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Politics, open government, and safe streets. And the constant incursion of cycling.

Category: Society Page 12 of 69

Cogs in a Machine

By

On February 5, 2010

In Society

TNC goes from the systemic challenges an individual trying to drop weight faces to the society-wide choices of institutional racism:

I don’t write this out so that I can establish blame/guilt. To the contrary, the point is that the system was so far-reaching, that it took a conscious, deliberate and often personally dangerous effort to defy it. Against all odds, against a media that reinforced the assumptions of the system, against segregated social institutions that prescribed the assumptions, against whole familes which had bought into the assumption, one would have to rebel and say, “No.”

Read it.

The Devil Made Me Do It

By

On January 14, 2010

In Society

Tragedies often focus attention. I’ve been paying attention to Haiti ever since I met a friend from Haiti on a flight back to the US in 1988. And some things, I think are common knowledge:

After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence.

Other facts? I did not know:

But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape.

Haiti is fucked enough by the natural world. I really hadn’t realized how much man had tried to compete with that.

World’s Fair Use Day

By

On January 12, 2010

In Distribution, Law, Music, Policy, Society, Tech

It’s World’s Fair Use Day! Err, what’s that?

World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials. WFUD will take place at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday January 12, 2010, and will be organized by Public Knowledge (PK), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group. PK works to ensure that communications and intellectual property policies encourage creativity, further free expression and discourse and provide universal access to knowledge. As part of its campaign to return balance to copyright law, PK hopes to use WFUD to educate the public about the importance of fair use in an information society.

That’s where I’ll be all day. Sound interesting to you? You can watch the proceedings below, and participate via the connected chat and Twitter hashtag (which I expect will be projected behind the speakers for most of the day).

(moved embed to the flip b/c it’s autoplaying)

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Seven Days!

By

On January 7, 2010

In Society

I sometimes wonder about the brains and talent that are wasted simply because they were born into a population of idiots:

HUNTSVILLE, AL -  “I believe the Bible is true,” Republican gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne said here Wednesday. “Every word of it.”

Byrne’s testimony came as he tried to clarify an earlier statement seized on by his opponents for the GOP nomination.

Byrne had been quoted in the Mobile Press-Register in November as saying, “I believe there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be literally true and parts that are not.”

Next up: water is not actually wine, and no I won’t give you my daughter to rape.

Tabbai On, Err, Public-Private Partnerships (and Enabling Media)

By

On January 6, 2010

In Politics, Society

Matt Tabbai’s occasionally overwrought channeling of Hunter S. Thompson can sometimes obscure the quality of his reporting, but mostly, he’s just dead on:

For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

Nicely said, no? Next paragraph gets better:

That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.

I’d just step back and admire that last sentence if, you know, it weren’t so painfully true.

Good Luck With That, Iran

By

On January 5, 2010

In Society

Iran bans its citizens from having contact with foreign news orgs (among others).

Yes, It Was Torture, and Illegal

By

On January 5, 2010

In Law, Society

From Saturday’s NYT Editorial:

Bush administration officials came up with all kinds of ridiculously offensive rationalizations for torturing prisoners. It’s not torture if you don’t mean it to be. It’s not torture if you don’t nearly kill the victim. It’s not torture if the president says it’s not torture.

It was deeply distressing to watch the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sink to that standard in April when it dismissed a civil case brought by four former Guantánamo detainees never charged with any offense. The court said former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the senior military officers charged in the complaint could not be held responsible for violating the plaintiffs’ rights because at the time of their detention, between 2002 and 2004, it was not “clearly established” that torture was illegal.

The Supreme Court could have corrected that outlandish reading of the Constitution, legal precedent, and domestic and international statutes and treaties. Instead, last month, the justices abdicated their legal and moral duty and declined to review the case.

[ . . . ]

In effect, the Supreme Court has granted the government immunity for subjecting people in its custody to terrible mistreatment.

Shameful actions, no? I fear that some think it’s just the last bits of the horrors of the Bush Administration being dusted away. Well, remember:

The party that urged the Supreme Court not to grant the victims’ appeal because the illegality of torture was not “clearly established” was the Obama Justice Department.

Mexico City. Really.

By

On December 21, 2009

In Law, Society

Slowly and surely:

Mexico City lawmakers on Monday made the city the first in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage, a change that will give homosexual couples more rights, including allowing them to adopt children.

I’ve not spent much time in Mexico City, but this strikes me as kinda big.  Sort of – to use a maybe not so great analogy – Ireland banning smoking in pubs.  That is to say, if *they* can do it, anyone can . . .

(I wonder if the Catholic Church there is throwing the same fits it has been in DC.)

HP Doesn’t Care About Black People!

By

On December 21, 2009

In Society, Tech

Don’t ask questions, just hit play:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM[/youtube]

This guy needs his own show, doesn’t he?  But seriously, the reason it doesn’t track is grounded in a completely legit technical issue (concerning contrast), which HP says it’s addressing.  You kinda wonder about a QA process that never brought this to light, though.

Frank Luntz Produces Something Interesting

By

On December 20, 2009

In Law, Politics, Society

Frank Luntz has an obvious talent, but it’s so often been used to such appalling ends (“death tax”, “government run healthcare”, etc.) that I don’t often look twice when I see his name.   However, he’s a gun-for-hire at heart, and he has occasionally crossed into unfamiliar territory to produce something interesting.  Looks like he’s recently done that, on the subject of guns:

Mr. Luntz queried 832 gun owners, including 401 card-carrying N.R.A. members, in a survey commissioned by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the alliance of hundreds of executives seeking stronger gun laws. In flat rebuttal of N.R.A. propaganda, the findings showed that 69 percent of N.R.A. members supported closing the notorious gun-show loophole that invites laissez-faire arms dealing outside registration requirements.

Even more members, 82 percent, favored banning gun purchases to suspects on terrorist watch lists who are now free to arm. And 69 percent disagreed with Congressionally imposed rules against sharing federal gun-trace information with state and local police agencies.

I don’t think that’s dispositive of anything, but it sure is interesting.  I think the continuing public conversation over gun ownership and what it means would be well served by less insane NRA fearmongering and more intelligent engagement of the issue.

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