Politics

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

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….

The American brand

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Having conflicting views about the U.S. — admiring its creativity, for instance, but resenting its double standards — doesn’t mean you are ‘mixed up,’ to use Mr Olins’ phrase, it means you have been paying attention.

— Naomi Klein, in an article on the branding of America, something that in many ways has far too many overtones of Wag the Dog for me to be entirely comfortable with.