Politics

Politically, I’m very liberal — about as far left as one can go without sliding into Libertarianism.

Not in Our Name

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An open letter that I think deserves a read and serious consideration has been posted here.

There is a deadly trajectory to the events of the past months that must be seen for what it is and resisted. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. President Bush has declared: “You’re either with us or against us.” Here is our answer: We refuse to allow you to speak for all the American people. We will not give up our right to question. We will not hand over our consciences in return for a hollow promise of safety. We say not in our name. We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare. We extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies; we will show our solidarity in word and deed.

(via Wil)

This is where it starts

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Constitution? Rights? What are you talking about? Those don’t exist in the USA anymore — we think you’re a bad guy (or have the potential to be a bad guy, or maybe you just look like a bad guy), therefore, we’re going to do whatever we want. We can detain you at will, only admit it to the public when it serves our best interest (by distracting from political issues we don’t like with the scare of a “dirty bomb”), with no due process, even though you’re a US citizen.

How long before this starts happening to people for reasons that aren’t linked in some way to this nebulous “War on Terror” that seems to be doing an amazingly effective job of brainwashing the American public? After all, for the most part, we seem to be accepting this instance easily enough — after all, he might be a terrorist! But what about the next person? Or the next? We did it to this guy, so now we can do it to others.

Grumble grumble grumble…. I’m a little too steamed (and tired) to go any further with this and stay coherent — but the direction things are going really does scare me.

Americans are never this nice

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I think this’ll be my last post for tonight…though, with me, you never know. I heard about this while we had the radio at work on to the Lionel Show, one of the talk shows on The Buzz, a local talk-radio station.

The original story was from the New York Times — “Where 9/11 News Is Late, but Aid Is Swift” (as the NYT site requires registration, and many people would rather not do that, I’ll include the article at the end of this post also). Basically, an African Masai tribesman who was visiting New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks went back to his tribe and, as they’re fairly cut off from the world, explained to them what had happened and how it had affected life here in America.

The tribe, then, felt that they wanted to do something to help — and so they took donations from members of the tribe, and are donating 14 head of cattle to the United States of America! I was just amazed at this — this is a fairly small tribe (the article mentions that a catastrophe that killed 3,000 people would be enough to wipe out their entire tribe) — 14 cattle is, by their standards, an amazing amount of wealth to give up freely! I’m not exactly sure how it would translate to our standards…possibly roughly equivalent to donating Texas to another country. Or Bill Gates. Whichever is worth more.

Anyway, I just thought it was one of the neatest stories I’d read in a long time, and while it may be incredibly bitter and jaded, I really can’t see us in the US doing anything like that. A shame, really — good to know that there are still some places in the world that seem to have their priorities straight.

Read more

That’s icky

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I’m actually in the midst of making an entry right now, but I had to say something about this. I’m currently using the Opera webbrowser, which uses built-in banner advertising to generate revenue to keep the software free. I can live with that, as Opera is a very good web browser (and when I have the money, I can purchase it to get rid of the banner), but the banner I’m currently getting is really annoying me.

Rather than car, credit, or casino ads, I’m currently getting a banner that starts with a picture of the American flag. The next frame says, “Own a piece of history…”, and the third frame offers, “Own a plaque made with the metal from the World Trade Center”. It then closes with, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET”.

Part of me knew that there would be people capitalizing on the tragedy as fast as they could — and, true to form, postcards featuring the WTC became hot items within hours after the attacks — but this one just makes my skin crawl. Personally, I think stooping to this level of crass commercialism and exploitation is just horrendous.

Guess I wouldn’t make it in the advertising world, huh?

Incidentally, this is the page that you get when you click on the banner, just in case you’re curious enough to check.

Eugenics wars

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I’m trying to figure out what surprises me more — that someone in the UK is writing an article that appears to be seriously promoting eugenics in the near future, or that in the resulting MeFi discussion nobody thought to mention the Eugenics Wars of the early 1990’s, leading to Khan Noonien Singh‘s bid for world power in 1992, and his departure with a band of followers in 1996. Or maybe I’m just a big Star Trek geek.

This CBDPTA bill is scary

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Just in case folks haven’t figured out how sweeping the Hollings-Feinstein bill, aka CBDTPA is, well, keep reading.

The CBDTPA says that if I were to write and sell this BASIC program…

10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT A$

…after the regulations take effect, I would be guilty of a federal felony. That’s up to five years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine. Distributing my two-line application without charging for it, either via handing out floppies or by posting it on a website would be at least a civil offense and, depending on the circumstances, a crime as well.

It’s no joke. CBDTPA regulates ‘any hardware or software that reproduces copyrighted works in digital form.’ My program above does that, especially if my BASIC interpreter permits arbitrarily long strings.

— Declan McCullagh, in ‘CBDTPA bans everything from two-line BASIC programs to PCs’

The rest of the article is well worth reading, also. This bill is just plain scary.

I hate your politics!

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Yeah, well I hate your politics, too! Beautifully written, very funny, and very true.

Liberals: …Liberals are politically able to have all sorts of freaky mammal sex but typically don’t; good liberal foreplay is a permission slip and three layers of impermeable barriers. The only vaguely liberal person we know of who seemed to enjoy sex in the last 30 years is Clinton, and look what he got out of it….

Conservatives: …Conservatives don’t actually bother to spend time with people who are not conservative, and thus become confused and irritable when people disagree with them; fundamentally can’t see how that’s even possible, which shows an almost charming intellectual naivete….

Libertarians: …Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it…. Blissfully clueless that Libertarianism is just great as long as it doesn’t actually involve real live humans….