Wired State

Twitter in a Teapot

NBC at the London Olympics. Photo by Martin Deutsch July 24, 2012.

I've been annoyed by all the wired jocks and geeks whining with entitlement-happy greed that NBC isn't live-streaming the Olympics right into their eyeballs, but is airing taped games at prime time.

The sheer muscular aggressiveness with which males deprived of mainlined real-time sports raise this issue is a real turn-off -- and their density about how money is made on TV is inexusable.

I don't watch sports and I don't care about the Olympics. The Olympics have all the politicization of the United Nations with none of the human rights mechanisms. I hate that the IOC couldn't spare a minute of silence on the 40th anniversary of the massacre of Jewish athletes by Palestinian terrorists -- yes, terrorists, not freedom-fighters -- an appalling crime that Germany has covered up and that evidently involved a then German IOC official who was a Nazi sympathizer. Of course, there were Euro-symps who were happy to fashion a  "freedom-fighting" cover for the Arab countries who blackmailed the IOC by saying they wouldn't cooperate if they more actively condemned and investigated the murders.

Yes, people are yakking it up on Twitter about the games and that means there is "spoiler" for those watching prime-time. Yes, you have to wait to see the show in many cases. So what?

No one has adequately explained how the hell NBC is supposed to make money on live-streaming if there isn't an audience to watch the ads which is how....sport on TV is funded, duh.

There's this silly open-source cult machination going on as with all things new media claiming that NBC would "make just as much money" if they got rid of their "old-fashioned" taping, because even with the Twitter spoilage and VPN tunneling to watch the games unlawfully, hordes of people still show up at prime-time.

Dan Wetzel, the Yahoo sportswriter claims, "The American viewing public was tuning in at night in record numbers anyway. That was proof NBC's old formula could not only survive in today's instant information age, it could thrive."

Well, derr, they show up at prime-time because many people have to work or go to school during the day and just aren't able to plunk down in front of the TV. Why is this so hard to understand?! And how the hell is NBC -- again -- supposed to make money with this, um, "new business model"?

That know-it-all tech and jock aggressiveness about all this is just so off-putting.

So now we're supposed to feel indignant because Guy Adams of the British Independent, one of these aggressives tweeters and new-media style journalists has been suspended by Twitter because he tweeted the email address of the NBC executive responsible for the decision to air the taped episodes.

He's suspended for cause, because he tweeted personal information. Good! Twitter is really right to curb that awful forced-transparency so common to the geeks.

And the alibi -- that it's a corporate address that anybody guess is stupid. Officials often change the obvious way an email would work precisely so they won't be spammed or harassed by angry members of the public. That's ok. So Twitter did the right thing.

But of course we're hearing no end of conspiracy theory

BTW, what a lot of people don't realize, is that if Twitter decided to mute this guy temporarily or permanently simply because he was urging the harassment of their business partner, *they'd get to do that*.

That's not an unpleasant truth to accept -- and hey, it's an unpleasant truth that I myself spent a lot of time fighting long before most people discovered Twitter, on Twitter, when people like Cory Doctorow, friend of the devs, wanted me banned because I criticized his inane "give away" open source cult business model, or even earlier, on the Second Life forums, when I criticized the developers' special friends who got inside information and immunity from prosecution for forums offenses -- and was banned, and told it was a "business matter," not even due to a TOS violation. That's how Silicon Valley rolls. Yes, it's hideous. But they are private companies even if they do perform public functions, and they get to decide who their members are. Like the Boy Scouts of America. This is the First Amendment *for them* even if not *for us*, and unfortunately, no court cases have proven otherwise (but you're welcome to try one).

If this journalist were to take NBC and Twitter to court over his ban, he will get nowhere. The judge will refer to the Twitter TOS and rightful action under the TOS, and the partnership with NBC will be irrelevant.

Wetzel at least understands this isn't a First Amendment issue, but he still gets it wrong -- suits are entitled to some reasonable notion of privacy, and siccing the public at large to harass somebody on their email is wrong -- even if that email is some kind of "public" email, which isn't really established.

On the rank of world transgression, some snarky journalist losing his tweeting privileges is incredibly low. This isn't even a First Amendment issue. The government isn't trying to silence the public.

This is a public-relations gaffe, and it's hard to imagine how Twitter didn't see it coming.

First, the account suspension directed far more attention to Adams' criticism than if he had simply been ignored. Second, it's an embarrassment for Zenkel. He now looks like some overly sensitive suit.

No, Wetzel and company look overly insensitive.  And Adams looks like a total Internet fuckwad himself, calling the NBC boss the "moronic exec behind the time delay."

What part of HOW WILL YOU MAKE IT PAY, DUMBASS! does this aggressive Twit-nit not get?!

Neither NBC or Twitter are particularly "thin-skinned" here; Adams is, like all his outrageous and indignant fanboyz.

 

 

 

Building Socialism

He built this...and what did government do but charge him a huge licensing fee and put him through red tape for permits. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I was really annoyed with Elizabeth Warren's "you didn't build that" -- Ron Paul called her a "socialist" over this and I can understand why. Here's what she is quoted as saying in a video where she railed against "corporate welfare" and "tax cuts for the rich":

She said: "No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own -- nobody." She said even a factory owner who became wealthy used public goods like roads, police and fire, and public education. She added: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

Gosh, that's magnanimous, this "progressive" is willing to let a factory owner "keep a hunk" of his private property (!). But she's got the social contact all wrong. Factory owners don't "pay it forward". They pay "it" in the here and now in the form of taxes, and those taxes are used to build the roads and schools. Actually, school taxes come from property owners!  If businesses uses roads or water, it's because they paid for them with taxes out of their income.

The Obama campaign seemed to have brazenly and boldly copied the idea from her deliberately, because they feel that they can prevail by being hard-lined, not by being accommodationist.

As the Christian Science Monitor reported:

President Obama’s statement, made at a campaign rally in Virginia last weekend, that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” provided an opening for the Romney campaign to hit the president at what they are presenting as his weakest spot – his failure to understand business and the economy.

The full quote:

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

This "you didn't build that" and "social contract" stuff isn't quoted out of context or misconstrued; it's unabashed about insisting on the socialistic spin to American life that has been described by James Taranto as one of the "the two economies," i.e. the economy of the government, the municipal and state unions, and spending on social welfare, and the economy of business and wealth generation, which is supposedly divided between red and blue states and between Republican and Democrat. (In fact, whoever popularized the red/blue distinction deliberately made the Republicans red rather than the more socialistic Democrats so that there could be no reinforcement of any communist undertow.)

But...there is.

I always marvel at the taboo placed on talking about Obama's socialist thinking. As we know from Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz, Obama attended the Socialist Scholars' Conferences in the early 1980s which I also attended. So I know this line very well, and the line of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest and most active socialist organization at the time. Obama spouts DSA rhetoric all the time, whether it's the "guns and religion" line of the  Marxist" religion as the opiate of the people," whether it's the "no first use" of nuclear weapons concept, taken straight from the Soviet propaganda line of the 1980s, and of course the obsession with health care socialization.

That doesn't mean that he *is* a socialist, as in being literally a member of some actual or crypto-socialist organization or party. There's been an effort to show him as having joined the Working Families Party, and maybe he did -- and that is disturbing, because basically Working Families is a kind of political cult, using the various Bolshevik tactics to get in, such as the faddish "participatory budgeting" movement  -- and of course, the very name of the party, to emphasize "work" and "family values," i.e. to play on the stereotype of welfare queens, even as they insert a socialistic message for how to run society. But Obama has been pretty careful to scrub his past of anything that could point definitively to him being any kind of trained socialist or communist operative, and that's why bloggers trying to portray him as one will always fail and always be labeled as "McCarthyites". The way to approach this is not in his ontological status, but his actual statements -- and how they resonate with socialist ideology.

Those who get their backs up when anyone tries to discuss Obama's socialist leanings and socialist and even communist influences try to insist on literalisms, like party membership or writings, or "counter-factuals," like the Obama Administration's efforts to "help to small business" or "Start-up America" or whatever. It doesn't matter. Obama comes from the community-organizing movement, and that is riddled with socialist concepts hiding out under plainer single-issue agendas because the cadres were always aware that they couldn't move the explicit full socialist agenda forward explicitly.

Now they feel they can, but they still cling to that stealth mode, where they try to keep the s-word out of the discourse, and discredit anyone who uses it.

The reality is, Elizabeth Warren's statement and Obama's later reiteration of it *are* socialistic statements. They are collectivist, state-tropic, and dismissive of the entrepreneur, the individual's hard work, and the concept of wealth distribution -- as opposed to wealth *generation*. They seek to club the business person over the head with some notion of social welfare that they believe is a priori to him as a role in society and which they believe is also a curb on his "excessive" profits which they imply "harm" society.

What I marvel at with the "you didn't build that" socialist rhetoric -- yes, it is socialist, and socialist in its envious and indignant class warfaring as well -- is that they can't see the obvious rejoinder to this socialism -- that businesses and individuals pay the taxes.

You didn't build that road literally ...because the government did...because the government collected *a part of your income as tax*. You didn't provide that water plant literally ... because the government did...because companies pay taxes, and that is used for infrastructure. Duh!

The government is the service organization that uses part of the wealth generated to provide these services, hopefully with liberal democratic oversight and regulation where required but not in excess.

But this perspective is completely jettisoned in the idea that first the state exists, with that tax revenue already collected -- and it doesn't matter how -- then that state dispenses goods to you as an individual or business.

It's really whack. The answer to the Obama campaign and Elizabeth Warren and the Marxist intellectuals pumping this statist ideology is to say this, about their vaunted state  and its redistribution plans --  "You didn't build that."

But put it at the typical individual level. First comes my job -- and then my yielding of my taxes. My job is at a firm that makes widgets or provides services and generates revenue -- and pays me! It supplies the jobs! It pays payroll tax, and corporate taxes! Hello! THAT is what makes the government's treasure chest. Jobs provided by corporations. Not jobs provided by the state, which are using the taxes from the corporations, you know? Sure, there's a role for municipal jobs and government welfare, but it has reached the point where it becomes the ideological center of gravity without any awareness of where the money is going to come from.

The reason why socialist countries like Greece find it so hard to collect taxes is because those doing well avoid excessive taxation -- I remember very vividly an aereal photo that showed a landscape dotted with swimming pools -- and precisely because of the ordinary citizens' mindset that the government should just be supplying all this without getting in the way of any one individual's desire to hang on to his wealth. It's awful to see it play out. Socialism leads to collapse and crime, as it is doing now in Greece. Just because it didn't lead to collapse and crime in Sweden doesn't mean that isn't its nature -- as we have seen played out so many times.

The Democratic propagandists often spin a yarn about "corporate welfare" and "corporations that don't pay taxes" -- of course never talking about the fact that Google runs all its revenue through Ireland and other low-tax havens and doesn't bring that tax home to support America and its infrastucture. Yet it provides jobs and buys goods and services so I guess it's something the government lives with -- and how could it be otherwise in a free society with free enterprise? Capital goes to where capital can be maintained cheaply.

The reality is that most businesses aren't these mega corporations and pay their taxes. If they get a city or state incentive of some kind, a bond or whatever, it's because they are productive! They create jobs! They create useful products! Why can't the socialists see that?! They are so ideologically blinkered, they can't. Or won't.

Hence the attempt to smear some businesses of those who have stood up to this "you didn't build that" crap as having government contracts or government bonds. So what!!! What's the big deal! Good! That shows they are entrepreneurial in getting customers and getting funding. Obviously they pay it back.

Which can't be said about all those green projects and "green jobs" that Obama was funding out of Washington as the "stimulus".

For some reason, the obvious debate to be had here -- about how wealth generates wealth and that *is* what forms the tax base! -- just keeps getting dismissed or deliberately muted by the "progressives," hence they come up with stuff like "it's because he's black" and "it's racist" in trying to explain why this ad has become popular.

Of course, when Jonathan Chait writes about Obama speaking in a more "black dialect," you have to wonder who is the racist. I didn't pick that up and didn't know what he meant at first. But sure, if the opposition clip features all white people with their i-pads dismissing the president's "you didn't build that," it has to be "racism," right?

It could never be capitalism. Only racism!

 

A Creepy Movie About the Future -- the Singularity?

A short futuristic film by Israeli film-makers Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo. This sure is a creepy film about the future -- with virtual worlding and apps embedded into the eyeballs, even beyond Google Glass -- and gamification everywhere. It's like Vernor Vinge's Rainbow, where there were "wearables" -- but not these implantations. Would people accept implantations like this? Well, people already accept laser surgery to improve sight or do without glasses, maybe they would. And that Wingman! It's funny that the girl didn't keep walking...

The Dog That Didn't Bark -- "The Internet"

Did you notice that CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Ac), the law on cybersecurity, already went through another version in the House and is moving along and could be passed, although rather weakened? There was a push to get it finished before the end of July, says The Hill.

And there is some theorizing that Obama isn't going to veto it as he promised, and as Alec Ross said he promised, and as he has written in an op-ed piece in which in the fine print, he says he would veto the bill if it violated civil rights. The language is the sort that Democrats often adopt when they are trying to seem patriotic and militant to critics on the right:

This approach stays true to our values as a society that cherishes free enterprise and the rights of the individual. Cybersecurity standards would be developed in partnership between government and industry. For the majority of critical infrastructure companies already meeting these standards, nothing more would be expected. Companies needing to upgrade their security would have the flexibility to decide how best to do so using the wide range of innovative products and services available in the marketplace. Moreover, our approach protects the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. Indeed, I will veto any bill that lacks strong privacy and civil-liberties protections.

Now, why isn't "The Internet" -- as the flashmobs and Mitch Kapor and Soros-funded nonprofits and networks of Silicon Valley tech web sites and blogs call themselves -- screaming? Why are there only a few scattered critical blogs? Why isn't there endless re-tweeting?

We all saw "The Internet" turn out 7 million (!) signatures when Google whiplashed already-heavily-incited geeks and Redditt types to sign petitions against the Stop Online Piracy Act to "prevent censorship" and their favourite websites like Tumblr or Youtube from "being taken down". Wikipedia even blacked out their web site for a day, remember, sending hundreds of thousands of homework-procrastinators into a tizzy.

SOPA never even came to a vote. It was shelved and likely won't come back, although it could, if Obama is defeated in the next elections and some more congress people feel more confident if they can win the battle on the bill over cybersecurity -- they're definitely related.

But basically, once "The Internet" had spoken -- hordes of teenagers on Tumblr and young women on Facebook and young men on Youtube responding to "viral videos" produced by anti-copyright cadres, and heeding the whistles from TechCrunch or Ars Technica or Mashable -- SOPA was dead. This was treated as a big victory for "the progressives". Beth Noveck even said confidently at the Tech@State conference a few weeks ago that after the battle against Komen was won, and SOPA, why there was no stopping them. Forward to the victories of technocommunism!

So why isn't there any noise about the cybersecurity bill? Oh, sure, Boingboing.net complained a few times. Electronic Frontier Foundation naturally bitched, and has tried to whip up sentiment, as have its spin-off groups like the Internet Defense League -- which has made a "call to action" which largely seems to be ignored -- because nobody is talking about it anywhere on Facebook, Twitter, or G+.

There was some blogging back in April like this -- and of course techdirt.com which had to concede defeat -- but then, not much, except for the paid-for nonprofit organizations doing their astro-turfing.   In May, Andy Greenberg even spoke of "Silicon Valley's silence" -- until Mozilla spoke (but that's just Mitch Kapor again.)

But it's just not "going viral". It's just not working. No teenagers care. There isn't a youtube, or if there is, it doesn't have gadzillion views.

Now why is that?

Answer: because Google isn't siccing its dogs on this one, at least not yet.

His Master's Voice -- the RCA Victrola-style dog that is the tech press -- haven't received instructions or picked up their Twitter cues to protest hard on this -- at least not yet.

The "Save the Internet" Mitch Kapor organizations are busy trying to get people to sign their ill-advised manifesto, and the paid and unpaid social media meisters are too busy right now inciting hatred against the Boy Scouts and Chick-fil-A -- as if these were tech issues -- to ponder the vicissitudes of CISPA.

Now why is that?

Campaign fatique? You can only call the dogs out so often, they get bored and tired?

It's not just because it's summer or the Olympics. Summer has nothing to do with it, and in todays multi-media snacking environment, the Internet hordes can rove around a mile a minute on any topic and consume oceans of information every hour, "distracted from distraction by distraction." If they are needed to rescue Google's business model, they'll respond on cue instantly.

Perhaps the lack of frenzy is  because Facebook, IBM and other big IT companies supported the cybersecurity bill when it first came out, and that split Silicon Valley. It just wasn't as easy to stampede the geeks and then the kids when Facebook and IBM were supporting something. Google didn't say it was opposed but didn't support it either and seemed to be laying low like Br'er Rabbit.

Now, maybe "The Internet" didn't have to be whipped up because Sen. John McCain (R-Az) suddenly up and opposed the bill on libertarian grounds, that it would mean too much government interference in business.

I supposed CISPA in its original redaction because I thought the concerns about privacy were simply hyped as hysterical hypetheticals just like SOPA's "censorship" was. Having seen through the charade that the SOPA hysteria was, I will never, ever believe any of those Cassandras again.

The government wasn't mandating ISPs or platform providers to pre-emptively monitor their customers, it was asking for voluntary cooperation in sharing data about cyber attacks. The notion that laws are designed for narrow purposes that have to be defended in independent courts completely escapes literalist binary-thinkers on the geek squad.

What I particularly liked about CISPA is that it had a clause saying basically, "Concerned about invasion of privacy? OK, we urge you to submit your case and we will look at it and adjust accordingly." In other words, it challenged they hysterics to come up with cases, something they don't have. Cases, with facts. Not edge-casing what-ifs. I was waiting to see them.

As for government regulating industry, I'm not as afraid of this as libertarians nor do I endorse it as much as the "progressives" do -- very selectively. You know, like they want the government to interfere to regulate the wildly fluctuating and complex question of bandwidth consumption and supply by ISPs, but then they want the government to go away while the script-kiddies crash sites from the Pentagon to Amazon for things they don't like politically, or "just for the lulz".

In his carefully crafted op-ed piece, written likely by the "CTO of America" or one of the other hired geeks temporarily on leave from Silicon Valley to serve their country in government, Obama makes it sound like he really understands the threat to the Internet and concedes it is real. But given how ready  he is nevertheless to veto it on vague notions of privacy invasion, we have to wonder.

Some professional war scholars like Thomas Rid and collectivists and Anonymous boosters like Yochai Benkler are saying there isn't any threat in cyberspace, and it's all concocted as an excuse to get more defense money or get more jobs for defense contractors. Like...that's any different from the way every single piece of software generated by Silicon Valley is all about jobs for geeks?!

The geeks start the clock running only on Stuxnet, too, which is really tendentious and misleading -- like this piece.

Iran -- you know, Iran? -- itself started its revoluntary assault on its own people and on emigres abroad and critics -- back in the 1970s before there was any Internet. Iran, one of the world's worst authoritarian states, is the prior condition. Iran threatens its own people, jailing and executing some, assassinating opposition abroad -- and is belligerent to its neighbours, periodically announcing that Israel should be wiped off the map. Iran! And what the US and Israel do indeed is figure out how to fight this awful threat, which isn't just the theocratic state itself, but appears in the form of Tehran's support of Hezbollah and other terrorist movements.  And that's ok.

Do I think it's ok to sabotage another country's infrastructure, even if they are totalitarians? No, I don't. I do think we have to oppose cyberwar and work toward some kind of international treaty on refraining from cyberattacks.

Realistically, however, attacking the computers operating the controversial nuclear power stations is a less belligerent and dangerous option than actually attacking Israel with bombs. Life is about choices.

And even if you don't make the distinction between Iran's prior analog belligerence and today's Western cyber response, you could still point out all the hostile things Iran does in cyberspace, not only blocking the Internet for its own people but engineering things like the theft of a laptop with plans for the president's helicopter on it.

Then of course there's the attacks from Russia and China. At the Dublin OSCE conference, a NATO spokesman said that most of the cyberattacks in the region come from "Eastern Europe". That's a polite way of saying "Russia."

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent who was vilified for asking Amazon to stop storing WikiLeaks' stolen State Department cables (good for him!) has pushed for this bill due to his legitimate concern for security.

In it's more watered-down version currently, the bill gives the Internet companies immunity from prosecution -- so they are happy, now that that their "safe haven" and "common carrier" status aren't jeopardized.

Basically, what we're seeing with this lack of "The Internet" frenzy, however, is evidence of just how thin, just how scattered, just how disorganized, and just how ineffective in fact the geek lobby is. They seemed mighty and unstoppable with their "7 million signatures" to stop SOPA. Now they aren't appearing in anything like that number and aren't stopping CISPA. And the reason isn't that there aren't some among them who are sincere anarchists and fighters for their version of freedom.

The reason is that Google hasn't decided to sic their fanboyz and attack dogs on this yet -- and that's how we can see, with a kind of lost-wax casting method, how fake the anti-SOPA frenzy was. The congress people should have called their bluff back then and held firm. They should have said, sure, we are concerned, and...bring us any cases. We'll take a look...

They were spooked, but they doubled down on cybersecurity since that's more important than piracy, as it concerns the very infrastructure of the country and large government and business processes.

The funny thing about all this is Sen. McCain -- whom the Voice savagely counted among one of the people "trying to ruin the Internet" for his support of SOPA -- is what is in fact holding up this bill now over "freedom" concerns. They just aren't "The Internet's" freedom concerns, as they involve commerce and business, which Anonymous and the open source cultists hate. McCain also rightly opposed "net neutrality" -- it's really a bandwidth consumption issue and the same libertarianism that makes him want to get government out of the Internet-security-regulation business prompted him to oppose the "net neutrality" gambit.

Has Google just decided to lobby in a more sophisticated fashion this time along, to sort of keep their powder dry? That could be it. Google disclosed that it was using its lobbying arm against CISPA back in April.

"We think this is an important issue and we're watching the process closely but we haven't taken a formal position on any specific legislation," the spokeswoman said.

They've been in that fake mode since, although furiously working behind the scenes.

Far from screeching all over the Internet about this, Anonymous -- whose shock-troops will organize the onslaught and take down the websites of anyone supporting legislation they don't like -- has this rather sedate blog on the topic on a Russian site which I see they swiped from this site called net-security.org. Hmm. Who hasn't let the dogs out?

One of the most vocal critics of the bill is the Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member John McCain. As the majority of USA's critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, he is against any type of State intervention in things like setting up security-related standards.

The bill’s sponsors are trying to push for a vote on the legislation as soon as possible - Senator Lieberman even said that the bill won't survive if the Senate doesn't consider it before the upcoming August recess. In a floor speech, Mr. McCain clearly objected to this pressure and added a remark that "it is not the right way to move forward with little or no opportunity for debate and amendments".

Oh, please. This has been in debate for years.  And the real reason they have to hurry is that at any moment, Google may let slip the dogs of war.

 

 

CC Chapman and the Campaign by Social Media and LGBT Against Business They Hate

CC Chapman is one of the best-known social media marketing consultants in the business. He's everywhere and constantly visible.

And now he's joined other tech web sites or social media "thought leaders" in waging the campaign against organizations and businesses whose leaders have come out for traditional family values and refuse to be stampeded into the pro-gay politically-correct stance.

Right -- they refuse to give up their beliefs in our free country that is supposed to protect freedom of belief -- or non-belief under the First Amendment.

TechCrunch's Gregory Ferenstein has started a controversial posting that has driven more traffic to TechCrunch, using their usual methods, and of course has caused some to ask if what social media is *about* is really a topic for the tech media.

I'm not surprised that they've made it one, because the geeks are always welding their own views into the tech, especially social media, and view the tech press as not really something to report tech news, but to help spread their worldviews and gain more power. That's natural for every power grouping. They are no different, and just have more of it than others these days.

Mashable also got on the ban wagon. Of course one of the leading Better Worlders, Jeff Bezos, is also going to put money into getting gay marriage passed -- and that means more hate campaigns against conservatives and boycott campaigns against targeted businesses in social media.

All the while they are engaging in this bullying campaign -- yes, it is indeed bullying, replete with snark, hate, incitement, viciousness, anger -- these social media gurus and bloggers are patting themselves on the back for their tolerance and love of human rights and taking star turns for cresting the wave of the latest "progressive" new media-whipsawed campaign.

It's pretty well orchestrated now, so I asked CC if he was paid to casually blog his love-up of Target.

As I say below, I'm glad Target did this ad -- but were they bullied into it? Is this like Shakedown Street?

And I think the way to bring about gay marriage rights and other rights related to the LGBT cause is not by vilifying the Christian right or the conservatives, but to demand equality and praise those who do tolerate gays.

I think the campaign by the aggressive "progressives' is only going to lead to more backlash.

***

C.C. Chapman shared The Denim Guy's photo.

Thursday at 10:00am ·

I love that we are seeing more ads like this. It reflects the world we live in. Plus I love thinking about all the assholes who will look at this and get bent out of shape.

Someday, this won't be news. That day can't get here soon enough.

i can really care less about that chicken company everyone is talking about. Who I really love today is Target

106Like · · Unfollow Post · Share

• 83 people like this.
• • 

    Corey O'Loughlin Love love love this!

    Thursday at 10:06am · Like
  • 

    Margot Bloomstein Really hope this means Target is changing its ways in the gay community--and not just trying to attract their dollars. It's been a tough boycott!

    Thursday at 10:12am via mobile · Like · 2
  • 

    Paul Parkinson Next up Chick-Fil-A...

    Thursday at 10:49am · Like
  • 

    Rick Liebling Here's the really important part: When we reach the time that people don't look at this and say, "Yeah, Target supports Gay marriage!" but when a heterosexual couple looks at this and simply says, "We should register at Target."

    Thursday at 10:56am · Like · 3
  • 

    Kirsten Harrell CC - I appreciate your comment. I look forward to that day too!

    Thursday at 11:15am via mobile · Like
  • 

    Jackie Funk Lots of love coming your way, Charles. If only we could convince the Boy Scouts of America!

    Thursday at 11:22am · Like
  • 

    C.C. Chapman Don't even get me going on them Jackie Funk!!! I grew up in the scouts and their stance on religion and sexuality piss me off to my core.

    Thursday at 11:23am · Like · 2
  • 

    Jackie Funk We have kept Jackson in, despite Denise's permanent removal. Fortunately, her current troop is supportive. Unfortunately, her being "banned for life" for simply being gay means she is excluded from numerous outings, scout development programs, etc. She's missing camp this week for this very reason (sigh...). I remain optimistic that awareness and education will eventually prevail.

    Thursday at 11:30am · Like
  • 

    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    I'm glad there are ads like this, too, CC, I support gay marriage and all LGBT rights. The way to campaign is through positive steps like this. These aggressive hate campaigns against Boy Scouts, Chick fil-A, trying to force private organizations to change their views, only causes backlashes, doesn't work, and is actually contrary to American law (First Amendment). The path for tolerance and empowerment of minorities in the US has always led through equal rights and civil rights, not through rabid "progressive" movements that establish hegemony for only one political and cultural perspective. Be pissed off all you want about BSA -- then start your own scouts or join some other organizations rather than *coerce* people into changing their views which in fact are compliant with law.

    Thursday at 1:01pm · Like
  • 

    Liz Gumbinner

    Catherine, I have to disagree. I don't think that condemning hate equals a hate campaign. And it's not a first amendment issue or a legal one. Freedom of speech is guaranteed to individuals, not corporations; and customers are entitled to know where their money is going, and to support those companies whose values align with their own. Just because something is legal doesn't make it right, and it's one of the most amazing, wonderful hallmarks of a democracy that its citizenry is allowed to speak up about injustices.
    
    It's also not accurate to say that these campaign don't work. Target entirely revamped their political giving policies after customer backlash. http://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/02/17/target-enacts-new-political-giving-policies/ And loud support for JC Penney's hiring of Ellen DeGeneres overtook the loud (minority) campaign against her.
    
    There are many other examples of public pressure leading to positive change. Progress only happens when people are willing to speak up and say, "this isn't right."

    

    Target enacts new political giving policies

    www.washingtonblade.com

    Change follows 2010 election donation controversy

    Yesterday at 9:20am · Like · 2
  • 

    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    ‎@Luz Gumbinner You're wrong about the First Amendment, and indeed it *is* a First Amendment and therefore legal issue. You don't seem to grasp how it works. It is not that free speech is "guaranteed" or "guaranteed to individuals, not corporations" -- that's incorrect. It's about *absence* of action by Congress to interfere with the recognized inherent freedom of speech -- the wording is "Congress shall make no law..." Of course the First Amendment applies to individuals as well as corporations, and that was true even before Citizens' United, which only reinforced the campaign contribution issue.
    
    What I marvel at is that you say that " customers are entitled to know where their money is going, and to support those companies whose values align with their own" -- applauding the free speech of individuals and their rights -- but can't grasp that the same applies in reverse -- companies have the same rights. Individual CEOs who head those companies get to espouse the views they like and make their companies align with their values. You are not required to use their services. But going to a boycott, and inciting the kind of vicious hatred we've seen (the VP of Public Relations of Chik-fil-A died of a heart attack!) begins then to encroach on others' rights, and isn't merely a fulfillment of one's own rights.
    
    Campaigns like this using the "freeze and isolate the target" Saul Alinsky method don't really work. All they do is bully and shame companies into scared stampeding to get reputation management from people like CC who do social media management. That's all. It doesn't change hearts and minds. It merely changes the semblance of hearts and minds -- it's really fake. The loud support for JC Penny over Ellen DeGeneres may overtake the loud campaign against her, but only from where you sit -- for where the opposition sit, they will only backlash harder in the next round.
    
    This is what I keep saying to people who think you're winning: win the culture war, lose the election. Just watch.
    
    Public pressure doesn't lead to positive change because in fact, gay marriage isn't getting legalized and the battle has grown harder in many states precisely because of these aggressive "progressive" hate and vilification campaigns. I'm confident that in some quarters LGBT leaders know this and at some point they're going to switch tactics and I look forward to seeing how/whether they can really call off their dogs. The 'progressives' overall think they are on a roll now, bullying Komen despite their views to return to funding Planned Parenthood despite some members' objections; harassing Rush Limbaugh for his tasteless remarks that are no different than leftwing talk show hosts' tasteless remarks (and some of them get that); bullying BSA and now Chik-fil-A. Who's next?
    
    I don't want to live in a country where select groups of people get to bully and persecute others and force them to change their views. I don't want it for gay people; I don't want it for Christian fundamentalists. I do not want that kind of country. That kind of country is the Soviet Union. I do not want it. I will fight it.
    
    It's not as you say, that people are saying "this isn't right". Instead, some well-financed Saul Alinsky methodologists in the highly-paid social media hyposphere that CC probably knows are creating the semblance of a social movement and stampeding the clicking crowds. Meanwhile, gay marriage doesn't get legalized. There is a connection here. That's because the focus isn't on equality and civil rights for all. It's about using one right to bully another into backing off from their own exercise of their right. That's wrong.

    16 hours ago · Like
  • 

    Liz Gumbinner I will always stand up against hatred and discrimination, Catherine. I always have. And I'm glad people like CC are willing to do it too. "Bullies" like Susan B Anthony and Martin Luther King have paved the way.

    10 hours ago via mobile · Like
  • 

    C.C. Chapman Catherine, I'm with Liz on this completely. Everyone is entitled to their thoughts, but using the word "hate" in the way you are is completely off base. I also find it interesting that individuals gathering around a cause are bullies, but the big corporations are not. That fascinates me that you believe that.
    
    But, as I was taught, to each their own.

    7 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2
  • 

    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    Of course it's hate and intolerance in reverse, CC. The deliberate, tendentious representation of this man's views as expressed on the record is only the beginning. The shrill, venomous hate campaigns on social media are obvious for all to see. You yourself say "their stance on religion and sexuality piss me off to my core" indicating the deep anger *and hate* you feel for a perspective that in fact a) does not prevent YOU from living as you please b) doesn't prevent gays from living as they please c) isn't illegal or threatening d) is only going to grow stronger, as a backlash, for feeling threatened. You just don't see it, CC, because as Madge used to say on the commercial in the old days, "You're soaking in it." Why is a big corporation a "bully" merely for deciding they want to endorse Christian beliefs and promote them in their philanthropy and public statements, but Jeff Bezos, in an even more gigantic wealthy corporation *isn't* a bully for funding the gay marriage struggle, which of course will include funding these kind of social media bullying campaigns!!! Hello! Look on the horrible Yahoo comments. The first thing people do from the "masses" is say "I hate it that this rich guy can buy a vote against what I believe". And you know something? There's a hell of a lot of blacks and Hispanics who have this more traditional belief, and they are a huge growing consumer class of young people for gadgets, and YOU ought to appreciate that. So be fascinated all you like, big guy. You're in a bubble. A person in the social media biz cannot afford to be in a bubble. You read too much TechCrunch, and too much self-reinforcing Facebook friend comments. To your peril.

    35 minutes ago · Like
  • 

    C.C. Chapman Sorry you feel this way. Nothing more I can say as I read this all and have to laugh. It is obvious that we see life VERY differently and that's fine. Great part about this world, room for all opinions.

    30 minutes ago · Like
  • 

    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    ‎@Liz Gumbinner You sound rather self-righteous and self-congratulatory. I stand up against hatred and discrimination, too. And that's EXACTLY what is happening when the aggressive "progressives" bully and harass individuals and groups and businesses to *forcibly* change their views or lose their business. That *is* bullying. Martin Luther King didn't use violence and didn't use force. He used peaceful methods and peaceful rhetoric. What a world away from the vicious unaccountable Internet mobs that spread hate.

    4 minutes ago · Like
  • 

    Matt Searles ‎CC Chapman I LOVE "Plus I love thinking about all the assholes who will look at this and get bent out of shape" - gives me black heart a warm glow

    2 minutes ago · Like
  • 

    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick P.S. Are you paid to do this campaign on social media, CC?

    about a minute ago ·
  • Like
  • • 

      Matt Searles

      Well.. I don't know if I should jump into this.. I think this complex in how it relates to the national discourses on the subject and I think the problem.. is a polarization where the right and left don't hear each other so well.. I think there is tone deafness on both sides.. which just exacerbates the friction... and a lot of it has to with the structural implications of the media system and it's implications on what and how stuff spreads..
      
      But.. on the subject of bullies.. Civil Rights was not all none violent.. Black Nationalism, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X... Nelson Mendela was not a non violent protester.. and all these people and groups played a roll in the movement, and bringing the ball forward..
      
      The way I would describe is to say "beware in throwing out your demons that you don't throw out the best part of you" that.. that the problem is not that you have this demon, it's that you haven't integrated it into your personality in such a way that it would play a constructive roll.. and the personality integration.. if you apply this to collective consciousness.. I mean it basically comes down America is in a big struggle to grow up.

      10 minutes ago · Like
    • 

      Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

      No, it's not about the "left and the right not hearing each other so well". I'm not on the right. I'm a liberal. I voted for Obama. I won't be doing that again because the pendulum has swung way too hard to the left. While it's fashionable to throw around Foucault words like "discourses," the reality is, there's a very poor understanding on the left particularly among the "progressives" about what civil rights really mean -- they really mean pluralism and free speech and diversity in the very real sense, not in the fake politically-correct sense. All that talk about "structuralist this and that" (Marxist critical approaches) can't disguise the real structure problem: an absolute refusal of the left to accept genuine freedom, genuine democracy, and genuine civil liberties. They've hijacked these terms and used them for so long as a fig leaf to their real Marxist agenda that they have completely lost touch with how fake they are. As for violence in the civil rights movement, that's not the civil rights movement. That's the violent black nationalist radical movement inspired by Soviet-style Marxist ideals and anarchist ideas, that were spread in the world in the 1960s. We don't have civil rights because of violence; we have civil rights because of non-violence. Had the Black Panthers succeeded, we wouldn't have freedom, but would live under Soviet-style tyranny. They bullied, beat, and even murdered their critics. They are not what made the civil rights movement succeed, they are not about the rule of law. Nelson Mandela also advocated and accepted violence. But that's not what won the anti-apartheid movement, it's in fact what delayed it many years from succeeding. This casual embracing of revolutionary radical violence by "progressives" is profoundly disturbing, and it's why they cannot be allowed to come to power in our country. As for your psychobabble at the end -- well, there isn't any need for anybody to grow up but the infantile tantruming left *shrugs*.

      2 minutes ago · Like
  • 

    Write a comment...
  • 

    C.C. Chapman Catherine, I saw a photo that I appreciated and shared it. That is all. Amazing that you'd think otherwise. Hope you have a great rest of your weekend.

    26 minutes ago
  • 

    Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick

    That's great, CC, but you should hardly think it's "amazing," given how concerted, contrived and concentrated these campaigns are right now. They are bought and paid social media exercises that whiplash people who do in fact genuinely believe what they do...but it all has LOTS of help. You're in the social media manipulation business, so the question *has* to be asked, given how often what you do on social media isn't merely just "sharing" or "your own personal opinions" but is weaved into the ad business.

    22 minutes ago
  • 

    C.C. Chapman Wow. I'm speechless to say the least. The fact that you think that is how business works shows just how little you understand. LIke I said before have a great weekend and move on to another street corner to picket please. My wall has had enough of it.

    21 minutes ago · 3
  • 

    Shaine Lee Mata From a marketing perspective, it seems very niche. The occasional reference here and there would work. This just seems like overt pandering. It's like businesses jumping on social media just because others are doing it. But, I suppose it depends on where the ad is placed.

And this is where CC blocks me because I can't use his wall as a picket sign -- only he can lol.

And like always, the geeks respond to direct, relevant, obvious criticism with making out their arcane priesthood to be even more arcane, that ordinary citizens "can't" understand it.

The fact is, as I worked for the Soros foundations for many years, I sat in on many meetings where just this type of old media, then new media campaign was formed, and the hired guns were brought in who are skilled in the "Saul Alinsky methods" as they are called by the right -- and not without reason. They are manipulative, they're hateful, they're arrogant and superior. It's class warfare of the prime Marxist sort.

It's why I wrote about CC and the "World Domination Summit" -- the sense that staged and contrived huge mass meetings like this feel so much like the Soviet experiment....

"Evil ISPs Are Evil"

The little telecom DSL box that controls your world, that gets Google and their fanboyz crazy... Photo (c) by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick.

Paul Venezia has an article about Internet metering on infoworld.com -- and it's a perfect exemplar of the snarky geek's assault on the Internet Service Providers and telecoms and the flogging of the typical Google-lobby arguments against metering or controlling traffic because bandwidth is a scarce resource.

You can tell from the snark and the vitriol dripping from the paragraphs reciting these well-worn geek saws about ISPs are wheeled out not from "science" but "politics".

And the first thing to understand about this politics is that it is a kind of craftsmen class war, if you will, or competing industrial warfare replete with sabotage -- part of which is articles like Venezia's.

GEEK CLASS WARFARE

The first class is the geeks -- computer programmers, Internet engineers, website designers and such -- the people who call themselves "the Internet" when of course, they are only part of the Internet and should know their place better, like gas station attendants and garage mechanics.

The primal need the geeks have is to disguise the cost of themselves to their clients, who are usually not ordinary consumers or end-users, but enterprise, or small business, who have to hire them to run the Internet in their offices or who work in large IT companies supplying the Internet's functioning. Their costs aren't cheap and don't seem to be coming down -- they start at $50 an hour as consultants and as staff they easily command six figures. From the earliest days of the Internet, the programmers had to "liberate" the content of things like newspapers that they wanted to bring over the Internet line to get more people using it because they had to remove from the view the fact that they -- and their machines -- cost a lot to install in an office.

Few offices have ever "saved money" by installing networks and computers. Even if they automate tasks that human clerks used to do, as it has been aptly pointed out by critics more than once, a more expensive programmer or network administrator now replaces some of the cheaper clerks -- and the machines, while they seem to be coming down in cost, seem to replicate like bunnies -- before, it was just a computer on your desk, now it's your laptop and phone that your company might also be paying for -- and someone will justify a tablet as well. All of these -- and their servicing, because they break down all the time -- add thousands and millions of dollars to IT budgets as well as personal expenses and make life more expensive, not less even if "the cost of computers and bandwidth are coming" down as the geek snarks always tell you. They hide the cost of themselves, which is only going up, and the number of their gadgets, which is doubling and tripling.

So this class of people -- I call it the Google lobby because it's Google first and foremost, and then everyone relying on Google products specifically and the Google paradigm of free content and ad revenue -- are very, very keenly interested in making other people pay for their work tools and the highways of their business and not have any more costs than they have to bear already, so they can make more money. They want telephony to be done all over the Internet "for free," as it is on Skype. They find ISPs and telecoms evil, piggy and selfish and even "corporate welfare clients" of the state because they are "in the way" of their vision of an Internet paid for by other people, which they get to use to "innovate on top of" and get paid their consulting or staff fees -- which, as I noted, aren't cheap.

REAL ENGINEERS

Meanwhile, the telecoms are filled with engineers, people who don't have to "build apps" for yet another way to share a song with your girlfriend who are also called engineers, but real engineers who have to actually go out and build towers, string wires, get wireless signals working, and serve individual customers, which geek programmers typically never have to do, or if they do, it is in a business setting where their "customer" is only the person who hired them and supervises them, not even the individual users in the office.

These business and industries have different profiles, cultures, ethos, etc. And they clash because they are selling the same thing: communications for people and increasingly, things. These communications are increasingly penetrating every aspect of life, so that where once it was just a phone, or then it was a phone and fax, now it is phone, fax (things never fall out of use completely), DSL line or other dedicated computer line, smart phone, laptop, tablets -- and then all the things in your home that are starting to be wired and connected to the "Internet of things," about which I have warned.

From the cold perspective of "The Internet" -- the geek bosses who control your connection, ultimately, because they must install it and fix it when it breaks down -- the telecoms are dinosaurs. They should get gone. They don't need to exist any more. Google will get into the phone business, and replace Apple. Voice can all be done over the Internet, and so can everything else.

Except Apple is a huge, powerful, rich force to conjure with, and won't go down easily. While it angers many people that Steve Jobs was hoarding billions of dollars and not hiring people or giving to charity, I can see why he built up this war chest to fight the battle needed with Google. And from the perspective of the consumer, it's a good thing when titans clash, because then they aren't in a totalitarian system under the thumb of only one power, and the titans have to reduce their prices and try to serve customers more or at least be a little mroe responsive to them.

THE 'NET NEUTRALITY' REACTIONARIES

Venezia's arguments are the same one repeated everywhere this discussion surfaces, as it does increasingly in the "net neutrality" wars. I think the very term "net neutrality" is a fake, contrived socialist term that should be changed to "bandwidth consumption management' or something like that to reflect the reality of the technocommunism forces battling for its "free-ness".

Infoworld.com calls Bill Snyder's arguments on this "conservative" and thereby contrasts Venezia then as "progressive," but the reality is, the progressive, socialist approach to the Internet is by far the more reactionary and conservative, based on ideologies of 150 years' vintage that have been disproven by the Soviet and other communist experiments around the world. What's far more modern and advanced is the marketplace where scarce goods are supplied by a free market, not doled out by the state, and people are paid for goods and services and commerce can thrive.

Metered Internet is probably something we will be facing at least in some places, because bandwidth doesn't come out of thin air but requires machines, electricity, people, lines, etc. to provide. Those costs have to be covered, even if geeks want them disguised. Telecoms manage their covering; they pay for them. This fact is something those arguing for "net neutrality" stubbornly ignore, and try to cover up with two arguments:

1. "Telecoms are subsidized and therefore the public should get more out of them." Well, subsidies is just a socialist word -- you could turn it around and call it "incentives". I'd like more numbers on this entire issue, but even if the "government pays for telecoms," it pays for them for a reason: they provide a necessary service, and they provide jobs. The incentive for them to do business, in other words, pays off. They are not welfare clients just sucking down tax-payers' moneys and then demanding more to go the next round; they produce. They are not Google, hijacking content, selling ads against it, and then reluctantly removing it under fire (they took down five million pieces of content last year from DMCA notices!).

That's why the entire notion of "corporate welfare" that the left brandishes in their assault on capitalism is so silly and infantile -- government use of tax-payer funds to incentivize a sector that serves people and provides jobs, including union jobs, can't be the evil the left suggests -- and however we may wish to criticize it as inefficient, it just doesn't compare, when you think of other boon-doggles like Obama's "green job" subsidies that ended in ruin.

And whatever these subsidies, what are they as a percentage of the ISPs overall revenue? And what ways is Google subsidized in its business, in fact, by subsiding ISPs? (That equation is *never* contempalted by the "net neutrality" nerds). And what way is Google also subsidized by states or municipalities supplying free Internet access and or wi-fi and broadband that benefits Google's ad sales business, basically, it's core enterprise?

2. "The Internet is already paid for so telecoms shouldn't charge more for content but let others innovate and build -- they are stifling innovation"

Er, paid for, by telecoms, so they should get to do what they need to do to stay in business. I saw what you did there, Google -- supplying free wi-fi in the New York subway or to entire towns in Kansas, trying to prove you can "do it better". I don't believe you.

INNOVATION IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR TECHNOCOMMUNISM

I've come to see -- especially from reading Fred Wilson's blog -- that "innovation" is just another word for technocommunism. It often involves merely jacking a siphon into the state's pipeline and siphoning off oil or gas -- in a world where AT&T and Verizon play the role of the state. In this case, the Internet is supplied by "somebody else" (the telecoms) and the FourSquares and Twitters and Tumblrs and all the things Fred invests in ride on top of this "for free" while the beneficiaries of the VC cash -- the start-ups -- either live off their VC stipends until they are sold to something bigger and everyone can cash out, or they put in ads and earn ad revenue against the hijacked content of other people, supplied over routes paid for by other people.

In other words, Verizon or Comcast has to hump Twitter or Youtube or Tumbl or Facebook over the "Internetwebs" for free, because their customers demand it, even though they are paying the same costs they paid 10 years ago (I am still paying $37 a month for Verizon DSL). My Internet use -- and my gadgets' Internet use -- is probably 10 times more than it was 10 years ago, but my fee is the same. That's going to have to give -- and I get that, especially because I don't pay any subscription fee for Facebook or Youtube or Twitter, despite heavy photo and video usage, even though I'd be willing to -- if those services then paid for their bandwidth instead of demanding a handout -- like they accuse the telecoms of getting LOL.

Venezia is outraged -- the horror! -- that Verizon might get into the content business the way AOL has, and might charge for either conveying heavier content or supply content of its own for no charge or less charge than those using their highways. But the outrage is entirely misplaced and entirely communist in nature. Why shouldn't a company that paid for the bandwidth and supplies the wires and the gadgets to access it provide a loss leader of content to compete with Netflix, which is siphoning off their gas, so to speak?

After all, um, Google is competing with Netflix now by having a dirt-simple interface over which you can get movies for cheap to see on Google Play. That's what this is all about, people!

THE INTERNET KILLED MY NEIGHBOURHOOD

I have nothing but undying scorn for Netflix. I had a perfectly good video store -- actually, 6 video stores within walking distance, all of them bustling, 4 of them Blockbusters and 2 of them independents -- and all of them were killed by "the Internet" i.e. Netflix. Within a year, when Netflix began delivering over the Internet instead of in mailed packages, they all died, scarring my neighbourhood with empty stores that didn't rent out. With them went choice, variety, and most important business and jobs, and the ecosphere of things that spring up around such giant stores -- the little delis that existed around them.

I used to go to the Blockbusters or the independent store and browse up and down the aisle. On Netflix, I can only see the top -- the screen -- and try to go around pre-fabbed categories that sometimes make no sense and then look at their pre-fabbed offerings based on whatever algorithms they use, painfully having to load page after page, and try to browse. Netflix works great if you already know of a movie you want and search for it -- it doesn't work great to browse and discover.

In a store, you browse by genre and alphabet and have the serendipity you cannot get online. You have the staff picks. You see your neighbours in the store, and they tell you something they liked. You see foreign films that serve your neighbourhood's actual people that just aren't on Netflix. And so on.

Netflix, meanwhile, destroyed everyone else's business with their Internet delivery -- then jacked up the prices, after they had everyone hooked, sparking the outrage of their customers, many of whom quit on them. And flocked to piracy. So this was a win, everybody? Jobs killed all over my neighbourhood, businesses killed that really didn't "need" to be killed "because of the Internet," and then everyone flocks to pirates like the now-seized tvshack.net? Which incurs more losses for the content industry?

Venezia argues that the cost of bandwidth has been lowered, and therefore is indignant that "ISPS are still claiming poverty. But once you come out of the Google lobbyist fog on this question, you see the issue -- it doesn't matter if bandwidth is cheaper because there are way more customers making way more demands on that bandwidth. Duh! Geeks don't understand the central issue of the telecom: CUSTOMER SERVICE AND MORE GADGETS!

SAY IT WITH ME NOW, LOUDLY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

That's because geeks don't have customers; they have clients.

It isn't at all "to the detriment of everyone" if my ISP now gets into the content business or even starts metering my hugely-bandwith intensive Second Life streaming, foreign TV, Skype, huge files of documents and photos for work, etc. -- which is way heavier than my aunt's occasional email, work files and Youtubes on Sunday although possibly not as heavy as my son's online war games, constant video watching and constantly pushing of photos on Facebook and such.

In fact, if the ISP delivers content for free as a loss leader to raise their prices on that much heavier load *on* the bandwidth and *many more customers* especially in mobile, THAT'S OK. In fact, that's business, that's capitalism, and that has to be done. It has to be done to cover costs; it has to be done to pay for people; they have unions with demands, and that's ok, too, although I've expressed skepticism about Verizon.

The alternative is gapingly obvious -- socialism, if not coercive communism, whereby the government pays for bandwidth "like a utility" -- although it isn't like water, that people need to live, or electricity, that people need to be part of the modern world and do their jobs and feed their families; it's largely socialization and entertainment that comes through the bandwidth, and therefore the idea that the government should fund it, instead of taxing it as it does cigarettes and alcohol, seems risible.

Venezia thinks ISPs and telecoms don't "really" care about bandwidth because they cope with the rising demand and keep making it possible for greedy Netflix and content-robbing Youtube to thrive. But he thinks they are "crazy" for caring that Netflix and Google's Youtube get a free ride -- and get to make their income off other people's money. Why? This is purely a technocommunist position. At least admit what your beliefs are: pure technocommunism of the "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" and "expropriating from the expropriators" variety. And admit that what you want is even more socialism from Obama, even more government control of the Internet via an executive agency, the FCC, which "net neutrality" "liberationists" want to achieve, and then all the coercion and deprivation *that* entails. Admit it. It's the Big Lie I can't stand...

And...Venezia talks as if Google Play, which can advertise on Google Search any day of the week and drive millions to its doors, doesn't exist and won't take a chunk out of Netflix's business. Hungarian "goulash communism" and Yugoslavia's "workers' self-management" was always competing against the more bumbling Soviet communism, you know?

INTERNET OF THINGS = BANDWIDTH HOG

Venezia is right to flag the "Internet of things" (although he doesn't call it that) -- the household devices like TVs or toasters or whatever that will "run on the Internet" or "your smart phone". They will be even bigger bandwidth eaters. And something has to give, somewhere. And in a free market society such as we still live in, that will be prices, not government agencies supplying socialism out of thin air. Pandora, Spotify, or itunes Streaming will have to pay more for what they do, and charge more, or die. Free is not viable. And yes, companies like AOL will compete, and that's good. Venezia is one of those people who loves competition to telecoms, but hates it when it's to Internet companies.

ISPs don't have to get "monopolistic"; they will just have to charge more and/or supply more loss leaders, and content seems the obvious low-hanging fruit.

OH, THOSE EVIL WALLED GARDENS...

There is nothing intrinsically evil about "walled gardens" as the geeks told us for years around Web 1.0 and the early Web 2.0. Surely they have to concede now that the giant walled garden of Facebook, heading to a billion members, is the winner of the war they thought they had won back in the 1990s over AOL with free open source browsers. AOL "lost," but then put in a free messengering system used by every teenager on the planet with an Internet connection. AOL "lost," and they "still make unsuspecting people pay for Internet connection" as geeks snort, yet they bought the geek and lefty flagship publications of TechCrunch and Huffpo and they continue to prevail with them and with music content they supply on their channel.

Venezia ends with an apocalyptic, hysterical geeky vision, calculated to stampede his fellow geeks into hatred and clicking on ads for various causes to kill telecoms and support the Google business model, such as the "Internet Freedom" goon squad are putting up everywhere. He warns:

Their [the ISPs'] ultimate goal is to turn the Internet into cable TV, with themselves at the center, getting paid coming and going. They want the whole pie, and it would be a wholesale disaster if we were to give it to them.

Uh...It's more like this: the Google and associated lobby ultimate goal is to take over the content streaming of the Internet, too, and we see Google doing that -- buying phones, supplying software to phones, buying Youtube and starting Google play. That's the more scary prospect, because these people own search, which means they own intentions and privacy of billions of people in searchable ways that telecoms don't match even carrying all our conversations.

The reality is that these two different industries and different cultures and different business models compete, and it's good that they stay in competition and one doesn't supplant the other. The telecoms are no more likely to "turn the Internet into cable TV" than Google will be able to take all telephony away from Apple and others. Already Google provides TV shows for $4.95 on the Internet, and Venezia isn't making a peep -- it's ok when Google turns the Internet into cable TV, but not when Comcast does it, you know?

Why Doesn't the USB Fit in the Slot?

Shouldn't all keyboard USBs be standard to fit in the towers of any computers?

So what's up here with this e-machines keyboard not being able to fit into this Dell 1100?

There's only one slot that a purple USB prong from the keyboard could go into -- this hole that is also helpfully coloured purple here on the back of the tower:

 

Yet it won't fit.

Now, why won't it fit?

If you look closely -- and it may not be visible in this camera photo -- the USB prong has a not only tines like a fork, but a kind of wedge that has to fit into a slot, inside.

And that doesn't match, as there is no slot inside the purple USB hole on the tower.

Hmmm. So I could cast around and see if I can find a used keyboard that goes with this Dell 1100 (used). Or get a wireless keyboard? I have a feeling those will break down a lot.

 

 

First World Problems

The World Domination Summit even with its ultra-modern army surplus graphics seemed really glib, superficial, and ultimately stupid, awash in a self-referential bath of social media boosterism contrived by ad men.

We're not supposed to call those new hipster agencies that help you "have a conversation about your brand" or "connect with your conmunity" or do some other vague thing actually about marketing, but they are indeed ad men.

I like CC Chapman, he seems a pleasant and interesting guy and I always click "like" on whatever brand or project he is hustling just because it's sort of interesting. I have less respect for Chris Brogan, who I see as more overtly political and manipulative.

But even with CCC, I remember an unpleasant moment I had at the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago several years ago. I looked up, and suddenly saw CC and his sidekick, whose name I'm forgetting now, sitting in the lobby by the piano.

It was because I realized he was there not because he was an SL true believer, but because he had believed, at least, until maybe that very meeting, that that the SL user base was an audience that was the Next Big Thing in social media marketing and all the big brands had flocked to it for a time. 

And it wasn't even that that bothered me, because that was perfectly legitimate work, perfectly normal activity trying to chase around the fickle public and the companies through the social media storm to make a consulting living. It's all good.

It was that suddenly, I realized that this series of gonzo journalism episodes that had appeared in the Aphaville Herald, and also a cartoon of a rolicking good times of this wierdo dude who partied and doped and womanized his way through all these SL virtual adventures, may have been in fact  merely a dressed-up marketing exercise. It may have even been paid for -- Pixeleen and Uri may have taken ad money for this, or may have simply cooperated in giving CC and co visibility and a stage to do their thing. SL isn't real but it has a certain versimilitude, if you will, to real life. But the smack-talk articles and gonzo adventure thing, I suddenly realized, were likely fake. And I felt highly manipulated, for not realizing that right away.

There was a whole running series of stuff  like this  -- Uri's call-out of other ad agencies as "fucktards" for not getting it -- involving Crayon, which was the name of the agency CC was in at the time. The Crayonistas were the good guys for "getting it" -- others were retarded for not. Uri was craven although he turned critical as the Crayonistas had their last gasp and were no more. I don't know what to believe. But CC and a bunch of other people like Neville Hobson left the Crayon thing and now I don't even know if it exists.

Chris Brogan I followed through his medicine show for Coke (or was it Pepsi) at SXSW, including his meeting with Gov. Perry and photo opp with him, which I'm sure he'd prefer to forget now.

In any event, the WDS isn't about the sort of world domination that Mitch Kapor plans while seemingly merely sponsoring open source projects. It's more banal and anodyne but therefore, perhaps may spread more.

It's about getting a whole bunch of mainly white people, although there are a fair share of black, Indian, and other minority speakers to make it look like a rainbow coalition, and having talks about things like "vulnerability" or "empowerment".  Then they all go off to posture in their cut-offs and boots and hard-hats building a Habitat for Humanity house for...a day.

The most sick-making feature of the jamboree this year was that the organizer, another PR guy named Chris Guillebeau, author of a book on $100 start-ups or something, gave everyone $100, apparently out of a gift he had received from a donor. So while they had paid some fee to come and had expenses to come, they got this $100 for a "$100 start-up" and were supposed to "go out and make a better world" or such. Like an app. Or something.

Jonathan Feldman was right to wonder if he was going into a "multi-level marketing morass of mumbo-jumbo." That is indeed what it is. A marketing ploy where the attendees are the product. It's the self-help camp show, where people pay money to hear motivational speakers who make their living...giving motivational talks to people who buy their books...telling others how they can make a business...that might involve giving motivational talks to others... It's terribly recursive...

Usually some "real guy" is thrown in who has climbed Everest or -- in this case -- couch-surfed around the world without paying rent or hotel fees LOL. Achievements!

It's all part of celebrating the sort of wired hipster world for which Portlandia is known -- the satire of the hippie/yuppie town Portland, Oregon.

Unfortunately, Feldman didn't get it because then he started writing this sort of nonsense:

I can also already tell that there will be learnings to be had about digital lifestyle. For example, one attendee tells how she runs two companies and raises three children by being a digital entrepreneur. At large enterprises, we like to think that we can lure the best and brightest. But can we? Only the other day, a woman at a large consumer products company was telling me how they don't allow people to work from home until they've worked for the company for at least a year. "You've got to earn the privilege," she said. Translation: "We assume that you're stupid and lazy until proven otherwise, and we judge people by the hours that your butt is in the seat instead of your productivity.

After I got done barfing over that awful term "learnings" which arch edu-punks began to use in SL and now it's everywhere, I had to wonder why a new hire completely untested in a company should be allowed to work at home, or why a normal business would have to be guilt-tripped into thinking that they were doing something wrong in waiting a year on that.

I'd love to learn what these two companies produce and Where's Dad and if he is really the one bringing home the bacon. Is this a company to overganize meetings to give motivational talks about how you can make a company to organize meetings to give motivational talks? Or is it just consulting with scared businesses that are afraid of Facebook and Twitter and what people might be saying about them on those slam-books?

Chris G. basically hopes to sell his book, his consulting services, and to "network" -- and help others to do the same because they make an audience for such books and services as a generic ecosystem. The list of writings about this content-free ecstatic social media experience will give you the idea -- but here's one summary that says it all -- it's a bunch of Norman Vincent Peale or Tony Robbins mantras dressed up for our cyber age that basically just say "do whatever you feel like doing and don't be guilty about it. There's no real self-sacrifice or kenosis or giving of the self or any sort of spiritual discipline as there would be in a real religion. There's no sense of God or a higher power or even another human being as in "I and Thou" -- it's more about feel-goods for the entitlement generation to help remove any traces of guilt they may still be feeling for not really doing a lot but whine.

As Chris Brogan, um, sagely told us, we must "embrace the persona of our inner superhero when putting ourselves out there."

What happened to "making a better world"? Oh, scrap that, I hate it when you guys go about makign a better world, it always involves coercion and taking away our freedoms in the end...

It reminds me of the way Marshall McLuhan used to say that the daily newspaper was like a warm bath for people. Now social media is an even warmer bath.

And it reminds me of what I read somewhere and can't attribute now, to the effect that people in the modern age are so unspiritual and so unused to religion and religious experience and a sense of the beyond and of the other world, that even a superficial reading of Carlos Castanada or some other pop spirituality book can give them an intense experience. Just being with other affluent wired white kids sprinkled with multi-culti kids or aging hipsters in a big field outdoors like a rock concert can be a rejuvenating and refreshing experience that gives their tiny lives meaning.

It's sad how much of this content-free stuff is around in the recession, but people have to live...

These pseudo-events concocted by ad men are the natural outgrowth of the social media consumer ethos and the "false consciousness" of the "concerned" movement, if you will, to turn a Marxist phrase in on itself -- concern about the environment, the third world, poor people, the planet, global warning, wars -- that converts into things like drinking bottled water that causes more impact to the earth than if you just turned on the tap, or involves buying expensive fairly-traded organic coffee or wearing shoes with the toes articulated and riding bicycles -- as if this was related to anything anywhere else on "the planet".

The theme of "vulnerability" is just one of those curious psycho fads -- the coolest people ever to be produced by civilization with the best teeth, education, and personally portable entertainment systems in the history of mankind are urged to be "less cool".

The story of Scott Harrison is one that inspires this me-generation:

He went from drinking, drugging, womanizing, and spending to serving, feeling, growing, and connecting. He went from club promoter to charity founder. He went from morally broke to founding one of the most inspirational and innovative charities known to man: Charity:Water.

Basically, what this over-hyped charity is about is taking all sorts of wired do-gooders on the Internet and trying to give them "something to do" by fashioning "stories" about "water projects" that will make them feel good. But most of the work is performed by their partner, Pump Aid, which itself grew up as a solution to the problem of all these much larger charities like Oxfam or Save the Children going through countries and putting in wells and water supplies, only to have the pumps break and yet not be able to go around and police just that issue -- either they were too preoccupied with other urgent issues, or they were even kicked out of countries. Pump Aid just chose this one service of making sure water pumps got spare parts and repairs and worked instead of sitting there as a emblem of first-world caring shortfalls.

This is all good but the reality of these countries is that they don't need endless charity, they need governance to change their kleptocratic or dysfunctional or even murderous regimes.

Malawi, for example, doesn't need just to keep getting hipster water projects, it needs a more free press and less corrupt government.

70% of the hospital beds are filled with AIDS patients not because the Catholic Church is somehow to blame -- only a small percentage of Africans are Catholics and don't listen to the Pope anyway about extramarital sex.

No, it's more about the refusal of men to take responsibility for their promiscuity and wear condoms-- which many do-gooders are happy to supply, especially now that the Obama Administration lifed the ban the Bush Administration had on supporting birth control in aid programs abroad. It's also about the usual problem of failing to educate girls, make conditions for girl's education, which can mean simple things like supplying water and sanitary napkins and security from rape on the long commute to school.

But Charity:Kotex would probably be a lot less popular or cool than Charity:Water.

Here's my more modest suggestion for "world domination":

1. Give your $100 to Doctors Without Borders, a reputable charitable group with low overhead that knows what they're doing and knows how to sort out the reality from the fraud in a place like Malawai.

2. Stay home and take care of your own family or neighbours or people in your city instead of the more self-aggrandizing feat of helping people overseas and building homes for people the government already provides shelter for if they have to.

3. Look around your own community to work on especially after-school programs and mentoring and "big brother" sort of work to try to save the teenagers from wreckage.

4. Stop travelling to ecstatic road shows to inflate your sagging Internet experiences and spending money on green tea, organic probiotic yoghurt and fairly-traded coffee and save it for something you really would gain advantage with -- foreign travel, a down payment on a house, the financing of a serious project.

This is not glamorous, but it will do. Stop being a product of ad men!

 

UN Rapporteur Frank La Rue Attacks US Over OWS in Latest UN Hustle

Sigh.

Frank La Rue, the UN's special rapporteur for freedom of expression, who has already promoted a troublesome resolution at the UN that invites more state participation in the Internet than less with the "development rubric," is now focusing on the US -- despite American diplomats' role in helping him pass his beloved resolution that just about declares Internet access as a "right".

And to make an inside baseball point, he's out of his mandate, strictly, as study and pronouncements on US treatment of Occupy Wall Street should really be done by another mandate, on freedom of peaceful assembly -- also brought into being by US persistence against severe human rights violators -- and whose stress on "peaceful" would certainly make many of the OWS claims of "violations of rights" wither on the vine.

My problem with this manipulative gambit from La Rue and the cheerleading of his action by the "progressives" isn't that I think the US should be shielded from UN criticism. Actually, we'd never have to worry about that problem EVER occuring as the UN is notorious for selectively obsessing about the sins of the US and Israel before they will ever cross the street to care about Sudan, Syria, Iran, etc.

No, it's about the timing of what is clearly a provocation and the likelihood that the US will do nothing to challenge it for fear of seeming illiberal -- enabling yet another round of bad-faith activity at the UN to persist.

BALANCING THE SADDLE-BAGS

Of course, these rapporteurs have to be impartial and be willing to criticize the great powers -- it's a very important system in the UN to keep protected which is always under assault by oppressive regimes trying to cover up their crimes.

And to be sure, Frank La Rue has expertly balanced his saddle-bags like the most savvy of rapporteurs with his list of fact-finding trips and with his list of statements on country situations which carefully includes Western states that don't really need his help, new democracies like Hungary that have real press freedom problems but which are already addressed by regional and national bodies and movements, and severe offenders like Iran.

Yet it's more than fine to ask whether his criticism of the US over OWS now isn't the usual third-world anti-American animosity at play here, and whether there isn't a microscope being applied to our liberal democracy at a time when situations in Russia, for example, like the firing of a journalist for writing supportively of the Magnitsky List, or the killing of a Siberian journalist, or beating of Russian demonstrators, aren't getting the attention they deserve from this rapporteur.

If I had time, I'd go read all his press releases and other statements and likely find the same technically perfect geographical balancing act there, although it would leave some egregious media freedom issues underserved -- "geographical distribution" always does that at the UN, and in fact undermines rather than upholds universality.

But in selectively picking on the US over OWS at this time, Frank La Rue is just "taking out insurance" against abusive regimes who endlessly demand "parity" with the US, and getting on the "progressive" and libertarian band-wagon, fanned very actively by the Open Society Institute and other "progressive" organizations that have worked with La Rue. They all accept the narrative of the left-leaning National Lawyers' Guild that has adopted the cause of monitoring very supportively the Occupy urban camp-outs, claiming that police efforts, sanctioned by local and national leaders, to dismantle these camps are somehow free-speech violations. 

NO GOOD DEED GOES UN-PUNISHED

He's doing this despite the after-glow of the US helping him get his pet resolution passed last month precisely because he needs to fend off other third-world US haters that are no doubt down his throat for that resolution. He needs to prove to them he is "balanced".

Focusing on the infamous pepper-spray incident, where a policeman appears to be casually --and brutally -- dispersing a sit-in -- is emblematic of this position of concern that the "progressives" adopt. Two police have been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. Could we ever get something like that going in Russia or China?

I'm certainly not for people being pepper-sprayed needlessly. My son was needlessly pepper-sprayed and hospitalized. Has yours been? I file complaints when I see excessive force used by the NYPD. Do you?

IS THERE A RIGHT TO ENDLESS URBAN PROTEST CAMPING?

Yet few ask how the UC Davis scene came about. An alternative account struggling to be heard in the politically-correct din, from an eyewitness on campus lets us know that students in fact surrounded police trying to disperse them, and the police had to summon extra help, and then had a harder job of dispersing what was now an obstructive sit-in blocking police themselves and other traffic on the campus. The New York Times denies this -- but then, they would, as they take the side of OWS in most of their reporting. Even Wikipedia lets us know there are counter-narratives, and we all await the outcome of the investigation. The UC David Chancellor apologized for the incident and said she had urged no force be used:

"I want to unequivocally apologize to the entire community for the appalling use of pepper spray. I will do everything in my power to make sure nothing like that ever happens again." She said, "My instructions were for no arrests and no police force. I explicitly directed the chief of police that violence should be avoided at all costs."^[55]

It's not like the cop just casually came up and sprayed pepper spray at the kids -- there were hours of interactions before that in which police kept trying to get people to disperse who were trying to make an Occupy camp-out on a college campus -- people who weren't even students and were outside agitators as well as students who didn't reflect the wishes of the whole student body.

Sure, people get to demonstrate but there are lawful restrictions as to time, place, and manner, and what Occupy does, as I've explained again and again, is try to lawfare their way out of legitimate prosecution of their civil disobedience by not acknowledging even that it *is* civil disobedience, and instead shrilly demanding right of way for disruptive urban campouts and traffic blockages as "freedom of assembly".

I'm not sure we will ever hear the truth, no matter how carefully calibrated the investigation -- an apt indication of the wildly skewed and politically-correct environment this is all taking place in is that when one member of the investigative body was from Kroll, which holds security contracts in the UC system was included, students rebelled because Kroll was tied to another agency which "works closely with the financial sector on Wall Street". There isn't anything these radicals won't find tainted with capitalism and Wall Street, and that is the issue, not impartiality.

Truly, the administration and the whole student body have to be asked: what do you guys want here? Socialism or capitalism? And are you willing to have radical student campouts disrupt your life endlessly instead of studying, and call that freedom? Please do tell us.

But Frank wasn't there to observe OWS in Zuccotti as I have been multiple times -- sure, they seemed like a peaceful bunch at the start, but there isn't an absolutely right to all-night camp-outs. And they turned rowdy, disruptive and problematic even for Mayor Bloomberg, who was initially tolerant of them, when they began shitting in the street, annoying passers-by, barging into local stores and demanding bathrooms and service and free food, well beyond the capacity of the local merchants to address, and then drumming and shouting and making noise all night so that the people who lived in the area couldn't sleep. Not to mention using illegal drugs, creating health hazards with loads of garbage and junk and rain-soaked bedding and rotting food, and even being involved in crimes like sexual harassment and rape, as well as theft and assault.

Enough got to be enough, and the mayor ordered the camp disbanded. Is Frank defending the absolute right for Marxist-Leninists, anarchists, class-hating hipsters and others to endlessly camp and disrupt? If so, he or some other OWS fan should bring the case of the Zuccotti dismantling to the UN Human Rights Committee. I'd be sad if that important body had to start dealing with frivolous cases, but I do think that it would help dissipate some of this fake "rights" speak coagulating around the anarchist and even violent OWS cause. I think the case will disintegrate on impact. No independent expert nor state-engaged hack (of which there are both in these treaty bodies) will defend the right of protesters to endlessly camp out and disrupt society in the name of radical revolutionary socialism. If they can find some incident of excessive use of force in roughing up a journalist or demonstrator, let them find it and let them condemn it. I'll eagerly await their findings. Their findings will not be about the US having some systematic policy of stifling assembly and media like Russia or China.

DO YOU GET A PASS IF YOU PROTEST AGAINST 'BANKSTERS'?

And I don't think that banking malfeasance entitles you to as pass from prosecution for your civil disobedience, although some leftists do, as the Huffo points out and La Rue readily concedes, championing their cause.

Even civil libertarians disagree whether the right to freedom of expression under First Amendment jurisprudence means all-night camping with fires, food, tents, crowds, etc. are all legitimate. Let them test their theory in court. I don't think they will fly.

I find it the most reprehensible moral equivalence to compare people demonstrating in Tahrir Square in Egypt, who lived under a dictator who jailed and tortured opponents, who were facing economic hardships, to the hipsters in OWS who have the leisure time and affluence to demonstrate over their college tuition bills or who are dysfunctional enough to be street people in the first place.

OWS is an appalling movement ideologically, which I've found from lots of up-close study of the meetings in person and also reading of the writings of the idealogues.

EVIL GREEDY CAPITALISTS ARE EVIL

But La Rue is not just examining whether Art. 19 and Art. 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Liberties were violated, given his mandate's jurisprudence. He's not just looking at freedom of the media and freedom of expression, he's got a "progressive" third-worldist agenda, and that is to demand socialism and demand the overthrow of capitalism. Take a look:

La Rue said the protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. "There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors," he said. That's especially the case when the bankers "still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes."

I find this sort of facile and Marxist dogmatic analysis of the savings-and-loan crisis and the recession to be unjustified, wearisome and ultimately stupid and unhelpful.

Bankers earning "very hefty salaries" isn't against the law; it isn't against the UN covenants, either. It's just against UN socialist cultural belief.

People losing their homes isn't against the law; it may be against certain UN covenants on economic rights the US hasn't signed, but it's more about -- again -- a sin against UN socialist cultural belief.

UN officials love to talk about "greed" -- all capitalism is "greed" to them. They scarcely differentiate.  It's not just greedy bankers who caused the NINJA loans; it's greedy community organizers with stealth socialist ideals demanding housing and education for free or low-cost for everyone to fit their ideals, and the politically-greedy Clinton Administration and even the Bush Administration being guilt-tripped into giving it to them with less and less questions being asked.

Sure, evil banksters are evil. But so are unscrupulous loan sharks and mortgage hustlers who took advantage of poor people with the "no income no job applications" (NINJA). The Internet accelerated and enabled the hustling of bad mortgages and loans and their conversion to toxic "investment products" as the aggregate debt was passed along. And here we are all. Yeah, we get it that there are regulatory actions to be taken and lessons to be learned. But the key one is not that socialism should replace capitalism, or that Wall Street, the stock market, the free enterprise system should be overthrown, dismantled, and destroyed (and surely Soros, who is funding the organizations engaged in all this agida with La Rue, doesn't personally believe this).

And that *is* what OWS wants, and if you don't want to hear it from me, just read their websites, General Assembly transcripts, and go to their demonstrations and read their signs. These are class-warrior anarchists who hate capitalism and think socialism or even outright communism will work.  That's what I mean about the stupid part.

La Rue thinks that he can trump any legal concerns about unlawful civil disobedience by invoking this "higher cause" of people "rightfully" challenging "greed". And I'm sorry, that's just plain Bolshevism. The idea that there are sectors with "personal interests" that prevail over people's needs is a conspiracy theory, not an analysis. It's not a report on freedom of expression rights being applied; it's a shrill and politicized provocation.

WRITING A LETTER

This being the ineffectual UN not at its best, one doesn't have to worry that La Rue will get too far with this deliberately obnoxious posturing -- all he's going to do is write a letter (and that's about all he can do, other than making a fact-finding visit or writing a report).

La Rue said he is in the process of writing what he called "an official communication" to the U.S. government "to ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations."

The US should be urged to answer this letter, and not ignore it like so many authoritarian governments ignore such UN letters. And if anything, La Rue should be encouraged to make a fact-finding visit to the US -- but here a debate really needs to be had about whether he's outside his mandate looking at assembly and not media -- but hey, let him come in tandem with his fellow special rapporteur for that cause.

But let them not speak just to the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild and Human Rights Watch and self-criticizing Obama operatives, but let them talk to those with alternative accounts, neighbourhood organizations who struggled to deal with OWS and let them examine carefully the police brutality allegations against the allegations that also bear examination of violence, even assault of police, and of course blocking traffic and obstructing business.

I welcome any and all rapporteurs coming to the US -- something they are not shy about doing as they come here in greater proportion than they do to China or Russia, which give them less access. But it's important to see that this is a political hustle:

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman welcomed the international scrutiny.

"We live in a much smaller, connected world than we ever did before, and just as Americans watch what goes on in Tahrir Square and in Syria, the whole world is watching us, too -- and that's a good thing," Lieberman said.

"We're kind of confident that we're living in the greatest democracy in the world, but when the international human rights world criticizes an American police officer for pepper spraying students who are sitting down, it rightly give us pause."

It's not about just sitting down, Dianna. It's about camping out and disrupting the campus and the ultimately, it's about blocking the police themselves and defying legitimate calls to disperse. Why do OWS demonstrators get to do this with impunity? What are you -- and they -- really trying to use these rights for?

You like so many activists seem to have forgotten the 1960s and 1980s when there was a kind of compact: demonstrators who want to make a point about an evil war or evil missiles go limp, and allow themselves to be arrested. They don't whine that their civil rights are violated when they know they are engaged in civil disobedience in the first place.

 

Take a Second Look at Democracy Lab's Recommended Reading -- Patrick Cockburn Gets it Wrong About Assange

Democracy Lab is a wonderful publication -- if you haven't seen it, take a look. I set it up also to come into my mailbox once a week -- it's a great roundup of all the democracy struggles in the world, and they are indeed far-flung these days.

It's published by a thoughtful and serious journalist, Christian Caryl, who I first came across when he worked for a time at Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. Now he's at the Legatum Institute, an organization I had in fact not heard of before, but which seems to be conservative or libertarian -- and that's to be welcomed in a world where the Foreign Policy discussion is dominated by "progressives". I was surprised that the FP ideologues even let an alternative take on social movements not rooted in Marxism appear on their pages, but perhaps they want to appear truly "bi-partisan" or "diverse".

So I was surprised when I saw on this otherwise excellent publication this recommended reading in the June 1st edition:

Writing for The Independent, Patrick Coburn offers an impassioned defense of Julian Assange.

Now, I get it that "recommended reading" doesn't mean "endorsement," just like "re-tweet" -- except we all know that it really does. You don't recommend pieces you think are wrong-headed. If you are really recommending various things from various points of view, you'd have several -- critics of Assange, of which there have been plenty lately in the British and Australian press, and not just  this.

But to post it, and call it "impassioned" to give it a kind of celebratory elan, means one of two things: a summer intern was at the switchboard on this one, or the libertarians in fact think there's something good about Patrick Coburn's whitewash of Assange and WikiLeaks -- and that's disturbing.

Disturbing, but in fact common as I've found from various Facebook fights. Libertarians tend to unquestioningly bash the TSA as their favourite exemplar of government interference in our freedoms, and they are worried that SOPA or Assange's case could also have larger impacts on our liberties and tend to take the side of WikiLeaks.

I find this troubling refusal to look at the facts of these "progressive" causes unjustified, and the libertarian refusal to concede that freedom involves some protection of the liberal state and freedom from each other, too equally troubling.  Some libertarians don't seem to believe in the abstraction of the "public good," or at least, have a very self-serving notion of it, and they also can't accept any form of government regulation in the name of that good, viewing it all as suspect; if they are more nuanced, they still "worry" that the government is going to overreach in the WikiLeaks case.

I don't. Stealing classified cables is a crime and rightly characterized as such; inciting others to hack and obtain them is also a crime.

We all get it that publishers of WikiLeaks should enjoy immunity from prosecution as a matter of the First Amendment.

But WikiLeaks itself is not a publisher; it's a source, as First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and others have aptly put it. It's a source not disconnected from a political cause, but in fact, embodying the political cause of anarchist revolution.

And yeah, even anarcho-revolutionary freaks get freedom of expression rights, even if they call for the overthrow of evil imperial Amerika, we get that, too.

But it's a source without ethics, which incited the hacking; evidence suggests that Assange was not only in direct touch with Bradley Manning, but he incited the hackers of LulzSec to go after his enemies in Iceland including some originally in his own group, and therefore enjoys a proximity to criminal activity that is more than casual (some key LulzSec operatives have now been arrested for attacking government and business websites).

Just how related Assange is to the incitement of the actual hacking is, of course, the job of a trial to determine. The US may never pursue an extradition of Assange as they may not have a case -- after all, despite all the shrill victimologists bleating about the danger of Assange being extradited from Sweden if sent there to face questioning on sexual charges, the US didn't extradite him for all this time from England, which they could have done as they have an extradition treaty.

It's disturbing that this investigation has been underway nearly two years and so little is known about the US government's intentions in prosecution. The Manning trial has been postponed once again.

Defenders of Assange are quick to accentuate the early statements of some American politicians, to the effect that they wanted to try Assange or even assassinate him, as somehow indicative of that big scary thing they think prosecution of WikiLeaks will cause.

But the reality is that since Harold Koh's cease-and-desist letter from the legal department of the State Department, and since the early statements that WikiLeaks had caused harm by Hillary Clinton, very little has been said by any US official in real authority, as distinct from a congressman or candidate in election or conservative radio talk show host.  So we don't know what they're going to do. Press reports that seemed to highlight findings that WikiLeaks really didn't do any harm were undone by later FBI evidence presented in the military's hearings in Manning's case showing that in fact there was a connection between Assange and Manning (about which Assange lied) and there was harm -- but this is debated endlessly. I saw this in Dublin in confronting Brigita Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP who has championed WikiLeaks, at the Irish conference on Internet Freedom at the OSCE -- she even claimed that *if* anyone's privacy was compromised and they suffered harm, that was more than justified and overridden by the fact that the "war crimes" of the US now exposed.

The problem is that what they are exposing isn't a war crime, and is a tendentious piece of propaganda by anti-American anarchist movement that simply wants to stick it to the Man.

Patrick Cockburn, like his more prominent brother Alexander, has long been associated with leftwing causes and taking up the lefty perspective on issues. So naturally he backs Assange.

Discounting the pundits "frothing with rage" against Assange even in the lefty Guardian which was burned by the anarchist operation, Cockburn thinks there's a triumph here:

Ignored, in all this, is his achievement as founder of WikiLeaks in publishing US government cables giving people across the world insight into how their governments really behave. Such public knowledge is the core of democracy because voters must be accurately informed if they are to be able to chose representatives to carry out their wishes.

This is certainly tendentious, as it implies that Assange is for working within the bounds of representative democracy -- he isn't -- and it implies that voters aren't accurately informed merely because they don't have access to sensitive classified cables that diplomats write to do the jobs of dealing with not only allies, good and bad, but some of the world's worst tyrants and terrorists. There's nothing that came out in "Cablegate" that would ever warrant a claim that whistle-blower status should be enjoyed by those who casually dumped it into the wild, exposing the sources' names.

I've worked with these cables much more than most people in covering Central Asia, and written lots about them -- and those harmed by them, too. I know for a fact of several cases of people forced to flee countries, suffering harassment of themselves and their families, and damage to their careers merely because they legitimately and rightly went to the US Embassy with their concerns.

The chief reason we don't hear about harm to WikiLeaks sources is obvious: why would anyone want to FURTHER paint a target on their backs? The people I know who have been exposed are just hoping not to be noticed and that the cables mentioning them won't get more airplay than they do, so that more damage isn't caused. If you are now living under threat from an oppressive government over serving as a source to the US, why would you announce that fact?!

As I've often said, the critics on the left who scorn the notion of harm wouldn't be satisfied even if a dissident was found assassinated clutching a WikiLeaks cable in his bloody hands. Jonsdottir has illustrated that in spades by telling me that the compromise of those sources was a loss that had to be borne for the greater cause of exposing American "war crimes". I call this Bolshevism -- not only is it "ends justifies the means" thinking that always pertains to these radical movements, it's a lie -- there are no war crimes exposed.

Says Cockburn:

Some adopt the official line that "lives had been put in danger" by the leaks. This lobby began to fall silent in 2011 when Pentagon officials admitted, off the record, that they had no evidence that anybody had come to harm

But that's not exactly the story. What happened was the Washington Post had a source of some officials who claimed this, but we don't know that those officials in fact had all the relevant information or, as I've aptly pointed out, there really is an effective way to get all the people harmed by WikiLeaks to step forward and paint even brighter targets on their backs.

I don't know whether the lobby has "fallen silent" -- my hypothesis is this, that the government or agencies in the government are divided on this and are warring, and that supervisors have ruled that no official say anything at all about Wikileaks, on or off the record. Indeed, officials are absolutely tight-lipped on this and won't discuss anything with journalists or NGOs. I've gotten a few officials to very circumspectly admit that they know harm was done or to be willing to look at reports of harm, but they never say anything further and will never say anything further because clearly they are under strict rules to keep their mouths shut while this investigation is going on.

That's unfortunate, because the only way to win this war waged on the US by America's enemies is to be out there, day after day, providing the counter-arguments and evidence against the propaganda, patiently, repeatedly, firmly, persuasively. Rather than wimpily remaining silent, the US should be fighting against the idea that it's ok to cripple a liberal democratic state by criminal acts like hacking cables.

If there isn't a State Department official that can do this, there should be Washington think-tanks who do it. There aren't. That's because of the "progressive" and libertarian have formed an alliance on this which views the hypothetical damage to civil liberties a greater concern than the need to defend a liberal state's right to keep classified cables secret -- or more importantly, challenge those who claim they've exposed bad acts by the US that entitle them to "whistle-blower status". That's understandable, but they shouldn't recommend articles that deliberately falsify the record on the way to making their libertarian case.

Cockburn says falsely claims that there were in fact no armed men in the "Collateral Murder" incident. Here's what he writes:

All these critics, and readers who agree them, should first switch on YouTube and watch a 17-minute video film taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter over east Baghdad on 12 July 2007. It shows the helicopter crew machine-gunning to death people on the ground in the belief that they are all armed insurgents. In fact, I cannot see any arms and what in one case was identified as a gun turned out to be the camera of a young Reuters' photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed along with his driver, Saeed Chmagh. The video shows the helicopter coming in for a second attack on a van that had stopped to pick up the dead and wounded. The driver was killed and two children wounded. "Ha! Ha! I hit 'em," shouts one of the US crewmen triumphantly. "Look at those dead bastards."

Well, Cockburn should switch on The New Yorker. There, his pal Assange himself has this to say about his work of propaganda:

“In the first phase, you will see an attack that is based upon a mistake, but certainly a very careless mistake. In the second part, the attack is clearly murder, according to the definition of the average man. And in the third part you will see the killing of innocent civilians in the course of soldiers going after a legitimate target.”

Khatchadourian has more curiosity than Cockburn and interviewed Assange at length for this story, and got him on the record saying this:

“One of them has a weapon,” Assange said, peering at blurry footage of the men walking down the street. “See all those people standing out there.”

“And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm,” Gonggrijp said.

That is, it's not just that the US soldiers mistook a long-lensed camera for an RPG -- that's part of the story. Assange concedes they had weapons; they did have automatic weapons and there was a camera mistaken for an RPG.

Since "Collateral Murder" is so often presented without context to maximize its propaganda value, it's important to note that even Assange concedes that it was a mistake. Soldiers returning from a firefight after numerous skirmishes thought that a group of armed man were active combatants. One of them ducked out from behind a building behaving in a suspicious manner. They were armed. So the soldiers shot them. If they showed some glee in making what they felt was a "righteous kill," that's war, not a war-crime, however awful we may find it as civilians.

Some more critical reviews of "Collateral Murder" can be seen here, here (from Stephen Colbert), here (from the conservative Weekly Standard), here (where the writer also notes with concern the influence of "Call of Duty," the war-game, on US military culture and young men joining the armed services).

The US soldiers left one wounded man to crawl away, but when they saw a van hurry up to the scene and rapidly pick up the wounded, they thought they were seeing rebels help their fallen comrade. They shot at the van. They had no way of knowing there were children in it. Why a father would drive a van with his two kids into a shooting incident and pick up a victim of a shoot-out we may never know, but the wounded children were carried by a US soldier to a hospital and while severely wounded, they survived. The Americans were not baby-killers; they shot at a van picking up a man they saw as a combatant and didn't know there were kids in the van -- as can be obviously seen on the very propagagnda film people like Jacob Appelbaum, an active WikiLeaks supporter and anarchist hacker himself, cite on Twitter mendaciously -- which is why I got into a very long polemical fight with him to expose his lies. (And was then savagely harassed on Twitter by droves of Appelbaum's Anonymous comrades who serve as WikiLeaks shock troops.)

Here's what the New Yorker journalist had to say about the film: