Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2011

Making light: are LED flashlights now “tacticool”?

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Chris Dumm has a bit of fun reviewing an LED flashlight:

Remember back when Mag-lite was the last word in aircraft-grade aluminum illumination? Those old incandescent Mag-Lites weren’t any brighter than ordinary flashlights, but their indestructible machined-aluminum bodies made them the choice of police, private security, Elvis and burglars. They were “tacticool” before people had a chance to learn to hate that word. The longer D-cell Mag-lites resembled aluminum billy clubs; they delivered a more devastating blow than any Monadnock PR-24 police baton ever could. Despite their size and weight, however, they still weren’t all that bright.

Then new technology arrived in the form of noble gas (Xenon bulbs) and heavy metal (Lithium batteries). SureFire and Streamlight built flashlights bright enough to temporarily blind and disorient a target without having to bash his brains in with five D-cell batteries wrapped in an aluminum Little League bat. And they were tough enough to drown, drop and attach to the hardest-kicking riot shotguns in the SWAT unit’s arsenal without fizzling out at the worst possible moment.

The new flashlights were rugged, dazzlingly bright and incredibly compact. Their only drawbacks: astronomical prices (for lights, bulbs, and batteries) and battery run-times of one hour or less. They quickly became the law enforcement standard, until LED technology took the lead and never looked back.

May 14, 2011

QotD: The Liberal Party as Canada’s “Skull-and-Bones Society”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:19

John Manley strikes me as a shining example of one of the great tragedies of the Liberal Party of Canada: a fine public servant blessed with good sense, but subsumed by the weird rituals of that odd cult. Over the years I’ve been shocked at how many really smart, well-meaning ex-Liberals I’ve met who left the party, and public service, because their skills and talent go thrown under the bus at some point by those hidden party puppet-masters we hear so much about, but so rarely show themselves (I assume they’re in some underground fortress in Rosedale) because it was what the party required.

Not being a Central Canadian lawyer, I don’t think I can ever understand the sort of strange grip the Liberal party in its prime once seemed to have on people, but it certainly appeared like it was, for a very long time, some kind of skull-and-bones society, promising Canada’s ambitious, young, bright men and women a route to power, but requiring their allegiance till death. I consider sharp, well-meaning guys like Manley, or former Indian Affairs minister Bob Nault, victims of a game they were obliged to play in order to achieve what they wanted. Until the Liberal party’s recent conversion into a yawning, smoldering crater, if you wanted to make an impact in Canada, especially through government, you’d be best to sell your soul to the Trudeausmen — which, ironically, often meant submitting principle, and logic, to the greater good of the party. I can see why Manley had to go along with the ritual, and retain his silence about the peculiar and problematic universe of mini-lobby groups that had grown like weeds within the party itself. Perhaps, like a befuddled Moonie, he couldn’t even see the problems until he broke free of the party’s hold. But then again, it’s also hard to sound credible complaining about structural problems in your party when it keeps winning election after election after election.

Kevin Libin, “Where was John Manley when the Liberals needed him?”, National Post, 2011-05-13

May 5, 2011

Confused about the details of the Bin Laden raid? So’s the White House

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

Jon sent me this link which is a systematic attempt to draw together all the information/misinformation/disinformation about the Abbotabad raid:

Usually when governments use misinformation, they use it to make themselves look good. The Obama Administration gets points for originality, insofar as it’s been using disinformation and misinformation to make itself look arbitrary, unlawful, helpless and stupid. Here’s jj’s great summary:

Okay, what do we have here:

1) There was a firefight.
2) There was no firefight.
3) Bin Laden was “resisting.”
4) Bin Laden wasn’t armed. (Makes the concept of “resisting” interesting.)
[4.a) And the newest one: the SEALS thought bin Laden was reaching for a weapon.]
5) He used his wife as a shield.
6) His wife was killed too.
7) He didn’t use his wife as a shield. She ran at a SEAL who shot her in the leg, but she’s fine.
8 ) Some other woman — the maid? — was used as a shield. By somebody. Downstairs.
9) That other woman — downstairs — was killed.
10) Maybe not. She was killed unless she wasn’t — and who was she, anyway?

That’s less than half the list.

Stay on message? They’d have to have agreed on what the actual message is first.

Back to the original post, which has been updated a few times:

When people say “something is wrong here,” they’re sort of right. The “here” in which the wrongness resides isn’t this specific news story. Instead, it’s an overarching pathology that we’re talking about.

That is, the SEALS did what they did. What’s driving everyone bonkers is that this administration is incapable of being straightforward. Serpentine deceit is its MO, regardless of the topic, whether birth certificates, health care debates, or sanctioned assassinations. Everything is wrapped in a web of lies and confusion because of the paranoia, personality disorders, narcissism, and sociopathy that walk the White House halls.

Brendan O’Neill on why Britons should vote “No” today

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:32

For some reason, British governments for the last decade have found it utterly impossible to organize a referendum on whether Britain should stay within the European Union, but they’ve been able to whip up today’s Alternative Voting referendum in double-quick time. Brendan O’Neill has a few last-minute words for those of you eligible to vote:

But now that we’ve been landed with a referendum for an electoral system that a majority of the public are savagely uninterested in, it’s paramount that we vote NO to AV.

Because AV would accentuate some of the most degenerate trends in politics today.

Through its invitation to voters to express their views about all candidates, it would turn voting from an impassioned statement of political desire or attachment to an ideal into a relativistic process of erming and ahhing.

And by making aspiring politicians potentially reliant on second- and third-preference votes, it would nurture even more public figures who refuse to say anything surprising or provocative for fear of alienating their kind-of constituencies.

In short, AV would water down the act of voting and reduce risk-taking and ideas-making in mainstream British politics – a trend that is already underway but which would effectively be institutionalised under AV.

So go out and say NO.

April 20, 2011

Modern bigotry

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:27

Brendan O’Neill says that the worst form of bigotry today is the liberal elites’ view of the working classes:

We often hear of self-loathing Jews, but what about self-loathing proles — working-class people who look back with contempt at the communities they had the misfortune to grow up in? There’s a very good example of it in today’s Guardian, in this column by Lynsey Hanley, a woman who has made a writing career on the back of the fact that she grew up on a council estate. (It is testament to the middle classes’ continuing colonisation of the media that Ms Hanley can be treated as a curious novelty by Granta and the Guardian, almost as a messenger from some distant, dark planet, simply because she once lived in social housing.) Ms Hanley writes of the “terrible ignorance” of the community she used to live in, prior to her moral and mental rescue by “metropolitan elite liberal values”.

Perhaps keen to assure her current employers that she is now one of them and has been scrubbed clean of any trace of working-class brutishness, Ms Hanley sneers at the “view of life” that held strong in the community she was born into. These people were “paranoid, suspicious, mistrustful, misogynist and racist”, she says. She heaps disdain on the “social conservatism” of white working-class communities, which are given to “silently or violently rejecting anyone who is different or who expresses a different opinion to that of the crowd”. Thankfully for her (and let’s face it, probably for the community she was born into), Ms Hanley escaped from this “crowd” (in pre-PC times they called it “the mob”) by embracing what she refers to as metropolitan, liberal values. She pleads with New Labour not to ditch these values, since there might be other “provincial working-class teenagers” who, like Ms Hanley, also want to be rescued.

[. . .]

What’s more, Ms Hanley’s dutiful provision of moral porn for the chattering classes, who so enjoy reading about the weird goings-on in mysterious council estates over breakfast, speaks to the prejudices that are rife amongst the community she has now embraced: the “metropolitan liberal elite”. The great irony of this elite’s war on the wantonness, gluttony, slothfulness and bigotry of the little people is that it is fuelled by a bigotry of its own, a respectable, PC form of bigotry — one which treats the white working classes as unenlightened Daily Mail drones in need of moral deliverance by sussed outsiders. It is not the working classes who “silently or violently reject anyone who is different”; rather it’s this increasingly intolerant metropolitan elite, which can’t even abide the fact that some communities eat and drink differently, never mind think differently, to itself. In presenting Britain as being neatly split between a morally superior race of liberals and mongrel race of paranoid racists, Ms Hanley and others are unwittingly rehabilitating the very prejudices that originally fuelled the politics of racism in the 19th century: a mean-spirited, Malthusian view of Britain’s own native lower classes as morally defunct.

April 7, 2011

Friend of Randian cultists afraid to say what he really means

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

The victim of Objectivist intimidation is poor little P.J. O’Rourke, who has to be very careful how he reviews Atlas Shrugged:

Atlas shrugged. And so did I.

The movie version of Ayn Rand’s novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.

Meanwhile, members of that tribe of “Atlas Shrugged” fans will be wondering why director Paul Johansson doesn’t knock it off with the incantations, sacraments and recitations of liturgy and cut to the human sacrifice.

But that’s about as far as he dares to go, risking retribution from Randian cultists. Oh, wait . . . he does go a tiny bit further towards martyrdom after all:

But I will not pan “Atlas Shrugged.” I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians — and I do — saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead.

The woman is a force. But, let us not forget, she’s a force for good. Millions of people have read “Atlas Shruggged” and been brought around to common sense, never mind that the author and her characters don’t exhibit much of it. Ayn Rand, perhaps better than anyone in the 20th century, understood that the individual self-seeking we call an evil actually stands in noble contrast to the real evil of self-seeking collectives. (A rather Randian sentence.) It’s easy to make fun of Rand for being a simplistic philosopher, bombastic writer and — I’m just saying — crazy old bat. But the 20th century was no joke. A hundred years, from Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda, were spent proving Ayn Rand right.

April 6, 2011

India’s educational triumphs and hidden flaws

Filed under: Economics, Education, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:00

India has vastly increased the numbers of students who go on to post-secondary education, and strives to keep tuition low and entry open to as many prospective students as possible. This great success in enrollment hides some pretty nasty deficiencies in the actual quality of education being offered:

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

[. . .]

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What’s more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.

[. . .]

Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.

But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

There’s no easy solution to this problem: by lowering educational standards, you reduce the employability of your existing graduates. If you raise standards, you increase the cost of education, both to students and to the government. Privatization may be the answer, but it won’t come cheap, and therefore will be politically dangerous to implement.

March 30, 2011

The author’s guide to dealing with criticism

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In short, watch how author Jacqueline Howett responds to a review with (pretty mild) critical comments, then don’t do this:

Jacqueline Howett said…

You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review. My Amazon readers/reviewers give it 5 stars and 4 stars and they say they really enjoyed The Greek Seaman and thought it was well written. Maybe its just my style and being English is what you don’t get. Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I will stick to my five star and four star reviews thanks.

She then reposts three Amazon reviews in the comment thread.

BooksAndPals said…

In response to the many comments from Ms Howett:

I received the email on 2/7 asking that I download the a new copy of the book, which I did. I verified in my library software (Calibre) that this was the version I had and read. However her note above as well as the email mentioned formatting. At least when I talk about formatting I’m referring to issues of conversion from the source (a Word .doc file or whatever) into an eBook so the text flows correctly on the Kindle and so on. I say no issues I would attribute to formatting.

I have doubts that Ms. Howett being English is the reason for my reaction to her writing although I can’t discount it entirely. I can say that in the last year I’ve read and in many cases reviewed on this blog books by natives of England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and multiple European countries where English is not the primary language. Some have been full of country specific slang. In none of these cases has this been an issue for me. I do mention these things in the FYI section of my reviews because it is an issue for some people.

I’ll also point out that in the first two chapters alone I found in excess of twenty errors that ideally would have been caught in editing and proofing. Some were minor, but all have the potential of disrupting an enjoyable reading experience, depending on the specific reader and their sensitivity to such things.

Here are a couple sample sentences from the first two chapters that gave me pause and are representative of what I found difficult while reading.

“She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs.”

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

I understand what both are probably saying. I do question the sentence construction.

However, I should point out that the review does say the story, which is the most important part of a book, is good. The effort of extracting the story through the errors and, at least to me, sometimes convoluted sounding language, made doing so much too difficult, IMO.

I would encourage anyone who thinks the story sounds interesting to sample the book. Read the first few chapters and decide for yourself.

Jacqueline Howett said…

My writing is just fine!

You did not download the fresh copy…. you did not. No way!

As to annoymous

Al was given the option of a free copy from smashwords the following day to download in any format he preffered.

Look AL, I’m not in the mood for playing snake with you, what I read above has no flaws. My writing is fine. You were told to download a new copy for format problems the very next day while they were free at Smashwords, so you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected. Simply remove this review as it is in error with you not downloading the fresh copy i insisted. Why review my book after being told to do this, and more annoying why have you never ever responded to any of my e-mails?

And please follow up now from e-mail.

This is not only discusting and unprofessional on your part, but you really don’t fool me AL.

Who are you any way? Really who are you?

What do we know about you?

You never downloaded another copy you liar!

You never ever returned to me an e-mail

Besides if you want to throw crap at authors you should first ask their permission if they want it stuck up on the internet via e-mail. That debate is high among authors.

Your the target not me!

Now get this review off here!

And it gets much, much worse . . .

March 24, 2011

Deconstructing “Friday”

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Jon sent me this link, saying “you owe it to yourself to read up on Rebecca Black and her self-published (in the worst sense of what that used to mean) music video, Friday. You need to see the video and absorb the meme to really enjoy this epic piece of work:”

She offers the camera a hostage’s smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”

***

Ms. Black first appears as her own computer-generated outline: wobbly, marginal, a dislocated erasure. The days of the week flip by accompanied by dull obligations — “essay due” — and tired clichés — “Just another manic Monday…” Her non-being threatens to be consumed by this virtual litany of nothing at all until, at long last — Friday.

[. . .]

Yet here the discerning viewer notes that something is wrong. Because it is a simple matter of fact that in this car all the good seats have already been taken. For Rebecca Black (her name here would seem to evoke Rosa Parks, a mirroring that will only gain in significance) there is no actual choice, only the illusion of choice.

The viewer knows that she’ll take the only seat that’s offered to her, a position so very undesirable as to be known by a derisive — the “Bitch” seat.

She might well have been better off on the school bus, among the have-nots. But Rebecca Black’s world is so advanced in the craft of evisceration that this was never a consideration. John Hughes died while out jogging, these are the progeny of his great materialist teen-villain, James Spader, a name that would come to be synonymous with desperate sex and high-speed collision. And as she gets in the car Ms. Black’s joy is as patently empty as her liberation.

“Partying, Partying,” she sings, in hollow mantra.

“Yeah!” an unseen mass replies, a Pavlovian affirmation.

February 7, 2011

Postmodern Monday

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:21

A little postmodernism to lighten your Monday morning burdens:

Surrealism in the works of Rushdie

John N. Humphrey

Department of Sociolinguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

1. Sontagist camp and capitalist theory

The main theme of the works of Rushdie is a self-justifying totality. The subject is interpolated into a capitalist theory that includes narrativity as a paradox.

It could be said that if Lyotardist narrative holds, we have to choose between Sontagist camp and the subcultural paradigm of narrative. Sontag suggests the use of surrealism to deconstruct class divisions.

Therefore, the subject is contextualised into a Sontagist camp that includes reality as a reality. Several sublimations concerning the role of the participant as observer may be discovered.

Thus, Porter[1] suggests that the works of Rushdie are postmodern. If constructive objectivism holds, we have to choose between capitalist theory and postdialectic narrative.

2. Rushdie and Sontagist camp

“Sexuality is part of the meaninglessness of language,” says Lacan. However, Sartre promotes the use of surrealism to analyse and read sexual identity. The subject is interpolated into a cultural rationalism that includes narrativity as a totality.

In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the distinction between without and within. It could be said that Sontag uses the term ‘surrealism’ to denote a mythopoetical whole. Baudrillard suggests the use of neodeconstructivist desemioticism to challenge elitist perceptions of truth.

However, the subject is contextualised into a capitalist theory that includes art as a reality. A number of constructions concerning surrealism exist.

But the characteristic theme of Geoffrey’s[2] essay on materialist postcultural theory is the absurdity, and hence the paradigm, of capitalist class. The subject is interpolated into a capitalist theory that includes sexuality as a whole.

Thus, the example of surrealism prevalent in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is also evident in Midnight’s Children, although in a more self-referential sense. Sontag promotes the use of Debordist image to analyse sexual identity.

However, the main theme of the works of Rushdie is not narrative, but subnarrative. Derrida uses the term ‘capitalist theory’ to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent collapse, of neotextual art.

3. Consensuses of economy

If one examines the conceptualist paradigm of narrative, one is faced with a choice: either reject capitalist theory or conclude that consciousness is responsible for capitalism. Therefore, the characteristic theme of Parry’s[3] model of Lacanist obscurity is a posttextual paradox. Marx suggests the use of capitalist theory to deconstruct archaic perceptions of society.

However, Lacan uses the term ‘surrealism’ to denote not discourse, but subdiscourse. The primary theme of the works of Rushdie is the genre of capitalist class.

But Sartre uses the term ‘capitalist theory’ to denote a self-justifying totality. The subject is contextualised into a surrealism that includes truth as a reality.

4. Rushdie and Sontagist camp

The main theme of de Selby’s[4] analysis of surrealism is the role of the writer as participant. Thus, an abundance of theories concerning the common ground between sexual identity and class may be found. Derrida uses the term ‘Batailleist `powerful communication” to denote the role of the observer as participant.

In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the concept of capitalist language. But the premise of surrealism implies that society, surprisingly, has significance, but only if truth is equal to reality; otherwise, Marx’s model of presemioticist narrative is one of “the textual paradigm of context”, and therefore part of the meaninglessness of narrativity. The characteristic theme of the works of Rushdie is the bridge between culture and sexual identity.

Thus, several desituationisms concerning Sontagist camp exist. Lyotard’s essay on capitalist theory states that reality is a product of the masses.

Therefore, Geoffrey[5] holds that we have to choose between surrealism and semantic theory. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie reiterates capitalist theory; in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, although, he analyses Sontagist camp.

In a sense, Marx promotes the use of the neodialectic paradigm of narrative to modify and challenge language. Lacan uses the term ‘surrealism’ to denote the role of the artist as poet.

1. Porter, Z. ed. (1998) The Failure of Discourse: Surrealism in the works of Fellini. And/Or Press

2. Geoffrey, J. W. I. (1986) Sontagist camp and surrealism. Loompanics

3. Parry, J. K. ed. (1994) Reassessing Modernism: Surrealism in the works of Mapplethorpe. Cambridge University Press

4. de Selby, A. (1989) Nihilism, surrealism and neotextual libertarianism. University of California Press

5. Geoffrey, O. R. ed. (1974) Poststructural Narratives: Surrealism and Sontagist camp. Yale University Press

H/T to Andrew C. Bulhak and Josh Larios for the link.

January 26, 2011

QotD: The elephant in the living world

Filed under: Economics, Japan, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Here in peaceful and progressive Canada, it is so easy to feel smug towards larger countries that get their hands dirty in the world arena. Especially that one country built on the conquest and near eradication of its peaceful natives who have received hardly any compensation or even an apology. You know, the one founded on belligerent exceptionalism and manifest superiority over other cultures that was turned into a national religion that has historically led to imperialist conquest and mass slaughter. This country still has an actual federal law that requires all foreigners to carry their papers with them at all times, or risk being deported by any policeman who can, simply on a whim, question and detain them. The country so primitive and barbaric that it actively uses the death penalty, shrugging off international protests about it just as coldly as it does in important environmental issues. Its provincial masses bitterly cling to their traditional values while their media feeds them a constant diet of mindless pap and actively hushes up embarrassing facts. They rarely travel abroad, being not just obsessed with ethnic purity and deeply suspicious, even afraid, of anything foreign, but also unapologetically sexist and classist, especially towards this one minority they consider dirty, criminal and less evolved. We can only sigh in relief that sun is finally setting on the once so unstoppable economic juggernaut… of Japan.

Ilkka, “The elephant in the living world”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2011-01-20

January 23, 2011

John Scalzi on Facebook

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

John Scalzi has been online for a long time. He even “handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.” He’s not excited about Facebook. Not at all:

A friend of mine noted recently that I seemed a little antagonistic about Facebook recently — mostly on my Facebook account, which is some irony for you — and wanted to know what I had against it. The answer is simple enough: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick. It’s a dumbed-down version of the functionality the Web already had, just not all in one place at one time.

Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.

[. . .]

I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices. A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. Facebook shouldn’t be telling me how many “friends” I should have, especially when there’s clearly no technological impetus for it. Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman. Its general ethos that I need to get over the concept of privacy makes me want to shove a camera lens up Zuckerberg’s left nostril 24 hours a day and ask him if he’d like for his company to rethink that position. Basically there’s very little Facebook does, either as a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization.

I have a Facebook account, but only really check it every few days. Twitter, on the other hand I’ve found to be an excellent tool for a blogger: lots and lots of interesting stuff has come to my attention first through a Twitter update from journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and just ordinary folks. And it doesn’t try to worm its way into everything I do.

Some folks felt John was being too harsh on Facebook users, rather than the site itself, so he posted an update later that day:

* In comments here and elsewhere there was interpretation of me saying that Facebook wasn’t for someone like me, but it was for normal people as a) a way to signal that I am awesome and smart and also awesome, and b) normal people are stupid and suck, and that’s why they use Facebook. Yeah, no. It’s not for me because the functionality doesn’t map well for what I want to do or have for my online experience, and “normal” in this case doesn’t mean “stupid people who suck,” it means “people who don’t want to make the time/energy commitment to run their own site.”

It’s always a problem with written work . . . some people will misunderstand or misinterpret what you’re saying — deliberately or otherwise — and it’s difficult to make something so clear that it can’t be twisted. Did I say difficult? I should have said impossible.

January 22, 2011

How Big Government fans cast their arguments

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

L.A. Liberty rounds up the rhetorical conventions of Big Government sympathizers:

With discussions of “rhetoric” in the air, I thought it timely to propose what I have observed — from online discussions, family get-togethers, and everything in between — as the archetypal rhetorical conventions of big government sympathizers (i.e. the left, generally, though not exclusively):

* deflections (altering or averting the basis of the discussion to a different but seemingly related topic),
* assertions of pathos (appeals to one’s emotions, usually in the form of a sad hypothetical or a specific personal account, intended to either pity a concession or portray the opposition as a monster; this could also take the form of fear mongering),
* assertions of ethos (attempts to find hypocrisy in the opposition’s position, either by alleging that a different position held by the opposition is counter to their opposition’s current position, or by simply alleging “You would sing a different tune if it were you [or other person you care about] who needed [said government program]”)
* ad hominem attacks (related to pathos, such an attack charges either the opposition or another person who shares the opposition’s position in order to render an argument invalid, this often takes the form of accusations of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry),
* straw men (absurd conclusions, ostensibly based on the opposition’s argument, created in order to be refuted)
and perhaps most common of all…
* non-sequiturs (similar to straw men, these are failures in logic that assume incorrect conclusions; often a form of reducto ad absurdum based on incomplete or incorrect data)

These conventions can be explained by what is arguably the greatest weakness of big government sympathizers: a lack of reasoned thought and creativity that is the result of their inability to look beyond the status quo. In other words, because government does it, they have a hard time envisioning how it could be done without government.

January 17, 2011

QotD: The impermanence of “The Cloud”

Filed under: Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:13

We adopt many web services because they’re convenient (and free!), but it’s only after becoming dependent on those services that we recognize why they were provided for free in the first place: after all, it’s only by eliminating the inconvenience of paying users that startups can snag attention and secure the freedom to alter, downgrade, or cancel their services at will. By then, of course, we’re trapped in an unstable relationship, and our only means of recourse is to wail as loudly as possible, “You broke my heart!”

The big lesson that should have come out of the Tumbleocalypse was that we trust too easily. Did any of us listen? Nah. Instead, we’re signing our friends up to Dropbox to score 250 megs of bonus storage space and sending our most important documents to “the cloud.” We trust Dropbox because we trust others who use Dropbox: web designers, tech writers and professionals who, we believe, would never gamble with an unproven, flaky, or suspect service. Without this kind of trust-by-proxy, free web services couldn’t survive at all. Can you imagine anybody in their right mind signing up for a Facebook account today without a good friend by the sidelines whispering, “Don’t mind all that privacy whaffle. I know these guys mean well.”

Cloud storage is convenient, of course — ask anybody who’s experienced the horrors of manually synching PC to iPhone — but we downplay the risks involved in outsourcing control of the data we own. We so badly want to live in the future that we’ve lost the ability to question what living in the future might actually mean.

[. . .]

Those who believe that “the cloud” can act as a storage platform for our collective memories believe that everything that was available to us yesterday will be just as available to us tomorrow. Where exactly does this conviction come from?

The web is like any other sprawling city, and maybe worse: it’s so damn rickety it’s a minor miracle it hasn’t collapsed entirely. When you link, you do so trusting that the data to which you direct your readers won’t just up and disappear into the virtual ether. Except that, inevitably, it will — the short history of the web has established that much. We live somewhere, we leave, it becomes forgotten, and then we come back years later to find our old haunts brutally 404’d.

Connor O’Brien, “Link Rot”, The Bygone Bureau, 2011-01-17

December 21, 2010

Do not attempt to change planes in Bombay

Filed under: Bureaucracy, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:45

India is a rising economic power in the world, but it still has lots and lots of problems. Sean had to change planes in Bombay. It wasn’t a pleasant experience:

It wasn’t just one person who’d fucked up. This was no single, lone fuck-up cascading through the nooks and crannies of a complex system, like a butterfly causes a hurricane; everybody who touched my life that day, apart from, thankfully, the pilot and the airframe maintenance crew and my rickshaw driver, was busy fucking up in one way or another, sometimes spectacularly so. The guy who had all that time to anticipate the Diwali crush and thousands of rebookings fucked up. The guy who’d arranged the airport signs fucked up. So did the guy who cleaned the floors. The women representing Air India and India Air were a pair of fucknuts; the baggage handlers were probably already pretty fucked up before they even got to work, which of course fucked things up even worse. And the guy who designed the airport had, at some point well in the past, fucked up pretty royally. Even my taxi driver was a complete fuckup. The president of Air India? That guy’s totally fucked in the head. What was most remarkable about it, though, is that despite things being so thoroughly fucked, I did eventually get where I was going. With my western eye, all I could see was disaster, chaos, and impossibility; what I couldn’t see, until a good samaritan made it clear, is that there was in fact a solution. I’d been told that this is a common thing in India, that life there can be a series of 11th-hour miracles.

And all this, at the freakin’ airport. If there was going to be more of the same in India, I’d better get used to it — and learn to navigate it better — before I tried to ride my scooter from one end of the country to the other.

H/T to Damian Penny for the link.

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