Comments (0) My fascination with the tribemen on the ground eventually led me to to this site:
http://savageminds.org/2008/07/01/are-there-uncontacted-tribes-the-short-answer-no/
As is typical on the internet, people are arguing about words instead of doing something proactive. More harm than good? I think not. Sounds like a little bit of professional jealousy and nitpicking if you ask me.
Henry George, an economist, said this a long long time ago:
“The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination . . . . It does not prevent anyone from using for himself the facts, the knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but only using the identical form of a particular book.”
Copyright is, according to Henry George, “the natural, moral right of each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no interference with the similar right of any one else to do likewise.”
But about patents, he had this to say:
“The patent, on the other hand, prohibits any one from doing a similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified time, an interference with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests . . . . It prohibits others from doing what has already been attempted.”
Food for thought.
Wikileaks is much ado about nothing, and in the end will harm the very cause that Assange claims to celebrate. The only thing Assange has accomplished with ‘Cablegate’ is to make the governments of the world hold their secrets closer to their chests. Those ‘classified’ documents were available to hundreds of thousands of people, not exactly top level secrets – but Assange wants the publicity for his ideological cause. In doing so, he has only empowered the right wing in his country and ours – people he should recognize as his enemy.
I don’t want to psychoanalyze the man himself too much because all I have to go on is interviews but he seems to me to have the kind of self centered importance and, really, paranoia that can come from viewing the world through the lens of a computer screen, and only a computer screen. Even if his heart is in the right place, if it can be separated out from his rapacious ego, in the end he’s no different than those on the right who can’t see farther than their own nose.
I am intimately familiar with the hacking subculture from which he sprang and that ethos, while very exciting on the surface, leads nowhere. I’d say he’s a geek first, an anarchist as an afterthought, and I tend to put the whole ‘free the information’ crowd there because, I speak from experience, the tendency with technicians is to think that all problems can be solved with technology, specifically computers, and given that, there is a group of them who think their particular ideology is the technological solution to everything under the sun. That faith in technology has gotten really extreme as global culture abandons it, and certain groups hang on to it even more tightly. They are wrong – in terms of real political reform, you have to address people’s hierarchy of needs, and land and bread come before ‘information’, not the other way around. Ownership of information, like any property, is as much a tool in the hands of reformers as it is in the hands of the elite. Robbing the people of that tool leaves them even more vulnerable to exploitation. And in the very real sense, it doesn’t matter if someone in Congo can look at ‘Mickey Mouse’ on a cell phone when their life is at risk and the damn thing is in English anyway. Politically, Assange and the Pirate Party etc. are just a sideshow, a dead end, a symptom of hoarded wealth and not a solution to the problem it creates.
I really can’t say anything about the date rape thing. Like everyone else I’ll just have to wait and see what the court says. And guessing which if any government has something to do with it would be only a guess. It seems like a government would be more apt to downplay the whole thing than to keep it in the media with a court room drama.
Slate has a very good series of articles about income inequality and the fate of the middle class in America:
http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/
I think they are leaving out something very important.
American top marginal tax rate:
Even though that paints an incomplete picture of tax burden, the correlation between the tax rate and the ‘great divergence’ of classes in the US is hard to miss.
Then there is this one – American tax rates since 1960, showing an increase in taxes on the middle class and a drastic decrease in taxes for the wealthy:
Basically, either intentionally or by accident the middle class was engineered out of existence.
I’ve said for a while that the Internet tends to isolate us, and our opinions, from other people and their beliefs. I believe it’s in the way the Internet was designed. I think Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org, does as well.
I suppose one could always look for the opposing view, which is rarely offered. Using the system is definitely something that relies on the individual fighting their own instinctual tendency, but I think he skirts the root of the problem which has to do with the nature of search and retrieval systems themselves – the main way we deal with the Internet. We find what we are looking for, and by extension, people who share our views and places that reinforce them. So fighting that tendency is not only fighting human nature, it’s fighting the nature of the network itself.
If the comments are anything to go by, some people are threatened to the point of anger by this article, which seems to criticize their perfect totem. Another example of the kind of tribal microculture that has become so prevalent in the world.
I’ve noticed something that may or may not be happening, and what I’ve noticed is this: In the ‘digital age’, culture hits but doesn’t stick. The artifacts are ephemeral, not only in their physicality but also in their cultural presence. People experience them, enjoy them, then the novelty wears off and they abandon them – and it leaves no lasting resonance with the predominant, ‘mainstream’ culture. Media, political events, trends in fashion or religion – they all seem to come and go without making much of an impact on people’s way of thinking or doing as they did in previous decades, not much of a dent in the edifice of the ‘overculture’.
If my hunch is right, I think there are a couple of reasons this might be happening. One is that if something has no money potential it doesn’t get the investment it needs to make it enduring in the public mind. Another might be that there are fewer hard and lasting artifacts being created, no discs to transmit culture in a concrete way, it becomes like TV where the hardware is the artifact and the shows are emanations from the artifact – the screens and players are totemistic, the ‘content’ disposable because it has lost it’s object-ness. Clothing etc., is of lower quality so those artifacts are of a more ephemeral nature as well. Combined with the dynamic of speed – not having time to set in, develop and become ritualized the culture is discarded before it can make and impact, these characteristics create a perfect storm where we forget our collective culture as it happens.
Google Instant is the new Google default interface that starts showing results as you type. Just in case you really don’t know what you’re looking for. Apparently they block out a lot of words.
http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/
Personally I turned that crap off first thing. The page changing every time I hit a letter was annoying and why do i want results before I enter my query? I could see it being useful if a) your most sophisticated query is the name of a celebrity, a movie, a politician, or a celebrity politician on a TV show, and b) you are driving a car in the rain and really need to know what Lindsey Lohan is up to.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently taking my lady for long dentist appointments, and burned through a little stack of older SFF books. A couple of Marion Zimmer Bradley books – one called ‘Brass Dragon’ which was not bad but not good, but there I was stuck in a waiting room, and another called ‘World Wreckers’, a Darkover novel which was remarkable because it talked about economic imperialism, pretty early for science fiction, written as it was in 1968. Neither compares to ‘Mists of Avalon’ which I would recommend to anyone.
I also read a Philip Jose Farmer that I’d missed called ‘The Cache’ which was of course very entertaining, and a couple of short stories in the back of that which were from the same year but completely different. I particularly liked ‘Rastignac’ because I’m convinced he made it up entirely as he went along with no idea what was going to happen, and what a fun ride.
In an effort to hold on to my waning egalitarianism, I picked up a couple of Dean Koontz novels at the thrift store to see what all the fuss was about, and got through one and don’t know if I’ll finish the other. The stories are fine, not particularly great, and full of science fiction ‘stuff’ all jumbled together. Every once in a while he purples up some little bit of description, and it would be a lot better if he didn’t. In one of them he pretty much did this whenever there was some sky in the story, but not much in other places. The sky is an ocean, the sky is a desert, the sky is a giant fungus, etc.,
I think I’ll take refuge in ‘Sense and Sensibility’ which I also rescued from the Goodwill (the last place paperbacks go before pulping.) If anyone is thinking that ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ might be good for a laugh, it’s not. I agree with my friend Andrew that it’s just that one joke (the title) and a whole lot of really bad writing inserted clumsily into really good writing. It pretty much turned me off of ‘mashup’ culture while I was reading it, but I’m still game for fake star wars trailers of any sort.
I’ve also got another Jay Lake book coming, everyone seems to either love or hate his stuff but I certainly never get tired of it, I read them as quick as he can put them out.
We’ve all heard the grandfather story – at least a thousand times. “My grandfather came here to the USA and worked his butt off, didn’t take a nickel from anyone, I’m tired of paying taxes so people can mooch off my hard work” etc., etc.,
Well, so did everyone’s grandfather. One of the reasons they came here is because a lot of the countries they came from aren’t the kind of places where people have helped each other like this one is. So grandpa never bought a house? With the government subsidized loan? He didn’t go to school with the federally guaranteed loan? Or the GI bill? If your grandfather was like mine and the majority of his generation, he was civic minded and understood that we are all in this together. The ‘handout’ part of welfare is tiny in comparison to the stuff people pay in to or pay back. What people are calling our ‘welfare state’ basically makes it so that kids can eat and have clothes, so they have a small chance at the stuff the middle class takes for granted.
Our grandfathers built that system, and for generations, it elevated people out of poverty. They built the social welfare programs that in turn created the biggest middle class in the history of the world, a great gift for their descendants. Those descendants elected people who told them what they wanted to hear, that they could be spoiled and greedy and there were no consequences, that people were only poor because they deserved it, homeless because they wanted to be, and so the GOP started exploiting people’s selfishness, killing our society – and the middle class, so they could keep our wealth for themselves, destroying lives so they could keep the cost of labor low.
Of course, it’s a free country, a level playing field, right? Well it depends on what one’s vision of ‘freedom’ is. The GOP’s version of freedom includes the freedom to live in a country full of families that made a ‘bad’ choice (like choosing between eating and paying for health care) and therefore future generations will live in poverty. There is a difference between ‘freedom’ in the mind of people who don’t understand why they have what they do (hint: they think it’s because of their ‘hard work’) and real freedom which comes from living in a modern democracy and not some backwards pit where the peasants have been trained to tell themselves they have the ‘freedom to fail’ and if they just love god/Allah/whatever they will inherit the earth.
But we cling to our myths, fed to us on a stick by the rich. Funny, they could be dispelled by looking at a federal or state budget. But they serve a purpose, and that is to make those who are being exploited feel rewarded. These myths are the same nonsense that always falls from the lips of the puritanical bourgeoisie right before they throw away everything they have because they don’t know how they got it in the first place. Anyone who doesn’t make the connection between the federal government and the fact that they get to live in a house that isn’t falling over, they have food that isn’t poison, electricity, roads, and schools, has absolutely no idea what happened in this country in the last century.
Here we are at yeat another crossroads. The post-Bush GOP is the greatest homegrown threat to western civilization since the Nazis. Their vile rhetoric makes the US look more and more like Italy in the 20′s and 30′s every day. If they win their precious power back, it’s over. I mean ALL of it, over. America will transmogrify from a force of good in the world into a brute force of destruction. These stakes are too high to risk letting them return to power.
(Originally from August 2007)
Well today we were down in Goshen Pass for a little natural suana and swim, and as we were walking down the stone steps to Indian Hole, we saw this guy fall off the trail as he passed under some trees. He was walking with his friend and then he just sort of tumbled off of the dirt, right into the thicket.
We kind of skirted around him, grinning uneasily at the sight of a forty year old bald man so drunk he couldn’t walk, and his suntanned buddy smiling back at us, revealing a tooth-hole where his front teeth should have been. Wow, these guys looked like they were accident prone.
Anyway we went and sat in the rapids and had some lunch, then this dude on an intertube floated by, he said there was a guy who had fallen backwards off the steps and had a big old hole in his head now, with a piece of flesh hanging out of the hole, and his friend had driven him to the rescue squad. Wow! We knew immediately who it was.
So we finished our lunch and wanted to go to a different place to swim, so we started walking back up to the road. Right there on the path, right by the steps, was the piece of that man’s head, the piece that had covered the hole. It was red and bloody on the bottom, there was some gray bone jutting out, and half of the flesh on top was bare and the other half was covered in mostly-bald-man stubble.
Wow! How could he have left it behind?
Should we have picked it up and tried to give it to him? What would you do?
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