Do like internets?

It's been awhile since I actually read anything involving tech that was worth reposting even in summary form. A fascinating new shat of bill is being kicked around the U.S. House right now that is meant to "promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation." Wonkette has picked up on reporting the act with a suitably alarmist tone.

At any rate, shuttering sites and government over-reach may be nothing new, but I must say I really sympathize with the closing sentiment of the article, upon explaining that the scope of the poorly-written bill could easily compromise mega merchants like Amazon;

But in practice, it won’t be giant business websites like Amazon that get the plug pulled. It will be the little guys, the alternative press, the OccupyWhatever sites, anything that gets in the way of the Internet’s actual role in America: retail advertising and shoe shopping and lonely online pursuits shown to lower people’s actual engagement with the world, like sport teams or pornography or gadget blogs or orc-battle games or anything shit out by the Murdoch empire of diversions.

Oh well. It was really an aberration that the Internet functioned as openly as it has these past two decades. But that era is already over, as proven by the U.K. national police shutting down mobile messaging during the summer riots or, just two months ago, San Francisco’s BART stations easily turning off all the cell phone signals within the stations to prevent protesters from organizing an action there against police brutality. [Emphasis mine]

Fight back. Or whatever. Kiss the tank.

October precedes November, the month of voting, stabbing

So why don't I want to vote?

I have been veering away from politics over the course of the past few months. I am sufficiently knowledgable to know I am unknowledgable. So I will try to make this one of only a few this election season, the last two posts on the meaning of santorum notwithstanding. (They weren't about politics, they were about coherence models of truth theory! I have a degree in Philosophy!)

Here's a post from last October I wanted to drag back, and improve (which I did); the takeaway?

This voting season, republicans will make gains [happened], and it will be a beautiful thing. Not so much because I want a bunch of Republicans running things any more than I would want Democrats doing it, but because it's 2006 all over again. Basically, the tea party will appear to be some "grass roots" support group [happened and continues to happen]. They will throw around a flurry of unconsolidated, unfocused money to buy incoherent votes [happened and happening].

As a result, Republicans, like the MoveOn fueled dems from back in 2006, will have no idea how they are supposed to vote since neither party has any backbone.

2004, 2008 - White House, Congress controlled by same party; opposition party huddles in ideological recesses of wings, lavishing attention on apparently sympathizable minority of their party

2006, 2010 - Congress (Both, HoR) ceded to opposition thanks to efforts of "grass roots"

2007, 2011 - Becomes apparent that it was an overcorrection as "grass roots" (MoveOn, Tea Party) have neither practical nor ideological moral/political authority or coherence or basic salience [happened]

2008, [2012] - Public votes to scurry back to status quo

So what does that mean with 2011's November? I don't even know. Apparently there are something like 22 Issues on my State's ballot. I have no idea if they all apply to me. I am not looking forward to voting. There is nothing to want on the ballot.

How to care about voting: The last time I wanted to vote I did so and the theatre at the end of my street got a liquor license in addition to the beer license they already had.

That is Democracy at work.

How to not care about voting:SB5/Issue2? Can't say I care. And that is speaking as someone who would be impacted by it.

Either (A) we support an over-the-top reform or (B) we support an unsustainable system. I did not paint this false dilemma, intra-state politics did. Should everyone be concerned about their job and financial stability? Obviously.Should the efficacy of government be elevated beyond normal scopes of performance and politicized? Probably not, unless someone is just making points.

• Voter apathy aside, how else can I be expected to vote in a way that balances impacting me least in the short-term, and doesn't screw me in the long-term?
• Do the people who paint these policies do so with dilemmas deliberately so as to disenfranchise vested parties?
• If Ohio votes down/up SB5/Issue 2, and it really is the false dilemma I characterize it as, then should either side repudiate the other or act as though any mandate was handed down? How should up/down voters react to seeing this?

The answer to addressing not caring about voting lies in a proper de-conflating government and politics. Political advocacy is good for imaging generally, and in particular the framing of a debate; it's not actually good at actually being convincing as an argument. To compensate for that, advocacy goes the route of saturation to the point of indoctrination through memetics. (They run a bunch of adverts with three word takeaways that are supposed to embed themselves in your brain creating a microstructure they can build upon.)

An idea is like an image; when it is shrunk, then blown up, it loses resolution and becomes grainy around the edges. That is a problem for coherent arguments but not memes. Dithering along those edges allows the user to plank a platform and does not engender critique of interoperability or coherence of stack.

[How's that for a mixed metaphor? I think there's at least three in there. -mfg]

Memetic political advocacy traffics in compressed images, and transmits them to people without any kind of codec or other scaling logarithm; as a result wildly variant deviations of the message conjoin with other memetics in the users cache to create what passes for a person's political affiliation, but in reality is just simply a bias constructed of the most resonant, residual memes they picked up.

So what does that mean to you? Stab in the dark, it's all you got.

piss off, bold progressivism

I think they got my email at a rally, or bought it, or maybe I gave it to them to let me know when the election results were in. At any rate, Bold Progressives have been streaming me a steady load of BS for the past two years.

Personally, I am a hard line social libertarian. Hard core. Progressives, based on the Bold ones anyway, have no interest in a substantive foray into social issues; that is fine, considering I assume they would be bad at organizing any kind of general modus operandi.

 Fiscally, governmentally, I am not a libertarian through and through. I consider myself not a moderate or progressive, conservative or liberal, but some kind of balanced Realist. The government is sometimes the best at providing services because they have specific channels of delivery that no corporation currently or ever should have access to. Similarly, there are some channels of delivery the government should never take advantage of and should be restricted to individuals. This view is neither libertarian, progressive, conservative, or liberal; it is entirely distinct. Many people will say "I don't trust the government to do anything, so they shouldn't"; some will propose the obverse maximal position. Ultimately, this is a failure of due deliberation; think it through and you realize they can do some things and not others and shouldn't over-reach. A wise man knows what he doesn't know, or whatever.

We should admit the government can do some things, and has a better chance of innovating in the process (look at the history of our country and it's more evident than you would suspect, further the innovations are public domain). We should admit that individuals have an enormous ability to innovate, they just have a limited ability to develop, deploy, and sustain. Economic incubators across the country are a proto-example of middling groups trying to (a) help with that and (b) invest in the future / skim money from the top (some only take stake interests, some have onerous terms to starting-up).

Anyway, we are dredging through the end of a century where the gears of war and economy and government and corporations became so twixt that today they appear insoluble. We need to realize they are soluble, that they don't need to be seen as indistinct or so shaded in the light of some Frankenstein's monster that they cannot be separated without the other dying. What does need to die are the support groups that reenforce their current connectivity.

The first thing I would look at is any group that told you to tell a given politician that because they X on single issue X'ing, you won't ever vote/support them again. Bold Progressives told me to tell Obama that because [he said benefits are being negotiated to redress our current debt and deficit issues] that [I will not vote for him]. They tried to back up their claims with other circumstantial statements, tried to cast Obama as in league with Republicans, as making taxes efficacious.

Bullshit absolutist positions are one thing; trying to not only hold them, but force them on others and thereby affect a politician's behavior is wrong. It is not wrong because a group is lobbying for something they believe in. It is wrong because they are affecting an absolutist stance; in other words, trying to back a politician into a corner, narrowing their options to act to affect change. Face it, politicians are some kind of necessary tool, and without options those tools die. This is what drives politicians to indecision, this is what drives them to campaigning and fund-raising the day after their inauguration. This is one of the many things wrong with the political apparatus. This Bold Progressives is not helping further a discussion that is fucking urgent, but rather they are hindering it by inserting absolutist positions into a situation where a deal needs to be struck immediately.

Anyway, after their email about some apparent outrage with Obama (that he would try to get an intractable situation between parties in Congress under control), I finally had to unsubscribe and tune out from their message. It's not that I wouldn't have liked to agree with them, they were just too much noise for too little signal. I guess its just EFF, FFRF, and AU now. Those three groups' influences are limited and articulate and I can handle anything they send my way.

Speaking of the Countdown... who should replace Olbermann

So who do you think can handle the MSNBC throne, Monday through Friday? Should it become a three minute show book-ended by bears on unicycles and seltzer bottle spraying cable repair men shopping for homes? Go past the jump and take the poll!

Olbermann... and any person's struggle with their better angels.

those bold progressives, they spam me so much. and it's not so bad. much of it is some kind of food for thought; not so much a thinking person's protein and nutrients, but more like mental fiber and ruffage - keeps the colon clear.

i got this gem last night:

Keith Olbermann announced Friday that it was his last show with MSNBC. Details are still coming out. But one thing's for sure: Keith Olbermann spoke truth to power and he deserves our thanks.

Please sign the "Thank you, Keith" statement -- and then pass it on. 

I apologize off the bat if you want to go and say thanks, because I do not feel the urge to say thanks and am not feeling like dropping those kind of links. Instead, I'll drop a link to their campaign page and if you're really interested you can follow up. Anyway...

The reason I bring this up at all is I think that Olbermann, even for many of us who can find argreeable the things he demagogues about, is all noise. In the war to cancel out the white noise of one group with the white noise of another, he and Maddow play their parts. I can only hope his role has been completely retired at MSNBC.

good night.However, in the war for one's own mind, he is among the choir of demons screaming down our better angels. All broadcasters who fit the mold of noise combating noise fall into this category. We do not need 'yes' men. I don't attend church for many reasons, one of which is that i dont need someone preaching to me, riling me up, assuaging and pandering to my sympathies. One reason attending church isn't a bad idea has always been for cases where a scripture or a priest pops up with a challenging idea. Or a challenging commitment. One where you have to look past your assumptions, past who you are and have been and your prior good deeds; and you have to reassess everything.

We had a moment recently where we were given a challenge. As a country, at least as an electorate anyway, we were challenged to allow the president and the congress do work. We were challenged to not assume someone of a partisan persuasion was an inherent threat to the well-being of our democracy and progeny. People rose up and admitted there were problems, both in how they had managed themselves and in the fundamentals of our political landscape. In order for anything to happen we need to budge from our bunkers and see the faces of the people in the other bunker for what they are; fellow americans who are as frightened, hurt, and disenfranchised as whoever 'we' happens to be.

I do not know if this was to be some magnanimous stepping down by Olbermann, but I should like to believe it is symbolic of a down-shift in the noise war. With one keystone gone, perhaps more will follow. Perhaps at least one news network is re-aligning and taking seriously the desire to change the signal to noise ratio, and provide people with the facts and dialog they need to be marginally informed. Perhaps single issue politicians and social value policy PACs will take a back seat to people actually trying to improve this country. Perhaps with less noise we might find ourselves coming to understand what the hell is going wrong across the country.

The claim that Olbermann spoke 'truth to power', and the 'good night, good luck' ending to his show are both patronizing. He was not some vulnerable person, nor did he have anything at stake; as such he was enchanting in his prose but shrill in his content. His allusion to and borrowing of "good night..." has always been a pander to Bush-hating first, but galvanizing of some kind of perpetual victimhood of his audience second. He may have known his audience well, but McCarthyism and Murrow's criticism and attack of the Red Scare are journalistic ambitions he never did quite live up to; yet Olbermann maintained the illusion and self-delusion up until his last broadcast (albeit with David Letterman camera flourishes)

In a way, with Olbermann stepping down, it's like one less Siren trying to steer us to shipwreck; and perhaps one of our better angels may come alight.

Update on 9:09AM by mfg

by the way, the corresponding poll on who should replace Olbermann will expire Saturday; you can go here to stuff the ballot box if you want to pick a suitable replacement for his soapbox.

• right now most people favor handing the show off to lewis black and cutting the show's duration to 3 minutes. not only would this be cost effective in terms of ego and salary, but also they could put real news, or archive footage of 1950s era county fairs(!), on the station for the other 57 minutes (minus commercials of course).
• Larry David also has a solid foothold in this too; although im not sure what an hour of talking about nothing would look like (being accustomed to KO's hour of bloviating about anything).

A Good Read

I found an interesting article on Religion and its definition in the context of persons seeking asylum (in particular, due to religious persecution).

The author begins with a tri-fold identification of the familial traits shared by religions; they have a shared belief system (a credos), a shared cultural identity (a sense of who the followers are), and a shared collection of cultural activities (rituals, worship, etc)

So i went all crazy on the Atheism.se with this one:

I happened across an article by T. Jeremy Gunn that goes into depth trying to analyze the problems with current attempts at definitions of religion. The purpose was to create a framework for adjudicators of asylum seekers that are seeking asylum on the grounds of religious persecution.(All quotes below belong to this article, pp. 189-215)

His purpose is to emphasize that not all three conditions should be required of the petitioner, and the adjudicator should assess the three following features of a religion when trying to understand whether or how someone has/n't been persecuted:

• "religion in its metaphysical or theological sense (e.g., the underlying truth of the existence of God, the dharma, etc.)"; "Religion as belief"
• "religion as it is psychologically experienced by people (e.g., the feelings of the religious believer about divinity or ultimate concerns, the holy, etc.)"; "Religion as identity"
• "religion as a cultural or social force (e.g., symbolism that binds a community together or separates it from other communities)"; "Religion as a way of life"

Mr Gunn then moves on to explain the two different approaches to defining a religion, the essentialist (where one picks a single trait shared among all, ie. "All Religions believe in a g/God) and the polythetic (where the religions are not bound by a singular, essential trait but by shared familial traits). To explain the latter, he references a 1965 US Supreme Court quote: "[T]he test of belief “in a relation to a Supreme Being” [in a law providing for conscientious objector status from military service] is whether a given belief that is sincere and meaningful occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God."

As religious and political persecution are means for an Asylum-seeker's application to be granted, it seems incumbent upon the atheist community to have a presence in these proceedings that isn't strictly limited to political persecution.

• As a note: (the determination of) political asylum (is) based on an actual experience of persecution in your home country or fear of persecution based on race, religion, or political opinion. The requirements not only of actual or precedence of persecution make it very difficult to have atheism, when not viewed as a religious category, be grounds for political asylum.
• Political persecution is hard to prove without extreme examples of religious police
• Violence of one group of [Religion A members] against atheists does not constitute political or religious persecution, just as Drug Cartels' violence is not indicative of systematic persecution of the people it harms. (It means there is an enforcement problem, and the religious aspect is classified as happenstance.)

In order to strengthen the case for atheists that fear/experience persecution, and that cannot describe atheism as a religion (or religious category), how can we construct a logical case for religious persecution of atheism? To streamline, here is a format for answers:

1. Please post a illustrative example (hypothetical or actual) where atheism is not used as a religion, yet functionally allows for status as religious persecution of the asylum applicant's atheistic views (not as political persecution)? (Your Example)
2. If atheism should not be defined in relation to religion (as seems to be a widely held view on the site), how can it be practically defined in relation to religious persecution? (Your Functional Definition)
3. Political persecution overrides religious in some cases (i.e. Shari'a law, "neutral" laws (p. 213) based on religious norms, etc) but is harder to prove, also in cases (also, where the predominant cultural group is religiously oppressive; Mutawwa'in example on pg. 211); however, answers should have a recourse for atheist seekers of asylum, so on what basis can one form a claim of persecution if one's "religion" isn't really a religion? (How is it separate from political persecution?)

@nomfg>> If you've got an answer, go check out the question and post it, or drop a comment here and there

mccuskerteers?

Update on 3:02PM by mfg

mfg started this article forever ago, but then again his brain is folded up like a fitted sheet, all hasty and eventually you just give up on order. so im just posting what he was doing, minus the writing skill he lacks, plus some pictures to make boring words lackluster.

-mittthedevourer