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June 29, 2004

Extremism

: I just opened the most upsetting email, one of many that responded to my view of Fahrenheit 9/11. It said in part:

Wake up Mr. Jarvis, we are a nation divided! It is us vs. them! What rock have you been living under for the past few years? I am much more afraid of Bush, Ashcroft, and the rest, then [sic] I am of any terrorists.

Now that is truly frightening. This man -- a guy named Robert who lives in Moscow, ID (supply your own irony) -- truly believes that his enemies are his fellow citizens and his President, not the terrorists who murdered 3,000 of my neighbors before my eyes.crack gay password

What the hell is happening to America?crack gay password

Or is it really happening to America? crack gay password

Or is it happening to an extreme fringe? crack gay password

When I was on CNN the other night, the only thing I said that surprised Aaron Brown and Jeff Greenfield -- and it took them physically aback -- was when I responded to the old saw that we are a divided nation and said, "It's our fault."crack gay password

It's our fault -- in media and politics -- when we paint America as a nation divided and it's as if we want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.crack gay password

This is why I have such a problem with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11: It seeks to divide. crack gay password

It demonizes. And it picks the wrong demons. It's us vs. them, but the them is us. crack gay password

I hated it when the right wing demonized Bill Clinton. So, you know what? That pretty much makes me honor-bound to hate it when the left wing demonizes George Bush. For I do not believe that the half of America that elected the one is evil while the half that elected the other is angelic. crack gay password

I can't stand Michael Moore for looking at America as inspiration for leftist invective just as I can't stand Rush Limbaugh for looking at America and spewing his right-wing rants. crack gay password

I hate it when my colleagues in media talk about how we all hate each other when I see absolutely no reporting that backs that up; I can't stand being turned into a one-dimensional fool by my own business. crack gay password

Am I going to light a candle and ask, "Can't we all get along?" No. The issue isn't us. The issue is how we are portrayed by politicians, political activists, and media. They're wrong about America. crack gay password

So it's time to turn the tables and treat them as they treat us: Let's cut them out of one-dimensional cloth, for they truly deserve it.crack gay password

It's time to treat Michael Moore as the extremist that he is. Simple-minded, simplistic, mean, venemous, a hate-monger who does nothing to advance the debate and aims instead to divide. Add your nominees on the left.crack gay password

And the same goes for Rush and Jerry Falwell and others who spew their hate and half-facts and bile and intolerance. Add your nominees on the right.crack gay password

They are extremists.crack gay password

We're not.crack gay password

And media are their dupes or, worse, coconspirators.crack gay password

But we the people now have a medium to call our own. We need to use it to reclaim the reasonable middle. crack gay password

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Don't quit your day job, Brooks

: Said it before. Say it again: When David Brooks writes a good column, it's good. But when he writes a dumb column it's a doozie. File today's under doozie. crack gay password

He has been trying to write about polarization in America (see the post above this one) and today he argues:

To a large degree, polarization in America is a cultural consequence of the information age. This sort of economy demands and encourages education, and an educated electorate is a polarized electorate.

He says that people who are more educated stick to their parties and sides more loyally, therefore they are more polarized. Or, professor, it could be that they've thought through their views and analzye issues differently -- perhaps more intelligently. crack gay password

He also argues that it's a matter of geography:

The information age was supposed to make distance dead, but because of clustering, geography becomes more important. crack gay password

The political result is that Republican places become more Republican and Democratic places become more Democratic.

That's absurd, too. I live in a rabidly Republican county and I'm a Democrat. But I don't yell at my neighbors about politics over the fence. Nor do I long to move to a place where I can sit in the Starbucks and talk with people sure to agree with me (in fact, I'd find that pretty damned dull). I might have no hope of winning a local election, but I cast my vote in the presidential election and mine counts just as much as the vote of the liberal in Upper Montclair. crack gay password

But then Brooks really goes off the deep end with his suggested fixes for this problem he's imaginging:

Still, it's worth thinking radically. An ambitious national service program would ameliorate the situation. If you had a big but voluntary service program of the sort that Evan Bayh, a Democrat, and John McCain, a Republican, proposed a couple of years ago, millions of young people would find themselves living with different sorts of Americans and spending time in parts of the country they might otherwise know nothing about.crack gay password

It might even be worth monkeying with our primary system. The current primaries reward orthodox, polarization-reinforcing candidates. Open, nonpartisan primaries might reward the unorthodox and weaken the party bases. To do nothing is to surrender to a lifetime of ugliness.

Oh, that's cute: The ideology draft: Forced service to meet people not like you. Well, you know, everybody isn't like me already. And "nonpartisan primaries"? That's oxymoronic; it's just plain illogical.crack gay password

: Micah Sifry responds to the same doozie column asking, What political ghettoes?

Here are some problems with these notions:crack gay password

-50% of us don't bother to vote in presidential elections; barely over 1/3 vote in non-presidential years and in some cases single digit turnouts have been sighted for some municiipal and even statewide races. If partisanship was on the rise, surely that would lead to much higher identification with each party's candidates, and thus be reflected in higher turnouts. crack gay password

-More Americans are identifying as political independents and registering as such (or "decline to state"), while Democratic identifiers are sharply down and Republicans are flat. This recent column by Rhodes Cook spells out some of the salient facts.crack gay password

-The information economy isn't as big as Brooks cliaims, so his theory that more of us are suddenly free to move wherever we like and thus congregate in places "where people share their cultural aesthetic and...political values" seems like quite a stretch. And even in such places, diversity reigns.

Go read the rest. crack gay password

See, we're not as divided as they -- media and politicians -- say we are. Only the extremists are. crack gay password

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Let the people speak

: Tim Blair, the most forward-thinking journalist I know, just did something great: He handed over his big-media Australian column to three Iraqi bloggers:

This week's column is brought to you direct from Baghdad by Ali Fadhil, a paediatrician, and his brothers Mohammed and Omar, both dentists. Read more from the trio at http://iraqthemodel.com/. crack gay password

How is life in Iraq? Depends on your point of view. A bunch of us were talking the other night; one friend, very angry, said: "Did you see what happened today in Antar Square? The Americans came, blocked the street and attacked the toy store. They were smashing kid's bicycles!" Another friend, listening carefully, asked: "Was there a big loading truck with them?" Yes, came the reply. The second friend then told his version: it turned out he'd been at the store buying a bike for his son. "I was in the middle of tough bargaining with the shopkeeper when two Humvees and a truck stopped out front. One of the Humvees waved all the cars to pass. Soldiers from the second Humvee said they wanted to buy some bicycles. It didn't take a long time, as they didn't bargain, and they bought a huge number of bicycles and filled the truck with them and left." Whom to believe? Here are two good friends and both were on the scene. As for me, it didn't take a lot of effort to figure out who was closer to the truth. Those bikes have probably been delivered to a local school. – Mohammed crack gay password

Something you may not have read about: in May, Iraqi soldiers saved the life of a US marine shot during patrols in Al Karmah, near Fallujah. Private Imad Abid Zeid Jassim dragged the injured marine away from gunfire then attacked the enemy. We (and you) don't read any good news like this. All we get are pictures of idiots throwing bricks at burnt cars. Why don't the media cover such stories? The attitude of the major media no longer surprises me. It only disgusts me. – Omar

Go read the rest.crack gay password

And big-time American journos should be ashamed of themselves they didn't think of this first. It has been there, on the web, right under their noses, all along. crack gay password

And I have to share this email from Tim, when he told me about this last week:

Another thing -- Ali, who is so polite and formal, insisted on beginning every email with "Dear Sir". So I told him everybody in Australia calls each other "mate".crack gay password

Now he's writing "can we change this, mate?", "Omar wants another couple of lines, mate", etc. And he's signing off with "Cheers, mate."crack gay password

It's beyond beautiful. I must meet these people.

Me, too, mate.
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Fisk away

: Andrew Sullivan asked any blogger to create a transcript of Fahrenheit 9/11 and a day later, here's the first chunk. And here's Andrew's take on the messianic parallels between Michael Moore and Mel Gibson.crack gay password

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What's really happening in Iraq

: Winds of Change has a roundup of what the Iraqi bloggers said about the handover of power.crack gay password

: Here's Michele's roundup.crack gay password

: And reservist and writer Eric Johnson tells a story of the Washington Post's bureau chief in Baghdad telling one view of what's happening there, the dark view.crack gay password

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A place for my stuff, cont.

: Today's packed PaidContent has two great items that point to the future of a Place for My Stuff:crack gay password

: Motorola, Rafat reports, is restarting its iRadio initiative. Here's Motorola's description in the job posting Rafat found:

• Time-slipped & buffered audio – record & store radio/TV audio and play it back at a scheduled time or on-demand. The audio might originate from Satellite radio, AM/FM broadcast, Internet or Cable TV. Imagine listening to your favorite radio/TV show when & where you want to . . . not when it happens to be broadcast!
• Pause-Resume – pause audio playback in one domain (person, home or car) and resume it in another. Picture listening to NPR during your commute home, pausing when you reach your garage and resuming where you left off on your home stereo!
• Push-to-Buy – push a button to purchase & download audio to a target destination. Imagine listening to a great new song on a phone or in your car . . . a simple push of a button launches a transaction to purchase a legal, secure digital copy of the song, download it to your home PC and wirelessly stream it to your car and phone when you get home!
Think of it as a Virtual Personal Audio Recorder based on a few building blocks:
• Car – An aftermarket, Bluetooth/802.11 enabled storage capable device or a multi-function head unit
• Home – A multi-media, 802.11 enabled gateway
• Person - A Bluetooth, MP3 & FM capable handset (Cell Phone or iPod)
• Back Office - Client & Server software architecture to enable seamless services
iRadio . . . doing to analog AM/FM broadcast what HBO & PVR did to traditional TV broadcast!

This is what the Place for My Stuff enables: I get my stuff wherever I want, whenever I want, on whatever device I have.crack gay password

: But until high bandwidth is ubiquitous, this will be accomplished by syncing. See, then, Rafat's World's-Fair-quality demo of a wi-fi car:

"At a table inside Starbucks, Ford executives set up a laptop that had a bunch of MP3 tracks on its hard drive. Inside the [2004 Lincoln Aviator SUV], a prototype Wi-Fi entertainment system from Delphi was built into the dashboard. It had all the regular buttons for AM and FM radio, a CD player and even a Sirius satellite radio receiver. But there was one more: a synchronization button...We pushed it, and in about 20 seconds, some two dozen MP3 files from the laptop inside Starbucks were downloaded to the Delphi radio and stored on a built-in flash memory drive."

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The value of links

: Paid Content tells us that game company IGN just bought movie-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes for $10 million. When you think about it, Rotten is a sort of early weblog -- summarizing and linking to reviews everywhere -- and it gets traffic (276k unique users per week), so it built value. crack gay password

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Supreme Court and free speech

: The Supreme Court just blocked a law aimed at pornographers as a likely unconstitutional slap at free speech. crack gay password

The court was divided and sent the case back to a lower court. But even in the case of pornography and children, the court stood behind free speech as a principle, an American ultimate, that requires protection. And if the Court protects free speech against even pornography and children, surely it will protect free speech against the indecent indecency legislation about to be signed by Bush.crack gay password

"There is a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech'' if the law took effect, Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority. crack gay password

: UPDATE: Here's Ernie Miller's take on the decision. And here's Eugene Volokh on the issue of prurient interest. And here's Jack Balkin, who also says:

Putting together Justice Thomas' opinion in Hamdi with his vote in ACLU v. Ashcroft, we may infer that the President can throw any citizen in a military prison indefinitely, but that the citizen has the right to view pornography while there.

Don't you just love having your very own constitutional law experts at the ready?crack gay password

: UPDATE: Henry sends me this great quote from Dennis Miller:

"The Senate overwhelmingly agreed on a bill Tuesday to fine broadcasters as much as $3 million a day for racy language. Oh, yeah? Well guess what, FCC. I'm still going to say whatever I want. So don't intercourse with me."

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Memevertising

: Hugh McLeod, marketing visionary, is trying to create a new kind of advertising by creating a meme for Technorati:

Smarter conversations equals better products. It’s so frickin’ obvious.

Spread the word.crack gay password

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RSS I: What RSS needs to make money... and grow

: I joined in an RSS webcast the other day and ranted on what RSS needs to grow -- which is also to say what it needs to make money, for if content creators can't make money from it (or at least not lose money because of it), they won't join in... but when they do join in, RSS will grow and become a new standard for delivering content across multiple media, clients, and devices. It goes hand-in-hand, or hand-in-pocket. crack gay password

Especially since RSS will be read by multiple clients on multiple devices (see the next two posts), we need to set business standards -- or at least establish business needs -- now so that as it proliferates it prospers. But I do not see any means of getting those business needs into standards-setting discussion now. Here are my opening bids for business needs:crack gay password

1. Unique users. If content creators cannot report unique users they cannot get advertising. Period. So RSS readers must set unique-user cookies. Period.crack gay password

2. Traffic. RSS readers must allow content creators to count displays -- versus just downloads -- of RSS items.crack gay password

3. Advertising. If content creators cannot put advertising on feeds, they will not give full content and will give only headlines to link back to their sites where they have the ads. But partial feeds are a pain, right? So there's the carrot/stick: Give them ads, they will give you content. That's the way the world works.crack gay password

4. Brand. I'm adding this one. As a reader, I find it frustrating that I can't see the brand of a feed unless I scroll up on FeedDemon and read the one line atop the the screen. Brand matters to the content creator, of course, but it also can matter to the reader: You want to know what you're reading.crack gay password

5. Navigation. I'm adding this one, too. But I know I'm not alone here: Like many RSS fans, I use the feeds to alert me that something is new and if it is of the slightest interest, I prefer to read the post on the web page with full functionality. It's a pain to get to that web page now. The easy solution to Nos. 4 & 5 is to include a brand element that is also clickable to the creator's web page.crack gay password

Now I know some will accuse me of just turning feeds into HTML and I will agree that this can go too far real fast. But there is also good need to consider this functionality to make RSS prosper. crack gay password

That's precisely why we need some means of soliciting, discussing, and incorporating business needs into the future of RSS. There are a few ways that can happen. Dave Winer just left the RSS advisory board and they're looking for a replacement; I suggest they get someone (no, not me) with a business outlook to join in. Or someone can put together an RSS business summit. Whatever. If someone does not take this bull by its horns, RSS will grow too slowly. crack gay password

RSS II: Putting his mouth where is money is

: Brad Feld, a VC at Mobius, explains on his blog why he just invested in Newsgator. It's a very good post but even more important, it's an example of a new and more transparent world of investment. crack gay password

RSS III: More on Newsgator

: By the way, regarding Newsgator... I said in an offhand remark when Brad invested in the company that I didn't use Newsgator because I don't want anything more cluttering my Outlook (it's plenty cluttered already!). Brad answers that in detail on his post, explaining that Newsgator also has web and mobile versions. I didn't mention it in my offhand remark but I've already used both. And they're both very good. In fact, I would absolutely love it if I could sync my reading of RSS feeds across mobile and laptop, as Newsgator offers. The rub remains: I still prefer using a client to using a web service with less functionality (and no offline usage) and Newsgator's non-web client uses Outlook and so I don't use Newsgator as my core reader. I do use Newsgator on my Treo. crack gay password

All of this is just transitional nitpicking on the way to the integration of RSS feeds into most every bit of software we use: It will be part of our browsers (see Safari); it will be on our mobile devices; it will feed the architecture of web sites (I'm working to rearchitect my day-job sites around news feeds); it will feed media of many sorts (it's already being used to feed ESPN video and rich advertising); it will feed new devices not yet invented. crack gay password

Feeding me -- sending me any kind of content anytime anywhere on any device -- is the promise of this medium in an ever-connected world and RSS will be at the core of that. This is just the beginning.crack gay password

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