digamma.net - notes

Hi. I’m the editor of possibly the most influential conservative magazine in America. I’ve been hearing a leftist argument recently that makes sense. Please refute it for me. Thanks.

The other night, I was flipping channels, and I landed on the Democratic debate. I heard something that made my ears prick up.

LIEBERMAN: We will not get them back unless we can convince them that we are a party that will be strong on defense and will reflect their best values. And what does that mean? A sense of right and wrong, neighbors that take care of one another, a willingness to stand up and take on some interests like Hollywood…

You see, I’d just been reading this post by Atrios about modern draconian copyright measures and the ridiculous ways in which they infringe on our rights, and Radley Balko’s farewell to Fritz Hollings, so Hollywood issues were fresh in my mind. Not that they needed much freshening, as I’ve been reading Slashdot for more than four years. So I was excited that a Presidential candidate was talking about “taking on Hollywood.”

Lieberman continued:

…. and say that the entertainment industry is putting too much violence and inappropriate sexual matter in front of our children and affecting their lives and ours.

Oh. He meant censorship.

I changed the channel.

Rocket Man Goes Ballistic

Elton sat down at the piano, but before he began to play, shot back: “This night is about charity - not washing your dirty political laundry. I love America, but if you want to know why the world hates America, I can give you two words: Dennis Miller.”

For the world to hate Dennis Miller, they’d have to understand what he’s talking about. And nobody understands what he’s talking about.

At TechCentralStation, Arnold Kling has a great open letter to Paul Krugman.

There are two types of arguments you might make in response. I call these Type C and Type M.

A hypothetical example of a Type C argument would be, “Well, Arnold, studies actually show that the minimum wage does not cost jobs. If you read the work of Krueger and Card, you would see that the minimum wage probably reduces poverty.”

A hypothetical example of a Type M argument would be, “People who want to get rid of the minimum wage are just trying to help the corporate plutocrats.”

Paul, my question for you is this:

Do you see any differences between those two types of arguments?

Read the whole thing. Paul Krugman has the power to change public opinion, but he’s throwing it away to preach to the choir.

Eugene Volokh notes that the German verbs “to be” and “to eat” are roughly the same. In Latin, “est” can also mean “eats” or “is", and can be combined with several other homophones to form the magical sentence:

Mea mater est mala sus.

which can be translated

“Look mother, the pig is eating the apples.”

or

“My mother is a bad pig.”

I love Latin.

Playing Shabbes goy for Eric Alterman, Charles Pierce responds (the link isn’t permanent because MSNBC sucks) to Peter Beinart’s review of Paul Krugman’s new book. Beinart wrote:

But guest lists that cross ideological lines can help liberals understand the conservatives they write about. And many Washington conservatives genuinely don’t see the Bush administration as radical: they see it as having ratified a big-spending, culturally liberal status quo. Krugman assumes a revolutionary consciousness that may not actually exist on the ground.

… and Pierce responded:

Peter Beinart is one of those liberals for whom I wish we still had some use….. It isn’t like the conservative agenda is hard to discern; when Grover Norquist says he wants to strangle government in his bathtub, he isn’t speaking metaphorically. He means it….

First of all, I don’t like when commentators are referred to in terms of “usefulness". The expression brings to mind totalitarian regimes where one’s fate rests on whether or not one serves the regime’s purpose. No, I don’t think Pierce wants to execute Beinart and others of “those liberals", but it’s still ugly language.

Second, Pierce is shaky on the definition of “metaphorically", unless he knows some way of putting the actual government of the United States into an actual bathtub and somehow drowning it there. Does the government need air to breathe? For all I know, it has gills and can breathe underwater.

Pierce continues:

And the fact that a lot of them haven’t yet gotten everything they wanted is hardly proof that the administration doesn’t want all the same stuff, too. It’s evidence that some Republicans — and even some Democrats — would rather not see the Republic taken all the way over a cliff. If it pains Mr. Beinart to know that some of his dinner pals want to demolish everything in which he believes, and that they are halfway there already, I am truly sorry, but the Krug is right and he’s wrong on this one.

Does Pierce truly believe there is no legitimate conservative gripe against the Bush Administration? Not the tariffs on steel, lumber, and, for the love of G-d, catfish? (Hey, it’s Rosh Hashanah - I’m not Jewish but I’m hedging my bets.) Not the farm bill? Not the campaign “reform” bill? Not the fact that government spending - even excluding the military and homeland security - has grown faster under Bush than it did under Clinton? Would the alternative to all this bloat really be “the Republic taken all the way over a cliff"?
Finally:

I don’t want these clowns understood. I want them defeated — permanently, the way the Whigs were — and the earth salted so they do not rise again.

But it is precisely BECAUSE people like Pierce and Krugman don’t care about understanding these clowns that they won’t be able to defeat these clowns.
As many have written better than I can, there are three forces at work in the Bush administration. First and foremost, there are Karl Rove and the cynical finger-in-the-wind political advisers. This faction is responsible for the idiotic tariffs, and, in all likelihood, for the “burning” of Valerie Plame. Does Pierce understand that genuine ideological conservatives believe in free trade and respect CIA operations?

Second in command are the “national greatness” neoconservatives, best represented by the Kristol family and the Weekly Standard magazine. This group is responsible for Bush’s “Pax Americana” foreign policy, but they are not above using the government at home to accomplish any goal they feel is worthwhile.

Finally, after the first two factions have their say, is a vague idea that free market policy is a good idea. The ONLY major Bush administration initiatives to come from this faction have been the tax cuts, and even they can be opposed from the right, since they are plunging the nation into the kind of deficits conservatives used to oppose.

But Pierce doesn’t want to understand any of these ideas - he wants Paul Krugman to preach to the choir. I agree with the idea that Democrats won’t win by kissing up to Republicans, but that doesn’t mean spewing bile nonstop. It means using strong but well-reasoned arguments to prove the Republicans wrong.

Hot Liberty writes:

My advice to you “anarchists:” wear your Castro and Che shirts. If people in Miami have learned one thing over the last few decades, it’s that collectivism works and capitalism is a big failure. None of their families have been brutalized or killed by anti-capitalist regimes. It’ll go over real sweet, I promise. If you get a chance, you may want to bring up the fact that Elian is better off now, because he has free health care. Be sure to praise Janet Reno and JFK. Mention how your ideas are thriving in Venezuela. And good luck to you!

Heh.

If you’ve never read The Corndog, Reason Online’s parody of National Review’s The Corner, read it now. Note the posts by John Dingleberry.

If you don’t get the joke, you need look no further than this ACTUAL post by John “Buggery Buggery Buggery” Derbyshire:

Surely one factor in the rise of prison rape–which I feel sure was wellnigh unknown a generation ago–has been the striking down of the very strong social taboo on male-male buggery. This taboo was universal across all cultures, primitive and civilized, and even including those that tolerated male-male erotic bonding, until the rise of the “gay rights” movement in the modern West. I’m not saying that this is the only factor, or even the major factor, but it must surely be **a** factor.

One track mind.

Update: Sullivan has more.

According to a post on the Full Disclosure mailing list, filesharing application Earth Station 5 contains code that allows attackers to delete any file on a user’s hard drive. Such vulnerabilities are a dime a dozen, except:

The people behind ES5 have intentionally added malicious code to ES5. If you have followed the ES5 discussions on message boards and read what the ES5 people have said and done (eg. DoS attacking BitTorrent sites), this comes as no surprise. The question then is “why did they do it?” I’m sure they won’t tell us, but here’s a theory: They could be working for the RIAA, MPAA, or a similar organization. Once they have enough users on their ES5 network, they would start deleting all copyrighted files they own which their users are sharing. The users wouldn’t know what hit them.

That theory makes perfect sense, but when I heard about the vulnerability, the one fact I knew about Earth Station 5 immediately popped into my head:

We’ll be more than glad to hear your comments or questions at:
Ras Kabir 121 Gaza Gaza, Palestine

Within reason, I sympathize with the Palestinian cause. “Within reason” means I don’t pretend there aren’t a lot of people there who, for whatever reason, would like to hurt a lot of people here. The same people also severely disapprove of much of the material exchanged over filesharing networks.
If the Full-Disclosure post is correct, is it too rash an assumption to suspect that Earth Station 5 was an attempted act of cyberterrorism? Could the creators have been waiting for a day on which they would scan the entire Internet and delete critical system files on every computer running ES5? The terrorism theory makes more sense to me than the RIAA conspiracy theory.

Don’t play with matches.

They were wrong. These days, if you’re careless with fire and you burn yourself, you get rich.

At last, a lawsuit that makes all preceding lawsuits against the tobacco industry look intelligent.

Mr Grisham said a significant factor was that Shannon was not a smoker but a child who had been an innocent party in the fire. He also pointed out changes made by Philip Morris to its Merit brand of cigarettes in 2000, which implied that the previous design, which allowed cigarettes to burn down their filter even when they were not being smoked, was dangerous.

No good deed goes unpunished. No. Good. Deed.