Quotulatiousness

January 5, 2012

Firefly MMO may rise from the dead

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

There’s still hope, Browncoat gamers:

While Multiverse, the development platform that was supposed to be the driving force for possible Buffy and Firefly MMOs, suffered a studio shutdown, the source code lives — and has been snatched up by the newly formed Multiverse Foundation. Fortunately for those who were holding out hope for an online version of Joss Whedon’s scifi western, it looks as though this new company wants to pick up where the previous team left off.

Don’t let your hopes soar too high: this is still very far from being a complete product (and the organization’s website is still in deep lorem ipsum marination). It is, however, a sign that there’s still enough life in the fan community for the Joss Whedon properties that it appears viable for someone to take this on.

January 4, 2012

Reason.tv: Ron Paul in Iowa

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:43

Infographics: big, eye-catching … and too often badly misleading

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

Megan McArdle’s year-end plea to stop the Infographic Plague:

If you look at these lovely, lying infographics, you will notice that they tend to have a few things in common:

  1. They are made by random sites without particularly obvious connection to the subject matter. Why is Creditloan.com making an infographic about the hourly workweek?
  2. Those sites, when examined, either have virtually no content at all, or are for things like debt consolidation — industries with low reputation where brand recognition, if it exists at all, is probably mostly negative.
  3. The sources for the data, if they are provided at all, tend to be in very small type at the bottom of the graphic, and instead of easy-to-type names of reports, they provide hard-to-type URLs which basically defeat all but the most determined checkers.
  4. The infographics tend to suggest that SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS HAPPENING IN THE US RIGHT NOW!!! the better to trigger your panic button and get you to spread the bad news BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

The infographics are being used to get unwitting bloggers to drive up their google search rankings. When they get a link from Forbes, or a blogger like Andrew Sullivan — who is like Patient Zero for many of these infographics — Google thinks they must be providing valuable information. Infographics are so good at getting this kind of attention that web marketing people spend a lot of time writing articles about how you can use them to boost your SEO (search engine optimization).

After a hopeful week, a disappointing finish in Iowa

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Brian Doherty was covering the Iowa Caucuses for Hit & Run:

As you saw below here on Hit and Run, despite some pretty widespread hope and anticipation from both the media (a week ago and earlier tonight) and a lot of his eager fans and grassroots volunteers (until late tonight), Ron Paul failed to win, or even come in second. This was not, it seems (at least the failure to win part) a huge surprise to more higher-level campaign staff.

As a Ron Paul admirer since 1988, having the sweet hope of victory held over my head for a moment led to a frustrating and dispiriting night. But — while all discussions of “moods of the room” are suspect, based, as they must be, on long talks with what by necessity will be a narrow unscientific sampling of the room — I seemed to be perhaps the most bummed person at the Paul “victory party.” Even the many Iowans who started today expecting a win are still satisfied and eager footsoldiers in an ongoing Ron Paul Revolution.

Before the results poured in, I sat in on the caucus process in Precinct 5 in Ankeny, held in a high school gym about a mile from Paul’s state HQ. More than 200 people showed up. I didn’t stay long enough to see the official count. But the GOP precinct organizer — Ron Paul supporter Ross Witt — had the various candidates’ fans bunch up in separate parts of the gym to pick their spokespeople, vote watchers, and potential delegate candidates. When that happened, Paul’s crowd was the largest (and contained the only African-American in the room).

While I was sorry to see Ron Paul not win, I was much more alarmed at who came in second a bare handful of votes behind Romney. Santorum’s surge (yes, I know . . . “that’s disgusting”) puts the most authoritarian candidate back into the race in a big way. It might have been “Anyone But Romney” up to now, but I’d far prefer Romney get the nomination than quasi-totalitarian Santorum.

Yesterday on Twitter, there was a brief attempt to add a new disqualifier to Santorum’s name (aside from Dan Savage’s anal sex neologism) by tagging lots of Santorum-mentions with the hashtag #sexdungeon. It was amusing, but I suspect the folks who are most likely to vote for Santorum don’t have Twitter accounts.

January 2, 2012

Presenting the good news as bad news, New York Times-style

Filed under: Africa, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

Walter Russell Mead has a textbook example of finding the cloud to every silver lining in the pages of the New York Times:

A worthless desert in South Africa, largely inhabited by drought-stricken sheep and a handful of marginal farmers, turns out to contain rich natural gas reserves that could bring a new wave of economic growth to South Africa and provide huge numbers of well paying jobs for poorly educated workers.

The New York Times, of course, is wringing its elegantly manicured hands. And why not? The soil of the Karoo desert is “fragile,” and the extraction of the natural gas will involve fracking. What will happen to the sheep?

The Times finds a local farmer who is worried about exactly that.

    “If our government lets these companies touch even a drop of our water,” [the farmer] said, “we’re ruined.”

Ruined! By wicked natural gas companies feeding the world’s hydrocarbon addiction. The farmer in question has a herd of 1400 sheep. (It was 2000 last year before a drought forced the slaughter of 600.) One somehow suspects that the farmer will find some other way to make money when the district becomes a major gas producing center. And, worst case, roughnecks eat a lot of meat.

That the Times chooses the lonesome shepherd to lead off one of the best good news stories around these days speaks volumes about the gloomy Gus mindset at the Paper of Record. Why can’t this be a good news story? Will a gas boom save South African democracy, for example? Will new economic opportunities transform the lives of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of poor black South Africans? Will the huge increase in South Africa’s natural gas supply reduce the country’s carbon footprint? Is there anything in the geology to suggest that other poverty stricken parts of Africa might also be similarly blessed? How are local leaders planning the spend the windfall: better schools? better hospitals?

January 1, 2012

Kathy Shaidle on overrated comedians

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:30

Kathy is in her normal take-no-prisoners mode over heroic liberal comedians:

Yeah, I’m a heretic. I also fell asleep during Star Wars.

Bruce Springsteen? Pompous blowhard.

The Godfather? Long stretches of beige nothingness.

And The Who are better than The Beatles.

(Hell, I prefer The Monkees to The Beatles…)

But here’s the first “pop culture” contrarianism I’m a teensy bit afraid to confess in public:

George Carlin never made me laugh.

I started thinking about overrated liberal comedians this week, when news broke that a fawning, big budget Smothers Brothers biopic is in development. Great: we’re now facing months of witless hagiography about these two “daring, transgressive, brave” performers, and the rest of the progressive comedy pantheon of heroic martyrs.

Who weren’t funny.

OK, so you think they’re funny. Maybe you’ll be driven to call me lots of mostly unimaginative names in the comments below. But the people I’m about to discuss rarely, if ever, made me laugh. Personally. That’s my definition of “funny.”

Your mileage will vary.

She’s certainly right about The Godfather, The Who, The Beatles, and The Monkees. My friends were much more into George Carlin’s humour than I was (I rather liked his late-career talk on the insanity of “saving the planet”, but generally didn’t listen to him).

The “progressive” view of Ron Paul

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Glenn Greenwald on how the Ron Paul campaign is viewed from the other side:

That’s fairly remarkable: here’s the Publisher of The Nation praising Ron Paul not on ancillary political topics but central ones (“ending preemptive wars & challenging bipartisan elite consensus” on foreign policy), and going even further and expressing general happiness that he’s in the presidential race. Despite this observation, Katrina vanden Heuvel — needless to say — does not support and will never vote for Ron Paul (indeed, in subsequent tweets, she condemned his newsletters as “despicable”). But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

December 31, 2011

Don’t mess with Firefly (or the right to free speech)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

December 30, 2011

Revolution driven by social media? How 16th Century . . .

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

The Economist shows that there’s nothing new in social media as a catalyst for change:

It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.

That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.

Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.

Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks — what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.

December 28, 2011

Dan Savage not worried about anti-gay stance in Ron Paul’s newsletters

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The man who perhaps single-handedly saved us from a Santorum presidency doesn’t think the anti-gay comments in Ron Paul’s newsletters matter:

In 2011, the press has discovered — for the third time — the newsletters Paul sold in the years between his failed 1984 Senate bid and his congressional comeback in 1996. They reveal Paul (or his ghostwriter) to be a scared cynic with paranoid thoughts about blacks, gays, and Israel. The comments about black men — including their supposed “criminal” tendencies — have attracted wide attention. But the newsletters were often just as vitriolic about gay people, saying they were “far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” A “gay lobby” suppressed the truth about AIDS, the newsletters claimed. “I miss the closet,” groaned Paul-or-his-ghost.

Republicans aren’t supposed to survive comments like that. Gay activists have “glitter-bombed” Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, showering them with sparkles to shame them for their anti-gay rights stances. After Rick Santorum compared gay sex to “man on dog” sex, Dan Savage told fans to Google-bomb “Santorum,” propagating the idea that it’s a Latin-sounding word for “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.” That was six years ago. Santorum still gets humiliating questions about it.

Nobody grills Paul about this stuff. When I asked Savage about the ugly comments in old Paul Survival Reports, he shrugged them off. “Ron Paul can have the closet,” he said. “He might miss it, but we sure don’t. Maybe there’s room in there for his old newsletters?”

There is no comparing Paul and Santorum, said Savage, because Paul is a leave-us-alone libertarian. “Ron is older than my father, far less toxic than Santorum, and, as he isn’t beloved of religious conservatives, he isn’t out there stoking the hatreds of our social and political enemies,” he explained. “And Ron may not like gay people, and may not want to hang out with us or use our toilets, but he’s content to leave us the fuck alone and recognizes that gay citizens are entitled to the same rights as all other citizens. Santorum, on the other hand, believes that his bigotry must be given the force of law. That’s an important difference.”

Uncovering the historical definition of “the press”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

Elizabeth sent me a link to this Dan Smyth post on what the US Founding Fathers understood the term “the press” to mean:

If the Founders wanted to protect in particular who today we call media, reporters, etc. with “freedom of…the press,” then surely the Founders could have written, for example, “freedom of … journalists” or “freedom of … newsmongers.”

Volokh describes how, with no significant exceptions, prominent writers the Founders often cited, including William Blackstone, Jean-Louis De Lolme, and George Tucker, connected press freedom with the right of every “freeman,” “citizen,” or “individual” to “write,” “print,” or “publish” his or her thoughts. This fact implies the Founders didn’t intend the press clause to protect the existing or future collection of “newsmongers” per se but rather to recognize the right of any person (or “freeman”) to use printing presses (Until 1694, England imposed licenses on publications, which the Founders abhorred). James Madison’s following first draft of the Bill of Rights’ speech/press clauses highlights this point: “The people [emphasis added] shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” According to Johnson’s dictionary, “people” had such definitions as “a nation,” “men, or per[s]ons in general,” and “the commonality.”

Volokh provides much more evidence for the press clause’s “the press” being the printing press, particularly his evaluations of U.S. court cases from the Founding to 2011 that demonstrate judges have consistently interpreted the press clause as protecting any individuals who use the printing press, including newspaper advertisers and authors of letters to the editor, pamphlets, and books. Volokh describes how it was only the 1970s when some lower courts began interpreting the press clause’s “the press” to be a collection of journalists and not the printing press as a technology.

December 27, 2011

Finding the motivations for those scary “libertarian” folk

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Jacob Sullum on a recent New York Times article that tried to define the typical Ron Paul supporter (and whether Ron Paul is responsible for their views):

Why does the Times think it is relevant to note that libertarians who focus on economic freedom are “backed to some degree by wealthy interests”? Isn’t that true of pretty much every political movement and organization, including Marxism and the Democratic Party? The implication seems to be that defenders of economic freedom are carrying water for special interests, who are in it only for the money.

Weirdly, the Times locates the scary militants in the part of the libertarian movement that focuses on “personal liberty,” which includes not only the rights explicitly protected by the Constitution (such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures) but also such unspecified rights as freedom to engage in consensual sexual relationships, to marry people of either sex, to bet on games of chance, and to ingest psychoactive substances (or even raw milk). So according to the Times, the right-wing extremists attracted to Paul are a tolerant, cosmopolitan group that nevertheless harbors odious views about blacks, Jews, and gay people. Also note that the Times, perhaps unintentionally, says the Constitution “at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.” All the more reason to be wary of defending this radical document.

In short, the libertarian movement consists of two parts: 1) self-interested tycoons seeking low taxes and minimal regulation in the name of economic freedom and 2) crazy right-wingers who take the Constitution too seriously and worry about personal freedom. I always thought the distinguishing feature of libertarianism was defending both economic and personal liberty, based on the insight that they are two manifestations of the same thing. But what do I know? I did not realize that the rule of law was a concept invented by F.A. Hayek until the Times explained it to me.

The plight of Japan’s “herbivore men”

Filed under: Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Think you had it tough as a teen? It’s not a good time to be a teenage boy in Japan:

It’s not easy being a young man in Japan today. Every few months sees the release of a new set of figures, stats and stories trumpeting the same meme: today’s Japanese men are unmanly — and worse, they don’t seem bothered by it.

Tagged in the domestic media over the past few years as hikikomori (socially withdrawn boys), soshoku danshi (grass-eating/herbivore men, uninterested in meat, fleshly sex and physical or workplace competition), or just generally feckless, Japan’s Y-chromosomed youth today elicit shrugs of “why?”, followed by heaving sighs of disappointment from their postwar elders and members of the opposite sex. With the country’s economy stagnant at best, its geopolitical foothold rapidly slipping into the crevice between China and the United States, and its northeast coastline still struggling with the aftermath of disaster and an ongoing nuclear crisis, the reaction to a failure of Japan’s men to take the reins, even symbolically, has evolved from whispers of curiosity to charges of incompetence.

[. . .]

Why the generational malaise and indifference to sex? Theories abound. The most provocative to me, a Japanese-American and longtime Tokyo resident, is that Japanese women have become stronger socially and economically at the very same time that Japanese men have become more mole-ish and fully absorbed in virtual worlds, satiated by the very technological wizardry their forebears foisted upon them, and even preferring it to reality. “I don’t like real women,” one bloke superciliously sniffed on Japan’s 2channel, the world’s largest and most active internet bulletin board site. “They’re too picky nowadays. I’d much rather have a virtual girlfriend.”

[. . .]

The phrase “herbivore men” was coined by a female Japanese journalist in 2006. By 2009, the Japanese male’s lack of ambition, sexually or otherwise, had become a media meme. With the latest reports in Japan, of men who can’t get it up for real women who won’t get married or have kids, the mutual gender-chill phenomenon has become mainstream. It may be the future, but is it really Japanese?

“Maybe we’re just advanced human beings,” says a Japanese friend of mine over dinner this week in Tokyo, who won’t let me use her real name. She is an attractive, 40-something editor at one of Japan’s premier fashion magazines, and she is still single. “Maybe,” she adds, “we’ve learned how to service ourselves.”

December 26, 2011

Brian Doherty doesn’t think the Ron Paul newsletters matter very much

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Over at Hit & Run, Brian Doherty outlines why he doesn’t think the Ron Paul Newsletter kerfuffle matters:

Many voices whose accomplishments I otherwise respect think that the fact Ron Paul had associates who, for a brief period over a decade in the past, wrote some mean-spirited, nasty, and dumb stuff rooted in race and sexual orientation under his name is the most important thing to discuss about Ron Paul, and that the public condemnation and humiliation of those supposedly responsible is the most important public policy issue surrounding Paul’s campaign now.

Part of this seems to be based on a so-far completely imagined belief that this particular repetition of the newsletter story cycle is somehow destroying Ron Paul’s campaign and that such name-naming or “grappling with the past” is necessary to save that campaign. While this may become true (and the consistent harping on and reminding people of it can’t help), there’s no evidence for it yet; Paul’s still gaining in polls. Note this Fox story headlined “Newsletters, Statements Cause Campaign Problems for Ron Paul” where the only voices they can find who actually thinks it’s an important issue belong to Paul’s opponent Newt Gingrich and GOP apparatchik Karl Rove and National Review editor Rich Lowry (whose own publication’s history has worse to answer to in terms of racial insensitivity combined with actual expressed support for legal actions against the rights of African-Americans, which leads Paul fans to believe that none of this has to do with actual objections to anyone with connections to past awful race-based comments, but with scuttling what is good about the Ron Paul campaign).

[. . .]

By any standard of political or moral judgment that I can respect, that is what is important about Ron Paul and the story of Ron Paul now. And from my five years of experience reporting on the Ron Paul movement that’s arisen since 2007, both for Reason and for my forthcoming book, I can assure any old libertarian worried about old libertarian movement business that it is the good things about Ron Paul that have won him the support and love he has won, and that this old business is irrelevant to them, and thus irrelevant to the actual important political and cultural story about Ron Paul now.

Delingpole: “I wouldn’t write a rude song about Islam if you paid me a million quid”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

James Delingpole is upset with the easy laughs that comedians can get for poking fun at Christianity, yet the same comic geniuses are terrified to offend the equally parody-worthy Islam — and for good reason. Write and perform a ditty about Jesus and you’re the toast of the town and get invited to all the late-night TV talk shows. Do something remotely the same on the topic of Mohammed and get a set of real death-threats and the constant need to check under your car for explosives:

Did you hear the song Aussie comic Tim Minchin wrote savagely satirising Islam for Channel 4’s Eid special? No, I didn’t either. It didn’t happen and it never would happen: first because no broadcast station in its right mind would ever allow it; second because I don’t believe that Minchin would be stupid enough to write it.

And I’m not calling Minchin out for physical cowardice on this issue. From the Danish cartoons to the Paris bombing, we’ve seen far too many cases of artists testing the right to free speech — only to find that where certain religions are concerned, such matters are strictly verboten. But what I am definitely accusing him of is hypocrisy and moral cowardice, as regards the banned song he wrote for a Jonathan Ross Christmas special likening Jesus to a blood-drinking zombie.

[. . .]

Again, let me stress, this isn’t a plea to Minchin to acquire set of cojones and commit suicide through the medium of satire. I wouldn’t write a rude song about Islam if you paid me a million quid. Or even ten million. But what I equally wouldn’t do is compromise my integrity by laying heavily into one soft-target religion while treating a rival one, far more ripe for satire, with kid gloves. To do so would, I think, make me look a hypocrite and a fraud.

Update, 27 December: Sorry, fixed the broken link. Didn’t realize it wasn’t working properly until now.

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