Fight for it

A few minutes into this clip is a statement that really got me riled (in a good way):

I agree. Let Republicans filibuster a public option. Put together something that is right and good for the American people and let them waste Congress' time reading from cookbooks while the American people live without a basic human right. Democrats need to gather up the cojones to stand up for what is right and let Republicans worry about how they're going to look when they oppose it.

I <3 Shep Smith

Shepard Smith continues to be one of my favorite people on television.

I really appreciate how in just a few sentences he clarifies and challenges the blatant obfuscation by Springer: We'd still have private insurance, private companies and government compete all the time, it's about options.

I don't have cable, so I don't know if these are rare moments for Shep, but every time I hear his name it's because he's telling it like it is in the face of conservative spin.

Astroturfing

via ThinkProgress I read today a memo detailing 'best practices' for harassing Democratic and Moderate Republican Representatives at town halls over health care, the stimulus and the like (but primarily health care.

Then I saw the practices in action in this video of Secretary of HHS Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter getting booed at a town hall.

Chris Good of The Atlantic Monthly has an examination of the plans to rally against lawmakers who support health care reform in August.

I've never really seen or heard of this type of thing before, or at least never thought that it might be effective. Apparently they call it "Astroturf" - as in an artificial grass roots movement. Essentially the lobbying groups responsible for the "Tea Parties" is continuing the effort by planning rallies and events as well as directly confronting lawmakers with organized heckling, booing, etc at their town halls.

Despite initially scoffing at it, watching the short video clips of the infiltrators at work it certainly LOOKS effective. Sebelius and Specter looked totally rattled by the coordinated questioning and booing.

Other accounts of the same town hall however note that the majority of attendees stood and applauded Sebelius and Specter in support, and that it was merely a vocal minority giving the brief impression of an angry mob.

But really, all we're likely to see are the short clips of booing right? So this is potentially an insanely effective strategy for which I cannot imagine an effective counter. Fox News is aptly highlighting these moments, and it gives the impression that everyone is against health care reform.

So, a few points:

Part of me supposes that even if a lobbying organization is sponsoring and organizing these events, it's not necessarily THAT artificial - they appear to be real people who actually believe the things they believe.

However, the things they believe are, well...wrong. In the Fox News clip linked above the questioner rails against medicare, medicaid and social security as "broke". Those are three of the most popular and successful government programs ever, and so it seems kind of oddball to point to them as reasons for not reforming health care.

So I guess what is artificial about it is that the lobbyist organization gives the impression of a well thought out movement that has rallied people together, when in fact it appears it's more like a cattle call for knee-jerk right-wing reactionaries.

You get the strong impression that once you reach a certain level in the administration of these groups, the people running the show don't actually believe any of the stuff the people taking orders are shouting. They just see the angry people doing the shouting as convenient foot soldiers. It's the same old unholy alliance of the machinations of the wealthy and the misguided anger of the poor. It's that "Southern Strategy" all over again - hold your nose and play up to the angry minority in order to form that necessary majority. Admittedly, that's reading a lot into things, but that's my analysis.

The effectiveness in the end of this strategy is going to hinge on the extent to which lawmakers and voters can step back from the emotional reaction to hearing jeers and boos and actually assess the merit of the argumentation, and realize how the majority of their constituents actually feel. And really, that is going to hinge on the supporters of health care reform making their voices heard.

But right now I perceive it as much easier to rally against health care reform than to rally for it, because there isn't a single solid plan to get behind - instead there are many versions. This is where Obama could really make a difference by coming in with a clear outline of what he wants to see, so the voters can get behind it with gusto.

Digital Media

The news that Amazon remotely deleted content from customers' Kindles gets me thinking about all kinds of ramifications of our digital age.

Striking features highlighted by the article include:

The lack of a second-hand market - you can't resell your digital content once you are done with it the way you can with a record album, book or video game disc.

The power of the licensing company to retract the content. In this case they seem to realize it was a bad decision and are taking all kinds of heat for it, and a refund was given, but for the 17 year old kid quoted in the article who had all his notes and annotations for a school assignment deleted as well, that's pretty horrible and he has no recourse.

International copyright law issues - In the United States the copyright to "1984" has not yet expired, but in other countries it has already entered the public domain.

But what really gets me thinking is the reference to Amazon's Terms of Service. Terms of Service have always bugged me. With a physical product you pretty much know the terms: you pay for it, it's yours. A restaurant's terms are likewise well known: they feed and serve you, you pay. Subscription services begin to get hazier, like your gym membership, cable television or cell phone, but even there the worst that can happen is that you're locked into paying the duration of a contract whether you use the service or not. It's in the online digital realm that TOS really get arcane. The uniqueness and strangeness of these sorts of TOS are compounded by the fact that they are rarely read. Everytime a new patch is added to a popular online game I play, I am asked to re-confirm my acknowledgement of the Terms of Service. I didn't read them the first time, I certainly don't re-read the three pages of fine print every time the game is patched. Only my assumption that there can't be anything ridiculous within the terms consoles me.

And that's where most people are. They don't pay much attention to the TOS because they assume that if they contained any outrageous offenses, either someone who is paying more attention would stir up a fuss or the terms would never hold up to scrutiny.

In the end whenever you have to agree to a Terms of Service it's generally good practice to assume that you have no rights and that your access to the provider's service is at their pleasure. The Kindle is that rare object that occupies a space in which that sort of surrender is hard to swallow, both because it mimics a physical object that has no such restrictions and because it seemingly follows a similar model to online music downloads. I would be shocked and dismayed to find that iTunes had deleted content from my personal computer. The realization that the Kindle may physically belong to the owner, but that all its contents exist at the discretion of Amazon is a shocking one.

Looking to the future I find it hard to believe that such a model could persist indefinitely. The concept of ownership is too important to humans (at least to Americans) to fade completely away as the digital age matures. Instead that distinction between owning and renting will probably become further defined in future products. Amazon's dilemma in this case is that their customers assumed they owned their purchases, and their legal team viewed them instead as indefinite rentals that Amazon still held responsibility for after the purchase had been made. Long term I don't see how Amazon's definition can hold up, and I think some other perspective will have to gain dominance, even if it isn't based on copyright over the data itself but instead on fees for transmission or hosting. After all, devices like the Kindle can still make money as a pay-for-download device if Amazon controls the means for putting information on the device - no matter whether the content is public domain or copyrighted. This is just another example of the old fashioned notions of copyright bumping up against the realities of digital media.

Mobile!

I've set up an iPhone app to allow blog posting from my phone. Unfortunately I think I can only have one blog set up on it, but it is a nice feature anyway.

Perhaps we'll see some remote postings in the future that would otherwise be lost to the abyss. In the meantime I am actually sitting in front of my computer writing this...

"FAIL"

I was all set to write a blog post about the expression 'fail' (as in 'epic fail') creeping into the mainstream, when I found out that Christopher Beam already did a much better job of it than I would have on Slate back in October.  It's a great read and you should check it out.

It's kind of like your Dad trying to work "rad" into a conversation though when conservative bloggers and summer tv previews co-opt an expression originating amongst forum-trolling gamers.

Like everything supposedly cool that enters into the mainstream, there's a certain element of "it was cool until you started doing it" here.  Shit, and in fact I guess I'm pretty uncool for coming late to the party in highlighting this little bit of lexicon.  But I swear, I knew about it back in '04.

Now my question is, is there a term for something being no longer cool because it has hit the mainstream?  I guess you could interpret that as 'Jumping the Shark' in a more universal sense.  But I'd rather there be a german word like shadenfreude that means that exact thing.  I'll have to look around for that one.

Hit Pieces and the Scientific Method

On the train today I read this over somebody's shoulder (sorry man) and it pissed me off.

http://www.metro.us/us/article/2009/05/01/01/3432-82/index.xml

Not just because it is really crazy to argue that climate change isn't happening, or that human activity doesn't have an effect on the global environment, but because I hate to see the word "skeptic" used against science and doubt used to bolster ignorance.

The article and the argument in general is a hit piece against science.  It hinges on the conceit that any two arguments should be given equal consideration simply because equality is good, irrespective of the quality of the two positions.  It likewise misrepresents the place of skepticism and doubt in scientific inquiry.  The same way creationists misconstrue the meaning of the word "theory" in the context of the scientific method, here Mr. Wood drops the loaded words "skeptic" and "believer" into the discussion as the only qualitative arguments on the table.  We are left with no actual data with which to make a judgment, only our conceptions of the relative value of arguments generally made by "skeptics" and "believers".  This type of argumentation is patently disingenous and were Mr. Wood a real and honest journalist, he would be ashamed.

The misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the scientific method in polemic writing is one of my biggest pet peeves.  Doing so intentionally in order to sow doubt and ignorance in the public is a travesty of logic and scientific reasoning.  Real science is the pursuit of truth, not the obfuscation of it.