Bushes, Clintons, Bushes, Clintons.
See Matt Stoller's Five Untouchable Symptoms [wayback].
January 2008
Facebook and Anti-Anarchy
B. sent this by email:
A thought on the current vogue internet social platform:
Facebook's political spectrum begins with "very liberal" on one side and ends with one fringe point more extreme than "very conservative" in the other direction: "libertarian." The options, therefore, for committed left Facebook users, if they choose to self-identify, are to be classified as Democratic, American liberals -- but liberals in what sense? Along voter registration lines, as nutty free-market neoliberals, or perhaps some vague socially liberal demographic? If Facebook does really want to accommodate a broad range of self-identifying and reductive political affiliations (and this doesn't really seem like it's the case) why not offer the diametric left-wing opposite to libertarianism? I might suggest a "socialist democrat" category for this purpose. The only available alternative is to classify oneself as "Other" -- a default, self-imposed exclusion from the reasonable spectrum, which quickly neuters the viable communicability or rationality of one's political affiliations by explicitly marking it as a non-option, a fringe unutterable thing. The available categories belie a thinly veiled agenda to the website: extreme right-wing affiliation is OKAY, as is apathy, but extreme left-wing identification is not.
My reply:
Good point. If you need a left wing counterweight to libertarian I suggest anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist.
However, as a non-Facebook user, I think the lack of such a category is telling--it suggests that free thinking but not completely self centered people literally do not belong within Facebook's class-exclusive and blatantly consumerist readymade social network.
In other words free and self-labeling on the open Web is the place to be.
I know I'm missing out on a world of fun not being part of Facebook or Second Life (or del.icio.us, or MySpace, or the iPhone/iPod milieu). Still, I'm rather enjoying my "public hermit" experiment via blog, RSS and email.
Mr. Flak Jacket Resurgent
Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker on John McCain's goals for Iraq:
McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.
Thought McCain was done after that picture of him appeared wearing the flak jacket in the Baghdad market. Apparently he stands a chance again in the primaries as the establishment's anti-Huckabee candidate. This is not too good. The man loves war.
Update: Have been reading that folks in New Hampshire thought McCain was the peace candidate. Compared to mouth-foamer Giuliani maybe so. Evidently less people saw the "stooge in the flak jacket" photo than was commonly thought.
Sad SID Wave
I wrote a lugubrious melody for the Sidstation synthesizer and the digital recorder drew this rather pleasingly proportioned wave (it's the LFO sweeping the cutoff filter, I think, that makes it so fat--the actual notes are buried in the zigzag). Captured in a couple of .wav-editors and got the black and blue images.
The sound it's making is here: [1 MB monaural .mp3]
By the way, note to PS and JP: I was wrong about editing patches in the Sidstation, you can hear the changes as you're making them. This one is a preset, though ("tel-lead").