Remember the weblog post that talked about how Friendster migrated from J2EE to PHP for performance reasons? Well, Joyce Park just got fired for publishing it. Sometimes I’d really love to talk more about the stuff that I work on, but episodes like this keep me from doing so. Update: If I had ever bothered to sign up for Friendster, I’d cancel my account.
Anyone who’s read this site more than, say, a day, knows that I’m interested in politics. Sometimes obsessed with politics. But lately I’m beginning to think that it’s a big waste of time. My problem is that I oftentimes think that people are like me. I used to be really conservative – I came from a small town in Texas, grew up in a Republican family, and was a big fan of Pat Buchanan. His column was in the local paper and he seemed a lot saner back then. (Although I do remember being in high school and reading a Buchanan column arguing that cuts in the capital gains tax were good for everybody and thinking that he was using some tortured logic.) Anyway, I went to college in a big city, was exposed to more different kinds of people, and my political views gradually changed. When I was a student I had a coworker who was a harcore liberal and who aggressively challenged every tenet of my conservative dogma. I argued with him at the time, but I also went home and thought about it. I remember him specifically introducing the term “institutionalized poverty,” which kind of threw me for a loop, being that back then I thought that poor people were poor because they were lazy and undisciplined. The irony, of course, was that I was lazy and undisciplined myself, and yet not poor. A few years later, I can remember one day talking to someone who was a Democrat and a Clinton supporter, and doing my usual bash Clinton thing, saying something stupid about tax and spend liberals, I think. Anyway, he happened to have a magazine that showed that the federal budget deficit had been halved since Clinton became President (this was 1995). “What,” I thought, “Perhaps I know less than I imagined.” Around this time I started listening to Democracy Now on the radio, I read Manufacturing Consent, and generally becoming a sort of raving liberal. I’ve since moved back to a more centrist philosophy, mainly because much of my idealism has been beaten out of me. Anyway, like I said, I tend to see other people as being like me. That is to say, willing to have their opinions challenged and to do their best to evaluate those challenges honestly. I’m becoming increasingly convinced, though, that few people really do have the capacity for change, mainly because they are not willing to challenge their own assumptions. To be honest, I can usually tell within 5 minutes of talking to someone about any topic whether they’re liberal or conservative. And I think that’s true for most people as well. Furthermore, most people don’t have a political philosophy at all, just a general world view that they sort of shove politics into. So I begin to despair of the idea of changing anyone’s mind. The biggest problem is that cognitive dissonance is a massive filter that transforms any fact that worms its way into our brains. People who like Bush and hate Kerry are inclined to believe the swiftvets, people who are Kerry partisans are inclined to think they’re liars. Lots of electrons have been wasted criticizing the media for not addressing the basic truth of the claims of the swiftvets, but does the truth really matter all that much? I’d like to say yes, but I don’t think so any more. I thought for sure that having been confronted with his own lies, John O’Neill would slink back into the cesspool from which he emerged, but there he was on Bill Maher Friday night, telling the same lies that he’s been telling all along, without a hint of shame. People like me will get mad and leave the room, and people on the other side will lap those lies up just as they always have. So I can see why people who are real political insiders seem to become less interested in some objective measure of the truth and more interested in gaining tactical advantages over time. Every number is presented without context, or with false context, to push forward some position. Every quotation is massaged to fit the narrative that interests them. Newspapers report every political story in terms of how it affects the ongoing ideological battle rather than on how the actual news affects the readers. And people who seek the truth anguish. ...
Federal judge Richard Posner lists what he sees as the greatest threats to the world: If I were asked to list the greatest threats to the world, I would include global warming, but would add bioterrorism, nuclear terrorism, nuclear proliferation, biodiversity loss, cyberterrorism, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence/robotics, and asteroid collisions. Pretty good list. Overall, I found his stint as Larry Lessig’s guest blogger to be informative and interesting. He’s often tarred as that libertarian University of Chicago guy, which is, of course, an accurate description. He’s not an ideologue, though, and I think he’d be a fine addition to the Supreme Court. ...
Dave Johnson has been hired by Sun to work on Roller full time. That’s awesome.
You can tell that Wikipedia is really catching on, because it looks like the first wave of the anti-Wikipedia backlash is starting. Syracuse Post-Standard writer is shocked, shocked that it’s not the online arm of a regular encyclopedia. What bothers me is that the journalist characterizes the site as “supposedly authoritative,” when it’s obvious that it is clearly not authoritative. It’s exactly what it says it is. My suggestion to the author of the article and to the librarians who complain about Wikipedia is to correct inaccuracies in Wikipedia if they see them. This account of an exchange with the article’s author is worth reading. ...
One of my chief complaints with the Bush administration has been a perverse obsession with secrecy. I know that some things have to be kept secret, but lots of stuff is classified when it should be released to the public, and things are generally kept secret long after they should be in the public domain. Anyway, as it turns out, the government spent $6.5 billion last year keeping things secret, and that doesn’t include any money that the CIA spent. So not only is there a cost to citizens in terms of government accountability, but there’s also a bottom line cost in keeping things from us. Seems like their ought to be a way to convince people that open government is a political issue they should care about. ...
I’ve been following the events in Najaf with interest over the last 3 weeks, because I believe that the confrontation between the US military (working at the behest of the interim government) and the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr will, in many ways, set the parameters for Iraq’s future. There are three major groups in Iraq, Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. The attitudes of the Sunnis and Kurds toward their American occupiers are already set (hate, and love, respectively). Our status with the Shiites is more complicated, and they’re the majority. The big news this week, which has not been covered all that thoroughly, is that the leading Shiite religious leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had returned early from London to put an end to the American siege of the holiest site in Shiite Islam. It wasn’t a coincidence that the fiercest fighting came after Sistani, one of the few people in Iraq who has any real popular support, had to leave the country for heart surgery. After weeks of brutal combat and unceasing and ineffective threats to assault the Shrine of Imam Ali and kill all of the Sadrists inside from the Iraqi interim government, Sistani made his triumphant return, and called on his followers to march to Najaf where they would enter the Shrine of Imam Ali and put an end to the fighting. Thousands of Shiites came from all over the country to join Sistani in reclaiming the shrine from Sadr’s followers and defusing the ongoing siege, and the subsequent cease fire was a fait accompli. Nobody dared fight once Sistani had put his foot down. Sistani’s move certainly helped out the Americans, in that it prevented an inevitable final showdown that probably would have left us with less support than ever before among anyone but warbloggers, and it helped out the Sadrists who had occupied the shrine, and who were all going to die or be captured. But the big winner was Sistani himself, who showed the Americans, the Iraqi interim government, Moqtada al-Sadr, and everyone else paying attention the power of popular legitimacy. As usual, I’m finding Juan Cole to be the most useful source of information on all things Iraqi. Christopher Allbritton has been posting some amazing first hand reports as well. Salam Pax has been on the scene as well. ...
I’ve decided to declare my swiftvets del.icio.us tag experiment a success. It’s already on the front page of the Google results for the search term “swiftvets,” not bad. The area of interest I’m focusing on now is framing, which is a concept found in economics and linguistics, but really boils down to psychology. The basic idea is that the presentation of a concept is as important to how it is received as the actual concept itself. In other words, if I call the estate tax the “death tax,” people are going to be reflexively opposed to it. You might say that the whole field of marketing is concerned with framing. Anyway, I’m going to be dumping any framing-related links I see into that bucket. ...
Looks like the Bush administration is finally catching up with most of the scientfic community and accepting that global warming is real, and that human activity has contributed to it.
I haven’t written anything about ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of the Sudan, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. The New Yorker has an article this week that explains what’s going on. Is it possible that nothing will be done about this ongoing tragedy? It’s almost impossible to believe that the people of Darfur exist in the same universe that we do.