thought. Instead of detailing a ten-point health-care plan, he says, politicians would be better off talking about health care in moral terms.

Right, because morality should have nothing to do with thought, and neither should voting or the processes of public engagement that lead up to it. It's about truthiness, not truth. Your gut—which is actually located in your brain—already knows the answers; you're just waiting for a politician to say what you already believe.

politics science neuroscience democracy capitalism EmSense

Orkut and Facebook: Social Networking Sites Allergic to Socialism and Communism

(((Attention Conservation: Google, Orkut, Facebook, Censoring political self-identification, Why can't users self-identify as socialist, communist, or anarchist?)))

Looking at the available options for "political view" on Orkut, I find it quite striking that someone is allowed to call themselves "authoritarian" or "very authoritarian" (who would seriously claim such a label, I wonder--surely it could only be neo-Nazis?), but that I can't identify myself as socialist or as communist (or anarchist, for that matter).

Your options at Orkut are these:

no answer
right-conservative
very right-conservative
centrist
left-liberal
very left-liberal
libertarian
very libertarian
authoritarian
very authoritarian
depends
not political

I had already noticed this about Facebook: there is no option for self-identifying as socialist or communist, but it at least lets me pick "other." MySpace, incidentally, has no profile field dedicated to political views or opinions. At least, not that I could find.

Is the issue that Google, like so much of the Western capitalist world, equates socialism, communism, and authoritarianism? It sure looks like the idea is that "authoritarian" and "very authoritarian" are meant to indicate both socialism/communism, on the one hand, and Nazism/fascism, on the other, because according to what most of us learned in high school, fascism and communism are the extremes of right and left that actually come together in a circle (rather than a line) as totalitarian systems opposed to freedom. But this is a facile pseudo-theory barely suitable for pre-teens, and the Google people seem smarter than that, and certainly not inclined to tell me I'm an authoritarian despite my own understanding of my politics, so let's say that's not it.

So, then, am I supposed to identify as "very left-liberal"? Well, my left-liberal comrades would balk at being called socialists or communists, since many Americans think socialists are ipso facto "dirty rotten scoundrels," so why force us onto them? And why make me lump myself in with people who actually probably believe more in the state than I do, despite the fact that they are less "radical" than I am? It strikes me that this would really be a political maneuver to conflate the left wing of the Democratic party with communists and socialists (e.g., Hillary Clinton, who, like Howard Dean before her, is far from communist, but is nevertheless painted with that brush as a means of discrediting her). Whereas neo-Nazis can comfortably call themselves authoritarians and not be confused with conservative right-wing evangelical protestants who vote Republican, for example.

In the end, I suppose I think the most disturbing answer is the correct one: that it is somehow more acceptable in a Western liberal (in the technical sense) democracy to self-identify as "very authoritarian" than to identify as socialist or communist (or as anarchist, by the way). This is deeply distressing, if true, although perhaps Jeanne Kirkpatrick is smiling in her grave.

So I suppose I am stuck with "very left-liberal" as the closest to my position. Likewise, my in-many-respects-mistaken anarchist brothers and sisters are left with "libertarian" if they choose to participate at all.

I suppose I should also acknowledge progress in the apparent fact that, some twenty years after Bush père turned "liberal" into an epithet by calling Michael Dukakis a "card-carrying liberal" (whatever that was actually supposed to mean) in a presidential debate, it's now at least ok to be a "liberal."

tags technorati : socialism, communism, facebook, orkut, liberalism, authoritarianism, fascism, politics, google

Lenin Just Like Hitler and bin Laden

(((Historical Analysis by George W Bush, Heritage Foundation, Bloggers, Freedom, War on Terror, Ignoring Warnings (= Warning Signs?), Communist Revolution, Racist Nazi Rigged Elections, Terrible Cost in Lives and Treasure [sic])))

The world's foremost expert in the history of Communism and Nazism (I know that's redundant), President Bush gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, yesterday, warning us not to forget the warning signs Lenin and Hitler gave of the evil they were determined to perpetrate.

History teaches that underestimating [sic] the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia -- and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews -- and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Um. Treasure? WTF?

But more to the point, look at those two paragraphs. Never mind that Lenin (for all his flaws) was a strident anti-anti-semite. Lenin is accused of having "laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia," while Hitler "explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews" (nice use of the serial comma there, by the way). In which treatises, which Leninist version of Mein Kampf, did Lenin warn us that he wanted to rule a Jew-free world from the Pan-Slavic Fatherland Russia?

Or that he wanted the world to be subject to sharia?

And yet we have to let people get away with this kind of intellectual sloppiness because what really matters is that they all killed lots of people. Therefore, since all evil beings, all bad things, are essentially the same, Hitler and Lenin (and Osama bin Laden) must be essentially the same, which is to say, the opposite of us. The differences between them are subtleties. Nuances of no import.

How do we learn anything from this kind of propagandist pseudo-history?

Dinosaur Music Execs Whine All the Way to the Bank

(((iTunes, Apple, NBC, Jeff Zucker, Music Downloads, Decrepit Music Industry Business Models, Sour Grapes)))

So, according to Terrence Russell, "[NBC Universal executive Jeff Zucker] claimed that Apple has made millions on its iPod 'off the backs of our content' and that the software maker "'destroyed the music business in terms of pricing.'"

Okay, never mind the millions Universal and other companies make off the backs of someone else's creativity. To say that Apple destroyed music pricing when the price of CDs, in stark contrast to the usual trajectory, has actually gone up since they were introduced, and that somehow in spite of that most musicians make diddly on their music. I wonder where all that money's going? Oh, right: into Zucker's pocket. So, Steve Jobs is picking his pocket. And I'm supposed to shed a tear for him?

No, if there's a problem in the business, it's that it's so hard in the first place for good musicians to make a living. But what else is new? Oh, there might be one other problem, and that's that all IP holders -- whether we're talking about music or drugs -- insist legislating their out-dated business models as a way of dealing with technological and other social and economic innovations, instead of, you know, coming up with new business models (aka, "adapting").

So instead of saying, huh, P2P and digital music in general changes the landscape of the business and we have to figure out new ways to make money, and maybe we need to stop gouging our artists (instead of gouging them harder so that they'll hate The Intarwebz more), they dig in their heels and cry foul when they get blown by.

Boo hoo hoo.

tags technorati : music industry, itunes

The Ministry of Truthiness

Wikipedia, that is. And who is the Minister of Truthiness? Why, you are.

It is a sort of dictum of the postmodern left that power is everywhere and everywhere contested. It is tempting at times to emphasize the latter and play down the former. But the recent news about—or, more importantly, from—WikiScanner reminds us that when everyone is anonymous, so are corporate and government agents. At its best (which is to say, when contributors edit entries both honestly and knowledgeably), Wikipedia is an interesting and even important experiment in open source content.

Unfortunately, the reality is much more problematic, in two ways. First, there is the opportunity for governments and corporations (and, frankly, any other organization with a vested interest in an entry, including non-profits organizations and institutions, other political entities, etc. etc.) to manipulate ostensibly "grassroots" information source in a very astroturf-y kind of way.

So, that's the Orwellian part.

But then there's the Tocquevillian part, the part where the truth is what most people believe the truth is. Stephen Colbert, whom we know and love, hits both of these elements in a recent segment: video, transcript.

I don't contribute code to, say, the Linux or BSD codebases. Better programmers than I do that, and I let them do it. Because it makes better code.

*Hint*

tags technorati : wikipedia wikiscanner truthiness politics

The Apotheosis of Spectator Politics

I've said for a long time that Americans were coming to treat politics just like major sports. Draft your Fantasy Congress team of legislators and play along! There is nothing that can't be commodified, even our legislative process! Shoot, it's not just commodified; it's getting to be commoditized.

Sketching an Anti-Economist

[via LBO-talk]

The question arose, what progressive or leftist alternatives are there to the Economist? Leaving aside the question whether one is either necessary or desirable (and these are debatable points, but I have a feeling the answer to both is, "yes"), what options might there be? Suggestions in response included the New Internationalist, the Guardian Weekly/Le Monde Diplomatique combo (which I personally favor), or even BusinessWeek (which has its own pretty serious drawbacks, perhaps most especially its US and economic focus, as opposed to the Economist, which is global in focus, both geographically and conceptually). But this all seemed to me to beg a more fundamental question (herewith the content of the list post):

What would an anti-Economist even look like?

Well, it would have to be the E but not, right? That is, it would have to be global in perspective, synthetic in its approach to news, rigorous in analysis, ruthless in application of principles, and critically reflective wrt those principles. As the organ of the anti-Empire, how can it gain wide readership? Does it need wide readership? Probably it does, first because that's part of the fight, and second, because it needs to make that much money in order to keep going.

I think the Economist is having success in the US in large part because it, well, does news. It's not a political magazine, not a "newsweekly" in the US mold of Time or Newsweek or any of now a half-dozen major newspaper weekly magazines, and doesn't succumb to the need to do stories about Britney Spears. Why does no one on this list argue that Time or Newsweek are good alternatives? Partly because they're crap, but I imagine it's also partly because the US newsweeklies do different things. There are no long or investigative pieces in the E. It's essentially a big newspaper published weekly. You can cruise the week's summaries and the TOC in the E every week and have a sense that you know basically wtf is going on around the world. Then you may not read cover to cover, but you can go read a succinct and generally pretty well written piece on page x. If the E were your only source, then this would be a problem, but it shouldn't be and I'm willing to guess it pretty much never is. The same would go, I would think, for the Anti-E.

So all of this makes me think our comparison with the Guardian Weekly and Le Monde Diplomatique makes pretty good sense, if we could just give them bigger budgets. The International Herald-Tribune is another model of newspaper collaboration going international, and it might be useful, here, except that we want a weekly. Maybe we could add the WSJ and, say, Mother Jones to the pool? With some material taken from the AFP wire? Throw in some independent journalists willing to pitch in for modest but reasonable fees (or even for free???), and you've got a pool of stories--if the relevant ownership is willing to share their material for the project--that an independent editorial board could draw on. Surely the best answer would be for such a publication to have its own staff of well-paid writers, but let's suppose for the moment that the scenario I'm working on is meaningfully more plausible than hiring a full staff for a progressive weekly to rival the Economist.

You would need money for space, a full-time editorial staff (maybe half a dozen people?) and a part-time editorial board (maybe a dozen to two dozen people who would have a genuinely meaningful role to play), money to pay reasonable rates to occasional freelance contributors (say 1-2/week?), and then money to cover printing and distribution costs. Am I forgetting anything? That's presuming that (a) publications like the ones noted above agree to pitch in not only with reprinted material but also (at least ideally) with a writer here and there for original material, (b) that the editorial board is able to spend significant time reviewing material for inclusion and occasionally writing original editorial or other pieces that add value to our weekly beyond reprinting material available elsewhere. And we should keep in mind that we want to break into the E's market, but we also want to grab markets not on the E's radar, so it ought to be cheap, or maybe there would be a program for distributing copies at low or no cost in certain areas or through certain channels.

If this is pie in the sky, which at best it probably is (at worst, it is precisely the opposite of what leftists and progressives ought to be worrying about, but that would be a very different post), then any dream of an anti-Economist is pie in the sky, too.

Anyone got the cash?

tags technorati : Economist, Media, Politics, Economics

CoffeeT00lz.com

I can't possibly be the only person who's had it with the "Coffee Exposed" sponsored Google link that keeps showing up in my Gmail "Web Clips" box. A snap to illustrate, or to jog your memory, depending:



Apparently, there's some "shocking secret" coffee companies don't want me to know, but is it SFW?

There's a not-so-secret I want the makers of coffeefool.com to know: you don't entice me to read your exposé by forcing me to acknowledge in the very link I click that I am a "coffee fool" who's been conned by coffee companies. Thanks for trying to remove the scales from my eyes, but might I suggest a less condescending approach? You sound like all those self-appointed enlighteners of the masses who are more worried about what's allegedly wrong with Kansas than what's wrong with their own message or organizing.

And we all know that allegedly "shocking" secrets almost never deliver, anyway, so I'm doubly put off. And then there's the fact that I've ignored it a million times already, and resent having to ignore it again. But since, like good capitalists, you've purchased a sponsored link, you've taken that choice away from me.

Go the fuck away, already.

tags technorati : coffee, coffeefool.com

Bottled Water and Car Escape Tools

Dave, who has no blog of his own (or I would link to it), and who probably hates me calling him Dave, notes the new top-sellers in the Automotive category at Amazon:


The LifeHammer item page tags the item as a "Hot Deal" at 4cents off (surely it is destined to be the Club of the 2000s), and exhorts us to hurry up and wait for our supplemental insurance policy:

Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.

Hurry, order now and we'll ship this item when it becomes available. You can cancel your order at any time. Your credit card will not be charged until we have shipped your order. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

So, in the absence of quality drinking water, we filter our water and drink it from innumerable plastic bottles (those of us who can afford it), and in the absence of safe bridges, we we will now install LifeHammers in our cars.

What's the answer for terrorists? Oh, right: trust your mechanic.

I can't wait to see if these things become the Club of the 2000s. At least people seem still concerned about keeping their cars clean.

tags technorati : LifeHammer, Minneapolis, Bridge Collapse