June 2013

Pres. Obama has nominated limousine liberal hawk Samantha Power to be UN Ambassador. You might remember her as the person who called Hillary Clinton a "monster" and had to resign from Obama's '08 campaign. She now deeply regrets that stumble on her rise to prominence, er, rather, slur against a great personage. Mark Ames, writing cruelly but humorously on the icky policy wonk love triangle among Power, U. of Chicago prof. Martha Nussbaum, and former Obama "regulation Czar" Cass Sunstein, described Power's politics thusly:

[...] Samantha wrote a “landmark” book, a book that really bowled over Team Obama, about genocides in the 20th century. Because genocides are really bad, she wants us to know. Not all genocides, mind you -- just the genocides she chooses to focus on. She didn’t include in her book the genocides that might muddy up her Dubya-brained moralizing about genocide -- anyway, it’s sexist to criticize her for omitting American-led genocides in the 20th century that led to millions of deaths in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America, and elsewhere; or Britain’s genocide-guilt in about 2/3 of the globe. Those aren’t officially “genocides” in Samantha’s classification, because that’s not playing by the rules. The rules say very clearly that these are genocides and those aren’t -- so for example, when America financed and armed the genocide in East Timor, Samantha writes that America “looked away.” Well, you get the point here.

We have the liberal hawks and their precedent of the "good" Balkan bombing to thank for Iraq and Afghanistan. The "kill for peace" pundits provided Democratic cover for the Bush and Cheney invasion plans. Saddam gassed his own people, the Taliban are sexist monsters, so, as caring folk, we needed to invade. It wasn't just about oil or misplaced revenge for 9/11, see.

Ames:

Samantha... had a “defining moment” in her biography. That defining moment was Bosnia—the tragedy that attracted hordes of defining-moment-tourists from the West’s top academic and struggling-journalist institutions. Every Orwell-swooning middlebrow secretly cursed under their breath that they’d never be able to duplicate his moral outrage and moral courage without a perfectly defined cause like his—so when Bosnia presented its tragedy on a bloodied platter, Samantha, along with all the David Rieffs and Peter Maas’s and you-name-‘em-if-they-read-Orwell-they-were-in-Sarajevo’s all entered the “watch me being morally outraged on behalf of humanity” competition in Bosnia, then took the “lesson” that “defined” them there, and came away with this: in the future, if America sees slaughter going on in some part of the world we don’t understand, we should bomb the bad guys and save the good guys.

Forbes writer J. J. Colao explains Snapchat to the suits.

The ubiquitous ghost that serves as the company’s mascot is known as “Ghostface Chillah”, a play on the stage name of former Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killah -- because that’s what you name your mascot when you’re 22.

Oh, really. In order to pull off this kind of writing, Colao must toggle between the objective universal point of view, his own POV, and the POV of that 22 year old Snapchat inventor he is alternately slapping and pimping, for example:

Take Facebook, a $50 billion company built on the premise of connecting friends to each other. A funny thing has happened since the social network debuted in 2004—our friends stopped being themselves. “I don’t know about you but my friends are really weird,” says Spiegel. Yet all of their quirks have been lost in the rarefied air of social media, replaced by self-conscious, superhuman wits who trade in “envy me” scenes—sunsets and vacations, impossibly fun parties and gourmet dinners.

If you wanted a trusted real life friend to see a picture of you in the morning with your hair mussed you could just send an email attachment but venture capitalists and Forbes writers wouldn't find that very interesting. As implied by Bob Lefsetz (see earlier post), Snapchat is an invention of kids to stay one step ahead of adults (which now includes Facebook) in the "awkward photo"-sharing milieu. Wikipedia's description of Snapchat suggests an elaborate Rube Goldberg device for preserving spontaneity, in a John Nash "screw over your buddy" gaming world of ultimate distrust:

During the viewing period, the recipient must maintain contact with the device's touchscreen which inhibits taking a screenshot (which is allowed) and also notifies the sender if a recipient took a screenshot. Of course, this does not prevent the user from bypassing this mechanism by, for example, taking a picture of the phone with another camera or by disabling the notification (by modifying the snapchat binary). Furthermore, running the snapchat application in an emulator will bypass all restrictions. After the set time expires, the image is hidden from the devices and the company's servers. Users of this type of product must take into account that once data has been transmitted to a general purpose device owned by another user it will always be possible to recover said content if sufficient effort is expended.